Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (61 page)

On March 23, 1984, the English High Court issued a Summons
on behalf of the “Church of Scientology Advanced Organization Saint Hill Europe
and Africa” requesting an injunction against Robin Scott, Morag Bellmaine, and
Ron Lawley to restrain them from the use, distribution or copying of the stolen
NOTs packs. A temporary injunction was issued, pending the response of the
Defendants. The surveillance by private detectives continued. A similar order
was issued in Scotland a few days later, again naming Scott, and adding several
of the staff at Candacraig.

The East Grinstead newspapers carried an article announcing
that the Church was offering a £120,000 reward for information “leading to the
recovery of what are said to be scriptures stolen from its European
headquarters.” The use of the word “scriptures,” first introduced at the
Mission Holders’ Conference in 1982, still came as a surprise. Despite
Scientology’s alleged religious nature, very few Scientologists thought of
Hubbard’s writings as scriptures. After all, Hubbard claimed that they were
scientific research.

After nearly five weeks in jail, the theft charge against
Robin Scott was thrown out by the Danish judge, but he was found guilty of a mixture
of industrial espionage and trespass. He was given a four month sentence, the
remainder of which was suspended. The Church issued a triumphant account in
their “Keeping Scientology Working News.” In the newsletter, Scott is called an
“apostate,” and there are three photographs taken at the time of his arrest,
all giving a good view of the back of Scott’s head.

In March 1984, Hubbard reinforced his alibi for failures of
the Tech. Such failures could be attributed to insufficient Security Checking,
“evil purposes,” communication with Suppressives, or paying heed to any
criticism of Scientology.
²
Many Independents had received tens, even
hundreds of hours of such counseling whilst in the Church. In fact, this
obsession with the evil that men do was a major reason for the disintegration
of the Church.

Solo NOTs, or “New OT7,” had been released to Scientologists
in 1979. After five years, usually of daily “solo-auditing,” no-one in the
Church had finished the level. With some relief, Independents were at last
allowed to attest their completion. Realizing the situation, the “Captain” of
Flag, in Clearwater, sent out a letter to Church members on this highest level
³
:
“I am somewhat alarmed that no one has completed yet ... Someone has to be
first.” A flood of Church completions started three months later.

In the United States, Religious Technology Center member
Kurt Weiland had moved into an apartment above the AAC in Santa Barbara. While
there Weiland did everything possible to upset those below, including
haranguing and snapping photographs of arriving clients, and playing deafening
music. Eventually, an injunction was issued protecting Mayo and his staff and
clients from this childish but extremely disturbing behavior.

Such harassment of Independents was widespread. An
Independent was picked up by Swedish police, again accompanied by Sea Org members.
It took three days for the police to realize that they could not charge the
man, and he was released. A girl was picked up in Munich, again based on
trumped up charges. She was released, but the aftermath was a little more
serious: At the end of May, German officials raided both the Munich Scientology
Org and the Mission, and carted away reams of documents.

Shortly before the German raid, Scottish Independent Fred
Smithers called me. He explained that his stepson, Gulliver, was a member of
CMO UK at Saint Hill. Gulliver had just phoned him to say he wanted to leave
the Church. Fred asked if I could give Gulliver a room for the night. He
arrived that Sunday evening while we were having dinner with friends. It came
as a shock when he realized his stepfather had sent him into the lair of an
infamous Suppressive, but he soon recovered and sustained a two hour interview.
The incredulity of his audience increased by the minute.

For six months, Gulliver had been a top executive in the
Commodore’s Messenger Organization UK, which controlled all other Scientology
organizations in Britain. He rated himself one of the top four executives in

CMO UK. He was fourteen years old. He explained that there
were several others his age, and some “kids” in CMO!

The Watchdog Committee were now bypassing the whole
elaborate management structure of the Church. They were sending telexes down to
individual Orgs on a daily basis, often hourly, demanding “compliance.”

