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Welcome to Jonestown Pt. 5 - The Ones That Got Away · Conspiracy! The Show

0:10
Speaker 1: Win Insurance. I'm a checked out both gets the Hey, everybody,
0:32
Speaker 1: welcome to Conspiracy The Show. I'm your host, Adam Todd
0:36
Speaker 1: Brown joining me as co host this week, my favorite
0:39
Speaker 1: co host of all no co host I am by myself.
0:43
Speaker 1: I don't know why I sound so surprised about that.
0:46
Speaker 1: I do this podcast by myself all the time. We have,
0:49
Speaker 1: mercifully for me at least, arrived at the final episode
0:54
Speaker 1: of what has been a damn lengthy exploration into the
0:58
Speaker 1: theory that Jonestown was actually a CIA medical experiment. Personally,
1:04
Speaker 1: I'm convinced, and this episode is going to be about
1:07
Speaker 1: why that is. Seems like a logical way to end things,
1:10
Speaker 1: you know. But first, these episodes have been coming out
1:13
Speaker 1: over a span of what feels like four years now,
1:16
Speaker 1: so let's recap all the stops along the journey so far.
1:20
Speaker 1: The first episode was just a recap of the officially
1:24
Speaker 1: accepted public version of events as described in the documentary
1:28
Speaker 1: Jonestown Paradise Lost, which you can watch on Hulu if
1:32
Speaker 1: you're into government propaganda. The next official episode covered Operation
1:37
Speaker 1: paper Clip, which was the United States initiative that brought
1:41
Speaker 1: thousands of Nazi scientists researchers and intelligence agents and their
1:46
Speaker 1: families to work for the United States after World War Two.
1:50
Speaker 1: That effort led to the creation of both the CIA
1:54
Speaker 1: and the mk Ultra program. It also brought a family
1:57
Speaker 1: called the Laytons to the United States, and they have
2:00
Speaker 1: a whole episode of their own. That family was headed
2:03
Speaker 1: up by doctor Lawrence Layton, who worked on the Manhattan
2:07
Speaker 1: Project and various other US military projects worked for the
2:12
Speaker 1: government most of his life. His wife, Lisa Layton, worked
2:15
Speaker 1: for the CIA while the family was living in Berkeley, California.
2:19
Speaker 1: Their children, Deborah, Carolyn, and Larry were all scientists or
2:23
Speaker 1: researchers or medical professionals of some sort. The oldest child, Tom,
2:28
Speaker 1: was a writer, and as discussed on the episode about them,
2:32
Speaker 1: this one family went on to provide a majority of
2:35
Speaker 1: the initial funding, planning, and physical labor that went into
2:40
Speaker 1: launching Jonestown, and they were all part of Jim Jones
2:44
Speaker 1: inner circle except for the dad, doctor Lawrence Layton. To
2:48
Speaker 1: hear history tell it, he was a victim who lost
2:51
Speaker 1: his entire family and most of his money to Jonestown.
2:54
Speaker 1: But if this CIA theory really is correct, the chances
2:59
Speaker 1: of that being the true are slim. To none. It
3:01
Speaker 1: would be one thing if his family also died at Jonestown.
3:05
Speaker 1: That would make for a believable tale. But now, not
3:08
Speaker 1: only did most of them get away, some of them,
3:11
Speaker 1: like Deborah Layton, got away with the full sympathy of
3:15
Speaker 1: the American public. That's convenient, huh. One of the architects
3:18
Speaker 1: and operators of Jonestown went on to become the public
3:22
Speaker 1: face and voice of the victims of Jonestown afterward. Then,
3:27
Speaker 1: on episode four, we talked about what the CIA was
3:31
Speaker 1: getting up to in Guyana when Jonestown was operational. At
3:35
Speaker 1: the exact same time, the CIA was actively recruiting Black
3:40
Speaker 1: Americans to move to Guyana and train his mercenaries. Jim
3:44
Speaker 1: Jones is actively recruiting Black Americans to move to Guyana
3:49
Speaker 1: to live in a socialist utopia that was actually a
3:52
Speaker 1: slave labor camp. Listen, I know coincidences exist in the world,
3:57
Speaker 1: but I also know there is almost zero chance that
4:00
Speaker 1: that is one of them. So that's where we're at
4:03
Speaker 1: so far, and now let's bring it on home. Honestly,
4:06
Speaker 1: the stuff I just mentioned was enough for me, but
4:09
Speaker 1: there is more. Not only is there more stuff to
4:12
Speaker 1: cover on this episode, but there's way, way more in
4:15
Speaker 1: this book that I just don't have time to get into.
4:19
Speaker 1: Did Harvey Milk get murdered over Jonestown? Maybe read the
4:22
Speaker 1: book and decide for yourself. But trust me when I
4:25
Speaker 1: say this shit is very wild. The book is out there.
4:29
Speaker 1: If you want to read it, google around, you'll find it.
4:32
Speaker 1: I am certainly not going to be the one to
4:34
Speaker 1: link you to a photo copied version of a book
4:38
Speaker 1: that's still available for purchase. I believe that might be
4:41
Speaker 1: a crime. Anyway, let's get to it. The first thing
4:44
Speaker 1: that has me very much sold on the idea that
4:47
Speaker 1: Jim Jones was a CIA asset of some sort are
4:51
Speaker 1: his movements before Jonestown. Like how in nineteen sixty when
4:55
Speaker 1: he went to recruit People's temple members in Cuba. That's
5:00
Speaker 1: right around the time the CIA would have been planning
5:04
Speaker 1: the Bay of Pigs invasion. And do you know what
5:06
Speaker 1: that involved? The short answer is recruiting Cubans to come
5:10
Speaker 1: to the United States to train for an attack on Cuba.
5:14
Speaker 1: So even before Jonestown, we have at least one documented
5:18
Speaker 1: instance of Jim Jones and the CIA being in the
5:22
Speaker 1: same place at the same time, doing relatively the same thing.
5:27
Speaker 1: Did you ever hear anything about a lot of Cubans
5:29
Speaker 1: joining the People's Temple though? Nope, never happened. Somehow, this
5:34
Speaker 1: one time, his powers as a master persuader, powers so
5:38
Speaker 1: intense he was allegedly able to swindle an entire family
5:44
Speaker 1: of learned doctors and scientists into giving him everything. This time,
5:50
Speaker 1: those powers didn't work. Okay, I guess that's fine. Or
5:54
Speaker 1: is it possible that he really was there to recruit
5:58
Speaker 1: for the Bay of Pigs operation and that's why the
6:01
Speaker 1: people he went there to recruit never joined his organization.
6:04
Speaker 1: I don't know. I guess it could go either way.
6:06
Speaker 1: But again, Jim Jones and the CIA doing recruiting in
6:10
Speaker 1: Cuba at the exact same time, just like they were
6:14
Speaker 1: in Guyana does not strike me as a coincidence. It
6:17
Speaker 1: sounds more like a partnership, honestly. Then there's his trip
6:20
Speaker 1: to Brazil. My god, is this part weird? That happened
6:23
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three. First of all, get a load
6:26
Speaker 1: of what Jim jones Wikipedia page says about this trip.
6:30
Speaker 1: Here's a quote. Ultimately, the lack of resources in Belo
6:34
Speaker 1: Horizonte led the family to move to Rio de Janeiro,
6:38
Speaker 1: in mid nineteen sixty three, where they worked with the
6:41
Speaker 1: poor in the favelas. Jones became plagued by guilt for
6:45
Speaker 1: effectively abandoning the civil rights struggle in Indiana and possibly
6:50
Speaker 1: losing what he had tried to build there. End quote.
