Jonestown

Richard McCoy was getting used to hearing strange stories in his job as consul at the U.S. embassy in Guyana.

It was early January 1978, and over the past five months his office had become ground zero for allegations about abuses in “Jonestown,” a commune of several hundred Americans headed by a peculiar preacher.

Relatives in the U.S. believed their loved ones were being held there as virtual prisoners. That it was a cult exerting mind control over its members. That their mail was screened and even blocked.

Leaders of the Peoples Temple, as the group called itself, frequently showed up at the consulate in Georgetown, the capital of this South American coastal nation, with wild complaints that U.S. officials were somehow conspiring to destroy the church, some 150 miles away.

Now three of them were in McCoy’s office accusing the U.S. government of intervening in a Guyanese court case involving the group. One made an astonishing threat: If the judge ruled against the temple, the entire community would commit suicide.

Despite McCoy’s youthful and unimposing appearance, the 43-year-old consul had been a Marine and investigator with the Air Force.

Among the many odd claims that had come his way about Jonestown, this had to be among the most absurd, and McCoy shrugged it off. That was “a lot of nonsense," he told them.

A congressional investigation into what went wrong concluded in 1979 the State Department had been “lax,” and that it failed to take adequate initiative or appreciate the “mounting indications of highly irregular and illegal activities in Jonestown.” For three decades the investigation’s 30,000-page record — the size of three soft drink vending machines — remained classified, stored inside gray, acid-free boxes on the air-conditioned sixth floor of the National Archives in Washington. In 2009, the Archives quietly unsealed them.

Now, 40 years after Congress reported its conclusions, the investigative record provides a trove of fresh insights and previously unreported details that cast the State Department’s actions in an even harsher light. After the Jonestown deaths, U.S. diplomats defended how they’d handled questions about the Peoples Temple, saying they had tried to respect privacy laws protecting Americans abroad and avoid interfering in Guyanese legal issues. The mass suicide threats also seemed extraordinarily far-fetched.

But a CQ Roll Call review of thousands of pages of testimony, diplomatic cables, letters, affidavits and federal investigative reports reveals how State Department officials for more than a year muffled their own suspicions, discounted appeals for help and neglected to elevate reports about serious allegations of abuse to senior diplomatic officials.

The declassified records show just how much information the State Department had gathered and how diplomats failed to act.

Among the CQ Roll Call findings:

Family concerns dismissed — Cables show that relatives of at least 48 temple members reached out to the State Department over more than a year, worried about their loved ones’ well-being and asking for help. The cases included credible examples of the temple restricting members’ communications with outsiders and preventing them from leaving. The records detail the extent to which diplomats minimized and sometimes dismissed these concerns.

Temple defectors ignored — A defector, Deborah Layton Blakey, fled Jonestown with help from the U.S. embassy and warned U.S. diplomats about preparations for mass suicide. But both the congressional and State Department investigations omitted that she also told them resisters were to be murdered. In addition, key State Department officials purposely chose not to read an 11-page affidavit by Blakey detailing serious abuses as they considered whether the department should take more proactive steps to address the allegations. Similar claims in an affidavit by a second Jonestown defector, which was sent to the State Department six months before the murders and suicides, was largely ignored by both diplomats and congressional investigators.

Report of guns, abuses — A U.S. Customs Service report detailing allegations of illegal gun shipments by Jones to Guyana — a document that sat all but unknown in State Department files until after the deaths — included key details that might have added legitimacy to the accusations. The report referenced interviews with more than a dozen temple defectors attesting to abuses by Jones in California, and it cited a local law enforcement official who believed the claims were credible and that temple defectors were justified in fearing for their safety.

The abrupt emigration of hundreds of temple members to Guyana in the summer of 1977 was hardly the State Department’s first clue of potential trouble. A news story and a federal investigative report detailing vast Peoples Temple abuses arrived at Foggy Bottom at about the same time. Officials in Guyana had told diplomats they had issues with Jones too.

Temple leader Jones, a pudgy 46-year-old who wore dark shades and a persecution complex, had been the subject of a scathing article in late summer 1977 by New West, a California-based magazine with an office in San Francisco, the church’s home and where Jones had forged prominent political connections as chairman of the city’s housing authority.

