Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Winning the good will of elected officials like George Moscone was just the means to an end for Peoples Temple, a safeguard against attack. Their first sympathies went out not to conventional politicians, but to those who shared the revolutionary vision. These they cultivated with flattery, political support and often a great deal of money.

  The endorsement of the Temple by political radicals was a two-way bonding process. Figures such as the communist Angela Davis and Laura Allende, sister of the late Chilean leader, validated the Temple as a social movement to those on the Left, while their presence and support validated the Temple to its own members. Besides Davis, the church proudly numbered among its friends actress Jane Fonda, Black Panther Huey Newton, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks and others whose radicalism was to Jones’s liking. Jones desperately wanted their recognition, for he considered himself a lifelong revolutionary and communist.

  Angela Davis had been quick to emerge as one of the Temple’s darlings—militant, bright, black and a woman. The Temple participated in rallies on her behalf, and she made visits where she chatted privately with Jones and top aides in his apartment in the San Francisco temple. Angela Davis was both a “sister” and a celebrity of the Left who could strengthen Jones’s radical credentials. But other radicals, chief among them Dennis Banks, were considered more reliable friends.

  In early 1976, the Native American activist received what was probably the largest Temple donation—$19,500. The church previously had bestowed large sums, mostly for humanitarian and public relations reasons, on a variety of charities and causes—for instance, $6,000 to save a senior citizens escort program, $500 each to Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union and the San Francisco Police Fishing Program, and $1,000 to a Marin County drug treatment program. But the huge contribution to Banks gave the church predominance in the effort by progressives to block the Indian’s extradition to South Dakota for trial on weapons charges indirectly related to the 1973 Wounded Knee uprising.

  The Temple stepped in, as the Peoples Forum reported in April 1976, with nearly $20,000 bail to free Banks’s wife Ka-mook and their newborn daughter from an Oregon jail. “A week ago, my wife was behind an iron door, my children were in Oklahoma. You, in your love, have moved the iron door,” Banks told 2,500 persons at the San Francisco temple.

  AIM was only one of several groups Jones was cultivating. Though philosophically Jones considered his Western Addition neighbors, the Black Muslims, to be sexist and racist, he respected their discipline and effectiveness in youth work and business enterprises. At one time, Jones feared that friction, born largely out of close proximity, might precipitate violence. He contributed to the superheated climate by speculating without cause that the Muslims were responsible for the Temple’s arson fire. Once after Temple photographer Al Mills allegedly was hassled by Muslims for taking photos of them, Jones became furious and sent a few of his biggest young black men, including Chris Lewis, to the nearby mosque to issue a warning. The Temple wanted no trouble, but would take no abuse.

  Gradually, however, relations with the Black Muslims improved. The Temple bought fish from Muslim fish stores. They even exchanged visitors at some services, which must have been particularly gratifying to Jones in light of the Muslims’ rebuff of him in Chicago years earlier. And, in 1976, the two organizations planned a historic event for the Los Angeles Convention Center. For their joint “Spiritual Jubilee” on May 23, 1976, the Muslims and the Temple invited political figures to their gigantic “demonstration of brotherhood.” Among those converging on the convention center were some of the Temple’s most treasured friends and political contacts—Dr. Goodlett, Angela Davis, San Francisco District Attorney Joe Freitas, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, not to mention Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, whom the Temple had wooed with little success.

  A half moon of at least fifteen to twenty Temple and Muslim guards sat, shoulder to shoulder, below the stage. The Temple had selected its beefiest men for the security ring out front and instructed them to look as mean as possible. Backstage several other bodyguards were posted, all packing pistols and instructed to protect their leader from the Muslims if necessary.

  In the audience, Temple members in red and black intermingled with Muslims in white, creating a spectacle of contrasting color. In those thousands upon thousands, Muslims far outnumbered Temple members, despite Temple claims to be the largest Protestant church in California. Jones felt compelled to make excuses: some Temple buses from northern California, he said, had broken down on the so-called Grapevine grade on their way south. The Temple compensated for the empty seats by putting on a very professional musical revue.

