American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (14 page)

Jones “is reported to have been fascinated by the magical rites of Macumba and Umbanda, and to have studied the practices of Brazilian faith-healers ... [and] conducted a study of extrasensory perception. These were subjects of interest to the CIA in connection with its MK-ULTRA program. So, also, were the ‘mass conversion techniques' at which Jones's Pentecostal training had made him an expert.”
²⁴

Returning to the U.S., Jones became a formally ordained minister and started his People's Temple, first in Indiana and later in Ukiah, California. Espousing socialism, talking against racism, his following grew. The FBI's COINTELPRO and the CIA's OPERATION CHAOS were going strong in the sixties, at the same time that Jones's Temple went out of its way to forge alliances with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and Angela Davis of the Communist Party.
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A congressional report showed that various agencies had “target populations” in mind for individual and mass control including blacks and young people.
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By 1972, Jones had brought his preaching talents to San Francisco. Four years later—at the same time he started putting Temple funds into Panamanian and Swiss banks—Jones leased some 4,000 acres from the Guyanese government. Forbes Burnham, the prime minister who'd come to power with help from the CIA, approved the deal. Weirdly, the location in Guyana's Northwest district was virtually the same place where, back in 1845, a Reverend Smith had brought together the native population to tell them that the end of time was at hand. When this didn't happen, 400 of Smith's followers committed mass suicide, supposedly believing they'd be resurrected as white people.
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Whether Jones was aware of this, nobody knows. It was a place of either bad karma or heavy voodoo, I'm not sure which.

Jones became a fairly prominent figure, even getting appointed to San Francisco's Human Rights Commission, with a testimonial dinner in his honor. At the same time, though, there were rumors of heavyhanded cult tactics being employed. He didn't head for Guyana with his nearly one thousand followers until July 1977, when
New West
magazine was putting together an exposé of the People's Temple. Things soon got mighty strange in the jungle compound. Jones set up loudspeakers all over and would do long readings and speeches. A State Department officer who paid a visit reported that members seemed “drugged and robot-like in their reactions to questions and, generally, in their behavior towards us visitors.”
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Congressman Ryan first heard rumblings about abuses of Americans in Jonestown from Deborah Layton, who'd been in charge of the finances in Jones's inner circle before she “defected.” She was the daughter of Dr. Laurence Layton, former chief of the army's Chemical Warfare Division.
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When Ryan decided to have a personal look, at first the State Department stonewalled him. After he arrived along with a national news crew, he was met by Richard Dwyer, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy. Dwyer accompanied Ryan to the compound for a twoday visit, and was present when the congressman and his party were later ambushed at the airport—also at the massacre itself. Jones, in the “Last Tape” transcribed by the FBI, can be heard amid wailing and screams exhorting his followers to take their lives and also saying: “Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him!”
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For a long time, Dwyer was assumed to be the CIA's station chief in Guyana. But this was really a man named James Adkins—who turns up later approving CIA pilots to resupply the Nicaraguan Contras, against U.S. law. It was Adkins who, monitoring radio transmissions in the middle of the night, was the first outsider to hear about what one Jonestown escapee called the “suicides
and murders
.”
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As for Dwyer, he may still have been keeping tabs on Jonestown for the State Department; in a later court proceeding, Justice Department attorneys kept him from being questioned.

Before Congressman Ryan left the Jonestown compound, he was attacked by a fellow wielding a knife. A death squad was then waiting for him back at the airstrip. Witnesses described the killers as walking mechanically and emotionless, “like zombies” and “looking through you, not at you.”
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Larry Layton, Deborah Layton's brother, was one of Ryan's executioners. He ended up the only individual ever prosecuted and sent to prison.

Within hours of the airstrip killings came the mass deaths at Jonestown. Later, an autopsy on Jones's body concluded he didn't take poison, but had killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The pistol, however, was found about 200 feet away from his body. Other researchers think the body identified as Jones couldn't have been him, because it didn't mesh with his essential physical characteristics.
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One raised these questions: “Photos of his body do not show identifying tattoos on his chest. The body and face are not clearly recognizable due to bloating and discoloration. The FBI reportedly checked his finger prints twice, a seemingly futile gesture since it is a precise operation. A more logical route would have been to check dental records.”
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None of the survivors were around to witness what actually happened.