A CMO newsletter
⁴
had claimed that the CMO
“Continental” units (including the UK) are “the OBSERVATION, EXECUTION and
POLICE ARM of WDC” (emphasis in original). Gulliver’s job was to enforce
Watchdog Committee orders. He had been in charge of seasoned Sea Org veterans,
OTs who had received a great deal of auditing, and were highly trained
counselors well versed in Scientology administration, having done the “
Organization
Executive Course
,” and sometimes even the “Flag Executive Briefing Course.”
They had had months of training, and years of on-the-job experience. Gulliver
had neither.

In a Scientology organization everything is meant to be done
per Policy (in accordance with the thousands of Policy Letters written almost
exclusively by Hubbard). Policy is very elaborate, but hinges on certain basic
ideas. Among these are the supposed right to question an order, and the right
to demand that an order be put in writing. A CMO teenager would frequently
issue a verbal order, and threaten the recipient with the Rehabilitation
Project Force (RPF) if the order was questioned. Again the staff member
theoretically has a right to demand a Committee of Evidence prior to assignment
to the RPF, which is reasonable as an RPF can take anything up to two years to
complete. These rights were all denied.

Gulliver said that all of the UK Organizations were losing
money. He also said that the majority of the money they did make was sent to
America, so periodically the Watchdog Committee would have to pay even the
lighting and heating bills, following a complex Purchase Order system. Nearly
all of the UK Orgs had their telephones disconnected at some point during 1984,
because of the delay in receiving funds.

The Sea Org crew at Saint Hill had been living on a diet of
rice and beans throughout Gulliver’s six months there. The high point of their
week would be a baked potato with cheese or soup. This diet, and the
deprivation of sleep which is usual for Sea Org members, can tell dramatically.
Sea Org members have for years collected hundreds of millions of dollars, in
return for bare subsistence, and pitiful “wages.” Gulliver was paid £1.25 for
his last week’s work, (less than $2 US), and this as a senior executive. Sea
Org pay is usually less than £4 a week, and often measured in pence. With this
pittance, most buy chocolate, tobacco, or a junk meal on their weekly morning
off.

Most alarming of all, the 14-year-old Gulliver talked about
the last Watchdog Committee program he had worked on, the “Non-SO spouse
program” (“SO” being Sea Org). Sea Org members whose spouses were not in the
Sea Org were either to persuade them to join up, or to divorce them. When I
wrote my article about the meeting (inevitably called “Gulliver’s Travels”) for
the Independent newsletter, Reconnection, I felt compelled to draw a parallel
to the chapter in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
called “The
Queen’s Croquet Ground,” where the players use live hedgehogs for balls, and
flamingos for mallets. The Church had entered the realms of the utterly
surreal.

1.
   
Author’s interviews with Scott, Lawley and Bellmaine; also Scott tape,
1984.

2.
   
HCOB “C/S series 119 - Dianetic Clear: Solved”, HCOB 27 March 1984.

3.
   
Flag Captain Ron Norton letter of April 1984.

4.
   
Central Bureaux Order 746 “Organization Pattern: Continental Commodore’s
Messenger Orgs”, 16 August 1983, reprinted in CMO UK Newsletter no.5.

PART eight

“All that Ethics is for ... is simply
that additional tool necessary to make it possible to apply the technology of
Scientology. Man does not have that purpose for his law or his justice. He
wants to squash people who are giving him trouble.”

—L.
Ron Hubbard,
Introduction to Scientology Ethics
¹

Chapter Thirty-Five

“The law can be used very easily to
harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway
... will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible,
of course, ruin him utterly.”

—L. Ron
Hubbard,
The Scientologist
, March 1955
²

The litigious nature of the Church of Scientology is
well-known. It has waged a 20-year battle against the Internal Revenue Service
in the United States. The IRS insist that the profits of Scientology have accrued
to the benefit of a private individual, namely L. Ron Hubbard. There was a
10-year battle against the Food and Drug Administration. The Courts upheld the
FDA’s assertion that the E-meter was improperly labeled. But the Church did
manage to overturn a ruling that material seized from them be destroyed. So the
Church, as usual, claims victory. In the 1970s in France, Hubbard was sentenced
in absentia to a prison term for fraud.

