WHY ARE JONESTOWN'S REPORT STILL DECLASSIFIED ?

A young neighbor two doors down and her young child perished in Jonestown. After the tragedy people would drive by the house and point and tell the story of the young mother. Her father died here in South Los Angeles a few years ago. He was 90 years old.

One of my friend's mother had invited me to go to a service at the People's Temple. She was a member but I never got around to it.

Time to declassify?


Over the years, there have been rumors of CIA involvement. Some people believe CIA agents were posing as members of the Peoples Temple cult to gather information; others suggest the agency was conducting a mind-control experiment.

In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined that the CIA had no advance knowledge of the mass murder-suicide. The year before, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had concluded that cult leader Jim Jones "suffered extreme paranoia."

The committee -- now known as international relations -- released a 782-page report, but kept more than 5,000 other pages secret.

Without those documents, it's hard to confirm or refute the speculations that have sprung up around Jonestown, said Melton, who planned to be in Washington Wednesday to ask for the documents' release.

George Berdes, chief consultant to the committee at the time of the investigation, told the San Francisco Chronicle the papers were classified to assure sources' confidentiality, but he thinks it is time to declassify them.

Paradise becomes a prison
What is known about the end of Jonestown is that on November 18, 1978, Jones ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink cyanide-poisoned punch. He told guards to shoot anyone who refused or tried to escape. Among the dead: more than 270 children.

Only two years before, Jones -- the charismatic leader of the Peoples Temple, an interracial organization that helped the desperate -- was the toast of San Francisco's political circles.

But after an August 1977 magazine article detailed ex-members' stories of beatings and forced donations, Jones abruptly moved his flock to Jonestown, a settlement in the jungle of Guyana, an Idaho-sized country on South America's northern coast.

The plan was to create an egalitarian agricultural community. But Peoples Temple members who worked the fields and subsisted mostly on rice soon learned it was more like a prison, recalls Jonestown defector Deborah Layton.

Dissent was unthinkable, she says. Offenders sweltered in "The Box," a 6-by-4-foot (1.8-by-1.2-meter) underground enclosure. Misbehaving children were dangled head-first into the well late at night. Loudspeakers broadcast Jones' voice at all hours.