Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? - Ch. 9

8/18/2019 Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? - Ch. 9

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4/21/2015 web.archive.org/web/20091130184325/http://www.fonebone.net/Jonestown/09.Chap.txt

http://web.archive.org/web/20091130184325/http://www.fonebone.net/Jonestown/09.Chap.txt

Orignal page 351 Jonetown

IX OF DOGS AND MONKEYS

The public life of Jim Jones began, progressed and ended with his manipulation of dogs and monkeys. Throughout his career, Jones surrounded himself with a variety of animals. These were the pet mascots for his preliminary experiments in behavior modification that helped him to develop his tremendous power to manipulate people. Over the years, these animals provided their master with money, recruits, favorable publicity and security guards for his Peoples Temple. They helped maintain the fallacy that Jones was a humanitarian who suffered constant attacks from racist enemies. In the final analysis, the Temple's animals provide an insight into the mind of Jim Jones. Perhaps the most accurate accounting of the Reverend Jim Jones comes from

viewing his career through the eyes of dogs and monkeys.

The first congregation of the child preacher's "pretend church" was comprised of several stray dogs that young Jim had adopted. His canine congregation followed the Bible- toting boy everywhere he went and sat patiently whenever he practiced preaching to them.


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Jones' pretend church grew to include the other children in his neighborhood but it remained oriented towards animals as Jim's primary function was to conduct funeral services for his playmates' deceased pets. Judging from his later treatment of animals, it is highly possible that young Jim murdered the pets just for the opportunity to officiate at the funerals. Jim Jones learned at an early age that a dead animal could give him power over people.

Years later, in an effort to finance his Peoples Temple, Jones embarked on the most absurd fund-raising campaign in religious history. He sold live Rhesus monkeys door-to- door. According to an interview published in the_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I_n_d_ i_ a_ n_a_p_ o_ l_ i_s_ _ _ N_ e_w_s on December 5th, 1953, Jones gotthe idea from an unidentified South American student who promised that there was money to be made in the monkey business. His first acquisition was a pet chimpanzee that he trained in table manners and the use of the toilet. Jones named the chimp "Sugar." Sugar enjoyed all the privileges of the other members of the household but received most of the attention as Jones had began an intensive study in primate behavior.

Sugar would die of strychnine poisoning. By Jones' account, he then imported several dozen Rhesus monkeys from South America, Africa, Thailand and India, housed them in his garage and sold them, one at a time, for $29 each. The local Black residents must have been quite surprised to discover the young White preacher at their door with a Bible in one hand and a live monkey in the other. It was the Christmas season and Jones convinced many parents that a monkey would make an excellent present for their children. The unlikely combination of salvation, racial equality and monkeys was successful in raising


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funds while providing a foot-in-the-door to recruit new parishioners. It was also good publicity; at least for a while.

A front page article in the_ _I_

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, dated April 10, 1954, heralded the death of Jones' monkey business. According to the report, Jones had abandoned a recent shipment in the customs warehouse in the Federal building in IndianapoIis when he refused the air freight bill. Of the seven monkeys in the crate, three had died in transit and the remaining four were very sick. Despite efforts by the customs officials to nurse the four back to health, only two survived to be sold at the unclaimed freight auction. Though the article tarnished the preacher's reputation, it did serve to disguise the true source of the monkeys.

It would have been impossible for Jones to have profitted from the sale of imported monkeys at $29 each, the cost of the operation was too prohibitive. Aside from the normal business overhead, there was the high cost of international communications, the initial price of the monkeys, the expensive crating and air freight to Indianapolis, the high mortality loss in shipment, the required vaccinations against communicable cable disease and, of course, bananas, bananas and more bananas. Jones, whose business background which would later build an empire valued between $20 and $50 million, would never have sold at a loss. Indeed, he_ _ d_ i_d sell several dozen Rhesus monkeys for $29 each but they had not been imported. Jones had acquired the monkeys from a

domestic research laboratory where they were to be used as subjects in medical experiments. Fearing that his association with the research lab might prove embarassing, if not incriminating, Jones


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staged a media manipulation by ordering a token shipment, refusing to accept it and reporting his activities to the local newspaper.

The monkey business was bizarre but important as it established Jones' early interest in behavioral science and his covert association with a medical research laboratory that apparently was of sufficient size that the loss of several dozen lab animals went unnoticed. It also attests to his ability to manipulate the press, a skill he would later hone to perfection, as well as his devious, yet intelligent,

planning, as this one project built the first Peoples Temple with money, parishioners, publicity and purpose as the first in many studies in behavior modification. In retrospect, the monkey business had all the elements of sadistic irony that marked the Temple's future projects. Whenever Jones set the record wrong he provided posterity with a glimpse of his sick sense of humor. The fact that this son of a Ku Klux Klan officer bankrolled his self-destructive interracial church by selling monkeys to his prospective Black victims is, in itself, a racial slur. There is also strong symbolism in selling lab animals to finance a medical experiment that used "lab people." It was almost as if the experiments in behavior modification had progressed to the point where

Jones, or his superiors, said, "Out with the monkeys; in with the Blacks" and, with his talent for logical planning, Jones accomplished both goals in one step.

Once he completed the transition from selling monkeys to saving Blacks, Jones returned to murdering dogs in an attempt to control people. The Indianapolis Temple was full of new Black faces but Jones realized he needed to do something spectacular to keep their


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attention and ensure their return. He also knew that nothing could bind a group closer than the threat of a common enemy. Since their only common enemy was Jones, himself, he proceeded to invent a fictitious one. From the very beginning, Jones claimed that his doctrine of racial equality and Utopian socialism had made him a target for the

racist Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party. According to Jones, he was constantly harassed by threatening phone calls and night riding vigilantes who vandalized his parsonage. He tried very hard to impress upon his predominantly Black congregation that he was somehow a champion for their cause.

Jones had converted his then defunct monkey house into an animal shelter where he fed and found homes for stray dogs, one in particular. He brought the dog

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Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? - Ch. 9