Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  “Well,” said the detective, “I look at Stoen in one of two ways. Either Stoen set the Temple up or Stoen is a second Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “He’s the one we’re looking for!” declared Lane.

  During a discussion about the movie plot, Mazor returned to his “overflight” disclosure, which would become a vital element in the Temple’s conspiracy scenario. “My problem is very simply this. I cannot have a full agreement on [how to portray] Jones because the last time I was in South America, I was there,” he said mysteriously. “And I didn’t really get a chance to view the scenery. I had to leave very quickly. The Kaituma River is very swift. But, ah, the river raft was very rough going across.”

  Lane and Freed did not rise to Mazor’s loud cue, but Richartz, who remembered vividly the six-day siege, picked up what had slipped by the rest. “When were you last in that area [of Guyana]?” she asked Mazor.

  “Last year.” “And you were on a raft?”

  “Well, Charlie made the news announcement.” Mazor dropped the hint obliquely.

  “About the raft?”

  “Didn’t Charlie make a nice news announcement?” Mazor said. “[Didn’t he say,] ‘Somebody tried to kill my client yesterday’?”

  “That’s true!” Richartz then remembered that Garry, during his September 1977 news conference with Dennis Banks, had mentioned the shot reportedly fired at Jones. “He did make an announcement like that. There was a shot fired.”

  “I know,” Mazor said. “I was flying back at the time it happened.”

  Lane, apparently thinking he could put Mazor in bed with Stoen, said, “Did you have the feeling Stoen was trying to use you in any way?”

  “No,” said the detective. “I have never talked to Tim Stoen ... because as far as I was concerned, Tim Stoen was always as dirty as Jones was.”

  “Let me tell you this,” Freed told Mazor. “I think that the Jarrico office is going to be probably swayed by your assessment.”

  That exchange and Mazor’s earlier “no comment” to questions about mercenaries left the impression that the detective had led an expeditionary force to Jonestown and might well have been responsible for the shot fired at Jones. He seemed to be on the verge of confessing to an attack staged by Jim Jones himself.

  After Lane left for a Los Angeles television appearance, Freed told Mazor, “I think we’ve broken the case, Joe. I really do.... Suppose I submit a request that you would at least talk on the telephone with a Peoples Temple agent to negotiate the ground rules for your own investigation [in Jonestown]?”

  A short time after Mazor departed, the Temple’s tired and shell-shocked San Francisco staff descended upon the hotel suite with party food. Freed put them in a euphoric mood by telling them that Mazor’s information would expose Stoen and the rest of the Temple enemies as conspirators in a plot to destroy the church.

  Already Freed had started work on a memo that aroused great hopes. “Bring Mazor to Jonestown at once,” the writer recommended. “He is ready to turn around....”

  Charles Garry had been planning a trip to Jonestown to prepare legal documents in the tangle of Temple suits and countersuits. The church asked Garry to invite Mazor along, which he did. After some negotiations with Mazor, and balking by Jones, the Temple agreed to pay Mazor his trip expenses and $2,500. According to the plan, Garry would fly down first, and Mazor would follow.

  En route to Guyana, Garry and a Temple staffer listened to tapes of the St. Francis Hotel meeting. The lawyer reached a speedy conclusion: “This is all bullshit.” He was particularly annoyed that Lane and Freed were promoting a useless movie at a time when serious lawsuits already burdened the church.

  In Jonestown that September day, Garry discovered Jones in ill health, incoherent, complaining that he had not urinated in four days. With Garry looking on, Jones was catheterized. The minister and everyone else were in a tizzy over Mazor’s approaching visit. They feared Mazor would smuggle in guns and cameras, and talked of canceling the visit. A short time later, when Mazor arrived on a Temple truck, Garry informed him, “Mazor, you’ve got to be searched.”

  When the two men finally met, they hit it off straight away, though Mazor had no stomach for Jones’s politics. “You’re a socialist, and I’m a capitalist and want to live on the hill,” he said. Nevertheless, the two con men spoke the same language, which became clear in the ensuing conversations.

