Quantcast
An exhaustive information source on Scientology
AUTHOR: Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHED ON: April 25, 2003
DOC SOURCE: CCN

COLUMN ONE

Heading # 9

01664484                  53065
Column One
The Mind Behind the Religon
From a life haunted by emotional and financial troubles, L. Ron Hubbard
brought forth Scientology. He achieved godlike status among his
followers, and his death has not deterred the church’s efforts to reach
deeper into society.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Joel Sappell; Robert W. Welkos; Time Staff Writers
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Non Dup; Series; Main Story; Profile
Word Count: 3,122

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    It was a triumph of galactic proportions: Science fiction writer L. Ron
Hubbard had discarded the body that bound him to the physical universe and
was off to the next phase of his spiritual exploration–“on a planet a
galaxy away.”

    “Hip, hip, hurray!” thousands of Scientologists thundered inside the
Hollywood Palladium, where they had just been told of this remarkable feat.

    “Hip, hip, hurray! Hip, hip, hurray!” they continued to chant, gazing
at a large photograph of Hubbard, creator of their religion and author of
the best-selling “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.”

    Earlier that day, the Church of Scientology had summoned the faithful
throughout Los Angeles to a “big and exciting event” at the Palladium. They
were told nothing more, just to be there.

    As evening fell, thousands arrived, most decked out in the
spit-and-polish mockNavy uniforms that are symbolic of the organization’s
paramilitary structure.

    The excited assemblage was about to learn that their beloved leader, a
man who dubbed himself “The Commodore,” had died. Yet, death was never
mentioned.

    Instead, the Scientologists were told that Hubbard had finished his
spiritual research on this planet, charting a precise path for man to
achieve immortality. And now it was on to bigger challenges somewhere
beyond the stars.

    His body had “become an impediment to the work he now must do outside
of its confines,” the awe-struck crowd was informed. “The fact that he …
willingly discarded the body after it was no longer useful to him signifies
his ultimate success: the conquest of life that he embarked upon half a
century ago.”

    The death certificate would show that Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, 74, who
had not been seen publicly for nearly six years, died on Jan. 24, 1986, of
a stroke on his ranch outside San Luis Obispo.

    But to Scientologists, the man they affectionately called “Ron” had
ascended.

    The glorification of L. Ron Hubbard that brisk January night wasnot
surprising. Over more than three decades he had skillfully transformed
himself from a writer of pulp fiction to a writer of “sacred scriptures.”
Along the way, he made a fortune and achieved his dream of fame.
    “I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that
it will take a legendary form, even if all the books are destroyed,”
Hubbard wrote to the first of his three wives in 1938, more than a decade
before he created Scientology.

    “That goal,” he said, “is the real goal as far as I am concerned.”

    From the ground up, Hubbard built an international empire that started
as a collection of mental therapy centers and became one of the world’s
most controversial and secretive religions.

    The intensity, combativeness and salesmanship that distinguish
Scientology from other religions can be traced directly to Hubbard. For,
even in death, the man and his creation are inseparable.

    He wrote millions of words in scores of books instructing his followers
on everything from how to market Scientology to how to fend off critics.
His prolific and sometimes rambling discourses constitute the gospel of
Scientology, its structure and its soul. Deviations are punishable.

    Through his writings, Hubbard fortified his clannish organization with
a powerful intolerance of criticism and a fierce will to endure and
prosper. He wrote a Code of Honor that urged his followers to “never desert
a group to which you owe your support” and “never fear to hurt another in a
just cause.”

    He transmitted to his followers his suspicious view of the world–one
populated, he insisted, by madmen bent on Scientology’s destruction.

    His flaring temper and searing intensity are deeply branded into the
church and reflected in the behavior of his faithful, who shout at
adversaries and even at each other. As one former high-ranking member put
it: “He made swearing cool.”

    Hubbard’s followers say his teachings have helped thousands kick drugs
and allowed countless others to lead fuller lives through courses that
improve communication skills, build self-confidence and increase an
individual’s ability to take control of his or her life.

    He was, they say, “the greatest humanitarian in history.”

    But there was another side to this imaginative and intelligent man. And
to understand Scientology, one must begin with L. Ron Hubbard.
    In the late 1940s, Hubbard was broke and in debt. A struggling writer
of science fiction and fantasy, he was forced to sell his typewriter for
$28.50 to get by.

    “I can still see Ron three-steps-at-a-time running up the stairs in
around 1949 in order to borrow $30 from me to get out of town because he
had a wife after him for alimony,” recalled his former literary agent,
Forrest J. Ackerman.

    At one point, Hubbard was reduced to begging the Veterans
Administration to let him keep a $51 overpayment of benefits. “I am nearly
penniless,” wrote Hubbard, a former Navy lieutenant.

    Hubbard was mentally troubled, too. In late 1947, he asked the Veterans
Administration to help him get psychiatric treatment.

    “Toward the end of my (military) service,” Hubbard wrote to the VA, “I
avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would
balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected.

    “I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and
suicidal inclinations, and have newly come to realize that I must first
triumph above this before I can hope to rehabilitate myself at all.”

    In his most private moments, Hubbard wrote bizarre statements to
himself in notebooks that would surface four decades later in Los Angeles
Superior Court.

    “All men are your slaves,” he wrote in one.

    “You can be merciless whenever your will is crossed and you have the
right to be merciless,” he wrote in another.

    Hubbard was troubled, restless and adrift in those little known years
of his life. But he never lost confidence in his ability as a writer. He
had made a living with words in the past and he could do it again.

    Before the financial and emotional problems that consumed him in the
1940s, Hubbard had achieved moderate success writing for a variety of
dime-store pulp magazines. He specialized in shoot’em-up adventures,
Westerns, mysteries, war stories and science fiction.

    His output, if not the writing itself, was spectacular. Using such
pseudonyms as Winchester Remington Colt and Rene LaFayette, he sometimes
filled up entire issues virtually by himself. Hubbard’s life then was like
a page from one of his adventure stories. He panned for gold in Puerto Rico
and charted waterways in Alaska. He was a master sailor and glider pilot,
with a reported penchant for eye-catching maneuvers.

    Although Hubbard’s health and writing career foundered after the war,
he remained a virtual factory of ideas. And his biggest was about to be
born.

    Hubbard had long been fascinated with mental phenomena and the
mysteries of life.

    He was an expert in hypnotism. During a 1948 gathering of science
fiction buffs in Los Angeles, he hypnotized many of those in attendance,
convincing one young man that he was cradling a tiny kangaroo in his hands.

    Hubbard sometimes spoke of having visions.

    His former literary agent, Ackerman, said Hubbard once told of dying on
an operating table. And here, according to Ackerman, is what Hubbard said
followed:
    “He arose in spirit form and looked at the body he no longer inhabited.
… In the distance he saw a great ornate gate. … The gate opened of its
own accord and he drifted through. There, spread out, was an intellectual
smorgasbord, the answers to everything that ever puzzled the mind of man.
He was absorbing all this fantabulous information. … Then he felt like a
long umbilical cord pulling him back. And a voice was saying, ‘No, not
yet.’ “

    Hubbard, according to Ackerman, said he returned to life and feverishly
wrote his recollections. He said Hubbard later tried to sell the manuscript
but failed, claiming that “whoever read it (a) went insane, or (b)
committed suicide.”

    Hubbard’s intense curiosity about the mind’s power led him into a
friendship in 1946 with rocket fuel scientist John Whiteside Parsons.
Parsons was a protege of British satanist Aleister Crowley and leader of a
black magic group modeled after Crowley’s infamous occult lodge in England.

    Hubbard also admired Crowley, and in a 1952 lecture described him as
“my very good friend.”

    Parsons and Hubbard lived in an aging mansion on South Orange Grove
Avenue in Pasadena. The estate was home to an odd mix of Bohemian artists,
writers, scientists and occultists. A small domed temple supported by six
stone columns stood in the back yard.

    Hubbard met his second wife, Sara Northrup, at the mansion. Although
she was Parsons’ lover at the time, Hubbard was undeterred. He married
Northrup before divorcing his first wife.

    Long before the 1960s counterculture, some residents of the estate
smoked marijuana and embraced a philosophy of promiscuous, ritualistic sex.

    “The neighbors began protesting when the rituals called for a naked
pregnant woman to jump nine times through fire in the yard,” recalled
science fiction author L. Sprague de Camp, who knew both Hubbard and
Parsons.

    Crowley biographers have written that Parsons and Hubbard practiced
“sex magic.” As the biographers tell it, a robed Hubbard chanted
incantations while Parsons and his wife-to-be, Cameron, engaged in sexual
intercourse intended to produce a child with superior intellect and powers.
The ceremony was said to span 11 consecutive nights.
    Hubbard and Parsons finally had a falling out over a sailboat sales
venture that ended in a court dispute between the two.

    In later years, Hubbard tried to distance himself from his embarrassing
association with Parsons, who was a founder of a government rocket project
at  California Institute of Technology that later evolved into the famed
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons died in 1952 when a chemical explosion
ripped through his garage lab.

    Hubbard insisted that he had been working undercover for Naval
Intelligence to break up black magic in America and to investigate links
between the occultists and prominent scientists at the Parsons mansion.
Hubbard said the mission was so successful that the house was razed and the
black magic group was dispersed.

    But Parsons’ widow, Cameron, disputed Hubbard’s account in a brief
interview with The Times. She said the two men “liked each other very much”
and “felt they were ushering in a force that was going to change things.”

    In early 1950, Hubbard published an intriguing article in a 25-cent
magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. In it, he said that he had
uncovered the source of man’s problems.
    The article grew into a book, written in one draft in just 30 days and
entitled “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.” It would become
the most important book of Hubbard’s life.

    The book’s introduction declared that Hubbard had invented a new
“mental science,” a feat more important perhaps than “the invention of the
wheel, the control of fire, the development of mathematics.”

    Hubbard himself said he had uncovered the source of, and the cure for,
virtually every ailment known to man. Dianetics, he said, could restore
withered limbs, mend broken bones, erase the wrinkles of age and
dramatically increase intelligence.

    Not surprisingly, the nation’s mental health professionals were
unimpressed.

    Famed psychoanalyst Rollo May voiced the sentiments of many when he
wrote in the New York Times that “books like this do harm by their
grandiose promises to troubled persons and by their oversimplification of
human psychological problems.”

    But “Dianetics” was an instant bestseller when it hit the stands in
May, 1950, and made Hubbard an overnight celebrity. Arthur Ceppos, who
published the book, said Hubbard spent his first royalties on a luxury
Lincoln.

    Hubbard had tapped the public’s growing fascination with psychotherapy,
then largely accessible only to the affluent. “Dianetics,” in fact, was
popularly dubbed “the poor man’s psychotherapy” because it could be
practiced among friends for free.

    In the book, Hubbard claimed to have discovered the previously unknown
“reactive mind,” a depository for emotionally or physically painful events
in a person’s life. These traumatic experiences, called “engrams,” cause a
variety of psychosomatic illnesses, including migraine headaches, ulcers,
allergies, arthritis, poor vision and the common cold, Hubbard said.

    The goal of dianetics, Hubbard said, is to purge these painful
experiences and create a “clear” individual who is able to realize his or
her full potential.

    Catapulted from obscurity, Hubbard decided in the summer of 1950 to
prove in a big way that his new “science” was for real.
    He appeared before a crowd of thousands at the Shrine Auditorium to
unveil the “world’s first clear,” a person he said had achieved a perfect
memory. Journalists from numerous newspapers and magazines were there to
document the event.

    He placed on display one Sonya Bianca, a young Boston physics major.
But when Hubbard allowed the audience to question her, she performed
dismally.

    Someone, for example, told Hubbard to turn his back while the girl was
asked to describe the color of his tie. There was silence. The world’s
first clear drew a blank.

    “It was a tremendous embarrassment for Hubbard and his friends at the
time,” recalled Arthur Jean Cox, a science fiction buff who attended the
presentation.

    More problems were on the way for the man whose book promised miracles
but whose own life would move from one crisis to the next until his death.

    He became embroiled, for instance, in a nasty divorce and child custody
battle that raised embarrassing questions about his mental stability.
    His wife, Sara Northrup Hubbard, accused him of subjecting her to
“scientific torture experiments” and of suffering from “paranoid
schizophrenia”–allegations that she would later retract in a signed
statement but that would find their way into government files and continue
to haunt Hubbard.

    She said in her suit that Hubbard had deprived her of sleep, beaten her
and suggested that she kill herself, “as divorce would hurt his
reputation.”

    During the legal proceedings, Sara placed in the court record a letter
she had received from Hubbard’s first wife.

    “Ron is not normal,” it said. “I had hoped you could straighten him
out. Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person–but I’ve
been through it–the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits
which you charge–12 years of it.”

    At one point in the marital dispute with Sara, Hubbard spirited their
1-year-old daughter, Alexis, to Cuba. From there, he wrote to Sara:

    “I have been in the Cuban military hospital, and am being transferred
to to the United States as a classified scientist immune from interference
of all kinds. … My right side is paralyzed and getting more so.

    “I hope my heart lasts. I may live a long time and again I may not. But
Dianetics will last ten thousand years–for the Army and Navy have it now.”

    Hubbard, who had earlier accused his wife of infidelity and said she
suffered brain damage, closed his letter by threatening to cut his infant
daughter from his will.

    “Alexis will get a fortune unless she goes to you, as she then would
get nothing,” he wrote.

    He also wrote a letter to the FBI at the height of the Red Scare
accusing Sara of possibly being a Communist, along with others whom he said
had infiltrated his dianetics movement.

    The FBI, after interviewing Hubbard, dismissed him as a “mental case.”

    In one seven-page missive to the Department of Justice in 1951, he
linked Sara to alleged physical assaults on him. He said that on two
separate occasions he was punched in his sleep by unidentified intruders.
And then came the third attack.

    “I was in my apartment on February 23rd, about two or three o’clock in
the morning when the apartment was entered, I was knocked out, had a needle
thrust into my heart to give it a jet of air to produce ‘coronary
thrombosis’ and was given an electric shock with a 110 volt current. This
is all very blurred to me. I had no witnesses. But only one person had
another key to that apartment and that was Sara.”

    After months of sniping at each other–and a counter divorce suit by
Hubbard in which he accused his wife of “gross neglect of duty and extreme
cruelty”–the couple ended their stormy marriage, with Sara obtaining
custody of the child. In later years, Hubbard would deny fathering the girl
and, as threatened, did not leave her a cent.

    Not only was Hubbard’s domestic life a shambles in 1951, his
once-thriving self-help movement was crumbling as public interest in his
theories waned.

    The foundations Hubbard had established to teach dianetics were in
financial ruin and his book had disappeared from The New York Times
bestseller list.
    But the resilient self-promoter came up with something new. He called
it Scientology, and his metamorphosis from pop therapist to religious
leader was under way.

    Scientology essentially gave a new twist to the Dianetics notion of
painful experiences that lodge in the “reactive mind.” In Scientology,
Hubbard held that memories of such experiences also collect in a person’s
soul and date back to past lives.

    For many of Hubbard’s early followers, Scientology was not believable,
and they broke with him. But others would soon take their place, conferring
upon Hubbard an almost saintly status.

    But as Hubbard’s renown and prosperity grew in the 1960s, so, too, did
the questions surrounding his finances and teachings. He was accused by
various governments–including the U.S.–of quackery, of brainwashing, of
bilking the gullible through high-pressure sales techniques.

    In 1967, Hubbard took several hundred of his followers to sea to escape
the spreading hostility. But they found only temporary safe harbor from
what they believed had become an international conspiracy to persecute
them.
    Their three ships, led by a converted cattle ferry dubbed the “Apollo,”
were bounced from port to port in the Mediterranean and Caribbean by
governments that wrongly suspected the American skipper and his secretive,
clean-cut crew of being CIA operatives.

    While anchored at the Portuguese island of Madeira, they were stoned by
townsfolk carrying torches and chanting anti-CIA slogans.

    “They (were) throwing Molotov cocktails onto the boat but they weren’t
lit,” a crew member recalled. “Fortunately, this was not an experienced
mob.”

    The years at sea were a watershed for Hubbard and Scientology. He
instituted a Navy-style command structure that is evident today in the
military dress and snap-to behavior of the organization’s staff members.
Hubbard named himself the “Commodore,” and subordinates followed his orders
like Annapolis midshipmen.

    As former Scientology ship officer Hana Eltringham Whitfield put it:
“Scientologists on the whole thought that Hubbard was like a god, that he
could command the waves to do what he wanted, that he was totally in
control of his life and consequences of his actions.”
CAPTION:

Photo: Above, L. Ron Hubbard, face toward camera, panning for gold in
Puerto Rico in 1932. He lived the life of an adventurer in his earlier
years, becoming a master sailor and glider pilot. At right, a copy of
Astounding Science Fiction Magazine from May, 1950. Hubbard’s article in
this issue, “Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind,” grew into the book that
laid the foundation for the Church of Scientology. Below, Scientology’s
Saint Hill Castle in East Grinstead, England, on the estate where Hubbard
lived in the 1960s.
Photo: At left, John Whiteside Parsons, who befriended L. Ron Hubbard in
1946. At the time Parsons was the head of a Pasadena-based Satanist cult.
The two men later had a falling out over a failed business venture. At
right, Sara Northrup Hubbard. She and Parsons were lovers before she began
a romance with Hubbard, later becoming his second wife.
Hearst Newspapers

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CULTS; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGION;
              WRITERS; THERAPY; MENTAL HEALTH; MYSTERIES; OCCULT SCIENCES;
              PARAPSYCHOLOGY; PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

DEFINE THEO

Heading # 8

01664522                  53103
The Mind Behind the Religion
Defining the Theology

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Joel Sappell; Robert W. Welkos
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 36  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 1,487

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    What is Scientology?

    Not even the vast majority of Scientologists can fully answer the
question. In the Church of Scientology, there is no one book that
comprehensively sets forth the religion’s beliefs in the fashion of, say,
the Bible or the Koran.
    Rather, Scientology’s theology is scattered among the voluminous
writings and tape-recorded discourses of the late science fiction writer L.
Ron Hubbard, who founded the religion in the early 1950s.

    Piece by piece, his teachings are revealed to church members through a
progression of sometimes secret courses that take years to complete and
cost tens of thousands of dollars. Out of a membership estimated by the
church to be 6.5 million, only a tiny fraction have climbed to the upper
reaches. In fact, according to a Scientology publication earlier this year,
fewer than 900 members have completed the church’s highest course,
nicknamed “Truth Revealed.”

    While Hubbard’s “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health”
typically is one of the first books read by church members, its
relationship to Scientology is like that of a grade school to a university.

    What Scientologists learn in their courses is never publicly discussed
by the church, which is trying to shake its cultish image and establish
itself as a mainstream religion. For to the uninitiated, Hubbard’s theology
would resemble pure science fiction, complete with galactic battles,
interplanetary civilizations and tyrants who roam the universe.
    Here, based on court records, church documents and Hubbard lectures
that span the past four decades, is a rare look at portions of
Scientology’s theology and the cosmological musings of the man who wrote
it.

    Central to Scientology is a belief in an immortal soul, or “thetan,”
that passes from one body to the next through countless reincarnations
spanning trillions of years.

    Collectively, thetans created the universe–all the stars and planets,
every plant and animal. To function within their creation, thetans built
bodies for themselves of wildly varying appearances, the human form being
just one.

    But each thetan is vulnerable to painful experiences that can diminish
its powers and create emotional and physical problems in the individual it
inhabits. The goal of Scientology is to purge these experiences from the
thetan, making it again omnipotent and returning spiritual and bodily
health to its host.

    The painful experiences are called “engrams.” Hubbard said some happen
by accident–from ancient planetary wars, for example–while others are
intentionally inflicted by other thetans who have gone bad and want power.
In Scientology, these engrams are called “implants.”

    According to Hubbard, the bad thetans through the eons have
electronically implanted other thetans with information intended to confuse
them and make them forget the powers they inherently possess–kind of a
brainwashing procedure.

    While Hubbard was not always precise about the origins of the implants,
he was very clear about the impact.

    “Implants,” Hubbard said, “result in all varieties of illness, apathy,
degradation, neurosis and insanity and are the principal cause of these in
man.”

    Hubbard identified numerous implants that he said have occurred through
the ages and that are addressed during Scientology courses aimed at
neutralizing their harmful effects.

    Hubbard maintained, for example, that the concept of a Christian heaven
is the product of two implants dating back more than 43 trillion years.
Heaven, he said, is a “false dream” and a “very painful lie” intended to
direct thetans toward a non-existent goal and convince them they have only
one life.

    In reality, Hubbard said, there is no heaven and there was no Christ.

    “The (implanted) symbol of a crucified Christ is very apt indeed,”
Hubbard said. “It’s the symbol of a thetan betrayed.”

    Hubbard said that one of the worst implants happens after a person
dies. While Hubbard’s story of this implant may seem outlandish to some, he
advanced it as a factual account of reincarnation.

    “Of all the nasty, mean and vicious implants that have ever been
invented, this one is it,” he declared during a lecture in the 1950s. “And
it’s been going on for thousands of years.”

    Hubbard said that when a person dies, his or her thetan goes to a
“landing station” on Venus, where it is programmed with lies about its past
life and its next life. The lies include a promise that it will be returned
to Earth by being lovingly shunted into the body of a newborn baby.

    Not so, said Hubbard, who described the thetan’s re-entry this way:
    “What actually happens to you, you’re simply capsuled and dumped in the
gulf of lower California. Splash. The hell with ya. And you’re on your own,
man. If you can get out of that, and through that, and wander around
through the cities and find some girl who looks like she is going to get
married or have a baby or something like that, you’re all set. And if you
can find the maternity ward to a hospital or something, you’re OK.

    “And you just eventually just pick up a baby.”

    But Hubbard offered his followers an easy way to outwit the implant:
Scientologists should simply select a location other than Venus to go “when
they kick the bucket.”

    Another notorious implant led Hubbard to construct an entire course for
Scientologists who want to be rid of it.

    Shrouded in mystery and kept in locked cabinets at select church
locations, the course is called Operating Thetan III, billed by the church
as “the final secret of the catastrophe which laid waste to this sector of
the galaxy.” It is taught only to the most advanced church members, at fees
ranging to $6,000.
    Hubbard told his followers that while unlocking the secret, he “became
very ill, almost lost this body and somehow or another brought it off and
obtained the material and was able to live through it.”

