Ma Anand Puja the Filipina Nurse Who Poisoned An Oregon Town

Wild Wild Country is a documentary currently streaming on Netflix about a cult that took over an Oregon, USA town in the early 1980's. At six hours the series is largely comprehensive but leaves out a lot of details and barely scratches the surface of how evil this cult was. Based around an Indian guru named Rajneesh the devotees were called Rajneeshees or sannyasins. 

The documentary is readily available and there are other videos about this cult all over Youtube. If you know nothing about them go watch the Netflix series or some of the other videos or read the Wikipedia entry. What I want to discuss here is one particular follower of Rajneesh known as Ma Anand Puja. 

  

Was born in Manila in 1947 as Diane Ivonne Onang, and grew up in California. She became a registered nurse in California in 1976 and trained at the LA County Hospital. In the years following her certification, Puja claims to have worked in clinics around Asia including the Philippines and Indonesia from 1977-1979, but in other interviews she claims to have been the director of Kern Country Medical Centre for several years during the same period. Whatever the case, she was in India in 1979 where she came into contact with sannyasins and the Pune one ashram.  After becoming a sannyasin,  astonishingly quick,  she became Director of the Rajneesh Health Centre in 1980,  until she fled with Sheela from Rajneeshpuram in September, 1985.

http://sannyasnews.org/now/archives/4933

The personal details about this lady are scant. She was born in Manila, immigrated to America at a young age, trained as a nurse, joined the cult, and eventually became the Director of the Rajneesh Health Centre. That is an ironic name because it was at the health centre where Ma Anand Puja cultured germs which she used to poison the town The Dalles, Oregon. It is also where she stored the Haldol which was used to drug the beer given to homeless people the cult invited to live with them. This was to keep them subdued. She also attempted to cultivate and weaponise the AIDS virus. In effect the health centre was a laboratory of death and disease.

The background story to all this is that in 1981 The Rajneesh cult immigrated en masse from India to Oregon. After a few years they attempted to take over the county. To do so they needed enough votes to change the county board. Oregon has a law that one only need live in the state for 20 days to become a registered voter. In a flash of genius the leaders of the cult sent out members around the country to bus in hundreds of homeless people who would in turn register to vote and consolidate the cult's power in the county. But the plan backfired and none of the homeless men were allowed to register to vote. In retribution it was decided to poison the town so no one would be able to show up on election day. 

The documentary Wild Wild Country does not answer the question of how the cult was able to obtain drugs and germs. But the book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War gives us a lot more detail. I will quote at length from this book.

The investigation eventually established that the cult had experimented in 1984 and 1985 with poisons, chemicals, and bacteria. The commune's germ-warfare chief was a thirty-eight year-old American nurse of Philippine origin who had been a close ally of Sheela's since their days in Poona, India. Ma Anand Puja, whose real name was Diane Ivonne Onang, supervises medical care at the commune. One of the "Big Moms," as the commune's three women leaders were known, Puja wielded enormous power. 

A stocky woman with narrow eyes, a fixed sneer, and jet-black hair, Puja was known to some sannyasins as "Nurse Mengele." She was obsessed with poisons, germs, and disease. 

David Barry Knapp, known as Krishna Deva, or K.D., the mayor of Rajneeshpuram, later testified for the prosecution after being taken into a federal witness-protection program. He said that Puja had given Haldol, a powerful tranquilliser, to many of the violent. mentally disturbed homeless people whom the cult had brought to the ranch to help win the county elections. Acting under orders from Puja and Sheela, sannyasins had injected hypodermic syringes filled with the prescription drug into tea consumed by the homeless. They has also stirred it into their mashed potatoes.

Another key witness told prosecutors that when state medical authorities asked Puja to account for the large Haldol purchases, she ordered her assistants to fabricate records to disguise its actual use. Several had left the commune rather than break the law. 

Puja was responsible for buying the prescription and over-the-counter drugs that the Rajneesh Medical Corporation kept in the Pythagoras pharmacy, as well as its medical supplies. 

Because she headed a medical corporation, she was entitled to buy such products from commercial medical supply companies like VWR Scientific and even obtain dangerous pathogens from the American Type Culture Collection, the giant private germ bank located first in Maryland and later in Virginia from which doctors, clinics, and hospitals order germs for research and standard diagnostic tests. 

An invoice from the ATCC shows that the cult ordered and received a variety of such pathogens, among them the Salmonella type, said Skeels, people would almost certainly have died in the outbreak. 

The invoice also listed Salmonella paratyphoid, which causes a similar illness, though not a severe, and, most startling of all, Francisella tularensis, which causes tularaemia, a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease. U.S. Army scientists in the 1950s had turned F. tularensis into a weapon, and is still remains on the nation's list of germs a foe might use in a biological-warfare attack.

Finally Puja had obtained orders of Enterobacter cloacae, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Shigella dysenteriae. Fewer than one hundred organisms of shigella are needed to cause very sever dysentery-profuese diarrhoea, bloody mucoid stools, and cramping-and death in as many as 10 to 20 percent of all cases, even in previously healthy persons. 

The ATCC invoice was dated September 25, 1984, indicating that the agents had been delivered between the two waves of the salmonella outbreak. 

No pathogens ordered from the germ bank were ever found at the ranch, and the order's implications got little attention. The investigation had begun more than a year after the poisonings, giving the cult time to destroy evidence before the authorities obtained search warrants. When the invoices were seized in the search, they were not shown to health officials who would have understood their significance. But those officials, who learned of the orders only years later, considered both the agents and the timing of their arrival at the ranch ominous. Skeels said that Francisella tualarensis, Salmonella typhi, Salmonella paratyphi, and Shigella dysenteriae were all unnecessary in a clinical lab the size of Puja's. And all these bacteria, he said, could have been used for bioterrorism. 

