Snapping

by Flo Conway; Jim Siegelman

  Jones's fear of defection was apparently linked to his fear of betrayal and exposure, and he soon introduced a new practice that would turn out to be his final solution to the problem. In January 1976, Jones tested his first suicide drill on Planning Commission members. He explained afterward that the drill was designed to test their loyalty. Grace Stoen recalled:

  "Jim Jones said, 'Just to show you how much I love you, I'm going to give all of you some wine.' We couldn't drink or smoke so everybody was excited about this treat. We all drank it and Jim Jones asked, 'Is everybody finished?' And we said yes. Then he said, 'Okay, you've all just been poisoned and you have one hour to live.' When I first heard that I said no, I don't believe it; but Jones went so far as to have some people fake that they had dropped dead. Others pretended to be freaking out to encourage anybody on the border line to do the same. When the hour was up, Jim Jones said, 'Well, that was just a test. You did well.' "

  The frequent suicide drills. that followed were the most dramatic in a series of indignities Jones forced upon his flock, and throughout 1976 a steady trickle of defectors -- including, to Jones's great dismay, Grace Stoen -- caused a mounting wave of rumors and horror stories to begin cresting around the Poople's Temple. In early 1977, when Jones received word that a devastating exposé based on interviews with ten defectors was being prepared for publication in New West magazine, he did everything within his power to prevent its appearance, including eliciting prepublication protests from New West's advertisers and representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union. Jones's move to censor New West failed, however, and as the publication date neared he began his crash move to Guyana.

  Jones used his usual ploys to induce temple members to accompany him. He told his black followers that if they stayed in America they would be put in concentration camps. He warned white members that they were already on the CIA's enemies lists. As always, rebels and potential defectors were threatened with blackmail and death. From the outset, Jones spoke of the life they would find in Guyana in only the most glowing terms: everyone would live and work together in tropical splendor and interracial harmony. Only temple executives knew Jones's real intention of making Guyana the seat of his unbounded authoritarian rule.

  "I remember once in San Francisco, Jim Jones said to me, 'Boy, when we get people down to Guyana we can do anything we want to them,' " said Grace Stoen. " 'There will be no more authorities and officials, no more police reports. We won't have to put up with any of that crap.' "

  In the weeks before the New West article appeared, Jones made a hasty attempt to cover his tracks and prepare for his move to Guyana. Church administrators called upon rank-and-file members to turn in receipts they were given for donations to the temple as well as items of veneration such as the lockets with Jones's photograph. When New West hit the stands, the word was out. There were more defections of temple members who hadn't yet gone to Guyana, and the temple's San Francisco headquarters became primarily a supply and communications base for operations in Guyana. A shortwave radio link was set up between the two points as Jones proceeded to conduct his distant forces and his attending throng in the creation of his earthly paradise.

  Life in Jonestown resembled not so much a paradise as a prison. According to survivors' reports, the commune was run like a concentration camp. Residents were required to work eleven-hour days in 120° heat with only a ten-minute break, constructing camp facilities and attempting to cultivate the land they had cleared of jungle growth. But farming proved to be a futile undertaking. Dense weeds would grow back and choke the crops within twenty-four hours. Before long, the commune's residents, who had visions of sharing their harvests with the Guyanese people, were themselves reduced to living on a diet of boiled rice with gravy.

  On the surface, however, Jones had managed to build an impressive jungle community, complete with living quarters, a central meeting place, a school, and one of the best-equipped medical facilities in Guyana. But as his agricultural experiment foundered, Jones appeared to sink deeper into despair and madness. He ordered disciplinary measures more harsh and punishments more brutal than those he practiced in California. Members indicted by Jones for infractions were sentenced to "the box" -- a kind of isolation and sensory deprivation cell. Young children were tied up and lowered down a well until they screamed for mercy. In nightly "business meetings" that often lasted until 3 a.m., which all commune members were required to attend, women who violated Jones's moral code were forced to have sex publicly with cult members selected at random by Jones. Those found guilty of other crimes were called on the floor before the assembly, then stripped naked and whipped, beaten unconscious by security guards, or pummeled bloody in boxing matches against opponents wearing weighted gloves.

  For the boldest dissidents or those who could not be dissuaded from wanting to leave, Jones established a special "extended-care unit" of the Jonestown medical facility. There runaways and other unruly members were confined and given massive doses of mood-altering drugs. Published reports have established that huge supplies of psychoactive drugs were smuggled into Jonestown by temple officials, including Quaaludes, Demerol, Valium, morphine, and some 11,000 doses of Thorazine, a powerful tranquilizer used in mental hospitals to subdue violent patients. Many of these drugs also promote hallucinations, blurred vision, confusion, speech disturbances, euphoria, depression, and suicidal tendencies. After a few days in extended-care, survivors have reported, people seemed to lose any desire they might have had to leave Jonestown or disobey Jones. "When they came out a week later, they were changed," one observer reported. "They couldn't talk to you and they walked around with empty faces."

