American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [61]
So the central thesis of one investigative writer, Jim Hougan, is that Jones “initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation ... would uncover evidence that the leftist founder of the People’s Temple was for many years a witting stooge, or agent, of the FBI and the intelligence community.” Also, that the congressman’s probe “would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the Agency’s most volatile programs and operations.”15
That makes a lot of sense to me. But none of that was brought out in the mainstream media. It was almost like they had a cleansed “bio” on Jim Jones. Who was he really? What did he do and who did he work with? When you start following this guy’s trail, he’s got intelligence community stamped all over him. He’s working for the alphabet agencies.
Jones was born in a small town in Indiana in 1931 and, by the age of nineteen, became a faith-healing, anti-communist-spouting preacher. By the late fifties, his charisma drew a congregation of more than 2,000. At the same time, Jones may have been a police or FBI informant gathering “racial intelligence”—as quite a few of his congregation were black and he’d taken to making pilgrimages to the headquarters of Father Divine.16
One of Jones’s boyhood friends was Dan Mitrione, later an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs. In 1970, he was taken hostage and murdered by Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas. Jones admitted having stayed friends with Mitrione. He even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jonestown.17
The CIA claimed after Jonestown that its file on “the Rev. Jimmie Jones” was almost empty. Actually, the CIA’s Office of Security had opened a 201-file on Jones in the early 1960s, when he took off for Rio de Janeiro. Agency records showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. So it seems pretty likely that Mitrione had recruited Jones into the CIA, using the State Department as his cover.18
By the time of his 201-file, Jones had already been to Castro’s Cuba in 1960. What was he there to do, preach to them and bring the heathens over to our side? Well, he stayed at the Havana Hilton where the Soviet Union had some Sputnik satellites on display, which the CIA would have been happy to get pictures of. While in Cuba, Jones definitely took photos of some crashed small planes that had carried mercenary pilots. He also encouraged Cubans he met to emigrate to the U.S. Yet somehow, on that trip or another one later, he and his wife had their picture taken with Fidel Castro himself!19
Also in 1960, Jones got a passport toward making a several-week-long “sightseeing/culture” visit to Poland, Finland, the USSR, and England. That was a very similar journey to the one Lee Oswald made a year earlier, including the USSR part. It raises the question whether both Jones and Oswald were dispatched on some kind of government spy mission. Later the State Department identified this as the first passport Jones ever had. The problem was, a few months earlier he would’ve needed one to go to Cuba, unless he went there covertly. This again raises cloak-and-dagger type questions.
Jones first visited Guyana in 1961, preaching against Communism. His whereabouts for a six-month period then are unknown. Somebody applied for a new passport in his name, and it looks like Jones was being impersonated on occasion, because he was said to be in Hawaii when he was actually in Guyana. Again, shades of Lee (or Harvey) Oswald! Two passports ended up being issued to Jones, one in Chicago on June 28, 1960, and another