Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Their only constant reminder that Jones would die in defense of his principles was his permanently bent pinky. This was the result, he told his followers, of his intervening on the side of a black man against a white knife-wielding attacker in Indiana. According to the story, Jones, though suffering a severed tendon, had managed to bludgeon the assailant with a brick, probably killing him. The message was inspiring enough that some children—and a few adults—started holding their pinky the same way.

  Finally on a pleasant Redwood Valley afternoon in the summer of 1972, the church’s paranoia exploded into genuine fear. The congregation had gathered, a few hundred strong, in the parking lot between the parsonage and the Temple. While food and plates were arranged on long rows of utility tables, the church band performed. Teen-agers were shooting a few baskets. Some older folks took to the shade.

  Then a boom froze the scene. Stephan Jones, thirteen, thought that a musician had stomped hard on a bass drum. Then he turned and saw his father hit the ground with a thud. Dozens of terrified faces turned on their leader. The shot had originated among the tall, dense grapevines, to one side of the lot. Stephan’s big mongrel Husky bolted in that direction, barking and ready to do battle. The people started to take off that way too, but Jones, clutching his hands to his bloody chest, stopped them. “No. No,” he choked. “That way.” He pointed weakly in almost the opposite direction, ordering everyone toward the rear of the house.

  In the pandemonium, the pack obeyed Jones. One older man almost had a heart attack; still he managed to pick up a shovel and join the pursuit, ready to brain someone. Old ladies trembled, and one woman screamed hysterically, thinking Jones had been assassinated, just like the other great leaders of recent years. Stephan stood by as people fussed over his father; something did not seem quite right. Why did his father direct the pursuers away from the vineyard?

  With Marci and the nurses swarming around him, Jones struggled bravely to his feet, and was helped toward his house. Jack Beam suddenly appeared and took one arm. The people feared they had lost their God.

  A half hour later, Jim Jones walked out of the house under his own power. The crowd gasped in relief and praised the heavens. Jones turned to his nurses: “Tell them. Tell them about the hole I had in me.” While Jack Beam held up the bloody shirt with a hole, one Temple nurse testified, “I could stick my fingers in the wound.” Lack of a hole in Jim’s chest was proof of the miracle. He had healed himself, he said. And to underscore his capacity for forgiveness and mercy, he confessed that he had sent his people away from the shooter, so the would-be assassin could make a clean getaway and not be harmed. An emotional, uproarious meeting of thanksgiving followed.

  To remind his followers of his miracle, Jones commissioned Archie Ijames to build a wooden case with a glass front to display the bloody shirt. The relic was shown for only one meeting, however. The sheriff’s office heard about the shooting incident somehow and made an inquiry to Jones. That scared him more than the shooting. With miraculous speed, the display case went into storage.

  Those who were familiar with the mechanics of his healings were unbothered by the shooting incident. The manipulation was valid because the outcome was positive: the shooting unified people and made them realize that they had enemies, real enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy them.

  Meanwhile, Jones encouraged the dorm students to take more direct and militaristic action than socialism classes. Suddenly, without a graceful transition, Jim Jones, the man who named his firstborn after Gandhi, had begun quoting Che Guevara’s pat phrase: “The bullet or the ballot.” His vanguard of young people was told they might have to protect the Temple family against attack. Shoot straight and survive, they were advised.

  The dorm students supplemented their political theory readings with study of military strategy, wilderness survival techniques, explosives and weaponry. Members were given military problems related to safeguarding Temple buses traveling to and from their cave shelter during nuclear warfare.

  The cadre took to the woods regularly, too, for maneuvers in steep and densely forested terrain. For some it was torture, but for many it blew away the tensions of the classroom as they raced up and down hills, fantasizing revolution and timing each other. They rappelled down cliffs with ropes or learned to hide in the bush, to travel silently, to use binoculars and compasses, to find the enemy, to ambush.