    Here’s what he said he learned:

    Seventy-five million years ago a tyrant named Xenu (pronounced Zee-new)
ruled the Galactic Confederation, an alliance of 76 planets, including
Earth, then called Teegeeack.

    To control overpopulation and solidify his power, Xenu instructed his
loyal officers to capture beings of all shapes and sizes from the various
planets, freeze them in a compound of alcohol and glycol and fly them by
the billions to Earth in planes resembling DC-8s. Some of the beings were
captured after they were duped into showing up for a phony tax
investigation.

    The beings were deposited or chained near 10 volcanoes scattered around
the planet. After hydrogen bombs were dropped on them, their thetans were
captured by Xenu’s forces and implanted with sexual perversion, religion
and other notions to obscure their memory of what Xenu had done.
    Soon after, a revolt erupted. Xenu was imprisoned in a wire cage within
a mountain, where he remains today.

    But the damage was done.

    During the last 75 million years, these implanted thetans have affixed
themselves by the thousands to people on Earth. Called “body thetans,” they
overwhelm the main thetan who resides within a person, causing confusion
and internal conflict.

    In the Operating Thetan III course, Scientologists are taught to scan
their bodies for “pressure points,” indicating the presence of these bad
thetans. Using techniques prescribed by Hubbard, church members make
telepathic contact with these thetans and remind them of Xenu’s treachery.
With that, Hubbard said, the thetans detach themselves.

    Hubbard first unveiled his Scientology theories during a series of
often breathless lectures he delivered in Wichita, Kan., Phoenix and
Philadelphia in 1952.

    His talks were sprinkled with tales of interplanetary adventures he
said he had experienced during earlier lives.
    There was the time, for instance, that Hubbard said he was resting in a
peaceful valley on a barren planet in some remote galaxy, and decided to
spruce up the place. He said he “fixed up a lake” and “managed to coax into
existence a few vines.”

    Then, “all of a sudden–zoop boom–and there was a spaceship,” Hubbard
recalled, saying “I got pretty mad about the whole thing.”

    “I remember bringing a thunderstorm,” Hubbard said. “Moved it over the
ship. … And then (I) let them have it.”

    Hubbard told associates that he had been many people before being born
as Lafayette Ronald Hubbard on March 13, 1911, in Tilden, Neb. One of them
was Cecil Rhodes, the British-born diamond king of southern Africa.
Another, according to a former aide, was a marshal to Joan of Arc.

    After Hubbard’s death in 1986, a Scientology publication described him
as “the original musician,” who 3 million years ago invented music while
going by the name “Arpen Polo.” The publication noted that “he wrote his
first song a bit after the first tick of time.”

    Hubbard realized that his accounts of past lives, implants and
extraterrestrial creatures might sound suspect to outsiders. So he
counseled his disciples to keep mum.

    “Don’t start walking around and telling people about space opera
because they’re not going to believe you,” he said, “and they’re going to
say, ‘Well, that’s just Hubbard.’ “

CAPTION:
Photo: L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the religion of Scientology.
Photo: The church’s distinctive, powder-blue headquarters in Hollywood.
LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CULTS; RELIGION;
              MYSTERIES; THEOLOGY

CHAP 2 MYSTIQ

Heading # 7

01664523                  53104
The Mind Behind the Religion
Chapter Two
Creating the Mystique
Hubbard’s image was crafted of truth, distorted by myth.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Joel Sappell; Robert W. Welkos; Time Staff Writers
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 38  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series; Non Dup; Profile
Word Count: 1,682

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    To his followers, L. Ron Hubbard was bigger than life. But it was an
image largely of his own making.

    A Los Angeles Superior Court judge put it bluntly while presiding over
a Church of Scientology lawsuit in 1984. Scientology’s founder, he
said, was “virtually a pathological liar” about his past.

    Hubbard was an intelligent and well-read man, with diverse interests,
experience and expertise. But that apparently was not enough to satisfy
him. He transformed his frailties into strengths, his failures into
successes. With a kernel of truth, he concocted elaborate stories about a
life he seemingly wished was his.

    There was his claim, for example, of being a nuclear physicist. This
was an important one because he said he had used his knowledge of science
to develop Scientology and dianetics.

    Hubbard was, in fact, enrolled in one of the nation’s early classes in
molecular and atomic physics at George Washington University, in
Washington, D.C., where he unsuccessfully pursued a civil engineering
degree. But he flunked the class.

    Church of Scientology officials deny that Hubbard claimed to be a
nuclear physicist and point to a taped lecture in which he admits earning
“the worst grades” in the class. But they fail to mention contradictory
statements Hubbard made when it suited his needs.
    Perhaps Hubbard’s most fantastic–and easily disproved–claims center
on his military service.

    Hubbard bragged that he was a top-flight naval officer in World War II,
who commanded a squadron of fighting ships, was wounded in combat and was
highly decorated.

    But Navy and Veterans Administration records obtained through the
federal Freedom of Information Act reveal that his military performance
was, at times, substandard.

    The Navy documents variously describe him as a “garrulous” man who
“tries to give impressions of his importance,” as being “not
temperamentally fitted for independent command” and as “lacking in the
essential qualities of judgment, leadership and cooperation. He acts
without forethought as to probable results.”

    Hubbard was relieved of command of two ships, including the PC 815, a
submarine chaser docked along the Willamette River in Oregon. According to
Navy records, here is what happened:

    Just hours after motoring the PC 815 into the Pacific for a test
cruise, Hubbard said he encountered two Japanese submarines. He dropped 37
depth charges during the 55 consecutive hours he said he monitored the
subs, and summoned additional ships and aircraft into the fight.

    He claimed to have so severely crippled the submarines that the only
trace remaining of either was a thin carpet of oil on the ocean’s surface.

    “This vessel wishes no credit for itself,” Hubbard stated in a report
of the incident. “It was built to hunt submarines. Its people were trained
to hunt submarines.”

    And no credit Hubbard got.

    “An analysis of all reports convinces me that there was no submarine in
the area,” wrote the commander of the Northwest Sea Frontier after an
investigation.

    Hubbard next continued down the coast, where he anchored off the
Coronado Islands just south of San Diego. To test his ship’s guns, he
ordered target practice directed at the uninhabited Mexican islands,
prompting the government of that neutral country to complain to U.S.
officials.
    A Navy board of inquiry determined that Hubbard had “disregarded
orders” both by conducting gunnery practice and by anchoring in Mexican
waters.

    A letter of admonition was placed in Hubbard’s military file which
stated “that more drastic disciplinary action … would have been taken
under normal and peacetime conditions.”

    During his purportedly illustrious military career, Hubbard claimed to
have been awarded at least 21 medals and decorations. But records state
that he actually earned four during his Naval service: the American Defense
Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign
Medal and the World War II Victory Medal, which was given to all wartime
servicemen.

    One of the medals to which Hubbard staked claim was the Purple Heart,
bestowed upon wounded servicemen. Hubbard maintained that he was “crippled”
and “blinded” in the war.

    Early biographies issued by Scientology say that he was “flown home in
the late spring of 1942 in the secretary of the Navy’s private plane as the
first U.S.-returned casualty from the Far East.”
    Thomas Moulton, second in command on PC 815, said Hubbard once told of
being machine-gunned across the back near the Dutch East Indies.

    On another occasion, Moulton testified during the 1984 Scientology
lawsuit, Hubbard said his eyes had been damaged by the flash of a
large-caliber gun. Hubbard himself, in a tape-recorded lecture, said his
eyes were injured when he had “a bomb go off in my face.”

    These injury claims are significant because Hubbard said he cured
himself through techniques that would later form the tenets of Scientology
and Dianetics.

    Military records, however, reveal that he was never wounded or injured
in combat, and was never awarded a Purple Heart.

    In seeking disability money, Hubbard told military doctors that he had
been “lamed” not by a bullet but by a chronic hip infection that set in
after his transfer from the warm tropics of the Pacific to the icy winters
of the East Coast, where he attended a Navy-sponsored school of military
government.

    Moreover, his eye problems did not result from an exploding bomb or the
blinding flash of a gun. Rather, Hubbard said in military records, he
contracted conjunctivitis from exposure to “excessive tropical sunlight.”

    The truth is that Hubbard spent the last seven months of his active
duty in a military hospital in Oakland, for treatment of a duodenal ulcer
he developed while in the service.

    Hubbard did, however, receive a monthly, 40% disability check from the
government through at least 1980.

    Government records also contradict Hubbard’s claim that he had fully
regained his health by 1947 with the power of his mind and the techniques
of his future religion.

    Late that year, he wrote the government about having “long periods of
moroseness” and “suicidal inclinations.” That was followed by a letter in
1948 to the chief of naval operations in which he described himself as “an
invalid.”

    And, during a 1951 examination by the Veterans Administration, he was
still complaining of eye problems and a “boring-like pain” in his stomach,
which he said had given him “continuous trouble” for eight years,
especially when “under nervous stress.”

    Significantly, that examination occurred after the publication of
“Dianetics,” which promised a cure for the very ailments that plagued the
author himself then and throughout his life, including allergies,
arthritis, ulcers and heart problems.

    In Hubbard’s defense, Scientology officials accuse others of distorting
and misrepresenting his military glories.

    They say the Navy “covered up” Hubbard’s sinking of the submarines
either to avoid frightening the civilian population or because the
commander who investigated the incident had earlier denied the existence of
subs along the West Coast.

    Moreover, church officials charge that records released by the military
are not only grossly incomplete but perhaps were falsified to conceal
Hubbard’s secret activities as an intelligence officer.

    To support their point, a church official gave the Times an
authentic-looking Navy document that purports to confirm some of Hubbard’s
wartime claims. After examining the document, though, a spokesman for the
Naval Military Personnel Command Center said its contents are not supported
by Hubbard’s personnel record.

    He declined further comment.

    Hubbard’s biographical claims were not confined to the events of his
adult life.

    He claimed, for example, that as a youth he traveled extensively
throughout Asia, studying at the feet of holy men who first kindled in him
a burning fascination with the spirit of man.

    “My basic ordination for religious work,” Hubbard once wrote, “was
received from Mayo in the Western Hills of China when I was made a lama
priest after a year as a neophyte.”

    Hubbard did, in fact, tour China while his father was stationed in Guam
with the Navy. However, a diary of that period makes no mention of his
spiritual awakening. Rather, it portrays him as an intolerant young
Westerner with little understanding of an unfamiliar culture or race.

    He described the lama temples he toured as “very odd and heathenish.”
    After visiting the Great Wall of China, Hubbard remarked: “If China
turned it into a rolly coaster it could make millions of dollars every
year.”

    He described the “yellow races” as “simple and one-tracked.” Wrote
Hubbard: “The trouble with China is there are too many chinks here.”

    Hubbard also claimed that he spent many of his childhood years on a
large cattle ranch in Montana, where he grew up.

    “Long days were spent riding, breaking broncos, hunting coyote and
taking his first steps as an explorer,” according to a Hubbard-approved
biography issued by the church.

    But Hubbard’s aunt laughed when asked whether he had been a pint-sized
cowboy.

    “We didn’t have a ranch,” said Margaret Roberts, 87, of Helena, Mont.
“Just several acres (with) a barn on it. … We had one cow (and) four or
five horses.”

    Hubbard’s biographical claims took center stage during the 1984
Superior Court lawsuit in which the church accused a former member of
stealing the Scientology founder’s private papers. Ex-member Gerald
Armstrong said he took the documents as protection against possible church
harassment.

    Judge Paul G. Breckenridge Jr. found in Armstrong’s favor and, in his
ruling, issued a harsh assessment of the church’s revered leader.

    “The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar
when it comes to his history, background and achievements. …”

    “At the same time,” Breckenridge continued, “it appears that he is
charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling,
manipulating and inspiring his adherents.”

    Hubbard, the judge said, was “a very complex person.”

    The church and Hubbard’s widow, Mary Sue, have appealed Breckenridge’s
decision, saying that it was based on “irrelevant, distorted and, in many
instances, invented testimony” of embittered former Scientologists.

    “Any controversy about him (Hubbard) is like a speck of dust on his
shoes compared to the millions of people who loved and respected him,” a
Scientology spokesman said. “What he has accomplished in the brief span of
one lifetime will have impact on every man, woman and child for 10,000
years.”

CAPTION:
Photo: Images of L. Ron Hubbard: His Many Faces: Above from left, two views
of L. Ron Hubbard in New York in 1973. Below from left, Hubbard in skipper
cap in an undated photo, as a photographer in 1974, and as a film director
in the late 1970s.
Photo: Hubbard’s Military Record: Records detailing L. Ron Hubbard’s
military service released by the U.S. Navy and the Church of Scientology
contain discrepancies. Below are segments of the records focusing on
Hubbard’s decorations. The official Navy record, below left, indicates
Hubbard recived four medals during his Navy career, as well as two
markmanship medals. A record released by the church, below right, indicates
Hubbard received 21 medals and decorations during his service. The
Department of the Navy says it has no record of the additional decorations
the church says Hubbard received. Record released by Church of Scientology.
Official U.S. Navy record.

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CULTS; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGION;
              MYSTERIES; NAVY (U.S.)–PERSONNEL; MILITARY RECORDS; MILITARY
              LIFE; MILITARY OFFICERS; RELIGION; THERAPY; LYING; BEHAVIOR

BLOOD CLAIM

Heading # 6

01664524                  53105
Staking a Claim to Blood Brotherhood

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 38  Pt. A  Col. 5
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 342

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    As L. Ron Hubbard told it, he was 4 years old when a medicine man named
“Old Tom” made him a “blood brother” of the Blackfeet Indians of Montana,
providing the inspiration for the Scientology founder’s first novel,
“Buckskin Brigades.”

    But one expert on the tribe doesn’t buy Hubbard’s account.

    Historian Hugh Dempsey is associate director of the Glenbow Museum in
Calgary, Canada. He has extensively researched the tribe, of which his wife
is a member.

    He said that blood brothers are “an old Hollywood idea” and that the
act was “never done among the Blackfeet.”

    As for “Old Tom,” Dempsey has informed doubts. For one thing, he said,
the name does not appear in a 1907 Blackfeet enrollment register containing
the names of hundreds of tribal members.

    For another, “It’s the kind of name, for that period (1915), that would
practically not exist among the Blackfeet,” he said. “At that time,
Blackfeet did not have Christian names.”

    In 1985, church leaders produced a document that they say proves
Hubbard was not lying.

    Typed on Blackfeet Nation stationery, it states: “To commemorate the
seventieth anniversary of L. Ron Hubbard becoming a blood brother of the
Blackfeet Nation. Tree Manyfeathers in a ceremony re-established L. Ron
Hubbard as a blood brother to the Blackfeet Tribe.”

    The document actually is meaningless because none of the three men who
signed it were authorized to take any action on the tribe’s behalf,
according to Blackfeet Nation officials.

    The document was created by Richard Mataisz, a Scientologist of
fractional Indian descent. Mataisz said in an interview he tried to prove
that Hubbard was a Blackfeet blood brother but came up empty-handed.

    “It’s not,” he said, “something you go down to the courthouse and look
up.”

    So Mataisz, using the name Tree Manyfeathers, said he held a private
ceremony, made Hubbard his own blood brother and, along with two other men,
signed the commemorative document.

    “You should not give it (the document) very much credibility,” said
John Yellow Kidney, former vice president of the tribe’s executive
committee. “I don’t.”

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; DOCUMENTS; LYING;
              AMERICAN INDIANS–MONTANA; BLACKFOOT INDIANS

BURGS and LIES

Heading # 5

01664525                  53106
Burglaries and Lies Paved a Path to Prison

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Robert W. Welkos; Joel Sappell; Times Staff Writers
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 39  Pt. A  Col. 2
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 909

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    It began with the title of a fairy tale–Snow White.

    That was the benign code name Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard gave
to an ominous plan that would envelop his church in scandal and send its
upper echelon to prison, a plan rooted in his ever-deepening fears and
suspicions.

    Snow White began in 1973 as an effort by Scientology through Freedom of
Information proceedings to purge government files of what Hubbard thought
was false information being circulated worldwide to discredit him and the
church. But the operation soon mushroomed into a massive criminal
conspiracy, executed by the church’s legal and investigative arm, the
Guardian Office.

    Under the direction of Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, the Guardian Office
hatched one scheme after another to discredit and unnerve Scientology’s
foes across the country. Guardian Office members were trained to lie, or in
their words, “to outflow false data effectively.” They compiled enemy lists
and subjected those on the lists to smear campaigns and dirty tricks.

    Their targets were in the government, the press, the medical
profession, wherever a potential threat surfaced.

    The Guardian Office saved the worst for author Paulette Cooper of New
York City, whose scathing 1972 book, “The Scandal of Scientology,” pushed
her to the top of the church’s roster of enemies.

    Among other things, Cooper was framed on criminal charges by Guardian
Office members, who obtained stationery she had touched and then used it to
forge bomb threats to the church in her name.
    “You’re like the Nazis or the Arabs–I’ll bomb you, I’ll kill you!”
warned one of the rambling letters.

    The church reported the threat to the FBI and directed its agents to
Cooper, whose fingerprints matched those on the letter. Cooper was indicted
by a grand jury not only for the bomb threats, but for lying under oath
about her innocence.

    Two years later, the author’s reputation and psyche in tatters,
prosecutors dismissed the charges after she had spent nearly $20,000 in
legal fees to defend herself and $6,000 on psychiatric treatment.

    It seemed that no plan against perceived enemies was too ambitious or
daring.

    In Washington, Scientology spies penetrated such high-security agencies
as the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service to find what
they had on Hubbard and the church.

    In nighttime raids, they rifled files and photocopied mountains of
documents, many of which the church had unsuccessfully sought under the
federal Freedom of Information Act.
    The thefts were inside jobs; the Guardian Office had planted one agent
in the IRS as a clerk typist and another in the Justice Department  as the
personal secretary of an assistant U.S. attorney who was handling Freedom
of Information lawsuits filed by Scientology.

    So bold had they become that one Guardian Office operative slipped into
an IRS conference room and wired a bugging device into a wall socket before
a crucial meeting on Scientology was to be convened. The operative rigged
the device so he could eavesdrop over his car’s FM radio.

    The U.S. was losing a war it did not even know it was fighting. But
that was about to change.

    Two Scientologists used fake IRS credentials to gain access to
government agencies and then photocopied documents related to the church.
Their conspiracy was exposed when one of the suspects, after 11 months on
the lam, became worried about his plight and confessed to authorities,
prompting the FBI to launch one of the biggest raids in its history.

    Armed with power saws, crowbars and bolt cutters, 134 agents burst into
three Scientology locations in Los Angeles and Washington.
    They carted off eavesdropping equipment, burglar tools and 48,000
documents detailing countless operations against “enemies” in public and
private life.

    In the end, Hubbard’s wife and the others were found guilty of charges
of conspiracy and burglary. The grand jury named Hubbard as an unindicted
co-conspirator; the seized Guardian Office files did not directly link him
to the crimes and he professed ignorance of them.

    In a memorandum urging stiff sentences for the Scientologists, federal
prosecutors wrote:

    “The crime committed by these defendants is of a breadth and scope
previously unheard of. No building, office, desk, or file was safe from
their snooping and prying. No individual or organization was free from
their despicable conspiratorial minds. The tools of their trade were
miniature transmitters, lock picks, secret codes, forged credentials and
any other device they found necessary to carry out their conspiratorial
schemes.”

    The 11 defendants were ordered to serve five years in federal prison.
All are now free.
    Church leaders today maintain that this dark chapter in their
religion’s history was the work of renegade members who, yes, broke the law
but believed they were justified because the government for two decades had
harassed and persecuted Scientology.

    Boston attorney Earle C. Cooley, Scientology’s national trial counsel,
said the present church management does not condone the criminal activities
of the old Guardian Office. He said that one of Hubbard’s most important
dictums was to “maintain friendly relations with the environment and the
public.”

    “The question that I always have in my mind,” Cooley said, “is for how
long a time is the church going to have to continue to pay the price for
what the (Guardian Office) did. … Unfortunately, the church continues to
be confronted with it.

    “And the ironic thing is that the people being confronted with it are
the people who wiped it out. And to the church, that’s a very frustrating
thing.”

CAPTION:
Photo: At far left, FBI agents guard the front gate of the Church of
Scientology in Hollywood during search for documents and burglary tools in
July 1977 raid. At immediate left, Mary Sue Hubbard, L. Ron Hubbard’s third
wife, after sentencing for her role in theft of government documents about
the church.

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; FREEDOM OF
              INFORMATION; FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT; BURGLARIES;
              CONSPIRACY; WIRETAPPING; BUGGING; EAVESDROPPING

CH 4  FINAL DAYS

Heading # 4

01664527                  53108
The Mind Behind the Religion
Chapter Four
The Final Days
Deep in hiding, Hubbard kept tight grip on the church.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Joel Sappell; Robert W. Welkos; Time Staff Writers
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 40  Pt. A  Col. 3
Story Type: Series; Non Dup; Profile
Word Count: 1,814

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard often said that man’s most basic
drive is that of survival. And when it came to his own, he used whatever
was necessary–false identities, cover stories, deception.

    There is no better illustration of this than the way he secretly
controlled the Church of Scientology while hiding from a world he viewed
as increasingly hostile.

    Hubbard was last seen publicly in February 1980, in the desert
community of Hemet, a few miles from a high-security compound that houses
the church’s movie and recording studio. His sudden departure fueled wild
and intense speculation.

    The church said Hubbard went into seclusion to continue his Scientology
research and to resurrect his science fiction-writing career. But former
aides have said he dropped from sight to avoid subpoenas and government tax
agents probing allegations that he was skimming church funds.

    Publications throughout the world ran stories about Hubbard’s
disappearance. “Mystery of the Vanished Ruler” was the headline in Time
magazine.

    In 1982, Hubbard’s estranged son filed a probate petition trying to
wrest control of the Scientology empire. He argued that his father was
either dead or mentally incompetent and that his riches were being
plundered by Scientology executives.
    The suit was dismissed after Hubbard, through an attorney, submitted an
affidavit with his fingerprints, saying that he was well and wanted to be
left alone.

    No doubt, Hubbard would have chuckled with satisfaction over the
speculation surrounding his whereabouts. For he had always considered
himself a shrewd strategist and a master of the intelligence game,
endlessly calculating ways to outwit his foes.