And here is what Congressman Ryan's friend, Joe Holsinger (the father of William, who raised the “broader conspiracy” idea), once wrote: “The more I investigate the mysteries of Jonestown, the more I am convinced there is something sinister behind it all. There is no doubt in my mind that Jones had very close CIA connections. At the time of the tragedy, the Temple had three boats in the water off Brazil. The boats disappeared shortly afterwards. Remember, Brazil is a country that Jones is very familiar with. He is supposed to have money there. And it is not too far from Guyana. My own feeling is that Jones was ambushed by CIA agents who then disappeared in the boats. But the whole story is so mind-boggling that I'm willing to concede he escaped with them.”
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Holsinger is deceased now, so there's no way to pursue what he based his conjecture on. But almost three years after Jonestown, some of the survivors filed a $63 million lawsuit against Stansfield Turner, CIA director when the massacre occurred, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The lawsuit alleged there had been a conspiracy to “enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones” in conducting “mind control and drug experimentation.” The suit was dismissed for “failure to prosecute timely,” and all requests for an appeal were turned down.
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The surviving children of Congressman Ryan also sued the government, charging the State Department with knowing of the dangers ahead of time but failing to warn him; also, that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment and the community was heavily armed and infiltrated by the CIA. The lawsuit was later dropped, for reasons that never got explained.
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“Bo” Gritz trained a special forces team that went into Jonestown afterwards, which he says was needed “after it had reached a point where they had to destroy the evidence.” Gritz believed Jonestown “was an extension of MK-ULTRA from the CIA and there are probably other experiments going on.”
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Will we ever know what actually happened at Jonestown? At this point, I doubt it. Since this was the time MK-ULTRA was coming to light and there could possibly be investigations into it, maybe Jonestown was “collateral damage.” By that I mean, if they had a camp going that was part of mind-control experimentation and you needed to destroy the evidence of that, what better way to do it than the “mass suicide” of a brainwashed cult?

After studying Jonestown, I think sometimes of the large, hand-lettered sign that was found in front of all those bodies. It said: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
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Whether that was a reference to MK-ULTRA is impossible to know, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”

—Ronald Reagan

“How can a president not be an actor?”

—Ronald Reagan

If you're like me, maybe you wondered a little about the timing. Within an hour after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president on January 20, 1981, the government of Iran released all but one of the 52 American hostages they'd been holding for 444 days. The American people rejoiced. The long ordeal that began when militant Muslims took over the American Embassy in Tehran was over.

But what if those hostages could actually have gained their freedom months earlier? And if Jimmy Carter had been successful in his negotiations, what if he'd been reelected to a second term? What if the Reagan-Bush team cut a secret deal with Iran to hold on to their American prisoners until after the November election? Would anybody call that treason?

Even at the time, as busy on the wrestling circuit as I was, I thought—whaaaat?! This stinks. It reeked of a behind-the-scenes deal. Here's the thing everybody forgets: Even though Reagan ended up swamping Carter in the election, as late as the middle of October Reagan's own poll-taker had Carter ahead by two percentage points. If Carter had managed to free the hostages before the election, good chance he'd have won. Instead, we had what Gary Sick, both Ford and Carter's Middle East expert on the National Security Council, called “a political coup” in his book
October Surprise
.

Most of us remember Operation Desert One, a hostage-rescue attempt by our military early in 1980 that ended up dead-in-the-desert, got eight Americans killed, and resulted as a major embarrassment for Carter. During negotiations after that, Iran was demanding of the Carter people that we exchange $150 million in American military equipment that they'd already ordered and paid for, before the Shah was overthrown and the Ayatollah Khomeini took power. Carter said he wouldn't deal with arms merchants, but otherwise thought this seemed fair enough. Meantime, the Reagan campaign was busy monitoring Carter's every move on this.

As early as March 1980, William Casey—who was then managing Reagan's election campaign and later was named his CIA director—approached two Iranian wheeler-dealers in Washington. The Hashemi brothers, Jamshid and Cyrus, were asked if they'd set up a meeting with some representatives of the government.
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The thing was, Cyrus Hashemi, who'd done some work for the CIA, was also an important intermediary for the Carter White House in the talks.
²
Anyway, what was basically a bidding war proceeded from there.

