San Diego Union Tribune Nov. l6 State Sen. Jackie Speier

SAN FRANCISCO --- Left for dead, bleeding from five bullet wounds, she prayed and waited. Her boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, was already dead. So were three journalists and a defector.

After 22 hours, Guyanese rescue workers airlifted her to safety.

Jackie Speier is a Democratic state senator now for parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties. But then she was Ryan's 28-year-old legal counsel, who went along with a contingent of officials, journalists and relatives to take a look at what was going on in this jungle where Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple had moved to from California.

They arrived on Nov. 17, 1978, and things were going pretty well, she remembers, until a reporter was slipped a note saying some members wanted to leave. "Jones became almost manic," she says. She and the others in the departing group were attacked the next day at a remote airstrip near Jonestown.

"It was very much like a plantation, ironically, for someone who preached equality," Speier says of the compound. "The whites were in leadership, and the African-Americans were subservient."

What happened there was murder, she adds. "These people's minds had been manipulated."

And she's not sure we've learned anything. "Jim Jones got away with what he got away with because he was politically connected and because he had the ability to call what he had a religion.

"Our commitment to protecting the First Amendment clouded reasonable people from recognizing that even though religions have a right to exist, they do not have a right to conduct themselves in a manner that suggests criminal conduct."

Was it a mistake to go to Jonestown 25 years ago?

"I don't think people who got out thought it was a mistake," she says. "And there were people who got out because we went down there. It was a mistake that our State Department did such a lousy job of monitoring the situation. Those were American citizens."

She points out that the suicides had been rehearsed time and again, in drills that Peoples Temple called "white nights."

"We knew about the white-night trials. I think that Jim Jones was going to be exposed, and he couldn't allow that to happen and was willing to take 900 people with him. He was a maniacal narcissist." Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

I remember vividly the night that I was listening to the radio and the news of this tragedy was announced and within minutes I had a call from a friend In Pennsylvania. He had heard it to and was so upset he could barely talk. For months I had been listening to KGO in San Francisco and heard many calls from parents begging for someone to listen to them about their loved ones in Guyana.

I am sad that there has been little progress in the past twenty five years with regard to any help from government. It is amazing with the many published articles naming the illegalities of some of the major cults that there are no elected officials to stand up and be counted. Perhaps the late and Honorable Congressman Ryan was the only hero among them .

Ida Camburn

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