6:55
Speaker 1: This man was a virulent racist, Nazi criminal. He did
6:59
Speaker 1: not go to Britain to help, and he did not
7:02
Speaker 1: leave out of a sense of guilt. That is an
7:05
Speaker 1: absurd notion that deserves one of those fake news disclaimers
7:10
Speaker 1: that we sometimes slap on tweets and YouTube videos. Also,
7:14
Speaker 1: you're ready for another Nazi twist, Guess who else moved
7:17
Speaker 1: to Brazil in nineteen sixty one. Joseph Mengela. That's right,
7:21
Speaker 1: and it's not a conspiracy theory. Go look at any
7:24
Speaker 1: biography of the man. He definitely got away. We know
7:28
Speaker 1: where he moved to after he got away, and we
7:30
Speaker 1: even know where he died, and it was not in
7:32
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany, is in South America. And he moved to
7:36
Speaker 1: Brazil right around the same time Jim Jones moved to Brazil.
7:41
Speaker 1: And if you're unfamiliar, Joseph Mengela was the Nazi in
7:46
Speaker 1: charge of creepy medical and psychological experiments. Is that another
7:51
Speaker 1: coincidence that the guy who crafted Nazi medical experiments and
7:56
Speaker 1: the guy who it seems like maybe went on to
7:58
Speaker 1: conduct one in Guyana with the help of a family
8:01
Speaker 1: that seems to have some weird Nazi connections of their own,
8:04
Speaker 1: those two just happened to be in Brazil at the
8:06
Speaker 1: exact same time. Totally believable. And then there's what happens next.
8:11
Speaker 1: Despite his own biography's claim that resources were tight in Brazil,
8:16
Speaker 1: he comes back to the United States with a whole
8:18
Speaker 1: bunch of cash and he immediately starts spending it on
8:22
Speaker 1: improving the lives of black people. Just joking. He used
8:26
Speaker 1: it to move to Yukaya, California, where he took over
8:30
Speaker 1: a hospital. I mean he kind of took over the
8:33
Speaker 1: entirety of Mendocino County. This is also where the People's
8:37
Speaker 1: Temple first started using welfare offices to recruit new members.
8:41
Speaker 1: But it's what they did at Mendocino State Mental Hospital
8:45
Speaker 1: that really stands out. When I say the People's Temple
8:48
Speaker 1: took it over, I mean they took it over like
8:52
Speaker 1: Nino Brown taking over the Carter in nwjack City. If
8:55
Speaker 1: you got that reference, let's be friends. Except the People's
8:59
Speaker 1: Temple didn't have to do it through violence or intimidation,
9:03
Speaker 1: just slowly, over time, someone somewhere decided every employee of
9:08
Speaker 1: that mental hospital should be a People's Temple member. And
9:12
Speaker 1: that's a pretty handy set of circumstances to find yourself
9:15
Speaker 1: in if say, someone had just tasked you with carrying
9:19
Speaker 1: out a massive medical experiment and you needed to train
9:22
Speaker 1: a bunch of people to help. Reminder, Jonestown didn't just
9:26
Speaker 1: have medical facilities. They had the best medical facilities in Guyana.
9:31
Speaker 1: There were lots of doctors and nurses and technicians for
9:36
Speaker 1: some reason, and the Mendocino State Hospital sure does seem
9:40
Speaker 1: like where they went to train for that work. And
9:43
Speaker 1: this was all happening at the exact same time another
9:46
Speaker 1: questionable government initiative was getting started, that being deinstitutionalization, you know,
9:53
Speaker 1: the thing where the government decided private facilities should handle
9:57
Speaker 1: mental health care instead of government run facilit By the
10:00
Speaker 1: time the People's Temple left Mendocino County for Guyana, they'd
10:04
Speaker 1: been there for nine years, at which point there were
10:07
Speaker 1: only around seventy patients left at that hospital. Can you
10:10
Speaker 1: guess what happened to those patients. That's right. They were
10:13
Speaker 1: all released into the custody and privacy of the People's Temple,
10:18
Speaker 1: and about a year later, Jim Jones, the Laytons, the
10:21
Speaker 1: now highly trained medical staff, and hundreds of test subjects
10:27
Speaker 1: were on their way to Guyana. But why, what was
10:30
Speaker 1: the point? Well, I'll tell you why, because it's the
10:34
Speaker 1: next obvious step. That's why. Keep in mind, by this
10:37
Speaker 1: point we are decades into MK ultra. The CIA had
10:42
Speaker 1: a mountain of data gleaned from all the weird shit
10:46
Speaker 1: we were doing there. Plus all that data and all
10:49
Speaker 1: those records we got from Japan and from the Nazis,
10:53
Speaker 1: what are we gonna do with it? You use it
10:55
Speaker 1: to conduct a field experiment. MK Ultra wasn't about controlling
10:59
Speaker 1: individual people. It was about controlling groups of people. And
11:03
Speaker 1: the only way to know if you're onto something in
11:06
Speaker 1: that regard is to obviously test it on a bunch
11:09
Speaker 1: of people at once. And why in Guyana, while we're
11:12
Speaker 1: talking science reasons? Doing it in the seclusion of the
11:15
Speaker 1: jungle means you can eliminate any outside influences that might
11:19
Speaker 1: interfere with the test. There were no books, there were
11:22
Speaker 1: no radios, no television, no contact with the outside world.
11:28
Speaker 1: The only entertainment was the dulcet tones of Jim Jones's
11:32
Speaker 1: voice blaring from speakers at all hours of the day
11:37
Speaker 1: and night, except for the occasional performance from the Jonestown Express,
11:41
Speaker 1: which was the official band of Jonestown. That's a real thing,
11:44
Speaker 1: by the way, But anyway, it was a controlled environment
11:47
Speaker 1: in every way possible, including the required activities at Jonestown.
11:53
Speaker 1: According to a few different survivor accounts, there were three
11:57
Speaker 1: things that were required of every won there. Weekly physicals,
12:02
Speaker 1: suicide practice, and one night a week everyone lined up
12:07
Speaker 1: to get one single cookie, hand delivered by Jim Jones himself. Now,
12:12
Speaker 1: of those three, let's talk about the obvious weird one
12:15
Speaker 1: right up front. Weekly physicals. You thought I was gonna
12:18
Speaker 1: say the cookie thing, right, It's called misdirection, babe. But also,
12:21
Speaker 1: that's way too many physicals. Most people, if you're really
12:25
Speaker 1: sticking to your p's and qes, are hitting up medical
12:29
Speaker 1: physical maybe every six months, probably more like once a year,
12:34
Speaker 1: once a week. Though that's beyond a physical that's monitoring,
12:40
Speaker 1: which raises the obvious question what were they monitoring? And
12:43
Speaker 1: don't forget those medical records. There were lots and lots
12:46
Speaker 1: of them at Jonestown. Obviously, you don't conduct weekly physicals
12:50
Speaker 1: on hundreds of people without producing a mountain of medical records.
12:55
Speaker 1: And all those medical records vanished. There were still hundreds
12:58
Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars in cash at Jonestown when all
13:02
Speaker 1: the smoke cleared, but the medical records were gone. Now,
13:06
Speaker 1: the reason for the weekly suicide drills is obvious, But
13:09
Speaker 1: what's with those cookies. Well, one thing that's mentioned about
13:12
Speaker 1: those cookies is that the production and distribution of them
13:17
Speaker 1: was tightly controlled. There's actually a story in the Michael
13:21
Speaker 1: Meyers book about a girl who helped make them slipping
13:25
Speaker 1: one to her boyfriend who was a guard at Jonestown,
13:28
Speaker 1: and the two of them get punished for that in
13:31
Speaker 1: a truly unspeakable way. Jim Jones took these cookies really seriously,
13:37
Speaker 1: and why because that's almost certainly how they were administering
13:41
Speaker 1: the drugs for this experiment. It wasn't because they were nice,
13:44
Speaker 1: it wasn't because they thought every resident should have a
13:47
Speaker 1: weekly cookie. There's clearly something else behind it. And remember,
13:51
Speaker 1: there were huge stockpiles of the same drugs the government
13:56
Speaker 1: was testing during mk Ultra, and no one reports just
14:01
Speaker 1: being fed pills every day, But there was that weekly cookie.