In the 1970s the Church fought to prevent the sale of books
critical of Scientology. They failed in this attempt, but caused authors George
Malko, Paulette Cooper, Cyril Vosper and Robert Kaufman considerable difficulty
(not only from the law suits: Roy Wallis, in his
Salvation and Protest
,
described the harassment he received after writing about Scientology). In 1982,
Paulette Cooper, author of
The Scandal of Scientology
testified that the
Church had brought 18 suits against her. More recently Russell Miller has
defended against attempts to prevent distribution of his
BareFaced Messiah
in England, Canada, Australia and the United States.

In 1983, the Legal office of the Church admitted that it did
not know how many suits were outstanding in England alone. So many writs had
been issued for libel it had lost track.
³
In 1968, 38 libel suits
were dropped by the Church in England alone. Cases which continued were
uniformly lost by the Church.

Boston attorney Michael Flynn won 14 of the 16 complaints
brought against him by the Church, the remaining two being withdrawn. The
Church has from time to time filed suits against the FBI, the IRS, the Justice
Department, Interpol and even against Henry Kissinger, for $800 million.

Scientology has filed hundreds of cases over the years. Most
have been withdrawn before trial, but in Britain suits against a former Police
Commissioner,
⁴
and Member of Parliament Geoffrey Johnson-Smith were
both lost by the Church. In return, there have been hundreds of suits filed
against Scientology. The Church was forced to pay substantial damages to former
Health Minister, Kenneth Robinson, and withdraw their allegations that he had
instigated “death camps,” likened by the Church to Belsen and Auschwitz.
⁵

Also in the legal arena are the reports of the many
Commissions of Inquiry, and of several US Grand Jury investigations. These run
to tens of thousands of pages. Two books have been written about the attempt
made by the Guardian’s Office to take-over the National Association of Mental
Health in the UK in the late 1960s, which also ended in a ruling against
Scientology in the English High Court.

Of all the court cases, two stand out. Their verdicts came
down within a month of each another: one in Los Angeles, the other in London.
The first and perhaps the most revealing to date, was the case brought by the
Scientologists against Gerald Armstrong.
⁶

Armstrong had joined the Sea Org in 1971. Over the years he
held various positions close to Hubbard. During the trial he gave detailed
testimony of these periods and of his time in the Rehabilitation Project Force.
His accounts highlighted the extreme duress of life in the Sea Org.

Armstrong saved over 20 boxes of Hubbard letters, diaries
and photographs from the shredder at Gilman Hot Springs. On January 8, 1980, he
wrote to Hubbard asking permission to collect material for a biography. A few
years earlier Hubbard had lamented that no biography could be written because
his personal documents had been stolen, and the great Conspiracy against him
would by now have altered all public records. Gerald Armstrong had the
beginnings of the necessary documentation.

Far from being stolen by the Russians in the early 1950s, as
Hubbard had claimed, his personal archive had quite remarkably been preserved.
When the Hubbards left Washington for Saint Hill, in spring 1959, the boxes had
been put into storage, where they stayed until the late 1970s. Somehow they had
been shipped to La Quinta, and thence to Gilman. Armstrong was excited, as it
would no longer be necessary to rely on the supposedly corrupted government
records, with Hubbard’s personal documents in hand.

Hubbard approved Armstrong’s request only days before he
went into deep hiding. Armstrong was titled “L. Ron Hubbard Personal Relations
Office Researcher,” and he collected over half a million pages of material by
the end of 1981.

Omar Garrison, who had already written two books favorable
to Scientology, was contracted to write the biography in October 1980, and the
Archives were made available to him. Armstrong became Garrison’s research
assistant, copying tens of thousands of the most relevant documents for Garrison’s
use.

In his judgment in the Scientologists’ case against
Armstrong, Judge Breckenridge explained the gradual erosion of Armstrong’s
faith in Hubbard
⁷
: