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Most Americans know the story of Jonestown, or at least they think they do.
The story we were handed was simple enough: Jim Jones started out as a humanitarian, eventually went insane and became a charismatic cult leader who convinced hundreds of vulnerable people to follow him into the Guyanese jungle in South America. Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered while investigating the settlement and more than 913 people ultimately died after drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, either killing themselves or allowing themselves to be killed because of their devotion to Jones.
That is the story most of us grew up hearing. Jonestown became synonymous with blind obedience to a cult leader, to the point that “drinking the Kool-Aid” became part of the American vocabulary.
But that version leaves out some of the strangest parts of what actually happened in Guyana, including one question that has followed this story for decades:
Was Jonestown simply the work of one insane cult leader or is there more to the story involving the CIA and the U.S. government's very real history of experimenting with mind control?
Because when you actually start going back through what was reported about the Peoples Temple, what authorities knew before the deaths, what happened in the days immediately afterward, and what investigators actually discovered inside Jonestown, there are holes in that story big enough to drive truck through.
Let’s Get Into It…
On December 29, 1978, 41 days after the mass deaths at Jonestown, The New York Times published a story under the headline, “Jones Commune Found Stocked With Drugs to Control the Mind.”
Investigators found a massive supply of psychoactive drugs at Jonestown, including 11,000 doses of Thorazine, along with enormous quantities of Quaaludes, Valium, Demerol and other mind controlling substances.
And immediately, I have questions. Questions that, apparently, nobody at The New York Times seemed particularly interested in asking. Shocker.
Why did it take nearly six weeks for this “discovery” to make its way into the press? When, exactly, were these drugs first discovered?
Do they truly expect us to believe it’s possible to obtain and smuggle this quantity of controlled drugs without the active help of pharmaceutical companies, organized crime, law enforcement, the State Department, or some combination of them?
And most importantly, what in the world were they doing with all of these drugs down there?
And then there was Jonestown’s medical operation.
Jonestown boasted about having an incredibly modern and efficient healthcare system, supposedly built around the humanitarian mission of “serving the people.” They had laboratories, modern testing and diagnostic equipment, nurses, doctors, therapists, dietitians, and many residents were reportedly receiving daily medical checkups. This was the kind of medical setup that would have put plenty of community clinics back in the United States to shame.
But here’s where things get strange.
For a community with such an elaborate medical operation, where are the medical records?
We’re told those records either disappeared or never existed in the first place. How does that happen? You have doctors, nurses, laboratories, diagnostic equipment, daily examinations and enormous quantities of prescription drugs, but somehow the records documenting the medical treatment of the people living there are nowhere to be found?
And then you have to somehow reconcile all of this supposed “humanitarianism” with what we now know was happening inside Jonestown. People were being controlled, drugged and subjected to conditions that amounted to virtual slavery.
Once you start looking past the version of Jonestown that has been repeated for nearly 50 years, it becomes pretty clear there was a lot more going on down there than Jim Jones simply losing his mind.
So let’s go back through the story the media gave us about Jonestown and the deaths of 913 people…
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The Official Version of Events
According to the version we were given, the Peoples Temple was led by good people doing good things. Apparently they were so humanitarian that, for years, law enforcement, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the San Francisco Chronicle and others repeatedly looked the other way as reports and allegations piled up involving kidnapping, murder, smuggling, extortion, child abuse and theft.
And somehow, while all of this humanitarianism was going on, the Peoples Temple managed to smuggle $15 million in cash out of the country, along with a massive cache of weapons and explosives and tens of thousands of doses of controlled pharmaceuticals, right under the noses of American authorities.
Not to mention that some of the earliest settlers at Jonestown had even been virtually kidnapped from the United States.
The authorities were apparently so impressed with Jones’ humanitarianism that they repeatedly ignored reports of crimes and failed to investigate serious allegations of criminal activity and smuggling involving the Peoples Temple in both the United States and Guyana.
Then, when Congressman Leo Ryan requested information from the State Department because he wanted to travel to Guyana and investigate Jonestown himself, suddenly there was supposedly no information available about the group.
We are talking about the United States government. The same government that can track your income, your passport, your criminal record and practically every interaction you’ve ever had with it, but when a sitting congressman asked what they knew about Jim Jones and hundreds of Americans living in a compound in Guyana, suddenly nobody seemed to know a damn thing.
And it wasn’t because nobody had warned them.