Whatever positive impressions Jones had built as an advocate for the poor among San Francisco’s powerful, he was engaging in bizarre practices to tightly control his congregation, according to the accounts of 10 former members named in the story. Death threats loomed over defectors, and Jones forced members to write admissions of crimes they’d never committed, which he could use against them if they broke from the fold.

He pressured them to transfer assets to the church. And he ordered brutal beatings with a wooden paddle before the assembly as punishment for resistance and even small offenses, including being inattentive during sermons. Jones also had misappropriated state funds intended for the care of emotionally disturbed boys.

Detailed and deeply sourced, the article tore away Jones’ carefully constructed facade of respectability, and he immediately compelled his followers to retreat with him to Jonestown, the outpost he’d begun to develop four years earlier on several thousand acres of land in rural northwest Guyana. The New West story circulated through the State Department’s offices in Washington as well as the embassy in Guyana.

Guyanese officials had their own concerns, which they’d begun sharing with the U.S. embassy months earlier. They thought Jones was smuggling in provisions and stoking anti-U.S. hostilities. The embassy’s deputy chief of mission, John Blacken, notified Washington and began a file.

Those reports and the New West article were the first of many red flags.

One important document from 1977 virtually disappeared in State Department files. That summer, U.S. Customs agents had written a report about their own months-long Peoples Temple investigation, expecting it would alert the State Department.

The Customs agents suspected Jones had already slipped a few hundred weapons into Guyana, but they posted lookouts in three U.S. ports to watch for more shipments. They recommended in the report that Jones be “closely observed.”

In Guyana, a few local officials reached the same opinion. Although they discussed creating a police outpost nearby to monitor the Jonestown compound, it never happened.

The Customs report — dated Aug. 26, 1977 — arrived at the State Department as the temple was attracting significant attention from the magazine expose. Washington’s Guyana desk officer, Frank Tumminia, read the Customs agents’ report and mistakenly assumed his colleagues in Georgetown had received it too. He put the five-page document into a Peoples Temple file but never mentioned it to them or to John R. Burke, the incoming U.S. ambassador to Guyana.

“No Position to Judge”

Over the next year, though, many other worrisome details did come to the ambassador’s attention. Virtually without exception Burke dismissed them. Burke’s assumptions and decisions, and the orders he gave his embassy staff, set boundaries that shaped how U.S. officials dealt with Jones and the accusations that massed around him.

Tumminia may have neglected to inform Burke about the Customs report, but his testimony reveals he believed the New West story contained “substantial allegations,” and he made sure the incoming ambassador saw it. Yet the expose made little impression on the 53-year-old formal naval officer, a career diplomat who had served in embassies from Europe to Southeast Asia.

“I was certainly in no position to judge the veracity of the article or any statements made in it,” Burke testified.

As he headed to his new job, Burke’s overall takeaway was that Jonestown was simply a successful, self-contained community.

His assessment contrasted starkly with the reactions of members of Congress and worried relatives in the U.S. From the earliest days of the temple’s exodus to Guyana in the summer of 1977, they contacted State Department officials at both Foggy Bottom and Georgetown, concerned that their constituents and loved ones were living in Jonestown under duress.

The case of Carolyn Looman, a 34-year-old former San Francisco schools official, was among the first. According to declassified State Department cables, her brother John in Ohio said she had phoned him on Aug. 21 saying she wanted out of the temple and asking him to mail a plane ticket with a note that her mother was sick. A few days after sending it, John Looman received a call from someone claiming to be a temple spokesman, saying Carolyn didn’t want to return. Alarmed, Looman sought help from Ohio Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, who asked the State Department for what’s called a “welfare and whereabouts” report on Carolyn, a request assigned to McCoy, who’d been on his job as consul at the embassy in Georgetown for just a year.

McCoy contacted temple leaders to arrange a visit to Jonestown and let them know he wanted to meet with her. They wanted to know why and pushed him to limit his communications with Looman to a phone call, but finally agreed to his visit. When he arrived on Aug. 30, Jones was waiting for him with an attitude the consul described as “surprised and disgusted,” and with the preacher’s paranoia at fever pitch, according to McCoy’s declassified report of the visit.