  With magnificent presence, Jones planted himself behind the microphone. “Peace, peace,” he uttered, motioning for silence. “We are grateful of this symbolic merging of our two movements.... If the Peoples Temple and the Nation of Islam can get together, anyone can.... A few years ago, we couldn’t walk down the streets because of tensions, and one might have thought we could fight.”

  In his strong staccato voice, Jones blazed an impressionistic trail of rhetoric, leaping abruptly from “unity” to Christianity to the need for a free press to Watergate to—totally out of context—a reference to himself as an object of sexual desire. Finally, Jones pledged support to the Muslims, declaring that he wished Wallace Muhammad were running for President of the United States.

  Despite such fleeting moments of grandeur, most of Jones’s pronouncements centered on local housing politics, not national politics. As a housing commissioner, Jones consistently took the side of tenants. So when, in late 1976 and early 1977, the Four Seas Investment Corporation tried to evict the mostly poor and elderly tenants of the International Hotel, he was quick to seize on the incident. Four Seas wanted to raze the decrepit residence hotel not far from the North Beach “topless” nightclub area for more profitable purposes. Jones saw a classic confrontation in the making—a greedy corporate giant versus the poor and helpless. Joining other community groups, Jones threw the weight of his office and the Temple against the planned eviction.

  With Jones as chairman, the Housing Authority voted to acquire the hotel, using $1.3 million in federal community development funds; they would then turn it over to a nonprofit tenants group. The Authority’s proposal, however, ran into unbridgeable obstacles in the courts. The evictions were ordered.

  The issue was heating up. Crowds of five thousand ringed the hotel. Sheriff Hongisto, a Jones political ally, said he lacked the manpower to carry out safely the evictions and was found in contempt. Meanwhile, picketers rallied around the clock, forming a human buffer zone to keep out the sheriff’s office. Protestors inside laid plans to barricade the doors at the first sign of an eviction squad.

  During a mid-January 1977 demonstration, the Temple supplied two thousand of the five thousand persons chanting, “No, no, no evictions!” The explosiveness of the situation was growing by the hour; police received reliable eyewitness reports that a gunman had been stationed on the hotel roof with a rifle and that Molotov cocktails were being poured by tenants’ supporters. On the streets, Jones’s people barely avoided a spontaneous violent incident involving an outsider. In this climate, Jones and Stoen had conferences with go-betweens for Sheriff Hongisto, who was in a tough spot, since his ideological sympathies probably were pro-tenant. Jones, wearing sunglasses although it was midnight, stood outside a car several blocks from the hotel surrounded by bodyguards; he looked like a Mafia don. His lawyer, Stoen, climbed into the car and did most of the talking, though at one point Jones interjected: “I’m concerned about the possibility of violence.”

  Though Jones contended there were no guns in the hotel, the situation had become so unstable that Superior Court Judge Ira Brown, Jr., stayed his eviction order. But, by June 1977, after Hongisto had served a five-day contempt sentence in his own county jail, the courts ruled that the Housing Authority could not acquire the hotel through eminent domain. The battle was lost.

&nb
sp; The International Hotel incident was not a total loss for the Temple, however. It incidentally introduced the Temple to many progressives and leftists, as well as labor and community leaders. More important, it reestablished the Temple as an organization which could turn out more “troops” on short notice than any other in San Francisco.

  To heighten his membership’s understanding and empathy for progressive and socialist struggles around the world, Jones provided political education in his sermons, in the church newspaper and in guest speaker programs. Most important, he imbued his people with fear so that they —no matter what their backgrounds—might feel oppression. The specters of Klan lynchings, a revival of Nazism, earthquake, nuclear holocaust and global famine exploded from the pages of Peoples Forum. Then Jones was handed evidence of what he had always suspected—that Big Brother was watching.

