Cult Massacre

Ambush in Guyana

After getting many complaints from constituents about relatives being kept against their will by a California cult that had decamped to the jungles of Guyana, Democratic Congressman Leo Ryan decided to see for himself. Last week, he flew to the small Latin American country and set out for the commune known as the "People's Temple." Accompanying him were an aide, a U.S. embassy official, eight newsmen and leftist attorneys Mark Lane and Charles Garry, who were representing the commune. From Georgetown, the capital, the party chartered two planes to reach a dirt airstrip 145 miles away. Then they rode 20 miles by jeep to the isolated, armed commune of some 1,100 fanatical members.

Ryan's group managed to get inside and bring out six to ten members who wanted to leave. As they boarded the planes, one of the defectors drew a gun and started firing. That was a signal for other commune members, who suddenly appeared on the runway and shot at the planes. Ryan, 53, was killed, as were four others: NBC Reporter Don Harris, 41, and Cameraman Robert Brown, 36; San Francisco Examiner Photographer Gregory Robinson, 27; and an unidentified woman. At least eight others were wounded. In Georgetown, a woman member of the sect killed herself and her three young children. A U.S. State Department spokesman said there were "alarming indications" that cult members in Guyana and California were on the brink of committing mass suicide.

Still unknown was the fate of the cult's flamboyant founder, Jim Jones, 47. A white civil rights activist and Marxist, he started building a largely black congregation in the late 1960s. A few years later, he ruled a string of communes from Los Angeles to Vancouver. Rigidly disciplined, they turned out diligent workers on election day to help Democratic candidates. In gratitude, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone appointed Jones chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1975, and many of the cultists were placed in city and county jobs.

Jones quit and led the exodus to Guyana after New West magazine last year ran an expose of concentration camp conditions within the communes. According to reports, members were punished for smoking, fraternizing with outsiders or acting like "male chauvinist pigs." They were paddled as many as 100 times by the "Board of Education," a thick plank, and a microphone was placed near the mouths of victims to amplify screams for the congregation. Jones, who said he could raise the dead, also staged healing rites in which he claimed to pull cancerous organs from ill people; what he had in his hands, in fact, were chicken innards.

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