Jonestown: Was the Story Spiked?

Tom Clavin

Pat Lynch, the first female investigative reporter for NBC Evening News, was in the midst of her second consecutive hot story. She had already broken the story about the money schemes and the intimidation tactics of the Synanon cult in California, and as a result had her life threatened numerous times. In the fall of 1978, she was taking on another cult: Jim Jones and his followers of the Peoples Temple.

Her "Segment 3" reports on Synanon that aired on NBC Evening News (anchored at that time by John Chancellor) had earned so much attention from viewers and others in the news media that NBC went ahead with a series on cults in America. The Peoples Temple was next up. Lynch and her crew had filmed as much as a dozen hours of interviews with Jones' followers, his detractors, and former cult members, and that tape had been edited down to a multi-part series. It was to begin airing in October 1978, shortly before a delegation led by Rep. Leo Ryan was to travel to Jonestown to investigate complaints by former cult members of abuse.

The Peoples Temple was founded in the 1950s in Indianapolis. Jones had become the head of it by 1965, when he and 140 followers moved to Mendocino County in California in the belief that they stood a better chance there of surviving a nuclear war. In 1974, the group leased 3,000 acres in Guyana, and Jones and over a thousand members of the cult moved there three years later.

Gordon Lindsay, a British journalist, had interviewed former Peoples Temple members who detailed physical and psychological torture, drug use, child abuse, and other actions that were taking place in Jonestown. Also described was Jones' use of alcohol and drugs and his increasing paranoia, plus the so-called "white nights" when Jones would have members rehearse a mass suicide. Reading Lindsay's report is what prompted Lynch to pursue the cult as a story after the Synanon series.

The Peoples Temple series was never broadcast. It still has not seen the light of day. Of the hours of footage Lynch turned in, NBC claims that only 18 minutes exist.

"It's the story of The Insider with NBC replacing CBS as the network that caved in," said Lynch, referring to the movie starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe about 60 Minutes initially refusing to air a segment on malpractices in the tobacco industry. "This is a similar story of a journalist who got hold of a great story that was going to cost the network a lot of money and a lot of grief, and they backed off."

Lynch stated: "I believe that if the story was broadcast when it was supposed to be, showing how dangerous a man Jim Jones had become, the people in Jonestown would not have died. Instead, the story was buried along with those unfortunate people."

The two top NBC executives involved at the time were Fred Silverman, president of the network, who had been a successful producer of shows like Charlie's Angels, and Lester Crystal, president of NBC News (and now a producer with PBS). Synanon members had staked out the apartment building in New York where Silverman and his family lived. (The headline "NBC Boss Life Threatened" blared in The New York Post.) Letters containing death threats had been sent to NBC, with Silverman and Crystal turning them over to the FBI. According to Lynch, her Jonestown series was spiked because NBC executives feared there would be a violent response from Jones's followers.

Instead, NBC reporter Don Harris and a crew with Bob Brown as cameraman were assigned to go to Jonestown and cover the activities of the Ryan delegation and reports that some cult members were being held against their will. "I really didn't see it coming, I was so idealistic then," said Lynch.

She tried desperately to reach Harris by phone or in person while he was in New York on November 13 to brief him on the mental deterioration of Jones and his followers, but he and NBC executives refused to talk to her. That same day, NBC issued a press release stating that a show about cults was being "temporarily halted" for valid journalistic reasons. The press release added that "NBC News has not been pressured by anyone to drop the work on this story."

Five days later and only an hour after he had deliberately asked Jones several provocative questions, Harris was dead. So was Brown, Ryan, a news photographer, and 918 residents of Jonestown, including 300 children, victims of murder and suicide. The twisted mind of Jim Jones had finally snapped.

"I was in New York, and Gordon Lindsay was the first to call me." Lynch recalled. "He was in Georgetown [Guyana's capital], and it saved his life that Jim Jones would not let him into Jonestown with the NBS crew. A plane had just come in carrying the most severely wounded and some of the dead. 'Pat,' he said, 'it's happening right now, the white night is happening.' And they all died."

Lynch resigned from NBC and looked for another job. Though a young woman, she was already a veteran newsperson. She began as a staff writer for CBS News, then was a writer and producer on the Twenty-First Century science series with Walter Cronkite. After leaving NBC, she went to work for ABC News. But after Silverman and Crystal were ousted -- the latter denied in a January 3, 1979 article he penned in Variety that any threatening letters had been received -- Lynch returned to NBC to work with Tom Brokaw.

