Inside Scientology (14 page)

The people of Rhodesia had no idea about Hubbard's plans. In several media interviews, he said he had come to Africa as a tourist, claiming to have distanced himself from Scientology.
But Hubbard's strategy fell apart when the Rhodesian government, apparently suspicious of his motives, refused to renew his visa.
Returning to England, Hubbard began to consider the future. For Scientology to flourish, he knew, it needed a secure home away from government oversight. There weren't many places in the world where that could be found. Then it came to him: 75 percent of the earth's surface was free from the control of any government. It was ocean.

That fall, Hubbard purchased a small fleet of ships and set off for North Africa. The first ship, a fifty-foot Bermuda ketch called the
Enchanter,
sailed from England to the Canary Islands at the end of 1966, followed by a trawler, the
Avon River,
and later a larger, more impressive ship, the
Royal Scotsman,
the flagship of the fleet. For the better part of the next ten years, these ships plied the waters of the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, finding temporary ports in Las Palmas, Tangier, Valencia, Corfu, Lisbon, Tenerife, Madeira, and many points in between. Hubbard was now commodore of this small fleet; Mary Sue was a captain, and his teenage daughter, Diana, a redhead like her father, was lieutenant commander. And those serving Hubbard and his family—a private navy, complete with uniforms—were called the Sea Organization.

These were Hubbard's closest disciples: longtime Scientologists who'd been with Hubbard since the 1950s, associates who had worked with him at Saint Hill, and increasingly, a cadre of younger and even more dedicated followers. Their work was highly confidential, and few other Scientologists knew anything about this shadowy team. Jeff's knowledge of the Sea Org was nil, except for the fact that Doreen was a member. And now she was running the show at Pubs.

"We are in the middle of a
war,
and this organization has been slack, slack, slack!" Casey screamed at the assembled Scientologists. "That's ending right now." Jeff almost laughed. Did she mean a literal war? Who was this woman? Then he looked around. The organization's leader, David Ziff, an heir to the Ziff-Davis publishing dynasty,
was nowhere to be found. Casey announced that Ziff had been removed from his post and sent away for ethics handling. Scientology was on a campaign to get Hubbard's books into as many bookstores around the world as they could. But they were failing, said Casey, because Pubs failed to deliver the books. Now the Sea Org would be in control, and she had come to get this organization "back on the rails." From now on, everyone would report to her—and address her as "sir," she informed them. The "hippie atmosphere" would no longer be tolerated. Long hair was to be cut short, beards were to be shaved, and workers were to call
all
of their superiors "sir," even if the sir in question was a female.

Under this new military-style discipline, which would soon be reflected throughout Scientology, if a design wasn't finished on time or a production order not met, staffers would be ordered to sleep among the books on the cold cement floor of the stockroom. Those who still did not produce and ship books fast enough would be "offloaded": sent to a smaller, more remote organization as punishment. "Either you are one hundred percent with me or you are against me," Casey said, in a threatening way. "And you will be dealt with accordingly."

We are at war.
This, in fact, was a proclamation coming from L. Ron Hubbard himself, though Jeff had always taken it to be a metaphor. Hubbard first hinted at this conflict in a taped message, titled "Ron's Journal '67," that began to make its way through Scientology organizations in early 1968. Speaking to his followers for the first time since his disappearance, the Founder said nothing about his whereabouts other than that he was on an island, with a view of "the wide blue sea with ships passing by, a few fleecy clouds overhead, and the bright sun shining down." Jeff, who had heard the tape months before Casey arrived, concluded that wherever Hubbard was, it sounded amazing. But far more astounding was what Hubbard had to say.

"I am giving you this short talk because you might have wondered what I was doing," Hubbard began. What he'd been doing, as it turned out, was discovering whole new levels of existence. He explained that he had been researching the most extraordinary realm of consciousness, a realm he had only just discovered, known as "Operating Thetan." An "OT," Hubbard said, was the most enlightened being in the universe, capable of operating "totally independent of his body, whether he had one or didn't have one." No one prior to the birth of Scientology had ever achieved this exalted state. Now, however, select Scientologists would be able to learn the techniques that made this possible, through a series of auditing processes known as the "OT levels."

Over the past year, Hubbard said, he'd been on a search for the deepest mysteries of the universe, a journey that took him through what he called the "Wall of Fire." The quest had been risky, and just that past winter, he said, he'd become very ill as a result of his efforts. And yet he managed to learn the truth and survived the experience, though barely. "The material involved ... is so vicious that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it," he warned. "I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material."

Hubbard didn't elaborate too much on the tape about what his adventures had entailed, nor what he had discovered. But he hinted that an incident of catastrophic proportions had occurred seventy-five million years ago, an event so traumatic that its residuals were still being felt on Earth to this day. His new OTs, represented initially by the Sea Org, would lead the charge to rehabilitate the planet against a small but powerful band of opponents.

"Our enemies are less than twelve men," he said via "Ron's Journal '67." "They are members of the Bank of England, and other higher financial circles. They own and control newspaper chains, and they are all, oddly enough, directors in all the mental health groups in the world." Most of the world's leading heads of state, including Britain's prime minister, Harold Wilson, were, according to Hubbard, under the control of these individuals.

The church now had private investigators in its employ, digging into the backgrounds of various bankers, journalists, and politicians. Scientologists would learn more about these activities, though only in vague references, as Hubbard issued many more directives pertaining to the battle ahead. "We are rolling up the heavy guns quietly and getting things exactly timed," he said in a letter to his staff on November 4, 1968.
Several weeks later, Hubbard announced that he had isolated the enemy and was readying a counterattack.

