The Jonestown Massacre: A Horrific Tavistock-Style Brainwashing Experiment

Winter Watch – by Russ Winter

Editor’s Note: Without an understanding of the Tavistock-Levin method, the reader will have a hard time grasping what happened at Jonestown or what is happening in the world in general. Read this first: “The Tavistock Method of Brainwashing and Social Psychiatry.”

On Nov.18, 1978, at a remote airstrip in the northwest corner of Guyana, an armed cadre of followers from Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple in Guyana assassinated congressman Leo Ryan and killed four others. 

Ryan was so passionately anti-CIA that his aides and family immediately thought that the agency had killed him. He had introduced the Hughes-Ryan Amendment in Congress to push for more controls and transparency.

In 1980, before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Operations, Ryan’s legislative assistant Joe Holsinger testified that the CIA had a covert operation in Guyana and that Ryan’s investigation into the operation would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the agency’s most volatile programs and operations.

At the Jonestown settlement a few miles away from where Ryan was gunned down, temple leader Jim Jones that evening assembled more than 900 followers to take part in what he called “a revolutionary suicide.” They ingested a mixture of potassium cyanide and tranquilizers in a fruit punch, either voluntarily or by force.

An undetermined number were shot execution style. The over-arching question: Is it plausible that 913 people willingly took their own lives at Jones’ request?

The appearance of the dead – laid out in neat rows – raised questions about how they died. Drag marks on the ground were noted. In addition to the sheer magnitude, the utter incomprehensibility of parents taking their children’s lives generated shock and disbelief.Initial accounts of what happened were conflicting. The reported number of those who died kept increasing as more and more bodies were recovered. First, the story was 400, but eventually it reached 913, despite the fact that this all went down in close confines within a clearing.

The Nihilists Who Ran the Jonestown Gulag

Jonestown was equipped with a first-class medical clinic, where residents reported daily to “take their meds” and to be monitored and documented. Jones had a young Jewish “anti-fa” doctor, Dr. Larry Schacht, who was a recovering meth addict and Jones’ bisexual boyfriend. Schacht role in Jonestown was to run the drugging program.

Schacht organized and planned the cyanide Kool-Aid doses and injections for the massacre. He and two “hench-nurses” administered the doses to the children and forced injections on resisters who were held down by the Red Brigade.

The following memo from Schacht to Jones was later found. The “doctor” experimented with botulism and other bacteria before settling on cyanide. It was all quite premeditated.

Cyanide is one of the most rapidly acting poisons. I had some misgivings about its effectiveness but from further research I have gained more confidence in it, at least theoretically. I would like to give about two grams to a large pig to see how effective our batch is to be sure we don’t get stuck with a disaster like would occurr [occur] if we used thousands of pills to sedate the people and then the cyanide was not good enough to do the job. I also want to order antedotes [antidotes] just in case we may need to reverse the poisoning process on people. Eli Lilly Co. puts out a kit or we could buy the chemicals.

1. Sodium nitrite
2. sodium thiosulfate both for Intravenous administration. We should get enough for about two hundred people.

Cyanide may take up to three hours to kill but usually is [it] is within minutes. If it had to be reversed it could be without significant damage to the central nervous system. Symptoms of cyanide poisoning are Increase of respiratory rate at first and then depression, blue color, Headache, loss of consciousness, asphyxia and seizures which precede death (often).

Another Jewish nihilist communist who carried out the gulag massacre was “nurse” Phyllis Chaikin. She can be heard urging people to line up at the dispensing table in the audio. A letter from this nutwing addressed to “dad” (Jim Jones) can be viewed here. In it, she puts forth her ideas about how the “revolutionary suicide” would be carried out. She was present on the ground, and what she states is pure coercion.

My proposal is the following – As it appears we will have to take the ultimate step, we prepare the people by reading the words of strong, assertive revolutionaries of the past who took this choice over the PA system. One aspect of the resistance is its unfamiliarity, particularly with leaders are people look up to. Their [There] should also be discussion of this tactic in the school and socialist classes. When the time comes that all our alternatives have been used up we will meet as a group in the pavilion surrounded with highly trusted security with guns. Names will be called off randomly. People will be escorted to a place of dying by a strong personality Joyce Touchette, Jan Woolsey [Wilsey], Sharon Amos, Carolyn Layton, Maria Katsaris, Paula Adams come to my mind who is loving, supported, but not sympathetic. They (victim/escort) are accompanied by two strong security men with guns. (I don’t trust people to arrange their own death any more than I trust someone to put himself on Learning Crew for 2 weeks, but both can be arranged by outside pressure and no alternatives left open.) At the place of dying they are shot in the head and if Larry does not believe they are definitely dead their throat was slit with a scalpel. I would be willing to help here if it’s necessary. The bodies would be thrown in a ditch. It might be advisable to blindfold the people before going to the death place in that the blood and body remain[ing] on the ground might increase the agitation.