  One Sunday in November 1976, Unita Blackwell Wright, a Mississippi mayor and longtime civil rights activist, was delivering a speech to the San Francisco temple about her trip to China with actress Shirley MacLaine in 1973. Two men caught eavesdropping at the front door suddenly took off by car.

  Temple sleuths eventually traced the rental car to a government electronics expert, Thomas Dawsey of Biloxi, Mississippi. In response to inquiries from Representative Phil Burton, Democrat from California, the Air Force wrote on January 26, 1977, that Dawsey, a civilian electrical engineer, had been working temporarily at California air bases but was off duty on the day of the Temple speech.41

  In two other letters, the Air Force said that Dawsey was assigned to a Keesler AFB, Mississippi, group that installed and maintained electronics and communications equipment. But it insisted that the group would not and did not spy on the Temple or Wright. The curious episode was added to the list of conspiratorial actions against the church.

  Jones’s inflated claims of power in the United States and in the international community of the Left, including Guyana, evidently did not excite Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. On January 24, 1977, Tim Stoen wrote Castro: “I have just learned that Rev. James W. Jones, the founder and leader of Peoples Temple Church (with more than 250,000 active members, considered the nation’s largest single church) will soon be visiting Cuba with Dr. Carlton Goodlett.... I would respectfully recommend that you consider making this occasion a Visit of State....”

  As it happened, Jones returned to Cuba with no more fanfare than on his first visit in the 1960s. In any case the real reason for the trip, arranged by Goodlett, was old-fashioned business. Goodlett and Jones wanted to establish an import-export trading relation with Cuba for a San Francisco Bay Area company that he, Jones and other unnamed persons had founded.42

  In Cuba, while visiting Goodlett’s business contacts and touring schools and other facilities, Jones was annoyed that Castro had not consented to see him. Ruefully he remarked that Castro must be living better than the people.

  The highlight of the trip was a visit to fugitive Huey Newton’s residence. Goodlett had provided the entree to the Black Panther leader, Newton—who had run from California charges of murder and assault and who, incidentally, had never met Castro during his two years in Cuba—was teaching at the University of Havana and living in a modest apartment complex. During their hour visit, Jones and Newton talked about the Panther’s family members who had attended the Temple—his parents and a cousin. They also discussed Newton’s desire to return to the United States struggle—a notion that Jones ridiculed privately, saying that Newton missed his luxurious apartment and his favorite bars in Oakland.

  The March 1977 Peoples Forum played up the trip in a big way. Jones offered basically a positive appraisal of Cuba, with exceptions:

  “With as much dissent as he saw, Rev. Jones felt free to suggest that it might be a good idea to allow someone with a different perspective to run against Castro. There have been elections for all the lower level offices, and Dr. Castro himself was reelected, but he ran unopposed....”

  In the meantime, Jones’s efforts in another leftist Caribbean state met with a series of successes. They had led off with an overblown pretentious letter similar to the one to Castro. In October 1976, Temple spokesman Mike Prokes requested that Guyana Prime Minister Forbes Burnham receive Jones as a dignitary during a visit later that year with some “high ranking U.S. officials.”

  To impress the Guyanese, Jones landed in Guyana on December 27 accompanied by California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. By Temple arrangement, Dymally was accorded VIP treatment: Jones and Dymally had a private meeting with Burnham and Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Wills. In the session, both Burnham and Wills said Guyana wanted to keep the door open to cooperation between the two countries, and Dymally agreed to convey the message to the U.S. State Department.

