Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Meanwhile, the State Department spent most of their time subtly discouraging Ryan by talking about transportation difficulties and so on, while neglecting to provide crucial information—the apparent psychological state of Jim Jones.

  One morning in November attorney Charles Garry picked up the San Francisco Chronicle to read that Representative Leo Ryan was leading a fact-finding congressional delegation to Jonestown. It was the first Garry had heard of the Ryan trip, although Mark Lane and the Temple knew all about it. Garry was furious. Already he had threatened to quit when he heard that Lane was holding press conferences and that the Temple were violating his warnings to lie low. Once placated, Garry had agreed to handle the existing lawsuits but refused to work with Lane, whom he detested for butting into the case. Now, with the wounds to his pride scarcely healed, he was hit with the final indignity of learning that Lane was already acting as the Temple’s chief attorney.72

  In a November 6 letter urging Ryan to delay his trip, Lane said Jones wanted him, as legal counsel, present for any congressional visit. Lane noted that he had prior commitments in November before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And he suggested that Ryan select a later date for a visit.

  Lane’s rather threatening letter to Ryan riled Garry all the more. Page two was especially disastrous, he thought, because it provided ammunition for Temple enemies.

  “You should be informed,” Lane told Ryan, “that various agencies of the U.S. Government have somewhat consistently oppressed Peoples Temple.... Some of the members of the Peoples Temple have had to flee from the U.S. You should know that two different countries ... have offered refuge to the 1,200 Americans now residing in Jonestown. Thus far, the Peoples Temple has not accepted either of those offers, but it is their position that if religious persecution ... is furthered through a witch hunt, they will be constrained to consider accepting either of the offers. [It] might very well result in the creation of a most embarrassing situation for the U.S. Government.”

  Leo Ryan’s November 10 response noted that he would resolve the scheduling conflict in favor of the House of Representatives. In other words, he was coming down.

  “No ‘persecution,’ as you put it, is intended, Mr. Lane,” Ryan wrote. “But your vague reference to ‘the creation of the most embarrassing situation for the American government’ does not impress me at all. If the comment is intended as a threat, I believe it reveals more than may have been intended. I presume Mr. Jones would not be supportive of such a statement.”

  Charles Garry was appalled by Lane’s latest performance and made his objection absolutely clear in a November 11 telephone conversation with June Crym, a Temple secretary in San Francisco. He said Lane’s letter was disastrous because it implied the Temple was unhappy in Guyana—and that church members were fugitives. “He’s sticking his goddamn fucking nose into a situation where he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.... If anyone’s gonna protect the rights of the organization, it’s my job.... I will call the shots or it’s gonna be Mark Lane calling the shots. It’s not gonna be both of us.... I’m not going to permit this kind of wishy-washy situation to run wild.”

  Unfortunately for Charles Garry and more than nine hundred residents of Jonestown, however, that is exactly what was about to happen.

  The zealotry of the Temple stateside staff was turning into a sort of martyrdom. Many sensed that they were part of a dying organization. The Wednesday night and Sunday meetings still were held in San Francisco, with Marceline or other members presiding. But now that the Temple’s drawing card, Jim Jones, was gone, attendance dropped off. By August, less than a hundred regulars were attending. Without the big healing donations, the church had to convert its assets into cash. Like a family going into hock, the Temple sold off pieces of property just to raise money for shipments to Guyana, some of which cost $30,000. The city staff generated the money, purchased the supplies, crated them and shipped them down. Since personnel was shrinking all the time, the few people left behind were overworked.

  Temple loyalists in San Francisco were experiencing the same epidemic of frustrations as the staff at Lamaha Gardens and the people in Jonestown—conflicting demands and answerless questions from their leader, unbearable stress, physical exhaustion to the point of failing health. Internal division and racial bitterness tainted both California temples. Blacks were angry that whites alone controlled the pursestrings, made the day-to-day decisions and consulted most often with Jones on the radio. Some whites, in turn, thought blacks were themselves to blame for their isolation from the power positions because they refused tedious work such as radio room duty.

