Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  At the American Embassy, hundreds of Guyanese began waiting in line by 7:00 A.M. to explore ways of emigrating to the United States. Down the street stood the British High Commission, and across the esplanade rose the splendid white Sacred Heart Church, where Jim Jones held his healing service. Next to that, the Presidential Palace was graced with lush gardens. It was along this boulevard that Paula Adams would do most of her work, currying favor with officials and influential private citizens.

  Adams had joined the Temple several years before. An attractive young white woman with delicate features and a pleasing personality, she was utterly devoted to Jim Jones. In a testimonial written for Jones, she confessed that when she first came to Peoples Temple she was a mixed-up woman of twenty-two with no hope beyond the drinking, doping life of a manic-depressive. She had been a student in the Santa Rosa dormitories, but was not doing well academically, and Jones decided she could better serve the cause in Georgetown.

  It was a shrewd choice. Attractive white women were not only rare, but real objects of desire in Guyana’s machismo-steeped culture. Adams’s soft good looks and relaxed style won the Temple many friends there, not least among them Laurence “Bonny” Mann, Guyana’s ambassador to Washington. Mann would squire her around town to social and diplomatic functions during the next few years when he was on home leave.

  By having Adams, along with Debbie Touchette, establish the Temple’s full-time public relations team in the capital, Jones set out to wire an entire nation. This was not an overwhelming task in a small, impoverished Third World country with potentially corruptible officials and a monolithic government. In Guyana, the “media” consisted of employees of the Ministry of Information. If Jones could lead San Francisco politicians around by the nose, the Guyanese should fall into step as readily.

  The fledgling Temple crew moved into a rented house at 121 Third Street in Albertown, a district of Georgetown. It was a fairly new, spacious home, with three bedrooms, a large living room, dining room and kitchen, and was built in the traditional fashion, on stilts. The church public relations staff worked and entertained there while getting to know and influence figures in the Guyana power structure, writing upbeat notes to government officials describing Temple accomplishments in the interior and arranging passports and visa matters with the Ministry of Home Affairs. There were some notable successes:

  In late 1974, government officials gave the Temple permission to import “duty free” certain items of household and personal effects, as well as construction and agricultural equipment. And on February 26, 1975, less than two months after the healing service at Sacred Heart, the National Assembly, Guyana’s Parliament, passed the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ Church Act, which incorporated the church in Guyana.

  Father Andrew Morrison, still smarting over the phony faith healing, did not see or hear of the Temple for several months. Then, to his amazement, two members approached him and asked to be admitted to the Guyana Council of Churches. When the Council discussed the application, Father Morrison strongly expressed his own reservations, and the Council delayed.

  As the Temple mobilized an intensive lobbying campaign, the Council did further checking. One member, Rev. Paul Tidemann, an American-born Lutheran minister, made an inquiry to a friend in the United States. He wrote on February 18, 1975, to Rev. Dr. Carl Segerhammer, at the Pacific Southwest Synod in Los Angeles:

  “Needless to say, I am more than a little skeptical about this group. ... Guyana, as with many Third World countries, is deluged with crazy religious outfits and personality cults. We are struggling with this Korean fellow, Moon, and his Unification Church. We don’t need another cult here, if that is what Peoples Temple is.”

  Segerhammer passed the letter on to the Northern California Ecumenical Council, among whose members was Karl Irvin, president of Northern California Disciples of Christ and a friend of the Temple. The Ecumenical Council group wrote back to Rev. Tidemann, giving the Temple a clean bill of health. With the reluctant assent of Father Morrison, the Council of Churches admitted the Temple. Over the next few years, membership would give the Temple continued visibility and prominence in Georgetown affairs, despite its basically passive role.

  As time went by, the Temple public relations machine kicked into high gear—with results. In January 1976, Ambassador Mann—Paula Adams’s friend—wrote to a Temple secretary in Redwood Valley, saying he had heard many fine things about “Bishop Jones” from Adams and from Mike and Debbie Touchette.