14:04
Speaker 1: There were actually three cookies, but each person only got one.
14:08
Speaker 1: And the reason for that, the explanation given in this book,
14:12
Speaker 1: and one that given all the stops we've made along
14:15
Speaker 1: this road to get here, sounds as reasonable as any
14:18
Speaker 1: other explanation to me, is that they were testing two
14:22
Speaker 1: different drugs to see which one worked better. So in
14:25
Speaker 1: that case, one group gets one drug, the second group
14:28
Speaker 1: gets the second drug, and Jim Jones litany of guards
14:31
Speaker 1: and helpers and CIA friends who are just there to
14:35
Speaker 1: observe get regular cookies. They weren't testing what these drugs
14:39
Speaker 1: would do if people were given massive doses all at once.
14:43
Speaker 1: They were testing what would happen if you administered it
14:46
Speaker 1: slowly over an extended period of time. Does that sound absurd,
14:50
Speaker 1: because I'd remind you we're essentially dealing with Nazi science here.
14:53
Speaker 1: Those motherfuckers probably invented UFOs. I think they could wrap
14:57
Speaker 1: their heads around the logistics of spiking cookies with drugs
15:02
Speaker 1: and then keeping track of who took what. And see,
15:04
Speaker 1: that's the other thing I think we talked on a
15:06
Speaker 1: previous episode about what kind of kid Jim Jones was.
15:10
Speaker 1: For one thing, he was obsessed with Nazis, and especially
15:14
Speaker 1: Nazi mind control science. He was also obsessed with evangelical preachers,
15:19
Speaker 1: but not because of Jesus. It was because he wanted
15:21
Speaker 1: to figure out why people followed them and how they
15:25
Speaker 1: made that happen. He was, as the book puts it,
15:28
Speaker 1: the nation's foremost expert on Nazi mind control, and as
15:32
Speaker 1: soon as he set up shop in Indiana, he proved
15:35
Speaker 1: he could wield that control. Next thing you know, he's
15:37
Speaker 1: hanging out in CIA hotspots and turning his cult into
15:41
Speaker 1: a group of trained medical experts. One thing you hear
15:44
Speaker 1: about the CIA all the time is that they barely
15:47
Speaker 1: accept anyone who applies to work there. They don't hire,
15:50
Speaker 1: they recruit. Jim Jones proving to be an effective mind
15:54
Speaker 1: controller at the exact same time the CIA was equally
15:58
Speaker 1: interested in mind control makes him an obvious candidate. And
16:02
Speaker 1: then he goes to Cuba with seemingly no trouble at
16:05
Speaker 1: all at a time when going there was significant trouble.
16:08
Speaker 1: Then he goes to Brazil to maybe pala round with
16:11
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany's pre eminent medical and psychological experimenter. Then he
16:16
Speaker 1: goes to northern California takes over an entire county, including
16:20
Speaker 1: its mental hospital, with little to no resistance, before moving
16:24
Speaker 1: on to Guyana. At the exact same time, the CIA
16:30
Speaker 1: was trying to get people to move to Guyana. Also,
16:32
Speaker 1: so yeah, those cookies were probably behind controlled drugs, and
16:36
Speaker 1: Jonestown was almost certainly the next logical step in the
16:41
Speaker 1: MK ultra project. But we are not done with wild
16:45
Speaker 1: but also wildly believable theories about the CIA presented in
16:49
Speaker 1: this book. There's also the Congressman Leo Ryan theory. History
16:53
Speaker 1: has painted the Jonestown massacre as something that happened spontaneously
16:58
Speaker 1: in response to the also spawn taneous murder of Lee O'Ryan.
17:02
Speaker 1: No way are our enemy's gonna let us live now
17:05
Speaker 1: we killed an American politician. Time to pull the plug?
17:09
Speaker 1: Except what if it wasn't that? For one thing, mass
17:11
Speaker 1: suicide was always how this was going to end, or
17:15
Speaker 1: at least an attempt at mass suicide. They talked about
17:18
Speaker 1: it for years, they practiced it weekly for years, all
17:23
Speaker 1: while slowly dosing their intended targets with MK ultra drugs.
17:28
Speaker 1: And drugs were only half of MK Ultra. It actually
17:31
Speaker 1: just kind of dawned on me as I was putting
17:33
Speaker 1: these notes together. But I think I know what they
17:36
Speaker 1: were trying to do specifically, and I understand that the
17:39
Speaker 1: tone of my voice right now makes it seem like
17:42
Speaker 1: I just thought of this on the fly while recording,
17:45
Speaker 1: But no, I'm just doing that for effect. I actually
17:48
Speaker 1: figured this out while I was doing the notes, and
17:50
Speaker 1: this part isn't in the book, but hear me out.
17:52
Speaker 1: One of the most notorious figures in MK Ultra was
17:56
Speaker 1: a guy named Ewan Cameron. I think we're supposed to
17:59
Speaker 1: call him doctor Cameron. He was the very first head
18:02
Speaker 1: of the American, Canadian and World Psychiatric Associations. After all,
18:08
Speaker 1: he was also the pioneer of an especially creepy MK
18:13
Speaker 1: ULTRA technique called psychic driving. If you ever read anything
18:18
Speaker 1: about the Montreal experiments which were part of mk Ultra,
18:23
Speaker 1: there have been lots and lots of lawsuits filed over
18:26
Speaker 1: them in Montreal over the years. Very well known story
18:30
Speaker 1: there that was doctor Ewan Cameron and the thing he
18:33
Speaker 1: was doing to people in Montreal was psychic driving as
18:36
Speaker 1: part of the mk ULTRA program, and basically, the subject
18:40
Speaker 1: would be put into a drug induced coma, sometimes for hours,
18:45
Speaker 1: sometimes for days. In a few cases it went on
18:48
Speaker 1: for weeks, and I think one guy was down for
18:50
Speaker 1: about three months. And while they were in that coma,
18:54
Speaker 1: the doctor in the room would play a series of
18:57
Speaker 1: looped messages meant to the subject's personality. I think the
19:02
Speaker 1: power of negative thinking would be a good name for it,
19:06
Speaker 1: the secret in reverse. Now, obviously it's gonna take a
19:10
Speaker 1: lot of drugs to keep a person down for that long.
19:14
Speaker 1: And for that and several other reasons, actual psychic driving,
19:19
Speaker 1: as it was done in those Montreal doctors' offices isn't
19:23
Speaker 1: a thing that's going to translate into crowd control without
19:27
Speaker 1: some kind of tweaking. You can't just render all of
19:29
Speaker 1: South Los Angeles unconscious for a month and tell them
19:33
Speaker 1: to sell crack while they're sleeping and expect no one
19:36
Speaker 1: to notice. Wait, I'm getting my CIA related conspiracies confused,
19:40
Speaker 1: but you get it. So what if that was the experiment?
