Jim Jones, founder of the notorious Jonestown, was a close childhood friend of Dan Mitrone, an intelligence agent famous for teaching torture techniques in Latin America. There is much evidence to suggest that Jonestown was a government financed experiment in mind control and behavior modification. However, the evidence is not air tight, and all that can be concluded is that this interpretation of events there fits the facts better than the official explanation.

When Mitrone went to Brazil in 1961, Jones ,his wife , and family found a way to locate there also. Jones had adopted eight children and was described by his landlady as "a gangster who used a Bible instead of a gun." He had become a faith healer. Jones told a neighbor in Brazil that he was connected with the Office of Naval Intelligence. The US embassy provided him with a large home, transportation, and groceries. This was at a time when the US government was funding the establishment of evangelical ministries in Latin America.

After a few years, he returned to the United States with $10,000 and founded People=s Temple in Ukiah, California in 1965. Jones, a white preacher affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, had earlier founded a People=s Temple in 1954 in Indianapolis. He also established Happy Haven Rest Home. The courts sent him 1509 foster children, and he also attracted former prisoners, the elderly, and the mentally ill. He had the backing of local Republicans, the local John Birch Society, and the local chapter of World Vision, which often operated as a CIA front. In 1968 his operations worked for the Nixon presidential campaign.

Jones took social security checks and other things from his people, and some of his opponents turned up dead. Then he claimed a political conversion and said he had become a socialist and he became an outspoken opponent of US imperialism. In 1977 he moved his flock from the San Francisco Bay area to Guyana, with the help of the US embassy. Congressman Leo Ryan started looking into complaints about human rights abuses there. There is evidence that Jones supplied mercenaries for the UNITAS forces in Angola. Unable to learn much from the embassy, Ryan went to Jonestown in 1978. Ryan and four reporters were killed at the Port Kaituma airport. A Jonestown defector was killed and US Ambassador John Burke was wounded. Eye witnesses said the assassins walked mechanically, like zombies and were glassy eyed.

A mass extermination followed. 408 victims drank cyanide cocktails, the rest died in different ways. Guyanese pathologist Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo found that most of the remainder had been injected behind their left shoulder blade. Still others were shot or strangled. By most accounts, over 1200 people were there. There were 913 dead, and 167 returned to the US as survivors. There was also a well-armed, well-fed all white group of guards who were unaccounted for. A Congressional aid told the Associated Press there were about 120 brainwashed white assassins who got away from Jonestown and were ready to kill again.

Michael Prokes, an admitted FBI informant and Jones aid, said the FBI and CIA were withholding a videotape of the massacre. After he made these comments at a press conference he went to the rest room and allegedly committed suicide. Charles Beikman, an adopted son of Jones and former Green Beret, was later arrested for killing a few members of the cult in Georgetown. The body of Jones was never positively identified, but it is believed he dispatched himself with his .357 Python. Before dying, he was heard shouting AGet Dwyer out of here.@ Later Richard Dwyer , CIA deputy chief of mission and Jones friend, was found at the airstrip.

Some Black Panther and Weathermen files were found in Jonestown. Perhaps these people were to be of use in strikes against these groups. Jones had hired Mark Lane, who wrote on the JFK assassination, as his lawyer, and Lane was at the airstrip to see Ryan killed. Lane had been writing about how the CIA was trying to infiltrate the community. For whatever reason, Jones also plotted to kidnap Grace Walden Stephens and bring her to Jonestown. She was a witness to the M. L King assassination. She had seen a man running from the murder scene with a rifle and had refused to say it was James Earl Ray. Her testimony was not used at the Ray trial.

It is known that a wide variety of drugs, including truth serums, were pumped into the Jonestown population. Nearby was Hilltown, a similar experiment run by Rabbi David Hill. Still another was Johnstown. There are other cult locations in the Philippines and Chile. One can only wonder if these places have been used for mind control experiments.

Ryan was not the CIA’s favorite Congressman. He had leaked damaging information to journalist Daniel Schorr and he was investigating CIA mind control experiments and possible domestic operations when he was killed. Ryan was co-author of the Hughes-Ryan Amendment that would have required the CIA to inform Congress of all its covert actions and projects. Ryan was also a source for columnist Jack Anderson, who first revealed CIA involvement in mind control experiments. Anderson also tied the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974 to the agency because Donald “Cinque” De Freeze allegedly underwent some sort of programming in Vacaville, California.

In 1983 several families of the Jonestown victims sued Admiral Stansfield Turner, claiming that their loved ones died in a CIA behavior modification experiment. The agency’s involvement with Jones began long before Turner became head of the CIA, and it is very unlikely that Turner, a liberal and reformer, had any idea what was going on there. Joe Hosinger, Leo Ryan’s assistant and friend, said he was sure Jonestown was a CIA mind control experiment.

The People’s Temple at Jonestown left behind a huge fortune in property and bank deposits in Latin America. According to the Brazilian paper Manchete ( 1/9/79), Brazilian police believe the cult supported itself through involvement in the Guyana-Bolivia-Brazil drug trade. The San Paulo police believe that Jim Jones began his involvement in the trade when he settled in Brazil in 1969.