  There seemed to be no end to the inhumanity at Jonestown. Mail to residents from relatives in the United States was never delivered, but those whose families expressed concern were forced to write letters home dictated by temple officials in which they would describe the fulfilling and idyllic lives they had found, express their unqualified joy and happiness, and reaffirm their commitment to make Jonestown their permanent home. Around the clock, Jones kept up his feverish ranting. In his nightly meetings and for up to six hours each day, temple loudspeakers broadcast to the farthest reaches of the Jonestown clearing. At night, after the exhausted, overloaded, and battered workers were finally permitted to go to sleep, Jones would turn on his loudspeakers again, screaming "Alert, alert, alert! Everyone to the pavilion!" and begin to rave anew about imminent attacks by the U.S. Army or CIA guerrillas. In these frequent "White Night" ceremonies, Jones would order commune members to drink from a fifty-gallon vat a fruit drink that was purported to contain lethal poisons. He declared that the commune was on the verge of being destroyed and that the only remaining course of action was "mass suicide for the glory of socialism." Afterward, when those who had fainted with fright or keeled over from suggestion alone had been revived, Jones announced that he had only been putting them through a loyalty test and now they could go back to sleep.

  These tales of life in Jonestown first came to public attention in the spring of 1978, when Deborah Layton Blakey, once Jones's trusted aide and financial secretary of the People's Temple, escaped from Guyana and returned to the United States intent on notifying the media and authorities of the abuses taking place in Jonestown, and of the prospect of mass suicide as she witnessed it in Jones's White Night rehearsals. She submitted a detailed affidavit to the press, local officials, and the U.S. Justice Department; but even after her sworn testimony was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle, there was little public outcry and no widespread call for an investigation. When official inquiries were made, Jones responded with legal challenges and menacing warnings. In a letter Jones reportedly sent to all U.S. Senators and Congressmen when he heard of a possible government investigation, he spoke of his readiness to sacrifice himself and the members of his temple. "I can say without hesitation," stated Jones, "that we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next."


  When Representative Leo Ryan left for Guyana with the media and representatives of the Concerned Relatives group, there had been ample warning and demonstrated cause for concern, not only from sworn testimony and Jones's own mass suicide threats, but from reports that originated in San Francisco of illegal shipments of arms and ammunition to Guyana.

  From the testimony of former members, we came to understand many aspects of the People's Temple experience, but, as we had suspected, they provided few hard clues to the states of mind of the nine hundred who died. The few survivors who returned to tell their stories have proved to be rare exceptions: an elderly woman who slept through the entire ritual, a young man who had an opportunity to escape when a nurse sent him to get a stethoscope. These individuals cannot tell us what went through the others' minds when they sipped the poison, but from their accounts, as well as those of other defectors, ex-members, and relatives, we can draw some preliminary conclusions about the degree to which People's Temple members were under mind control.

  Former temple members confirmed for us that Jim Jones did impair his followers' ability to question and to make choices. In this his manner was straightforward. "When he would ask people to do something," one elderly woman told us, "he would say to them, 'Now don't ask me why, just do it." He never gave anyone a reason." Jeannie Mills recalled how Jones explained his need for unquestioning obedience. "He told us that he was set up in a position of leadership and that in order to be an effective agent for change he had to have full power and we had to protect the office -- which is what he called himself. He said that meant we could never criticize him or question him because to do so would be to weaken the effectiveness of the group."

  Jones also relied upon group pressure to keep people from questioning and objecting. "I always had a nagging doubt in the back of my mind about whether or not his healings were for real," one woman recalled. "But I couldn't just say to someone, hey, that looks phony. You just didn't talk like that about Jim Jones. No one else was questioning. It seemed to me that I was the only person in the whole group questioning, so eventually I stopped questioning."

  And, like every cult leader, Jones used his finely honed rhetorical skills to dissect his members' peace of mind. "He would talk for hours and hours about slavery and Fascists and Hitler killing the Jews," said another ex-member. "It would be like a bell ringing in your ears all the time. Then you would get to where you didn't listen to anything else. Your mind didn't have time to create anything on its own, and that was all you'd know."

  Overwhelmed and exhausted, as in other cults, at some point many of Jones's followers seemed simply to switch off their own thought processes. Jeannie Mills told us that after she and her husband had quit the church, only to be coaxed back several months later by their children, they made a conscious decision to close their minds to the contradictions and "strange things" they had observed. She recalled how she -- and no doubt many others -- surrendered her will to Jim Jones. "You voluntarily chose not to question. You voluntarily chose to allow someone else to make your decisions. Then you kind of turned off this logical portion of your mind which people use to make everyday decisions. You stopped using it. And eventually you lost the capability of making decisions."

  To relatives and other close observers of temple members, there is a virtual unanimity of opinion on our question of mind control. One elderly ex-member of the temple expressed the reigning opinion in less than clinical terms. "Toward the end, they looked like they were under some sort of spell. It seemed like they were helpless under him. They looked weary and worried and depressed, very depressed."

