Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (34 page)

You will find that Scientologists will come rushing
forward with 90 percent of your facts anyway. (They are
never
from
auditing sessions.) Scientologists are really terribly ethical. [All emphases
and punctuation as in the original Hubbard directive]

This directive was followed by a Hubbard Bulletin called
“The Anti-Social Personality, the Anti-Scientologist.”
¹⁶
(the two
being one and the same). Hubbard restated his earlier theory that 20 percent of
the population (the Suppressives and those under their influence, the Potential
Trouble Sources, combined) “oppose violently any betterment activity or group.”
He asserted that “When we trace the cause of a failing business, we will
inevitably discover somewhere in its ranks the anti-social personality hard at
work.”

In fact, the cause of all disaster at work or at home,
according to Hubbard, lies with Suppressive Persons. They are characterized by
a majority of the following traits and attributes. According to Hubbard, SPs
speak in generalities (“everybody knows”); deal mainly in bad news; worsen
communication they are relaying; fail to respond to psychotherapy (i.e.
Scientology); are surrounded by “cowed or ill associates or friends”;
habitually select the wrong target, or source; are unable to finish anything;
willingly confess to alarming crimes, without any sense of responsibility for
them; support only destructive groups; approve only destructive actions; detest
help being given to others, and use “helping” as a pretext to destroy others;
and believe that no-one really owns anything.

These points are Hubbard's reworkings of the characteristics
of the Anti-social Personality, or psychopath, given by Hervey Cleckley, MD, in
his 1950s book
The Mask of Sanity
.

Having failed to secure a “safe-point” in Rhodesia from
which to resist the encroachments of the Suppressives, Hubbard planned to take
to the High Seas. At the end of 1966, he incorporated the Hubbard Explorational
Company Ltd. He titled himself the “expedition supervisor,” holding 97 of the
100 issued shares. The stated object of the HEC was to “explore oceans, seas,
lakes, rivers and waters, land and buildings in any part of the world and to
seek for, survey, examine and test properties of all kinds.”
¹⁷

Hubbard was still a member of the Explorers Club of New
York, and was authorized to fly their flag on his proposed Hubbard Geological
Survey Expedition, which was going to make a geological survey of “a belt from
Italy through Greece and Egypt and along the Gulf of Aden and the East Coast of
Africa.” The survey was intended to “draw a picture of an area which has been
the scene of the earlier and basic civilizations of the planet and from which
some conclusions may possibly be made relating to geological predispositions
required for civilized growth.”
¹⁸
The expedition never took place.
Hubbard was good at promoting expeditions, even at inventing their details, but
not so good at actually carrying them out.

Having given his last Saint Hill Briefing Course lecture,
Hubbard left for North Africa at the end of 1966. On December 5, British Health
Minister Kenneth Robinson denied that an Inquiry was necessary, but denounced
Scientology as “potentially harmful,” adding “I have no doubt that Scientology
is totally valueless in promoting health.”
¹⁹
Hubbard responded in
usual form with a 20 page internal memo, asserting that the crimes of government
would prove far more interesting to the newspapers than those of Scientology.
Hubbard believed that events could be turned against the representatives of
government, putting them into the courtroom rather than Scientology. He wanted
nothing short of Kenneth Robinson and Lord Balniel's resignations. The emphases
of the attack were to be religious persecution and psychiatric mayhem.
Scientology's opponents were simply dismissed as fascists:

If we play this right, these people go on trial, not us, and
if we hit hard enough with our statement, we may never even have to appear in
the courtroom ... We are very pale news copy. Theirs is sensational, injury,
murder, extortion, insanity, misappropriation ... Our objective is to cause
Robinson to resign under a cloud just by filing a suit, to cause psychiatry to
be looked on as an extortion racket that demands money under the threat of
torture ... You'll find this will mob hysteria [sic] people ... And to cause
Balneil and the connected MPs to resign ... Religious prejudice is horrid to
the English. So perchance this can be salted in ... In short if we do this
right, we cause a political uproar, a stampede, against psychiatrists and
enough resignations to make the enemy too weak to fight ... Now is the time for
all out boiling oil before they batter in the main gate ... Right wing is a
spit word in world press today. So we must insert it where we can ... right
wing torture groups run the largest multi-billion dollar extortion racket in
history.
²⁰

