The Airstrip at Port Kaituma: Ryan's Final Hours

(00:00:00) The Airstrip at Port Kaituma: Ryan's Final Hours
(00:00:56) The Concerned Relatives
(00:02:26) Inside Jonestown
(00:04:18) The Morning of November Eighteenth
(00:05:28) Port Kaituma
(00:06:58) The Death Tape
(00:08:49) The Morning After
(00:10:02) What Ryan Actually Found

On November 17, 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan landed in Guyana with a delegation of congressional staff, journalists, and desperate family members known as the Concerned Relatives. He was there because constituents kept telling him their loved ones couldn't leave Jonestown — and he wanted to see it for himself.

What he found was a compound carefully staged for outside scrutiny. Jim Jones presided over a practiced performance: music, community speeches, an affable surface hiding a network of informants who reported any whispered dissent. But the performance cracked. Notes were slipped to NBC journalist Don Harris. Sixteen people asked to leave. Sixteen defectors was a number Jones couldn't absorb — visible proof of everything the Concerned Relatives had been saying for months.

By the morning of November 18, the situation couldn't be walked back. A Temple member put a knife to Ryan's throat. Then came the convoy to the airstrip at Port Kaituma — a narrow strip of packed earth where two small planes waited. Among those boarding was Larry Layton, who claimed to want out. He was lying. He'd been sent by Jones.

A flatbed truck pulled onto the airstrip. Temple gunmen opened fire. Ryan was killed. NBC cameraman Don Harris was killed. Two other journalists and a defector died. Congressional aide Jackie Speier — shot five times — lay on the ground for hours before help arrived.

Back in Jonestown, Jim Jones gathered his nine hundred followers around the vats.

This episode reconstructs the final twenty-four hours of Leo Ryan's life, the courage of the Concerned Relatives, and the chain of decisions that turned a congressional fact-finding mission into the trigger for the largest mass death of American civilians in the twentieth century.

This episode includes AI-generated content.