A recording reveals the death throes of the Jim Jones cult
First had come the numbing photos: nearly 900 colorfully clad bodies clustered near a vat of poison. Next, the anguished accounts of the bewildering tragedy by its few survivors. Last week, nearly four months after they had occurred, the mass deaths at Jonestown in the remoteness of Guyana's jungles took on a new and far more personal dimension. Americans sat in their living rooms and heard the actual sounds of the Peoples Temple dying.
In an incredible aftermath to a bizarre event, NBC television broadcast a tape recording of the Rev. Jim Jones' pleading with his followers to "die in dignity" by sipping a cyanide-laced drink. A few of the cultists protested. Some women screamed. Children cried. Armed guards took up positions around the camp to keep anyone from escaping. Other cultists, assembled around their leader's wicker-chair throne in an open hall, applauded as Jones implored in a high-pitched, agitated voice: "Please, for God's sake, let's get on with it."
Someone in the schizophrenic California-based cult, which hacked a spare living out of the Guyana soil while banking millions in secret Swiss accounts, had recorded the final 43 minutes of the colony's existence. The tape was found by a U.S. consular employee in Guyana and turned over to the FBI. Guyanese officials were given a copy. While both Guyana and the U.S. Justice Department refused to release the tape, copies somehow proliferated. The one obtained by TIME last week discloses that Jones' death decree was met with stubborn resistance as well as fatal acquiescence.
Jones had called his followers together after a two-day visit by California Congressman Leo Ryan. The Temple leader was outraged by the fact that a score of the cultists had asked Ryan to help them escape the colony. Ryan's party and the defectors had left Jonestown to fly home from a nearby airstrip. Jones knew of a plot by his group to shoot the pilot of one of the visitors' two planes. He was not aware, at first, that Ryan and four others in the party had already been ambushed and slain at the airfield.
Jones: We are sitting here, waiting on a powder keg. To sit here and wait for the catastrophe that's going to happen on that airplane−it's going to be a catastrophe. It almost happened here when the Congressman was nearly killed here. [A cultist had attacked Ryan with a knife.] You can't take off with people's children without expecting a violent reaction. [Some of the defectors were children whose parents had split on whether to flee or stay.] We've been so terribly betrayed.
What's going to happen here in a matter of a few minutes is that one of those people on the plane is going to shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn't plan it, but I know it's going to happen. And we better not have any of our children left when it's over. Because they'll parachute in here on us. [He feared the Guyanese army would retaliate.] So you be kind to the children and be kind to seniors, and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide−it's a revolutionary act.