The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

advanced by John Judge in “The Black Hole of Guyana” (in Secret and Suppressed, 1993). Here it is suggested that the People’s Temple, from its very origin, was a CIA exercise in mind control. Judge points out that many of the drugs found at Jonestown matched those used in the CIA’s MK- ULTRA programme and that Larry Layton, Jones’s right-hand man, was the son of the chief of the US Army’s Chemical—Biological Warfare Division. Surviving People’s Temple official Joyce Shaw speculated that Jonestown was “some kind of horrible government experiment… a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate blacks”. (The majority of the People’s Temple congregation were black women.) Since Jones was showing signs of mental instability, so the story goes, the CIA decided to kill—literally—the People’s Temple project rather than risk its exposure.

In Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? (1989) Michael Meiers posits that Congressman Ryan was about to make such an exposure, hence his assassination. Meiers adds another twist, suggesting that Jonestown was the site of the CIA’s HIV/AIDS experiments. Then there is the suggestion by S. F. Alinin, B. G. Antonov and A. N. Itskov that the CIA massacred the People’s Temple because it was a socialist, not a religious, organization, and was about to embarrass the US by defecting en masse to the USSR. It’s a matter of record that Jones had meetings with Soviet and Cuban officials, and almost his last order was that luggage containing money and documents was to be taken to Guyana’s Soviet embassy.

Possible CIA involvement in the Jonestown massacre was investigated by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded in 1980 that the agency had no links with Jones or any part in the massacre. A lawsuit by Ryan’s children alleging that the CIA ran Jonestown as part of MK-ULTRA was thrown out.

Amid the flurry of Jonestown theories, the obvious explanation still holds up: it was the work of a messianic guru who exercised an almost hypnotic hold over his psychologically needy followers. Jones was, if you like, a little Hitler. Affidavits by People’s Temple survivors detail all too clearly Jones’s long-held plans for a mass suicide should his little Reich be jeopardized. The People’s Temple former financial director, Deborah Layton Blakey, who escaped the cult, issued a public affidavit six months before the massacre warning that Jones was intent on a mass suicide. Most convincing of all is the audio-tape retrieved from Jonestown, widely believed to be genuine, in which Jones can be heard discussing the deteriorating situation:

Jones: It’s all over. The congressman has been murdered. (Music and singing.) Well, it’s all over, all over. What a legacy, what a legacy. What the Red Brigade doin’ that once ever made any sense anyway? They invaded our privacy. They came into our home. They followed us six thousand miles away. Red Brigade showed them justice. The congressman’s dead. (Music only.)

Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. It’s just simple. Just, please get it. Before it’s too late. The GDF [Guyanese Defense Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin’, get movin’, get movin’.

Woman 6: Now. Do it now!

Jones: Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land out here. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. Are you going to separate yourself from whoever shot the congressman? I don’t know who shot him.

Voices: No. No. No.

Jones: Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? You don’t know what you’ve done. I tried. (Applause, music, singing.) They saw it happen and ran into the bush and dropped the machine guns. I never in my life. But not any more. But we’ve got to move. Are you gonna get that medication here? You’ve got to move. Marceline, about forty minutes.

[…]

Jones: Please. For God’s sake, let’s get on with it. We’ve lived—we’ve lived as no other people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with it. Let’s be done with the agony of it. (Applause.) It’s far, far harder to have to walk through every day, die slowly—and from the time you’re a child ’til the time you get grey, you’re dying. Dishonest, and I’m sure that they’ll—they’ll pay for it. They’ll pay for it. This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide. So they’ll pay for this. They brought this upon us. And they’ll pay for that. I leave that destiny to them. (Voices.) Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane. I want to go—I want to see you go, though. They can take me and do what they want—whatever they want to do. I want to see you go. I don’t want to see you go through this hell no more. No more. No more. No more. We’re trying. If everybody will relax. The best thing you do to relax, and you will have no problem. You’ll have no problem with this thing if you just relax.

[…]

Jones: Where’s the vat, the vat, the vat? Where’s the vat with the Green C on it? The vat with the Green C in. Bring it so the adults can begin.

Jonestown: a mass suicide called by a delusional, mind-games-playing tyrant. So why, then, do 5,000 pages of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA) 1979 hearing remain classified?

The Jonestown massacre was carried out by CIA to disguise mind-control experiments: ALERT LEVEL 5

Further Reading

John Judge, “The Black Hole of Guyana”, Secret and Suppressed, ed. Jim Keith, 1993

Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison: A Survivor of Jonestown Shares Her Story, 1999

Michael Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence, 1989

KAL007

On 1 September 1983 a Korean Air Lines 747 set off from Alaska for Seoul. Instead of following the prescribed route, the civilian flight went 365 miles (590km) off-course and into Soviet airspace. There it was engaged by Soviet fighters, which launched two air-to-air missiles at the airliner, sending KAL007 down into the Sea of Japan with the loss of 269 passengers and crew aboard.

These were the bad old days of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Yuri Andropov in the Kremlin. On the face of it, the shooting down of KAL007 was cold-blooded, unprovoked murder by the Soviets and was condemned as such by the White House. But was it? According to R. W. Johnson in Shootdown (1986), KAL007 was on a CIA/US military mission to fly into Soviet airspace and thereby trigger the Reds’ defence systems—which could then be monitored by NATO and Japanese surveillance systems. One of the monitoring stations, Johnson hypothesizes, was the space-shuttle Challenger, which flew over the Sea of Japan four times during KAL007’s flight. To lend weight to his argument he details a history of “mistaken” Korean Air Lines infringements of Soviet airspace, including the 1978 gunning-down of a strayed Korean airliner. According to lawyer Melvin Belli, who represented some of the passengers’ families, the KAL007 pilot said to his wife before departure: “This is the last trip. It’s too dangerous.”

KAL had an incentive to tag along with a CIA spying scheme. The company was in a poor financial state and required US government dispensations to survive.

Johnson concluded that the US government bet the Soviets wouldn’t open fire on a civilian airliner, but got it disastrously wrong. His case has to be weighed against the investigations of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which determined that the 747 went off-course because the inattentive pilot failed to engage the Inertial Navigation System, relying instead on the magnetic compass to guide the plane. He would have to have been very drowsy indeed, and likewise the remainder of the flight crew. The plane’s ground mapping radar would have informed them that they were flying over land and not sea as indicated on the flight plan.

No one, incidentally, could call R. W. Johnson the usual conspiracy theory suspect. He’s an Oxford professor