American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [63]
For a long time, Dwyer was assumed to be the CIA’s station chief in Guyana. But this was really a man named James Adkins—who turns up later approving CIA pilots to resupply the Nicaraguan Contras, against U.S. law. It was Adkins who, monitoring radio transmissions in the middle of the night, was the first outsider to hear about what one Jonestown escapee called the “suicides and murders.”31 As for Dwyer, he may still have been keeping tabs on Jonestown for the State Department; in a later court proceeding, Justice Department attorneys kept him from being questioned.
Before Congressman Ryan left the Jonestown compound, he was attacked by a fellow wielding a knife. A death squad was then waiting for him back at the airstrip. Witnesses described the killers as walking mechanically and emotionless, “like zombies” and “looking through you, not at you.”32 Larry Layton, Deborah Layton’s brother, was one of Ryan’s executioners. He ended up the only individual ever prosecuted and sent to prison.
Within hours of the airstrip killings came the mass deaths at Jonestown. Later, an autopsy on Jones’s body concluded he didn’t take poison, but had killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The pistol, however, was found about 200 feet away from his body. Other researchers think the body identified as Jones couldn’t have been him, because it didn’t mesh with his essential physical characteristics.33 One raised these questions: “Photos of his body do not show identifying tattoos on his chest. The body and face are not clearly recognizable due to bloating and discoloration. The FBI reportedly checked his finger prints twice, a seemingly futile gesture since it is a precise operation. A more logical route would have been to check dental records.”34 None of the survivors were around to witness what actually happened.
And here is what Congressman Ryan’s friend, Joe Holsinger (the father of William, who raised the “broader conspiracy” idea), once wrote: “The more I investigate the mysteries of Jonestown, the more I am convinced there is something sinister behind it all. There is no doubt in my mind that Jones had very close CIA connections. At the time of the tragedy, the Temple had three boats in the water off Brazil. The boats disappeared shortly afterwards. Remember, Brazil is a country that Jones is very familiar with. He is supposed to have money there. And it is not too far from Guyana. My own feeling is that Jones was ambushed by CIA agents who then disappeared in the boats. But the whole story is so mind-boggling that I’m willing to concede he escaped with them.”35
Holsinger is deceased now, so there’s no way to pursue what he based his conjecture on. But almost three years after Jonestown, some of the survivors filed a $63 million lawsuit against Stansfield Turner, CIA director when the massacre occurred, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The lawsuit alleged there had been a conspiracy to “enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones” in conducting “mind control and drug experimentation.” The suit was dismissed for “failure to prosecute timely,” and all requests for an appeal were turned down.36 The surviving children of Congressman Ryan also sued the government, charging the State Department with knowing of the dangers ahead of time but failing to warn him; also, that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment and the community was heavily armed and infiltrated by the CIA. The lawsuit was later dropped, for reasons that never got explained.37
“Bo” Gritz trained a special forces team that went into Jonestown afterwards, which he says was needed “after it had reached a point where they had to destroy the evidence.” Gritz believed Jonestown “was an extension of MK-ULTRA from the CIA and there are probably other experiments going on.”38
Will we ever know what actually happened at Jonestown? At this point, I doubt it. Since this was the time MK-ULTRA was coming