  With Garry and Temple aides looking on, Mazor told Jim Jones that he had the goods on Tim Stoen, that he possessed a tape of Grace Stoen admitting that Jones sired her child and that he had led mercenaries through the Venezuelan jungle to Jonestown in September 1977.69 Mouths agape, Jones and his aides nearly drooled over their good fortune. The glib private eye did everything but say outright that he had fired the shot at Jones which set off the six-day siege. Mazor confessed to a plan to blow up the Temple communications tower and, in the confusion, to rush into the settlement and grab about a dozen children for his clients. He mentioned a plan to use an airplane supplied by World Airways President Ed Daly—the aborted plan he had mentioned to me a year earlier (see note 55). Mazor even explained why the alleged mercenaries had left without fully executing their plan: from the jungle perimeter it appeared that the defectors had lied about the settlement—there seemed to be no guards, barbed wire or unhappy people.

  As he sat back and let Mazor describe his phony siege for the benefit of others, Jones almost glowed. He was vindicated. A man once in the employ of Jones’s most ardent enemies had confirmed the only “attack” on Jonestown.

  The Temple believed, rightly so, that it had purchased an important functionary. Jones wanted to put Mazor on the payroll, but the detective wanted to work independently, free to take information to police or the press if warranted. The private eye may have accepted money from Jones —about $2,400 on top of the initial $2,500—but he never lost sight of his other agenda.

  As a postscript to the visit, Garry said in a taped message sent to Jones, “I think we are very fortunate to have Mazor.” But his optimism was unwarranted. Mazor could not come up with the promised tape of Grace Stoen, though he would sign an affidavit repeating his contention. For its money, the Temple received precious little. Mazor did, however, go to the press.

  His phone call amazed me. Without explaining his elaborate arrangement with Jones, Mazor told me that he had traveled to Guyana alone, had been admitted to Jonestown and had spoken with Jim Jones at length. He offered me and a television reporter his story, exclusively.

  Mazor had given me the impression that he would project a somewhat positive appraisal, which made me wonder what turned him around. The Examiner decided that Mazor’s story, whatever it was, would not carry much weight. We would not write about Jonestown conditions until we could visit.

  Meanwhile another writer was already in Jonestown on the heels of the detective. Mark Lane’s visit just days after the Garry-Mazor stay excited Jones’s sense of persecution. Jones had grown impatient with Garry and his lie-low strategy. He ached for the resolution of all his problems. He was flushed now with the achievement of having obtained an internationally known conspiracy theorist such as Lane. Perhaps Lane’s headline-grabbing, pugnacious counteroffensive would finally free Jones from his tormentors. There would be no more punching it out in the courtroom over individual cases. They would go for broke with the contention of massive conspiracy.

  At his father’s request, Stephan Jones had greeted Lane with these words: “You’ve given us new hope.” That is exactly what Lane’s visit did. The prospect of blowing away the defectors, the government, and the press with one grand conspiracy case had caused Jones to start thinking even of escaping his self-made jungle prison. Living in the bush, isolated, without a telephone to call important people, without a real pulpit, the bus trips, the high energy of rallies or the ecstasy of healing services, Jones felt lifeless, a shut-in surrounded mostly by children and the elderly. His only entertainment was playing with the lives of his people, indu
lging in drugs and sex.

  He told Lane in the pavilion area that he would like to pull an “Eldridge Cleaver,” referring to the fugitive Black Panther who had returned to the United States as a Born Again Christian patriot. With his son looking on, Jones claimed that he was drafting a letter to the CIA and other government agencies, promising that, if they left him alone, he would repatriate and cause no trouble for the government. While playing the penitent religious man, he actually planned to come back in Elmer Gantry style, with a healing tour. And to show Lane he could pull it off, he ordered his aides to run a Temple promotional healing film. When Stephan Jones and some of his friends saw footage of Teri Buford, enthralled, nearly swooning over the miracles, they snickered.

  Jones would not let Mark Lane slip out of Jonestown without sharing the good news with the inhabitants. In a speech about the King assassination, Lane drew parallels between the fate of one of the greatest civil rights leaders of our time and of Jim Jones.