19:44
Speaker 1: What if Jonestown was meant to take what we learned
19:48
Speaker 1: from psychic driving and apply it to people who were
19:51
Speaker 1: drugged but still awake. If you look at it that way,
19:55
Speaker 1: the suicide practice makes a lot more sense that was
19:58
Speaker 1: the loop they were being fit. Someday the bad guys
20:02
Speaker 1: will come and we'll have to commit suicide constantly, day
20:06
Speaker 1: after day, year after year, all while you're being dosed
20:11
Speaker 1: with MK ultra edibles. The obvious endpoint for that experiment
20:16
Speaker 1: is you ask people to commit suicide and see who
20:19
Speaker 1: goes along. If nothing else, it's gonna tell you which
20:22
Speaker 1: of those two drugs work the best. From there, as
20:25
Speaker 1: suggested in the book, you round up all the people
20:27
Speaker 1: who didn't comply and you kill them. That is not
20:30
Speaker 1: a crazy suggestion when you take into account that if
20:34
Speaker 1: all nine hundred plus people did go along with it,
20:37
Speaker 1: that would have been a rousing success, at least from
20:39
Speaker 1: the standpoint of the people running it. So of course
20:42
Speaker 1: they'd be fine with eliminating the people who didn't comply.
20:45
Speaker 1: What else are they going to do? Let them get
20:46
Speaker 1: out and talk about it. So then after that you
20:50
Speaker 1: just mark the bodies according to who did and didn't
20:52
Speaker 1: go along willingly. You match that data with your massive
20:56
Speaker 1: archive of medical records. Then you get the fuck out
20:58
Speaker 1: of town and build on what you learned in another
21:01
Speaker 1: jungle or in a compound in upstate New York or
21:05
Speaker 1: wherever the hell this went next. And with that, congratulations, Cia,
21:09
Speaker 1: you just pulled off one of the biggest actual scientific
21:13
Speaker 1: mind control field experiments of all time. And the icing
21:17
Speaker 1: on the cake, you maybe get to eliminate one of
21:19
Speaker 1: your biggest foes in the process. Let's get back to
21:23
Speaker 1: le O'Ryan. I keep mentioning how there were a bunch
21:26
Speaker 1: of high profile defections that happened before the Jonestown massacre.
21:30
Speaker 1: These were all high level people. These were the people
21:33
Speaker 1: getting actual cookies, and conveniently enough, they slowly start disassociating
21:39
Speaker 1: from Jonestown in the months leading up to leo'ryan's visit.
21:43
Speaker 1: That's why leo'ryan decided to visit. Deborah Layton, who was
21:48
Speaker 1: one of the highest level members, conveniently escapes at the
21:52
Speaker 1: last minute and starts spreading the news that they're planning
21:55
Speaker 1: a mass suicide at Jonestown. Then a bunch of other
21:59
Speaker 1: defections follow and all of a sudden, the world is
22:02
Speaker 1: hearing about these evil things happening at Jonestown, and Leo
22:06
Speaker 1: Ryan decides to swing into action. He heads to Jonestown
22:10
Speaker 1: with a gaggle of reporters, defectors, concerned family members, and
22:14
Speaker 1: a couple of aids and assistance. There are a few
22:17
Speaker 1: interesting names who traveled on that plane, but the most
22:21
Speaker 1: interesting is Dick Dwyer, and not just because his name
22:24
Speaker 1: is Dick. His name is also in a notorious nineteen
22:28
Speaker 1: sixty eight book called Who's Who in the CIA, which
22:32
Speaker 1: is exactly what it sounds like. It was a book written,
22:37
Speaker 1: I believe by the East German STAZI that listed the
22:42
Speaker 1: names of thousands of alleged CIA agents, operatives, and collaborators.
22:49
Speaker 1: His name is also mentioned in another interesting place at
22:52
Speaker 1: Jonestown during the massacre. For whatever reason, audio of that
22:57
Speaker 1: entire moment was recorded. I don't know who would need
22:59
Speaker 1: that or for what, And on those tapes at the
23:02
Speaker 1: start of things, Jim Jones can be heard saying, get
23:05
Speaker 1: Dwyer out of here. Why was Dwyer there? By the
23:08
Speaker 1: time all the carnage started, that entire delegation was supposed
23:12
Speaker 1: to have all been at the airstrip getting shot at.
23:15
Speaker 1: Dick Dwyer also spent a few days showing Leo Ryan
23:19
Speaker 1: slides of Jonestown that made the place seem like the
23:23
Speaker 1: utopia that they claimed it was. When the delegation got
23:26
Speaker 1: delayed in Georgetown before being allowed into Jonestown, even though
23:31
Speaker 1: they were on a trip meant to investigate survivor claims
23:34
Speaker 1: of abuse. So if he really was CIA, the fact
23:38
Speaker 1: that he worked that closely with Leo Ryan was a big,
23:42
Speaker 1: big break for the CIA, because you see, Leo Ryan
23:45
Speaker 1: wasn't just a showman who liked pulling wacky investigative reporting
23:50
Speaker 1: stunts to garner political clout. Remember this is the guy
23:53
Speaker 1: who basically checked himself in to San Quentin Prison for
23:59
Speaker 1: a few weeks to investigate claims of abuse by prison guards.
24:03
Speaker 1: He was that kind of guy. He liked going places
24:06
Speaker 1: to investigate the things people were telling him for himself.
24:10
Speaker 1: But he was also a devout enemy of the CIA.
24:14
Speaker 1: Prior to Jonestown, he'd conducted investigations attempting to tie the
24:19
Speaker 1: CIA to both the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that
24:24
Speaker 1: kidnapped Patty Hurst, and the Unification Church, which is the Moonies.
24:28
Speaker 1: He also co sponsored a bill called the Hughes Ryan
24:32
Speaker 1: Amendment that limited the CIA's ability to carry out covert
24:37
Speaker 1: operations by, among other things, making it a requirement that
24:41
Speaker 1: the president be clued in about any covert operations. They
24:45
Speaker 1: also had to get congressional approval before any covert operations
24:49
Speaker 1: could be funded. Now is that enough reason for the
24:51
Speaker 1: CIA to want someone dead? Yeah, of course it is absolutely. Also,
24:56
Speaker 1: you have to keep in mind what point and history
24:58
Speaker 1: we're talking about. It's the Watergate story. Broke America was
25:03
Speaker 1: all about finding out what else the government was up to.
25:06
Speaker 1: That's when we found out about mk ultra, prompting the
25:09
Speaker 1: Church Committee hearings and a whole bunch of calls for
25:12
Speaker 1: the CIA to clean up their act. And all of
25:15
Speaker 1: this is happening right when, if this theory is to
25:18
Speaker 1: be believed, they're about to pull off the field experiment
25:22
Speaker 1: that presents the next logical step in mk ultra, The
25:26
Speaker 1: culmination of all those decades of horrifying research and experiments
25:33
Speaker 1: just up in flames because of one nosy congressman. If
25:37
Speaker 1: Jonestown really was that, it raises an obvious question, did
25:41
Speaker 1: the Jonestown massacre happen because le Orion was killed? Or
25:46
Speaker 1: was le Orion killed so the Jonestown massacre could happen
25:49
Speaker 1: because that would certainly kill two big birds with one stone.
