A Rajneesh "Peace Force" officer guards the Bhagwan. (Photos: The Oregonian)

Ma Anand Sheela worried constantly about Rajneeshpuram being raided by immigration officials. So she came up with a plan.

"Whenever there was a situation which would be perceived as an emergency, such as a raid by the INS," FBI agents wrote in an internal investigative report, "a code word would be broadcast [around the property], which, for a time, was 'Mukta's Laundry.' When this code word would broadcast, beepers would go off and the key security people would then respond to a contingency plan."

That meant hiding the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the luxury-loving Indian guru whose followers had built the small city for him in remote Wasco County, Oregon. It also involved quickly moving foreign followers "with visa problems" to undisclosed locations on the Rajneeshees' 64,000-acre property.

The contingency plan was one of the many insider details that Rajneeshpuram mayor David Knapp told the FBI as authorities closed in on him and other Rajneeshees for various criminal acts, including murder plots against government officials and a bioterrorism attack in the town of The Dalles.

The cult's brief, action-packed Oregon adventures in the 1980s have received a splash of renewed attention in the past few weeks thanks to the six-part Netflix documentary, "Wild Wild Country." The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern has been especially diligent about following narrative strands left hanging by filmmakers Maclain and Chapman Way, and that includes tracking down the FBI summary report about Knapp's testimony.

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David Knapp

Knapp, known among Rajneeshees as Swami Krishna Deva, made clear that the red-robed, free-love-espousing commune members were willing to meet government agents with violence.

Sheela, Rajneesh's personal secretary and the commune's undisputed leader despite Knapp's mayoral title, created a security force initially of 38 heavily-armed officers. The outfit came to be known as "The 38."

The force soon grew to more than 100 men and women, who all carried Uzis and other automatic weapons.

These gun-toting Rajneeshees were polite but focused, recalled longtime Oregon public-relations maven Jan Dickinson, who said she visited the ranch "around 1983" with the late KEX reporter Bob Chase.

After being allowed through the front gate by armed guards and told where to go, Chase and Dickinson stopped their car on the side of the road to gaze at the vast natural scenery.

"Rajneeshees showed up immediately, all with guns, and asked what we were doing and why we had stopped," Dickinson told The Oregonian on Monday.

She said she and Chase never felt threatened or in danger, but that it was a little unnerving to "always have eyes on you."

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Sheela walks alongside the Bhagwan as he drives one of his Rolls Royce cars.

That sense of paranoia, like most everything that defined the commune, apparently came from Sheela, who Knapp claimed was taking valium and a variety of other drugs. Knapp told the FBI that Sheela had ordered guards at the Rajneeshees' airstrip to be ready for the feds to descend from the sky, in which case "Rajneesh aircraft would take off and fly in layered levels over the airport to prevent hostile aircraft from landing."

Guards also were allegedly told that if a government helicopter tried to land at the commune, armor-piercing bullets should be used to ward it off.

By this time, the Rajneeshees were on the defensive on a series of fronts.

Early in 1985, Les Zaitz and other reporters at The Oregonian were finishing work on a 20-part newspaper series that would shred the Rajneeshees' self-created public image as harmless spiritual seekers being maligned by small-minded religious bigots and an overzealous government.

As a result, Sheela allegedly directed a Rajneeshee agent named Ava Avalos to find a way into The Oregonian's downtown Portland offices. "Knapp was aware Ava was trying to get the article that Zaitz was preparing for The Oregonian, concerning Rajneeshpuram, out of his files or destroy the computer that contained the information," the FBI report states.

Sure enough, Ava and her team posed as a cleaning crew and gained entry to The Oregonian, but one of the building's actual janitors noticed the strangers -- and how they were poking around in an unusual way. The janitor notified a security guard, who ushered them out. They didn't get their hands on Zaitz's work until it was published.

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Rajneeshees hold a rally in Portland.

David Knapp's allegations go on and on in the 40-page FBI report. Another example: He stated that Sheela directed trusted Rajneesh agents to dig out evidence of the possible sexual peccadilloes of Senator Mark Hatfield. Sheela would spend just over two years in federal prison for crimes including arson, poisoning attacks and immigration fraud.

All of this, it seems, was Sheela's attempt to protect the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh from harm. In the end, however, she would determine that the greatest danger to the guru came not from Oregon reporters or government officials but from his own followers -- specifically, Knapp said, from a group of wealthy Californians who played to the Bhagwan's vanity by giving him expensive gifts. These presents included a wristwatch that cost more than $1 million.

When Francoise Ruddy (a.k.a., Hasya), the former wife of Hollywood producer Albert Ruddy, told Sheela "she could not say no to Bhagwan, Sheela responded by telling her that it was important to learn to say no to Bhagwan."

-- Douglas Perry

More: Rajneeshees in Oregon: The Untold Story.