  In a letter to Burnham, Dymally would call Jim Jones “one of the finest human beings” and later would say he was “tremendously impressed” by his visit to Jonestown.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Flight of the Princess

  Behind Jones’s international diplomacy and the Temple’s barrage of public relations, problems were popping up faster than they could be resolved. Jim Jones feared Treasury Department scrutiny for political activity and tax improprieties. He feared the FBI, although the agency had shown no interest in him. He feared the news media, although he had cultivated San Francisco Chronicle city editor Steve Gavin, its popular columnist Herb Caen and several local reporters on daily newspapers and in television. With one hand he raised a clenched fist to figures on the Left, while with the other he shook the hands of politicians. All the time he kept a sturdy hold on his organization. But behind the walls of Temple image, political alliances and hocus-pocus lurked the truest threat—disloyalty from the ranks.

  Some defectors knew so much that Jones must have considered them high-grade explosives waiting to be detonated. In the past, Jones had covered himself fairly well. Linda Dunn, who once had dug through garbage as a Jones staffer, had been tailed by a private investigator, then intimidated by Chris Lewis, who spat at her feet. Marvin Swinney, the first head of security, had moved across the country after Jones bought his silence and tried to threaten him. Deanna and Elmer Mertle, who defected in the mid-1970s to become Jeannie and Al Mills, received vaguely threatening letters that implied trouble if they broke silence. And the Eight Revolutionaries mostly had been placated. The net effect was that those who could have hurt Jones most had refrained from doing so. Until Grace Stoen turned against him.

  In July 1976, Grace Stoen vanished from the San Francisco temple without a word. Shortly thereafter she showed up in Redwood Valley to collect belongings. “Can we help you?” some people asked. “No, thanks,” she replied, “it’s just garbage.” She threw boxes of possessions into the car and sped away from the valley where she had spent six difficult years.

  No single deception or episode had driven her away. It was, rather, an unending accumulation of demands, contradictions, emotional traumas and disappointments. As her negativity deepened, she had confided in her friend Jack Arnold Beam, the Temple bandleader and son of Jack Beam, Sr. They commiserated. When young Beam defected, he invited her to come along, but she was not yet ready. Before leaving, he advised her to seek out Walter Jones, his co-worker in the bus garage. Jones—a sandy-haired master mechanic known as Smitty—had stayed behind when his wife Carol and her family, the Purifoys, had moved back to the Central Valley, but now he too was wavering. In him, Grace found a new ally. They became friends. They spent more and more time together. Word around the church was that Jones had assigned Grace to Smitty in the hopes her “special attention” would keep him from following the path of his in-laws. If so, the plan backfired. Grace did not keep Walt Jones in the church but in fact led him away.

  Grace Stoen had seen her marriage dismantled, her child given up to be raised communally. She had been berated in p.c. meetings for not publicly proclaiming Jones to be father of the child. She had watched her little boy paddled in front of the church. She had seen Jones portray he
r husband as a homosexual. She had sat in p.c. while Jones waved a gun and threatened to shoot her if she fell asleep. She had seen poor people treated like cattle on bus trips and fed poorly at home, while Jones ate good meat. She had seen the fleecing and the fraud. As head counselor, and part of the Temple justice system, she had been compromised. As one of the notary publics, she handled guardianships and property transfers that tightened the church’s grip on other members. As a p.c. member, she had witnessed atrocious statements and actions.

  In the summer of 1976—after witnessing dozens of spankings and boxing matches—Grace Stoen finally drew the line. A forty-year-old woman was being pummeled by some dozen members for saying that Jones had turned them all into robots. The animal rage of the attack, the violent squelching of dissent, was too much. She told Walt Jones afterward, “Walt, I’m leaving. This is too heavy duty.”

  “Can I leave with you?” he asked.

  On the Fourth of July weekend, the head counselor of Peoples Temple—the woman Jones had asked to administer the San Francisco temple, the wife of the assistant district attorney in San Francisco—made her dash for the outside world. To avoid hampering church operations, she left behind her church-related keys and instructions about unfinished business. She also left a note expressing her pain at leaving so many people she loved, one of them her son. Grace would say later that she did not want to put his life in danger. She was all too aware of Jones’s claims on the child, his attempts to track down traitors, his threats to kill them.