Was the embassy pushing the Guyanese government to expel the temple? Jones wanted to know. He claimed people in San Francisco wanted to kill him, and he thought the CIA was watching. The CIA had better things to do, McCoy told Jones. But temple leaders shadowed McCoy for his full five-hour visit.

When the consul met Looman and spoke with her privately, she said her brother had misunderstood. She had no desire to leave, she said, and she passed up McCoy’s offer to return with him to Georgetown.

Back at the embassy, he told colleagues he wasn’t sure she hadn’t been pressured to stay. And he thought it was possible he was being played. He cabled Washington, writing that he might have just witnessed “a gigantic put-on” by Jones and his followers. “I wasn’t completely taken in by all this, but, at the same time, I couldn’t prove anything else,” he testified. “I had to accept what they told me at face value.”

Family Concerns

McCoy had plenty more opportunities to test fact versus fiction at Jonestown, as the welfare and whereabouts requests kept coming that fall. Unsealed cables and McCoy’s testimony detail the types of concerns crossing his desk and his assessments of them.

The family of Marshall Farris, a California man, said he had abruptly sold nearly all his belongings to move with the temple to Guyana, leaving his wife behind with no income, according to one cable. Not only did the one letter he’d sent from Jonestown, to his mother, seem forced and artificial, they noted her name and address were both misspelled, leading them to suspect someone in Jonestown was controlling his mail.

Another case involved Steven Katsaris, a California therapist who believed the temple was psychologically manipulating his daughter, Maria, against him. Jones blocked his efforts to visit her in Jonestown that fall, even after Katsaris enlisted help from Lawrence Mann, Guyana’s ambassador to the U.S. Katsaris returned a few weeks later and this time, with McCoy appealing to the temple, the meeting finally happened. But it was in the presence of both U.S. officials and temple leaders, and only after what McCoy described in testimony as “obfuscations” — with the temple repeatedly changing the time and location of the meeting. Katsaris showed McCoy letters from his daughter that the consul described as “warm” and “normal” letters a daughter sends her father. But in the presence of Jones, Maria barely spoke to him. When temple officials discovered Katsaris had left a plane ticket with McCoy in case Maria decided to leave, they challenged the consul on his motivations.

Then there were the Oliver brothers, Bruce and Billy. They traveled to Jonestown for what their parents said was supposed to be a two-week holiday in July 1977 and never returned. The boys wrote their parents in late August asking them to come to Jonestown. But when the couple tried to arrange the visit, a temple representative intervened and told the U.S. embassy the boys were no longer interested in seeing them. In testimony, McCoy said he urged temple leaders not to interfere. By preventing direct contact, he told them, they were lending credibility to the accusations of psychological pressure. The temple disagreed, and claimed the parents were pawns of an unidentified group spreading lies about the church.

As more relatives attempted visits with loved ones, church leaders routinely blocked them. The reason, McCoy told Washington, was they believed the outsiders were “part of a conspiracy” against the temple.

Besides the queries from families, members of Congress and other high-placed Washington officials wanted answers too, which might have pressured the diplomats to dig deeper. One cable shows Attorney General Griffin Bell sought the status of a temple member. Another request came through the White House after a mother appealed to President Jimmy Carter.

And early on, the embassy learned Jones might have illegally brought as many as 200 children to Guyana who were wards of California. Embassy officials asked the State Department to raise questions with California officials, who confirmed court permission would have been required to take them to Guyana. McCoy testified he didn’t know of any California officials ever contacting the embassy or coming to Jonestown to check on them, and the queries went nowhere.

McCoy’s own testimony shows he witnessed many instances of controlling, manipulative and bullying tactics by Jones and his inner circle, and was confronted with plenty of suspicious, if circumstantial, evidence. Yet the State Department’s views still didn’t tip toward the credibility of the allegations.

All the questions and suspicions competed with an intense outreach campaign by temple leaders, who peppered U.S. officials with letters praising Jones and describing good works by the temple.

Ultimately, despite what the embassy acknowledged were “serious” allegations against Jones and the temple concerning assault, forgery and appropriating property, it reported to Washington that frequent visits to the compound would strain embassy resources. Burke and McCoy agreed that visiting Jonestown once every three months was sufficient.

