Just started Mark Lane’s book on Jonestown. So far he has admitted...
Jim Garrison Keillor@books_rum
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Apr 05, 2024
~5 min read
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Just started Mark Lane’s book on Jonestown. So far he has admitted to receiving $7500 from the Peoples Temple to investigate and prepare a response to a hostile National Enquirer article about Jonestown. This article was arranged by the State Dept who finally killed it.
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Lane (who first got involved with the Temple 2 months before the massacre) describes Jones as paranoid, ill, and increasingly sure that the CIA had infiltrated Jonestown. He’d just decided to move Jonestown to Russia because the colony was failing.
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In November of 1978 when the congressional investigation began, apparently it was the final straw for Jones’s sanity
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Lane describes the colony as a fairly well-intentioned place, with good living conditions and happy residents. I guess the location wasn’t conducive to livestock or crops. Whoops
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Early in his career Jones operated an intelligence gathering operation among his disciples that he’d learned from reading FBI documents. He used this in his sermons and his phony healings. I’m picturing Steve Martin in Leap of Faith
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Lane points out that the @washingtonpost, which covered it’s ass after the massacre, had for years been celebrating Jim Jones and his nutty conman shit
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Even after the massacre publications like The NY Times and Newsweek portrayed Jones as an idealistic victim. Lane is unequivocal that the man was a “master conman”
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Lane unsurprisingly portrays the troubled black residents of Jonestown, and their belief in the colony, in a sympathetic light. They believed this could’ve been a genuine socialist, egalitarian model for a new kind of society.
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Eighty percent of the victims, many of whom believed in Jones and his mission, were black former convicts.
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So Lane denies acting as general counsel for the Peoples Temple but he did file some FOIA lawsuits for them after his first trip there. These seem to have been related to the congressional investigation headed by Congressman Ryan.
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Lane tried to warn Ryan and the media that Jones was very unstable and the camp was armed and Jones would become very upset if the media visited, which he’d been assured they wouldn’t do.
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Jones’s former legal counsel Timothy Stoen, whom Jones believed to be working for the CIA, apparently masterminded the trip with Ryan and the media, working with the American embassy and the state dept.
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On a side note, Lane learns in the middle of all this that the HSCA isn’t going to call his client James Earl Ray as a witness. Infuriating.
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So after the massacre the State Dept and the army covered up the cause of death, but here Lane provides solid evidence that the majority of the people were forcibly injected with poison or shot.
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The media, informed by the State department, overwhelmingly claimed that it was a mass suicide. Attorney General Griffin Bell refused to release the last recording made at Jonestown. A heavily edited version was later published in transcript by The NY Times.
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Jones was shot by someone. Didn’t kill himself. And this:
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One interesting thing is that the church increasingly resembled the CIA in its operations. There was a counterintelligence unit, a defectors and critics division, a government and media/propaganda division, even disinfo campaigns to smear the church’s enemies etc.
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Timothy Stoen’s activities start to seem like those of a provocateur. He starts planning to kill defectors and commit mass terrorism/bombing campaigns against the enemies of the church.
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Stoen was the money guy, establishing offshore bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland to hold the bank’s millions of dollars.
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Stoen also possessed the records for Jones’s embarrassing 1973 arrest for lewd conduct and used them to blackmail and bribe Jones. Was Stoen Jones’s handler for the feds as some kind of op?
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US consul in Guyana Richard McCoy provided falsely reassuring reports of the conditions at Jonestown in 1977. Had he been honest, relatives would’ve been justifiably concerned. McCoy had a background with air force intelligence.
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After the massacre the state department and the FBI covered up their knowledge of conditions in Jonestown. If Ryan had known these things he wouldn’t have gone down there in the first place.
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The FCC was monitoring Jonestown’s short wave broadcasts. I mean, the feds knew an awful lot about what was going on down there. They knew about Jones’s mass suicide plans, his desperation and everything.
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It must be said that a major factor in Timothy Stoen’s harassment of Jones was the fact that Jones had fathered a child with Stoen’s wife (at his request!) and he desperately wanted to get the boy out of Jonestown.
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Uhhhh
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Jones emerges as more of a patsy than anything else here. A conman and a paranoid psychopath, but still a patsy, and not an operative or a fed.
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If I had to guess, I’d say that Stoen was Jones’s handler until he became hellbent on destroying Jonestown. At which point he was replaced by McCoy and Dwyer from the American embassy who did everything they could to hide the horrors of the place from prying eyes.
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Ah this is interesting - Forbes Burnham was the prime minister of Guyana during Jonestown. He was installed by the CIA in 1964 and served to stave off communism. Strange place to put your Marxist colony. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_Bu…
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He made sure that Guyana didn’t turn into another Cuba, according to Philip Agee’s diary
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This was a CIA-sponsored client state. And the state department was closely monitoring Jonestown and sheltering it from criticism. They lied to the family members who were justly freaked out about Jones.
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Ok I’ve finished Lane’s book. He finds a concerted government conspiracy to antagonize and destroy Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, all the while letting the problems at the colony fester. This created the conditions that led to the massacre.
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There was a concerted CIA-led coverup across the media that said it was a mass suicide. For whatever reason, this was the Official Narrative. I’m guessing it was an op designed to further discredit Marxism and the civil rights movement, the main values of Jones’s church.
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Of course this doesn’t rule out Jonestown as an advanced, large-scale MKULTRA-style CIA experiment on mind control. Lane doesn’t speculate on this
