Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (45 page)

Mary Sue Hubbard’s deputy, Guardian Jane Kember, was a
fanatical Scientologist. It is worth quoting one of her Scientology Success Stories.
It was written in 1966, before the GO really gathered steam:

Before Scientology I couldn’t have a baby, having miscarriage
after miscarriage. I have recently had twin boys, after training and processing
in Scientology. Before Scientology I had kidney trouble. I have no kidney
trouble now. Before Scientology I had skin trouble, chronic indigestion, was
very nervous, very unhappy, highly critical of all around me, felt inferior,
inadequate and unable to cope with life. Now the skin troubles have gone and
the chronic indigestion. I am no longer nervous, feel happy, have lost my
inferiority complex and feel no need to criticize others.
²⁰

No wonder Kember later ran the Guardian’s Office with steely
and unswerving devotion.

In 1971, Alexis, Ron’s 21-year-old daughter by his second
marriage, started trying to find him.
²¹
Ron sent instructions to
Jane Kember to deal with what he saw as a potential embarrassment. Alexis is
undoubtedly Hubbard’s daughter, but he had lost all paternal feeling for her,
and had dropped contact with her after his divorce from her mother in 1951.

On Hubbard’s instructions, two GO agents visited Alexis, and
read a letter to her. Kember had followed her orders exactly. The letter had
been typed on a “non-general-use” typewriter, which is to say the typewriter
was used solely for this letter and then ditched.

The letter that Hubbard sent to Kember for her to relay to
Alexis came to light in the Armstrong case. Hubbard’s description of events, as
given in the letter, is manifestly different from the facts. He claimed that
Sara had been his secretary in Georgia, at the end of 1948. In July 1949, she
had arrived in New Jersey, where Hubbard was supposedly working on a film
script, flat broke and pregnant. Hubbard referred to Sara’s involvement with
Jack Parsons, and claimed to be unsure who she had lived with in Pasadena. He
further claimed that Sara had tried to take the Los Angeles Dianetic Foundation
as part of a divorce settlement. Hubbard said that Sara could not obtain such a
settlement, because legally they had not been married. Hubbard’s description of
events is manifestly different from the facts
²²
:

Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late
1948 ... In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey writing a movie. She
turned up destitute and pregnant. I do not know who she was living with in Pasadena,
but she was closely associated with Jack Parsons ... I came up to Palm Springs,
California where I was living and found you abandoned ... [Sara and her husband
to be] obtained considerable newspaper publicity, none of it true, and employed
the highest priced divorce attorney in the U.S. to sue me for divorce and get
the foundation in Los Angeles in settlement. This proved a puzzle since there
was no legal marriage, there can’t be any divorce.

The wording is 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.

Under Jane Kember’s direction, the Guardian’s Office ran
scores of operations, many illegal, many more simply immoral. She irrefutably
received her orders from the Hubbards. Written orders survive.

In 1976, the GO was determined to silence all opposition in
the City of Clearwater. Mayor Cazares was its chief target. A GO agent, posing
as a reporter, interviewed the mayor when he was on a visit to Washington, DC.
The “reporter” introduced Cazares to Sharon Thomas, another GO agent. She
offered to show Cazares the sights of Washington. While they were driving, they
ran into a pedestrian. Sharon Thomas drove on. The Mayor did not know that the
“victim” of the accident was yet another GO agent, Michael Meisner.
²³

The GO was sure that it could use Cazares’ failure to report
the accident to its advantage. The next day an internal dispatch gloated, that
Cazares’ political career was finished.
²⁴
That same day, Hubbard
sent a dispatch asking whether the Miami Cubans could be persuaded that Cazares
supported Castro: “I should think the Mayor’s political days are at an end.”
²⁴
That same day, Hubbard wrote, “Cazares - is there still some possibility the
Cubans in Miami might get the idea he is pro-Castro?”
²⁵

The GO initiated “Operation Italian Fog” which was to bribe
officials to put forged documents into Mexican records showing that

Cazares had been married twenty-five years before.
²⁶
The Scientologists could then accuse him of bigamy:

“The purpose of this Op[eration] is actually to get real
documentation into the files of the Mexican license bureau or bureaus stating
that the Mayor got married in Mexico to some Mexican gal 25 years ago ... puts
the Mayor in a position of bigamy. This can be accomplished by a bribe or a
covert action.”