  After Lane left, Jones nearly burst with excitement. He ticked off items in the conspiracy case to be exposed. “Lane told me ... Lane told me....” Stephan Jones and some others were not as impressed. One quipped, “This guy makes a conspiracy out of everything.”

  On September 20, 1978, on his way through Georgetown, Lane stopped and called a news conference. He announced in grand fashion that he and Freed, through their Citizens Commission of Inquiry, had “investigated” conditions in Jonestown and interviewed various people in California. “We are able to state conclusively ... at this time that none of the charges ... made against the Peoples Temple are accurate or true,” Lane declared. “... there has been a massive conspiracy to destroy Peoples Temple and ... Jim Jones ... initiated by the intelligence organizations of the United States.” To support this contention, Lane alluded to Mazor without naming him: “We have uncovered in recent days ... a key witness ... who has now made in essence a full confession to us ...”

  Though actually on Jones’s payroll, Lane presented himself to the public as a disinterested seeker of justice and truth. Also, the California interviews he mentioned—with Steve Katsaris, George Hunter, some ex-members and Joe Mazor—had not produced the clear-cut picture he drew.

  After trying to discredit the Temple’s detractors in Guyana, Lane swung through San Francisco to do the same thing. In a speech at the San Francisco temple at the beginning of October, he scoffed at the Concerned Relatives’ accusations and told church members that the settlement was “the closest thing on earth like paradise that I have ever seen.” (Later, he would deride Charles Garry for having said essentially the same thing.)

  A couple of days later, at an October 3 news conference covered by San Francisco newspapers and broadcast stations, Lane formally announced the conclusion of his independent investigation and declared once again that there was no substance to charges against the Temple and that the government was conspiring to destroy the church.

  These news conferences were the opening volleys in a public relations and legal counteroffensive which Lane and Jones had agreed to without Garry’s knowledge. According to Temple notes, Lane, at $6,000 per month for three months, had promised to work full time filing Freedom of Information Act requests and preparing a federal court suit against Tim Stoen, federal agencies, news media, some John Does and “probably Joe Mazor.”

  In an enthusiastic return letter, Temple attorney Gene Chaikin sent a list of investigation targets—a dozen law enforcement agencies and court officials, two dozen publications. He suggested doing “backgrounds” on nine reporters. Heading the list: Marshall Kilduff and Tim Reiterman.

  Lane’s first assignment was to counteract an impending article by free-lance Gordon Lindsay for the huge weekly tabloid National Enquirer. In a rambling October 2 monologue, Jones told his people: “Dr. Mark Lane ... got that article killed because he paid to get somebody that lied on us, and he went into the National Enquirer and said, ‘Here’s one liar and I got his affidavit. You print this and we’ll sue you for seventy million dollars’ ...”

  A few days later, on October 5, Lane took Mazor to lunch in San Francisco with two newsmen—Hal Jacques of the National Enquirer and Bob Levering of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The purpose of the meeting was in essence to have the private eye confess to being a former conspirator; later, there was some dispute about whether the Enquirer article was discussed at all.70

  In any case, on November 8, the Temple’s Jean Brown delivered $7,500 to Lane at Los Angeles International Airport and he in turn produced a draft of the Enquirer article. The story never appeared in print. Mark Lane later would contend he had played no part in killing it, but had accepted the Temple money merely to counter the damaging article.

  PART SEVEN

  NIGHTMARE

  They whip dreams of madness out of their own nightmares.

  JIM JONES

  October 1978

  FORTY-EIGHT

  In the Hands of a Madman

  If there were any lingering doubts that Jim Jones had lost touch with reality, his September 25, 1978, letter to President Jimmy Carter should have silenced them. The minister, who had chatted on the phone with the First Lady two years earlier, now felt compelled to tell the President of the United States his rationale for siring John Stoen. The five-page, single-spaced letter was marked URGENT URGENT URGENT, with copies to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the State Department’s Guyana Desk.

