The image taking shape is the face of the eighties, its character lines etching shadows much deeper than any single religious cult -- or even the cult movement as a whole -- had cast in the seventies. Its broad emerging visage reveals the specter of mind control brought home, an everyday reality in which powerful new techniques of human exploitation and manipulation may run rampant through our culture. From our view at the moment, the face of the eighties looks troubled and unruly.
The first shock wave hit in August 1978, when the U.S. government indicted eleven high officials of the Church of Scientology on criminal charges of conspiring to plant spies in government agencies -- including the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service -- breaking into government offices, stealing government documents, and bugging government meetings. The twenty-eight-count indictment alleged one of the most extensive domestic plots of government infiltration in history.
Soon after, independently, another branch of government leveled charges against a second major cult. In November, 1978, a House International Relations subcommittee chaired by Rep. Donald Fraser of Minnesota released a report urging that a federal task force be established to investigate the Unification Church for violations of U.S. currency, immigration, banking, tax, foreign agent registration, arms export control, and other laws. After a three-year probe, the subcommittee charged Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon with attempting to establish a world government under his rule and, among other illegal acts, of attempting to become an international supplier of Korean-made M-16 rifles.
About the same time, another event took place that signaled a major escalation in the running battle between America's religious cults and the law. In October, 1978, Los Angeles attorney Paul Morantz, who had recently won a $300,000 damage suit against Synanon, the once-respected but increasingly extremist California-based drug rehabilitation foundation, was bitten by a four-and-a-half-foot rattlesnake that had been placed in his mailbox with its rattle removed. Quick thinking by Morantz along with eight vials of anti-snakebite serum are credited with saving his life. Following leads supplied by Morantz's neighbors, police arrested two members of Synanon's self-styled "Imperial Marines" commando unit and charged them with attempted murder. Later, authorities also issued an arrest warrant for Synanon founder Charles Dederich, charging him with conspiracy to commit murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and solicitation to commit murder. To those observers who have been keeping close watch on the cults of the seventies, it was the first instance of a group electing undisguised terrorism in response to its critics. Up to that point, most cult counteroffensives had been limited to lawsuits, harassment, and, at worse, mere threats of violence. With Synanon's violation of that tacit ground rule, the cult issue seemed suddenly to have been thrown into a whole new arena of controversy -- and cause for alarm.
Then came Jonestown, and in one of the most staggering human tragedies of modern times, the prospect of cult terrorism was fulfilled in unimaginable detail.
The facts have become legend: On November 18, 1978, a U.S. Congressman and three newsmen were shot and killed while on a fact-finding mission to investigate charges that American citizens were being held against their will, beaten, and subjected to other physical and emotional abuses at the jungle commune of an American religious sect, the People's Temple, in Jonestown, Guyana. The victims, among them Rep. Leo J. Ryan of California, NBC News correspondent Don Harris, NBC cameraman Bob Brown, and San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, had uncovered evidence confirming many of the charges made by a group of concerned relatives of temple members and had agreed to take with them more than a dozen temple members who had requested safe passage back to the United States. At the grassy airstrip in nearby Port Kaituma, as Ryan's party was boarding two chartered planes, a red tractor and trailer from the the People's Temple pulled up to the runway. Three or four men jumped off and opened fire on the group. As the wounded fell to the ground, the attackers strode forward and shot them in the head at point-blank range.
At the same time in Jonestown, People's Temple founder and leader Rev. Jim Jones signaled his players to enact the final scene in what turned out to be a well-rehearsed tragedy. Jones's lieutenants gathered at the commune's main pavilion, their automatic rifles ready. Then Jones called together the population of Jonestown and informed them that the congressman and the journalists were dead and that Guyanese defense forces were on their way to Jonestown to torture and kill the commune residents. "It is time to die with dignity," said Jones, reiterating for the last time his repeated vow that he would lead his followers in a "mass suicide for the glory of socialism." Next, at Jones's command, the temple doctor and his medical team brought forth a battered washtub of strawberry Flavour-aide laced with heavy doses of cyanide, tranquilizers, and painkillers; and Jones told the assembly that "the time has come to meet in another place." "Bring the babies first," he ordered, and his nurses shot the poison down their throats with syringes. Then the rest came forward, including whole families, each member drinking a cupful of poison and being led away by temple guards and told to lie with others in rows, face down. Within minutes, people began to gasp for air, blood flowing from their mouths and noses before the final convulsions set it. According to one witness who managed to escape, the entire ritual lasted almost five hours. All the while, they said, Jim Jones sat on his raised chair in the pavilion repeating, "I tried. I tried. I tried." Then, "Mother. Mother. Mother. Mother." When it was over, Jones lay toppled on the podium with a bullet in his head. And 912 people were dead.
The massacre and mass suicide in Guyana left the entire world stunned and groping for answers. Who was Rev. Jim Jones? What manner of religious group was the People's Temple? What was the chain of events that led to what the New York Times. termed "one of the most shocking and extensive losses of U.S. lives outside of wartime"? Even before the final body count was completed, the real story of what happened in Jonestown began to emerge.
