Mass suicide in Johnstown - a CIA experiment?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In November 1978, 914 members of the People's Temple religious sect were killed in the village of Johnstown, Republic of Guyana. According to the official version, all of them, led by the leader, committed ritual suicide. But was it really purely religious motives that caused the tragedy?

Guru of the new formation

James Warren Jones speaks to the flock

In 1931 in the USA, in a small town in Indiana, James Warren Jones was born. His father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret racist religious organization. At the age of 17, James began to study medicine, but a year later dropped out and, despite his lack of priesthood, founded his own church in Indianapolis, which eventually turned into a sect called the People's Temple.

James Jones sought to provide free education, health care and employment for the poor in his flock. And he did not use the believers' money for personal purposes. But for his philanthropy and honesty, he demanded unquestioning obedience. And he achieved it, first of all, thanks to fiery sermons, in which he emphasized the dependence of each of the parishioners on his own person. However, he later began to resort to intimidation of members of the sect, using sex and violence for this purpose.

Jones' activities can be likened to a grand experiment in mind control, even if the members of the sect submitted to him voluntarily. But was it just the embodiment of Jones' ideas and ambitions?

CIA "scientific" program

In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) appeared in the United States. Almost from the very beginning, there began research and experiments on the control of human consciousness, carried out under the BLUEBIRD program ("Blue Bird"). Soon the program was transformed into the MK-ULTRA project, the purpose of which was to obtain an answer to the question formulated in 1952:

"Can we establish control over a person to such an extent that she fulfills our prescriptions against her will and even contrary to the most basic laws of nature, such as the instinct for self-preservation?"

It is known that within the framework of this project hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and mescaline, were tested, and US citizens were also the subjects of the tests. In 1973, after a wave of protests, the CIA officially announced the termination of work on the project. However, according to rumors, research continued, and the "People's Temple" sect in fact served as an experimental base for the CIA and was also funded by it.

Communist preacher, aka despot

In 1953, 22-year-old preacher Jones, who was eager to help poor people, joined the Communist Party. It seemed to him that the ideals of Marxism were consistent with the principles of the church he founded. During the period of the persecution of progressive leaders and organizations organized by Senator McCarthy, the authorities could not help but pay attention to such a clearly "un-American" church with a communist bias, especially when in the 1960s Jones rejected Christianity as a "white man's religion" and proclaimed his own doctrine, which is a mixture of ideas from Marx and Robin Hood. However, according to some researchers, many of Jones's actions directly contradicted the socialist principles that he allegedly followed.

Meanwhile, the first fugitives from the "People's Temple" appeared, unable to withstand the regime of blind obedience combined with hard labor and violence. After the stories of some of them about the conditions of their stay in the sect, the media began a campaign against the order that was implanted there. There were rumors that the Senate Commission was preparing to investigate the activities of the sect.

"People's Temple" emigrates to Guyana

Cultists at the entrance to Johnstown territory in Guyana

Jones felt that the clouds were gathering over his head, and decided to relocate the "People's Temple" to Guyana, where in 1974 he bought 11 thousand hectares of jungle. For three years, members of the sect grubbed up a vast tract of land there and built a village with residential buildings, a school, a hospital, workshops, as well as reliable armed guards.

Fearing an investigation by the Senate Commission, Jones in 1977 persuaded his followers to leave the United States and settle in Guyana, in a village he called Johnstown. So the sect turned into a commune.

Meanwhile, preparations for Armageddon - the end of the world - became a new obsession in Jones' mind. In his sermons, he began to praise ritual suicide as an act of sacrifice in the name of a common holy cause. During regular "practice sessions" codenamed "White Night," Jones forced members of the sect to drink supposedly poisonous drinks, which were in fact harmless and served (so far) only to test the hardness of the cultists.

Congressman's tragic mission

Congressman Ryan's plane shot by sectarians

And rumors of abuse and violence in the "People's Temple" continued to reach the US authorities, now from Guyana. Several fugitive cultists met with California Congressman Leo Ryan and talked about the tyranny and hard labor conditions prevailing in the commune, as well as the methods of mind control. And in November 1978, Ryan, at the head of a small group of journalists, went to Johnstown to verify the reliability of this information.