  The tone was frantic: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple were being destroyed by enemies, including rumormongers at the U.S. Embassy, and by defectors who stole thousands of dollars and “planned to blow up bridges ...” and “poison the water supply of Washington, D.C.” For one not intimate with Temple developments, the letter must have read like the incoherent ramblings of a lunatic. What Jones wrote about the Stoen child was particularly telling:

  “The schemes against us include some of the most devious stratagems imaginable.” One of the principles told me several years ago, in tears: ’I have to quit my job ... I have to leave the church. My wife is going to leave me. But she is attracted to you. Will you please have sex with her?’ ... Well, I checked with my wife and the church board, and they thought it would be alright if I went ahead to satisfy this desperate man’s plea—they reasoned that this woman was distraught or confused enough to tell all kinds of lies about the church.... I went into the relationship, and although I used preventatives, she got pregnant.

  “And now, six years later, a big issue is being made over the child. ... these people are attempting to use a child as a pawn to discredit and ruin my work.”71

  Jones had begun to see himself as a ruler of a sovereign city-state: writing letters to the President of the United States, receiving visiting foreign dignitaries. His letter to Jimmy Carter was tame compared to his daily broadcasting over Jonestown loudspeakers.

  Life there was growing more surreal by the week. The drugs—injectable Valium, Quaaludes, uppers, barbiturates, whatever he wanted —had taken hold of him. His voice, once so riveting, now sounded pathetic, raspy, as if he were very drunk or his tongue coated with peanut butter. Words collided with each other in slow motion. He would read from typed notes, but often not finish sentences. Sometimes, as he sat in West House, barely gripping the army field phone that connected him to the radio room, he could not read at all. In that case, Larry Schacht or Mike Prokes might prompt him by reading the sentence first and urging him to repeat it or, if Jones was really in bad shape, they would read it themselves after making excuses. Once, Schacht announced that Jones was in the next room combing his hair in anticipation of a visit from King Hussein of Jordan.

  Somehow Jones got himself in shape on October 2 for the long-awaited visit from Soviet Consul Feodor Timofeyev. Timofeyev’s colleague from Tass had visited in April and sent a glowing report back to the Soviet Union. But Timofeyev was the man who really mattered, the man on whom the Temple pegged its naive notion that nine hundred expatriate Americans would be welcome in Russia. They spent cou
ntless hours practicing phrases in Russian to impress the Russian diplomat.

  The program for Timofeyev got under way with Temple singer Deanne Wilkinson delivering a political protest song in a rich and hauntingly beautiful voice, with organ accompaniment. Then Jim Jones stepped to the microphone.

  “For many years,” Jones said, “we have made our sympathies publicly known. The United States is not our mother. The USSR is our spiritual motherland.” A tremendous ovation greeted his words. “Ambassador Timofeyev, we are not mistaken in allying our purpose and our destiny with the destiny of the Soviet Union.”

  The Russian consul stepped forward, greeting the eager crowd in Russian. “On behalf of the USSR,” he said, switching to a halting English, “our deepest and most sincere greetings to the people of the first socialistic and communistic community from the United States of America in Guyana and in the world.”

  He continued with lavish praise, pausing to explain at length the history of the Soviet Union since 1917 and to defend its policies. Wishing the collective continued great success, he concluded: “It is a great pleasure to see how happy you are being in a free society.”

  After the speech, Jones led everyone in a hand-clapping, gospel-style rendition of various socialist songs, including one that was repeated again and again:

  “We are communists today and we’re communists all the way. Oh, we’re communists today and we’re glad.”

  Whatever personal strength and discipline Jones had marshaled for the Timofeyev visit was exhausted the next day. When he returned to the loudspeaker for news, announcements and lectures on fascism, he sounded drugged again. But he poured out his words faster than he could enunciate them, as if he were on stimulants. At one point, he threatened Public Service for anyone who said Christ’s birth was more important than the Russian Revolution. Then he leaped to the subject of Charles Garry, whom he first described as a nice, even admirable, man, then mocked as a cowardly old fool. “Every time I wanted to sue, he’d say, ‘no, no, no, no. They don’t bother you.’ The hell they don’t! Those lies hurt you. I’d take an entirely different course of action now. We were stuck with him ... when you deal with an attorney, you have to tell him everything. He knows certain facts about our organization, and when he goes against you, you have difficulties.”