    Hubbard took with him only two people, a married couple named Pat and
Anne Broeker.

    Pat Broeker, Hubbard’s personal messenger at the time, had gone into
hiding with him once before and knew how to ensure his security. Broeker
relished cloak-and-dagger operations. His nickname among Hubbard’s other
messengers was “007.”

    Anne had been one of Hubbard’s top aides for years. She was cool under
pressure and able to defuse Hubbard’s volatile temper.

    Hubbard and the Broekers spent their first several years together on
the move. For months, they traveled the Pacific Northwest in a motor home.
They lived in apartments in Newport Beach and the suburbs of Los Angeles.

    Then, in the summer of 1983, they decided to settle down in a dusty
ranch  town called Creston, population 270, where the hot, arid climate
would be kind to Hubbard’s bursitis.

    About 30 miles inland from San Luis Obispo, it was a perfect spot for a
man of notoriety to live in obscurity. In those parts, people don’t ask a
lot of questions about someone else’s business.

    Hubbard and the Broekers concocted an elaborate set of phony names and
backgrounds to conceal their identities from the townsfolk. Pat and Anne
Broeker went by the names Mike and Lisa Mitchell. Hubbard became Lisa’s
father, Jack, who impressed the locals as a chatty old man, charismatic but
sometimes gruff.

    They purchased a 160-acre ranch known as the Whispering Winds for
$700,000, using 30 cashier’s checks drawn on various California banks. Pat
Broeker told the sellers, Ed and Sherry Shahan, that he had recently
inherited millions of dollars and was looking to leave his home in Upstate
New York to raise livestock in California.
    At the time, the Shahans were suspicious. As Ed Shahan recalled, “They
were having trouble deciding whose name to put the property in.”

    In less than three years, Hubbard poured an estimated $3 million into
the local economy as he redesigned the ranch to his exacting and elaborate
specifications.

    He launched one project after another, some of them seemingly
senseless, according to local residents. He ordered the construction of a
quarter-mile horse-racing track with an observation tower. The track
reportedly was never used.

    The 10-room ranch house was gutted and remodeled so many times that it
went virtually uninhabited during Hubbard’s time there. He lived and worked
in a luxurious 40-foot Bluebird motor home parked near the stables.

    All this was done without work permits, which meant that Hubbard and
his aides would not have to worry about nosy county inspectors.

    Like Hubbard’s aides in earlier years, the hired help saw extreme sides
of the man who was chauffeured around the property in a black Subaru pickup
by Anne Broeker.
    Fencing contractor Jim Froelicher of Paso Robles remembers asking him
for advice on buying a camera. Several days later, Froelicher said, Hubbard
presented him with a 35mm camera as a gift.

    Longtime Creston resident Ed Lindquist, on the other hand, said
painters dropped by the local tavern at lunch to talk about how the “old
man” was acting eccentric. They said he had them paint the walls again and
again because they “weren’t white enough,” according to Lindquist.

    Scientology officials insist that Hubbard was in fine mental and
physical health during his years in seclusion. Most of his days, they say,
were spent reading, writing and enjoying the ranch’s beauty and livestock,
which included llamas and buffalo.

    But Hubbard was doing much more, according to former aides. Even in
hiding, they say, he kept a close watch and a tight grip on the church he
built–as he had for decades.

    As early as 1966, Hubbard claimed to have relinquished managerial
control of the church. But ex-Scientologists and several court rulings have
held that this was a maneuver to shield Hubbard from potential legal
actions and accountability for the group’s activities.
    Over the years, efforts to conceal Hubbard’s ties to the church were
extensive and extreme.

    In 1980, for example, a massive shredding operation was undertaken at
the church’s desert compound outside Palm Springs after Scientology
officials received an erroneous tip of an imminent FBI raid, according to a
former aide.

    “Anything that indicated that L. Ron Hubbard controlled the church or
was engaged in management was to be shredded,” recalled Hubbard’s former
public relations officer, Laurel Sullivan.

    For more than two days, Sullivan said, roughly 200 Scientologists
crammed thousands of documents into a huge shredder nicknamed “Jaws.”
Documents too valuable to destroy, she added, were buried in the ground or
under floorboards.

    In his self-imposed exile, Hubbard continued to reign over Scientology
with almost paranoid secrecy.

    He relayed his orders in writing or on tape cassettes to Pat Broeker,
who then passed them to a ranking Scientologist named David Miscavige, the
man responsible for seeing that church executives complied.

    Hubbard’s communiques travelled a circuitous route in the darkness of
night, changing hands from Broeker to Miscavige at designated sites
throughout Southern California. To mask the author’s identity, the missives
were signed with codes that carried the weight of Hubbard’s signature.

    Sometimes Broeker himself appeared from parts unknown to personally
deliver Hubbard’s instructions to church executives.

    From his secret seat of power in the oak-studded hills above San Luis
Obispo, Hubbard also made sure that he would not be severed from the riches
of his Scientology empire, high-level church defectors would later tell
government investigators.

    They alleged that Hubbard skimmed millions of dollars from church
coffers while he was in hiding–carrying on a tradition that the Internal
Revenue Service said he began practically at Scientology’s inception about
30 years ago. Hubbard and his aides had always denied the allegations, and
accused the IRS of waging a campaign against the church and its founder.

    While Hubbard was underground, the IRS launched a criminal probe of his
finances. But the investigation would soon be without a target, and
ultimately abandoned.

    By late 1985, Hubbard’s directives to underlings had tapered off. At
age 74, he no longer resembled the robust and natty man whose dated
photographs fill Scientology’s promotional literature. Living in isolation,
separated from his devoted followers, he had let himself go.

    His thin gray hair, with streaks of the old red, hung without sheen to
his shoulders. He had grown a stringy, unkempt beard and mustache. His
round face was now sunken and his ruddy complexion had turned pasty. He was
an old man and he was nearing death.

    On or about Jan. 17, 1986, Hubbard suffered a “cerebral vascular
accident,” commonly known as a stroke. Caring for him was Gene Denk, a
Scientologist doctor and Hubbard’s physician for eight years.

    There was little Denk could do for Hubbard in those final days –the
stroke was debilitating. He was bedridden and his speech was badly
impaired.

    One week later, at 8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 24, Hubbard died.
    Throughout the night, according to neighbor Robert Whaley, heavy
traffic inexplicably moved in and out of the ranch. Whaley, a retired
advertising executive, said that he was kept awake by headlights shining
through his windows.

    For more than 11 hours, Hubbard’s body remained in the motor home where
he died. Scientology attorney Earle Cooley had ordered that Hubbard not be
touched until he arrived by car from Los Angeles with another Scientology
lawyer.

    The next morning, Cooley telephoned Reis Chapel, a San Luis Obispo
mortuary, and arranged to have the body cremated. With Cooley present,
Hubbard was transported to the mortuary.

    Once chapel officials learned who Hubbard was, however, they became
concerned about the church’s rush to cremate him. They contacted the San
Luis Obispo County coroner, who halted the cremation until the body could
be examined and blood tests performed.

    When then-Deputy Coroner Don Hines arrived, Cooley presented him with a
certificate that Hubbard had signed just four days before his death. It
stated that, for religious reasons, he wanted no autopsy.
    Cooley also produced a will that Hubbard had signed the day before he
died, directing that his body be promptly cremated and that his vast wealth
be distributed according to the provisions of a confidential trust he had
established. His once-ornate trademark signature was little more than a
scrawl.

    After the blood tests and examination revealed no foul play, coroner
Hines approved the cremation. With Cooley’s consent, he also photographed
the body and lifted fingerprints as a way to later confirm that it was the
reclusive Hubbard and not a hoax.

    Within hours, Hubbard’s ashes were scattered at sea by the Broekers and
Miscavige.

    Two days after Hubbard’s death, Pat Broeker stood before a
standing-room-only crowd of Scientologists at the Hollywood Palladium. It
was his first public appearance in six years, and he had just broken the
news of Hubbard’s passing.

    The cheers were deafening.

    Broeker announced that Hubbard had made a conscious decision to “sever
all ties” to this world so he could continue his Scientology research in
spirit form–testimony to the power of the man and his teachings.

    He “laid down in his bed and he left,” Broeker said. “And that was it.”

    Hubbard left behind an organization that would continue to function as
though he were still alive. His millions of words–the lifeblood of
Scientology–have now been computerized for wisdom and instructions at the
touch of a button.

    In Scientology, he was–and always will be–the “Source.”

CAPTION:
Photo: Hubbard’s Signature: L. Ron Hubbard’s ornate signature deteriorated
near the time of his death. The church maintains that Hubbard, who died on
January 24, 1986, discarded the body that bound him to the physical
universe to begin the next phase of his spiritual exploration–“on a planet
a galaxy away.” At right, L. Ron Hubbard’s signature as it regularly
appears in Scientology publications. Above, his signature as it appeared on
his will in 1986, one day before his death.
Photo: L. Ron Hubbard in La Quinta, Calif., in the late 1970s. The photo is
believed to be the last picture of Hubbard in the public domain.
DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CULTS; MYSTERIES;
              MISSING PERSONS; FUGITIVES; LIFESTYLES; BEHAVIOR;
              ECCENTRICITY; FRAUD; DOCUMENT DESTRUCTION; DEATH

HI-TECH PROTECTION

Heading # 3

01664528                  53109
The Mind Behind the Religion
Church Scriptures Get High-Tech Protection

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Robert W. Welkos; Joel Sappell
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 40  Pt. A  Col. 4
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 389

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    Scientology is determined that the words of L. Ron Hubbard shall live
forever.

    Using state-of-the art technology, the movement has spent more than $15
million to protect Hubbard’s original writings, tape-recorded lectures and
filmed treatises from natural and man-made calamities, including nuclear
holocaust.
    The effort illustrates two fundamental truths about the Scientology
movement: It believes in its future and it never does anything
halfheartedly.

    In charge of the preservation task is the Church of Spiritual
Technology, which functions as archivist for Hubbard’s works.

    It has a staff–but no congregation–and its fiscal 1987 income was
$503 million, according to court documents filed by the church.

    The organization has purchased rural land in New Mexico, Northern
California and San Bernardino Mountains to store the Hubbard gospel.

    According to Church of Spiritual Technology documents, the New Mexico
site has a 670-foot tunnel with two deep vaults at the end. The tunnel is
protected with thick concrete and has four doors with “maintenance-free
lives of 1,000 years.”

    Three of the doors purportedly will be “nuclear blast resistant.”

    All this to house mere copies of the original works, which include
500,000 pages of Hubbard writings, 6,500 reels of tape and 42 films.The
originals themselves are being kept under tight security on a sprawling
Scientology complex near Lake Arrowhead.

    While details of the facility are sketchy, a San Bernardino County
sheriff’s deputy, who requested anonymity, said the group has burrowed a
huge tunnel into a mountainside.

    At the Arrowhead repository, sophisticated methods are being used to
prepare Hubbard’s works for the bomb-proof vaults. Here, according to
Scientology officials and documents, is the process:

    First, the original writings are chemically treated to rid the paper of
acid that causes deterioration. Next, they are placed in plastic envelopes
that church officials say will last 1,000 years.

    From there, they are packaged in titanium “time capsules” filled with
argon gas to further aid preservation.

    Hubbard’s writings also are being etched onto stainless steel plates
with a strong acid. Scientology officials said the plates are so durable
that they can be sprayed with salt water for 1,000 years and not
deteriorate.
    As for Hubbard’s taped lectures, they are being re-recorded onto
special “pure gold” compact discs encased in glass that, according to
Scientology archvists, are “designed to last at least 1,000 years with no
deterioration of sound quality.”

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; TECHNOLOGY; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY;
              DOCUMENTS; AUDIO RECORDINGS; DOCUMENT PRESERVATION; CHURCH OF
              SPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGY; ARCHIVES

MAN IN CONTROL

Heading # 2

01664529                  53110
The Man in Control

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
By: Joel Sappell; Robert W. Welkos; Times Staff Writers
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 41  Pt. A  Col. 5
Story Type: Series; Sidebar; Profile
Word Count: 816

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.NEXT: Part Two– The Selling of Scientology.

TEXT:
    The Church of Scientology today is run by a high-school dropout who
grew up at the knee of the late L. Ron Hubbard and wields power with the
iron-fisted approach of his mentor.

    At 30, David Miscavige is chairman of the board of an organization that
sits atop the bureaucratic labyrinth known as the Church of Scientology.

    This organization, the Religious Technology Center, owns the trademarks
that Scientology churches need to operate, including the words Scientology
and Dianetics.

    The Religious Technology Center licenses the churches to use the
trademarks and can revoke permission if a church fails to perform properly.
Therein rests much, but not all, of Miscavige’s power.

    He is the man in control, charting a direction for the organization
that is at once expansionist and combative–in keeping with the dictates
and personality of Hubbard, his role model. He refused repeated requests to
be interviewed for this report.

    Church spokesmen say Miscavige is a tireless, no-nonsense leader who
works 15-hour days and whose vision is guiding the church’s foray into
mainstream society.

    “He has a tremendous ability to cut through bull and get to the point,”
said one Scientology spokesman, who has worked closely with Miscavige.

    “He’s an initiator,” said another.

    High-ranking former Scientologists describe him as a ruthless infighter
with a volatile temper. They say he speaks in a gritty street parlance,
punctuated with expletives.

    One recalled the time that Miscavige became enraged with the
performances of Scientology staffers on a church record album. He propped
its cover against an embankment outside his Riverside County, office and
shot it repeatedly with a .45-caliber pistol, said the associate.

    To the public, the Rev. Heber Jentzsch, president of the Church of
Scientology International, is portrayed as Scientology’s top official. He
appears regularly at news conferences and on talk shows, and was one of a
group of Scientologists detained recently by Spanish officials
investigating the church. In reality, Jentzsch appears to be chiefly
responsible for church public relations.

    The real power is consolidated among a handful of Scientologists, led
by Miscavige, who keep low public profiles.

    Miscavige’s climb to prominence is a lesson in the origins and nature
of power in the church that Hubbard built.

    At the age of 14, with the blessing of his Scientologist parents,
Miscavige joined a cadre of trusted youngsters called the “Commodore’s
messengers.” In the beginning, they merely ran Hubbard’s errands. But as
they emerged from adolescence, Hubbard broadened their influence over even
the highest-level church executives.

    In time, the messengers controlled the communication lines to and from
Hubbard–a critical component of power in an organization that revered him
as almost saintly. When messengers spoke, they did so with Hubbard’s
authority. Bad-mouthing a messenger, Hubbard said, was tantamount to
personally challenging him.

    When Hubbard went into hiding in 1980, he left behind but did not
forget Miscavige, one of his favorites.

    It was Miscavige’s job to ensure that Hubbard’s orders, secretly
relayed to him, were followed by church executives. In effect, Miscavige
became the sole link between church leaders and Hubbard.

    Miscavige also was put in charge of a profit-making firm called Author
Services Inc., which was established in 1981 to manage Hubbard’s literary
and financial affairs. The job further enhanced Miscavige’s reputation as
having Hubbard’s confidence.
    Church defectors say Miscavige wasted no time flexing his new muscles.

    Among other things, he spearheaded a purge in 1981 of upper-echelon
Scientology executives accused of subverting Hubbard’s teachings and
plotting to seize control of the organization.

    He also cracked down on owners of Scientology franchises, or missions,
who pay the church roughly 10% of their gross income.

    At a 1982 church conference, Miscavige accused the mission owners of
cheating the “mother church.” He and his aides announced that “finance
police” would audit the missions to ensure that the church was getting its
fair share of money. And the audits would cost the missions $15,000 a day.

    In taking command of Scientology after Hubbard’s death, Miscavige
survived a challenge from two other Hubbard lieutenants once thought to be
his likely successors: Pat and Anne Broeker, who had been in hiding with
Hubbard.

    The power struggle was so intense at one point that even Hubbard’s
final Scientology writings, revered as sacred scriptures, became the object
of a tug of war between Miscavige and Pat Broeker, according to Vicki
Aznaran, a top Scientology executive who left the church in 1987 after a
falling out. Aznaran said Broeker threatened to use the writings to start
his own church.

    Miscavige today has achieved exalted status within the Scientology
movement.

    He has personal aides who walk his dog, shine his shoes and run his
errands, according to Aznaran, a top Scientology executive who left the
church in 1987 after a falling-out. In his rare public appearances, he is
surrounded by respectful subordinates.

    And like Hubbard, who was frequently referred to by his initials, David
Miscavige is called D.M.

CAPTION:
Photo: David Miscavige, foreground, at a 1986 trial in Los Angeles. Trial
involved suit against the church.
Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  MISCAVIGE, DAVID; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CULTS; HUBBARD, L
              RON; MANAGEMENT; RELIGIOUS TECHNOLOGY CENTER; TRADEMARKS;
              LICENSES; LEADERSHIP

ABOUT SERIES

01665184                  53765
THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY: A SPECIAL REPORT
About This Series

Los Angeles Times (LT) – SUNDAY June 24, 1990
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 36  Pt. A  Col. 3
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 513

MEMO:
Series: The Scientology Story. Today: The Making of L. Ron Hubbard. First
in a six-part series.

TEXT:
    The Times today begins a six-part series on the Church of Scientology
, the controversial religion founded by the late author L. Ron Hubbard.

    Since its creation nearly four decades ago, Scientology has grown
into a worldwide movement that, in recent months, has spent millions of
dollars promoting its founder and his self-help book, “Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health.”
    …In the past five years alone, more than 20 of Hubbard’s fiction and
nonfiction books have become national bestsellers–most of them achieving
that status after his death in January, 1986.

    Scientology executives estimate the church’s membership to be more than
6.5 million, although some former members believe the actual number is
smaller.

    Scientology’s largest stronghold is in Hollywood, the organization’s
management nerve center. The church is also a major presence in Clearwater,
Fla., where Scientologists from around the world go for training.

    No other contemporary religion has endured a more turbulent past or a
more sustained assault on its existence than the Church of Scientology. It
has weathered crises that would have crippled, if not destroyed, other
fledgling religious movements–testimony to the group’s determination to
survive.

    Eleven of its top leaders–including Hubbard’s wife–were jailed for
burglarizing the U.S. Justice Department and other federal agencies in the
1970s. Within the church, there have been widespread purges and defections.
Some former members have filed lawsuits accusing the church of intimidating
its critics, breaking up families and using high-pressure sales techniques
to separate large sums of money from its followers.

    In 1986, Scientology paid an estimated $5 million to settle more than
20 of the suits, without admitting wrongdoing. In exchange, the plaintiffs
agreed never again to criticize Scientology or Hubbard and to have their
lawsuits forever sealed from public view.

    Through all this, the church has persevered, dismissing its critics in
government, psychiatry and the media as “criminals” and “anti-religion”
demagogues who have conspired to persecute Scientology.

    Today, the Scientology movement is writing a new chapter in its
history, one that has attracted a new generation of supporters and
detractors. Through official church programs and a network of groups run by
Scientology followers, the movement is reaching into American society as
never before to gain legitimacy and new members.

    The apparent intent is to position Hubbard as a sort of 20th-Century
Renaissance man, lending new credibility to his Scientology teachings.

    Among other things, church members are disseminating his writings in
schools across the U.S., assisted by groups that seldom publicize their
Scientology connections.

    Scientology followers also have established a number of successful
consulting firms that sell Hubbard’s management techniques to health care
professionals and businessmen. In the process, many are steered into the
church.

    And Scientologists are the driving force behind two organizations
active in the scientific community. The organizations have been busy trying
to sell government agencies and the public on a chemical detoxification
treatment developed by Hubbard.

    There is little question that, although Hubbard is gone, Scientology is
here to stay–and doing its best to meet his expectations. “The world is
ours,” he once told his adherents. “Own it.”

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGION; RELIGIOUS
              ORGANIZATIONS; MENTAL HEALTH; CULTS

SALES

Heading # 15

01664831                  53412
Church Markets Its Gospel With High-Pressure Sales

Los Angeles Times (LT) – MONDAY June 25, 1990
By: JOEL SAPPELL; ROBERT W. WELKOS; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Profile; Main Story; Series
Word Count: 2,205

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY. Today: The Selling of a Church. Second in a
six-part series.

TEXT:
    Behind the religious trappings, the Church of Scientology is run like
a lean, no-nonsense business in which potential members are called
“prospects,” “raw meat” and “bodies in the shop.”

    Its governing financial policy, written by the late Scientology
founder L. Ron Hubbard, is simple and direct: “MAKE MONEY, MAKE MORE MONEY,
MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY.”

    …The organization uses sophisticated sales tactics to sell a
seemingly endless progression of expensive courses, each serving as a
prerequisite for the next. Known collectively as “The Bridge,” the courses
promise salvation, higher intelligence, superhuman powers and even possible
survival from nuclear fallout–for those who can pay.

    Church tenets mandate that parishioners purchase Scientology goods and
services under Hubbard’s “doctrine of exchange.” A person must learn to
give, he said, as well as receive.

    For its programs and books, the church charges “fixed donations” that
range from $50 for an elementary course in improving communication skills
to more than $13,000 for Hubbard’s secret teachings on the origins of the
universe and the genesis of mankind’s ills.

    The church currently is offering a “limited time only” deal on a select
package of Hubbard courses, which represent a small portion of The Bridge.
If bought individually, those courses would cost $55,455. The sale price:
$33,399.50.

    As a promotional flyer for the discount observes, “YOU SAVE
$22,055.50.”
    To complete Hubbard’s progression of courses, a Scientologist could

conceivably spend a lifetime and more than $400,000. Although few if any
have doled out that much, the high cost of enlightenment in Scientology has
left many deeply in debt to family, friends and banks.

    Ask former church member Marie Culloden of Manhattan Beach, who
describes herself as a “recovering Scientologist.”

    “I’m trying to recover my mortgaged home,” says Culloden, who spent 20
years in Scientology and obtained three mortgages totaling more than
$80,000 to buy courses.

    The Scientology Bridge is always under construction, keeping the
Supreme Answer one step away from church members–a potent sales strategy
devised by Hubbard to keep the money flowing, critics contend.

    New courses continually are added, each of which is said to be crucial
for spiritual progress, each heavily promoted.

