Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (26 page)

Their hidden funding may include more intelligence links. A mysterious account in Panama, totaling nearly $5 million in the name of an “Associacion Pro Religiosa do San Pedro, S.A.” was located.
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This unknown Religious Association of St. Peter was probably one of the 12 phony companies set up by Archbishop Paul Marcinkus to hide the illegal investments of Vatican funds through the scandal-ridden Banco Ambrosiano.
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A few days after the story broke about the accounts, the President of Panama, and most of the government, resigned. Roberto Calvi of Banco Ambrosiano was murdered, and the Jonestown account disappeared from public scrutiny and court record.
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The direct orders to cover up the cause of death came from the top levels of the American government. Zbigniew Brzezinsky delegated to Robert Pastor, and he in turn ordered Lt. Col. Gordon Sumner to strip the bodies of identity.
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Pastor is now Deputy Director of the CIA.
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One can only wonder how many others tied to the Jonestown operation were similarly promoted.

One of the persistent problems in researching Jonestown is that it seems to lead to so many other criminal activities, each with its own complex history and cast of characters. Perhaps the most disturbing of these is the connection that appears repeatedly between the characters in the Jonestown story and the key people involved in the murder and investigation of Martin Luther King.

The first clue to this link appeared in the personal histories of the members of the Ryan investigation team who were so selectively and deliberately killed at Port Kaituma. Don Harris, a veteran NBC reporter, had been the only network newsman on the scene to cover Martin Luther King’s activity in Memphis at the time of King’s assassination. He had interviewed key witnesses at the site. His coverage of the urban riots that followed won him an Emmy award.
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Gregory Robinson, a “fearless” journalist from the San Francisco Examiner, had photographed the same riots in Washington D.C. When he was approached for copies of the films by Justice Department officials, he threw the negatives into the Potomac River.
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The role of Mark Lane, who served as attorney for Jim Jones, is even more clearly intertwined.
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Lane had co-authored a book with Dick Gregory, claiming FBI complicity in the King murder.
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He was hired as the attorney for James Earl Ray, accused assassin, when Ray testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about King.
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Prior to this testimony, Ray was involved in an unusual escape plot at Brushy Mountain State Prison.
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The prisoner who had helped engineer the escape plot was later inexplicably offered an early parole by members of the Tennessee Governor’s office. These officials, and Governor Blanton himself, were to come under close public scrutiny and face legal charges in regard to bribes taken to arrange illegal early pardons for prisoners.
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One of the people living at Jonestown was ex-FBI agent Wesley Swearingen, who at least publicly condemned the COINTELPRO operations and other abuses, based on stolen classified documents, at the Jonestown site. Lane had reportedly met with him there at least a year before the massacre. Terri Buford said the documents were passed on to Charles Garry. Lane used information from Swearingen in his thesis on the FBI and King’s murder. Swearingen served as a key witness in suits against the Justice Department brought by the Socialist Workers Party.
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When Larry Flynt, the flamboyant publisher of
Hustler
magazine, offered a $1 million reward leading to the capture and conviction of the John F. Kennedy killers, the long distance number listed to collect information and leads was being answered by Mark Lane and Wesley Swearingen.
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With help from officials in Tennessee, Governor Blanton’s office, Lane managed to get legal custody of a woman who had been incarcerated in the Tennessee state psychiatric system for nearly eight years.
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This woman, Grace Walden Stephens, had been a witness in the King murder.
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She was living at the time in Memphis in a rooming house across from the hotel when Martin Luther King was shot.
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The official version of events had Ray located in the common bathroom of the rooming house, and claimed he had used a rifle to murder King from that window.
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Grace Stephens did, indeed, see a man run from the bathroom, past her door and down to the street below.
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A rifle, later linked circumstantially to James Earl Ray, was found inside a bundle at the base of the rooming house stairs, and identified as the murder weapon.
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But Grace, who saw the man clearly, refused to identify him as Ray when shown photographs by the FBI.
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Her testimony was never introduced at the trial. The FBI relied instead, on the word of her common-law husband Charles Stephens, who was drunk and unconscious at the time of the incident.
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Her persistence in saying that it was not James Earl Ray was used at her mental competency hearings as evidence against her, and she disappeared into the psychiatric system.
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Grace Walden Stephens took up residence in Memphis with Lane, her custodian, and Terri Buford, a key Temple member who had returned to the U.S. before the killings to live with Lane.
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While arranging for her to testify before the Select Committee on Ray’s behalf, Lane and Buford were plotting another fate for Grace Stephens. Notes from Buford to Jones found in the aftermath of the killings discussed arrangements with Lane to move Grace Stephens to Jonestown.
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The problem that remained was lack of a passport, but Buford suggested either getting a passport on the black market, or using the passport of former Temple member Maxine Swaney.
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Swaney, dead for nearly two and a half years since her departure from the Ukiah camp, was in no position to argue, and Jones apparently kept her passport with him.
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Whether Grace ever arrived at Jonestown is unclear.

