Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  When he met Tim Carter, Brian was working in a local food market, sharing a place with other young men, mastering the saxophone, partying, and visiting his strong-willed Irish Catholic mother several times a month. When he came face to face with Jones, something clicked. The minister detected a certain receptiveness in him. “You know what I’m talking about,” Jones said after his humanitarian spiel. He wanted Brian, and Brian was flattered. Instead of starting the fall 1975 term at San Francisco State University, Brian moved to Redwood Valley, became a true believer, cut his hair short and found a job at a Ukiah Safeway.

  Clare Bouquet had trouble staying in touch with her son. He would drop by her place unannounced every three or four months, but he told her the only way to contact him was by mail. A rebellious son had been transformed into a zealot who kept a picture of Jim Jones over his heart to protect himself from auto accidents, who collected all his possessions of value, including an heirloom diamond ring. His mother hoped he would pass through the phase. But the brief visits grew less frequent.

  Along the way, Brian had met a pretty young woman named Claudia Dillard. Her mother, Esther Dillard, the daughter of a Baptist preacher, had drifted to Catholicism and spiritualism before joining the Temple several years earlier. The large family was musically inclined, and Claudia sang beautifully. When the singer met this saxophone player, the two fell in love. Brian wrote his mother, breaking the news, describing his girl friend as very pretty, “the kindest person I have ever known,” and black. For a couple of years, Clare Bouquet urged her son to bring his girl friend home with him for Christmas Eve with the family, but Brian always had an excuse. Then, on January 20, 1978, Brian showed up unannounced at his mother’s apartment and introduced Claudia. “This is my wife,” he said. “We were married last Tuesday at the courthouse in Los Angeles.” Clare Bouquet hugged Claudia and welcomed her to the family.

  The newlyweds brought belated Christmas presents—a flower vase from Claudia, an antique spyglass from Brian. But when Clare mentioned getting them a wedding present, Brian discouraged it, saying the present probably would be sold when they left the country. A happy occasion suddenly turned frightening as he said, “We might be going to the mission for a while. We have a beautiful experiment down there.” His mother begged, “Don’t go down there, Brian,” and she elicited a promise that he would come to see her and discuss it before going.

  In May, when Clare Bouquet discovered Brian already was gone, the San Francisco temple arranged for her to talk to him by radio-telephone. “Brian, why did you leave like that without even saying good-bye?” she said.

  “Well, we didn’t know what you were up to,” he said, implying she might have tried to stop him. “We think you’re in cahoots with Tim Stoen.”

  Clare Bouquet had never met Tim Stoen. But this phone conversation prompted her to contact Stoen and the other Concerned Relatives. Meanwhile, she continued doing what every American supposedly should do to resolve a grievance. For the entire summer of 1978 she tried to enlist the help of government officials in the United States and in Guyana, and of law officials and even the Catholic Church. She received only the most callous sorts of bureaucratic responses. Clare Bouquet wrote Prime Minister Burnham with copies to President Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Guyana’s U.S. Ambassador Laurence Mann. She wrote to her congressmen, one of whom was Representative Leo Ryan. “I am desperately worried about the safety and well being of my son, Brian Bouquet, and his wife Claudia.... The very lives of those 1,100 Americans may be in jeopardy.”

  A short time after sending the letter, she received a radio-telephone call from Brian. “Why did you send those lies to ... Washington?” he asked. Though he did not tell her, Brian had been ordered to write a letter to some California congressmen saying his mother was upset merely because he had married a black woman.

  With only a thin partition for privacy, Brian and Claudia lived in the loft of a cottage shared with about a dozen other people. They did love each other and their music. They went before the Jonestown relationships committee to ask for permission to have a child. As a test, they were first required to go through a trial parenthood, taking care of some children.

  Brian’s few letters to his mother, with sweetened accounts of Jonestown life, did not console her much. He described the trade winds, a pet parrot and his performances with the Temple band in Georgetown, where he said he made much money. He sent a picture of himself and Claudia smiling in front of their “very own cottage,” but Mrs. Bouquet became alarmed when she learned from Debbie Blakey that it actually belonged to Marceline Jones.