    Church members are warned that unless they keep purchasing Scientology
services, misery and sickness may befall them. For the true believer, this
is a powerful incentive to keep buying whatever the group is selling.
    Through the mail, Scientologists are bombarded with glossy, colorful
brochures announcing the latest courses and discounts. Letters and
postcards sound the dire warning, “Urgent! Urgent! Your future is at risk!
. . . It is time to ACT! NOW! . . . You must buy now!”

    By far the most expensive service offered by Scientology is
“auditing”–a kind of confessional during which an individual reveals
intimate and traumatic details of his life while his responses are
monitored on a lie detector-type device known as the E-meter.

    The purpose is to unburden a person of painful experiences, or
“engrams,” that block his spiritual growth, a process that can span
hundreds of hours. Auditing is purchased in 12 1/2-hour chunks costing
anywhere between $3,000 and $11,000 each, depending on where it is bought.

    Even Scientology’s critics concede that auditing often helps people
feel better by allowing them to air troubling aspects of their lives–much
like a Catholic confessional or psychotherapy–and keeps them coming back
for more.

    The church makes no apologies for the methods it uses to raise funds
and spread the gospel of its founder. Scientology spokesmen said in
interviews that it takes money to cover overhead expenses and to finance
the church’s worldwide expansion, as it does for any religion.

    “You can’t do it on bread and butter,” said one.

    Church leaders will not discuss Scientology’s gross income or net
worth. But they contend that Scientologists who pay for spiritual programs
are no different from, say, Mormons who tithe 10% of their income for
admittance to the temple, or from Jews who buy tickets to High Holiday
services or from Christians who rent church pews.

    “The fact of the matter is that the parishioners of the Church of
Scientology have felt and continue to feel that they get full value for
their donations,” said Scientology lawyer Earle C. Cooley.

    Many Scientologists say that Hubbard’s teachings have resurrected their
lives, some of which were marred by drugs, personal traumas, self doubts or
a sense of alienation. They say that, through the church, they have gained
confidence and learned to lead ethical lives and take responsibility for
themselves, while working to create a better world.

    Scientology “works,” they say, and for that, no price is too high.
    “It takes money,” acknowledged Scientologist Sheri Scott. “It took
money for my father to buy his Cadillac. I wish he’d sell the damn thing
and give me the money (for Scientology). . . . I have never felt cheated at
all.”

    “I’m not glued to the sky or anything. I’m a very normal person,” she
added. “I just wish more people would take a look, would read (about
Scientology), before they decide we’re cuckoo.”

    While other religions increasingly advertise and market themselves,
none approaches the Church of Scientology’s commercial zeal and
sophistication.

    Its tactics come directly from Hubbard, who wrote entire treatises on
how to create a market for, and sell, Scientology.

    He borrowed generously from a 1971 book called “Big League Sales
Closing Techniques.” Touted as the “selling secrets of a supersalesman,”
the book was written by former car dealer Les Dane, who has conducted
popular seminars at Scientology headquarters in Florida.

    Hubbard said Scientology must be marketed through the “art of hard
sell,” meaning an “insistence that people buy.” He said that, “regardless
of who the person is or what he is, the motto is, ‘Always sell something. .
. .’ “

    Hubbard contended that such high-pressure tactics are imperative
because a person’s spiritual well being is at stake.

    Among other things, he directed his followers to: “rob the person of
every opportunity to say ‘No.’ “; “help prospects work through financial
stops impeding a sale”; “make the prospect think it was his idea to make
the purchase”; utilize the two man “tag team” approach, and “overcome and
rapidly handle any attempted prospect backout.”

    One of the most important techniques in selling Scientology, Hubbard
said, is to create mystery.

    “If we tell him there is something to know and don’t tell him what it
is, we will zip people into” the organization, Hubbard wrote. “And one can
keep doing this to a person–shuttle them along using mystery.”

    Frequently, a person’s first contact with Scientology comes when he is
approached by a staff member on the street and offered a free personality
test, or receives a lengthy questionnaire in the mail.

    Using charts and graphs, the idea is to convince a person that he has
some problem, or “ruin,” that Scientology can fix, while assuaging concerns
he may have about the church. According to Hubbard, “if the job has been
done well, the person should be worried.”

    With that accomplished, the customer is pushed to buy services he is
told will improve his sorry condition and perhaps give him such powers as
being able to spiritually travel outside his body–or, in Scientology
jargon, to “exteriorize.”

    Former church member Andrew Lesco said he was told that he “would be
able to project my mind into drawers, someone’s pocket, a wallet and I
would be able to tell what’s inside . . . “

    Church members are required to write testimonials–“success
stories”–as they progress from one level to the next.

    The testimonials regularly appear in Scientology publications. Usually
carrying only the authors’ initials, they are used to promote courses
without the church itself assuming legal liability for promising results
that may not occur, according to ex-Scientologists. Here is an example:

    “We were having trouble with the windshield wipers in our car.
Sometimes they would work and sometimes they wouldn’t. . . . We were
driving along, and my husband was driving. I got to thinking about the
windshield wipers, left my body in the seat and took a look under the hood.
I spotted the wires that were shorting and caused them to weld themselves
together, like they were supposed to be. We haven’t had any trouble with
them since.”

    Scientology staffers who sell Hubbard’s courses are called
“registrars.” They earn commissions on their sales and are skilled at
eliciting every facet of an individual’s finances, including bank accounts,
stocks, cars, houses, whatever can be converted to cash.

    Like all Scientology staffers, a registrar’s productivity is evaluated
each week. Performance is judged by how much money he or she brings in by
Thursday afternoon. And, in Scientology, declining or stagnant productivity
is not viewed benevolently, as former registrar Roger Barnes says he
learned.

    “I remember being dragged across a desk by my tie because I hadn’t made
my (sales quota),” said Barnes, who once toured the world selling
Scientology until he had a bitter break with the group.

    Barnes and other ex-Scientologists say that this uncompromising push to
generate more money each week places intense pressure on registrars.

    Another former Scientology salesman in Los Angeles said he and other
registrars would use a tactic called “crush regging.” The technique, he

said, employed no elaborate sales talk. They repeated three words again and
again: “Sign the check. Sign the check.”

    “This made the person feel so harassed,” he said, “that he would sign
the check because it was the only way he was going to get out of there.”

    A 1984 investigative report by Canadian authorities quoted a Toronto
registrar as saying that members of the public want to be “bled of their
money. . . . If they didn’t, they would be staff members eligible for free
training.”

    The Canadian report also recounted a meeting during which Scientology
staffers chanted: “Go for the throat. Go for blood. Go for the bloody
throat.”
    Former Scientologist Donna Day of Ventura said that church registrars
accused her of throwing away money on rent and on food for her cats and
dogs–“degraded beings,” they called her pets. They said the money should
be going to the church.

    “I was so upset, I finally left the house with them sitting in it,”
said Day, who sued the church to get back $25,000 she said she had spent on
Scientology.

    Several years ago, church members persuaded a Florida woman to turn
over a workers compensation settlement she received after the death of her
husband, Larry M. Wheaton, who left behind two children, ages 3 and 7. He
was the pilot of an Air Florida jet that plunged into the Potomac River
after it had departed Washington, D.C.’s National Airport in 1982.

    The Wheatons were longtime church members.

    Joanne Wheaton gave nearly $150,000 to the church and almost as much to
a private business controlled by Scientologists. But the deal was blocked
when a lawsuit was brought by an attorney appointed by the court to protect
the children’s interests.
    The suit claimed that the Scientologists had disregarded the future
welfare and financial security of the Wheaton family by taking money that
was supposed to be used solely for the support of the children and their
mother.

    After protracted discussions, the money was refunded and the
Scientologists who negotiated the deal were expelled by the church for
their role in the affair.

    For years, one of Scientology’s top promoters was Larry Wollersheim. He
traveled the country inspiring others to follow him across Hubbard’s
Bridge. Then he became disenchanted with the movement.

    In 1980, he filed a Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, accusing the
church of subjecting him to psychologically damaging practices and of
driving him to the brink of insanity and financial ruin after he had a
falling out with the group.

    Three years ago, a jury awarded him $30 million. The award was recently
reduced to $2.5 million.

    During the litigation, Wollersheim filed a 200-page affidavit in which
he offered this analysis of what keeps Scientologists hooked:

    “Fear and hope are totally indoctrinated into the cult (Scientology)
member. He hopes that he will receive the miraculous and ridiculous claims
made directly, indirectly and by rumor by the sect and its members.

    “He is afraid of the peer pressure for not proceeding up the prescribed
program. He is intimidated and afraid of being accused of being a
dilettante. He is afraid that if he doesn’t do it now before the world ends
or collapses he may never get the chance. He is afraid if he doesn’t claim
he received gains and write a success testimonial he will be shunned. . . .

    “How many people could stand up to that kind of pressure and stand
before a group of applauding people and say: ‘Hey, it really wasn’t
good.’?”

    Wollersheim said that the courses provide only a temporary euphoria.

    “Then you’re sold the next mystery and the next solution. . . . I’ve
seen people sell their homes, stocks, inheritances and everything they own
chasing their hopes for a fleeting, subjective euphoria. I have never
witnessed a greater preying on the hopes and fears of others that has been
carefully engineered by the cult’s leader.”

    NEXT: Part Three–Inside Scientology.

CAPTION:
Photo: A “free personality test,” offered here at the Scientology complex
in Hollywood, often constitutes a person’s introduction to the church.
LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times
Photo: The E-meter, used to monitor responses during “auditing.”
Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGION; HUBBARD, L RON; CULTS;
              MARKETING; RELIGIOUS EDUCATION; RELIGIOUS LITERATURE;
              HARASSMENT; SUITS; FUND RAISING

PROFILE

Heading # 14

01664853                  53434
Shoring Up Its Religious Profile
The church has adopted the terminology and trappings of traditional
theologies. But the IRS is not convinced.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – MONDAY June 25, 1990
By: JOEL SAPPELL; ROBERT W. WELKOS; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 18  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Sidebar; Series
Word Count: 985

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY

TEXT:
    Since its founding some 35 years ago by the late science fiction writer
L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology has worked hard to shore up its religious
profile for the public, the courts and the Internal Revenue Service.

    In the old days, for example, those who purchased Hubbard’s
Scientology courses were called “students.” Today, they are

“parishioners.” The group’s “franchises” have become “missions.” And
Hubbard’s teachings, formerly his “courses,” now are described as sacred
scriptures.

    The word “Dianetics” was even redefined to give it a spiritual twist.
For years, Hubbard said it meant “through the mind.” The new definition:
“through the soul.”

    Canadian authorities learned firsthand how far Scientologists would go
to maintain a religious aura.

    According to police documents disclosed in 1984, an undercover officer
who infiltrated Scientology’s Toronto outpost during an investigation of
its activities was asked by a church official to don a “white collar so
that someone in the (organization) looked like a minister.”

    For three decades, critics have accused Scientology of assuming the
mantle of religion to shield itself from government inquiries and taxes.

    “To some, this seems mere opportunism,” Hubbard said of Scientology’s
religious conversion in a 1954 communique to his followers. “To some it
would seem that Scientology is simply making itself bulletproof in the eyes
of the law. . . .”

    But, Hubbard insisted, religion is “basically a philosophic teaching
designed to better the civilization into which it is taught. . . . A
Scientologist has a better right to call himself a priest, a minister, a
missionary, a doctor of divinity, a faith healer or a preacher than any
other man who bears the insignia of religion of the Western World.”

    Joseph Yanny, a Los Angeles attorney who represented the church until
he had a bitter falling out with the group in 1987, said Scientology
portrays itself as a religion only where it is expedient to do so–such as
in the U.S., where tax laws favor religious organizations.

    In Israel and many parts of Latin America, where there is either a
state religion or a prohibition against religious organizations owning
property, Yanny said Scientology claims to be a philosophical society.

    In the beginning, Hubbard toyed with different ways to promote his
creation.

    For a time, he called it “the only successfully validated psychotherapy
in the world.” To those who completed his courses, he offered
“certification” as a “Freudian psychoanalyst.”
    He also described it as a “precision science” that required no faith or
beliefs to produce “completely predictable results” of higher intelligence
and better health. Hubbard bestowed upon its practitioners the title
“doctor of Scientology.”

    This characterization, however, landed him in trouble with the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration and a federal judge, who concluded in 1971
that Hubbard was making false medical claims and had employed “skillful
propaganda to make Scientology . . . attractive in many varied, often
inconsistent wrappings.”

    The judge said, however, that if claims about Scientology were advanced
in a purely spiritual context, they would be beyond the government’s reach
because of protections afforded religions under the First Amendment.

    In the United States, it is easy to become a church, no matter how
unconventional–you just say it is so. The hard part may come in keeping
tax-exempt status, as Scientology has learned.

    The U.S. government is constitutionally barred from determining what is
and what is not a religion. But, under the law, there is no guaranteed
right to tax exemption. The IRS can make a church pay taxes if it fails to
meet criteria established by the agency.

    A tax-exempt religion may not, for example, operate primarily for
business purposes, commit crimes, engage in partisan politics or enrich
private individuals. It should, among other things, have a formal doctrine,
ordained ministers, religious services, sincerely held beliefs and an
established place of worship.

    In 1967, the Church of Scientology of California was stripped of its
tax-exempt status by the IRS, an action the church considered unlawful and
thus ignored. The IRS, in turn, undertook a mammoth audit of the church for
the years 1970 through 1974.

    So began Scientology’s most sweeping religious make-over.

    Among other things, Scientology ministers (formerly “counselors”)
started to wear white collars, dark suits and silver crosses.

    Sunday services were mandated and chapels were ordered erected in
Scientology buildings. It was made a punishable offense for a staffer to
omit from church literature the notation that Scientology is a “religious
philosophy.”
    Many of the changes flowed from a flurry of “religious image”
directives issued by high-level Scientology executives. One policy put it
bluntly: “Visual evidences that Scientology is a religion are mandatory.”

    None of this, however, convinced the IRS, which assessed the church
more than $1 million in back taxes for the years 1970 through 1972.
Scientology appealed to the U.S. Tax Court, where, in 1984, it was handed
one of the worst financial and public relations disasters in its history.

    In a blistering opinion, the court backed the IRS and said the Church
of Scientology of California had “made a business out of selling religion,”
had diverted millions of dollars to Hubbard and his family and had
“conspired for almost a decade to defraud the United States Government by
impeding the IRS.”

    The church lost again when it took the case before the U.S. 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals in San Francisco and the U.S. Supreme Court let the
lower-court decision stand.

    Stripped of its tax-exempt status, Scientology executives turned the
Church of Scientology of California into a virtual shell.
    Once called the “Mother Church,” it no longer controls the Scientology
empire and does not serve as the chief depository for church funds.

    It has been replaced by a number of new organizations that Scientology
executives maintain are religious and tax exempt. But, once again, the IRS
has disagreed, ruling that the new organizations are still operating in a
commercial manner.

    Scientology is appealing the IRS decision in the courts.

CAPTION:
Photo: Cross of Church of Scientology.

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGION; CULTS; MARKETING; CHURCHES
              ; TAXES–UNITED STATES; TAX EXEMPT STATUS; SUITS; INTERNAL
              REVENUE SERVICE; RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS

CELEBS

Heading # 13

01664854                  53435
The Courting of Celebrities
Testimonials of the famous are prominent in the church’s push for
acceptability. John Travolta and Kirstie Alley are the current headliners.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – MONDAY June 25, 1990
By: JOEL SAPPELL and ROBERT W. WELKOS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 18  Pt. A  Col. 4
Story Type: Sidebar; Series
Word Count: 695

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY

TEXT:
    The Church of Scientology uses celebrity spokesmen to endorse L. Ron
Hubbard’s teachings and give Scientology greater acceptability in
mainstream America.

    As far back as 1955, Hubbard recognized the value of famous people to
his fledgling, off-beat church when he inaugurated “Project Celebrity.”

According to Hubbard, Scientologists should target prominent individuals
as their “quarry” and bring them back like trophies for Scientology.

    He listed the following people of that era as suitable prey: Edward R.
Murrow, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo,
Walt Disney, Henry Luce, Billy Graham, Groucho Marx and others of similar
stature.

    “If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as a
reward,” Hubbard wrote in a Scientology magazine more than three decades
ago.

    Although the effort died, the idea of using celebrities to promote and
defend Scientology survived–though perhaps not as grandly as Hubbard had
dreamed.

    Today, the church’s most famous celebrity is actor John Travolta, who
credits Hubbard’s teachings with giving him confidence and direction.

    “All I’ve had are benefits,” said Travolta, a church member since 1975.

    Another Scientology celebrity is actress Kirstie Alley, co-star of the
television series “Cheers.” Last year, Alley and Travolta teamed up in the
blockbuster comedy film, “Look Who’s Talking.”

    Alley is international spokeswoman for the Scientology movement’s
controversial new drug and alcohol treatment center in Chilocco, Okla.,
which employs a rehabilitation regimen created years ago by Hubbard.

    A former cocaine abuser, Alley has said she discovered Hubbard’s
Narconon program in 1979 and that it “salvaged my life and began my acting
career.”

    Alley also has become active in disseminating a new 47-page booklet on
ways to preserve the environment. The booklet, entitled “Cry Out,” was
named after a Hubbard song and was produced by Author Services Inc., his
literary agency. Author Services is controlled by influential
Scientologists.

    In April, Alley provided nationwide exposure for the illustrated
booklet–which mentions Hubbard but not Scientology–when she unveiled it
on the popular Arsenio Hall Show. Since then, it has been distributed to
prominent environmental groups throughout the U.S.

    Besides Alley and Travolta, the Scientology celebrity ranks also
include: jazz pianist Chick Corea; singer Al Jarreau; actress Karen Black;
opera star Julia Migenes; Priscilla Presley and her daughter Lisa Marie
Presley, and Nancy Cartwright, who is the voice behind Bart Simpson, the
wisecracking son on the animated TV hit, “The Simpsons.”

    U.S. Olympic gymnast Charles Lakes also is a prominent Scientologist.

    After the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, Lakes appeared on the cover of
Celebrity magazine, a Scientology publication that promotes church
celebrities. In an interview with the magazine, Lakes credited Dianetics
for his success and strength.

    “I am by far the healthiest person on the team,” he said. “They (other
team members) are actually resentful of me because I don’t have to train as
long as they do.”

    Celebrities are considered so important to the movement’s expansion
that the church created a special office to guide their careers and ensure
their “correct utilization” for Scientology.

    The church has a special branch that ministers to prominent
individuals, providing them with first-class treatment. Its headquarters,
called Celebrity Centre International, is housed in a magnificent old
turreted mansion on Franklin Avenue, overlooking the Hollywood Freeway.

    In 1988, the movement tried to associate itself with a non-Scientology
celebrity, race driver Mario Andretti, by sponsoring his car in the GTE
World Challenge of Tampa, Fla. But the plan backfired.

    When Andretti saw seven Dianetics logo decals stripped across his
Porsche, he demanded that they be removed.

    “It’s not something I believe in, so I don’t want to make it appear
like I’m endorsing it,” he was quoted as saying.

    For years, Scientology’s biggest celebrity spokesman was former San
Francisco 49ers quarterback John Brodie.

    Brodie said that when pain in his throwing arm threatened his career,
he applied Dianetics techniques and soon was “zipping the ball” again like
a young man.

    Although he still admires Hubbard’s teachings, Brodie said he gave up
promoting them after some of his friends in Scientology were expelled and
harassed during a power struggle with church management.

    “There were many in the church I felt were treated unfairly,” Brodie
said.

CAPTION:
Photo: John Travolta and Kirstie Alley in movie “Look Who’s Talking.”
Photo: Below, Hollywood mansion that houses Celebrity Centre International,
a branch of the church that ministers to the famous.

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CELEBRITIES; CULTS; RELIGION;
              TRAVOLTA, JOHN; ALLEY, KIRSTIE

WORK

01665301                  53882
Defectors Recount Lives of Hard Work, Punishment

Los Angeles Times (LT) – TUESDAY June 26, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series
Word Count: 2,029

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY: Today: Inside the Church. Third in a
six-part series. NEXT: Part Four–Reaching Out.

TEXT:
    Doris Braine says the transformation of her Patty Jo was heartbreaking.

    “It was,” she said, “like my darling daughter had died.”

    Before Patty Jo went to work for the Church of Scientology at the age
of 20, she had been “fun and pretty and a joy to be with,” recalled her
72-year-old mother. “Suddenly, she became a totally different person,
shooting fire from her eyes.”
    There were those hateful looks, and the dozens of letters that Patty Jo
returned unopened. For two years, she would not even speak to her mother,
who had criticized Scientology and refused to hand over $2,000 for church
courses.

    And Patty Jo had taken to calling Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard
her father.

    “I would cry all the time,” recalled Braine, a retired college dean. “I
had to psych myself up to go to work, be charming and do a good job. But
all day long I thought about her. I prayed my head off that someday she
would be able to get out of it.

    “It took 15 years, but I think it was worth every prayer I said.”

    In 1982, Patricia Braine left Scientology, disillusioned with the
church and disappointed with herself for succumbing to an environment that,
she said, twisted her thinking and isolated her from a world she had hoped
to make better.

    Scientology, she said, “promises you euphoria but ends up taking your
body, heart, mind, soul and family. . . . We were so brainwashed to believe
that what we were doing was good for mankind that we were willing to put up
with the worst conditions.”

    Over the years, defecting Scientologists have come forward with similar
accounts of how their lives and personalities were upended after they
joined the church’s huge staff. They say the organization promised
spiritual liberation but delivered subjugation.

    In interviews and public records, former staffers have said they were
alienated from society, stripped of familiar beliefs, punished for aberrant
behavior, rewarded for conformity and worked beyond exhaustion to meet
ever-escalating productivity quotas.

    “Slave labor” is how Canadian authorities in 1984 described the
Scientology work force.

    Worldwide, there are nearly 12,000 church staff members, many of whom
are in Los Angeles, one of the organization’s largest strongholds. They
have kept Scientology afloat through a turbulent history that, arguably,
would have sunk any other newly emerging religion.

    Day and night they labor single-mindedly at jobs ranging from the
meaningful to the menial. Some work in administrative areas such as
promotion, legal affairs, finance, public relations and fund raising.
Thousands of others deliver the church’s religious programs. Still others
proselytize on city sidewalks, sell books and wash dishes.

    Scientology spokesmen insist that the staff is treated well and not
exploited. They say that the detractors simply lacked the devotion to
advance the religion’s aims and the morality to abide by its high ethical
standards.