Neither Robinson not Balniel resigned their Government
positions, nor were any psychiatrists stampeded. However, on February 28, 1967,
every Member of Parliament received a letter from the Hubbard College of
Scientology. The letter spoke of the Karen Henslow case of a few months before:
“This unhappy story gave the newspapers and others of a lurid turn of mind the
opportunity to further their vehement attack against us with libel and slander.
And so the pattern repeats itself, the well worn pattern.”
²¹

The letter went on to ask who was “behind this pattern of
attack,” and after discoursing on Scientologists' friendly relations with
medicine in general, concluded with an attack on psychiatry in particular,
adding “Like the Russian authorities, we believe that brain surgery is an
assault and rape of the individual personality.”

Hubbard's public relations “technology” only succeeded in
bringing the boiling oil down upon Scientology. The letter inevitably created
an effect, but not necessarily that expected by its author. On March 6, 1967,
Kenneth Robinson made a further statement about Scientology in the House of
Commons
²²
:

I do not want to give the impression that there is
anything illegal in the offering by unskilled people of processes intended in
part to relieve or remove mental disturbance ... provided that no claim is made
of qualified medical skill ... What they do, however, is to direct themselves
deliberately towards the weak, the unbalanced, the immature, the rootless and
the mentally or emotionally unstable; to promise them remolded, mature
personalities and to set about fulfilling the promise by means of untrained
staff, ignorantly practicing quasi-psychological techniques, including
hypnosis...

I am satisfied that the condition of mentally
disturbed people who have taken scientology courses has, to say the least, not
generally improved thereby ... My present decision on legislation may
disappoint the honorable Members, but I would like to remind them that the
harsh light of publicity can sometimes work almost as effectively. Scientology
thrives on a climate of ignorance and indifference...

What I have tried to do in this debate is to alert the
public to the facts about scientology, to the potential dangers in which anyone
considering taking it up may find himself, and to the utter hollowness of the
claims made for the cult.

Meanwhile, Hubbard added “Degraded Beings” to Suppressives,
and Potential Trouble Sources. While the latter two groups comprised only one
in five of the world's population, “Degraded Beings” outnumbered “Big Beings”
by 18 to one.
²³
In Hubbard's eyes, Kenneth Robinson was undoubtedly
not only a Suppressive Person, but also a Degraded Being.

Business was still fair, and the Scientology Church in
Britain showed a total income of £457,277 for the year ending April 1967 (an
average of almost £9,000 pounds per week)
²⁴
Hubbard gave the
following instructions to his subordinates a few months later
²⁵
:

The real stable datum in handling tax people is NEVER VOLUNTEER
ANY INFORMATION ... The thing to do is to assign a significance to the figures
before the government can ... I normally think of a better significance than
the government can. I always put enough errors on a return to satisfy their
bloodsucking appetite and STILL come out zero. The game of accounting is just a
game of assigning significance to figures. The man with the most imagination
wins.

True to these maxims, the 1966-1967 accounts contained
several creative designations for expenditure. Directors' fees stood at only
£2,914, but £39,426 was justified as “provision for bad debts,” and an astonishing
£70,000 as “expenditure of United States Mailing List and Promotion.” The
previous year, £80,000 had been charged under this heading. In 1967-1968 the
figure was again £70,000.
²⁶

British action against Scientology was growing. The Ministry
of Labor reported that a hundred American teachers of Scientology were to be
banned from Britain.
²⁷
In a dramatic move, 500 Scientologists were
interviewed by the police as they arrived at Saint Hill.
²⁸
This
fiasco resulted in one American being fined £15 for failing to register as an alien,
occasioning UFO cartoons in the newspapers.