Although the method of execution was switched to a combination of cyanide and bullets, a Temple eyewitness, Tim Carter, who went back to identify bodies, attests to abscesses and injection markings on numerous dead. In the final death tape, Jones is heard pleading, “Don’t lay it [your life] down with tears and agony. Stop this hysterics! This is not the way for [people] to die.”

On the scene at Jonestown, Guyanese troops discovered a large cache of drugs, enough to drug the entire population of Georgetown, Guyana (well over 200,000), for more than a year. According to survivors, drugs were being used regularly “to control” the population of only 1,100 people. One footlocker contained 11,000 doses of thorazine, a dangerous tranquilizer. Drugs used in the testing for MK-ULTRA were found in abundance, including sodium pentathol (a truth serum), chloral hydrate (a hypnotic), demerol, thalium (confuses thinking), and many others. Schacht had supplies of haliopareael and largatil as well, two other major tranquilizers.

An interesting footnote to all of this is Jeff Brailey’s description of his visits to Jonestown in the week after the deaths. Brailey came as part of the 193rd Infantry Brigade from Panama to evacuate the bodies from Jonestown. He writes that as he was leaving Jonestown by helicopter, an unidentified American government official hopped on board carrying a large crate of documents he had retrieved from the community. The man told Brailey to shoot anyone who attempted to take the crate away.

Michael Meiers, author of “Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? A Review of the Evidence,” writes, “The quantity of psychoactive drugs, together with the meticulous medical records and the layout of the bodies, indicates an attention to detail and evidence that the experimenters wanted to follow.

“As the cause of death was noted on the medical records of each Test Person,” writes Meiers, “the corpses were dragged to one side and placed in neat, orderly piles” (Meiers 413). Of course, part of the experiment was not to test the children, but rather the willingness of mothers to kill their children (Meiers 445).

Seven months after the massacre, the New England Journal of Medicine commented on the handling of the bodies at Jonestown [New England Journal of Medicine, “Law-Medicine Notes: The Guyana Mass Suicides: – Medical-Legal Re-evaluation” by William J. Curran, J.D., LL.M., S.M. Hyg., June 7, 1979].

Citing the criticisms of forensic experts and organizations [10], the Journal noted that:

Six months after the massacre, only one-third of the bodies at Jonestown had been positively identified; no death certificates had been obtained for any of the people who’d died in Guyana; a medicolegal autopsy ought to have been performed on every body to establish the cause and manner of death in each case.

In fact, only seven autopsies were carried out among the 913 victims. All of the bodies had been embalmed in Guyana, using a procedure that “ripped up” the internal organs. In the end, physicians were able to certify the cause of death in only two of the more than 900 cases.

Despite Guyana law requiring an autopsy for any unnatural death, American officials insisted that the cause of death was readily apparent and additional inquiry was not necessary. Dr. Sturmer, then president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, sent an open letter to the U.S. Army complaining about the handling of remains and the illegal cremations of most of the Jonestown victims.

The identities of those who died were also encrypted – a mystery in its own right. “Lots of people had identification tags on their wrists, usually their right one,” said Frank Johnston, an American magazine photographer who toured the commune shortly after the massacre. [Miami Herald, “Army to Identify Bodies of Cultists,” 22 Nov., 1978, p.1.] But then the tags and ID bracelets disappeared.

The Guyanese physican who examined the bodies, Dr. Mootoo, reported that 83 of the 100 bodies he examined had needle-punctures on the backs of their shoulders—suggesting that they had been forcibly held down and injected against their will. [American Medical News, “Bungled Aftermath of Tragedy,” by Lawrence Altman, MD, p. 7.]

Syringes containing cyanide, but lacking needles, lay everywhere on the ground at Jonestown—a circumstance leads to a conclusion that the syringes had been used to squirt poison into the mouths of those (children and others) who had refused to drink. Still other victims seem to have been duped into thinking that they were taking tranquilizers: bottles containing potassium cyanide, but labelled “Valium,” were scattered on the ground around the pavilion.

According to Charles Huff, a former Green Beret who was one of the first at the scene, many in Jonestown had been forcibly injected with poison, or had been shot as they ran toward the jungle.