25:52
Speaker 1: You get to see your experiment through to the end,
25:55
Speaker 1: even if it's a little early and one of your
25:57
Speaker 1: biggest foes goes away. One thing to take into account
26:01
Speaker 1: when it comes to this particular theory. They were practicing
26:04
Speaker 1: for the suicide drill for like five years, right we
26:07
Speaker 1: know that. Now, Ask me when they bought the potassium
26:10
Speaker 1: cyanide to carry out that mass suicide. They bought it
26:14
Speaker 1: dot dot dot two days before Leo Ryan arrived. That
26:19
Speaker 1: detail comes from the official government report about Jonestown. For
26:24
Speaker 1: the record, it's restated in this book, but that is
26:27
Speaker 1: the government's own information. Even though this was a thing
26:31
Speaker 1: they'd been practicing for years under the premise that it
26:34
Speaker 1: might be necessary to do it at a moment's notice,
26:38
Speaker 1: they didn't actually prepare for it until right before Leo
26:42
Speaker 1: Ryan arrived. What a coincidence. There have been so many
26:45
Speaker 1: of those so far. If for some reason it sounds
26:48
Speaker 1: crazy that the CIA would go to these kinds of
26:50
Speaker 1: lengths to protect their dynasty. Let me run a quick
26:54
Speaker 1: timeline by you. For my money, this is one of
26:56
Speaker 1: the most underrated and under explored. Not even a conspiracy theory,
27:02
Speaker 1: just set of circumstances. It works like this for right
27:06
Speaker 1: around one year from nineteen seventy six to nineteen seventy seven,
27:10
Speaker 1: George hw Bush served as director of the CIA, even
27:15
Speaker 1: though his stint was short. As we've already discussed, it
27:18
Speaker 1: happened during a time of all sorts of upheaval and
27:22
Speaker 1: uncertainty at the CIA, especially the part where the Hughes
27:26
Speaker 1: Ryan Amendment dictated that they report their covert actions to
27:29
Speaker 1: the president. You see where this is going. What happens
27:32
Speaker 1: one year after George hw Bush takes over a CIA director,
27:37
Speaker 1: he quits so he can run for Vice President of
27:40
Speaker 1: the United States, first CIA director to hold that office,
27:44
Speaker 1: by the way, first to run. And there was lots
27:48
Speaker 1: of concern at the time over a CIA chief coming
27:53
Speaker 1: even sort of close to the presidency because again Watergate,
27:58
Speaker 1: MK Ultra, the Church Committee hearings all happening at this
28:02
Speaker 1: exact same time. And just as if by magic, the
28:06
Speaker 1: CIA decides to run for vice president, and then what
28:09
Speaker 1: happens next. Ronald Reagan is very nearly assassinated. Given what
28:15
Speaker 1: we know about the CIA's desperation to stay in business
28:18
Speaker 1: at the time and their history of being aokay with
28:22
Speaker 1: political assassinations, is it really so crazy to suggest that
28:25
Speaker 1: maybe they wanted Reagan dead so one of their own
28:28
Speaker 1: could be the president that they had to report their
28:31
Speaker 1: shenanigans to. Again, too crazy, because we're talking about the
28:35
Speaker 1: studio that brought you MK Ultra. I think it's not
28:37
Speaker 1: crazy at all. Anyway, Let's get back to Jonestown. Like
28:40
Speaker 1: I've said before, there is lots and lots of information
28:44
Speaker 1: in this book, too much for me to devote podcast
28:47
Speaker 1: space to all of it. So I'm going to wrap
28:50
Speaker 1: things up by running through some of the details of
28:52
Speaker 1: the Jonestown massacre itself and the final weeks of Jonestown
28:57
Speaker 1: that I think point to this being a CIA medical experiment.
29:01
Speaker 1: I've already talked a little about the defections, but it's
29:04
Speaker 1: really hard to overstate how completely and totally the upper
29:09
Speaker 1: level white people got the fuck out of there before
29:13
Speaker 1: the killing started. It's not just that all those defections
29:16
Speaker 1: were high level members. There's also the strange case of
29:18
Speaker 1: Lisa Layton, the mother of the Layton family. Former CIA
29:23
Speaker 1: analyst Deborah Layton gave Leo Ryan a letter to take
29:26
Speaker 1: to Lisa Layton, and when he got there, he was
29:29
Speaker 1: informed that Lisa Layton died and was buried somewhere at Jonestown,
29:33
Speaker 1: but no one remembered where, and she was one of
29:36
Speaker 1: the highest level people at Jonestown. She didn't even have
29:39
Speaker 1: to sleep inside Jonestown. She slept in the guest house
29:43
Speaker 1: full time. She mattered at Jonestown, and then when she died,
29:47
Speaker 1: they just buried her and forgot where. Sure sure, sure
29:50
Speaker 1: that doesn't sound like the cover story of someone who
29:53
Speaker 1: faked their death at all. And then there are all
29:57
Speaker 1: of the high level members who just conveniently happened to
30:00
Speaker 1: be at Dennis's appointments or basketball tournaments or on the
30:05
Speaker 1: official Jonestown boat when the massacre happened, like Temple aid
30:10
Speaker 1: Charles Beekman, a white former marine who ran the temple's
30:14
Speaker 1: thrift store but conveniently closed it a week before the massacre.
30:18
Speaker 1: All of that's beneficial for two reasons. One, it keeps
30:21
Speaker 1: them from being killed, obviously, but also it adds to
30:24
Speaker 1: the story of this being a spontaneous thing prompted by
30:27
Speaker 1: the death of Leo Ryan, as opposed to it being
30:30
Speaker 1: a cover for the murder of Leo Ryan. But hey,
30:33
Speaker 1: maybe the fact that all of those early defectors were
30:36
Speaker 1: white and part of Jones' inner circle is just another
30:40
Speaker 1: in the long, long list of coincidences. That have popped
30:43
Speaker 1: up in this story. And then there's the death count.
30:45
Speaker 1: There's lots of weirdness there, but if we're talking suspicious
30:49
Speaker 1: escapes and defections, it's worth noting that for most of
30:53
Speaker 1: its history, the population of Jonestown was said to be
30:56
Speaker 1: between eleven to twelve hundred people. You remember how many
30:59
Speaker 1: people died, just over nine hundred, So where are those
31:04
Speaker 1: hundreds of other people? Before you even say it, There
31:07
Speaker 1: is absolutely no way a place that kept this kind
31:11
Speaker 1: of control over its population, including subjecting them to weakly
31:15
Speaker 1: physical exams, would just lose count of how many people
31:18
Speaker 1: were there. If they were saying it was eleven to
31:21
Speaker 1: twelve hundred, they knew how many people were there. This
31:23
Speaker 1: isn't a clerical error. Hundreds of people got away and
31:27
Speaker 1: no one has ever explained how or who they were.
31:30
Speaker 1: Were they all just lucky survivors who decided to never
31:33
Speaker 1: ever share their story with anyone. Yeah, probably, but it's
31:37
Speaker 1: most likely because their side of the story is very
31:40
Speaker 1: different than the story you'd hear from people who died.
31:43
Speaker 1: Then there are all the suspected or confirmed CIA operatives
31:47
Speaker 1: who were on the scene. We already did an entire
31:49
Speaker 1: episode about how the CIA itself was very much in
31:53
Speaker 1: Guyana at the time. For example, the US embassy chief
31:56
Speaker 1: of Mission, who, when asked about his CIA affiliation after Jonestown,
32:01
Speaker 1: said he could quote neither confirm nor deny. So that's
32:05
Speaker 1: basically their way of saying, ha, you got me. Then
32:07
Speaker 1: there's the entire Layton family who an entire previous episode
32:12
Speaker 1: was dedicated to Phil Blakey, who married into the Layton
32:15
Speaker 1: family and who oversaw the construction of Jonestown. He was
32:19
Speaker 1: rumored to be British intelligence. Or how about Tim Stowin,
32:22
Speaker 1: he was a People's temple lawyer. East Germany certainly thought
32:25
Speaker 1: he was CIA, seeing as how they arrested him in
32:28
Speaker 1: the early sixties after he was caught photographing sensitive military
32:32
Speaker 1: installations near the Berlin Wall. They held him for nine
32:36
Speaker 1: days before deporting him back to the United States. But
32:39
Speaker 1: the actions of Dick Dwyer on the day of the
32:43
Speaker 1: Jonestown massacre are the weirdest. The same Dick Dwyer named
32:47
Speaker 1: in that Who's Who in the CIA book. For one thing,
32:51
Speaker 1: when everyone arrived at the airstrip, he reportedly slipped back
32:55
Speaker 1: into town and before anyone even noticed he was gone.