It is now known that the San Francisco police and media, repeatedly declined to investigate reported crimes by the People’s Temple, and that the State Dept., FBI and other government agencies had also, over the years, received complaints and reports of kidnapping, torture, smuggling and so on which they declined to investigate.
Apparently Jim Jones was just such a humanitarian that the police and FBI couldn’t bring themselves to believe any of it.
I have to admit, I never realized the U.S. government, the largest terrorist organization in the world, was so easily moved by humanitarianism.
Or maybe there was another reason the Peoples Temple was allowed to operate with so little scrutiny.
Jones certainly wasn’t without friends in powerful places. In San Francisco, he had the support of Mayor George Moscone. Yes, that Mayor George Moscone. The one who was murdered just nine days after Jonestown.
Police and the media quickly concluded Moscone’s murder had nothing to do with Jonestown, despite the fact that warnings had already been made that political officials could be killed.
Maybe Moscone’s murder had absolutely nothing to do with Jonestown. But considering everything that had just happened in Guyana, you would think somebody might have wanted to take a closer look.
Now Let’s Talk About The Congressman’s Visit
Despite the State Department supposedly knowing next to nothing about the Peoples Temple and despite opposition from embassy officials in Guyana, Congressman Ryan went ahead with the investigation anyway.
Tell me: does the following story, presented to us over and over again by the media, actually make sense?
After spending two days investigating Jonestown, Ryan and four others were slaughtered at the Port Kaituma airstrip on November 18.
But the descriptions of the men who carried out the attack are disturbing.
Witnesses described the assassins as “glassy-eyed,” “mechanically-walking zombies” who appeared completely “devoid of any emotion.”
So who exactly were these men?
Besides the 913 people reported dead, another 167 survivors eventually returned from Jonestown. Yet reports placed the population of the settlement at no fewer than 1,100 people, with many estimates closer to 1,200.
That leaves a pretty obvious question: what happened to the 200 or more people who were apparently never accounted for?
Survivors described a separate, all-white group inside Jonestown that was heavily armed, received better treatment than everyone else, and was reportedly free to come and go from the compound.
Who were they?
These armed guards were never accounted for in subsequent news reports.
Back to the shooting: Guyanese soldiers stationed nearby refused to get involved and no help arrived until the following morning. Why? Because there were no lights at the airstrip.
So let me make sure I understand this correctly. A high-level U.S. delegation, including a sitting United States Congressman and an official from the U.S. Embassy, are mowed down at an airstrip. People are dead, others are wounded, and nobody is coming to help them because there are no lights?
I thought helicopters had lights, but perhaps I’m mistaken.
Anyways, moving on…
The morning of November 19, help finally arrives and the survivors from Congressman Ryan’s group are evacuated. But then another 24 hours pass before it occurs to anyone that maybe they should go check Jonestown, the colony Ryan had just been investigating when he was murdered.
The compound was roughly an hour away by jeep or just a few minutes by helicopter.
When they finally get there, they discover the bodies.
Already decomposing.
Remarkable.
Once again, let’s think about what we’re actually being asked to believe here.
Presumably, the soldiers at the airstrip radioed in that Congressman Ryan’s group had just been massacred, that some of them were still alive, their lives were in danger and they desperately needed medical assistance.
Did the Guyanese police and military simply decide it was too dark outside and they would deal with it in the morning? Did anyone bother reporting to the U.S. Embassy that a sitting American Congressman had just been murdered and members of his delegation were still lying wounded at an airstrip?
And let’s remember who else we’re talking about here. The U.S. military is capable of moving an entire army practically anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, but somehow it took 36 hours before anyone arrived at Jonestown to “discover” the bodies.
And somehow, this story is about to get even harder to believe.
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What They Found At Jonestown
On November 20, authorities reported finding 409 bodies at Jonestown. Another 500 people were reportedly missing, believed to be alive and to have escaped into the jungle.
So for the next three days, more than 250 U.S. Air Force personnel, along with other military and intelligence investigators and Guyanese military personnel, searched the jungle for these 500 missing people.
Journalists, with the exception of a select few, were forbidden from entering the scene.
Then something remarkable happened. It turns out, there wasn’t anybody in the jungle after all.
4 days after the initial count of 409 dead, the officer in charge announced that the body count “could reach 780.”
The following day, November 25, the final count suddenly jumped to more than 900 deceased.
So how exactly do we explain a mystery such as this?
We were told the original number (409) was simply a miscount. We were told the Guyanese couldn’t count properly. We were told there were bodies underneath other bodies.
Apparently, 500 bodies underneath the 400 they had already counted.
Okay, but what exactly are we supposed to believe here?