  In addition to everything else, there was serious concern that the Temple would lose its lifeline to Guyana—the radio. Several times the FCC threatened to shut it down. But the Temple forestalled that while breaking amateur radio rules against using codes and conducting business, and while making contingency plans to move their radios to Mexico and transmit to Guyana from there.

  Jones’s degeneration dragged down everyone. For example, he ordered the skeletal stateside staff to produce immediately fifteen hundred letters to the Federal Communications Commission and fifteen hundred to the Internal Revenue Service to ward off governmental action. As the Temple’s problems increased in number and its options were cut off, Jones could only react defensively. To protect his flanks, he brought to Jonestown any distrusted or wavering members or anyone in a position to embarrass the church. In the early years, he sent the problem children to his tropical Siberia, but now he began calling down trusted aides.

  Because she worked efficiently out of the immediate presence of Jones, Sandy Bradshaw had been chosen to stay in the city, sharing Jones’s former Temple apartment with Marceline when she was in town. Up by 7:30 A.M., Bradshaw would scan the local papers for news of Peoples Temple then clip articles and buy a broad range of papers and magazines to send Jones. By about 10:00 A.M., the radio band would be “up,” meaning the Temple had fixed on its customary frequency. Bradshaw spend most of her time in a tiny nine-by-twelve-foot room deciphering words in a sea of static, often until the early morning.

  Bradshaw kept at it, convinced the cause superseded her personal sacrifices. Sometimes she daydreamed about being in Jonestown, a field worker without any responsibility or worries. But the problems in the city kept popping up. Who should stay in San Francisco and who should leave for Guyana? Who was cracking under the pressure? Could they handle the new demands from Jonestown? When would the next media attack hit? What was Tim Stoen doing? And why could the church not regain its old momentum? For a change, the past looked better than the future. The present was miserable.

  After renovating all of the Temple’s Los Angeles property for sale, faithful Archie Ijames had moved back to San Francisco to help with the packing and crating of supplies for Jonestown. At one time, Ijames had wanted to bring his wife to Jonestown. But once Debbie Blakey had defected and told horror stories that rang of truth, he was glad to be in the United States. After several months in San Francisco, however, Ijames got a radio call. Jones told him a beautiful flower garden already was planted in paradise, for Archie and Rosie. Ijames’s stomach cramped; he figured someone in San Francisco had reported him for a negative attitude. Ijames respectfully said no one else could perform his job, and Jones reluctantly let him stay.

  The defection of key people always threw Jim Jones into fits of rage and self-pity. But for sheer bad timing, perhaps no defection could rival that of Teri Buford on October 27, 1978, a time when Jones already was balancing too many problems. Buford, the strategist who had accompanied Debbie Blakey on their international financial sleuthing, likely knew more about the complex Temple finances and bank accounts than anyone aside from Carolyn Layton.

  At twenty-six, Buford was painfully thin, with deep-set eyes, shoulder-length brown hair, tireless energy and utter loyalty. After she had joined the Temple in the early seventies as a University of California student, Buford had risen rapidly
in the Temple hierarchy. Her ability to quickly plot complicated strategy with Jones cemented her standing. But many other members thought she embodied the worst traits of Jones’s staff—secretive, conspiratorial, often speaking in a whisper. Wearing a bunch of keys on a necklace like symbols of her dedication, Buford worked harder than just about everyone there.

  The disenchantment of this true believer was not sudden. While in San Francisco during the six-day siege, Buford—like other staffers—felt Jonestown residents had the right to choose the time and manner of their death. But after six months in the Jonestown radio room, after seeing the effect of the Blakey defection on Jones in May, she realized that the man who had once inspired her loyalty and love had changed.

  By early fall, she had wangled a transfer to San Francisco. She left Jonestown with the intention of never returning. Not only had Jim Jones become a sick tyrant but also his decisions were tactically weak. And there was a distasteful mission Jones had entrusted to her—that of gradually drugging Sandy Bradshaw, so she could be moved to Jonestown peacefully.

