Jonestown

Jonestown was the informal name of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, a remote settlement in the jungle of Guyana. Peoples Temple began in Indianapolis in 1955 under the preacher Jim Jones, moved to Redwood Valley, California, in 1965 and later made San Francisco its headquarters. In 1974 it negotiated a lease on more than 3,800 acres of Guyanese land. In the summer of 1977, as New West magazine prepared an article on abuse allegations, Jones and several hundred followers moved there.

On November 17, 1978, California congressman Leo Ryan arrived to look into complaints from members' relatives. The next afternoon, as his party left with a group of defectors, Temple gunmen opened fire at the Port Kaituma airstrip, killing Ryan, three journalists and one defector. That evening 909 people died in Jonestown, nearly all from cyanide mixed into a flavored drink, and four more died at the Temple's house in Georgetown. A 782-page House staff report followed in May 1979. One man, Larry Layton, was convicted in a U.S. court.

Jones had long told his followers that U.S. intelligence agencies were conspiring against them. After the deaths the claim turned around: Ryan's aide Joe Holsinger said in 1980 that Jonestown had been a CIA mind-control experiment, a follow-up to MK-ULTRA, and writers such as John Judge and Michael Meiers built on the idea. The House intelligence committee reported in 1980 that it had found no evidence of CIA activity at Jonestown. The archive kept at San Diego State University, which publishes the tapes, the FBI files and the government reports, remains the fullest public record.