Inside Scientology (66 page)
Read Inside Scientology Online
Authors: Janet Reitman
Of the many friends and colleagues who provided assistance and support, I want to particularly thank my father, Alan Reitman, a meticulous line editor and the man who inspired me to become a journalist and who never ceased to amaze me with his generosity, love, and guidance. Josh Hammer and Shannon Burke read early drafts of the book and offered valuable criticism, as did Richard Leiby, who knows more about Scientology than most journalists and shared his knowledge and insights freely. Nora Connor, my researcher, spent months synthesizing complex legal data and poring over documents and transcripts; Alex Provan fact-checked every paragraph; Amelia McDonnell-Parry transcribed my interviews and also organized my office and filesânot an easy task. Chris Steffen did additional transcribing and reporting. Raney Aronson at PBS's
Frontline
and Lisa Santandrea were amazing friends and sounding boards. To all I say thank you.
Finally, Lee Smith, an amazing journalist who understands better than most the emotional and financial costs of this profession, not only insisted I write this book but stuck it out with me through all the years it took me to finish it. Key chapters could not have been completed without his editorial guidance; the entire book could not have been written without his patience, encouragement, and most of all his love. Thank you for enduring ... and Bode, too.
* The issue of
Time
published on May 6, 1991, bore the cover story "Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power," which accused the church of "Mafia-like tactics"; it remains one of the most scathing exposés of the church ever written. In response, Scientology sued
Time
and the reporter Richard Behar for libel, and lost, though the suit cost the publisher, Time Warner, millions of dollars.
***
* Hubbard, an avid Boy Scout, became an Eagle Scout at the age of twelve, making him the youngest Eagle Scout in the country at the time, according to the Church of Scientology.
***
* Staff at the
New York Times
would later tell the biographer Russell Miller that they had no record of ever buying any photographs from Hubbard or making any agreement to do so.
***
* The Church of Scientology has long held that L. Ron Hubbard had two war records, one possibly used as a front. In the official record released by the U.S. Department of the Navy, Hubbard's achievements are meager. But church officials have explained this by stating that most of what is in the record is falsified to cover up Hubbard's more sensitive and covert activities as a member of naval Intelligence.
***
* In 1969, in response to an investigation by the London
Sunday Times
into Hubbard's relationship with Parsons, the Church of Scientology issued a statement explaining that Hubbard had been sent to 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue by U.S. Naval Intelligence, assigned to infiltrate and break up a so-called black magic cult. The church gave as evidence the fact that the Agape Lodge ultimately dissolved and that a number of high-ranking physicists associated with Parsons were ultimately put on a U.S. "enemies list" and stripped of security clearance. A few historical facts support this claim: by the 1940s, a widespread anti-cult campaign was sweeping the country, and numerous groups and individuals suspected of cult activity, including Parsons, had been investigated by the FBI. But, as many of Hubbard's critics have pointed out, no evidence substantiates the claim that he was assigned intelligence work, and though, because of his odd activities, Parsons's FBI file had grown quite thick, he retained top-secret security clearance until his death in 1952. Hubbard is not mentioned in connection to Parsons in any FBI papers.
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* No evidence has been found in Hubbard's medical records to suggest he was ever crippled or blinded in World War II, or at any other time.
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* Though Hubbard had been discharged from active duty in the navy, he remained a commissioned officer until October 30, 1950.
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* With the halcyon days of the Parsonage at an end, Parsons and Marjorie Cameron moved into a smaller house in Pasadena. In 1952, at the age of thirty-six, Parsons was killed in a mysterious chemical explosion in his garage. It was, as many have noted, a fitting way for a black magician to die.
***
* Polly filed for divorce in 1947, still unaware that Hubbard had remarried. Later that year, he scandalized his parents by bringing Sara to Washington, where they settled, briefly, into the house he and Polly, and their two children, had once shared. The divorce was finalized in 1948.
***
* This is an actual scientific term defined by
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary
as "a hypothetical change in neural tissue postulated in order to account for persistence of memory called also
memory trace.
"
***
* In his first edition of
Dianetics,
Hubbard acknowledged "fifty thousand years of thinking men without whose speculations and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been possible," giving particular credit to "Anaxagoras, Thomas Paine, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Socrates, René Descartes, Plato, James Clerk Maxwell, Euclid, Charcot, Lucretius, Herbert Spencer, Roger Bacon, William James, Francis Bacon, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Newton, van Leeuwenhoek, Cmdr. Joseph Thompson (MC) USN, William A. White, Voltaire, Will Durant, Count Alfred Korzybski, and my instructors in atomic and molecular phenomena, mathematics and the humanities at George Washington University and at Princeton." Later editions of the book, however, do not carry this acknowledgment.
***
* In a 1983 interview with
Penthouse
magazine, Hubbard's eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., maintained that he was the result of a failed abortion, according to his father. "Nibs"âwho would later change her son's name to "Ronald DeWolf" in an attempt to distance him from his fatherâalso recalled that when he was six years old, he'd watched his father try to perform an abortion on his mother, using a coat hanger. "There was blood all over the place ... A little while later a doctor came and took her off to the hospital. She didn't talk about it for quite a number of years. Neither did my father." Nibs later retracted these and many other denigrating statements he'd made about Hubbard Senior.
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* Sara Hubbard had, in fact, written to the head of the Elizabeth Foundation, stating that she felt her husband was a paranoid schizophrenic and urging him to help get Hubbard psychiatric care.