  Sandy Bradshaw’s health had deteriorated. Under constant stress, she experienced heart palpitations, other physical symptoms and depression. She yearned to move to carefree Guyana but was awaiting the results of various tests. Ever skeptical, Buford believed Bradshaw was faking illness to get out of the work in San Francisco. In a memo to Jones marked “For JJ’s Eyes Only,” Buford asked Jones how to handle “Lilly,” the code name for Bradshaw. On the matter of drugging her, Buford wrote:

  “As for the other thing, it is going to be extremely difficult to do because her eating is extremely odd (I mean it is hard to mix something with potato chips). I don’t know. Also, your job may be done for you in that she already believes that she is dying.”

  Buford already had heard about the drugging of Shanda James. She probably knew about the drugging of Chaikin, too. His treachery indicated that Jones would bring to Jonestown, and drug if necessary, anyone who showed the slightest disloyalty. If Jones could order Buford to drug a peer and a rival, Buford must have wondered whether she might be next. Though she willingly had played informer, she was unwilling to become executioner as well.

  Buford knew that Jones would discover her own disobedience soon enough, because Bradshaw was scheduled to leave for Jonestown within a week. More than ever she was convinced that regardless of how her defection was disguised, Jones would react hysterically. She thought they might try to kill her. She resolved to get her name off all the bank accounts so no one could accuse her of running off with Temple money.

  Buford knew that every prominent defector eventually had teamed up with Tim Stoen and the Concerned Relatives. She would not take that route because she deplored Tim Stoen. Still, that past pattern provided her with a plausible reason for her sudden departure: she would say she had embarked on a mission to “get” Tim Stoen.

  Buford needed help from an outsider—a trusted person who would advise her and, if necessary, provide a refuge. She remembered a spark of skepticism in Mark Lane’s eye as they rode the truck from Jonestown to Matthews Ridge that September. Lane had asked her the familiar question: Why was the leadership white in a largely black movement?

  Buford made final plans in San Francisco. She arranged to spend a few days with her sister, and slowly began mailing her belongings to her sister’s house. And she phoned Mark Lane. “If I tell you some things, are you obligated to tell them to Jim Jones?” Buford asked tentatively.

  “As you know,” Lane replied, “I have been retained by Jim Jones to file applications under the Freedom of Information Act. The information that you are telling me, would it be related to that?”

  “No, another matter.”

  “Then it may not be a conflict of interest if it is another matter. I am not the general counsel.”

  With detailed ground rules, they agreed to meet at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York on Sunday, October 29. Buford bought an airline ticket with money her parents regularly sent her, money that usually ended up in the church coffers.

  At 5:45 A.M. on Friday, October 27, Buford went to Charles Garry’s office, picked up a small briefcase she had left the night before and headed for the airport. Five minutes prior to takeoff, she called Pat Richartz. Buford said she was going to the dentist and asked her to call Jean Brown in an hour and direct her to some messages.

  The package for Brown contained a four-page “confidential” letter to Jim Jones, which was Teri Buford’s carefully woven “cover.” It said she had gone to play double agent and infiltrate “Tim Stoen’s group” to learn its strategy.

  She began by noting that she was extremely upset about the state of Jim Jones’s health and frustrated by the Temple’s failure to expose the other side. “I don’t know how much longer you are going to live,” she wrote. “I heard you on the phone patch the other night and you could barely get out the words.”

  Buford took great pains to explain why her “defection” would fool the other side into accepting her and divulging their anti-Jones strategy. For one thing, Buford noted, she had no blood ties to Jonestown so she could be embraced more readily than an infiltrator with kin in the jungle. “Frankly,” the letter continued, “if I don’t fuck up and get myself in a lot of trouble, there is a possibility that Stoen in particular would be quite interested in cultivating a working relationship....”

  The letter continued in that vein for several more pages and concluded: “... if you try to interfere, you will have a suicide....”