Then, on November 29, 1968, Hubbard made his most dramatic declaration to date in a memo to all staff, titled "The War." Hubbard revealed that the twelve individuals he had formerly referred to were merely a front for a much larger, more dangerous enemy: the World Federation of Mental Health. Hubbard often called it SMERSH, a reference to both the Stalin-era counterintelligence units of the Soviet army and the fictional nemesis of James Bond. This organization had been behind every attack on Dianetics and Scientology since 1950, Hubbard said. The Founder had begun to view psychiatrists as not simply suppressive but the ancient enemy of mankind, responsible for the enslavement of the human race. Psychiatry and the broader field of mental health, he explained, were chosen long ago as "a vehicle to undermine and destroy the West." But the Church of Scientology had stood in its way. Now, Hubbard said, Scientologists had "the goods" on SMERSH and intended to battle its forces worldwide, using every legal means at their disposal. "We don't stoop to murder and rough house. But man, the effectiveness of our means will become history," he wrote, though he never specified which tactics
would
be used. "It's a tough war. All wars are tough. It isn't over."

War.
That was pretty much the opposite of what Jeff Hawkins, pacifist, ex-hippie, onetime anti-war protestor, stood for. One of the reasons he'd joined Scientology was because of its doctrine of world peace. But those thoughts would come much later—years later. At the time, Hubbard's directive, his "battle plan," as his missives were often called, seemed thrilling—a cause! Few staff members had time to wonder about all the evildoers. A wave of panic now washed over the organizations. The future of the world was at stake and they, the Scientologists, weren't doing enough. They
had
to do more. "In all the broad Universe," Hubbard said, "there is no other hope for Man than ourselves."

By the beginning of 1969, Scientologists around the world were dedicated to fighting Hubbard's war on psychiatry. In Britain, where L. Ron Hubbard had been declared an "undesirable alien" and his movement denounced in Parliament as a "pseudo-philosophical cult,"
Scientologists began to picket the London offices of national mental health organizations, carrying banners that said
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In Edinburgh, Jeff and his Pubs colleagues conducted a late-night raid of what they were told was the local headquarters of the World Federation of Mental Health. "We rushed through the building, putting up lurid posters depicting psychiatrists as leering death's-head skulls, terrorizing innocent citizens," he said. "It seemed like a college prank."

But Hubbard's goals were deadly serious. As early as 1960, Hubbard had been considering how Scientology might take over society. "We are masters of IQ and ability,"
he wrote in a policy letter titled "The Special Zone Plan." "We have know-how. Any of us could select out a zone of life in which we are interested and then, entering it, bring order and victory to it." A housewife, for example, might take over her local garden club, and then, using Scientology's communications technology, could begin to present various Hubbardian ideas on marriage and child rearing. A junior executive might use the same techniques and "if only as 'an able person' he would rapidly expand a zone of control, to say nothing of his personal standing in the company." Hubbard also advised that the same techniques could be used in a more sophisticated sphere, such as government. "Don't bother to get elected," he instructed. "Get a job on the secretarial staff [of a politician] or [be] the bodyguard, use any talent one has to get a place close in." From that trusted post, he argued, Scientologists could wield tremendous power.

Hubbard also had instructed his troops how to do battle. "If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace," he instructed in one policy letter.
"Don't ever defend, always attack. Don't ever do nothing. Unexpected attacks in the rear of the enemy's front ranks work best."

Now, in a memo to his wife written on December 2, 1969, Hubbard laid out the purpose of his war: "To take over absolutely the field of mental healing on this planet in all forms."
That was not the original purpose of Scientology, he noted. "The original purpose was to clear Earth." But the various battles Scientology had engaged in over the years had led him to the inevitable conclusion that the enemy, psychiatry and its many front groups, would have to be eradicated.

Mary Sue Hubbard received in this missive her appointment as Chief Guardian and Controller of the Church of Scientology, reflecting her leadership of a special organ of the church known as the Guardian's Office. Created by Hubbard in 1966, its job was to enforce church policy and "safeguard Scientology orgs, Scientologists, and Scientology," as Hubbard put it.
Guardians held the highest posts on Scientology's board of directors. They ran its legal apparatus, its finance office, and its public relations and social outreach bureaus, which targeted such areas of concern as drug and criminal rehabilitation, education reform, and "eradicating mental health abuse"; the latter was handled by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an advocacy group formed by the Guardian's Office in 1969. The Guardian's Office also ran a highly sophisticated intelligence operation that collected and maintained files on Scientology's growing list of enemies. Its guiding principle was attack. Under Mary Sue's leadership (though always, it was understood, with the approval of her husband), the Guardian's Office filed dozens of libel suits against media outlets that had run negative stories about Scientology; gathered intelligence on members of various state, local, and national governments; and launched myriad propaganda campaigns and attacks on psychiatrists and psychiatric organizations.

Hubbard directed his war through written proclamation; his operatives carried it out. On March 26, 1969, for example, the leader issued an order, titled "Zones of Action," instructing his followers to "invade the territory of Smersh" and "purify the mental health field." Several months later, the Guardian's Office, acting on Hubbard's orders, initiated a strategy to take over England's National Association of Mental Health. The plan was fairly simple: Scientologists, seeing that NAMH membership was open to the public, began joining the organization in large numbers—in October 1969, the NAMH, after receiving no more than 10 or 15 membership applications per month, suddenly saw the number jump to 227. By November, there were 302 new members. The organization's annual meeting, in which it elected new leaders, was scheduled for November 12, 1969; suddenly, there came a flurry of nominations from the new members, suggesting eight of their own for positions on the council.