32:59
Speaker 1: Returned earned with a Guyanese constable who coincidentally enough went
33:04
Speaker 1: on to provide the shotgun that killed le O'Ryan. When
33:07
Speaker 1: the guards who did the actual shooting arrived, Dwyer in
33:11
Speaker 1: this constable, who has somehow never been identified, approached them,
33:15
Speaker 1: talked for a bit, and then the constable handed over
33:18
Speaker 1: his shotgun and he and Dick Dwyer just back away.
33:21
Speaker 1: Dick Dwyer is also the one who suggested that everyone
33:24
Speaker 1: boarding the planes be padded down and stripped of any weapons,
33:28
Speaker 1: which probably sounded like a good idea at first, but
33:31
Speaker 1: not so much once everyone's being shot at and no
33:34
Speaker 1: one can shoot back. Then there's Larry Layton. He was
33:37
Speaker 1: the only person who was ever tried for any jonestown
33:41
Speaker 1: related crimes. After he shot a couple people, someone wrestled
33:44
Speaker 1: his gun away and then delivered that gun and Larry
33:48
Speaker 1: Layton not to the Guyanese authorities, but to Dick Dwyer. Also,
33:52
Speaker 1: during the entirety of the airstrip shooting, there was a
33:55
Speaker 1: team of Guyanese soldiers at the end of the airstrip
33:59
Speaker 1: who just watched but never intervened. When someone from the
34:02
Speaker 1: group who was being shot at ran up to them
34:05
Speaker 1: and asked if they'd help or at least loan him
34:07
Speaker 1: a weapon. They replied that they couldn't intervene because this
34:10
Speaker 1: was quote Americans killing Americans. But after the shooting stopped,
34:16
Speaker 1: they did agree to shelter the seriously wounded, but only
34:19
Speaker 1: after being approached by Dick Dwyer. So that's all weird.
34:22
Speaker 1: And the last thing I want to talk about that
34:25
Speaker 1: I believe also points to some kind of government cover
34:28
Speaker 1: up at Jonestown is everything that happened afterward. For starters,
34:33
Speaker 1: we almost immediately learned that Jackie Spier, an aid to
34:36
Speaker 1: le O'Ryan at the time who was shot five times
34:39
Speaker 1: but survived and later went on to serve in Congress.
34:42
Speaker 1: But she's still doing now. She said this to Leo
34:44
Speaker 1: Ryan while they were still at Jonestown. There is no
34:47
Speaker 1: question in my mind that there is mind control being
34:50
Speaker 1: exercised here. Also, as has been mentioned before, the body
34:54
Speaker 1: count is highly suspicious. At first, it was announced as
34:58
Speaker 1: around three hundred days, then it climbed to around four hundred,
35:02
Speaker 1: and then it eventually reached nine hundred plus. I think
35:06
Speaker 1: the exact numbers like nine hundred and three, and the
35:08
Speaker 1: explanation for that discrepancy was that some of the bodies
35:11
Speaker 1: fell on top of others. In other words, three hundred
35:14
Speaker 1: bodies fell in such a way as to disguise another
35:17
Speaker 1: six hundred bodies. Maybe if each body fell on top
35:21
Speaker 1: of two children, that explanation could work, but there weren't
35:24
Speaker 1: enough kids at Jonestown for that to be the case.
35:26
Speaker 1: The speculation there is that the people who tried to
35:29
Speaker 1: flee into the jungle were eventually rounded up and murdered.
35:32
Speaker 1: Doesn't sound that crazy when you take into account that
35:35
Speaker 1: the majority of those who died were murdered by way
35:39
Speaker 1: of injections in the back. We know the murders happened,
35:43
Speaker 1: we just don't know who did it, or if the
35:45
Speaker 1: part where people fled and were rounded up is definitely true,
35:49
Speaker 1: or if they just resisted right there on the scene
35:51
Speaker 1: and were killed immediately. The subsequent increases in the body
35:55
Speaker 1: count and the lame excuses for it, though, I think,
35:58
Speaker 1: do make the found up in murder theory seem a
36:01
Speaker 1: little more believable. The arrangement of the bodies was odd also.
36:05
Speaker 1: They were all lined up next to each other in
36:08
Speaker 1: a very orderly fashion. It's not because they just happened
36:11
Speaker 1: to die that way. Cyanide poisoning does not work that way,
36:15
Speaker 1: you contort and flop around. There's also no suggestion from
36:19
Speaker 1: any survivor account that the people who did commit suicide
36:23
Speaker 1: were then instructed to stand next to each other. No,
36:26
Speaker 1: those bodies were moved. Was it so they could mark
36:28
Speaker 1: the bodies of those who did and did not commit suicide? Yeah?
36:32
Speaker 1: Most likely, and probably also to make the mass suicide
36:35
Speaker 1: story look more believable. That one detail, the positioning of
36:38
Speaker 1: the bodies, was enough to make some people suspect CIA involvement,
36:42
Speaker 1: like activist comedian Dick Gregory, who said that exact thing
36:47
Speaker 1: in the days following the massacre. Either way, those bodies
36:50
Speaker 1: didn't fall into the neat formation they were in when
36:53
Speaker 1: Guyanese officials arrived on the scene. Speaking of those officials,
36:57
Speaker 1: one of them was the country's chief medical examiner, doctor
37:00
Speaker 1: c Leslie Mutu. He was able to conclude that the
37:04
Speaker 1: majority of the dead had been murdered as opposed to
37:07
Speaker 1: willingly drinking poison. But also the United States not only
37:11
Speaker 1: refused to send additional medical help to the scene so
37:15
Speaker 1: the situation could be investigated more thoroughly, they also refused
37:18
Speaker 1: to let any private offers of help come through, like
37:22
Speaker 1: the one that came from doctor Robert Stein in Chicago.
37:25
Speaker 1: He offered to help us government wouldn't let him. In fact,
37:28
Speaker 1: the State department's initial idea for how to handle the
37:31
Speaker 1: mountain of dead bodies was to dig a massive hole
37:35
Speaker 1: and bury them all together right there in Guyana. These
37:38
Speaker 1: are Americans. We're talking about Americans with families back home
37:43
Speaker 1: who loved them, and the official government response at first
37:46
Speaker 1: was bury them and leave them there. Does that seem normal?
37:50
Speaker 1: We didn't send an official delegation to Jonestown until four
37:54
Speaker 1: days after the killings happened, and that entire time all
37:57
Speaker 1: of those bodies were just rotting in the high South
38:00
Speaker 1: American son. The first thing the American delegation did upon
38:04
Speaker 1: arriving was to bayonet all the bodies so they didn't
38:07
Speaker 1: explode from the internal gases building up inside them. Also,
38:12
Speaker 1: they couldn't do much because the government didn't send any
38:14
Speaker 1: medical supplies. This is a quote. I didn't even have
38:17
Speaker 1: a pocket knife, no equipment, and no preservatives for specimens.
38:21
Speaker 1: That's doctor Lynn Cook, one of the two medical examiners
38:25
Speaker 1: sent to Jonestown, So that alone made identifying the bodies difficult,
38:30
Speaker 1: as did the fact that all identifying documents and any
38:34
Speaker 1: politically sensitive materials were removed from the bodies before examiners arrived.