That hundreds of military, police and intelligence personnel spent three days searching the Guyanese jungle for roughly 500 people they believed were still alive only to eventually discover that the people they had been searching for were dead and lying right there at their feet the entire time?
And then, after finally discovering those 500 additional deceased bodies, it somehow took another 24 hours to count them all?
Keep that in mind, because we’re not done yet.
When reporters were finally allowed onto the scene, they started asking some pretty obvious questions about the deaths.
For one, why was there so much blood?
The explanation was that cyanide poisoning can apparently be a very bloody affair.
Really? I didn’t know that.
But despite all of the unanswered questions surrounding how these people actually died and what had happened at Jonestown, the U.S. Air Force rushed in once all of the bodies had finally been “discovered,” embalmed them and removed them from the scene.
In doing so, the Air Force effectively prevented a proper investigation of the scene, along with the autopsies and toxicological testing that could have helped determine exactly how these people died.
And when an Air Force spokesperson was asked why they did this, his response was incredible:
“I don’t know.”
Then, in an action described as unprecedented in police science, Jim Jones’ body was cremated while the entire world was still left wondering how he had actually died.
And throughout all of this, the media just kept repeating the same story: more than 900 people had committed mass suicide at Jonestown.
Never mind that neither the U.S. nor Guyanese military and police seemed particularly interested in conducting a serious investigation into how these people actually died. Never mind all the questions that piled up around the scene and the circumstances surrounding the deaths. The story had already been decided and the Mockingbird journalists happily repeated it.
For an event this massive, involving the deaths of more than 900 people under circumstances this bizarre, the complete lack of serious investigative journalism surrounding Jonestown is almost as unbelievable as the story itself.
The implications of all of this are staggering.
When you put it together, it starts to look like we could be dealing with a much larger cover-up involving the military, the State Department and the media, carried out so completely that almost nobody stopped to question just how many pieces of this story didn’t add up.
Even the deaths themselves could have been part of the cover-up. Were the roughly 900 deaths by suicides at all? Did they occur at the same time or over the course of several days?
Let’s dive a little deeper…
The Cause of Death: Suicide?
More than 900 men, women and children were suddenly and violently dead under circumstances that remain mind-boggling to this day.
And yet the explanation that quickly emerged in newspapers and books was incredibly simple: the people of Jonestown had been brainwashed. They were religious fanatics who had become so completely devoted to Jim Jones that when he told them to die, they obeyed.
So Jonestown became the image of just how powerful “brainwashing” could supposedly be, while also serving as a warning to the American public about the dangers of new religious movements.
In reality, what was presented as news was only a theory and, as it turned out, an inaccurate one.
The source of the “Kool-Aid Suicide” stories was the U.S. State Department, which presented the story immediately after the “suicides” were reported as though it was the only obvious truth. A U.S. Army spokesman pronounced with complete authority:
No autopsies are needed. The cause of death is not an issue here.
The bodies were then allowed to rot in the jungle. Despite the lack of a need for autopsies, Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo, the top Guyanese pathologist, was at Jonestown hours after the deaths, and, refused the assistance of U.S. pathologists who were attempting to engage in a cover-up.
His conclusions? Dr. Mootoo found fresh needle marks at the back of the left shoulder blades on 80 to 90 percent of the victims. This would indicate that people were held down and given a substance which killed them.
Others had been shot or strangled (you simply cannot strangle yourself).
A surviving witness stated that those who resisted were forced by armed guards to comply (the same assassins who killed Congressman Ryan, perhaps?)
Dr. Mootoo’s opinion, and that of the Guyanese grand jury investigating Jonestown, was that all but three (only two of which were suicides) were murdered by “persons unknown.”
Jim Jones himself was found to have been killed by a gunshot wound to the head.
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The Connections
Let’s take a closer look into Jim Jones’ own background.
Jones had told some of his neighbors that he was involved in the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. While living abroad, he also reportedly received an unusual amount of assistance from the U.S. Embassy, including transportation, groceries and a large home. One neighbor remembered that Jones “lived like a rich man.”
Then, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jones returned to the United States with $10,000.
By 1965, he had established Peoples Temple in Ukiah, California, along with the Happy Havens Rest Home. Despite lacking properly trained personnel and appropriate licensing, Jones began surrounding himself with exactly the kinds of vulnerable people who would be easily swayed by a charismatic leader: prisoners, elderly people, patients from mental institutions and roughly 150 foster children, many of whom were placed there by court order.
But take a look at some of the other people who began appearing around Jones.