His position on addressing the Jonestown accusations was firm: The embassy must avoid appearing to favor either the temple or its critics. For the department to step in more actively, the information had to go beyond gossip or hearsay and be “hard evidence.”

In a two-paragraph note to one worried relative late in 1977, Burke wrote that his people were unable to frequently inspect Jonestown. But he said a Guyanese district officer visited regularly and didn’t believe temple members were being held against their will. “It is obviously impossible for us to determine whether anyone is being coerced to remain at Jonestown,” Burke wrote.

His kid-glove approach to the temple was in some cases based on assumptions and misperceptions.

Privacy Concerns

Burke believed, and emphasized, that the federal Privacy Act prohibited them from sharing much of any information, even internally, about Americans age 18 and over in Guyana without that person’s permission.

That severely hampered candid communications with Washington about the questions they were trying to field about Jonestown and its residents. The Privacy Act was only a few years old, though, and complicated.

Later, after so many had died, Burke testified to congressional investigators he was actually uncertain about the law’s requirements. He had asked the State Department for clarification, but when it failed to respond he never pressed for an answer. In fact, the act allowed more disclosure in cases of suspected illegal activity.

Embassy officials said the temple’s status as a “religious” group with constitutional protections was another constraint, although congressional investigators later noted there was little about the Peoples Temple that qualified it to be a church.

Burke and McCoy also testified they were unnerved by the temple’s persistent threats to file harassment charges if U.S. officials intruded without justification. Jones’ paranoia and short fuse meant his threshold for perceived harassment was extremely low.

And because temple leaders had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for some of McCoy’s correspondence about Jonestown, the consul felt he couldn’t be candid in his cables to Washington, even as his concerns about Jonestown grew.

The embassy’s tenuous trust of Guyanese officials hampered candor with them too. Rumors persisted that some of them were in bed, in some cases literally, with temple members. It was a tactic that Jones reportedly encouraged to compromise officials and give himself leverage over them, a ploy that had helped him secure power in San Francisco too.

Mann, the Guyanese ambassador to the U.S., was in fact involved with a top Jones associate, Paula Adams, and eventually fathered a child with her. But early on, U.S. officials weren’t sure how much stock to put in the rumors, and it was a barrier to working with the Guyanese to sort out the allegations about Jonestown.

The case that threatened to detonate the temple powder keg perhaps more than any other was a custody fight over 5-year-old John Victor Stoen, who lived under the temple’s care at Jonestown.

As senior temple members, Tim and Grace Stoen had agreed for their son to be raised communally by the church, like many other children of members. The couple held special standing — Tim was the group’s legal adviser as well as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. But over time they had soured on the temple and left it, yet the boy had wound up with Jones in Guyana. The couple, by then separated, had teamed up in a legal fight to get their son back, and they ranked at the top of Jones’ enemies list.

Jones vowed to keep the boy in Guyana, and as the legal dispute wore on it fueled confrontations as well as increasingly dire threats about the fate of Jonestown’s residents. The testimony reveals it also led to a promise from McCoy about what it would take for the State Department to take action.

A custody hearing in Guyana was set for early January 1978. In the days beforehand, three temple members met with McCoy. They suspected the U.S. of intervening against Jones in the case, they told him. Group spokeswoman Sharon Amos warned that if Jones lost, the residents of Jonestown would commit mass suicide. It seemed an extraordinary, overblown claim McCoy couldn’t take seriously, and he brushed it off.

Meantime, he prepared for another visit to Jonestown — his first since the previous August. The questions about the temple that had persisted for months caused him to approach the visit with a different agenda.

He now had a list of 20 people to talk to – names provided by families who’d reached out in concern, including the Oliver brothers. During his visit on Jan. 11, he sought them out.

The Oliver boys said they were fine, but they’d come to believe their parents were hostile to the temple, so they no longer wanted to see them.

Overall, the results were largely the same as in August 1977. Residents told McCoy they were happy and didn’t want to leave. And he was impressed by the progress he saw — newly built dormitories, power and refrigeration, and even a clinic.