Casey went to Spain in July and worked out arrangements to get arms to the Iranians from several locations in Europe, by way of Israel, once the hostages were freed.
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The equipment was worth billions and involved arms dealers, not to mention $40 million in bribes going to various individuals.
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Abol Bani-Sadr, president of Iran at the time, later wrote about the “secret deal” in two books.
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One of Khomeini's nephews was supposed to present Iran with a proposal from Carter, but he instead returned home with one “from the Reagan camp.” Bani-Sadr was told that if he didn't accept it, the Republicans would make the same offer to his radical rivals. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.” Bani-Sadr said he first resisted and tried to get the hostages released right away—there had already been an official agreement with Carter done in Algeria—but, not surprisingly, Ayatollah Khomeini was working both sides of the street.
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A secret plan by the Carter administration for a second hostage rescue mission went operational in September. But it was leaked to Richard V. Allen, soon to be Reagan's national security adviser. “Shortly thereafter, the Reagan-Bush campaign launched a major publicity effort warning that President Carter might be planning an ‘October surprise' to obtain the release of the hostages prior to the election .”
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That fall, Cyrus Hashemi received a $3 million deposit arranged by a Houston lawyer who was associated with vice-presidential candidate Bush.
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Around that time came a meeting in Paris that involved Bush himself—although the U.S. government, and most of the media, would do their best to pretend it never happened. (Bush called it “that ugly little word-of-mouth rumor.”)

Playing their cards close to the vest, Iran's leadership was saying it wanted either Reagan or Bush to personally put their John Hancock on a final agreement. On September 22, Iraq invaded Iran, which made Iran's need for war equipment all the more urgent. A series of meetings ensued over five days at different hotels in Paris. Bush and Casey are said to have arrived at the Paris Hilton for a 90-minute discussion to cut the final deal on October 19. Secret Service spokesmen later claimed that Bush was in Washington that weekend, but their logs showed a missing 21 hours in his itinerary. There's nothing from the time of a speech he gave on a Saturday night, until another speech that he arrived late for the next night, and other Secret Service documents show that he flew into National Airport at 7:35 PM on that Sunday.
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He left for Paris on a BAC-111 owned by one of the Saudi royal family, and returned on a fast SR-71 aircraft that the CIA loaned him.
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“At least five of the sources who say they were in Paris in connection with these meetings insist that George Bush was present for at least one meeting. Three of the sources say that they saw him there.”
¹¹
Ari Ben-Menashe, an ex-member of Mossad Israeli intelligence, said he'd been part of an advance team working with the French in arranging the meetings.
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CIA contract agent Richard Brenneke testified under oath that he'd seen Bush, along with NSC official Donald Gregg, in the French capitol that weekend.
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There was also an investigation overseen by Sergey V. Stepashin, who later became Russia's prime minister. On January 11, 1993, he had a sixpage report translated by the American Embassy in Moscow and forwarded to Congress. At the Paris meeting, the Russians independently learned, “R[obert] Gates, at the time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA director George Bush also took part.”
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Robert Gates, eh? Well, that brings us right up to the present. Gates came in to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary under Bush-II, late in 2006, and Obama decided to keep him there. If truth be known, Gates has a shady history as a career intel guy. In 1991, there were accusations he brushed aside that he'd had a secret role in arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq War. Witnesses in the Middle East said this had included Saddam Hussein getting hold of cluster bombs and material for chemical weapons. Later, a sworn affidavit by one of Reagan's National Security Council guys said that when Iran was gaining the upper hand in the spring of 1982: “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq.”
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It was also 1982 when the U.S. kindly removed Iraq from its list of terrorist states.

Kinda makes you wonder about who our “enemies” really are, doesn't it? There the Republicans were, sending weapons first to Iran to make sure Reagan got elected, then turning around and arming Saddam Hussein—right down to getting him stuff for chemical weapons that would justify W's invasion of Iraq twenty years later! And now today, it's all about demonizing another recipient of our generosity—Iran! Who's the real demon here? We are, behind the scenes, because we're the ones giving these countries weapons that they can turn around and use on us. It's utter craziness, and so frustrating to watch our leaders operate with so little regard for human life.