He had contact with missionaries from World Vision, an international evangelical order that often fronts for the CIA, along with the local head of the John Birch Society and Republican Party leaders.
Members of the Peoples Temple were reportedly used for voter organizing and fundraising connected to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. One of Jones’ advisers was also described as a mercenary connected to UNITA, the CIA-backed army in Angola.
Then there was the Layton family.
UC Berkeley chemist Dr. Laurence Laird Layton had worked on the Manhattan Project and later served as chief of the Army’s Chemical Warfare Division in the early 1950s. His wife was the daughter of Hugo Phillips, a German banker and stockbroker who became wealthy representing Siemens & Halske and I.G. Farben (two notorious Nazi Holocaust profiteers).
So Jones had claimed a connection to Naval Intelligence, received assistance from the U.S. Embassy, surrounded himself with vulnerable populations and had people entering his orbit with backgrounds touching the military, chemical warfare and CIA-backed operations.
Despite this background, he suddenly began presenting himself as a liberal socialist and eventually claimed to be the reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and Lenin. By this point, suspicion was already beginning to grow around the Peoples Temple, where Jones maintained armed security personnel dressed in black uniforms.
Jones took everything he could get from his followers, much of it coming directly from their welfare and Social Security checks, while accusations of blackmail, extortion and other forms of coercion followed the Peoples Temple.
The local press reported on seven mysterious deaths involving people who had attempted to leave the “church” or had come into conflict with Jones. At the same time, accusations of kidnapping, beatings and sexual abuse were beginning to circulate.
With the controversy growing around him, Jones moved to San Francisco.
And somehow, instead of all these allegations destroying his reputation, Jones became an important fundraiser for the Bay Area political establishment. Before long, he was rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names among the liberal and radical elite, meeting people like Rosalynn Carter (wife of former president Jimmy Carter) and Angela Davis (a prominent political activist).
Jones was eventually rewarded with a position on the city’s Housing Commission, while some of his key followers landed jobs in the Welfare Department.
Much of Jones’ following came from the unemployed and dispossessed. The Temple deliberately recruited among the poor and vulnerable, particularly women, children and minorities.
Many members were recruited directly from San Francisco mental hospitals (keep this in mind as you continue to read this).
In 1977, an exposé put him on the defensive and Jones responded by moving his supposed utopia to Guyana.
Once again, he did so with assistance from the U.S. Embassy.
More Connections…
And then there is Richard Dwyer, the U.S. Embassy official who traveled to Jonestown with Congressman Ryan.
As the deaths were unfolding, Jones can be heard on the infamous tape yelling, “Get Dwyer out of here!”
Dwyer was later found at the airstrip, methodically washing his hands.
In 1968, Dwyer’s name appeared in a publication called Who’s Who in the CIA. When he was later asked directly whether the allegation that he worked for the CIA was true, his response was:
No comment.
And Dwyer wasn’t the only person in Guyana with CIA connections.
Besides those previously mentioned, U.S. Ambassador John Burke and embassy official Richard McCoy were also reported to have suspicious ties to the intelligence community.
McCoy, while he was serving as the U.S. Consul and Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassy in Georgetown, was the primary liaison between the U.S. government and the cult.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown housed the CIA station operating in Guyana.
At the time, Guyana had a socialist government, making the country an obvious potential target for American covert operations.
Then there was Dan Webber, who was sent to Guyana after the massacre, and he was also with the CIA.
Even Joseph Blatchford, who became the “official” attorney for the Jonestown survivors had previously been caught up in a controversy involving allegations of CIA infiltration of the Peace Corps.
And then we have the money.
Millions of dollars belonging to the Peoples Temple simply “disappeared” after the slaughter. Conservative estimates put the missing fortune at around $26 million, while some estimates went as high as $2 billion.
Where the hell did all of that money go? And where did it come from in the first place?
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Suspicious Deaths After The Massacre
The killings didn't stop in Guyana.
Michael Prokes was one of Jim Jones’ aides. After Jonestown, Prokes held a press conference where he claimed that the CIA and FBI were withholding an audiotape of the massacre.
During that same press conference, he also revealed that he had been an FBI informant.
Immediately afterward, Prokes walked into the restroom.
He did not come out alive.
His death was ruled, as always, a suicide.
And the strange deaths didn’t end there. In Georgetown, several more Peoples Temple members were killed following the massacre at Jonestown.
The man charged with those murders was Charles Beikman, an early follower of Jones who had eventually become one of his “adopted sons.”
Beikman also happened to be a Green Beret.