    Current staff members say their lifestyle is no more unusual or harsh
than that of a monk. Joining the Scientology staff, they say, was the
supreme expression of their devotion to create, in Hubbard’s words, “a
civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the
able can prosper and honest beings can have rights.”

    The elite of Scientology’s workers, at least 3,000 of them, belong to a
zealous faction known as the Sea Organization and are given room, board and
a small weekly allowance.

    They sign contracts to serve Scientology in this and future
lifetimes–for a billion years. Their motto is: “We come back.”
    Dressed in mock navy uniforms adorned with ribbons, they bark orders
with a clipped, military cadence. They hold ranks such as captain,
lieutenant and ensign. Officers, including women, are addressed as “Sir.”

    Hubbard called himself “The Commodore,” a reflection of his infatuation
with the U.S. Navy. “The Sea Org is a very tough outfit,” he once said.
“It’s no walk in the park. . . . We are short-tempered, but we do our job.”

    Scientology staffers enter a clannish world of authoritarian rules and
discipline based on Hubbard writings. His works govern every detail of the
operation, from how to disseminate his teachings to how to cook baby food.

    When staffers observe transgressions of Hubbard’s dictums, they are
required to inform on each other. The church says “knowledge reports” help
the organization correct problems and ensure a high standard of operation.
But critics contend that the practice works to stifle expressions of
discontent or doubts about the church, even between husbands and wives.

    To break the group’s rules or fall below work quotas can subject even
top Scientologists to grueling interrogations on a lie detector-type device
called the E-meter, and perhaps land them in the Rehabilitation Project
Force, or RPF.
    The Rev. Ken Hoden, a church spokesman in Los Angeles, once described
the RPF like this: “You just do some grounds work for a few weeks. That’s
all.”

    Others, however, have called it in hindsight the most degrading ordeal
of their lives–although one that they believed at the time was leading
them to spiritual salvation.

    RPFers, as they are called, are separated from their family and friends
for days, weeks, months or even longer. They cannot speak unless spoken to,
they run wherever they go and they wear armbands to denote their lowly
condition.

    The RPF provides the church with a pool of labor to perform building
maintenance, pull weeds, haul garbage, clean toilets or do anything else
church executives deem necessary for redemption.

    Former Sea Organization member Hana Eltringham Whitfield said in an
affidavit that she once saw an RPF work crew eating like “unkempt
convicts,” digging their hands into a large communal pot of food because
there was no cutlery or plates.
    “The Church of Scientology, which was dedicated to saving the planet
from insanity, had succeeded in turning these human beings into savages,”
said Whitfield.

    Bill Franks, the church’s former international executive director, said
that he once lived in a crowded garage for seven months while assigned to
the RPF.

    “We were indoctrinated on a continuous, daily basis that we were
suppressive people, that we were anti-social people, that we were
criminals,” said Franks, who had a falling out with the church in the early
1980s. He was accused by senior Scientologists of engineering a coup to
wrest control of the church from them.

    The Church of Scientology says the RPF was established in 1974 so that
errant Sea Organization members would have a place to both work and study
Hubbard’s writings without distractions or substantive duties.

    But Hubbard’s former public relations officer, Laurel Sullivan,
testified in a Scientology lawsuit that Hubbard told her the RPF was
created because “he wanted certain people segregated” whom he believed were
“against him and against his instructions and against Scientology.”
    In Scientology, a staff member is evaluated based on his or her
productivity. Hubbard made it clear in a 1964 directive that there is no
excuse–short of death–for missing work.

    “If a staff member’s breath can be detected on a mirror,” Hubbard said,
“he or she can do his or her job.”

    Measuring weekly productivity, Hubbard said, eliminates personality
considerations from staff evaluations. Critics, however, say the system is
dehumanizing.

    “There is no time for anything else, for compassion, for talking or
going out,” said Travers Harris, who left the Sea Organization 1986 after
nearly 14 years. “The only communication is about work. When work is
finished you are too tired (and) you have to go to bed.”

    Several years ago, some branches of the church initiated a program to
boost productivity even higher.

    Under the so-called Team Share Program, staffers who repeatedly failed
in their jobs could be exiled to cramped living quarters called “pigs
berthing” and fed only rice and beans. Those who kept their productivity up
would be afforded special privileges and the distinction of wearing a
silver star.

    Staffers become so consumed by their jobs that their children sometimes
get lost in the shuffle, according to former staff members who had
youngsters and those who cared for them.

    At best, they say, children see their parents one hour a day at dinner
and perhaps late in the evening. Sometimes, according to ex-staffers,
youngsters have gone for days without a visit from their parents, who
believe that their work for the group is transcendent.

    In 1984, a British justice cited the case of a staff member who left
her job to seek medical help for a daughter who had broken her arm.

    “She was directed to work all night as a penalty,” the justice noted.

    He recounted the case of another woman who refused to take a church job
that would have separated her from her daughter for two months.

    “She was shouted at and abused because she put the care of her child
first,” the justice wrote in connection with a child custody battle between
a father who was a Scientologist and a mother who had defected. The mother
was awarded custody.

    Former staff members say they tolerated the harsh conditions for many
reasons. They say they were captives both of their dreams of creating an
enlightened world through Scientology and of their fears of leaving the
organization.

    Staff members are continuously told that there is no safe refuge for
them outside the group because society is a breeding ground for criminals,
the insane and people too ignorant to see that Scientology is the answer to
mankind’s problems.

    In the church, non-Scientologists are derisively called “wogs,” defined
by Hubbard as “a common ordinary run-of-the-mill garden variety humanoid. .
. . Somebody who isn’t even trying.”

    A recruitment flyer for a school run by Scientologists exemplifies this
mind-set:

    “If you turn your kids over to the enemy all day for 12-15 years, which
side do you think they will come out on?” the flyer asks rhetorically. The
enemy, in this case, is public education.

    The organization’s fear of hostile outside influences is so
institutionalized that potential staff members are grilled about whether
they are government agents or reporters or whether they harbor critical
thoughts of Hubbard. Their answers are monitored on the E-meter.

    Security around church buildings is elaborate and sophisticated. Remote
cameras sweep the streets outside. Scientologists with walkie-talkies scout
the perimeters.

    In time, the staff member’s world orbits ever more tightly around one
man–Hubbard.

    “You finally are to the point where you do not examine, logically,
Scientology,” said former Scientologist Vicki Aznaran, who until two years
ago was one of the most powerful figures in the church and is now locked in
litigation with Scientology.

    “You are cut off from anything that might give you another viewpoint,”
she said.
    Some stay because they fear calamity will befall them if they are
denied church courses they have been told are vital to spiritual and
physical stability.

    Former Sea Organization member Janie Peterson, for one, once testified
that she was “so indoctrinated into Scientology that I felt . . . I would
die” upon leaving.

    Other former members said they felt trapped by the church’s “freeloader
debt” policy.

    Many Scientologists join the staff as a way to obtain the church’s
expensive services for free. But should they leave before the expiration of
their employment contracts–ranging from two years to 1 billion years–they
must pay for the programs they had received at no cost. This “freeloader
debt” can reach thousands of dollars.

    And on top of all this is the haunting fear that they will be
ostracized by family and friends for shunning the religion.

    “For those like myself who had been in Scientology for years,
Scientology was our entire life, our friendships, our work, our home,” said
ex-Sea Organization member Whitfield, who spent nearly two decades on the
staff. “The organization had made us grow so entirely dependent on it, it
was almost inconceivable to leave.

    “After all, we had no job skills, no jobs and we believed we would be
immediately hit with thousands of dollars of freeloader debt.”

    Whitfield said that she, like others, defected after reaching the
conclusion that the church seemed “only interested in controlling” its
members.

    “I have looked back and said to myself, ‘What an indoctrinated fool I
was. What a fool.’ “

CAPTION:
Photo: HANA ELTRINGHAM WHITFIELD, Ex-Sea Organization Member
Photo: Patricia Braine, left, with daughter Becky and mother Doris Braine
in a 1986 photo, says she was disillusioned by her years in the church.
Photo: Members of the Sea Organization, left, in navy-style uniforms.
Los Angeles Times
Photo: Church members who break rules may be assigned to the Rehabilitation
Project Force, in which they perform manual labor, right.
Photo: LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGION; CULTS; RELIGIOUS
              ORGANIZATIONS; HUBBARD, L RON; RELIGIOUS WORKERS; WORK ETHIC;
              WORKPLACE; DEFECTIONS

INFLUENCE

Heading # 10

01665644                  54225
Church Seeks Influence in Schools, Business, Science

Los Angeles Times (LT) – WEDNESDAY June 27, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Main Story; Series
Word Count: 6,312

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY. Today: Reaching Into Society. Fourth in a
six-part series. NEXT: Part Five–The Making of a Best-Selling Author.

TEXT:
    Emerging from years of internal strife and public scandal, the
Scientology movement has embarked on a sweeping and sophisticated
campaign to gain new influence in America.

    The goal is to refurbish the tarnished image of Scientology founder
L. Ron Hubbard and elevate him to the ranks of history’s great
humanitarians and thinkers. By so doing, the church hopes to broaden the
acceptability of Hubbard’s Scientology teachings and attract millions of
new members.

    The campaign relies on official church programs and a network of groups
run by Scientology followers. Here is a sampler of their activities:

    Scientologists are disseminating Hubbard’s writings in public and
private school classrooms across the U.S., using groups that seldom
publicize their Scientology connections.

    In the business world, Scientologists have established highly
successful private consulting firms to promote Hubbard as a management
expert, with a goal of harvesting new, affluent members.

    Scientologists are the driving force behind two organizations active in
the scientific community. The organizations have been busy trying to sell
government agencies a chemical detoxification treatment developed by
Hubbard.

    The Scientology movement’s ambitious quest to assimilate into the
American mainstream comes less than a decade after the church seemed
destined for collapse, testifying to its remarkable determination to
survive and grow.

    In 1980, 11 top church leaders–including Hubbard’s wife–were
imprisoned for bugging and burglarizing government offices as part of a
shadowy conspiracy to discredit the church’s perceived enemies.

    Today, Scientology executives insist that the organization is
law-abiding, that the offenders have been purged and that the church has
now entered an era in which harmony has replaced hostility.

    But as the movement attempts to broaden its reach, evidence is mounting
that Hubbard’s devotees are engaging in practices that, while not unlawful,
have begun to stir memories of its troubled past.
Scientology and the Schools

    The Scientology movement has launched a concerted campaign to gain a
foothold in the nation’s schools by distributing to children millions of
copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on basic moral values.

    The program is designed to win recognition for Hubbard as an educator
and moralist and, at the same time, introduce him to the nation’s youth.

    The pocket-size booklet, entitled “The Way to Happiness,” is a
compilation of widely agreed upon values that Hubbard put into writing in
1981. Its 96 pages include such admonitions as “take care of yourself,”
“honor and help your parents,” “do not murder” and “be worthy of trust.”

    The booklet notes in small print that it was written by Hubbard as “an
individual and is not part of any religious doctrine.”

    But Scientology publications have called the campaign “the largest
dissemination project in Scientology history” and “the bridge between broad
society and Scientology.”

    Scientologists estimate that 3.5 million copies have been introduced
into 4,500 elementary, junior high and senior high schools nationwide.
Altogether, more than 28 million copies have been translated into at least
14 languages and distributed throughout the world.

    The booklet is distributed by the Concerned Businessmen’s Assn. of
America, an organization not officially connected to the church but run by
Scientologists.

    The Scientology connection is downplayed by the group. Its leader,
Barbara Ayash of Marina del Rey, said she launched the association after
five of her children became involved with drugs.

    Her group runs a nationwide contest encouraging students to stay off
drugs by following the precepts in Hubbard’s booklet. Participants in the
“Set a Good Example” contest must come up with projects using the booklet
as their guide. By focusing on the drug issue, the association has won the
backing of school officials and olitical figures unaware of its links to
Scientology.

    In Louisiana, a junior high school distributed Hubbard’s booklet to
students and then had them pledge in writing:

    “I promise to do my best to learn, practice and use the 21 points of
good moral conduct contained in ‘The Way to Happiness’ book to improve
myself, set a good example for my friends, and to help my family, my
community and my country.”

    As an incentive to get campus administrators on board, the association
awards $5,000 to the winning elementary, junior high and senior high
schools.

    At contest awards ceremonies, the winners and Hubbard’s book share the
spotlight.

    For example, during a ceremony at the Charleston, W.Va., civic center,
then-Gov. Arch Moore and other dignitaries were each presented a
leather-bound copy of “The Way To Happiness.”

    Scientology critics contend that the contest is being used to enlist
new church members, who, as the theory goes, may be so inspired by “The Way
to Happiness” that they will reach for Hubbard’s other writings. They argue
that the booklet’s distribution in public schools violates constitutional
mandates separating church and state.

    But Ayash of the businessmen’s association insists that her group has
no motive other than to help children lead better lives. “The Way to
Happiness,” she said, shows them the path in simple, direct language.

    For the most part, school officials whose campuses have participated in
the contest said they were unaware of Hubbard’s Scientology connection or
that his followers were directing the contest. They said Scientology was
not openly promoted and they did not regret taking part.

    But one California public school system recently banned the contest
after administrators conducted an investigation and learned that Hubbard
was the author of Scientology’s doctrine.

    For three years, students at El Capitan Middle School in Fresno
participated in the nationwide contest. In Spring, 1989, the students won
second place for organizing an anti-drug relay in which they passed each
other a symbolic “torch”–Hubbard’s booklet.

    Deluxe leather-bound copies were presented to mayors of the 15 cities
along the relay route.

    Last fall, the contest’s sponsors decided to accelerate their efforts
in Fresno County, urging the entire 5,000-student Central Unified School
District to participate, instead of just one school. But they ran up
against Geoff Garratt, the district’s director of educational services and
personnel.

    Garratt said that, while he was aware of Scientology, he had never
heard of Hubbard. He said he learned of the connection at the local
library, where he went to investigate Hubbard’s background.

    “The more I investigated,” Garratt said, “I found it (the businessmen’s
association) represented a very small self-interest group: Scientology.”
Among other things, he said, he discovered that the association had the
same phone number and address as the local Dianetics center.

    Garratt said he rejected the association’s plea to expand the contest,
fearing that the booklet’s distribution in the public schools might violate
constitutional prohibitions against mixing matters of church and state.

    Garratt said the association refused to consider the possibility of
holding the contest without Hubbard’s booklet. “They said flat out,
‘Without the book, there is no contest.’ “

    Scientologists also are attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial
program in public schools, using a church-affiliated organization called
Applied Scholastics.

    Yellow posters advertising Applied Scholastics have appeared in
storefront windows throughout Los Angeles. They promise better learning
skills but make no mention of the church.

    Applied Scholastics currently has plans to build a 1,000-acre campus,
where the organization would train educators to teach Hubbard’s tutorial
program. A recent Applied Scholastics mailer predicted that the training
center will be a “model of real education for the world” and “create
overwhelming public popularity” for Hubbard.

    Developed for students of Scientology, the Hubbard program is built
upon an elementary premise: learning difficulties arise when students read
past words they do not understand.

    “The misunderstood word in a subject produces a vast panorama of mental
effects and is the prime factor involved in stupidity,” Hubbard wrote in
1967. “This is a sweepingly fantastic discovery in the field of education.”

    The chief solution he propounds is simple: students must learn to use a
dictionary when they encounter an unfamiliar or confusing word.

    In recent years, Applied Scholastics has targeted predominantly
minority schools, where many students tend to do poorly on standardized
tests. Applied Scholastics considers these schools fertile ground because
campus administrators are willing to try new approaches to improve scores.

    The Compton Unified School District in 1987 and 1988 allowed the
Hubbard program to be tested with 80 students at Centennial Senior High
School. The program there was run by a substitute teacher named Frizell
Clegg, a Scientologist who was an Applied Scholastics consultant.

    Clegg, who refused to be interviewed, was suspended from his teaching
duties in 1988 after he reportedly gave discourses on Scientology in a
history class. He no longer teaches at the school.

    In applying for district financing, Clegg said the educational program
was “developed by American writer and educator L. Ron Hubbard.” Excluding
any reference to Hubbard’s Scientology connection, he persuaded the board
to provide $5,000 to tutor 30 sophomores with low reading scores and to
conduct a parent workshop.

    After the program grew to 50 students, Applied Scholastics submitted a
proposal increasing the number of students to 125 and the cost to $27,000.

    District officials killed the program, believing that Applied
Scholastics was seeking to expand too quickly. Officials were also
displeased that the group, without district approval, was using its
involvement with Centennial to market the program elsewhere, according to
Acting Supt. Elisa Sanchez.
    In promotional literature, Applied Scholastics made claims of
remarkable success at Centennial High. While some parents said the program
helped their children, Sanchez said the claims made by Applied Scholastics
were unsubstantiated.

Converting the Business World

    Scientology is using a network of private consulting firms to gain a
foothold in the U.S. business community.

    The firms promise businessmen higher earnings but appear to be mainly
interested in recruiting new members for the church.

    Although these profit-making firms operate independently of each other,
they sell the same product: Scientology founder Hubbard’s methods for
running a profitable enterprise. The Church of Scientology has for years
employed these same methods–heavy marketing, high productivity and rigid
rules of employee conduct–to amass hundreds of millions of dollars for
itself.

    Critics contend that the consulting firms are concealing their
Scientology links so they can attract to the church prosperous people who
might otherwise be put off by Scientology’s controversial reputation.

    The strategy appears to have proven effective.

    A Scientology publication in 1987 reported that the consultant network
earned a combined $1.6 million a month selling Hubbard’s management methods
to a variety of professionals, many of whom have reported improved incomes.
It also said that 50 to 75 businessmen were recruited monthly into the
church, where each week they spent a total of $250,000 on Scientology
courses.

    Two of the movement’s firms have been ranked by Inc. magazine as among
the fastest growing private businesses in America.

    The consulting firms use seminars and mailers to attract health
professionals, salesmen, office supply dealers, marketing specialists and
others.

    Those who have dealt with the firms describe the process this way:

    Businessmen are drawn into Scientology after they have gained
confidence in Hubbard’s non-religious management methods. They are often
told that, to achieve true business success, they should get their personal
lives in order. From there, the church takes over, encouraging them to
purchase spiritual enhancement courses and begin a process called
“auditing.”

    During auditing, a person confesses his innermost thoughts while his
responses are monitored on a lie detector-type device known as the E-meter.
Auditing must be purchased in 12 1/2-hour chunks, costing between $3,000
and $11,000 each, depending on where it is bought.

    Spearheading all this is an arm of the church called World Institute of
Scientology Enterprises, or WISE.

    In recent months, WISE has been encouraging Scientologists nationwide
to become consultants within their respective professions. The appeal is
simple: make money while disseminating your religion.

    In the process, WISE profits, too. It trains and licenses the firms to
sell Hubbard’s copyrighted “management and administrative technology.” WISE
charges roughly $12,000 for its basic no-frills training course. For
consulting services, it charges $1,875 a day.
    On top of this, the consulting firms that sell Hubbard’s business
methods must pay WISE 13% of their annual gross income.

    At the heart of Hubbard’s business system is a concept he called
“management by statistics,” which he said guarantees optimum office
efficiency. Scientology critics maintain, however, that it creates an
oppressive and regimented workplace environment.

    An employee is judged solely upon his productivity, which is charted on
a graph each week. Sagging productivity could bring a rebuke from the boss.
Or it could lead to an employee’s firing.

    The management techniques promoted by the consulting firms are
identical to those used by the church, except that all Scientology
references have been deleted from the materials. The consultants even
employ the most basic instrument used by the church to recruit new members
off the street–a 200-question personality test that purports to let people
know if they have ruinous personality flaws.

    The consultants encourage businessmen and their employees to purchase
Scientology courses to remedy personality problems uncovered by the test.
    One of the most successful consulting firms licensed by WISE is
Sterling Management Systems, which targets dentists and other health care
professionals. For the past two years, Inc. magazine has ranked it among
America’s fastest-growing privately held businesses.

    Sterling, based in Glendale, claims to be the “largest health care
management consulting group in the U.S.”

    A company spokesman said the firm charges clients $10,000 for its
complete line of Hubbard courses and 30 hours of private consultation. The
spokesman said Sterling has helped dentists increase their income an
average of $10,000 a month.

    He insisted that the company has “no connection” to the church, but
added: “If people are interested in Scientology, we will make it available
to them.”

    Sterling publishes a tabloid called “Today’s Professional, the Journal
of Successful Practice Management.” Mailed free to 300,000 health care
professionals nationwide, it is filled with “management” articles by
Hubbard that are actually excerpts from Scientology’s governing doctrines.
    The company also holds nationwide seminars that, according to its
promotional literature, have been drawing 2,000 people a month.

    Sterling Management was founded in 1983 by Scientologist Gregory K.
Hughes, at the time a prosperous dentist in Vacaville, Calif. Hughes holds
seminars across the country, offering himself as evidence that Hubbard’s
methods work.

    In promotional publications for Sterling, Hughes has said that his
annual income soared from $257,000 in 1979 to more than $1 million in 1985.
In one month alone, he has claimed to have seen 350 new patients.

    Sterling’s paper, Today’s Professional, has boasted that “the
techniques that produced amazing results when applied to Greg’s practice
are being applied all over the U.S.”

    But neither the paper’s readers nor those who attend Hughes’ seminars
are told that his dental office, which employed the high-volume Hubbard
techniques that he imparts to others, has been accused by former patients
of dental negligence and malpractice.

    Hughes currently is under investigation by the California Board of
Dental Examiners. The board already has turned over some of its findings to
the state attorney general’s office, which will determine whether action
should be taken against Hughes’ dental license.

    To date, there are more than 15 lawsuits pending against Hughes and his
dental associates, alleging either negligence or malpractice. He has denied
the allegations.

    Attorney E. Bradley Nelson is representing most of those who have sued
Hughes.

    “It is my opinion,” he said, “that the overall quality of care took
second place to the profit motive. . . . I’ve never seen anything
approaching this volume of complaints against one dentist in such a short
period of time.”

    In mid-1985, Hughes closed his office without warning to devote full
time to Sterling. He left behind a reputation so tarnished that he was
unable to sell his million-dollar-a-year practice, according to dentists in
the area.

    “He actually had to walk away,” said Roger Abrew, co-chairman of the
peer review committee of local dental society.