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* In 1971, Alexis, now a twenty-one-year-old college student, went looking for her father. In response, Hubbard sent two church officials to visit her, with a letter asserting that he was not her real father. According to Hubbard, Sara had been his secretary in Savannah, Georgia, in 1948, and in 1949, "destitute and pregnant," had come to find him when he was living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie. As Sara later testified in
Armstrong v. The Church of Scientol-
ogy
in 1984, Hubbard also told her daughter that Sara had been a Nazi spy and that the couple had never been legally married. As Jon Atack would later point out, the wording of the letter was crucial: "Hubbard did not deny his marriage to Sara, simply its legality. He was technically correct; the marriage, being bigamous, was illegal, but that was hardly the fault of either Alexis or Sara."
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* Contrary to Hubbard's claims, the E-meter was not a new invention. It was technically a variation of a Wheatstone Bridge, which is an electronic meter that measures resistance to various electrical flows. Constructed to measure the tiny electrical fluctuations under the surface of the skin, "psychogalvanometers," as they were called, were used as far back as the nineteenth century, and Carl Jung, for one, enthusiastically embraced the devices as a therapy tool.
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* In 1956, the Founding Church of Scientology, in Washington, D.C., was granted tax-exempt status by the IRS; soon many other Scientology churches would be granted similar exemptions. In 1959, the Washington church's tax exemption was revoked (though several other Scientology organizations would remain tax-exempt). Upon review, the U.S. Court of Claims found that Hubbard was profiting from Scientology beyond what would have been considered standard remuneration.
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* Even more controversial was Hubbard's assertion that low-toned individuals should be exiled from society. "The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the tone scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered," Hubbard wrote. "It is not necessary to produce a world of clears in order to have a reasonable and worthwhile social order; it is only necessary to delete those individuals who range from 2.0 down, either by processing them enough to get their tone level above the 2.0 line"âa task that might take as few as fifty hours or more than two hundred, according to Hubbardâ"or simply quarantining them from the society."
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* Homosexuality was decreed one such "perversion."
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* Hubbard had by then begun to downplay his degree from Sequoia University on his résumé.
***
* Burroughs would later denounce Scientology's organizational policies and Hubbard's "overtly fascist utterances" as suppressive of freedom of thought, though he maintained that some of Scientology's techniques were valid.
***
â In the late 1980s, Scientology produced a cassette tape titled "Can We Ever Be Friends?" to help members repair relationships with their families and "help you gain wide acceptance of Scientology in your area," as one promotion read. The forty-five-minute cassette presented Scientology as a tolerant, mainstream religion, not in any way a cult, as some families believed it was.
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* The term, an acronym for Worthy Oriental Gentleman, is a holdover from British imperialism, once used to describe people of African or Asian descent.
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* The twelve conditions, ranging from highest to lowest, are Power, Power Change, Affluence, Normal, Emergency, Danger, Non-Existence, Liability, Doubt, Enemy, Treason, and Confusion.
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* According to a number of followers, Hubbard had become convinced during an auditing session that he was the reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes, the flamboyant adventurer and founder of the African country of Rhodesia. Acting on this belief, Hubbard had journeyed to southern Africa, hoping to "safe point," or establish, a safe haven in what is now Zimbabwe, to build a Scientology community. Some believed he planned to turn the realm of Cecil Rhodes into a country of Scientologists. "The entire objective," recalled one former follower, Hana Eltringham Whitfield, who would become a close aide to Hubbard, "was to find a place that Hubbard could eventually turn into his own kingdom, with his own government, his own passports, his own monetary system, in other words his own principality, of which he would be the benign dictator."
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* Rolph also noted that in response, Scientologists filed an injunction against the NAMH, insisting they be reinstated, and Gaiman personally sent letters to members of the organization, and its chairman, urging them to adopt a policy of psychiatric reform. After many months of legal wrangling, the decision to eject the Scientologists from membership in the organization was upheld by a British high court. Gaiman went on to serve as public relations director for the Church of Scientology in Great Britain.
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* A pseudonym.
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* On land, some organizations continued the policy in a distinct way: forcing a staff member to stand against a wall while other Scientologists threw buckets of water at him or her.
***
â The
Diana
and the
Athena
were now anchored off the coasts of southern California and Denmark, respectively, in close proximity to the Scientology Advanced Organizations in Los Angeles and Copenhagen. In addition, there were four other ships, including a small yacht called the
Neptune,
which one Sea Org recruitment brochure described as being part of the "Pacific flotilla."
***
* At one time, said Urqhart, Hubbard instituted a policy, later discarded, of raising Scientology prices by 10 percent every month in order to increase income.
***
â Hubbard also kept cash on handâhe was known to store $50,000 to $100,000 in cash in shoeboxes, recalled one former follower, in increments of $25,000 per box.
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* Hubbard himself apparently was of two minds. "If you think for a moment that it's the purpose of Scientology to produce something intensely spectacular like a ghost that can move cigarette paper or mountains, you have definitely gotten the wrong idea," he wrote in the Professional Auditor's Bulletin No. 2 (May 1953). "We are not trying to achieve the certainty of mysticism, necromancy, or, to be blunt, the Indian rope trick. We are trying to make sane, well beings."
***
â In the 1970s, the price for the complete package of OT levels was roughly $3,000.
***
* This practice, in fact, had been going on since 1969. According to Jon Atack (
A Piece of Blue Sky,
p. 253), the Guardian's Office had used "plants" to infiltrate a number of perceived "enemy" organizations, ranging from the Better Business Bureau to the American Medical Association.