On returning to Georgetown, however, he encountered a different image. The Stoens had arrived for the custody hearing, and Grace Stoen came to see McCoy. The 27-year-old hoped to impress upon the young diplomat the seriousness of her cause. She’d witnessed plenty of Jones’ abuses and assaults and she laid out details for him. Because her experiences came from the temple’s San Francisco days, McCoy distanced them from the allegations about Jonestown.

“I did not feel on the basis of what she had told me that I had any specific information or enough information in which to be able to pass to a federal law enforcement agency which would cause them to open an investigation,” McCoy testified.

But frustrated by so many allegations he’d been unable to verify, he made Stoen a promise. If anyone else defected and corroborated her stories, the U.S. would take action.

“Get me one person to walk out of there and say there is physical abuse and wrongdoing and, by God we will step in there and do what we can,” McCoy promised, according to the unsealed testimony.

The court case went forward and the judge said he’d rule later. But as the Stoens were departing, McCoy confronted another instance of apparent temple coercion.

Tim Stoen arrived at the airport only to be surrounded by three temple members who threatened the couple’s lives if they refused to drop the lawsuit, according to Stoen’s testimony.

He returned to Georgetown and swore out a complaint with the Guyanese police. But after discussing it with McCoy and acknowledging he had no witnesses, Stoen dropped it.

A few days later McCoy cabled Washington describing his recent visit to Jonestown and his frustrations over all the allegations.

“I feel like a tennis ball who keeps being hit from one side to the other,” McCoy wrote on Jan. 18. “Obviously, no matter what we do one side will accuse us of favoritism.”

Of his visit, he wrote: “I was convinced it was improbable that people were being held against their will.”

“Drugged” and “Robot-Like”

Tumminia, the Guyana desk officer in Washington, was readying for his own trip to Jonestown. He arrived Feb. 2 with charge d’affaires Blacken, but his testimony reveals how Jones tightly held the reins, accompanying them throughout the four-hour visit and limiting any real fact-finding. There was little opportunity to determine if they were seeing “the real thing,” Tumminia reported.

“I am sure that they took us where they wanted to take us,” he testified. He managed a conversation with just one Jonestown resident.

Crack in the Dam

Around 10 a.m. on May 12, McCoy’s secretary told him a woman was waiting to see him. It was Deborah Layton Blakey, a 25-year-old temple member who was the group’s financial adviser. She had lived in Jonestown until recently, when she’d moved to Georgetown to work in the temple office there. Although she often accompanied others who complained to McCoy about the U.S. government’s supposed hostility to the temple, she seemed different to him. More reasonable.

Now, she nervously asked to speak to him privately and he instinctively realized she was going to ask for his help to leave. “I just knew it,” he testified.

Indeed, Blakey wanted to escape from the temple. Her defection and the information she provided the State Department has long been recognized as a critical moment in the Jonestown saga, documented in news accounts and even a book she wrote. The unsealed Jonestown archive provides fresh insights about the embassy’s efforts to assure her safe escape — an implicit acknowledgement that she might be at risk.

Behind the closed door of McCoy’s office, Blakey told him temple members’ lives were in danger. Preparations were underway for mass suicide by poisoning if Jones lost the Stoen case, she said.

“They really mean it,” she told McCoy.

Jones had been staging rehearsals, and those who resisted suicide were to be killed, Blakey said.

“I thought it was a crack in the dam,” McCoy testified.

Blakey said she couldn’t be sure Jones would go through with it, but she wasn’t going to wait and find out. Her sister had secretly sent her a plane ticket, but Jones held everyone’s passports in Jonestown, and she couldn’t ask for it. She feared he’d try to stop her from leaving. She needed McCoy’s help for an emergency replacement.

McCoy had dismissed Amos’ earlier threat of mass suicide, but he listened to Blakey. After consulting with Burke, they agreed to ask her for a written statement describing the plans for mass suicide and murder. She signed a 200-word account scrawled across yellow legal pages.

Since she couldn’t get a plane out until the next day, the embassy booked a room for her in a nearby hotel and provided her emergency contact numbers. Vice Consul Daniel Weber told the hotel staff to provide no information about Blakey if anyone asked, and he advised her to lock her door and open it to no one but him. McCoy also enlisted Weber to take Blakey to the airport the next day because, the consul testified to investigators, “I was certain they had my car and license plate memorized.”