As it turned out, People's Temple was not a temple at all, but a scheme devised by Jim Jones to create a socialist utopian community in the guise of fundamentalist Christianity. Although he was an avid churchgoer from an early age, by the time he reached adolescence James Warren Jones no longer believed in religion. At eighteen, Mao Tse-Tung was his hero, yet he continued to espouse his Christian faith -- believing religion to be the ideal tool with which to build a Marxist social group in the United States. In 1956, he formed the first People's Temple in Indianapolis, and in 1965, fearing racial bigotry and anti-Communist persecution, Jones and one hundred of his most devout followers moved to Redwood Valley, California.
Jones's temple flourished in California, attracting thousands and establishing centers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But it soon became apparent that life inside the People's Temple fell far short of the utopia Jones depicted. Jones began making increasingly stringent demands on his followers, commanding them to make a total commitment to the temple, instructing them to break off relationships with family members outside, and urging them to donate all their money and possessions and sign over their homes and real estate to the temple treasury. Reports of beatings, violence, bizarre sexual practices, criminal activities, and death threats to former members and potential defectors led to a series of exposés in California newspapers and magazines; and in August 1977, Jones quickly removed his flock to Guyana, where he had leased 27,000 acres of land from the Guyanese government for the establishment of an "agricultural mission."
At the jungle site, its climate almost unbearably hot and steamy and its living conditions primitive, Jones managed to cut off the entire populace from the outside world. A few rare visitors and defectors brought back information on worsening deprivations and physical abuses inflicted on temple members, along with consistent reports of Jones's own progressive mental deterioration. There were also rumors that millions of dollars were being cached in secret temple bank accounts in Switzerland and Panama, and that Jones was planning a mass migration to a Communist country, possibly
Cuba or the Soviet Union. Those reports and the desperate pleas of a newly established Concerned Relatives Committee prompted Congressman Ryan's mission. When Ryan's authority to conduct such an investigation was challenged by temple lawyers, and information was received that any intruders might be met by heavily armed defenders, Ryan permitted television and newspaper journalists to accompany him, convinced that full media coverage would be his best protection. The journalists, on the other hand, felt that the presence of a U.S. Congressman was theirs.
These sad details and many others surfaced in the first media inquiries into the People's Temple, and undoubtedly more information will emerge in the continuing criminal investigations and government inquests into the events that transpired: names of individuals who committed specific acts, exact balances of the temple's foreign bank accounts, and even the full picture of Jones's underlying political aims may add whole new dimensions to a tragedy already rich in grotesque subplots. But, in our opinion, one of the key factors in the equation that has been inadequately explored is the broad question of the state of mind of Jim Jones and his followers at the time of the debacle in Guyana. In its immediate aftermath, our print media and airwaves overflowed with speculation, but as the public's thirst for discussion and dissection waned, a number of serious questions remained unaddressed -- lingering issues that, we feel, merit further inquiry out of respect for the dead and responsibility to the living. Was Jim Jones from the beginning a sadistic, calculating megalomaniac, or did he begin with a sincere dream of an interracial socialist utopia? If the latter was so, what factors led him to his final blaze of infamy? What program of manipulation did he employ that led nine hundred people to take their lives at his command? Indeed, in view of the particulars of life in Jonestown -- especially the presence of arms and numerous reports of beatings and other acts of coercion -- can what finally happened truly be called suicide, or must it more properly be labeled mass murder?
To gain insight into these dilemmas, we undertook our own inquiry into life and death in the People's Temple. For two months we researched Jim Jones and his organization and interviewed a number of individuals with personal experience in the group. We spoke to former members of the temple, to people who had lost family members in Guyana, to representatives of the Concerned Relatives Committee who had tried to bring the threat of mass violence to public and government attention, and to staff members of the Human Freedom Center, the Berkeley, California halfway house that was established by former temple members to help others who wanted to leave the group make the difficult transition back into the larger society. Most of the people we interviewed requested anonymity, but two former members of Jones's executive Planning Commission, Jeannie Mills and Grace Stoen, permitted us to use their names and quote liberally from our conversations. Like ours, their concern was that the tragedy of People's Temple be given a full public airing, and that the lessons that may be derived from it be responsibly applied to any similar cult threat should it arise.
Our findings made deep impressions on us. With each interview we grew more amazed at Jones's crude, almost primitive manner of manipulation, and repeatedly we had to ask ourselves if his method even warranted the label of mind control. Certainly, Jones achieved an alteration of belief and behavior in his followers described classically as "brainwashing," and we could see that, by his strong-arm intimidation tactics, to a certain extent he even gained control over his followers' minds, shaping their thoughts, feelings, and desires. But, from our perspective, we found nothing in Jones's scheme that produced the kind of bedrock alterations of personality that we have termed information disease. Jones had no specific ritual or technique such as those used by other cults we have studied that may, over time, alter or destroy fundamental information-processing pathways in the brain.