Ryan's questions to Jones caused Jones anxiety bordering on panic. Regarding all the accusations against him, he only repeated:

- This is all a lie … They want to destroy me … I will commit suicide.

During the congressman's stay in Johnstown, several "Communards" persuaded him to take them back to the United States. Ryan agreed.

When Ryan, along with members of the delegation and "repatriates" arrived at the airport of the town of Port Kaitum and was already heading for the plane, a truck suddenly appeared on the tarmac. Several armed guys jumped out of the back and opened fire from machine guns. Ryan, three journalists from the delegation and one former commune member were killed.

Bloody denouement

A shot of Johnstown from a helicopter. Hundreds of corpses are visible near the building

By sending the guards after Ryan, Jones knew he had lost. Early the next morning, he summoned the congregation again for the White Night.

Vietnam War veteran Odell Rhodes, one of the parishioners of the People's Temple, Jim Jones managed to get rid of heroin addiction. For this, the grateful Rhodes was ready to fulfill any order of the guru, work for him 12 hours a day, and even die on his orders.

When, on November 18, 1978, during another "White Night", Rhodes noticed how members of the commune were pouring real potassium cyanide into bottles of lemonade, he realized that their spiritual mentor, who had repeatedly persuaded his followers to commit a "revolutionary act", was universal suicide, this time he really wasn't joking.

When Rhodes saw that adults began to give poisoned drink to their children, an animal instinct for self-preservation worked in him. He managed to deceive the vigilance of the armed guards, climb over the fence and escape to Port Kaitum, located 10 kilometers to the northeast, where he raised the alarm in the local army unit. Together with the military, he returned to Johnstown on November 20, but there they saw only the corpses of members of the commune lying side by side.

So what really happened that day in Johnstown, lost in the Guyanese jungle?

Rumors, facts, assumptions

American soldier disinfecting corpses so experts can work with them

Soon after the tragedy, rumors spread that there was no mass suicide, but a cold-blooded murder. According to a report by a pathologist at the local police department, many of the bodies showed bullet marks or clear signs that the poison was injected into them by force.

The following fact remains mysterious: the autopsy of Jones' corpse revealed the presence of a large dose of poison in his body. But he died from a bullet wound to the head. ("Control" shot? If so, whose?)

After the tragedy in Johnstown, a large number of different assumptions about its causes appeared. Some considered the organizer and the main culprit of the massacre of Jones, calling him a mentally ill man possessed by megalomania.

Others believed that all events in the commune, including the final tragedy, were connected with the behind-the-scenes side of Jones's activities. In their opinion, the "guru" collaborated with the CIA, and the creation of Johnstown was part of the MK-ULTRA project. And the "redeployment" of the "People's Temple" to Guyana occurred under pressure from the CIA, which sought to hide from public opinion the truth about the experiments on mind control carried out on people.

According to some sources, the number of victims of the "White Night" itself was less than half of the total number of victims, and only two days later increased by another 400 people. This version is indirectly confirmed by the conclusion of the Guyanese investigator Leslie Mutu that about 700 victims died from bullet wounds and blows inflicted on them. If the conspiracy theory is to be believed, this all happened because Ryan's investigation could reveal the fact of the CIA's involvement in the activities of the People's Temple in the framework of the MK-ULTRA project, which, according to official figures, was completed in 1973. And in the book by J. Wankin and J. Walen, "The Sixty Greatest Conspiracies of All Time," the following is explicitly stated:

"According to one definition, Johnstown was a CIA concentration camp, created as part of a secret government project, the purpose of which was to" reprogram "the American mind."

And yet, who was the leader of the "People's Temple"? Really a communist? Or a double agent tasked with penetrating the secrets of mind control techniques used in countries with communist regimes? Or maybe just a psychopath, paranoid with megalomania, who, during the Cold War era, threw himself into the whirlpool of the struggle between the USA and the USSR only to use it for his own insane purposes? We will probably never know about this.