Hubbard had spent the last weeks of 1966 “researching” OT3
in North Africa. In a letter of the time, he admitted that he was taking drugs
(“pinks and grays”) to assist his research.
²⁹
Early in 1967, Hubbard
flew to Las Palmas, and Virginia Downsborough, who cared for him after his
arrival, was astonished that he was existing almost totally on a diet of drugs.
For three weeks Hubbard was bedridden, while Downsborough weaned him off this
diet. He was obsessed with removing his “body-thetans.”

The Enchanter
, a 50-foot Bermuda ketch, sailed to
meet him in Las Palmas. Her dedicated Scientologist crew of 19 were known as
the Sea Project.
³¹
Their formation and their departure from England
were highly secretive. The Hubbard Explorational Company started to draw
$15,000 per month from the Church of Scientology of California.
³²
The Church also paid $125,000 into one of Hubbard's Swiss accounts.
³³

From Las Palmas, having just forgiven Scientology $13
million, Hubbard issued orders that every Org set up an “LRH Good Will Repayment
Account” at their local bank. Executives who failed to do so would be
dismissed, as they were “stealing ... or at least not on our side.”
³⁴
Hubbard also ordered the Church of Scientology to buy Saint Hill from him.
³⁵

As the British Health Minister had predicted, the “harsh
light of publicity” had done its work, and Scientology had been propelled into
the public eye. By August, Saint Hill was taking in as much as £40,000 a week
³⁶
,
almost five times its income of the previous year.

1.
   
Organization Executive Course
, vol.7, pp.494 & 503.

2.
   
Scientology spokesperson to the East Grinstead Courier, 12 August 1983.

3.
   
Paragraph 81.

4.
   
Hubbard even had his photograph taken while in Rhodesia, wearing a
Rhodes style outfit.

5.
   
The Chronicle, Bulawayo, 14 July 1966.

6.
   
Foster report, paragraph 32; Evans, pp.85-6; Malko, Scientology the Now
Religion, p.82; Hubbard, 'About Rhodesia', tape no.6607C18.

7.
   
The
Auditor
, issue 19.

8.
   
CSC v Commissioner of Internal Revenue, docket no.3352-78, ruling 24
September 1984.

9.
   
Author interviews with McMaster and with a former Sea Org executive.

10.
 
Foster
paragraph 69; “Founder” HCO PL,
Organization Executive Course
, vol.7,
p.579.

11.
 
Organization
Executive Course
, vol.3, p.348, “I have decided to remain as signatory on
every account which exists in the organizations”; this was confirmed by Mary
Sue Hubbard in CSC v. Armstrong, vol.17, pp.2789-90.

12.
 
Author
interview with a member of the LRH Finance Committee.

13.
 
Sullivan
in CSC v. Armstrong, vol.19, pp.3222-3.

14.
 
News
of the World 28 July 1968; Author interview with an occupant of the same
rooming house as Henslow; C.H. Rolph, Believe What You Like, pp.39 & 85;
Wallis, p.194; Evans, p.88; Cooper, p.61.

15.
 
HCO
Executive Letter of 5 September 1966; reprinted in Foster, paragraph 181.

16.
 
Technical
Bulletins, vol.6, p.177.

17.
 
Foster,
paragraph 73.

18.
 
Explorers
Club letter to John Fudge, HCO, Washington, of 8 December 1966.

19.
 
Foster,
paragraph 11.

20.
 
CSC
v. Armstrong, exhibit 500-6H, read in, vol.13, pp.2036-42.

21.
 
Rolph,
pp.39f.

22.
 
Foster,
paragraph 13.

23.
 
Technical
Bulletins, vol.6, p.193.

24.
 
Foster,
paragraph 79.

25.
 
Organization
Executive Course
, vol.3, p.63.

26.
 
Foster,
paragraph 79.

27.
 
Daily Sketch 11 March
1967.

28.
 
ibid
,
26 April 1967.

29.
 
Author
interview with Armstrong, 1984. The letter was to his wife.

30.
 
Author
interview with Downsborough, Santa Barbara, October 1986.