  At the urging of Jones, some dorm students went out and bought a few M-1 carbines. Target practice was great fun, but deep down they knew that they were not Che Guevaras, and no revolution had arrived. Yet, in the summer of 1972, Jim Cobb and four other Temple members would be admitted to a special three-month course in weapons and legal training conducted by the San Francisco Police Department. Jones finally had sneaked some of his best people inside the belly of the beast. At the conclusion, the students were entitled as reserve or special police officers to carry a gun and do private security work.

  Self-protection became a preoccupation with Jones, almost as though he believed in the incidents he himself faked. In the space of a few years, security went from a one-man operation to a Secret Service-type blanket force. Armed protection was inaugurated in about 1969. At first, Marvin Swinney, a husky five-foot-eleven, 190-pounder whose family had been following Jones for years, worked alone, legally armed with a gun permit. Then he was augmented by Jones’s trusted aides, Jack Beam and Archie Ijames. In August 1972, Jones told the whole congregation, “I’d like to see you get your minds and spirits so you could hold ... guns and not feel any hypocrisy.” By late 1972, ten or eleven Temple members were attending special meetings for holders of gun permits, and Jones’s coterie of guards at services numbered at least thirty men and women, about five of them armed.

  As the church flourished, more security personnel were needed to pat-search all men who entered services and sift through the purses of women. Very few guns were confiscated, but knives piled up. At each meeting, security officers also checked around the podium and elsewhere for bombs and listening devices. Jones dreaded the thought that a tape of one of his socialistic Bible stomps might fall into the hands of an enemy.

  “Security” trained with weapons at a private gun club off Highway 101, or simply went into the woods. Jones chose the group from staff, planning commission, and the rank and file. Some members were brought to security mainly because of physical stature, others because they knew how to handle firearms. The same team did not serve at every event. Sometimes, if Jones wished to impress people with muscle, he brought out the meanest, most hulking crew he could assemble. If he wanted a lower profile, he used women and less intimidating men.

  When they put their bodies around Jones, it was as though they were shielding a world leader. All orders had to come from Jones himself. They were his personal police force.

  Despite the formalized training and snappy uniforms—usually leisure suits of various colors, shirts, ties and berets—it was on the whole a ragtag group of amateurs. No doubt that was why Jones imposed strict regulations on firearms use, especially in crowds. No one was supposed to show a gun except on the command of Jones, yet some guards flaunted them. A couple of times Jones even ordered security to display their weapons in meetings, a show of force like a scene from a bad gangster movie.

  Teddy Ballard, at seventeen hardly a professional teacher, conducted karate classes for about fifty people twice a week. Claiming martial arts expertise, Jones would come watch the lessons. But he phased them out after a month because the students shouted too loudly during practice. He was afraid the locals would feel threatened.

  To maintain the same high level of vigilance on the road and to protect the offerings money, Bus No. 7 was heavily armed, usually with a shotgun, a rifle and at least one pistol. The bus escorts, converted black and white Highway Patrol cars, were equipped with CB radios so they could communicate among themselves on trips. Security squad cars often met returning buses several miles outside of Ukiah and escorted them home in event of some threa
t or crisis.

  Despite their ultraloyalist demeanors, security people came to recognize that Jones was afraid for his life. Some were disguised to look like Jones so that they would take any bullets meant for him. One of these “doubles,” Wayne Pietila, wondered why the self-sacrificing Jones was unwilling to take bullets when he supposedly could cure himself anyway. Security guards also were among the first to doubt the authenticity of attacks on Jones.

  Most curious was the phantomlike ability of would-be assassins to vanish, of alleged bullets to penetrate a plywood antiassassin screen without making holes, of Jones to know almost as though on cue exactly when the shots would ring out. Once as the congregation went into hysterics, Jones clutched his head and shouted, “Calm down. I’ve been shot in the head, but I’m all right.” His explanation? “I dematerialized the bullets.”