Her next hot story was on the seemingly illegal activities of Lyndon LaRouche, who has run for president every four years since 1976 and whose organization has been accused of being an anti-Semitic cult. He was convicted in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, and served five years in prison. Lynch went on to return to CBS on Street Stories with Ed Bradley and Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. Among the kudos for her are two Emmy Awards out of 10 nominations and a DuPont Award from Columbia University for investigative reporting.

"I've never written about the Jonestown story, but that doesn't mean I haven't kept thinking about it," said Lynch, interviewed at her home in Southampton. "I had sort of resigned myself that it would never be told . . . but then things changed."

What revived her desire to get the story out is that recently Lynch has received queries from editors and producers in the U.S. and from Canada, South Africa, and Australia who are embarking on Jonestown-related stories to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the founding of the cult community in Guyana. All have asked the same question of Lynch: "Did you shoot more than 18 minutes of film?"

"We shot in 20-minute sections and then put the film in a canister," Lynch recalled. "There were between 20 and 30 canisters. In addition to that, I personally screened more than three hours of dramatic footage shot inside Jonestown by the cameraman who died doing his job. What happened to it?"

Lynch said that after the Jonestown tragedy the canisters of film were put under lock and key by NBC. Only the FBI was granted access to them, and the agency made copies of the film Lynch and her crew had shot and footage that had been recovered from Harris's crew. Lynch said, "It is very hard to believe now that all that material was just accidentally lost."

She added: "The recent queries from filmmakers have inspired me to start my investigation of the Peoples Temple once again. In two years all the classified material about the massacre is supposed to be released to the public. The government has kept their secrets well for almost 30 years."

Theories abound as to why the FBI, CIA, and the State Department have kept documents about the Peoples Temple classified for decades. One was voiced by Rep. Leo Ryan's mother, who told Lynch, "It's a massive government and intelligence cover-up." Ryan had co-sponsored a bill in Congress that required prior congressional approval of all CIA covert operations, and testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee revealed that Jonestown was part of a CIA covert operation in Guyana. Ryan may have been the target of an operation that went terribly awry.

"I can confirm based on the investigating I've done for almost 30 years that the U.S. government knows a lot more about the Peoples Temple and what happened at Jonestown than it has ever admitted to," stated Steve Katsaris.

Katsaris lives is Montana and is the founder and head of Concerned Relatives. The organization was founded after the Jonestown massacre to press for more information about the alleged involvement of U.S. government and Guyanese government agencies in Peoples Temple activities and the subsequent deaths of over 900 people. Katsaris's daughter, Maria, had been the treasurer of the People's Temple and died with most of Jones's other followers on November 18, 1978.

"The whole thing has a lot of seamy sides to it, and has never been adequately explained," said Katsaris, who was in Guyana trying to persuade his daughter to leave Jonestown when the final "white night" took place. "It can only help the effort to find the truth with Pat Lynch renewing her investigations."

Lynch is aiming to tell "the real truth about the Jonestown massacre" in a book, which would include how her Peoples Temple series was compiled and then scuttled. A priority is to try to track down the missing NBC footage. Lynch has obtained from the Jonestown Institute in California, which collects primary source information on the Peoples Temple, a three-hour pirated tape with footage lensed by Bob Brown and proof via a Freedom of Information Act request that the FBI is in possession of the 12 hours of footage from NBC. The institute has launched a lawsuit to acquire all Peoples Temple material that the FBI has.

Another part of the story is the possibility that Lynch was the object of gender discrimination. There was very little support at the time in television news for female investigative reporters, and Lynch was on her own at NBC. "This wouldn't have happened to a man, I'm sure of it," she said. "I don't know why I just didn't say that then. Those were macho times. I was an alien female in a man's world, which is what investigative journalism was back then. Don Harris was a macho guy who had covered the war in Vietnam. He wasn't going to heed warnings from a woman. And that killed him."

Lending support to Lynch's efforts has been Ken Auletta, a Bridgehampton resident who is a prize-winning journalist, the author of several nonfiction best-selling books, and a writer for The New Yorker magazine.

"The real story should be told for at least three reasons," Auletta said. "First, there's the matter of accountability for 918 deaths. Second, there's the issue of journalistic responsibility. We ought know more about those who made those fateful news decisions. Finally, at a time when the media is criticized for missing the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and for its own lack of transparency, telling this story is not only a way to come clean but a cautionary tale for all news organizations."

This article originally appeared in the Southampton and East Hampton (NY) Press.