Those who did survive—Charles Garry, Mark Lane, Mike and Tim Carter, Michael Prokes, Odell Rhodes, Stanley Clayton, and others—did so because they were able to flee the scene. Clayton and Rhodes emphasized the presence of armed guards, some with rifles and others with crossbows, who formed a perimeter to prevent people from escaping. Only one person was ever convicted of a crime in this whole affair, Larry Layton, one of the assassins of Congressman Ryan and others at the airstrip.

Evidence from audiotapes indicates that the community had rehearsed suicide on several occasions. The death obsessed Jones called this “White Night”. Jones had the community so worked up that at first those who drank the Kool Aid may have thought it was another ritualized drill?

Winter Watch Takeaway: The evidence that a significant degree of coercion and trickery was used is overwhelming.

The event went on during the evening of November 18. The response was incredibly rapid. Within hour at 3:04 A.M. on November 19 a C-141 MEDEVAC left Charleston, N.C., bound for Guyana. At 3:29 A.M., the JCS chronology indicates that “CIA NOIWON reports mass suicides at Jonestown.” [Ibid. The JCS chronology cites the following reference: “CIA 191138Z Nov 78”.  NOIWON is the National Operations and Intelligence Watch Officers Network.] Somehow, the Agency learned of the mass deaths and claimed “by suicide” while it was still dark, hours before the Guyanese Defense Forces (GDF) arrived at the commune.

In his book The Strongest Poison, Mark Lane also argues that people in Jonestown were murdered. Lane was hired by Peoples Temple to explore what the group believed was a government conspiracy against it. Lane accompanied Ryan to Guyana. He remained behind in Jonestown when the congressman left for the airstrip, and fled into the jungle with another Temple attorney, Charles Garry, as the deaths were beginning. He reported hearing automatic weapon fire.

Lane believes that, given the radical politics and power of Peoples Temple, intelligence agencies regularly monitored the group in the U.S. and in Guyana. U.S. officials, particularly at the State Department, allowed Congressman Ryan to visit Jonestown knowing that it was a dangerous mission. Lane places blame for the murders of the Jonestown residents on Jim Jones and on armed security guards who forced people to take poison. But he also blames U.S. officials who knew that violence was a real possibility, and who in fact exacerbated the dangers with agent provocateurs.

Another benefit of the Jonestown event was the discrediting of Mark Lane, who had been targeted for assassination. It was more advantageous to destroy his career rather than his life, since he was within days of proving the conspiracy against Martin Luther King. Thus two (Ryan and Lane) of the major opponents of covert CIA operations were removed at the same time.

A 24/7 Strategy of Tension and Trauma Based Psyops Was Applied by Jim Jones and his Nihilist Crew

Jones ran a strategy of tension and trauma based mind control against the cult members with around the clock loud speakers and in his rhetoric. Jones compared this schedule to the North Korean system of eight hours of daily work followed by eight hours of study. Nothing in the way of film or recorded TV (shown on the commune’s closed-circuit system), could be viewed without a Temple staffer present to “interpret” the material for the viewers.

Jones used an aggressive form of cultural Marxist sensitivity Gestalt training [see The Tavistock Method of Brainwashing and Social Psychiatry] and an advanced beta test form of the “racists boogeymen are after you” (called “tigers”) agitprop group think, or group dynamics. Sensitivity training, or attack training involves gathering a group of people, assigning a group leader, identifying the stronger-willed people in the group and hammering them into silence or submission through ostracism and shaming. You can hear an example of this directed against Christine Miller in the “death tape” below.

Author Julia Scheeres succiently describes this wearing down Tavistockian method as practiced by Jones and his goons in this interview. Sleep depravation was applied.

Entertaining movies from Georgetown that the settlers had watched previous to Jones’ arrival were mostly canceled in favor of Soviet propaganda shorts and documentaries on American social problems. Bureaucratic requirements sapped labor resources for other unproductive needs. Buildings fell into disrepair and weeds encroached on fields. School study and nighttime lectures for adults turned to Jones’ discussions about revolution and enemies, with lessons focusing on Soviet alliances, Jones’ personal crises, and the purported outside “mercenaries” threats to the community. During his final Kool-Aid speech (below) you can hear Jones warn of “paratroopers” dropping in to “kill our babies.”

Jones set up a false sniper attack upon himself and begin his first series of White Nights, called the “Six Day Siege”. During the Siege, Jones spoke to Temple members about attacks from outsiders. The rallies took an almost surreal tone as black activists (aka “authority figures” in Tavistockian method) Angela Davis and Huey Newton communicated via radio-telephone to the Jonestown crowd, urging them to hold strong against the attackers.