38:40
Speaker 1: And speaking of weird things that happened immediately after the tragedy,
38:43
Speaker 1: the FBI was denied entry into Guyana by the Forbes
38:47
Speaker 1: Burnham administration. The CIA was allowed in. Military personnel were
38:51
Speaker 1: allowed in to remove the bodies. Independent reporters and researchers
38:55
Speaker 1: were allowed in, but the FBI was not. That reminds
38:58
Speaker 1: me of the Finder's Scandal. Go back and listen to
39:01
Speaker 1: that episode if you haven't. Everyone from the FBI to
39:05
Speaker 1: DC Metro Police to fucking Customs and Border Patrol wanted
39:09
Speaker 1: to investigate that group, but all the investigations got shut
39:14
Speaker 1: down once it got kicked up to the CIA. The
39:17
Speaker 1: nearly complete and total lack of an investigation into this
39:21
Speaker 1: is a huge red flag. The nearly complete and total
39:25
Speaker 1: lack of an investigation into this is also a huge
39:28
Speaker 1: red flag. As I've mentioned so many times already, only
39:32
Speaker 1: one person was ever tried or convicted for any of this,
39:35
Speaker 1: but not just that, no one was ever even subpoenaed
39:39
Speaker 1: or interviewed, including the men who killed Leo O'Ryan. We
39:43
Speaker 1: knew who they were, we knew their names. The government
39:47
Speaker 1: never even tried to apprehend or talk to them. Larry
39:52
Speaker 1: Layton was tried on conspiracy charges, so who did he
39:54
Speaker 1: conspire with? He was the only defendant. A government cover
39:58
Speaker 1: up is the only way any of that makes sense.
40:01
Speaker 1: And then there's Joe Holsinger. I've mentioned before that in
40:05
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath of Jonestown, the question of whether or
40:09
Speaker 1: not this was a CIA thing was a very mainstream
40:12
Speaker 1: talking point, which shouldn't surprise anyone, because again, this was
40:15
Speaker 1: about four years after the world found out about MK Ultra,
40:18
Speaker 1: and one of the most high profile proponents of the
40:22
Speaker 1: CIA Jonestown theory was Joe Holsinger, administrative assistant to and
40:27
Speaker 1: good friend of Leo Ryan. His suspicions were aroused almost
40:32
Speaker 1: immediately when the White House called to tell him Ryan
40:35
Speaker 1: was murdered. When he asked who told him that, they
40:38
Speaker 1: said it was the CIA, So if nothing else, that's
40:41
Speaker 1: the White House itself confirming the CIA was at least there. Also,
40:46
Speaker 1: one of the problems the delegation faced upon reaching the
40:49
Speaker 1: airstrip was that there were no working radios for them
40:52
Speaker 1: to use. To call for help. That meant there were
40:54
Speaker 1: three possibilities for where that message from the CIA to
40:58
Speaker 1: the White House came from the plane that managed to
41:01
Speaker 1: escape early with Jonestown resident Monica Bagbee, the radio inside
41:05
Speaker 1: the disabled plane at the end of the runway, or
41:07
Speaker 1: the radio inside Jonestown. That means either Monica Bagbee was
41:11
Speaker 1: also CIA, or the pilot of her plane was CIA,
41:15
Speaker 1: or that the CIA was watching from the disabled plane
41:18
Speaker 1: that the Guyanese military was guarding at the end of
41:21
Speaker 1: the runway, or the CIA was still in Jonestown after
41:25
Speaker 1: Leo Ryan died. Whatever the case, Joe Holsinger was suspicious,
41:30
Speaker 1: even more so when he received his boss's briefcase after
41:33
Speaker 1: it was sent back from Jonestown. He said, for starters,
41:36
Speaker 1: the clasps looked like they had been removed and reattached,
41:40
Speaker 1: and also the tape recorder that Ryan took with him
41:43
Speaker 1: to Guyana was missing. The Black Panthers were actually the
41:46
Speaker 1: first group to publicly assert that the CIA did Jonestown,
41:51
Speaker 1: mostly for all the reasons we've discussed in this series,
41:54
Speaker 1: and Joe Holsinger did a whole lot to try and
41:57
Speaker 1: give their theory a more maze stream voice, but he
42:01
Speaker 1: took it a step further by publicly accusing Dick dwyer
42:05
Speaker 1: and US Embassy official Richard McCoy, Temple member Tim Carter,
42:10
Speaker 1: and airstrip pilot Guy Spence all of being CIA agents
42:15
Speaker 1: or informants. He was also the first to publicly suggest
42:18
Speaker 1: that Leo Ryan was set up to be murdered because
42:22
Speaker 1: of his support for the Hughes Ryan Amendment. And that's
42:25
Speaker 1: the story of how the CIA was taken down over
42:28
Speaker 1: their involvement of Jonestown. Just joking, obviously. Again, aside from
42:33
Speaker 1: Larry Layton going to jail for a while, nothing ever
42:36
Speaker 1: came of any of this. The government conducted an investigation
42:39
Speaker 1: that was based mostly on interviews with the State Department,
42:43
Speaker 1: the CIA, and Jim Jones' own words, and unsurprisingly, the
42:47
Speaker 1: conclusion they came to was that there was no US
42:50
Speaker 1: government involvement in what happened at Jonestown, and that was
42:54
Speaker 1: pretty much the end of the story. But hey, at
42:56
Speaker 1: least Jim Jones died, right, at least there's some justice
42:59
Speaker 1: in that. Did he come on, do you think he
43:02
Speaker 1: really died that day? I believe that exactly as much
43:06
Speaker 1: as I believe that Hitler was somehow the only high
43:10
Speaker 1: level Nazi who didn't make it to Argentina. Meanwhile, Hitler's
43:15
Speaker 1: personal pilot made the last flight out of Berlin before
43:19
Speaker 1: it fell. But Hitler definitely wasn't on that plane, no way.
43:23
Speaker 1: Sure his body was never found, but still if he
43:26
Speaker 1: got out, someone would tell us, right, No, of course
43:29
Speaker 1: they wouldn't. They tell you he died, especially if your
43:31
Speaker 1: country decided to team up with his regime after World
43:35
Speaker 1: War Two ended, which we totally did. I feel the
43:38
Speaker 1: same way about Jim Jones. He wasn't crazy, he wasn't delusional.
43:42
Speaker 1: He was just a truly evil, master criminal, so much
43:45
Speaker 1: so that despite a lifetime of criminality, he was only
43:49
Speaker 1: arrested a single solitary time in Los Angeles in nineteen
43:54
Speaker 1: seventy three. And that's a really important moment because it
43:58
Speaker 1: marks the one point in historyware the United States gets
44:02
Speaker 1: his fingerprints on file. Good thing too, because despite dental
44:06
Speaker 1: records being the obvious way to go, we eventually used
44:09
Speaker 1: fingerprints to identify Jim Jones' body. But what if that
44:14
Speaker 1: wasn't Jim Jones that got arrested that night. Not only
44:17
Speaker 1: is it well known that Jim Jones traveled with body doubles.
44:21
Speaker 1: This book even names a few of them, Wayne Patila,
44:24
Speaker 1: Harold Cordell, and Mike Prokes. That's a big part of
44:27
Speaker 1: why he always wore those gigantic sunglasses. Way easier to
44:30
Speaker 1: get body doubles past people when huge sunglasses are an
44:35
Speaker 1: iconic part of your look. So with Jim Jones being
44:38
Speaker 1: so good at crime, you would expect that his nineteen
44:41
Speaker 1: seventy three arrest either involved some very bad luck or
44:45
Speaker 1: some very good police work. But nope, he was arrested
44:49
Speaker 1: for masturbating in front of an undercover cop in a
44:53
Speaker 1: movie theater bathroom. But but but wait, approximately two weeks
44:58
Speaker 1: after his son was harassed by that same undercover cop
45:03
Speaker 1: in the same bathroom in that same movie theater. In
45:07
Speaker 1: other words, Jim Jones knew there was a cop working
45:11
Speaker 1: in that bathroom, and he made a conscious decision to
45:15
Speaker 1: go to that theater and jerk off in front of
45:18
Speaker 1: the guy and get arrested. Does that sound like the
45:20
Speaker 1: work of a master criminal or does it sound like
45:23
Speaker 1: someone who's going out of their way to get arrested,
45:25
Speaker 1: Because the suggestion in this book is that it wasn't
45:28
Speaker 1: Jim Jones who got arrested, but one of his body
45:30
Speaker 1: doubles pretending to be Jim Jones. Once he was booked
45:34
Speaker 1: under Jim Jones' identity, his fingerprints were on file as
45:37
Speaker 1: being those of Jim Jones, and it was those LAPD
45:41
Speaker 1: fingerprints that were eventually used to identify the corpse that
45:45
Speaker 1: the US Embassy said they were quote awfully convinced end
45:50
Speaker 1: quote was Jim Jones, but they couldn't say for sure
45:53
Speaker 1: because again it had been rotting in the sun for
45:56
Speaker 1: four days. Do you know how they got his fingerprints?