Then there were Jeanne and Al Mills, former the Peoples Temple members who were writing a book about Jonestown. Both were found bound and shot to death inside their home.
In Detroit, another Jonestown survivor was killed near his home. And yet another survivor would later become involved in a mass murder of schoolchildren in Los Angeles.
But perhaps one of the strangest questions concerns Jim Jones himself.
There were questions about whether the body identified as Jones was actually his. Photographs of the body did not show tattoos Jones was known to have, his fingerprints had to be checked twice, and his dental records were never used to confirm the identification.
Jones was also known to use body doubles, similar to how the CIA has been known to operate.
Let’s Recap Before We Talk More About Drugs and CIA Mind Control
As we’ve already discussed, Jones had a pattern of recruiting his followers from some of the most vulnerable populations in society, including prisoners, people from mental institutions, minorities and others who were already marginalized or dependent on institutions.
Now ask yourself: who else was notorious for targeting these exact same populations for experimentation?
The CIA.
And around the same time Jones was building his following, cults were exploding in popularity across the United States and around the world.
Could Jonestown itself have been connected to, or even created by, the CIA?
Before we can seriously explore that possibility, we need to understand exactly what the CIA had already been doing with mind control, drugs and human experimentation. I am going to give you a brief synopsis of what was taking place and I’ll save a more in-depth version for part two.
CIA and Mind Control
The CIA’s interest in mind control goes all the way back to the agency’s founding in 1947. From the very beginning, developing methods to control and manipulate the human mind was a priority.
Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA conducted an enormous series of experiments involving drugs, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation, behavior modification and other methods of manipulating human behavior.
The most infamous of these programs was MKULTRA.
Hundreds of experiments were conducted on prisoners, psychiatric patients and other vulnerable people, many of whom had no idea they were being used as human guinea pigs. Researchers experimented with psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, extreme isolation, sleep deprivation and intense psychological pressure. They also studied group behavior and whether these techniques could be used to influence groups of people.
After decades of research into controlling human behavior, the CIA supposedly shut the program down and destroyed much of its documentation.
But here is the question that matters for Jonestown:
Did the research actually end, or did it simply move somewhere else? Instead of experimenting on individual human guinea pigs, did the research expand to entire groups of people, using what we now call cults as the laboratory?
Because think about what you would need to conduct an experiment like that without attracting attention.
An isolated population. Control over their food, sleep, work and communication. Access to drugs. A closed environment where people could be subjected to extreme psychological pressure without outsiders seeing what was happening.
And look at what was happening at the same time.
Cults were exploding across America and most of them weren’t exactly operating out of somebody’s basement. They had enormous amounts of money, sophisticated operations, connections to organized crime and powerful people and, in some cases, a remarkable ability to avoid serious scrutiny from law enforcement.
Hint: the Manson “Family” did not appear out of no where. They were a CIA creation.
So back to Jonestown:
Four years after MKULTRA was supposedly terminated, hundreds of vulnerable Americans were living almost completely cut off from the outside world in the middle of the Guyanese jungle.
They were being drugged. They were deprived of sleep and subjected to isolation, sensory deprivation, forced labor, humiliation and physical abuse. Their food, work, communication and movement were controlled.
And Jonestown had a massive stockpile of psychoactive drugs.
All of the markings of an MKULTRA experiment.
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Wrapping Everything Up
So what is the evidence of a connection between MKULTRA and Jonestown, besides everything I’ve already mentioned?
Let’s go through it.
First, look at the cover-up following the deaths in Guyana. Even a superficial review of what happened raises serious questions about the actions of the military, police, State Department and media. Something on that scale could only have been orchestrated at the very highest levels.
Then look at what was happening for years before the deaths. Reports and allegations surrounding the Peoples Temple and Jonestown repeatedly reached the press and law-enforcement agencies, yet somehow they continued to look the other way. I don’t believe something like that happens spontaneously. Someone got to them.
Then there is the strange contradiction inside Jonestown itself. This supposedly humanitarian community had remarkably modern and extensive medical services, while at the same time people were being subjected to drugs, behavior modification and other extreme forms of coercion, up to and including murder. But maybe that isn’t a contradiction at all. We have already seen the same disturbing combination inside the American prison system and state psychiatric hospitals.
There were enough drugs stockpiled there to drug 200,000 people for more than a year. Those drugs did not just appear in Jonestown. Someone obtained them and brought them into the middle of the Guyanese jungle. That required planning. Who did this? And how was it done?