    He also left behind patients with worse problems than they had before
they were treated by Hughes’ office, according to Abrew and other dentists,
who have since been treating them. The dentists said that, based on their
examinations, Hughes’ office performed both substandard and unnecessary
work.

    “I think its kind of ironic to see a guy who did such a botched job of
dentistry teaching others,” said dentist David C. Aronson, summing up the
sentiments of most of his colleagues in the small Northern California
community.

    Hughes, who continues to conduct his “Winning With Dentistry” seminars,
refused to be interviewed for this story. But Frederick Bradley, an
attorney defending him in the lawsuits, suggested that the Vacaville
dentists may simply resent his client’s success because their patients had
deserted them for Hughes.

    Another firm once licensed by Scientology’s WISE organization to sell
Hubbard’s management techniques was Singer Consultants. Before it merged
with another management company, Singer was ranked as one of the nation’s
fastest growing private businesses.

    The company focused its training on America’s chiropractors. It brought
hundreds of new members into the church and triggered a nationwide
controversy among chiropractors over its links to Scientology. In fact, a
chiropractic newspaper devoted almost an entire issue to letters praising
and condemning Singer Consultants, which was located in Clearwater, Fla.,
where Scientology is a major presence.

    “We felt that there were young doctors who didn’t know they were being
solicited to do something above and beyond the practice of their
profession,” said Dynamic Chiropractic editor Donald M. Peterson,
explaining why his Huntington Beach-based newspaper entered the
controversy.

    Singer Consultants was headed by Scientologist David Singer, an
accomplished speaker and chiropractor who held nationwide seminars to pitch
Hubbard’s business methods.

    Two years ago, the company was absorbed into another management firm
owned by Scientologists.

    Although Singer refused to be interviewed by The Times, he told Dynamic
Chiropractic: “Hubbard was a prolific writer and wrote on a multitude of
subjects. We do not, have not and will not make part of our program the
teaching of any religion.”

Scientology and Science

    Hubbard was so proud of a detoxification treatment he developed–and so
hungry for plaudits–that he openly talked with his closest aides about
winning a Nobel Prize.

    Although the man is gone, Scientologists are keeping the dream alive.
They have embarked upon a controversial plan to win recognition for Hubbard
and his treatment program in scientific and medical circles.

    The treatment purports to purge drugs and toxins from a person’s system
through a rigorous regimen of exercise, saunas and vitamins–a combination
intended to dislodge the poisons from fatty tissues and sweat them out.

    Physicians affiliated with the regimen have touted it as a major
breakthrough, and a number of patients who have undergone the treatment say
their health improved. But some health authorities dismiss Hubbard’s
program as a medical fraud that preys upon public fear of toxins.

    In the Church of Scientology, the treatment is called the “purification
rundown.” Church members are told it is a religious program that, for about
$2,000, will purify the body and spirit. In the secular arena, however,
Scientologists are promoting it exclusively as a medical treatment with no
spiritual underpinnings. In that context, it is simply called the “Hubbard
Method.”

    The treatment is being aggressively pushed in the non-Scientology world
by two organizations that sometimes work alone and sometimes in tandem.
They have no formal church ties but both are controlled by church members.

    The firms promise businessmen higher earnings but appear to be mainly
interested in recruiting new members for the church.

    Although these profit-making firms operate independently of each other,
they sell the same product: Scientology founder Hubbard’s methods for
running a profitable enterprise. The Church of Scientology has for years
employed these same methods–heavy marketing, high productivity and rigid
rules of employee conduct–to amass hundreds of millions of dollars for
itself.
    Critics contend that the consulting firms are concealing their
Scientology links so they can attract to the church prosperous people who
might otherwise be put off by Scientology’s controversial reputation.

    The strategy appears to have proven effective.

    A Scientology publication in 1987 reported that the consultant network
earned a combined $1.6 million a month selling Hubbard’s management methods
to a variety of professionals, many of whom have reported improved incomes.
It also said that 50 to 75 businessmen were recruited monthly into the
church, where each week they spent a total of $250,000 on Scientology
courses.

    Two of the movement’s firms have been ranked by Inc. magazine as among
the fastest growing private businesses in America.

    The consulting firms use seminars and mailers to attract health
professionals, salesmen, office supply dealers, marketing specialists and
others.

    Those who have dealt with the firms describe the process this way:
    Businessmen are drawn into Scientology after they have gained
confidence in Hubbard’s non-religious management methods. They are often
told that, to achieve true business success, they should get their personal

lives in order. From there, the church takes over, encouraging them to
purchase spiritual enhancement courses and begin a process called
“auditing.”

    During auditing, a person confesses his innermost thoughts while his
responses are monitored on a lie detector-type device known as the E-meter.
Auditing must be purchased in 12 1/2-hour chunks, costing between $3,000
and $11,000 each, depending on where it is bought.

    Spearheading all this is an arm of the church called World Institute of
Scientology Enterprises, or WISE.

    In recent months, WISE has been encouraging Scientologists nationwide
to become consultants within their respective professions. The appeal is
simple: make money while disseminating your religion.

    In the process, WISE profits, too. It trains and licenses the firms to
sell Hubbard’s copyrighted “management and administrative technology.” WISE
charges roughly $12,000 for its basic no-frills training course. For
consulting services, it charges $1,875 a day.

    On top of this, the consulting firms that sell Hubbard’s business
methods must pay WISE 13% of their annual gross income.

    At the heart of Hubbard’s business system is a concept he called
“management by statistics,” which he said guarantees optimum office
efficiency. Scientology critics maintain, however, that it creates an
oppressive and regimented workplace environment.

    An employee is judged solely upon his productivity, which is charted on
a graph each week. Sagging productivity could bring a rebuke from the boss.
Or it could lead to an employee’s firing.

    The management techniques promoted by the consulting firms are
identical to those used by the church, except that all Scientology
references have been deleted from the materials. The consultants even
employ the most basic instrument used by the church to recruit new members
off the street–a 200-question personality test that purports to let people
know if they have ruinous personality flaws.

    The consultants encourage businessmen and their employees to purchase
Scientology courses to remedy personality problems uncovered by the test.

    One of the most successful consulting firms licensed by WISE is
Sterling Management Systems, which targets dentists and other health care
professionals. For the past two years, Inc. magazine has ranked it among
America’s fastest-growing privately held businesses.

    Sterling, based in Glendale, claims to be the “largest health care
management consulting group in the U.S.”

    A company spokesman said the firm charges clients $10,000 for its
complete line of Hubbard courses and 30 hours of private consultation. The
spokesman said Sterling has helped dentists increase their income an
average of $10,000 a month.

    He insisted that the company has “no connection” to the church, but
added: “If people are interested in Scientology, we will make it available
to them.”

    Sterling publishes a tabloid called “Today’s Professional, the Journal
of Successful Practice Management.” Mailed free to 300,000 health care
professionals nationwide, it is filled with “management” articles by
Hubbard that are actually excerpts from Scientology’s governing doctrines.

    The company also holds nationwide seminars that, according to its
promotional literature, have been drawing 2,000 people a month.

    Sterling Management was founded in 1983 by Scientologist Gregory K.
Hughes, at the time a prosperous dentist in Vacaville, Calif. Hughes holds
seminars across the country, offering himself as evidence that Hubbard’s
methods work.

    In promotional publications for Sterling, Hughes has said that his
annual income soared from $257,000 in 1979 to more than $1 million in 1985.
In one month alone, he has claimed to have seen 350 new patients.

    Sterling’s paper, Today’s Professional, has boasted that “the
techniques that produced amazing results when applied to Greg’s practice
are being applied all over the U.S.”

    But neither the paper’s readers nor those who attend Hughes’ seminars
are told that his dental office, which employed the high-volume Hubbard
techniques that he imparts to others, has been accused by former patients
of dental negligence and malpractice.
    Hughes currently is under investigation by the California Board of
Dental Examiners. The board already has turned over some of its findings to
the state attorney general’s office, which will determine whether action
should be taken against Hughes’ dental license.

    To date, there are more than 15 lawsuits pending against Hughes and his
dental associates, alleging either negligence or malpractice. He has denied
the allegations.

    Attorney E. Bradley Nelson is representing most of those who have sued
Hughes.

    “It is my opinion,” he said, “that the overall quality of care took
second place to the profit motive. . . . I’ve never seen anything
approaching this volume of complaints against one dentist in such a short
period of time.”

    In mid-1985, Hughes closed his office without warning to devote full
time to Sterling. He left behind a reputation so tarnished that he was
unable to sell his million-dollar-a-year practice, according to dentists in
the area.
    “He actually had to walk away,” said Roger Abrew, co-chairman of the
peer review committee of local dental society.

    He also left behind patients with worse problems than they had before
they were treated by Hughes’ office, according to Abrew and other dentists,
who have since been treating them. The dentists said that, based on their
examinations, Hughes’ office performed both substandard and unnecessary
work.

    “I think its kind of ironic to see a guy who did such a botched job of
dentistry teaching others,” said dentist David C. Aronson, summing up the
sentiments of most of his colleagues in the small Northern California
community.

    Hughes, who continues to conduct his “Winning With Dentistry” seminars,
refused to be interviewed for this story. But Frederick Bradley, an
attorney defending him in the lawsuits, suggested that the Vacaville
dentists may simply resent his client’s success because their patients had
deserted them for Hughes.

    Another firm once licensed by Scientology’s WISE organization to sell
Hubbard’s management techniques was Singer Consultants. Before it merged
with another management company, Singer was ranked as one of the nation’s
fastest growing private businesses.

    The company focused its training on America’s chiropractors. It brought
hundreds of new members into the church and triggered a nationwide
controversy among chiropractors over its links to Scientology. In fact, a
chiropractic newspaper devoted almost an entire issue to letters praising
and condemning Singer Consultants, which was located in Clearwater, Fla.,
where Scientology is a major presence.

    “We felt that there were young doctors who didn’t know they were being
solicited to do something above and beyond the practice of their
profession,” said Dynamic Chiropractic editor Donald M. Peterson,
explaining why his Huntington Beach-based newspaper entered the
controversy.

    Singer Consultants was headed by Scientologist David Singer, an
accomplished speaker and chiropractor who held nationwide seminars to pitch
Hubbard’s business methods.

    Two years ago, the company was absorbed into another management firm
owned by Scientologists.
    Although Singer refused to be interviewed by The Times, he told Dynamic
Chiropractic: “Hubbard was a prolific writer and wrote on a multitude of
subjects. We do not, have not and will not make part of our program the
teaching of any religion.”

Scientology and Science

    Hubbard was so proud of a detoxification treatment he developed–and so
hungry for plaudits–that he openly talked with his closest aides about
winning a Nobel Prize.

    Although the man is gone, Scientologists are keeping the dream alive.
They have embarked upon a controversial plan to win recognition for Hubbard
and his treatment program in scientific and medical circles.

    The treatment purports to purge drugs and toxins from a person’s system
through a rigorous regimen of exercise, saunas and vitamins–a combination
intended to dislodge the poisons from fatty tissues and sweat them out.

    Physicians affiliated with the regimen have touted it as a major
breakthrough, and a number of patients who have undergone the treatment say
their health improved. But some health authorities dismiss Hubbard’s
program as a medical fraud that preys upon public fear of toxins.

    In the Church of Scientology, the treatment is called the “purification
rundown.” Church members are told it is a religious program that, for about
$2,000, will purify the body and spirit. In the secular arena, however,
Scientologists are promoting it exclusively as a medical treatment with no
spiritual underpinnings. In that context, it is simply called the “Hubbard
Method.”

    The treatment is being aggressively pushed in the non-Scientology world
by two organizations that sometimes work alone and sometimes in tandem.
They have no formal church ties but both are controlled by church members.

    Seeking customers and credibility, the two groups have targeted
government and private workers nationwide who are exposed to hazardous
substances in their jobs. They have pressed public agencies to endorse the
method, lobbied unions to recommend it and written articles in trade
journals that seem to be little more than advertisements for the treatment.

    One of these groups is the Los Angeles-based Foundation for
Advancements in Science and Education. The nonprofit foundation has forged
links with scientists across the country to gain legitimacy for itself and,
thus, for Hubbard’s detox method.

    Among its key functionaries is a toxicologist for the Environmental
Protection Agency, whose advocacy of the treatment has raised
conflict-of-interest questions.

    Building credentials and allies, the foundation has channeled tens of
thousands of dollars in grants to educators and researchers studying
toxicological hazards, most of whom were unaware of the organization’s ties
to the Scientology movement.

    In 1986, for example, the foundation gave $10,000 to the Los Angeles
County Health Department for a study of potentially harmful radon gas.
County officials say they were not apprised of the organization’s links
with the Scientology movement.

    Bill Franks was instrumental in creating the foundation in 1981 when he
served as the Church of Scientology’s executive director, a post from which
he was later ousted in a power struggle. Franks described the foundation in
an interview as a Scientology “front group.”

    “The concept,” he said, “was to get some scientific recognition” for
Hubbard’s treatment without overtly linking it to the church.

    Buttressing Franks’ account, the foundation’s original incorporation
papers state that its purpose was to “research the efficacy of and promote
the use of the works of L. Ron Hubbard in the solving of social problems;
and to scientifically research and provide public information and education
concerning the efficacy of other programs.”

    The document was later amended, however, to remove Hubbard’s name,
obscuring the foundation’s ties to the Scientology movement and its founder
in official records.

    Hubbard’s name, however, continues to appear regularly in the
foundation’s slick newsletter. In the latest edition, for instance, three
different articles advocate the “Hubbard method” as an effective therapy
for chemical and drug detoxification.

    A fourth article did not mention Hubbard by name, but reported
favorably on Narconon, his drug and alcohol rehabilitation program, which
is run by Scientologists.

    The other organization in the outreach effort is HealthMed Clinic,
which administers Hubbard’s treatment from offices in Los Angeles and
Sacramento and is run by Scientologists.

    An independent medical consultant in Maryland who reviewed the program
for the city of Shreveport, La., dismissed Hubbard’s treatment as
“quackery.”

    The foundation and HealthMed have attempted to create an impression
that they are linked only by a shared concern over toxic hazards. In
reality, however, they operate symbiotically.

    The foundation, for its part, tries to scientifically validate the
Hubbard method through studies and articles by individuals who either are
Scientologists or hold foundation positions. HealthMed then uses the
foundation’s credibility, writings and connections to get customers for the
treatment.

    According to state corporate records, the foundation also holds stock
in HealthMed. Moreover, the foundation’s vice president, Scientologist Jack
Dirmann, has served as HealthMed’s administrator.

    In 1986, four doctors with the California Department of Health Services
accused HealthMed of making “false medical claims” and of “taking advantage
of the fears of workers and the public and about toxic chemicals and their
potential health effects, including cancer.” The doctors also criticized
the foundation for supporting “scientifically questionable” research.

    The state physicians, who evaluate potential toxic hazards in the
workplace, leveled the accusations in a letter that triggered an
investigation by the state Board of Medical Quality Assurance. That probe
was concluded last year without a finding of whether the detox treatment
works. Investigators said they were stymied by HealthMed’s refusal to
provide patient records and by a lack of complaints from those who had
undergone the regimen.

    The four physicians who prompted the investigation said they decided to
study the Hubbard treatment after receiving calls from union
representatives, public agencies and individual workers throughout the
state who had been solicited by the clinics. Among them were the California
Highway Patrol, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers,
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the Los Angeles County Fire and Sheriff’s
departments.

    “It was the accumulation of these calls that led us to say, ‘Hey, this
is going on all over the state. Let’s look into it,’ ” recalled Gideon
Letz, one of the doctors.

    The foundation and HealthMed have worked particularly hard to tap one
large pool of potential clients: firefighters. The Hubbard method has been
pitched to them as a cure for exposure to a carcinogen sometimes
encountered during fires. Known as PCBs, the now-banned chemical compound
was once widely used to insulate transformers.

    City officials in Shreveport, La., said they paid HealthMed
$80,000–and were ready to spend a lot more–until they hired a consultant,
who denounced the treatments as unnecessary and worthless.

    What happened in Shreveport is a case study of how the foundation and
HealthMed have worked together to draw customers through methods that
critics contend are exploitative.

    In April, 1987, dozens of Shreveport firemen were exposed to PCBs when
they responded to an early morning transformer explosion at the Louisiana
State University Medical Center. In the aftermath, some began to complain
of headaches, dizziness, skin rashes, memory loss and other symptoms that
they attributed to the exposure.
    Blood and tissue tests by the university medical center showed no
abnormal levels of PCBs in their systems. But the firemen wondered if the
university was trying to protect itself from liability because the
explosion had occured there.

    Searching for alternatives, one of the firemen came across an article
in Fire Engineering magazine. Headlined “Chemical Exposure in Firefighting:
The Enemy Within,” it was written by Gerald T. Lionelli, “senior research
associate for the Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education.”

    Lionelli discussed the frightening consequences of chemical exposure
and then got to the point. He said the foundation had found an effective
detoxification technique developed by “the late American researcher L. Ron
Hubbard” and delivered by HealthMed Clinic.

    The article did not mention another of Hubbard’s notable
developments–Scientology.

    The firemen contacted HealthMed, and, before long, were sold on the
program. They went next to Howard Foggin, then the city’s medical claims
officer, and gave him HealthMed literature and a Washington, D.C., phone
number the clinic had provided them. It was for the office of EPA
toxicologist William Marcus.

    Marcus, a non-Scientologist, is a senior adviser to the foundation. But
it is his authoritative position with the EPA’s office of drinking water
that helps impress potential HealthMed clients.

    When Shreveport officials called Marcus, he vouched for HealthMed. The
EPA had spoken, or so the city’s claims manager thought back then.

    “All he told me was, it seemed I had no alternative but to send those
people to Los Angeles” for HealthMed’s treatment, Foggin said, adding: “I
felt I had to get moving on it fast.”

    In an interview with The Times, Marcus acknowledged that he recommended
HealthMed, but he denied any conflict of interest.

    “They called me and I talked to them,” Marcus said. “I told them that
basically there was no other game in town. . . . I think L. Ron Hubbard is
a bona fide genius.”

    Marcus said he receives only travel-related expenses for the foundation
work.
    His boss, Michael Cook, said he is satisfied that Marcus did not act
improperly. He said that Marcus has insisted “he made it clear that he was
not speaking as an EPA employee. Certainly that is what we would hope and
expect he (would) do.”

    In all, HealthMed brought about 20 Shreveport firefighters to Los
Angeles to treat what the clinic described as high levels of PCBs in their
blood and fatty tissues. For the most part, the firemen returned home
saying that they felt better.

    Although city officials had learned of Hubbard’s Scientology
connection, they were unconcerned.

    Then, as HealthMed’s bills mounted, two private insurance carriers for
Shreveport suggested that city officials hire an independent analyst to
review the treatment before doling out more money. The city agreed and
commissioned a study by National Medical Advisory Service Inc., of
Bethesda, Md.

    The report, prepared by Dr. Ronald E. Gots, was an indictment of
HealthMed’s professionalism and ethics. The bottom line:
    “The treatment in California preyed upon the fears of concerned
workers, but served no rational medical function. . . . Moreover, the
program itself, developed not by physicians or scientists, but by the
founder of the Church of Scientology, has no recognized value in the
established medical and scientific community. It is quackery.”

    Gots’ 1987 report ended the city’s involvement with HealthMed.

    “I think we were misled,” lamented city finance director Jim Keyes.
“Somebody should have laid everything out on the table.”

    Neither HealthMed nor the foundation would return phone calls from The
Times.

CAPTION:
Photo: Scientologists estimate that 3.5 million copies of copies of L. Ron
Hubbard’s pamphlet, “The Way to Happiness,” have been distributed in 4,500
elementary and junior and senior high schools in the U.S.
Los Angeles Times
Photo: Firemen in Shreveport, La., were exposed to PCBs, a toxic chemical,
during 1987 fire. Many later were treated at an L.A. clinic using L. Ron
Hubbard’s detoxification program.
JOHN ARMISTEAD / Shreveport Journal
Photo: HealthMed clinic in Los Angeles, which uses Scientology’s
“purification” methods, came under fire from some in medicine who claim
clinic preyed upon fears of workers exposed to toxic chemicals.
LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; HUBBARD, L RON; RELIGION; CULTS;
              RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS; ASSIMILATION; SCHOOL EQUIPMENT AND
              SUPPLIES; MORALITY; BOOKS; UNITED STATES–SCHOOLS; STUDENTS;
              CONCERNED BUSINESSMEN’S ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA; SEPARATION OF
              CHURCH AND STATE; UNITED STATES–EDUCATION; UNITED
              STATES–BUSINESS; CONSULTANTS; MANAGEMENT; WORLD INSTITUTE OF
              SCIENTOLOGY ENTERPRISES; MEDICAL TREATMENTS; DETOXIFICATION
              ; REHABILITATION; FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCEMENTS IN SCIENCE AND
              EDUCATION; HEALTHMED CLINIC

BROKERS

Heading # 8

01665807                  54388
Courting the Power Brokers
From politicians to the leaders of business, the courts and the media, the
church works to win allies to smooth the way for expansion.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – WEDNESDAY June 27, 1990
By: JOEL SAPPELL; ROBERT W. WELKOS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 18  Pt. A  Col. 3
Story Type: Sidebar
Word Count: 610

TEXT:
    To create a favorable environment for Scientology’s expansion, church
executives are working to win allies among society’s power brokers and
opinion leaders.

    It is a theme expounded in church publications.

    “We need to be able to approach the right people in order to get things
done,” wrote Heber Jentzsch, president of the Church of Scientology
International, in the newspaper Scientology Today. “We need to to find out
how to reach key people in the media, in government, in the control points
of society, the people who run things.”

    Underscoring the campaign’s breadth and determination, a pull-out
questionnaire entitled “Communication Lines to the World” was inserted in
the newspaper. It asked Scientologists to list their connections to people
in six areas:

    POLITICS: “This would be political figures on a local, state or
national level, such as local city officials, mayors, governors, senators,
congressmen, and members of parliaments. It would also include government
agency officials and civil servants.”

    MEDIA: “This would be any media terminals that you know, such as owners
or proprietors of magazines, newswire services, newspapers or publishing
houses, TV and radio networks or stations and publishers and editors of any
type of news media.”

    LEGAL: “This would be any judges, law enforcement officials, lawyers,
barristers and so on.”