By the next morning, temple officials realized something was up with Blakey. The calls started coming in to McCoy asking if he’d seen her. He lied and said no, but the temple kept leaving messages for her. Finally, Blakey relented.

“I wanted Jim to know why I was leaving,” she said about Jones. “I didn’t want him to think I was afraid of him.”

In McCoy’s presence, she called. She told Jones she held no ill will toward the church, but it wasn’t the life for her. Jones warned that if she went to the U.S., she’d be arrested for her temple activities, but Blakey held her ground.

At the airport she was confronted by two or three crying female temple members who tried to persuade her to stay. But she boarded the Pan Am flight. As it happened, McCoy was booked on the same plane for a conference in Washington.

With the plane in the air, they stood together behind the door of the cockpit and the details poured out.

Blakey told McCoy that prior to his visits members were instructed about what to say. It was all rehearsed. Guns had been smuggled in and armed guards typically ringed the commune, but Jones ensured the weapons stayed hidden when outsiders visited. The temple leader was heavily using drugs, and controlled the community through fear tactics. He’d convinced his Jonestown flock that he had ties to powerful people outside, including the Mafia, and could arrange for defectors to be killed, she said.

They were warned not to trust anyone with the U.S. government — Jones claimed the CIA kept all their names on a secret enemies list and would track, arrest and possibly kill them if they returned to the United States.

He was also using corporal punishment to keep people in line. One woman, Laura Johnson, had been badly beaten, Blakey said. She provided names of others she thought were eager to defect.

“If conditions were as she said they were, eventually this was bound to come out,” McCoy testified. “I just couldn’t see how you maintain the situation, even given the remote location of the place, where you could keep a thousand people cooped up like that without something – the lid, if you will, blowing.”

He strongly urged Blakey to go to federal investigators.

Another Defector

A few days later, at the State Department, more evidence arrived. It could have proved to be critical, but it was largely ignored.

While McCoy was in Washington, a packet came for Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. It contained a letter from Tim Stoen on behalf of a group called the Concerned Relatives, along with a petition signed by 57 of them, urging the U.S. and Guyanese governments to investigate suspected human rights abuses at the commune.

The packet included an affidavit signed by Yulanda Crawford, a former temple member, describing what she’d witnessed in San Francisco and in Jonestown before defecting in June 1977. In California, Crawford saw shipments of guns packed for Guyana and her account of Jonestown dovetailed with much of Blakey’s story: passports retained, mail screened, phone calls monitored, departures prohibited, threats of death for defectors.

The packet also noted two recent documents in which temple members proclaimed they were committed to die for their cause: a March letter to members of Congress, and an April press release aimed at temple critics.

“I wish there was some way to convince you that the situation in Jonestown is desperate,” Stoen said in his letter.

McCoy saw the material while he was in Washington, as did others in the State Department, which later acknowledged the packet received “very little attention.” No State Department official responded to the group’s appeals, investigators found. Nor did anyone ever contact Crawford, she told CQ Roll Call recently.

Congressional investigators would never ask McCoy or Burke anything about the Crawford affidavit.

Meanwhile, temple members descended on McCoy’s office demanding to know how Blakey had managed to get out when her passport was being held in Jonestown. They asked him to inform them about anyone else seeking to leave — a request McCoy told them he refused to honor.

Nevertheless, the diplomats thought it was time to do more. They ruled out going to federal investigators, believing Blakey should take the initiative.

“I had no direct evidence about what was going on,” McCoy said, so he felt his information was no good to federal authorities.

As Burke explained to congressional investigators who pressed to understand why he didn’t reach out to authorities in Washington with Blakey’s warnings: Temple members “were quite sensitive to any harassment on the part of the government.” Burke decided to ask the State Department for permission to go to the Guyanese and suggest they step up oversight of Jonestown.

In a four-page cable to Washington dated June 6, 1978, he wrote it had become clear that Guyanese officials exercised little or no control over the community. He noted many U.S. news articles alleged individuals were being held there against their will, and the embassy was fielding numerous inquiries about their welfare.