Various forms of punishment were used against members considered to have serious disciplinary problems. Methods included imprisonment in a 6 × 4 × 3-foot plywood box and forcing children to spend a night at the bottom of a well, sometimes upside-down. This “torture hole”, along with beatings, became the subject of rumor among local Guyanese. For some members who attempted to escape, drugs such as Thorazine, sodium pentathol, chloral hydrate, Demerol, and Valium were administered in an “extended care unit.” Armed guards patrolled the area day and night to enforce Jonestown’s rules.

Because it stood on poor soil, Jonestown was not self-sufficient and had to import large quantities of food. Temple members lived in small crowded communal houses, some with walls woven from Troolie palm, and ate meals that reportedly consisted of nothing more on some days than rice, beans, greens, and occasionally meat, sauce, and eggs. Medical problems, such as severe dysentery, struck half the community in February 1978.

Did Jim Jones just master this textbook trade of strategy of tension and his method of trauma based mind control abuse on his own volition? This seems highly unlikely. There are wide swaths of Jones’ life that are a mystery and are inconsistent. Some have even theorized that he had a double?? And who were his skilled nihilist brainwasher cronies?

Although Jones in his prime in San Francisco was a dynamic speaker, in Jonestown he had been reduced by drugs into a babbling incoherent mess. The last 44 minute November 18, 1978 recording below of the horrifying death of Jonestown is testimony to this. Listen to Jones badly slur his words, and speak with “marbles in his mouth.” At 26:45, Jim McElvane, a former “therapist” and another Jones nihilist brainwasher hack, who had arrived in Jonestown only two days earlier, assisted Jones stating “Let’s make it a beautiful day” and then pushed reincarnation New Age hocus pocus.

You will also hear a woman, Christine Miller attempt to counter Jones, but to no avail. The shaming method is used on her. Individuals who were away in Georgetown on the basketball team may have been able to defuse the situation, but by coinkydink (?) were not present. This is described in this clip at 55:10 to 58:05. These eyewitnesses also spoke to what a mess Jones was in his last year.

The crowd acts and sounds zombified, at least up to the point people realize what is really happening. What a bizarre hokey choice of music in the background. This is the death tape.

Was Jones himself being worked over by some element?

Although by every account Jim Jones (1931-1978) had the necessary nasty proclivities, were other factors in play that drove him toward the horrific finale of this experiment? Was there some organized psyops gangstalking in play to enhance Jones’ underlying paranoia and that of his cult?

Jones’ health significantly declined in Jonestown. In 1978, Jones was informed of a possible lung infection, upon which he announced to his followers that he in fact had lung cancer – clearly a ploy to foster sympathy and strengthen support within the community. Jones was said to be abusing injectable Valium, Quaaludes, stimulants, LSD, and barbiturates.

Audio tapes of 1978 meetings within Jonestown attest to Jones’ declining physical condition, with the cult leader complaining of high blood pressure, small strokes, rapid weight loss, temporary blindness, convulsions, and, in early November 1978, grotesque swelling of the extremities. Jones often mentioned chronic insomnia; he would often say he went for three or four days without any sleep. During meetings and public addresses, his once-sharp speaking voice often sounded slurred; words ran together or were tripped over. Jones would occasionally not finish sentences even when reading typed reports over the commune’s PA system.

After covering Jones for eighteen months for the San Francisco Examiner reporter, Tim Reiterman, who accompanied Ryan to Jonestown, thought it was “shocking to see his glazed eyes and festering paranoia face to face, and to realize that nearly a thousand lives, ours included, were in his hands.” The decline of Jim Jones and Jonestown was very rapid. The main group, including Jones, had arrived only fifteen months before in August, 1977.

The Jim Jones Plantation Human Harvesting Method

There is also substantial evidence of outright exploitation. Jones used drugs to control his poor rainbow diversity pseudo-slaves who were totally exploited by their new social justice warrior masters on the Jonestown plantation. Jones did not permit members to leave Jonestown without his express prior permission. Passports were taken. Mail was censored.

Up to $65,000 in monthly welfare payments from U.S. government agencies to Jonestown residents were signed over to the Temple. Black people made up approximately 70% of Jonestown’s population. 45% of Jonestown residents were black women, many with children. Members were plucked from institutions and from those who had lost hope or direction in life. Jones stepped into the breach.  An estimated $26 million was deposited into foreign bank accounts. Little was invested back into improving Jonestown.

This begs the question: did Jones and his nihilist minions slip out of Jonestown? Large sums of money were later withdrawn from bank accounts by so-called survivors.