    FINANCIAL / CORPORATE: “This would be any members of the board or
presidents, vice presidents or other senior officials/executives with banks
or other financial institutions (such as savings and loan companies, credit
unions, etc.) financiers (this could be government or private industry)
stockbrokers, financial advisers and commodities brokers.”

    ENTERTAINMENT / CELEBRITIES: “This would be any producers or directors
in the stage, motion pictures or television; actors, artists, writers and
any opinion leaders in these areas.”

    OPINION LEADERS: “This would be anyone who is respected by or who
influences the opinion of individuals in the above categories.”

    While developing support in the secular community, Scientology has also
been working hard to gain support from mainstream religious figures.

    Spearheading this effort is the Religious Freedom Crusade, a
Scientology group that has attracted officials of various faiths. The
crusade’s rallying cry is that court actions brought against the Church of
Scientology by disaffected members or government agencies pose a
constitutional danger to all religions.

    In 1988, Scientologists mustered a multidenominational coalition to
push a bill through the California Legislature requiring judicial approval
before religious groups or nonprofit organizations can be sued for punitive
damages.

    The Church of Scientology had a special interest in the legislation: It
has been ordered at least twice to pay huge punitive awards to
ex-Scientologists, although one award was reduced on appeal and the other
was set aside.

    Scientologists not sure how to recruit religious allies got some tips
in a document provided to The Times by an ex-member, who said it was
distributed at a Scientology meeting in the mid-1980s.

    The document suggested that Scientologists, after selecting an
appropriate church, should attend Sunday services and praise the minister:
” ‘Your sermon was brilliant! Would you be willing to speak at our church?’
(He’ll have a hard time refusing that one!).”

    It advised them to establish good communication with the minister’s
wife because “she can be an ally or an enemy and you want her support if
possible.”

    After the service, “make friends with other congregation members,” the
document added. “. . . Circulate, but be sure to spend a few minutes with
the minister and to meet his wife and family. . . . If you haven’t gotten
the minister’s phone number earlier, get it before you go.”

    Finally, the document urged, get the ministers to write a notarized
affidavit or letter stating that “Scientology is a bona fide religion.”

CAPTION:
Photo: Scientologists join other clergymen at a 1986 “Religious Freedom
Crusade” in Los Angeles protesting jury award against the church.
LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS; CULTS;
              RELIGION; BUSINESS; ASSIMILATION

                    Copyright (c) 1990, Times Mirror Company

Heading # 9

01665806                  54387
THE ‘ORG BOARD’
Hubbard’s Plan for Improving on ’80 Trillion Years’ of Management

Los Angeles Times (LT) – WEDNESDAY June 27, 1990
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 18  Pt. A  Col. 4
Story Type: Sidebar
Word Count: 142

TEXT:
    A key element of the management techniques Scientologists sell to
businessmen is L. Ron Hubbard’s “organizational board.”

    Used also by the Church of Scientology, the “Org Board” divides an
organization into seven divisions–executive, personnel, sales, finance,
training, marketing and qualifications. Each division’s duties are spelled
out, along with the basis for evaluating employee performance.

    In describing the Org Board’s virtues, Scientology consultants omit
Hubbard’s colorful account of its origins–an account reminiscent of one of
his science fiction tales.

    During a 1965 lecture to Scientologists in England, Hubbard said his
board is a refined version of one that was used for “80 trillion years” by
an “old galactic civilization.”

    Hubbard said the civilization died (he did not say when) because its
organizational board lacked one division that he incorporated into his
modern-day version.

    Declared Hubbard: “We don’t want these temporary fly-by-night affairs!”

DESCRIPTORS:  MANAGEMENT; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; HUBBARD, L RON;
              RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS; CULTS; BUSINESS; CONSULTANTS

ESCALANTE

Heading # 7

01665808                  54389
Foundation Funds Provide Assist to Celebrated Teacher Escalante

Los Angeles Times (LT) – WEDNESDAY June 27, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 19  Pt. A  Col. 2
Story Type: Sidebar; Profile
Word Count: 256

TEXT:
    The Scientology movement’s Foundation for Advancements in Science and
Education has befriended one of America’s most celebrated teachers, Jaime
Escalante of Garfield High School.

    Escalante is the East Los Angeles teacher profiled in the hit 1988 film
“Stand and Deliver,” which chronicled his success in teaching advanced
calculus to barrio students.

    During the last few years, the foundation has provided Escalante with
tens of thousands of dollars for computers, audiovisual aids, tutors and
scholarships. In addition, the foundation has solicited contributions from
major corporations to help Escalante’s Garfield High mathematics program
grow in size and sophistication.

    In fact, the foundation has been Escalante’s primary benefactor.

    He is now teaming up with the foundation to develop a series of 12
educational videos for distribution by the Public Broadcasting System.
Called “Futures,” the series is intended to motivate students by showing
them the relevancy of math in the workplace. The foundation’s president
will be the executive producer, while Escalante will be host of the series.

    Escalante says he was unaware of the foundation’s links to Scientology.
“No, no,” he said, “they (foundation officials) never mentioned that name.”
But, he added, it makes no difference.

    “From my point of view,” he said, “I really don’t mind what they are.
The only thing I care about is that they help my students, my kids. That’s
my main goal.”

    The foundation, for its part, has not been reticent about publicizing
its support of Escalante. Its promotional literature regularly includes
photographs of Escalante in his classroom or standing side-by-side with
beaming foundation executives.

CAPTION:
Photo: JAIME ESCALANTE, Garfield High School teacher

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS; RELIGION;
              CULTS; GRANTS; TEACHERS; TEACHING; SCHOOL EQUIPMENT AND
              SUPPLIES; EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION; PUBLIC BROADCASTING SYSTEM;
              ESCALANTE, JAIME; FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCEMENTS IN SCIENCE AND
              EDUCATION

BESTSELLERS

Heading # 6

01666175                  54760
Costly Strategy Continues to Turn Out Bestsellers

Los Angeles Times (LT) – THURSDAY June 28, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series
Word Count: 2,030

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY. Today: The Making of a Best-Selling Author.
Fifth in a six-part series. NEXT: Part Six–Attack the Attacker.

TEXT:
    Call it one of the most remarkable success stories in modern publishing
history.

    Since late 1985, at least 20 books by Scientology founder L. Ron
Hubbard have become bestsellers.

    In March of 1988, nearly four decades after its initial publication,

Hubbard’s “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health” was No. 1 on
virtually every best-seller list in the country–including the New York
Times.

    Ten hardcover science fiction novels Hubbard completed before his death
four years ago also became bestsellers, four of them simultaneously on some
lists.

    The selling of L. Ron Hubbard was envisioned, planned and executed by
members of the Church of Scientology, who say that worldwide sales of
Hubbard’s books have topped 93 million. The sales have been fueled by a
radio and TV advertising blitz virtually unprecedented in book circles, and
has put on the map a Los Angeles publishing firm that eight years ago did
not even exist.

    In some cases, sales of Hubbard’s books apparently got an extra boost
from Scientology followers and employees of the publishing firm. Showing up
at major book outlets like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, they purchased
armloads of Hubbard’s works, according to former employees.

    As a writer, Hubbard was extremely prolific. He wrote short stories. He
wrote books. He wrote screenplays. And, for more than 30 years, he wrote
thousands of directives and scores of personal improvement courses that
form the doctrine of Scientology.

    The promotion of Hubbard’s books is part of a costly and calculated
campaign by the movement to gain respect, influence and, ultimately, new
members. In the process, Hubbard’s followers hope to refurbish his
controversial image and position him as one of the world’s great
humanitarians and thinkers.

    Hubbard’s writings have become a means by which to spread his name in a
society that often equates celebrity with credibility. It is not with
whimsy that the church often calls its spiritual father “New York Times
best-selling author L. Ron Hubbard.”

    The church once summed up the strategy in a letter recruiting
Scientologists for Hubbard’s public relations team, an operation that
thrives despite his death. Sign up now, the letter urged, and “make Ron the
most acclaimed and widely known author of all time.”

    But apparently Hubbard’s followers have not trusted sales of his books
entirely to the fickle winds of the marketplace.

    Sheldon McArthur, former manager of B. Dalton Booksellers on Hollywood
Boulevard in Los Angeles, said, “Whenever the sales seem to slacken and a
(Hubbard) book goes off the bestsellers list, give it a week and we’ll get
these people coming in buying 50 to 100 to 200 copies at a crack–cash
only.”

    After Hubbard’s first novel, a Western adventure called “Buckskin
Brigades,” was re-released in 1987, the book “just sat there,” recalled
McArthur, whose store was across from a Scientology center.

    “Then, in one week, it was gone,” he said. “We started getting calls
asking, ‘You got ‘Buckskin Brigades?’ ” I said, ‘Sure, we got them.’ ‘You
got a hundred of them?’ ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘here’s a case.’ “

    Gary Hamel, B. Dalton’s former manager at Santa Monica Place, had
similar experiences. He said that “10 people would come in at a time and
buy quantities of them and they would pay cash.”

    Hamel also speculated that some copies of a Hubbard science fiction
novel were sold more than once.

    He said that while he was working at the B. Dalton in Hollywood, some
books shipped by Hubbard’s publishing house arrived with B. Dalton price
stickers already on them. He said this indicated to him that the books had
been purchased at one of the chain’s outlets, then returned to the
publishing house and shipped out for resale before anyone thought to remove
the stickers.

    “We would order more books and . . . they’d come back with our sticker
as if they were bought by the publisher,” Hamel said.

    Hubbard’s U.S. publisher is Bridge Publications Inc., founded and
controlled by Scientologists–something that Bridge does not publicize.
Company officials refused to be interviewed about book sales or any facet
of the firm’s operations.

    But former employees alleged in interviews with The Times that Bridge
encouraged and, at times, bankrolled the book-buying scheme.

    Mike Gonzales, a non-church member who worked in accounts receivable,
said one supervisor gave him hundreds of dollars for weekend forays into
bookstores.

    In one month alone, he said, he bought and returned to Bridge 43 books
in Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” science fiction series. And, according to
Gonzales, he was not alone.

    “We had 15 to 20 people going all over L.A.,” he said.

    During a shopping spree at B. Dalton in the Glendale Galleria, Gonzales
said, he bumped into three Bridge co-workers.

    “There we were, four people in line buying ‘Buckskin Brigades,’ and
(the clerk) blurted out, ‘You know why they do that? To get on the
bestsellers list!’ “

    Corinda Carford, who was Bridge’s sales manager for the East Coast,
said she was instructed by two superiors to go to bookstores and buy
Hubbard’s books if sales were sluggish.

    “They would tell me to go and count the books and . . . if it looks
like they’re not selling, go and buy some books,” Carford recalled. She
said she was troubled by the request and bought only four copies of one
Hubbard paperback.

    Carford said Bridge executives also asked her in late 1988 and again in
early 1989 to obtain the names of bookstores whose sales are the basis for
the New York Times bestseller list.

    “It happened more than once,” she said. ” . . . My orders for the week
were to find the New York Times’ reporting stores anywhere in the East so
they could send people into the stores to buy (Hubbard’s) books.”

    Carford said she questioned several bookstore operators but they
refused to cooperate.

    “That is confidential information,” she said.

    Carford said she left Bridge after a pay dispute and now works for
another publishing firm.

    Another former Bridge employee, salesman Tom Fudge, said a supervisor
once handed him a list of booksellers purportedly monitored by the New York
Times. He said he was instructed to promise each one that Hubbard’s books
would “sell well” if they stocked more copies.

    “I was told that they (Bridge) had Scientologists who would go out to
specific stores and buy copies of the books,” Fudge said.
    An attorney who represents Bridge and Scientology denied that the
publishing firm possessed a list of bookstores the New York Times uses to
determine bestsellers.

    “The list does not exist,” insisted Boston lawyer Earle Cooley, who
characterized the former employees as “disgruntled” and “antagonistic”
toward Bridge and Scientology.

    Adam Clymer, a New York Times executive, said the newspaper has
examined the sales patterns of Hubbard’s books. In a two-year span, Hubbard
logged 14 consecutive books on the New York Times list.

    Clymer said that, while the books have been sold in sufficient numbers
to justify their bestseller status, “we don’t know to whom they were sold.”

    He said the newspaper uncovered no instances in which vast quantities
of books were being sold to single individuals.

    Science fiction and self-improvement books have always been big sellers
in America, and Hubbard’s works have long had a strong following.

    But Bridge learned quickly that to make him a best-selling author in
the 1980s, it had to aggressively market his writings, especially within
the bookselling industry.

    As part of its campaign Bridge has purchased full-page ads on the cover
of Publishers Weekly, an important trade magazine.

    For a time, the firm was enticing book distributors to place large
orders by offering them free television sets and VCRs.

    Marcia Dursi, director of book operations for ARA Services in Maryland,
which distributes paperbacks to supermarkets and airports, said she was
offered a TV for the employee lunchroom.

    “I don’t have to be bribed,” Dursi said she responded.

    Former Bridge consultant Robert Erdmann said that, while other
publishers offer incentives, he stopped the practice at Bridge because “it
could be perceived as influence peddling.”

    Erdmann, a non-Scientologist, was an industry veteran hired by Bridge
to help make inroads in the competitive publishing world.
    Because the Scientologists at Bridge “did what we told them to do,”
Erdmann said, “Dianetics” is no longer “the passion fruit of the Pacific
that people in the Midwest are afraid to eat.”

    When it was first published in 1950, “Dianetics” rode bestseller lists
for several months before sales dwindled. But it has remained the
bedrock–“Book One”–of Hubbard’s Scientology movement.

    In “Dianetics,” Hubbard said that memories of painful physical and
emotional experiences accumulate in a specific region of the mind, causing
illness and mental problems. Hubbard said that, once these experiences have
been purged through cathartic procedures he developed, a person can achieve
superior health and intelligence.

    So revered is the book that Hubbard scrapped the conventional calendar
and renumbered the years beginning with the date of its publication. To
Scientologists, 1990 is “40 AD” (After Dianetics).

    From the outset, the Scientology movement has made the book the
centerpiece of its campaign to generate broad interest in Hubbard’s
writings.
    In the last few years, millions of dollars have been spent on
“Dianetics” advertising to reach a targeted audience of young professionals
who want to improve their lives and careers.

    The ads have appeared on television, radio, billboards and bus stops.

    “Dianetics” has been a sponsor of the California Angels and Los Angeles
Rams games on radio. Race cars in world-class competitions such as the
Indianapolis 500 have sported “Dianetics” decals. In New York City
recently, 160 billboards promoting Hubbard were purchased in subway
stations.

    Next month, in what may be the Scientology movement’s biggest promotion
yet for the book, Dianetics will be a sponsor of Turner Broadcasting
System’s 1990 Goodwill Games, an Olympics-style event bringing together
2,500 athletes from more than 50 countries for two weeks in Seattle.

    Among other things, there will be Dianetics commercials during the
internationally televised competition and Dianetics signboards at sporting
venues. Goodwill Games spokesman Bob Dickinson said that Dianetics and 12
other sponsors–including Pepsi, Sony and Anheuser-Busch–have paid “lots
and lots of money” for the exposure, but he would not provide a specific
figure.

    “It is safe to say it is in excess of several million dollars,”
Dickinson said.

    Word of the sponsorship has triggered more than 100 complaints from
disaffected Scientologists and critics of the church to TBS, the
Atlanta-based cable network owned by media entrepreneur Ted Turner. Most
have accused the network of providing a global forum for the Church of
Scientology.

    But Dickinson said that Dianetics, not Scientology, is the event’s
sponsor and that “we really don’t make any value judgment in terms of the
product of the sponsors. They have a right to advertise.” He added that
Dianetics for years has been buying air time on TBS.

    Although Dianetics advertisements never mention Scientology, the book’s
promotion is a key component of the church’s efforts to win new converts.
Scientology literature calls the strategy the “Dianetics route.” The idea
is to attract readers to Dianetics seminars and then enroll them in
Scientology courses.
    Given the success of the Dianetics campaign, Bridge now seems confident
that the public will clamor for Hubbard’s Scientology writings.

    Hubbard books that for decades had no audience outside Scientology are
scheduled to be mass-marketed into the next century, complete with costly
promotional campaigns as big as that for “Dianetics.”

    One of them, Hubbard’s 1955 “Fundamentals of Thought,” has
“Scientology” splashed across its cover, the first test of whether
Hubbard’s image has been so greatly improved that the public is finally
ready to accept his religion.

    Even long-forgotten science fiction that Hubbard wrote back in the
1930s will be dusted off, dressed in eye-grabbing covers and pushed as
though it were written today.

    In recent months, billboards have appeared along Los Angeles freeways
and such well-traveled thoroughfares as Sunset Boulevard.

    With the sea as a backdrop, they show a smiling Hubbard of earlier
years, the wind tousling his red hair. Below his robust image is the
phrase: “22 national bestsellers and more to come . . . ”
    The selling of the late L. Ron Hubbard has only begun.

CAPTION:
Photo: Billboards tout a continuing stream of bestsellers from the late
author. “Dianetics,” advertised atop a building in Westwood, was first
published in 1950 and is still Scientology’s “Book One.”

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; PUBLISHING INDUSTRY;
              BOOKSTORES; BOOKS; SALES; WRITERS; MARKETING; BRIDGE
              PUBLICATIONS INC; ADVERTISING; TELEVISION ADVERTISING;
              GOODWILL GAMES

OFFENSIVE

Heading # 5

01666640                  55225
On the Offensive Against an Array of Suspected Foes

Los Angeles Times (LT) – FRIDAY June 29, 1990
By: JOEL SAPPELL; ROBERT W. WELKOS; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 1  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Main Story; Series
Word Count: 5,414

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY. Today: Attack the Attacker. Last in a
six-part series

TEXT:
    “Never treat a war like a skirmish. Treat all skirmishes like wars.”

    –L. Ron Hubbard

    The Church of Scientology does not turn the other cheek.

    Ministers mingle with private detectives. “Sacred scriptures” counsel
the virtues of combativeness. Parishioners double as paralegals for
litigious church attorneys.

    Consider the passage that a prominent Scientology minister selected
from the religion’s scriptures, authored by the late L. Ron Hubbard, to
inspire the faithful during a gala church event.

    “People attack Scientology,” the minister quoted Hubbard as saying. “I
never forget it; always even the score.”

    The crowd cheered.

    As far back as 1959, Hubbard warned that illness and even death can
befall those seeking to impede Scientology, known within the church as
“suppressive persons.”

    “Literally, it kills them,” Hubbard wrote, “and if you don’t believe me
I can show you the long death list.”

    He told the story of an electrician who bilked the organization.
“Within a few weeks,” Hubbard said, “he contracted TB.”
    Scientology seems committed not only to fighting back, but to chilling
potential opposition. For years, the church has been accused of employing
psychological warfare, dirty tricks and harassment-by-lawsuit to silence
its adversaries.

    The church has spent millions to investigate and sue writers,
government officials, disaffected ex-members and others loosely defined as
“enemies.”

    Teams of private detectives have been dispatched to the far corners of
the world to spy on critics and rummage through their personal lives–and
trash cans–for information to discredit them.

    During one investigation, headed by a former Los Angeles police
sergeant, the church paid tens of thousands of dollars to reputed organized
crime figures and con men for information linking a leading church opponent
to a crime that it turned out he did not commit.

    Early last year, an American Scientologist was arrested in Spain for
possessing dossiers containing confidential information on a member of
Parliament and a Madrid judge who is oversaw a fraud and tax evasion probe
of the church. The dossiers included personal bank records and family
photographs, according to press accounts.

    Before a British author’s critical biography of Hubbard was even
released two years ago in Europe, the church had him and his publisher tied
up in a London court for alleged copyright infringement. The writer
speculated that Scientology sympathizers had somehow managed to obtain
pre-publication proofs of the book.

    Scientology spokesmen insist that the organization is doing nothing
illegal or unethical, and is merely exercising its constitutional rights
with vigor.

    They argue that Scientology has been targeted by hostile government and
private forces–including the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the press,
psychiatrists and unscrupulous attorneys–that have persecuted the church
since its founding three decades ago.

    As a matter of self-preservation, lamented Scientology attorney Earle
C. Cooley, the church has been forced to fight back and then has been
unfairly chastised for its aggressiveness.

    “When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor we didn’t just sit back and
defend there,” Cooley declared. “We tried to get out on the offensive as
quickly as possible. . . . To sit back and ward off the blows is
ridiculous.”

    Underlying the church’s aggressive response to criticism is a belief
that anyone who attacks Scientology is a criminal of some sort. “We do not
find critics of Scientology who do not have criminal pasts,” Hubbard wrote
back in 1967. “Over and over we prove this.”

    When Scientology takes the offensive, L. Ron Hubbard’s writings provide
the inspiration. Here is a sampling of what Hubbard wrote:

    “The purpose of the (lawsuit) is to harass and discourage rather than
win.”

    “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. . . . Don’t ever defend. Always attack.”

    “We do not want Scientology to be reported in the press, anywhere else
than on the religious pages of newspapers. . . . Therefore, we should be
very alert to sue for slander at the slightest chance so as to discourage
the public presses from mentioning Scientology.”

    “NEVER agree to an investigation of Scientology. Only agree to an
investigation of the attackers. . . . Start feeding lurid, blood, sex
crime, actual evidence on the attack to the press. Don’t ever tamely submit
to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.”

    Obedience to these rules is not discretionary. They are scripture and,
as such, have guided a succession of church leaders in their responses to
perceived attacks.

    Ironically, Hubbard’s doctrinal dictums have often served only to
escalate conflicts and reinforce the cultish image the church has been
trying to shake.

    In the early 1970s, British lawmaker Sir John Foster offered a
seemingly timeless observation on Scientology in a report to his
government.

    He wrote that “anyone whose attitude is such as Mr. Hubbard displays in
his writings cannot be too surprised if the world treats him with suspicion
rather than affection.”
    Defeating its antagonists is considered so vital to the religion’s
survival that the church has a unit whose mandate is to bring “hostile
philosophies or societies into a state of complete compliance with the
goals of Scientology.”

    Called the Office of Special Affairs, its duties include developing
legal strategy and countering outside threats.

    Its predecessor was the Guardian Office, whose members became so
overzealous that Hubbard’s wife and 10 other Scientologists were jailed for
bugging and burglarizing U.S. government agencies in the 1970s.

