Mark Lane: AIMster Attorney

Victims of the Jonestown Mass Murders

In 1973, when gun-toting American Indian Movement (AIM) terrorists seized the S. Dakota town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, the terrorists' supporters tried to sneak in supplies, weapons, and explosives. When the FBI tried to keep weapons out of the town by setting up roadblocks, the AIM terrorists shot at them.

You can hear the former FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Joseph H. Trimbach and his son John tell what happened at Pine Ridge on this 1-11-08 radio program.

In Joe Trimbach's just-released book American Indian Mafia, FBI agent Joanne Pierce tells what happened when an AIM lawyer named Mark Lane was stopped at a roadblock:

On one occasion, attorney Mark Lane arrived at one of the roadblocks. The Agent on duty opened the trunk of [Mark Lane's] car and reported back to me that he had found materials that could be used to make Molotov cocktails. The Agent detained him and radioed back for permission to place lane under arrest. I relayed the request to the Assistant U.S. Attorney. After a short pause, he vetoed that suggestion and Lane was allowed to proceed, without the contraband. The following year I was called to testify about what happened March 8th. The lawyer who cross-examined me was the same man, Mark Lane. (p. 122; June 28, 2005 letter from Joanne Pierce to Joe Trimbach)

Joe Trimbach observes:

SA Pierce witnessed first-hand the frustration of federal investigators whose main job, it seemed, was to provide target practice for the same gunmen government lawyers sought to appease. (p. 122)

In footnote 55 on page 571, Mr. Trimbach reports that the AIM lawyer Mark Lane "would go on to achieve further notoriety by becoming mixed up in the Jonestown mass killing and by writing Rush to Judgement, the book that launched a cottage industry of conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination." [Rush to Judgement has been debunked by the lawyer Vincent Bugliosi, author of Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Bugliosi is best known for prosecuting the cult-killer Charles Manson.]

Mark Lane reportedly was one of two lawyers for cult leader Jim Jones' People's Temple at Jonestown, Guyana.

Jones forced his congregaton to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. 913 people died when they were poisoned by a cyanide cocktail, shot, strangled, or injected with cyanide. More than 270 of the victims were children. Mark Lane was one of only nine people who saved himself that day by running into the jungle.

Lane's Wikipedia notes:

[Mark Lane] writes about Jonestown in his 1980 book The Strongest Poison. That book, since its publication, has been criticized by some as a long list of conspiracy theories, and as a repeat of the stories told by Rev. Jim Jones to keep his followers in a state of fear, such as that CIA-employed mercenaries were posted nearby and slaughtered Jonestown residents as they tried to flee through the jungle. Lane was insulted for this in Tim Reiterman's 1982 book Raven.

The Mitrokhin Archive, smuggled notes based on KGB documents, details Soviet active measures and contains information about Mark Lane. According to The Sword and Shield by the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew and the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin, "Soviet journalists, including KGB agent Genrikh Borovik, met with Mark Lane to encourage him in his research" [see note 12].

According to The Sword and Shield, the KGB also gave Mark Lane money through "the intermediary of a close friend" to travel to Europe and to "help finance his research." According to The Sword and Shield, this intermediary is identified in Mark Lane's KGB file only as a trusted contact of the KGB. "While Lane was not told the source of the money, the [New York KGB] residency suspected that he might have guessed where it came from; it was also concerned that the secret subsidy might be discovered by the FBI" (p. 228). Pages 225-230 of The Sword and Shield are transcribed here.

In 1987 a book jointly written by S.F. Alinin, B.G. Antonov, and A.N. Itskov was published in the USSR. The Jonestown Carnage: a CIA Crime cited Mark Lane's book about Jonestown, The Strongest Poison, and made the mendacious claim that the people at Jonestown were murdered by "U.S. special services" because they were dissidents who wanted to move to the USSR:

"[T]he official version about 'the suicide of the religious fanatics' in Jonestown, which was skillfully circulated in the mass media, was contrived by the US administration as a cover-up for a monstrous act of predetermined murder of several hundred American dissidents by the US special services." (Page 5-6; cited from Wikipedia).

This Soviet-sponsored lie that American intelligence or security agencies poisoned over 900 Americans is a lot like the former professor Ward Churchill's lie that FBI-backed death squads killed 342 Indians. [See also here.]

The former professor at the University of Colorado Ward Churchill, who was fired on July 24, 2007, for research misconduct, published that lie in the Covert Action Information Bulletin (C.A.I.B), a publication started by a CIA traitor who cooperated with the KGB and Cuban DGI, the late and unlamented Philip Agee.

The University of Colorado investigation showed, among other things, that Churchill had not used honest research to document his claim that the American Army deliberately infected the Mandan Indians with smallpox.

It is a common theme of communist propaganda that the American government is complicit in genocide.