Based on the population estimates there could be anywhere between 20 and 120 followers not accounted for. Ryan’s Congressional aide Joe Holsinger claimed these people formed the so-called gun-toting “Red Brigade”.

Shown at left is the only “death photo” taken of Jim Jones, who is alleged to have died of a bullet to the head. His face is obscured. There is only a small amount of blood visible. Why is his shirt pulled up? If it is actually Jones, was he dragged into this pose by the shirt?

I have conducted an open search on the subject of life insurance/Jonestown and find this information strangely lacking- which is a red flag. Was this some type of large-scale Crime Syndicate life insurance scam as well? Were death benefits paid out, and to whom? This is an unknown unanswered equation. If anybody has color to add-on this, please comment below and I can update this article.

Winter Watch Takeaway: Beyond a beta test of trauma based mind control, was there human harvesting of sorts going on here?

The Worldview of Jim Jones

Jim Jones was a prima facie example of the worst form of cultural-Marxist extremist social justice warrior combined with a pervert justice warrior. He exploited his vulnerable targets’ religious sentiments and turned it on them. In truth, Jones was a religious phony as well as a psychopathic criminal.

He said, “How can I demonstrate my Marxism?” The thought was, infiltrate the church with “Apostolic Socialism.” He acted as a “New Age,” One-World Messiah, preaching that he was the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin. 

Jonestown was where Jones started propagating his belief in what he called “Translation”, where he and his followers would all die together and move to another planet and live blissfully.

Jones’ wife, Marceline, admitted in a 1977 New York Times interview that Jones was trying to promote Marxism in the U.S. by mobilizing people through religion, citing Mao Zedong as his inspiration. She stated that “Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion” and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling, “I’ve got to destroy this paper idol!”

According to Jones’s mother, he was terrorized by dreams in which a snake figured prominently. Thus the possibility that Jones was sexually abused as a child should not be ruled out–particularly in light of his own abusive sexual behavior as an adult. Even those who remain loyal to Jones, insisting that he was somehow “misunderstood,” lament his enthusiasm for sexually humiliating those who had displeased him—not occasionally by resorting to homosexual rape.

On Dec. 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with soliciting a man for sex in a movie theater restroom near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles that was known for homosexual activity.

Jones incorporated weaponized sex as part of his trauma based abuse. Sex among Temple members outside of marriage was banned, yet he set up a different standard for himself, and voraciously engaged in sexual relations with both male and female Temple members. Jones, however, claimed that he detested engaging in homosexual activity and did so only for the male temple adherents’ own good, purportedly to “connect” them symbolically with him (Jones).

Additionally, Jones had a hardcore cuckolding kink far beyond free love. This was used to humiliate and control his underlings and break down family units- another classic Tavistockian method. He sired nine children with different cult women. Shit storms over children became a bone of contention. Over time, the cuckolding backfired as the targeted men revolted, with several becoming opposition and even enemies.

Children were generally surrendered to communal care, and at times were only allowed to see their real parents briefly at night. Jones was called “Father” or “Dad” by both adults and children.

Before departing for Guyana, Jones operated in San Francisco, which was a major center for radical protest movements and New Age social experimentation at the time. There Jones and the Temple became politically influential in San Francisco politics, culminating in the Temple’s instrumental role in the mayoral election victory of George Moscone in 1975. Moscone subsequently appointed Jones as the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.

Even in California, “bad things” tended to happen to those who stood up to the Temple or got in their way. Or they would clean out a target’s bank account and “suicide” them. The case of Maxine Harpe and Mendecino County is illustrative.

Jones enjoyed public support and contact with some of the highest level politicians in the United States. Jones personally met with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale  and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. Guests at a large 1976 testimonial dinner for Jones included Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, and Assemblyman Willie Brown, among others.

Prime Minister Burnham of Guyana stated that country allowed the Temple to operate in the manner it did on the references of Moscone, Gov. “Moonbeam” Brown, Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter and others. Despite the growing allegations of misconduct against the Peoples Temple in the U.S., the move to Jonestown was given the full support of the American Embassy in Guyana.

The Jonestown location was once a CIA training camp for mercenaries as part of their covert operations in Angola.

At one point on the sound-recording made during the mass suicide, Jones’ own voice commands, “Take Dwyer on down to the East house;” and a short time later, Jones says, “Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him.”On Sept. 27, 1980, a column by investigative reporter Jack Anderson was published under the title “CIA Involved In Jonestown Massacre.” According to Anderson, Richard Dwyer and Jones had ties to the CIA, with Dwyer’s ties dating to at least 1959. When quizzed directly about this alleged CIA involvement, Dwyer responded “no comment.”

Winter Watch