American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [59]
—Memorandum from CIA Inspector General Lyman
Kirkpatrick to Richard Helms, August 19631
Over the years, it’s become a kind of household word aimed at people who join unusual groups: “Oh, you must have taken the Kool-Aid.” It’s not really all that amusing, in fact the reality is pretty tragic—because the reference is to Jonestown. Deep in the jungles of Guyana, on November 18, 1978, an official total of 913 men, women, and children supposedly came forward to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide from paper cups in a mass suicide. They were said to be part of the “brainwashed cult” of Reverend Jim Jones and his People’s Temple.
I was in the midst of my wrestling career at the time. I kept up with the news, but it wasn’t a high priority. With Jonestown, I just knew what we were told—that this was a psychotic preacher who had a bunch of nutcases that went along to find utopia in Guyana, and then things went sour quickly. I did hear how a congressman, Leo Ryan, had flown in to do an investigation of whether U.S. citizens were being abused or held against their will at Jonestown. Then he and four others were shot dead by People’s Temple security forces, before their plane could leave again. I viewed that they were killing the congressman as a desperate move, because he was going to expose them. Then, apparently they felt they would get busted for it, so Jones and most of his followers supposedly did themselves in first.
When the 30-year anniversary of Jonestown came around, an article appeared in California’s San Mateo Daily Journal. The headline was, “Slain Congressman to be Honored.” Representative Ryan’s onetime aide, William Holsinger, spoke out for the first time at the memorial. He’d been investigating complaints of a Concerned Relatives Group in 1978, and the night it all happened, he received a message on his phone that “your meal-ticket just had his brains blown out.” Holsinger wore a bulletproof vest to the congressman’s funeral, and then left San Francisco for good. He said a curious thing in his remarks all these years later: “Whether there was some broader conspiracy and what it might have consisted of, are matters I have determined to leave to future generations.”2
That raised my eyebrows when I read it. Most of what’s been said about Jonestown still sticks with the “brainwashed cult” idea, but I found that several investigative journalists have come up with leads pointing toward a “broader conspiracy.”3 By the way, the Temple’s assets were estimated at between $26 million and $2 billion.4 The Guyanese press for awhile called it “Templegate,” in reference to all the money that the local government allegedly ran off with from Jonestown.
Before we get into the strange background of Jim Jones, let’s start with some most curious facts about the event itself. It’s kind of grisly, but here goes. Remember the famous color pictures of the bodies lying all over the compound? Did it strike anybody else as weird that they are all facedown and looking like they’d been carefully arranged? When they were first discovered, the body count started out around 200. But it kept going up. The next day’s papers reported 363 bodies, 82 of them children, and eventually it escalated to 913. The official word was that immediate identification had been difficult because a lot of the adults had been on top of kids. Hmmm ... more than 500 bodies hidden under the first 363?5
That doesn’t quite make sense, but maybe there’s a reasonable explanation. But this next one is impossible to explain away: Dr. Leslie Mootoo was Guyana’s chief medical examiner and the first forensic specialist on the scene. This man was no fly-by-night doctor down in South America; he was very well-educated, trained in London and Vienna. Dr. Mootoo examined scores of the bodies within the first couple of days, taking specimens.