  The following month, two years after the Temple had applied for the Jonestown lease, the government finally granted it. The Temple originally sought 25,000 acres, but after a survey, it was cut down to 3,000 acres. Under the lease, the rent would be 25 cents an acre for the first five years, then would be revised at five-year intervals. The original application called for a minimum investment of $1 million Guyanese (about $400,000 U.S.) during the first two years. As part of a requirement to cultivate and occupy at least half the land within five years, the Temple had to submit progress reports.

  The jungle pioneers had moved permanently from Port Kaituma into Jonestown in 1975. They slept in the large building next to the banana shed. Mike Touchette’s parents ran the place, Charlie as chief planner and administrator, Joyce as head of the kitchen. Charlie, in his early forties, was independent-minded, resourceful and well organized. Once a successful salesman in the Midwest, he now produced in the jungle too, getting the most out of his workers, winning their respect, pitching in to help.

  Touchette’s wife, thoroughly and unquestioningly committed to Jim Jones, was the mother figure for all the children. She lent a sympathetic shoulder to older men who were homesick or missed their wives. Joyce even took on the role of daughter to Mom and Pop Jackson, an elderly black couple who flew to Guyana when the first settlers arrived by boat. (Jones had always bragged that Pop Jackson was one hundred and eight and his wife one hundred four, but Mike Touchette once peeked at their passports and discovered they were only eighty-nine and seventy respectively.)

  In Jonestown, Mike Touchette’s lifelong wish to live like a lumber-jack in the wilderness was fulfilled. After the Guyanese workers cleared jungle, young Touchette would let the trees sit for ninety days, then burn the debris. At that point, he would scrape the field smooth with his Caterpillar tractor, forming nutrient-rich piles of brush and vegetation. It was a delicate task for heavy machinery. He had to push the debris into windrows without disturbing the thin and precious topsoil. But Touchette became known as the best bulldozer operator in the area.

  Sometimes workers would cut loose from their jobs. They threw fifty-five-gallon diesel drums on the windrows, lit them, and watched the explosions blow huge logs into the air. The young men hiked the jungle trails and tasted the thrill of exploration, the pride of owning a vast tract of land.

  But from the start, Mike Touchette doubted the project would ever become self-sufficient. The soil was too poor. The high temperature in the jungle oxidized the organic matter, leaving the ground hard as concrete. In the ongoing quest for the right soil nutrients, the group bought hundreds of tons of commercial fertilizer and crushed sea shells to spread over one hundred acres of land. But each application of fertilizer lasted for one crop only, and was effective only if the weather was decent and heavy rains did not wash away the thin topsoil. Jim Jones told the settlers to keep experimenting. But it was costing a fortune.

  In December 1974, the Jonestown settlers requested some essential machinery: a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a ten-ton truck and a four-wheel-drive tractor with a winch—as well as all sorts of small tools and farm implements. Archie Ijames and J. R. Purifoy, back in the States, sent word they had located Army surplus trucks, off-road models that could negotiate even Jonestown’s mud. They also made a bargain deal on a ten-ton dump truck and mobile crane that could lift twenty tons once they were rebuilt. And they promised to send down a warehouse full of parts and a generator.

  The equipment finally arrived at th
e Kaituma River dock on September 29, 1975, nearly ten months after the requests for it. During unloading from the boat, the crane, its tires completely bald, slipped on the wet and steep dock, so the Jonestown crew had to borrow a government Caterpillar to pull it off. The Temple’s newly rebuilt truck lost its brakes on a dockside incline just as the hydraulic hose on the rebuilt crane broke. The crate of parts fell open as it was unloaded. Inside was rusted, no-good junk. Only a windshield wiper motor worked. The Temple had also shipped three generators—one would not start, the others blew up within three weeks.