  Tortured with worry, Clare Bouquet wanted to know about her son’s true living conditions and well-being, but the State Department handled her inquiry sloppily. Consulate officials promised to visit Brian in August 1978 and to report back. But no one from the Embassy would set foot inside Jonestown until November, less than a week before Mrs. Bouquet arrived in Guyana with her congressman.

  FORTY-FOUR

  41 Lamaha Gardens

  News of the fuss in California had reached Guyanese newspaper publisher Brindley Benn. Once the deputy prime minister under Cheddi Jagan and later founder of the pro-Chinese Working People’s Vanguard party, Benn was more than willing to reprint allegations of Temple misconduct in one of his several antigovernment newspapers to embarrass his political foes. On Christmas Day 1977, his paper The Beacon carried a small inside story repeating accusations made by ex-Temple members in the United States.

  That Sunday, Sharon Amos and Paula Adams of the Lamaha Gardens public relations team dropped by Benn’s home to demand a retraction. They said they were surprised by an attack coming from a comrade in socialism. But Benn thought his visitors did not know the first thing about socialism. And when they suggested his story was an indirect jab at Burnham, he replied, “When I want to attack the PNC, I will [do it directly].”

  The Temple group left him with a batch of documents and articles bearing on the alleged conspiracy against the Temple. Benn became so intrigued by their contents that he went to see Guyana’s commissioner of police and related accusations about guns, people held against their will in Jonestown, snipers shooting at Jones from the bush and other troubling reports. The commissioner listened politely but did not appear interested.

  The January 22, 1978, edition of Benn’s The Hammer, a four-page mimeographed sheet, devoted the third page to Jonestown. Its headline: [Police Commissioner] BARKER MUST PROBE PEOPLES TEMPLE.

  “Vanguard Publications believes,” wrote Benn, “that all is not above board with the Peoples Temple, although Rev. Jones appeared photographed with the Prime Minister. Vanguard is determined to secure every [bit of] information, local and foreign, on the sect.” For the educated classes of Georgetown, who cherished every scrap of news from nongovernment sources, the stories rivaled the New West expose; they were a potential embarrassment to the Burnham regime.

  The Temple considered suing Benn to clear its name, even though he had no money and sold bakery goods to survive. Amos and Adams went to see their old friend Fred Wills. Though fired as foreign minister, Wills still met periodically with the Temple and imparted valuable information about government matters. Wills told the Temple it would be foolish to sue Benn. “You’d be a laughingstock,” he said. “It would be like suing Bobo the Clown.”

  The house at 41 Lamaha Gardens could not have been in a more desirable location. Bought April 17, 1977, for 33,000 U.S. dollars to accommodate the Temple’s burgeoning public relations staff in the capital, the spacious, two-story yellow stucco building stood on stilts in one of the quieter sections of town. One could gaze out the large picture window and see cows or goats grazing in green fields.

  Inside, the house was well appointed because the residents regularly entertained prominent Guyanese government figures. The wood- paneled living room was tastefully simple, with hardwood floors, throw rugs, a couch, several comfortable blue and red chairs. With the stereo tape deck went a good selection of jazz
and popular music from the States. The walls were decorated with Jones’s political trophies, most prominently the California State Senate commendation.

  The downstairs served as nerve center, housing the radio room and office with a Xerox machine, three phones, typewriters and taping equipment. Upstairs and down were rooms, some with cement floors that were perpetually jammed with bunks, mattresses and sleeping bags; these primarily were accommodations for visitors from Jonestown or the States and new settlers on their stopover.

  By late 1977, the mainstays of the public relations team, Paula Adams and Debbie Touchette, had been joined by Mike Prokes and Tim Carter. But internal problems already had beset the Georgetown operation, too. Jones correctly suspected that Paula Adams had been pulling punches in her reports to him. For instance, he would get on the radio at 3:00 A.M. and tell her to call the home affairs minister about some immediate problem. Knowing that calling at that hour would be counterproductive, Adams would sit tight, then tell Jones the minister’s schedule was full.