Puja was also particularly fascinated by the AIDS virus, about which relatively little was known at the time. The Bhagwan had predicted that the virus would destroy two-thirds of the world's population. For Puja, it was a means of control and intimidation. She repeatedly tried to culture it for use as a germ weapon against the cult's ever-growing enemies. Her apparent failure was not for lack of effort. After she was told by a technician at the ranch, for instance, that her lab lacked the necessary equipment to stabilise and dry the virus, the corporation promptly bought a "quick-freeze dryer" in September 1984. 

Experts doubted that Puja had the skills, expertise, or supplies needed to culture the AIDS virus or the other dangerous pathogens she had ordered, But several sannyasins told the police that in at least one instance she had injected blood drawn from a homeless man who had tested positive for the AIDS antibody into the veins of a cult rival. The fate of the man is unknown.

State and federal investigators eventually concluded that the plot to poison people in The Dalles with a biological agent, which involved about a dozen people, had grown out of the cult's legal war with the county and its determination to win control of the country government in the November elections. 

Sometime during the spring of 1984, according to sworn affidavits and court testimony in 1985 and 1986, the commune's inner circle began brainstorming about how the commune's four thousand or so members could defeat the roughly twenty thousand residents of Wasco County. At one meeting, Sheel fastened on the idea of making non-Rajneeshees too sick to vote. Together, she and Puja began reading books like How to Kill:Volumes 1-4, and The Handbook of Poisons, trying to locate various bacteria that would sicken people without killing them. They also asked a urologist at Puja's clinic about poisons and bacteria that would be difficult to trace. The urologist, apparently unalarmed since he was told the women were trying to defend the commune against germ attacks by the Rajneeshees' numerous enemies, mentioned salmonella as a possibility.

Rajneeshpuram's mayor, K.D., told another cult member that Puja did some experiments with a hepatitis virus and had initially considered using it to sicken local residents. Puja also proposed using Salmonella typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, which she wound up purchasing for the lab. But a Rajneesh Medical Corporation lab technician warned her that orders of typhoid cultures would be easy to trace if an outbreak occurred. As far as K.D. knew, the plan was never implemented. 

K.D. also testified that Puja had considered sickening people by putting dead rodents-rats and mice-into the water system. Puja believed that daed beavers would be especially effective because they harboured a natural pathogen-Giardia lambda, which causes diarrhoea. When other plotters complained that the county's water reservoirs were covered by screens, K.D. recalled, someone "jokingly" suggested that the beavers be put in a blundered and liquified.

Sheela and Puja finally settled on Salmonella typhimurium as their germ weapon of choice, known by the American Type Culture Collection's designation 14028. Before they began plotting in the spring of 10984, the cult ordered bactrol disks from VWR Scientific, the Seattle-based company. Puja then used the bacteria in the disks to culture and produce large amounts of the bacteria in a part of her lab known as the "Chinese Laundry." Ava Kay Avalos, known as Ma Ava, another star prosecution witness who was granted partial immunity, said that the lab was later moved, at another technician's insistence, to a complex closer to where people with AIDS and other infectious diseases were kept-a more isolated part of the ranch. 

Two rooms in the A-frame housed the production unit, with its gloves, masks, white robes, pills, syringes, containers, a large freeze dryer, and what Ava described as a small, green "apartment-type refrigerator" in which Puja kept the petri dishes filled with colonies of salmonella.

Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, pages 26 - 29.

Known as Nurse Mengele this lady was obsessed with germs and disease. Her status as director of the health centre enabled her to purchase bacteria and germ cultures in large quantities.  She was also able to purchase large doses of Haldol. She attempted to culture the AIDS virus and even injected a rival with AIDS infected blood. And it was all in an effort to control and intimidate people both cult members and Oregonians.

More can be read about her doings at the cult in eyewitness testimony given by Ava Kay Avalos. Watching the documentary one gets the sense that Ma Anand Sheela was the brains and brawn behind the activities of the cult but the testimony points to Puja being the real wielder of that power.

Puja subsequently plead guilty and was sentenced to almost 20 years in prison.

Another commune leader, Ma Anand Puja, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years for conspiracy in the salmonella poisonings, to be followed by 3 years probation for wiretapping. Puja, a 38-year-old Filipino who led the commune’s Rajneesh Medical Corp., is not required to leave the country. 

On the state charges, Wasco County Circuit Judge John Jelderks sentenced Sheela to 20 years in prison and Puja to 15 years for attempting to murder the doctor and assaulting the county officials. Sheela also was sentenced to 20 years for arson. Prosecutors said, however, that Sheela would be in prison only about 4 1/2 years.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-23-mn-21578-story.html

Remarkably she only served 39 months in prison before she was released.

Ma Anand Puja, 40, also known as Diane Yvonne Onang, was released from the federal prison at Pleasanton, Calif., Thursday after nearly 39 months behind bars, including time spent in a German jail before she was extradited to the United States in late 1985. 

Puja's plea bargain called for her to serve three years' probation following her release from prison for her role in the electronic eavesdropping network, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Baron Sheldahl of Portland.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/12/31/Gurus-ex-aide-back-in-Oregon-after-prison/1337599547600/

What happened to her subsequently is not very clear. She is not interviewed in the documentary and the filmmakers do not focus on her but rather on Ma Anand Sheela. It is rather strange that this lady who poisoned an entire town only served 39 months of a 20 year sentence. Very strange indeed. Unless, that is, this cult was infiltrated by the CIA and run like their MKULTRA operations and Puja worked for them as some have opined. Stranger things have happened.