I'm a believer that if Congress and the media had been doing their jobs right when the October Surprise story began coming out in the late eighties and early nineties, we'd never have gone to war in Iraq. In fact, there would—or at least should—have been impeachment proceedings against George Bush Sr., and that would have been it for the family in politics. No two-term presidency for Junior.

Of course, it was Poppa Bush who set the family precedent for stealing elections. Keep in mind that he'd been director of the CIA in 1976. “Bush had also protected wayward or hot-triggered Agency operatives—veterans of everything from Chilean assassinations to Vietnam's Phoenix program and improper domestic surveillance—from indictment by President Ford's Justice Department.”
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Then Carter came along and replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner. The CIA's good-old-boy network hated Carter, because Turner proceeded to clean house and dismiss many of the longtime covert operatives.

But I digress. Let's pick up the 1980 story with the fact that, right after the Paris meeting with Bush and Gates in attendance, Iran suddenly told the Carter administration it had no further interest in receiving military equipment.
¹⁷
Then, over the next several days, Israel quietly shipped F-4 fighter-aircraft tires to the Iranians, in violation of the U.S. arms embargo,
¹⁸
while Iran started dispersing the hostages to several different locations.

So, Carter lost the election and then came the timed release (like a good sleeping pill) on Reagan's inauguration day. Banker Ernest Backes from Clearstream in Luxembourg later said he'd been in charge of a transfer of $7 million from Chase Manhattan and Citibank on January 16, 1980, to help pay for the hostages' liberation.
¹⁹
According to Bani-Sadr of Iran: “We have published documents which show that US arms were shipped, via Israel, in March, about 2 months after Reagan became president.”
²⁰

Call me naïve, but I just find it amazing how powerful people can do illegal things and so easily cover their tracks. If George Bush went over and used the hostages for pawns in a political game, shouldn't he and his cronies go to jail for that? I mean, let's make a comparison. Say some people were being held hostage in a bank, and you found out that a lieutenant on the police force delayed getting them freed simply to advance his own personal agenda, wouldn't you be appalled enough to think that officer should be fired or even stand trial for doing this? The hostages in Iran had been there for months! But ultimately, the Bush-Casey types figure, it's fine because we'll win the presidency and all will be better off. You sacrifice the few for the many, not really knowing whether the many are going to profit or not. It's like saying, if somebody had killed Charles Manson a year before the Sharon Tate murders, none of those people would have died.

Anyway, they'll violate all the laws of human decency to make sure Ronald Reagan gets elected. I've always believed you'll govern like you campaign. If you lie and cheat during the campaign, it's not going to end there. And, of course, it didn't. Before long we had the Iran-Contra scandal, which we'll look at in the next chapter. I angrily look at the American people and wonder how they can possibly accept this. We just throw our hands up in the air and say, “Oh, well, that's government, that's what they do.” No, we need to understand, government is us!

The whole seamy saga surrounding the hostages started to unravel in 1987, when the
Miami Herald
published an article quoting some statements from a CIA agent, Alfonso Chardy, about the secret October meetings. Also that year, Bani-Sadr wrote a book that was published in Europe and got into some of what he knew.
Playboy
and
Esquire
followed up with articles. In 1989, Barbara Honegger came out with her book
October Surprise
; she'd been a loyal Reagan staffer until she left out of disillusionment with some of the practices she'd observed. Honegger said she was present on inauguration day when she heard Reagan say to “tell the Iranians that the deal is off if that [last] hostage is not freed.”
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Reagan had left office by the time of Honegger's book, and Poppa Bush was just beginning his first term.

In early November 1989, Ari Ben-Menashe was arrested in L.A. The Mossad agent was charged with having violated the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, by attempting to sell Iran three C-130 transport planes with a false-end-user certificate. Apparently our left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. Israeli master spy Rafi Eitan was worried that Ben-Menashe “was in a position to blow wide open the U.S./Israeli arms-to-Iran network whose tentacles had extended everywhere: down to Central and South America, through London, into Australia, across to Africa, deep into Europe.”
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