  In close quarters, the guards got intimate glimpses at Jones’s healings too. Jim Cobb was assigned to guard the “cancers” as they were paraded around the church after healings. If it looked as though someone might get their hands on one of the putrid things, he was supposed to destroy the evidence by eating it first.

  Accidents happened too. One day, a telephone man was making some repairs at the Jones house, and he found a small overnight case. The first urgent phone call went to Marvin Swinney, since he was head of security. Swinney, thinking the case might contain a bomb, hustled over. He opened it gingerly, first the clasp, then the lid, ever so slowly. A terrible smell invaded his nostrils. In a plastic bag was a blob of chicken guts fermenting. When Swinney brought the find to Jones’s attention, the minister erupted: “It’s somebody trying to plant something to make me look bad. I’ll take care of these.”

  At one point, the gun situation started to slip out of control. It was a wonder that no one was shot when crises developed. Some guards were wearing guns on their hips Western-style, bragging about pistols in front of kids and showing off. A number did not understand the first thing about gun safety. Swinney was not particularly comforted when he saw Jones himself carrying a little .25-caliber automatic pistol—which he claimed the sheriff suggested he carry.

  Finally, Jones too decided that his people were using their guns as phallic symbols and that an excessive number owned weapons. Out of concern that someone—even he—might be shot, he ordered everyone to turn in their firearms. Members surrendered more than 170 of them—everything from expensive deer rifles with scopes to Saturday Night Specials to shotguns. The guns were stored at the Stoen house. Then one day, a church member transported them to a secure place in San Francisco. Some later would be sold or junked and others would be secreted in crates bound for South America, where they would be turned on outsiders for the first time.

  PART FOUR

  A DELICATE BALANCE

  Wherever you have lied, permanently or to stop awhile, you will make your little lies come forth, little thin wisps of lies at first, then larger windblown ones, complete with all the anger that seethes within yourself....

  LYNETTA JONES

  “Ode to Liars”

  TWENTY-THREE

  First Cracks

  During the California period, Jones had kept a nominal outpost in Indiana, mainly so he could recruit there on the Temple’s periodic cross-country bus excursions. It made sense to keep a foot in the fertile midwestern recruiting territory. In fact, a small group of loyalists left behind in Indianapolis had been managing the nursing homes, the former church and other Temple income properties. And Jones probably envisioned a permanent base in the Bible Belt. But his return to Indianapolis in 1971 brought on trouble with dire implications for the future.

  On this stopover, the former Indianapolis human rights director downplayed socialism in his services, as he usually did on the road. But he made the mistake of failing to temper his healings, which caused the vigilant local press to jump on his grandiose claim to be a Prophet of God, with power to raise people from the dead. Suddenly newspapers which had ignored or missed Jones’s healing ministry in the past were exposing him. The story was a bizarre one: the city’s first paid human rights director had returned as a healing huckster.

  CHURCH FILLED TO SEE “CURES” BY SELF-PROCLAIMED “PROPHET OF GOD,” read the headline of a skeptical first-person account in the Indianapolis Star October 14, 1971. Though the reporter did not accuse Jones directly of fakery, he did comment: “The people who were called upon in the evening [service] had a striking resemblance to some who were called upon earlier in the day.” The news coverage set the Indiana State Psychology Board to investigating Jones’s claims of curing “psychosomatic diseases” through “parapsychology.”

  Stung by the story and afraid of the investigations, Jones moderated his pitch when he returned to Indiana two months later. On this December 1971 visit, he downplayed the miracle-working, emphasizing instead the Temple’s social work in California. He also launched a diatribe against faith healers who spent their money on Lincoln Continentals and opulent houses of worship. Jones did manage a little healing—he had a woman pass a cancer and then ordered it paraded around like a saint’s relic—but he also made a disclaimer: “Don’t give up on the medical profession or on parapsychology.”