To gain information for an inside story, an editor at the
Clearwater
Sun
enrolled on the Communication Course in the Tampa Org. The staff at the
Sun
did not know that their every move was being leaked to the GO by
agent June Phillips.
²⁷
The Scientologists saw the editor’s move as
“infiltration” and Phillips reported that the editor was traumatized when a
suit was filed against him and the Sun for a quarter of a million dollars. The
Scientologists charged that he had caused their members “extreme mental
anguish, suffering and humiliation.”
²⁸

“Op Yellow,” launched in April 1976, was to consist of
sending an anonymous letter to Clearwater businesses congratulating the mayor
for his Christian hostility to Scientology, and for keeping the Miami Jews out
and the Clearwater Negroes where they belonged:

Fellow Clearwaterians ... God bless the Mayor. He is a true
Christian and the entire town should be proud of him. He has stood up against
un-Christian Scientology and God is obviously with him. On the Scientology
issues, the Mayor is right. We back him all the way. But what we should also do
is make sure no more undesirables move into Clearwater. We kept the Miami Jews
from moving in and turning beautiful Clearwater into Miami Beach. The blacks in
Clearwater are decent and know their place.
²⁹

After the publication of her book
The Scandal of
Scientology
, in 1971, Paulette Cooper became a major target for harassment.
Distribution of her book was severely restricted through a series of court
actions in different states, and even different countries. Cooper simply did
not have the legal or financial resources to defend against all of these actions.
As a result of a GO Op she was indicted for making a bomb threat against the
Church of Scientology. The GO wanted to finish her off for good. The purpose of
Operation Freakout was “to get P.C. [Paulette Cooper] incarcerated in a mental
institution or jail, or at least hit her so hard that she drops her attacks.” Randy
Windment (aka Bruce Raymond), who wrote “Op Freakout,” added “The FBI already
think she really did the bomb threats on the C of S.”
³⁰

A US Court Sentencing Memorandum gave this description of Operation
Freakout:

In its initial form Operation Freakout had three different
plans. The first required a woman to imitate Paulette Cooper’s voice and make
telephone threats to Arab Consulates in New York. The second scheme involved
mailing a threatening letter to an Arab Consulate in such a fashion that it
would appear to have been done by Paulette Cooper. Finally, a Scientology field
staff member was to impersonate Paulette Cooper at a laundry and threaten the
President and the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A second
Scientologist would thereafter advise the FBI of the threat.

Two additional plans to Operation Freakout were added on
April 13, 1976. The fourth plan called for Scientology field staff members who
had ingratiated themselves with Cooper to gather information from Cooper so
Scientology could assess the success of the first three plans. The fifth plan
was for a Scientologist to warn an Arab Consulate by telephone that Paulette
Cooper had been talking about bombing them.

The sixth and final part of Operation Freakout called for
Scientologists to obtain Paulette Cooper’s fingerprints on a blank piece of
paper, type a threatening letter to Kissinger on that paper, and mail it.
³¹

GO operations were burgeoning. Operation Devil’s Wop was an
attack on an Arizona senator who had supported anti-cult groups.
³²
The Clearwater Chamber of Commerce had been infiltrated.
³³
Agents
had been inside the American Psychiatric Association for several years.
³⁴
The GO had penetrated anti-cult groups
³⁵
and newspapers,
³⁶
and was beginning to move into US government agencies, including the Coast
Guard.
³⁷

However, the vehement application of Fair Game, and the use
of the law to harass were making trouble for Hubbard. Those on the receiving
end wanted Hubbard himself to testify in court, which had to be avoided at all
costs. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent process servers from serving
Hubbard. His location was kept secret, and his retinue was ready to whisk him
away at a moments notice. In May 1976, Hubbard fled, shrouded in secrecy, from
Washington DC to Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles.
³⁸
With him
were only his wife and a few dedicated Sea Org staff. His new location was
codenamed Astra, and it maintained contact with, and control of Scientology
through telex links to Church management in Clearwater, and to the Guardian’s
Office in Los Angeles.

