A cult suicide is a term used to describe the mass suicide by the members of groups that have been considered cults. In some cases, all or nearly all members have committed suicide at the same time and place. Groups that have committed such mass suicides and that have been called cults include Heaven's Gate, Order of the Solar Temple, and Peoples Temple (in the Jonestown incident). In other cases, such as the Filippians, a group has apparently supported mass suicide without necessarily encouraging all members to participate.

Reverend James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip. Over 200 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of whom were forcibly made to ingest cyanide by the elite Temple members.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in that state in the 1950s. Jones and the Temple later moved to California, and both gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the mid-1970s.

The incident in Guyana ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, though most likely it involved forced suicide and/or murder, and was the single greatest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001. Among the dead was Leo Ryan, who remains the only Congressman assassinated in the line of duty as a Congressman in the history of the United States.

Robert "Bob" Booker Baer (born July 1, 1952) is an American author and a former CIA case officer who was primarily assigned to the Middle East. He is currently TIME.com's intelligence columnist and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Baer is a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, espionage and U.S. foreign policy.

Baer was born in Los Angeles, raised in Aspen, Colorado, and aspired to become a professional skier. He spent many years of his childhood with his mother in Europe before returning to the US. After a fairly poor academic performance during his freshman year at high school, his mother sent him to Indiana's Culver Military Academy. In 1976, after graduating from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and entering the University of California, Berkeley, Baer decided to join the CIA's Directorate of Operations (now the National Clandestine Service) as a case officer. Upon admittance to the CIA, Baer engaged in a year's training, which included a four-month paramilitary course and foreign language courses.