In fact, Jones's method tampered only superficially with the fundamental structures of personality that we have been exploring throughout this book. Jones used many of the elements of physical, emotional, and intellectual manipulation that have been identified with mind control -- isolation, deception, indoctrination, exhaustion, poor diet, and an instilled fear of the outside world and together these techniques managed to suppress, if not overwhelm his followers' freedom of thought. But the very fact that Jones resorted to blatant physical coercion, frequent beatings, punishments, sexual abuse and humiliation, and, eventually, the forced use of psychoactive drugs on temple rebels and dissidents suggests the profound ineffectiveness -- and perhaps the ultimate failure -- of Jones's attempt to gain mastery over the minds of his followers.
We found a sharp point of departure between the People's Temple and other cult groups in the dramatically different nature of its comprehensive cult experience. Where most other cults attract converts with the promise of life-changing spiritual and psychological experiences -- intense moments of revelation, enlightenment, ecstasy, or bliss -- Jim Jones's approach was, from the beginning, more social and political than spiritual. In this sense, it could be said that the most noteworthy element of the People's Temple experience was a legitimate social objective: the establishment of an experimental interracial community based on principles of shared labor and equitable distribution of wealth. This expressed goal was down-to-earth and genuinely attractive to the underprivileged blacks who comprised the great majority of temple members. It also had great appeal to the fundamentalist Christian whites who were drawn to Jones's plan from the first days of his ministry in the Midwest, and to the middle- and upper-middle-class white liberals and intellectuals who, in the heyday of sixties' political activism in California, saw Jones as a dynamic and effective organizer and agent of social change.
But where Jones's initial social intentions may have been admirable, his methods were questionable from the beginning. From his earliest preaching days, he proved to be an expert manipulator, combining the wealth of knowledge he had gleaned on the Holy Roller circuit with the force of his personality to tailor-make a personal pitch to every potential covert. When courting black recruits, he made moving appeals to their deep desire for a better life, both materially and spiritually. He spoke of their longing for racial harmony and sympathized with their historical plight dating back to the roots of slavery in America.
"You know, black people have suffered all down through history," a black woman who belonged to the temple for five years told us, "and he used to tell us about the slave ships and the suffering. The man laid it on heavy, I'm not lying. He knew how to talk to you. He knew how to make you feel good."
Another former temple member whose daughter died in Guyana remembered Jones's seductive style. "To me, he was just like a cat charming a bird," she said. "That's the way he sucked those people in. He told them to give all their possessions to the church and that the church was going to take care of them, take care of all their needs. All they had to do was live and enjoy themselves. They wouldn't have to worry about any bills, food, anything. The church would take care of everything."
Jones's social overtures to blacks were not without their spiritual elements. He was well-acquainted with the central role of religion in their lives, and in his weekly religious services he employed techniques that wowed their belief in his supernatural and divine powers. His miraculous healings and psychic "readings" were largely responsible for his illustrious reputation among blacks in California. A woman who lost five close relatives in Jonestown told us how she and her family were recruited into the temple:
"I went to the beauty shop and my operator told me about this Jim Jones, that he could heal people. That's the way he drew his crowds, telling people that he healed cancer. So my momma and I decided to go and check it out, just for kicks. We had to get there before eleven o'ciock Sunday morning, and the place was packed. They had singing and dancing and people meeting other people for two or three hours before Jim Jones came out. Finally, he appeared to preach or whatever he called it. Then he picked out one person and told him that he had cancer and said that he was going to heal him. Then a nurse ran bac
k to this person with a cup and told him to spit the cancer in the cup, and the person started gagging and spat this cancer into the cup -- it was supposed to have been cancer, but I heard it was rotten chicken liver. They put it on a piece of gauze and passed it all through the church and it smelled up the whole place. Everybody jumped up and down and clapped their hands and shouted and carried on. I was hard to convince, but of course my momma believed it. She joined the temple, then she got my sister to go. Then she joined and convinced her daughter to join. Then her daughter brought in her husband and several of their friends."
Jones's healings, like other aspects of his style that gave him such power, especially over the middle-aged and elderly blacks in his congregation, were patterned on the world-renowned ministry of Father Divine, a black preacher who first appeared in the 1930s as founder of the Kingdom of Peace Movement. The ostentatious Divine, who proclaimed himself God of the universe, said he raised the dead and healed the sick in his colorful, bombastic revivals. In the late fifties, when Jones was traveling around the country observing various black and white preaching styles, Divine's technique made a strong impression on Jones, as did his fanatical obsession with maintaining strict discipline and unwavering loyalty among his followers.
Jones's trick of extracting "tumorous masses" in his healings is a classic ploy of faith healers, voodoo priests, and "psychic surgeons" around the world; and similarly, his famed psychic "readings" were carried out with great flourish and showmanship. "He used to 'call people out,'" another ex-member told us, "and when he called out a person's name that person would stand up and the usher would go up to him with a mike. Jim would ask him, 'Have you ever seen me before?' And he'd say no. 'Have I ever been in your house before?' No. 'Well, you live in such and such a place, your phone number is such and such, and in your living room you've got this, that, and the other, and on your sofa you've got such and such a pillow . . . Now do you remember me ever being in your house?' "
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