In June 1976, the GO received the first blow against its
elaborate and highly successful Intelligence machine. A GO agent who had infiltrated
the IRS was arrested. For a month the GO carried on with their Ops, confidently
believing that the agent’s connections would never be traced.

Mayor Cazares was running as a congressional candidate. As a
part of “Op Keller” his opponent was offered supposedly damaging information
about Cazares. When the opponent declined the offer, a letter signed “Sharon T”
was mailed to politicians and newspapers in Florida. It sought to implicate
Cazares in the fake hit-and-run “accident” staged in Washington. To cover the
exits, an anonymous letter was sent to Cazares’ opponent, Bill Young, saying the
“Sharon T” letter was Cazares’ work, and that he would claim it had been a
dirty trick on Young’s part! Young turned the letter over to the FBI.
³⁹

In July, the GO instituted Operation Bulldozer Leak to “effectively
spread the rumor that will lead Government, media, and individual SPs
[Suppressive Persons] to conclude that LRH has no control of the C of S and no
legal liability for church activity.”
⁴⁰

Hubbard moved to a hacienda in La Quinta, near Palm Springs
in California. The hacienda was codenamed Rifle. About him he assembled the
Controller’s staff (Mary Sue’s assistants), a few chosen teenage Commodore’s
Messengers, and his Household Unit. For a while, they took a vacation from
Scientology, fulfilling the pretense of Hubbard’s lack of control. There were
no Scientology books at the hacienda, and Scientologese was briefly forbidden.
⁴¹
While the Commodore fiddled, the Guardian’s Office was beginning to burn.

Hubbard had been in such a rush to leave Florida that he had
left part of his gun collection behind. Shortly after “Op Bulldozer Leak” the
Assistant Guardian for Flag [Clearwater] reported: “The missing guns belonging
to the Boss have shown up in the custody of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF) ... [our] investigation to find the guns omitted a thorough
search of King Arthur’s Court ... Several days ago the guns were discovered in
Apt. No.1 ... by cleaners ... Due to an inventory list packed with the guns,
and an engraving on one of the guns, they know the Boss owns some of the guns.”
⁴²

One of the guns was a Mauser machine-pistol, which should
have been registered.
⁴³
Somehow the GO managed to avert prosecution.
But on the day the report on Ron’s guns was made, the FBI issued a warrant for
the arrest of one Michael Meisner.
⁴⁴
The FBI was beginning to make
the necessary connections.

1.
   
p.89.

2.
   
HCOPL 7 February 1965.

3.
   
Organizational Executive Course, vol.7, p.494.

4.
   
ibid
, p.503.

5.
   
Hubbard, What
is Scientology?, p.262.

6.
   
Author interview with former Hubbard telex clerk.

7.
   
Hubbard, Technical Bulletins, vol.2, p.157.

8.
   
Rolph, p.61.

9.
   
Daily
Telegraph, 26 November 1968; Rolph, p.63.

10.
 
Rolph,
p.101.

11.
 
Organizational
Executive Course, vol.7, p.521.

12.
 
Rolph,
p.102.

13.
 
ibid
,
pp.52-3.

14.
 
Sea
Org Executive Directive 1890, 26 March 1969.

15.
 
Rolph,
pp.102 & 116.

16.
 
Rolph,
pp.117-9.

17.
 
ibid
,
p.102.

18.
 
ibid
,
p.142.

19.
 
ibid
,
pp.86-7.

20.
 
The Auditor, no.15,
p.7.

21.
 
Sara
Northrup letter to Paulette Cooper, 1972; Armstrong in CSC v. Armstrong,
vol.12, p.1940.