He said nothing about Blakey and her explosive allegations, or the Crawford affidavit, or the fact that by now multiple temple members had described plans for mass suicide. He never forwarded the two-page signed statement Blakey gave McCoy. Instead it remained stashed in a safe at the embassy until early November, when it was retrieved in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Neither did the cable say anything about McCoy’s numerous first-hand observations of the temple’s efforts to restrict relatives’ access or their objections when he offered to help members leave the country.

Burke was uncertain whether the Privacy Act permitted him to discuss details of the cases, he later explained to congressional investigators.

Despite the embassy’s buttoned-up approach, Blakey’s story was getting out anyway.

She had felt uneasy about going to federal investigators. “I was still paranoid from the church, and I didn’t want to make any major phone calls like that without an attorney,” she said. “I felt I could be easily used as a scapegoat for something.”

Instead she decided to work through the courts and the press.

She swore out an 11-page affidavit on June 15 with the details she’d shared with McCoy and it was filed in San Francisco court as part of the Stoen custody case. The Stoens’ lawyer sent the State Department copies, which arrived within days.

Dead-End Request

Among the revelations from the unsealed testimony is how officials in Washington turned a blind eye to the most serious allegations.

Marshall Kilduff of the San Francisco Chronicle followed up on Blakey’s affidavit with calls to at least two people at the State Department who had access to copies of it and authority to weigh in on the response to Burke’s June 6 cable. McCoy had shared with them Blakey’s allegations when he was in Washington, but neither read her affidavit — nor would they, even after prompting from Kilduff, their testimony shows.

“We have to have something more concrete,” Stephen Dobrenchuk, chief of emergency protective services, told the reporter, according to the records.

Alan A. Gise, deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs, declined to read it too. “So far as I could see, on what basis could you go to the Guyanese and say, ‘something’ is going wrong there?” Gise testified.

On June 26, the State Department sent Burke its decision. Because Jonestown was subject to Guyana law, any request to step up oversight would be construed as U.S. interference. Unless there was “evidence of lawlessness,” the embassy should make no such request, the department decided.

No one from Washington ever called Burke to discuss what prompted his request or the rationale behind it. A State Department investigation after the massacre concluded it was clear officials in Washington “had not the slightest notion of what lay behind the Embassy’s telegram or what the Embassy in its exquisitely careful way was trying to say.”

Burke did not attempt to challenge the decision or provide additional details. Grace Stoen, who’d been promised action by McCoy if one more person defected, was sure Blakey’s affidavit would change everything. Her lawyer, Margaret Ryan, described it as a turning point.

“There was now an allegation that the child’s life was in danger,” she told congressional investigators. “The U.S. government, particularly the Department of State, has the responsibility to protect the lives of U.S. nationals abroad if the foreign government isn’t able or willing to perform that duty, so it seemed that something should have come out of it.”

Despite tales of behind-the-scenes machinations and abuses from Blakey and Crawford and names of people seeking to escape Jonestown, the records at the National Archives show officials shifted into low gear.

McCoy stuck to his quarterly visit routine. He intended to return to Jonestown in late July or early August 1978, before moving to Washington to replace Tumminia as the Guyana desk officer, but heavy rains prevented his flight and he never returned to the compound.

When McCoy’s replacement, 31-year-old Douglas Ellice, arrived in Guyana, the consul testified he briefed him at length over several days about the Peoples Temple. He provided all his files and offered tips on how to avoid triggering suspicions by Jones during consul visits.

But while Jonestown had consumed so much of McCoy’s time, Ellice testified whole weeks went by when he had no contact with the temple.

The State Department continued to miss signals. In August, the judge in the Stoen case withdrew, saying he’d been harassed by offensive phone calls about the case and had to hire security guards for his home. Ellice cabled the news to Washington, but it raised no particular alarms.

After Blakey’s defection, at least 14 more families contacted the State Department seeking information and help, according to unsealed cables.

Among them was one from Steven M. Loomis, who in late summer contacted his congressman, California Democrat John L. Burton, for assistance reaching his 18-year-old fiancée, Tina Lynn Grimm. She had left the U.S. on June 2 to visit her mother in Jonestown prior to the couple’s wedding and promised to be back in two weeks. She hadn’t returned and Loomis couldn’t reach her.

“I have good reason to believe that she is being forced to stay against her will,” Loomis wrote, asking for help. “It has been two months now and this is my last resort.” In late August, Burton’s office forwarded a letter from Loomis to the embassy and asked that it be delivered to her.

