Danny Mitrone and Jim Jones

Dan Mitrone and Jim Jones
America’s systematic use of torture did not begin at Abu Ghraib prison, it began in Latin America. The Baltimore Sun has found a 1983 US torture manual called AKUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. A The earliest edition dates back to 1963. It was used to train Latin American security forces. An especially interesting part deals with equipping safe houses with electric transformers and using shocks to help victims regress to much earlier stats in their lives. It is very reminiscent of all the UKULTRA psychiatric research carried on by the intelligence agencies since the early 1950s. Thirteen years later, in 1986, the government found seven of these manuals in use at the School for the Americas at Fort Benning. There was also a 1984 manual used to train Honduran forces in th4e use of torture and another contemporaneous one for the Contras. John Stockwell, former station chief in Nicaragua, recalled how the Contras would castrate the father in front of the children and then peel skin off his face. Sometimes a grenade was placed in his mouth and the pin was then pulled. Sometimes the children were tortured while the parents had to watch. But the Contras seemed to especially gang rape the mother and then cut her breasts off.

While working as a USAID policy advisor Latin America, Dan Mitrone refined US torture methods. He was especially good at using ultra-thin highly conductive wire to shock victims, sometimes placing it between their teeth like dental floss. Mitrone went to Latin America in 1960 to teach torture techniques. For seven years, he worked with a Death Squad in Brazil that disposed of at least a hundred bodies. In 1967, he returned to Washington to share his knowledge with Agency for International Development Public Safety Police Academy trainees. In 1969 he flew to Uruguay where he headed a four man team training police. Uruguayan sources said he intr4educed torture as a means of dealing with political prisoners and that it soon became normal. Mitrone’s approach was scientific in that he sought just the right amount of pain to get the information he desired, and it was noted that he employed psychological knowledge to induce surrender and despair. Often, he drug beggars off the streets so he could experiment with various torture and sickness inducing techniques. Sometimes he used these poor souls to demonstrate his techniques for visiting intelligence people. One of his favorite techniques was playing tapes of women and children screaming that the subject’s family was being tortured.

Tupamaros rebels kidnapped and executed him in 1970, and Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis Hope did a benefit concert for his family in Richmond, Indiana. His name is honored on a plaque in the Truman Building in Washington DC for losing his life abroad in honorable service to his country.

Jim Jones, founder of the notorious Jonestown, was a close childhood friend of Dan Mitrone, an intelligence agent famous for teaching torture techniques in Latin America. There is much evidence to suggest that Jonestown was a government financed experiment in mind control and behavior modification. However, the evidence is not air tight, and all that can be concluded is that this interpretation of events there fits the facts better than the official explanation.

When Mitrone went to Brazil in 1961, Jones ,his wife , and family found a way to locate there also. Jones had adopted eight children and was described by his landlady as “a gangster who used a Bible instead of a gun.” He had become a faith healer. Jones told a neighbor in Brazil that he was connected with the Office of Naval Intelligence. The US embassy provided him with a large home, transportation, and groceries. This was at a time when the US government was funding the establishment of evangelical ministries in Latin America.

After a few years, he returned to the United States with $10,000 and founded People’s Temple in Ukiah, California in 1965. Jones, a white preacher affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, had earlier founded a People’s Temple in 1954 in Indianapolis. He also established Happy Haven Rest Home. The courts sent him 1509 foster children, and he also attracted former prisoners, the elderly, and the mentally ill. He had the backing of local Republicans, the local John Birch Society, and the local chapter of World Vision, which often operated as a C.I.A. front. In 1968 his operations worked for the Nixon presidential campaign.

Jonestown had a sensory deprevation pit, and there was much use of Tohrazene. Some of the white staff had family ties to the biochemical warfare industry. Electroshock to discipline children had been used in San Francisco, and the practice was carried over to Jonestown. Jones was an expert hypnotist, perhaps having hearned the techniques from a preacher named David Miranda. However, Jones may have been programmed. This is difficult to sort out because it seems there was also a Jones double.