  The press and the local establishment were not appeased by such peace offerings. A doctor joined the opposition, expressing public concern that genuinely sick people might defer crucial medical treatment because of Jones’s quackery. When the doctor and others challenged Jones to submit the “cancers” to laboratory analysis, Jones said that he would welcome such tests, but that his publicity-shy church leaders would not allow it. Besides, he went on, someone might switch the bona fide cancers with a phony substance. His “enemies” would do anything to discredit his powers. In fact, he noted, there had been no fewer than twenty-three threats on his life since the Indianapolis Star story two months earlier.

  Seeing he would be hounded and investigated in his home state, the Prophet retreated. At the tail end of his healing campaign, he indicated he would permanently discontinue his Indiana ministry because, he said, of the great distance from his main church in California. After that graceful exit, the Temple did sell the nursing homes, the church and other properties. Two corporations chartered in Indiana were so inactive that they had their charters revoked. And Tim Stoen flew to the state to convince the psychology board to drop its inquiry. Everything was cleaned up, except the press. The newspaper was not finished with him yet.

  A few months after Jones’s departure, Indianapolis Star reporter Carolyn Pickering wrote the San Francisco Examiner inquiring after the transplanted church. The inquiry was passed along to the Examiner’s religion editor, Lester Kinsolving, who had already learned of the Temple from one of his newspaper column readers, and was curious. After some delay, he went after the story.

  Kinsolving and Examiner photographer Fran Ortiz drove to the Temple one morning in the summer of 1972, parked their car and approached the Redwood Valley church as people arrived for a service. The two journalists were soon intercepted by four or five clean-cut young men wearing white shirts, neckties and slacks. These Temple security guards first told the newsmen they could not enter, then, after checking with Jones inside, said that both could come in, but without cameras. Kinsolving plunged ahead, but Ortiz refused to leave his cameras unattended. While the service went on, he took exterior shots, with the security guards tailing him. He noticed that three wore sidearms and one was cradling a shotgun. When Ortiz asked why they carried guns, his escorts said that someone had tried to assassinate Jones by firing through a window.

  After Ortiz’s photos documented the allegation that Peoples Temple had become an armed compound, Kinsolving continued his research. He found that church members often were afraid to talk. But in a few weeks, he began to penetrate the organization’s wall of secrecy and developed some confidential sources.

  The “investigation” threw the Temple into a frenzy of defensive actions. The first major crisis was breaking out. Lester Kinsolving was no small-
town reporter, but a nationally syndicated columnist and well-known “ecclesiastical curmudgeon,” as Time magazine called him in a full-page 1971 profile. At news conferences, he shot questions like a prosecuting attorney. During Watergate he had asked Nixon whether he had stopped going to church. A fourth-generation Episcopal priest who had abandoned a career in advertising and public relations, Kinsolving had a nationwide reputation in religious circles. He reached many readers in the Temple’s prime recruiting areas. And he was sharing information with the Indianapolis Star, Jones’s nemesis.

  Believing that the best defense was a good offense, Jones had church members send some fifty-four letters to the Examiner praising himself. When it became clear that Kinsolving’s story would not be killed, Jones pretended to cooperate with the reporter, selecting Tim Stoen as intermediary to answer questions raised by Kinsolving’s interviews with former Temple members and other detractors. But Stoen, apparently overzealous, stumbled into a public relations blunder with his September 12, 1972, letter answering Kinsolving’s inquiries. After providing church statistics and extolling Jones’s humanitarian virtues, Stoen confirmed one of the most serious allegations against the church:

  “Jim has been the means by which more than forty persons have literally been brought back from the dead this year.... I have seen Jim revive people stiff as a board, tongues hanging out, eyes set, skin greying, and all vital signs absent....”

  The logic in Stoen’s closing appeal was as well knotted as a ribbon. “In case you wonder why I am so deeply interested in the matter of publicity of Jim Jones, it is this: it hurts him, even good publicity. He is antitotalitarian whether communist or fascist, and therefore we have extremists who recurringly try to do him in.... Whenever there is publicity, the extremists seem to show themselves.”