  As with all cult members, however, the strongest evidence of mind control is to be found among those who left the temple. They report the kinds of aftereffects that commonly follow a cult experience, including the residual disturbances of thought and feeling that suggest some deeper alteration has occurred. "After I left, it took me five months to a year to come around," said Grace Stoen. "I moved as far away from the temple as I could, I got a job, but all I wanted to do was sleep. I would just sleep and sleep and sleep. I was very confused and mixed up and crying a lot. I couldn't talk to anyone because people couldn't relate to what I had to tell them. It was just too bizarre. I was very depressed, and I was having bad dreams. At one point, I said, I'm going back, I'm already a ruined person and I can't make it out here. And one of the people who had left earlier said not to worry, that I needed more time, that time alone would heal it. I said, yes, but what's wrong with me? She said, 'I don't know, but I went through the same thing.' "

  More than a year later, Grace Stoen was still having difficulty making choices and acting on her own. "For a long time it was very hard to make decisions," she told us. "Up until just a little while ago I found myself calling people and saying, 'By the way, I was thinking of doing such and such, what do you think?' I was very unsure of myself and my judgments."

  ---

  Massacre or mass suicide? The dilemma might be resolved either way. There is ample evidence -- plus the weight of official and public opinion -- to support the contention that the dead took their lives of their own free will. But it is equally possible to argue that Jim Jones was a mad, sadistic figure who presided over the execution of nine hundred helpless people -- nearly three hundred of them children.

  We believe it was a massacre. The Jonestown commune was a living hell. The people at Jonestown were subjected to extreme physical and emotional duress, then willfully deceived and confused beyond the point of self-responsibility. But there is a terrible irony to the tragedy at Jonestown, an irony that makes the massacre of 912 people so much sadder and more foreboding, With his wealth and power, Jones was free to pursue any course of action he desired. But his followers had no altematives. They had indeed been charmed, coerced, exported, and imprisoned. Yet, despite the lies Jones told them, their twisted perceptions probably found their way to the truth: following the airport killings, there was no escape -- either to freedom or from the inevitability of Jones's wrath.

  Few who died in Guyana knew just how correct they were in that final belief that they had no other way out. For all they knew, most of those who had defected had already been murdered. Those members who were aware of the existence of the Concerned Relatives Committee and the Human Freedom Center knew only that all their missions to Guyana had ended in failure. Beyond that, however, most members had no idea that nearly every major government agency had been asked to investigate the People's Temple and had refused. The Treasury Department had been informed of illegal arms shipments to Guyana eighteen months earlier. The Federal Communications Commission had declined to press charges against the People's Temple for violations of shortwave radio broadcast regulations. Twice in the preceding year, the Social Security Administration had attempted to determine whether cult members were being forced to sign over to the temple more than $40,000 in government payments every month, only to be told by the State Department that they found no evidence that members had been forced to sign away their benefits. And the Justice Department, after receiving hundreds of reports alleging "brainwashing," coercion, and criminal activities in connection with numerous religious cults, had repeatedly refused to investigate such groups on the grounds that such an investigation would violate the group's constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion.

  Even lacking that knowledge, in all likelihood the residents of Jonestown were overcome that afternoon by a profound sense of hopelessness. For the majority of them, born black and poor, life had always been an uphill struggle against insurmountable odds. For the rest, the young white college graduates and the earnest middle Americans, their ideals and values shaken by the cultural upheavals of the sixties and early seventies, Jonestown may have simply been the final letdown in a long series of disillusionments. For a time, unlike the other cults we have studied, the People's Temple offered them a real course of action for social change. "It was like you died and went to heaven and it was beautiful," said Jeannie Mills, "then sudde
nly God went crazy and everything went sour."

  That may be the real tragedy of the People's Temple, that it was born of a sincere desire to make life better, but that its founder's notorious achievement was to undermine the very premise of our human existence. Grace Stoen offered a final thought on the fulfillment of the vision of the People's Temple. "When they first set things up in Guyana it was beautiful, it was fantastic, until Jim Jones came down and spoiled everything. It was so painful to watch. There was so much ability in the people. So much could have been accomplished, but Jim Jones ruined it. People's Temple could have been something. It could have been an example to the world."

  ---

  We didn't investigate the People's Temple in the first edition of Snapping. Seven months ago, of the estimated 3,000 religious cults active in the United States in the seventies, the People's Temple didn't even bear mentioning among the ten largest, richest, or potentially most destructive. Our original investigation focused on the major groups currently operating on a national or international scale and those that employ identifiable techniques for stilling the mind. In that sense, as we have described it, Jim Jones's program of manipulation does not and never did fall within the scope of what we originally defined as 'information disease' -- the lasting alteration through intense experience of an individual's fundamental information-processing capacities, more commonly, his abilities to think and feel.