  When he later read this letter, Jim Jones was not put at ease. It looked to him as if Buford had gone on an ill-conceived “adventure,” not a church “mission.” He sent Sandy Bradshaw to look for her in feminist bars in Berkeley. But Buford was actually in hiding back east with Mark Lane, informing him, among other things, that Debbie Blakey had told the truth about nearly everything.

  By early November, Buford had not surfaced anywhere. Jones was almost positive that she was merely buying time with her letter and had turned against him. Deciding to find out for sure, he sent a message to Tim Carter to infiltrate the Concerned Relatives and find out what Buford was doing. Carter had been traveling in the United States after delivering some of the affidavits Garry had prepared during his 1978 visit to Jonestown. He had gone to his father’s home in Boise, Idaho, for some dental work—but Jones’s orders sent him packing to the Bay Area. Soon Pat Richartz was being informed that Carter had infiltrated the relatives and would contact her with the code name “Jonathan.” Within moments, the phone rang at Garry’s office. “This is Jonathan,” a voice said. “Hi, Tim,” Richartz said. Taking the phone, Charles Garry told Carter that the plan was stupid. But Carter continued his mission, calling in a few more times to report on his progress. Once Jones heard about the Ryan trip, he asked Carter to find out about that as well as about Buford.

  The night of the first newspaper article announcing the Ryan trip, Pat Richartz was awakened at her Berkeley home by a pebble bouncing off her window. She looked out. There was Tim Carter, dressed in black and wearing a knit cap. “Pat. Pat. Lemme in.”

  He was breathless and as nervous as a cat. He sat on the kitchen floor so that no one could see him from outside, and he asked her to keep the lights low and to close the shades, as Temple members always did when they came to her home for dinner. She brewed some herbal tea to calm him. Carter said that he had met with Stoen as well as the others: they said Ryan was going to Jonestown—with Stoen.

  “Who else is going?” Richartz asked.

  Carter named some of the relatives who had done the most screaming, and some reporters. Jones would never let in Reiterman, he commented. Since Buford was not among the defectors, Carter had managed to confirm her betrayal. So his mission was a double success.

  Using a credit card, he called Lamaha Gardens and told Sharon Amos to relay everything to Jones and his aides. Though much of it had appeared in the newspaper, his information was reported as undercover intelligence. In great detail, Carter expla
ined how he had met three times with various relatives and what they told him about the Ryan trip. He quoted himself saying to Stoen: “What a coup! What a coup! You’ve really done it.” And he quoted Stoen as saying, “Wait until you see what happens once you get to Jonestown.”

  It was a long call to Guyana, maybe an hour. Carter was excited and happy with the information he had stolen from “the belly of the enemy.” Richartz suggested he go back to his roominghouse, continue the cover and find out what Stoen meant by his tantalizing reference to Jonestown.

  Carter presumed, however, that the call to Lamaha Gardens had blown his cover, since the Concerned Relatives were monitoring radio transmissions. He left hurriedly, seeming to think his life was in danger.

  FIFTY

  The Eye of the Storm

  As October turned into November in Jonestown, events toppled onto Jones with head-spinning speed. He learned the specifics of the Ryan trip almost in the same breath as he got confirmation of Teri Buford’s defection. At the same time, the Jonestown basketball team, including top security guards, prepared to leave for the basketball tournament in Georgetown. On November 7, the new American consul, Douglas Ellice, would arrive for his first visit to Jonestown and the first Embassy inspection in six months. And to add a surreal touch to the most critical month in the history of Peoples Temple, Marceline Jones had just returned from the States with her parents, the Baldwins, who had wanted to see Jonestown firsthand for a long time. It was hardly an opportune time for a folksy visit with the in-laws.

  The Baldwins had first planned a September visit to Jonestown, but Jones delayed it. Then Marceline called her parents from New York in October and said she would visit Indiana, then fly down to Guyana with them. Marceline was proud of Jonestown, eager to have her parents see the progress and share her joy. But her Indiana stopover troubled the family.