  The settlers were angry. They were sweating in the heat and mud clearing the jungle, building paradise for Peoples Temple, and their reward was equipment that qualified as scrap metal. They blamed the money-saving mentality of the folks back home. Disgusted and rebellious, Mike and Charlie Touchette went into Georgetown and, without authorization, bought new generators. Later, they would find out that Temple mechanics in Redwood Valley had just begun to rebuild the equipment when Jim Jones ordered them to ship it off immediately.

  The settlers were further handicapped by a scarcity of funds in Jonestown, even to buy lumber. Little construction was going on, though nationals were paid to erect structures from Jonestown’s own harvested timber. The large wall-less pavilion was the most prominent of these.

  In the early years, the settlers held meetings there on Sundays, with Joyce and Charlie Touchette presiding. When problems arose, the group dealt with them in a civil manner. They had decided never to have heavy catharsis sessions like those in the States; games and browbeating would only hurt the project. The meetings would, however, open with the “Three Miracles,” a ritual instituted in the California church. Everyone would be called upon to attest to the miraculous protection accorded by Jones that week. In the States, Mike often had to make up at least a couple of his three miracles, things such as “Father’s love saved me from certain death on the freeway Tuesday....” In Jonestown it was easier, because the work was physical and hazardous. “Thank you, Father, for saving me from an accident where the machine threw a rock up and almost hit my head,” was one Mike Touchette recited often, whether he believed it or not.

  The meetings would last anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours, with much time devoted to planning. They discussed building a large number of cottages, each to house two or three couples or eight singles and kids. And there were the nuts-and-bolts matters—generator repair, ordering materials from the States and Georgetown, construction of septic tanks or showers or toilets, and agricultural concerns.

  Just when the settlers got too complacent, just when they were beginning to forget their holy mission, hour-long tapes of Jim Jones’s sermons and teachings would arrive from California. Listening to each tape eight or ten times would jar them into remembering how bad things really were back home. Then their productivity would improve noticeably.

  Jim Jones did not visit again until November 1975, when he, Mike Prokes and Stephan Jones came to check the settlement’s progress. Mike Touchette was glad to see them, if only for a few days, especially because his wife accompanied them out from Georgetown. Mike and Debbie had been going as many as six months without seeing each other, even though they were only 150 miles of jungle apart.

  Charlie Touchette was looking forward to Jones’s stay for another reason: he had been entreating Jones for more money to keep the place running. At times, shortages of funds and fuel almost dragged work to a standstill. A number of times, they had to shut down the Caterpillar—once for two weeks—until they could get more diesel fuel. But when Mike’s father Charlie made a plea for more money, Jones threw him a withering look: “I’m bleeding for money,” Jones told him. “I’m dying for you and you’re just bitching about money, just throwing it around.”

  Instead of money, Jones brought his catharsis sessions with him. He thrived on the emotional upheavals the settlers had hoped to avoid. Just before the Sunday meeting, he went up to Mike Touchette. “I want you to jump Tim Swinney’s ass for being a bully. He’s treating people bad. And I want you to do it so people don’t think there’s an alliance between you two.”

  Jones knew that Mike and Swinney, his uncle, were inseparable. Swinney did have a tough exterior that put off some people. But when Touchette confronted him, as instructed, he felt very uncomfortable. It reminded him of the day Jones told him to confront Grace Stoen in p.c. He got a glimmer that Father might be trying to keep people apart, rather than mend their problems. After the confrontation, Touchette and Swinney stayed friends.

  In 1976, Jones visited his settlers only twice. While he was away, they lived almost autonomously, and more happily. Though there were still fewer than fifty settlers, many more organized activities were available. Rented 16-millimeter movies from Georgetown—everything from Hello, Dolly! and Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon—were screened in the jungle. A print of Z, the Costa-Gavras film about corruption and fascism in Greece, was run a dozen times a month for a year. Settlers memorized the screenplays so well that they walked around during the day spouting lines from the movies or singing songs from the musicals.