Ellice had made plans for an inaugural trip to Jonestown soon after his arrival in Guyana, but he postponed it twice at the request of the Peoples Temple, his testimony shows. Repairs to a charter plane used by the embassy further delayed his visits, he said. Neither he nor anyone else from the State Department would visit Jonestown again until Nov. 7 — six months after Blakey fled.

In Ellice’s opinion, the queries he received were mostly “quite routine.” Nothing stood out, he said.

In preparing for his trip to Jonestown, Ellice’s testimony shows he organized a list of more than a dozen names of people he wanted to talk to, all from the latest welfare and whereabouts requests. Against McCoy’s advice, he forwarded every name to temple leaders prior to his visit.

When Ellice finally arrived at Jonestown more than a week later, spending several hours, he did not detect a single sign of fear or apprehension.

As he testified: “It appeared very much like a very enthusiastic group of people.”

When asked if he attempted to talk with others — the people Blakey named as eager defectors, for example, or the woman she described being badly beaten — Ellice said he didn’t recall McCoy telling him anything about them.

He made no attempt to talk to anyone not on his list.

“I was not a private investigator,” he testified.

At a meeting at the State Department in mid-September, McCoy acknowledged to Ryan the allegations against the temple might be true. “I just literally could not prove anything,” McCoy testified telling the congressman.

Ryan listened. “Well, I guess you did all you can do,” McCoy recalled Ryan telling him. “Now I believe it is time to do more.”

Days before departing for Guyana, Ryan organized a meeting between his staff, State Department officials and Blakey, who again reported on what life had been like in Jonestown. Yet the reaction of State officials seemed to be surprise — leaving the impression they had been unaware of her account to that point.

Few asked questions, though, and Blakey left the meeting with little expectation that anything would happen.

Without the benefit of cables or reports, Ryan and his team were unaware the State Department hadn’t followed up on Blakey’s allegations. They assumed the embassy had tried to check them out, and simply been unable to verify anything.

So it was that Ryan, Speier and others trekked to Guyana armed with an incomplete picture. During their 22-hour stay in Jonestown, they quickly confirmed what the temple critics had been saying all along: American expats were being held virtual prisoners in the jungle. Some passed notes to the delegation seeking help to escape and 15 were emboldened enough to leave with Ryan.

They boarded a temple truck and rode out of Jonestown and onto a dusty airstrip at Port Kaituma, where two planes were readied to take them away. But a temple vehicle with gunmen followed. At the airport, Jones’ guards fired on Ryan and the group of aides, defectors and news crews. A Jones loyalist, Larry Layton — Blakey’s brother — boarded one of the planes posing as a defector and opened fire on its passengers.

The lawmaker and four others were murdered; 11 more were wounded, including Speier, who survived by playing dead on the tarmac.

Jonestown resident Odell Rhodes, a teacher who escaped after witnessing the mass deaths and murders in Jonestown, later described to congressional investigators the commune’s ultimate demise. More than an hour after the truck carrying Ryan’s party drove out, he heard Jones declare that the congressman was dead and that Guyanese soldiers would soon be arriving to kill the settlers. He watched temple members carry vats of poisoned grape-flavored soft drinks to the main pavilion and saw one after another person follow Jones’ instructions to drink it — an unfathomable act that would root itself in the American lexicon with the phrase “Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid.”

Hundreds of others, innocents and resisters, were injected with the poison. One young boy died in Rhodes’ arms after convulsing and gasping. He cradled others, former students, already dead. Eventually Rhodes managed to elude the armed guards by crawling through a field.

Jones himself didn’t drink from the vats. He was discovered lying on a pillow, dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Sharon Amos, the temple official who signaled the first warning of mass suicide to the embassy, killed herself and her three children at the temple’s offices in Georgetown.

“The only thing I can say is when Debbie Blakey left, something may have been able to be done,” Rhodes testified.

Among the hundreds who died that Saturday night were all 48 people whose relatives had contacted the State Department for help, including Carolyn Looman, Maria Katsaris, the Oliver brothers, Marshall Farris, Tina Lynn Grimm and John Victor Stoen.