45:59
Speaker 1: By the way his body was so decomposed, an FBI
46:03
Speaker 1: agent had to remove Jim Jones' fingertips and put them
46:07
Speaker 1: over a pair of gloves and do the fingerprint identification
46:12
Speaker 1: that way. Also worth noting, no autopsy ever done on
46:15
Speaker 1: Jim Jones' body. Speaking of that, have I mentioned exactly
46:18
Speaker 1: how Jim Jones died. I think there's some belief out
46:21
Speaker 1: there that he committed suicide, but no, he was shot
46:23
Speaker 1: behind the ear. Bobby Kennedy's style history has blamed that
46:27
Speaker 1: on a disgruntled temple member, but that's never been proven,
46:31
Speaker 1: and that temple member has never been identified. So what
46:35
Speaker 1: do we think Jim Jones, a man with an army
46:39
Speaker 1: of security around him, finally gets taken out by his
46:42
Speaker 1: followers when they are at their absolute weakest and actively
46:47
Speaker 1: being forced to drink poison while surrounded by men with
46:51
Speaker 1: guns keeping them from fleeing to the jungle. In that moment,
46:56
Speaker 1: someone got to Jim Jones finally. Okay, I guess, I
47:00
Speaker 1: guess that's fine. Maybe, but I think it's way more
47:03
Speaker 1: likely that the person who was arrested in Los Angeles
47:06
Speaker 1: and the body that was eventually identified as Jim Jones
47:09
Speaker 1: were one and the same, but that neither of them
47:11
Speaker 1: were actually Jim Jones. That's the theory in the book.
47:14
Speaker 1: And man, I know it sounds crazy, but again, it's
47:18
Speaker 1: the only way that arrest in Los Angeles makes any sense.
47:22
Speaker 1: And I know someone will leave a comment you can't
47:25
Speaker 1: explain the actions of crazy people, man, Jim Jones wasn't crazy,
47:29
Speaker 1: he wasn't delusional, he wasn't afraid of the CIA. That
47:33
Speaker 1: is all cover story. Jim Jones was a criminal and
47:38
Speaker 1: he was great at it. He was a meticulous criminal.
47:41
Speaker 1: He was not a jerk off in a movie theater
47:44
Speaker 1: bathroom in front of a cop kind of criminal. There
47:48
Speaker 1: was more to that arrest than Jim Jones wanting to
47:52
Speaker 1: beat off in front of police. And I know that
47:54
Speaker 1: seems like a long con seeing as how it happened
47:57
Speaker 1: five years before the Jonestown massacre, But that's only if
48:00
Speaker 1: your assumption is that Jim Jones didn't know Jonestown was
48:04
Speaker 1: eventually going to end that way. But he did. He
48:06
Speaker 1: told people that all the time, and he made his
48:09
Speaker 1: followers practice for it. If he knew that was coming
48:12
Speaker 1: and knew he wanted to get away after it happened,
48:14
Speaker 1: getting a body double's fingerprints on record as your own
48:17
Speaker 1: makes perfect sense. And he did privately tell a bunch
48:20
Speaker 1: of people he had no plans of dying during that
48:24
Speaker 1: mass suicide. He went so far as to say he
48:27
Speaker 1: was going to escape by sea. And with that in mind,
48:30
Speaker 1: here's a nineteen eighty one quote from Joe Holsinger. The
48:33
Speaker 1: more I investigate the mysteries of Jonestown, the more I'm
48:36
Speaker 1: convinced there is something sinister behind it all. There is
48:39
Speaker 1: no doubt in my mind that Jones had very close
48:43
Speaker 1: CIA connections. At the time of the tragedy, the temple
48:46
Speaker 1: had three boats in the water off the coast, the
48:50
Speaker 1: boats disappeared shortly afterwards. Remember, Brazilla's a country Jones was
48:54
Speaker 1: very familiar with. He is supposed to have had money there,
48:57
Speaker 1: and it is not too far from Guyana. My own
49:00
Speaker 1: feeling is that Jones was ambushed by CIA agents who
49:04
Speaker 1: then disappeared in the boats. But the whole story is
49:06
Speaker 1: so mind boggling that I'm willing to concede he escaped
49:10
Speaker 1: with them. End quote. That's from an article published in
49:14
Speaker 1: the UK publication The Globe. It also included a quote
49:17
Speaker 1: from a guy Inese official. Here it goes, a lot
49:20
Speaker 1: of people here believe Jones had a body double who
49:23
Speaker 1: died at Jonestown, and that Jones himself is still alive.
49:27
Speaker 1: End quote. But who knows. We'll probably never know. Personally,
49:31
Speaker 1: I think the idea that someone as criminally inclined as
49:34
Speaker 1: Jim Jones would even put himself in a position to
49:37
Speaker 1: be killed in that moment is unlikely. But hey, decide
49:41
Speaker 1: for yourselves, America. I know I've talked about how much
49:44
Speaker 1: I hate when conspiracy theory podcasts and with that line,
49:48
Speaker 1: but only when I know they're withholding information that would
49:51
Speaker 1: make the conspiracy they're pushing seem a lot less believable.
49:54
Speaker 1: I don't think I did that here. There's just so
49:56
Speaker 1: much more to this book that if I covered every
49:58
Speaker 1: page of it, podcast would be nothing but Jonestown for
50:02
Speaker 1: like another two or three months. Again, whether you want
50:05
Speaker 1: to pay for it or not, the book can be found,
50:08
Speaker 1: Go find it and read it. I think it makes
50:10
Speaker 1: a pretty compelling case. Anyway, Oh my god, I'm so
50:13
Speaker 1: glad to be done talking about Jonestown. I have no
50:17
Speaker 1: idea what we're gonna talk about next week. Hopefully something
50:19
Speaker 1: involving puppies or clouds or sunny days. I don't know.
50:25
Speaker 1: I mean it certainly won't be. This is a very
50:27
Speaker 1: dark podcast. I will concede that. I mean, we try
50:30
Speaker 1: to keep it light. Sometimes we usually fail, but it's
50:33
Speaker 1: always a valiant failure, I would argue. Anyway, don't think
50:37
Speaker 1: too hard about Jim Jones. You know we got through this.
50:42
Speaker 1: Just let it go. What are you gonna do? Bring
50:44
Speaker 1: the CIA to justice? Nah, never gonna happen. Uh. Do
50:48
Speaker 1: I have anything to plug now? I mean Patreon, dot com,
50:51
Speaker 1: slash on Pops on popsnetworkedout, Supercast dot tech. You can
50:54
Speaker 1: get two bonus episodes of Conspiracies Show every month and
51:00
Speaker 1: there's no ads on the free episodes, so go look
51:04
Speaker 1: into that if you're so inclined. And I think that's it,
51:08
Speaker 1: let's get out of here. Adam say goodbye, goodbye, everybody,
51:11
Speaker 1: We love you.