  On a typical day, people were awake at sunup and at work by seven. They broke for lunch, often a hearty vegetable stew. Quitting time was about five thirty, then people scrubbed up for dinner. Having no cold storage facilities, the settlers ate meat only when fresh-killed-usually two or three times a week. The Amerindian hunters sold them deer, “bush cows,” wild boar, two types of South American rodents and a variety of small jungle animals.

  Except for Sunday nights, people had the evenings free. They could read, catch up on their sleep, play cards and dominoes or watch movies. For Mike Touchette, it was a great life. He loved hanging out on the porch outside the kitchen with Swinney, Jim Bogue, Phil Blakey and others. They would turn off the generator and talk quietly in the dark, or listen to the sounds of the jungle, the baboons howling in the wind, the crickets, frogs, night birds and vampire bats.

  THIRTY

  Radicals

  Like all con men, Jones had learned the value of keeping his followers and pursuers off balance. He even managed to obscure the nature of the Temple—perhaps the biggest juggling act for such a highly visible personality.

  In Indiana, the Temple was more of a church than a social movement or cult; in California, it was more of a social movement and cult than a utopian community; in Guyana, it would become a utopian community and in some ways the ultimate cult.

  The most respectable and accurate label in the Temple’s early years, even in California, was “church.” To most people, the California Temple remained a humanitarian, activist Christian church. The Pentecostal style of the services and the conventional religious trappings kept religious people in a familiar theological sphere while moving them in other directions. However, in terms of the intimacy among members, the Temple most closely resembled a utopian community. Like dozens of communal groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Temple came to the West Coast to escape some perceived outside threat and persecution and harbored a self-righteous group mentality that raised natural barriers to outsiders.39

  While he never publicly called his organization a cult, Jones, with his paranoid idiosyncratic personality, ventured toward the extremes of cultism—toward the pinnacle of human control. His extremist internal methods demanded secrecy and caution in recruiting, which doomed him to mediocrity in the numbers category. Yet in some sense, the personality cult surrounding Jones was similar to those around Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Elvis Presley or John F. Kennedy. There was a sort of rock-star sex-object mentality, along with hero worship and a respect for his personal sacrifices as the ultimate socialist. In another sense, Jones’s exploitation of power carried the same scars as Hitler’s and Charles Manson’s—though on a much smaller scale than Hitler’s, on a different and less maniacal scale than Manson’s.40

  In the end, Jones’s people were subjected unwittingly and gradually to sophisticated mind control and behavior-mo
dification techniques borrowed from postrevolutionary China, North Korea and perhaps from other cults. Though he had always been domineering, it is unlikely that Jones, a reader of books on psychology and mind control, would have arrived independently at common cult techniques, such as isolation of the recruit and renunciation of self, family and previously held values. Like the Temple, most cults set out unattainable goals such as heaven on earth, because attainment would leave the organization without a justification for its own existence. The cult really strives to preserve a state of mind with defendable borders. As in the Temple, most significant violations of the cult borders are defections by “traitors” and investigations by the outside “enemy.” And this alarmist view is promoted by the charismatic leader who constantly asks his followers to push a juggernaut of paranoia. There are no checks on him, for he defines reality and makes all rules. His power is so institutionalized that organizational contradictions go unchallenged. In the Temple, for instance, Jones promoted his infallibility while convincing his people that they could voice dissent. Each unchallenged contradiction in turn nourished the leader’s delusions of grandeur. Charismatic personalities such as Jones start viewing themselves as divine or as representatives of the divine, with the power to punish, instruct, command, reveal. Some seize power over life and death. In the Temple, Jones not only took divine powers but also allowed himself earthly privileges: typically, sexual gratification and, to a lesser extent, material things.

  The Temple distinguished itself from most cults with its overtly political message. The church involved itself in political processes and formed political alliances, not just for the sake of expediency but also out of some real political sympathies. In the final analysis, the Temple did act most often—in the outside world—as a social movement, with a dual purpose of improving this world and aggrandizing the group. As the social direction of the Temple became more openly socialistic and communistic, it depended more upon the political world, in particular on the Left, for its identity and its protection.