Lane was also forced to leave Ray in the midst of testimony to the Select Committee when he got word that Ryan was planning to visit. Lane had attempted to discourage the trip earlier in a vaguely threatening letter.
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Now he rushed to be sure he arrived with the group.
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At the scene, he failed to warn Ryan and others, knowing that the sandwiches and other food might be drugged, but refrained from eating it himself.
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Later, claiming that he and Charles Garry would write the official history of the “revolutionary suicide,” Lane was allowed to leave the pieces of underwear to mark their way back to Georgetown.
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If true, it seems an unlikely method if they were in any fear of pursuit. They had heard gunfire and screams back at the camp.
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Lane was reportedly well aware of the forced drugging and suicide drills at Jonestown before Ryan arrived.
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Another important figure in the murder of Martin Luther King was his mother, Alberta. A few weeks after the first public announcement by Coretta Scott King that she believed her husband’s murder was part of a conspiracy, Mrs. Alberta King was brutally shot to death in Atlanta, while attending church services. Anyone who had seen the physical wounds suffered by King might have been an adverse witness to the official version, since the wound angles did not match the ballistic direction of a shot from the rooming house.
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Her death also closely coincided with the reopening of the Tennessee state court review of Ray’s conviction based on a guilty plea, required by a 6th Circuit decision.
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The judge in that case reportedly refused to allow witnesses from beyond a 100 mile radius from the courtroom.
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The man convicted of shooting King’s mother was Marcus Wayne Chenault. His emotional affect following the murder was unusual. Grinning, he asked if he had hit anyone.
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He had reportedly been dropped off at the church by people he knew in Ohio.
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While at Ohio State University, he was part of a group known as “the Troop,” run by a Black minister and gun collector who used the name Rabbi Emmanuel Israel. This man, described in the press as a “mentor” for Chenault, left the area immediately after the shooting.
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In the same period, Rabbi Hill traveled from Ohio to Guyana and set up Hilltown, using similar aliases, and preaching the same message of a “Black Hebrew elite.”
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Chenault confided to SCLC leaders that he was one of many killers who were working to assassinate a long list of Black leadership. The names he said were on this list coincided with similar “death lists” distributed by the KKK, and linked to the
COINTELPRO
operations in the 60s.
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The real backgrounds and identities of Marcus Wayne Chenault and Rabbi Hill may never be discovered, but one thing is certain, Martin Luther King would never had countenanced the preachings of Jim Jones, had he lived to hear them.
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In the face of such horror, it may seem little compensation to know that a part of the truth has been unearthed. But for the families and some of the survivors, the truth, however painful, is the only path to being relieved of the burden of their doubts. It’s hard to believe that President Carter was calling on us at the time not to “overreact.” The idea that a large community of Black people would not only stand by and be poisoned at the suggestion of Jim Jones, but would allow their children to be murdered first, is a monstrous lie, and a racist insult.
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We now know that the most direct description of Jonestown is that it was a Black genocide plan. One Temple director, Joyce Shaw, described the Jonestown massacre as, “some kind of horrible government experiments, or some sort of sick racial thing, a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate Blacks.”
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If we refuse to look further into this nightmarish event, there will be more Jonestowns to come. They will move from Guyana to our own backyard.

The cast of characters is neither dead nor inactive. Key members of the armed guard were ordered to be on board the Temple ship, Cudjoe — at the hour of the massacre they were on a supply run to Trinidad. George Phillip Blakey phoned his father-in-law, Dr. Lawrence Layton, from Panama after the event.
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At least ten members of the Temple remained on the boat, and set up a new community in Trinidad while Nigel Slinger, a Grenada businessman and insurance broker for Jonestown, repaired the 400-ton shipping vessel. Then Charles Touchette, Paul McCann, Stephan Jones, and George Blakey set up an “open house” in Grenada with the others. McCann spoke about starting a shipping company to “finance the continued work of the original Temple.”
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That “work” may have included the mysterious operations of the mental hospital in Grenada that eluded government security by promising free medical care.
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The hospital was operated by Sir Geoffrey Bourne, Chancellor of the St. George’s University Medical School, also staffed by his son Dr. Peter Bourne.
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His son’s history includes work with psychological experiments and
USAID
in Vietnam, the methadone clinics in the U.S., and a drug scandal in the Carter White House.
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The mental hospital was the only structure bombed during the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. This was part of a plan to put Sir Eric Gairy back in power.
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Were additional experiments going on at the site?
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In addition, the killers of Leo Ryan and others at Port Kaituma were never accounted for fully. The trial of Larry Layton was mishandled by the Guyanese courts, and the U.S. system as well.
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No adequate evidentiary hearings have occurred either at the trial or in state and Congressional reviews. The Jonestown killers, trained assassins and mercenaries, are not on trial. They might be working in Africa or Central America. Their participation in Jonestown can be used as an “explanation” for their involvement in later murders here, such as the case of the attack on school children in Los Angeles.
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They should be named and located.