Look at what happened to people once they arrived in Guyana. Members of Jones’ “church” were bound and gagged immediately after landing and taken to the compound, where residents were subjected to forced drugging.
Then look at the conditions people were living under. Jonestown residents were packed into cramped quarters and surviving on meager rations of food that was often spoiled. They were forced to work 16 to 18 hours a day, and when they weren’t working, they could be kept awake day and night listening to Jim Jones lecture.
And the punishments sound eerily familiar after everything we’ve just covered. Residents were subjected to forced drugging, sensory deprivation inside an underground box, physical torture, beatings, verbal abuse, public sexual rapes and humiliation.
The drugs being pumped into people at Jonestown, combined with sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, forced labor, isolation, humiliation and physical abuse, were the same kinds of methods that had already been used and studied under MKULTRA.
But it gets even more interesting when you look at who was living at Jonestown.
A 1974 government report acknowledged that behavioral experiments had targeted specific populations, including black people, women, prisoners, the elderly, children and psychiatric patients. These people were used as guinea pigs to test drugs, brain implants and psychosurgery at an isolated military missile base in California.
Now look at Jonestown.
Roughly 90 percent of the dead were women. Around 80 percent were black. And 276 were children.
These weren’t just similar methods being used on people. They were the same kinds of vulnerable populations the government had already identified and used for human experimentation.
Congressman Ryan, known for being a critic of the CIA, may have suspected that Jonestown was being used as a front for something far more sinister.
In 1980, Ryan’s aide Joseph Holsinger was given a paper that challenged the government’s claim that MKULTRA had ended in 1973.
The paper argued that the CIA’s mind-control experiments never actually stopped. Instead, they continued in places where vulnerable people could be isolated and controlled, including public hospitals, prisons and religious cults, with those institutions essentially providing cover for the experimentation.
Holsinger later appeared at a San Francisco psychology forum on Jonestown and publicly stated that he believed the CIA had worked with Jim Jones to conduct medical and mind-control experiments through the Peoples Temple.
Holsinger had worked for the Congressman who traveled to Jonestown specifically to investigate what was happening there and who was murdered before he ever made it home.
Michael Meiers, author of Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, came to an extraordinary conclusion about Dr. Laurence Layton, the same man we discussed earlier who had served as head of the Army’s Chemical Warfare Division.
Meiers wrote:
The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as it was Jim Jones’.
Former the Peoples Temple member Joyce Shaw was asking disturbing questions of her own. She wondered whether Jonestown had been “some kind of horrible government experiment.”
And then, in October 1981, Jonestown survivors took their suspicions to court.
They filed a $63 million lawsuit against former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former CIA Director Stansfield Turner alleging that the State Department and CIA had conspired to “enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones” and had conducted “mind control and drug experimentation” at Jonestown.
Four months later, the lawsuit was dismissed for “failure to prosecute timely.” Requests to appeal were denied.
So after everything we’ve gone through, the massive stockpile of psychoactive drugs, the forced drugging, sleep deprivation and isolation, the vulnerable populations Jones deliberately surrounded himself with, the strange intelligence connections, the years of government mind-control experimentation that preceded Jonestown, and finally survivors themselves accusing the CIA and State Department of using Jonestown for mind-control and drug experiments, I want to ask what you think:
Was Jonestown a CIA mind control experiment?
Relevant reading:
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A Note on Sources
This investigation draws extensively from previous research into Jonestown, Peoples Temple, intelligence connections and government mind-control programs. In particular, I relied on the work of investigative journalist Jim Hougan, the research collected at Whale.to, and “The Penal Colony,” a 1979 paper later presented by Congressman Leo Ryan aide Joseph Holsinger and preserved by the Jonestown & Peoples Temple archive at San Diego State University.
I have directly quoted portions of these sources, paraphrased and condensed portions of their research, independently reorganized the material, and added my own research, analysis and commentary throughout.
I strongly encourage readers interested in going further down this rabbit hole to read the original sources themselves:
Jim Hougan, “Jim Jones, Dan Mitrione and the Peoples Temple”
Read Jim Hougan’s original article
Jonestown research archived at Whale.to
Read the source material
“The Penal Colony,” Jonestown & Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive, San Diego State University
Read “The Penal Colony”
thank you for your important work. i was a military brat, a gate kid, and my whole family has autoimmune issues now. my dad, a vietnam vet, was dead by 50.
i don’t even know how to begin to understand (never mind process) what my government has done to me.
Amazing, courageous journalistic piece. Looking forward for an eventual part 2 and other such articles.