  When Sharon Amos was sent into Georgetown in early 1978, her mission was to keep Paula Adams honest. Humorless and absolutely obedient, Amos took Jones’s every word literally. It did not take her long to discover that Paula Adams held back information from Jones, a fact Amos immediately passed on to her master.

  In January 1978 the Stoen case was again reactivated, after a long period of dormancy. That month, Tim and Grace Stoen slipped into Georgetown for another go-round in the protracted legal proceedings. From the moment their plane arrived, Stoen felt their movements were being observed closely. Most officials seemed suspicious and unfriendly. Nevertheless Stoen was encouraged by remarks from the high court bench and believed the matter would be resolved in a few days. While they waited, Stoen wanted to charter a plane to Jonestown to see John. But his lawyers said he should not risk arrest or force the issue until the judge’s decision. That was prudent advice, because the U.S. Embassy seemed hesitant to get deeply involved.

  At 4:00 P.M. in his hotel one day, Stoen was approached by an immigration officer and officially ordered out of Guyana by the following evening, one week before his visa expiration.

  Stoen saw the influential hand of Jim Jones at work. He told the Embassy he would stay and resist, but would send Grace to neighboring Trinidad. While at the ticket counter the next day, they were approached by a second immigration officer who informed them the order had been rescinded. Consul Dick McCoy had intervened on the Stoens’ behalf. Stoen decided to send Grace to Trinidad anyway.

  Before leaving the airport, the American lawyer found himself surrounded by three Temple members who threatened his life unless he dropped his lawsuit. Stoen reported the incident to Skip Roberts, Guyana’s assistant commissioner of police, who later warned the Temple against taking the law into their own hands.

  Meanwhile, Sharon Amos visited McCoy to protest Embassy involvement in the Stoen case. When her pleas seemed to get nowhere, she said, “We’re all going to sit down and die if they take John from us.”

  “Quit talking nonsense,” McCoy snapped.

  Though Amos began to cry, McCoy did not take her threat seriously. This was before the Blakey defection, and he could not believe that a group with so much of an investment in Jonestown would take such drastic action over one child.

  The consul was getting heat from both sides, fending off the Temple public relations aides, yet trying to placate frustrated and hostile relatives who did not comprehend that the Foreign Service was not an investigative agency. He was using chits with the Guyanese government to help the Stoens; already the Embassy had devoted more time to the case than any in his experience with the Foreign Service. And although he secretly admired the tenacity of the Stoens’ attorney, Jeff Haas, McCoy finally lost his temper when Haas accused him of being chummy with the Temple.

  “You come to us accusing us of doing nothing,” McCoy shouted. “Well, tell me.... Who left that child and who are the parents? So don’t say it’s my fault.... I’m a father, too, and I wouldn’t leave my kids.” That outburst only tended to confirm the Embassy’s alleged unresponsive attitude toward the Stoens.

  After days and days of waiting, the Stoens heard that Justice Bishop had taken the matter under submission. The Temple began lobbying in earnest, besieging all its lawyers and government friends daily about the case’s status.62 The Temple’s Georgetown barrister, Sir Lionel Luckhoo, finally became sick of Amos and ushered her out of his office, telling her not to come without an appointment.

  Technically, Jones stood in contempt of court for refusing to surrender John. However, in a March 22, 1978, meeting, Home Affairs Minister Mingo told Amos that the commissioner of police would not arrest Jones unless the court ordered him to do so.

  Somehow, the case bogged down even longer. In May, Justice Bishop called a meeting of attorneys for both sides and told them he had received hostile phone threats from people with American accents. On August 3, 1978, nearly a year after the Jones arrest order, Justice Bishop disqualified himself from the case. “In this matter,” the judge told the court, “there have been persistent and continuing efforts of an extra-legal or opprobious nature ... intended to influence the outcome of the proceedings.... I consider those acts mean and despicable.”

  Chief Justice Harold Bollers suddenly found himself with a difficult case to reassign. Everything was back at square one.

  The Temple’s lobbying efforts may have been effective as far as the Guyanese government was concerned, but they were more clumsy and harmful when directed at the U.S. Embassy. Dick McCoy was exasperated by their repetitive visits. He did not appreciate Sharon Amos’s rabid approach to public relations. When he joked or teased, they took him seriously. Once when they accused him of being the CIA chief in Guyana, he grinned and said, “What if I am?” They looked at him as if he had just sprouted horns.

  A key dispute was whether McCoy would give the Temple in advance the names of everyone to be interviewed on his trips to Jonestown, including those whose relatives had inquired about their well-being. The Temple said it needed the list so McCoy would not arrive to find them “on the river” or “in town,” or otherwise unavailable. McCoy agreed but kept a few names secret until his arrival. That way, he thought, Jones and his aides would not be able to coach them. He was wrong, though. Jones coached everyone.

  When McCoy’s successor, Douglas Ellice, arrived in Georgetown as the new consul, the Temple tried to play him off against McCoy. They told Ellice that McCoy always had provided a list of every person he wanted to see. Jones gave his Georgetown crew specific instructions to tell Ellice they would be neither intimidated nor interrogated. If he wanted to ask questions, he could do so in front of a thousand people. Ellice, however, stood his ground and refused to give the Temple a complete list of names.

  Outside Georgetown political and legal circles, Peoples Temple was not a familiar name. Occasionally, a resident might run into somebody who had attended the 1975 healing service or who had donated to a government-licensed Temple solicitor. Or a resident might accidentally tune to the Temple radio show, though its propaganda would not hold many listeners.

  On one show, Sharon Amos interviewed Dr. Jose Louis DeSilva, a Georgetown optometrist who spent three days in Jonestown giving eye exams and taking orders for glasses from 187 people. Amos served as cheerleader, while DeSilva raved about his royal tour as Jonestown’s official optometrist.

  “And the food,” he said, “you should cut down on the food you serve—two eggs, bacon, three kinds of jam. It’s just too much to eat.”

  Said Amos: “Well, that’s what we all eat....”

  In late October, Dr. DeSilva would ship more than a hundred pairs of glasses to Jonestown. He would never receive payment; by that time, it would be too late.

  The Temple generally enjoyed favored status with the Burnham regime. The editor of the government-owned Guyana Chronicle told Sharon Amos that he would never reprint any of the accusations, because, “We need your agricultural
techniques. You can show us what a little hard work can do.”

  The friendship ran deeper than that. The thirty-member National Relief Committee for aid to victims of fire and disaster had three Temple public relations members on it. Additionally, Tim Carter, Mike Prokes, Debbie Touchette, Sharon Amos and Paula Adams took active roles in the Guyana-Korea Friendship Society, which sponsored two seminars on revolutionary concepts of North Korean leader Kim II Sung. And the Ministry of National Economic Development (headed by Ptolemy Reid) put Touchette and Amos on a committee to mobilize worker support for a May Day celebration.

  The Temple’s biggest contribution to the Burnham government was voting in the June 1978 “Referendum.” Burnham’s term was up, but as usual he was afraid to call for an unrigged general election. To avoid that, he suggested adoption of a new constitution, and if a referendum on that passed, his party, the PNC, would stay in power to write it.

  Again, according to Amos the Temple contact points were Wills and Mingo. In a March 9, 1978, note regarding Mingo, Amos said: “He seemed to appreciate the donations we were making and also the donations to the PNC.” Touchette also reported on an April meeting with Mingo: “He said in confidence Dr. Reid wanted to make it possible for us to participate in the voting (he let us know it wasn’t really legal, though). Sharon agreed we would like to do that.”

  Most of the electorate, particularly the Indians, boycotted the election, and the referendum measure passed overwhelmingly, with help from the Temple. Jones had picked the winning side once again.

  Aside from the Stoen case, there were two primary areas of conflict with the government. One was the Jonestown school, the other a medical internship for Temple doctor Larry Schacht.

  Because Guyanese law prohibited private schools, the Education Ministry wanted Jonestown to integrate its school with Guyanese children and Guyanese teachers. For obvious reasons, Jim Jones could not bow to that. So the church claimed additional children could not be accommodated.