    Now, Scientology spokesmen say, attorneys are hired to handle conflicts
with church adversaries to ensure that history does not repeat itself. The
attorneys, they say, employ private detectives to help prepare court
cases–a role that, in the past, would have been filled by Scientologists
from the Guardian Office.

    But some former Scientologists contend that the private detectives have
simply replaced church members as agents of intimidation. The detectives
are especially valued because they insulate the church from deceptive and
potentially embarrassing investigative tactics that the church in fact
endorses, according to this view.

    One of the first private detectives hired by the church was Richard
Bast of Washington, D.C.

    In 1980, he investigated the sex life of U.S. District Judge James
Richey, who was presiding over the criminal trial of Hubbard’s wife and the
10 other Scientologists. Richey had issued rulings unfavorable to them.

    Bast’s investigators found a prostitute at the Brentwood Holiday Inn
who claimed that Richey had purchased her services while staying at the
hotel during trips to Los Angeles. Bast’s men gave her a lie detector test
and videotaped her account.

    That and other information obtained by Bast’s investigators was leaked
to columnist Jack Anderson, and appeared in newspapers across the country.
Soon after, Richey resigned from the case, citing health reasons.

    In 1982, Bast surfaced again, this time in Clearwater, Fla., where the
church’s secretive methods of operating had stirred community anxiety.

    Bast’s detectives, posing as emissaries of a wealthy European
industrialist, lured some of the community’s most prominent businessmen
aboard a luxurious yacht. Their pitch: the industrialist wanted to invest
$100 million in Clearwater’s decaying downtown.

    But there was a catch, recalled developer Alan Bomstein, one of the
businessmen being wooed. The emissaries said their boss was dismayed by the
conflict between Clearwater and Scientology, and wanted the businessmen to
help quash a public inquiry into the church’s activities.

    When the businessmen refused, Bomstein said, the emissaries vanished.
Two years later, Bast revealed the deception in a court declaration. He
said the undercover operation was necessary to learn whether Clearwater’s
elite were conspiring to run the church out of town.

    More recently, Scientology investigations have been run by former Los
Angeles Police Department sergeant Eugene Ingram, who was fired by the
department in 1981 for allegedly running a house of prostitution and
alerting a drug dealer of a planned raid. (In a later jury trial, Ingram
was acquitted of all criminal charges.)

    When he needs help, Ingram has sometimes turned to former LAPD
colleagues.

    Ex-officer Al Bei, for example, played a key role in a 1984
investigation of David Mayo, an influential Scientology defector who had
opened a rival church near Santa Barbara. Scientologists believed Mayo was
using stolen Hubbard teachings.

    Bei and other investigators questioned local businessmen, handing out
business cards that said, “Special Agent, Task Force on White Collar
Crime.”

    Their questions suggested–falsely–that Mayo was linked to
international terrorism and drug smuggling, according to court records. At
a local bank, Bei tried without success to obtain Mayo’s banking records
and implied that Mayo was engaged in money laundering, an executive of the
bank said.

    The investigators rented an office directly above Mayo’s facility and
leaned from the windows to photograph everyone who entered.

    Mayo eventually obtained a court order barring Ingram Investigations
and church members from going near Mayo or his facility. The judge said the
investigation amounted to “harassment.”
    On another occasion, Bei surfaced on a quiet residential street in
Burbank, where he questioned neighbors of two highly critical former
Scientologists, Fred and Valerie Stansfield. The Stansfields had
established a competing center in their home to provide Scientology
courses.

    One of the neighbors said in a declaration that Bei attempted to
“slander” the Stansfields with such questions as: “Did you know that
Valerie told someone that she had pinworms two years ago?”

    Los Angeles police officer Philip Rodriguez is another who has assisted
Ingram in Scientology investigations.

    In late 1984, he provided Ingram with a letter on plain stationery
saying Ingram was authorized to covertly videotape a hostile former member
suspected by church authorities of plotting illegal acts against the
church.

    Although the letter was written without official police department
approval, Rodriguez’s action lent an air of legitimacy to the
investigation. In fact, when church officials disclosed its results, they
described the operation as “LAPD sanctioned”–a characterization that
Police Chief Daryl F. Gates angrily disputed.

    Rodriguez was suspended for six months for his role in the affair.

    And when the clandestine videotapes were introduced in an Oregon court
to discredit testimony by the former member, the presiding judge said: “I
think they are devastating against the church. . . . It (the investigation)
borders on entrapment more than it does on anything else.”

    Another former LAPD officer, Charles Stapleton, worked part time for
Ingram while teaching law at Los Angeles City College.

    “Gene is a very thorough investigator,” Stapleton said in an interview.
“He is determined to do the finest job he possibly can and he will employ
whatever methods or tactics are necessary to do that job.”

    Stapleton said he “bailed out” after Ingram asked him to tap
telephones.

    “Who’s going to know?” he quoted Ingram as saying.

    “I will know,” Stapleton said he replied.

    “I was told that if I didn’t want to do it, he knew somebody who
would,” Stapleton said, adding that he did not know whether any telephones
had, in fact, been monitored.

    Ingram denied ever asking Stapleton to tap telephones.

    “I’ve never done it and I’ve never asked anyone to do it,” Ingram said.
“It’s just not worth it. It’s a crime. You’re going to get caught, so why
do it?”

    Ingram also said that he has not harassed anyone during his probes. He
describes himself simply as “aggressive.”

    “People who claim that I have conducted an improper investigation
against them probably have so many things to hide,” said Ingram.

    Church lawyer Cooley backed the investigator, saying: “I know of no
impropriety that has ever been engaged in by Mr. Ingram or any other
(private investigator) for the church. Mr. Ingram has done nothing wrong.”

    Last year, Ingram and his colleagues surfaced in the small town of
Newkirk, Okla., to investigate city officials and the local newspaper
publisher. The publisher has been crusading against a controversial
Scientology-backed drug treatment program called Narconon.

    At the core of the dispute is a contention by publisher Bob Lobsinger
that Narconon concealed its Scientology connection when it leased an
abandoned school outside town to build the “world’s largest” drug
rehabilitation center.

    Lobsinger’s weekly newspaper has written about Scientology’s troubled
past, and published internal documents on the drug program. In the process,
he has helped rally community opposition.

    Fighting back, Scientology attorneys in September mailed an “open
letter” to many of Newkirk’s 2,500 residents announcing that Ingram had
been hired to investigate Narconon’s adversaries. The letter said that “a
few local individuals have sought to create intolerance by broadsiding the
Churches of Scientology in stridently uncomplimentary terms.”

    After arriving in town, Ingram tracked down the mayor’s 12-year-old son
at the local public library, handed him a business card and told the boy to
have his father call, Lobsinger said. “It was just a subtle bit of
intimidation,” he said. “It certainly did not do the mother much good. She
was very unnerved.”

    Lobsinger said investigators also camped out at the local courthouse,
where they searched public records for “dirt” on prominent local citizens.

    “They were checking up on the banker, the president of the school
board, the president of the Chamber of Commerce and, of course, the mayor
and his family, and me,” Lobsinger said.

    Newkirk Mayor Garry Bilger, who opposed the drug treatment program,
said a man he believes was a church member tried to coax him into
disclosing personal information. Bilger said the man showed up without an
appointment and claimed that he was helping his daughter with a report on
small-town government for a class at a nearby high school.

    “He wanted to interview me and take pictures around the office but I
didn’t allow that,” the mayor recalled. “Finally, I said, ‘Are you with
Scientology or Narconon?’ He said, ‘I don’t know about those people.’ But
he did, because he got outta there in a hurry.”

    Before the man left, he gave Bilger the name of his daughter. The mayor
then checked with the school system and was told that no such girl was
enrolled.

    “They have a standard pattern,” Bilger said of the Scientologists.
“They try to be very aggressive. They try to intimidate. This is not the
kind of atmosphere we need in the Newkirk community. . . . This tells me
they are far from being harmless.”

    Scientology critics contend that one church writing, above all others,
has guided the organization and its operatives when they fight back. It is
called the Fair Game Law.

    Written by Hubbard in the mid-1960s, it states that anyone who impedes
Scientology is “fair game” and can “be deprived of property or injured by
any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist.
May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”

    Church spokesmen maintain that Hubbard rescinded the policy three years
after it was written because its meaning had been twisted. What Hubbard
actually meant, according to the spokesmen, was that Scientology will not
protect ex-members from people in the outside world who try to trick, sue
or destroy them.
    But various judges and juries have concluded that while the actual
labeling of persons as “fair game” was abandoned, the harassment continued
unabated.

    For example, a Los Angeles jury in 1986 said that Scientologists had
employed fair game tactics against disaffected member Larry Wollersheim,
driving him to the brink of financial and mental collapse. He was awarded
$30 million. In July, the state Court of Appeal reduced the amount to $2.5
million but refused to overturn the case.

    Wrote Justice Earl Johnson Jr.: “Scientology leaders made the
deliberate decision to ruin Wollersheim economically and possibly
psychologically. . . . Such conduct is too outrageous to be protected under
the Constitution and too unworthy to be privileged under the law of torts.”

    In a recent lawsuit, former Scientology attorney Joseph Yanny alleged
that the church and its agents had implemented or plotted a broad array of
fair-game measures against him and other critics, including intensive
surveillance and dirty tricks.

    Earlier this year, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Yanny
$154,000 in legal fees that he said the church had refused to pay.
    Among other things, Yanny said in his lawsuit that he attended a 1987
meeting at which top church officials and three private detectives
discussed blackmailing Los Angeles attorney Charles O’Reilly, who won the
multimillion-dollar jury award for Wollersheim.

    According to Yanny, the plan was to steal O’Reilly’s medical records
from the Betty Ford Clinic near Palm Springs, then exchange them for a
promise from O’Reilly that he would “ease off” during the appeal process.

    Yanny, who later had a bitter break with Scientology, said he objected
and the idea was dropped. The church denies such a discussion ever took
place.

    “There is not a scintilla of independent evidence that Yanny’s counsel
was ever sought for any illegal or fraudulent purpose,” church attorneys
argued in court papers.

    Numerous other church detractors have said in court documents and
interviews that they, too, were victims of fair game tactics even after the
policy supposedly was abandoned.

    John G. Clark, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School, said he once criticized the church during testimony before
the Vermont legislature. Scientology “agents” retaliated, Clark alleged in
a 1985 lawsuit, by trying to destroy his reputation and career.

    He said in the lawsuit that they filed groundless complaints against
him with government agencies, posed as clients to infiltrate his office,
dug through his trash, implied that he slept with female patients and
offered a $25,000 reward for information that would put him in jail.

    “My sin,” Clark said in an interview, “was publicly saying this is a
dangerous and harmful cult. They did a good job of showing I’m right.”

    Scientologists, for their part, have described Clark as a “professional
deprogrammer,” who in court cases has diagnosed members of religious sects
as mentally ill without conducting direct examinations of them. They have
branded his professional work as fraudulent and his psychiatric theories as
“childish and nonsensical.”

    In the words of one Scientology spokesman: “It’s a crime that he’s
walking on the street right now.”

    In 1988, the church paid Clark an undisclosed sum to drop his lawsuit.
In exchange for the money, Clark agreed never again to publicly criticize
Scientology.

    On the opposite coast, psychiatrist Louis (Jolly) West, who formerly
directed UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, said he also has felt the wrath
of Scientology.

    West, an expert on thought control techniques, said his problems began
in 1980 after he published a psychiatric textbook that called Scientology a
cult.

    West said Scientology attempted to get him fired by writing letters to
university officials suggesting that he is a CIA-backed fascist who has
advocated genocide and castration of minorities to curb crime.

    He said Scientologists once managed to get inside a downtown Los
Angeles banquet room before guests arrived for a dinner celebrating the
Neuropsychiatric Institute’s 25th anniversary. On each plate, West said,
was placed “an obscenely vicious diatribe” against him and the
institute–neatly tied with a pink ribbon.

    So consumed are some Scientologists by their zeal to punish foes that
they have violated the confidentiality of one of the religion’s most sacred
practices, according to a number of former members.

    These former members accuse others in the church of culling
confessional folders for information that can be used to embarrass,
discredit or blackmail hostile defectors–a practice once called “repugnant
and outrageous” by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. Some of these former
members say they themselves took part in the practice.

    The confidential folders contain the parishioners’ most intimate
secrets, disclosed during one-on-one counseling sessions that are supposed
to help devotees unburden their spirits. The church retains the folders
even after a member leaves.

    Last year, former church attorney Yanny said in a sworn declaration
that he was fed information from confessional folders to help him question
former members during pretrial proceedings. Yanny said he complained but
was informed by two Scientology executives that it was “standard practice.”

    Church executives have steadfastly denied that the confidentiality of
the folders has been breached. They maintain that
“auditors”–Scientologists who counsel other members–must abide by a code
of conduct in which they promise never to divulge secrets revealed to them
“for punishment or personal gain.”

    “And that trust,” the code states, “is sacred and never to be
betrayed.”

    Often, those who buck the church say their lives are suddenly troubled
by unexplained and untraceable events, ranging from hang-up telephone calls
to the mysterious deaths of pets.

    Los Angeles attorney Leta Schlosser, for one, said someone developed
“an unusual interest” in her car trunk while she was part of the legal team
in the Wollersheim suit against Scientology. She said it was broken into at
least seven times.

    She said her co-counsel, O’Reilly, discovered a tape recorder, wired to
his telephone line, hidden beneath some bushes outside his home.

    Then there is the British author, Russell Miller. After his biography
of Hubbard was published, an anonymous caller to police implicated him in
the unsolved ax-slaying of a South London private eye.
    Miller was interrogated by two detectives, who concluded that he was
innocent. Det. Sgt. Malcolm Davidson of Scotland Yard told the Los Angeles
Times that the caller “caused us to waste a lot of time investigating” and
“caused Mr. Miller some embarrassment.”

    There is no evidence that ties the church to any of these incidents,
and Scientology officials deny involvement in clandestine harassment or
illegal activities. They suggest that church foes may themselves be
responsible as part of an effort to discredit Scientology.

    Today, the Scientology movement is engaged in a sweeping effort to gain
influence across a broad swath of society, from schools to businesses, in
hopes of winning converts and creating a hospitable environment for church
expansion.

    And Hubbard’s followers apparently consider his theology of combat an
important component.

    In 1987, they elevated to high doctrine a warning he wrote two decades
ago in a Scientology newspaper, addressed to “people who seek to stop us.”

    “If you oppose Scientology we promptly look up–and will find and
expose–your crimes,” he wrote. “If you leave us alone we will leave you
alone. It’s very simple. Even a fool can grasp that.

    “And don’t underrate our ability to carry it out. . . . Those who try
to make life difficult for us are at once at risk.”

CAPTION:
Photo: Scientology attorney Earle C. Cooley, saying the church has been
forced to fight back and then has been unfairly chastised for its
aggressiveness.
Photo: Private investigators unnload equipment in Santa Barbara in 1984.
Investigators conducted surveillance of David Mayo, a former top
Scientologist who formed a breakaway church called Advanced Ability Center.

Scientology says he conspired to steal its secret teachings.
LONDON SUNDAY TIMES
Photo: Ex-LAPD sergeant Eugene Ingram, left, and Officer Philip Rodriguez.
Ingram has investigated Scientology critics worldwide, assisted by former
police colleagues. Rodriguez helped him on one occasion.
Los Angeles Times

DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CULTS; SUITS;
              INVESTIGATIONS; PSYCHOLOGY; BEHAVIOR; THEOLOGY; PRIVATE
              DETECTIVES; THREATS; CONFIDENTIALITY; HARASSMENT

PSYCHS

Heading # 4

01666704                  55289
Suits, Protests Fuel a Campaign Against Psychiatry
As part of its strategy, the movement created a nationwide uproar over the
drug Ritalin, used to treat hyperactive children.

Los Angeles Times (LT) – FRIDAY June 29, 1990
By: JOEL SAPPELL; ROBERT W. WELKOS; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 48  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 1,147

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY.

TEXT:
    In recent years, a national debate flared over Ritalin, a drug used for
more than three decades to treat hyperactivity in children.

    Across the country, multimillion-dollar lawsuits were filed by parents
who contended that their children had been harmed by the drug.

    Major news organizations–including The Times–devoted extensive
coverage to whether youngsters were being turned into emotionally disturbed
addicts by psychiatrists and pediatricians who prescribed Ritalin.

    Protests were staged at psychiatric conferences, with airplanes
trailing banners that read, “Psychs, Stop Drugging Our Kids,” and children
on the ground carrying placards that pleaded, “Love Me, Don’t Drug Me.”

    In 1988, the clamor reached a point where 12 U.S. congressmen demanded
answers from the Food and Drug Administration and three other federal
agencies about the safety of Ritalin. The FDA assured the legislators that
the drug is “safe and effective if it is used as recommended.”

    The Ritalin controversy seemed to emerge out of nowhere. It frightened
parents, put doctors on the defensive and suddenly called into question the
judgment of school administrators who authorize the drug’s use to calm
disruptive, hyperactive children.

    The uproar over Ritalin was triggered almost single-handedly by the
Scientology movement.

    In its fight against Ritalin, Scientology was pursuing a broader
agenda. For years, it has been attempting to discredit the psychiatric

profession, which has long been critical of the self-help techniques
developed by the late L. Ron Hubbard and practiced by the church.

    The church has spelled out the strategy in its newspaper, “Scientology
Today.”

    “While alerting parents and teachers to the dangers of Ritalin,” the
newspaper stated, “the real target of the campaign is the psychiatric
profession itself. . . . And as public awareness continues to increase, we
will no doubt begin to see the blame for all drug abuse and related crime
move onto the correct target–psychiatry.”

    The contempt Scientologists hold for the psychiatric profession is
rooted in Hubbard’s writings, which constitute the church’s doctrines. He
once wrote, for example, that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture
and kill everyone, they would do so. . . . Recognize them for what they
are; psychotic criminals–and handle them accordingly.”

    Hubbard’s hatred of psychiatry dated back to the 1950 publication of
his best-selling book “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.” It
was immediately criticized by prominent mental health professionals as a
worthless form of psychotherapy.
    Hubbard used his church as a pulpit to attack psychiatrists as evil
people, bent on enslaving mankind through drugs, electroshock therapy and
lobotomies. He convinced his followers that psychiatrists were also intent
on destroying their religion.

    A church spokesman said that psychiatrists are “busy attempting to
destroy Scientology because if Scientology has its voice heard, it will
most assuredly remove them from the positions of power that they occupy in
our society.”

    Scientologists call Ritalin a “chemical straitjacket” leading to
delinquency, violence and even suicide. They claim that it is being used to
indiscriminately drug hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren each day.
Medical professionals say the Scientology claims cannot be supported and
are causing undue panic.

    Known generically as methylphenidate hydrochloride, Ritalin is intended
for youngsters afflicted with “attention deficit disorder,” more commonly
known as hyperactivity. It is a central nervous system stimulant that,
paradoxically, produces calmer behavior in young people. The government
classifies it as a controlled substance.
    FDA statistics show that between 600,000 and 700,000 people (70% of
them children or adolescents) are being treated with Ritalin. Between 1980
and 1987, the latest period for which statistics are available, the FDA
received 492 complaints of serious problems resulting from the drug. The
agency said this level of complaints indicates the drug is safe.

    Medical experts agree that some doctors may be too quick to prescribe
Ritalin as the sole treatment for problems that warrant a more moderate or
creative approach. But, they add, the drug itself is not to blame.

    Scientologists have waged their war against Ritalin and psychiatry
through the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Los Angeles-based
nonprofit organization formed by the church in 1969 to investigate mental
health abuses.

    Its members often wear shirts reading “Psychiatry Kills” and
“Psychbusters.” They have recently broadened their campaign against
psychiatric drugs to include Prozac, the nation’s top selling
anti-depressant, with 1989 sales estimated at $350 million.

    Throughout the world, the commission has consistently fought against
electroshock therapy and lobotomies, practices that Scientologists believe
are barbarous and should be banned.

    In the U.S., the commission has encouraged parents to file lawsuits
against doctors who have prescribed Ritalin to their children and then has
provided nationwide publicity for the suits.

    The commission’s president is veteran Scientologist Dennis Clarke.
Although he is not a doctor, Clarke has positioned himself as the country’s
most quoted Ritalin expert. In public appearances, Clarke cites a litany of
alarming statistics, some of which are exaggerated, unsubstantiated or
impossible to verify.

    Some medical experts agree that the use of Ritalin in the schools has
grown dramatically over the last two decades, but not to the level claimed
by Clarke.

    For example, Clarke has maintained that in Minneapolis, 20% of children
under 10 attending mostly white schools in 1987 were on Ritalin and the
percentage was double that in predominantly black schools.

    “If they are saying that is the statistic in Minneapolis, they are
lying,” said Vi Blosberg, manager of health services in the 39,000-student
district. She said that fewer than 1% of students districtwide were taking
Ritalin or other drugs used to control hyperactivity during the year in
question.

    Using its statistics, the Citizens Commission in late 1987 lobbied the
congressional Republican Study Committee to push Congress for an
investigation of Ritalin.

    Its campaign attracted the attention of Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.),
who is on the House Education and Labor Committee.

    Ballenger’s legislative director, Ashley McArthur, said she met with
the Citizens Commission because the statistics about Ritalin abuse “caught
our attention.” She said Ballenger and 11 congressional colleagues sent
letters to four federal agencies, including the FDA, requesting reports on
Ritalin usage and safety.

    McArthur said she later learned that Scientologists were behind the
Citizens Commission and that some of the information they provided did not
“add up.”

    “Once we knew their whole organization was run by Scientologists, it
put a whole different perspective on it,” McArthur said. “I think they’ll
try to use any group they can.”

    A recent Scientology publication said the anti-Ritalin effort was “one
of (the commission’s) major campaigns in the 1980s.”

    “Hundreds of newspaper articles and countless hours of radio and
television shows on this issue resulted in thousands of parents around the
world contacting (the commission) to learn more about the damage
psychiatrists are creating on today’s children,” the article stated.

    “The campaign against Ritalin brought wide acceptance of the fact that
(the commission) and the Scientologists are the ones effectively doing
something about the problems of psychiatric drugging,” the publication
added.

CAPTION:
Photo: Church of Scientology’s “Freedom” magazine regularly prints articles
attacking the use of the drug Ritalin, which is used by some psychiatrists
to control hyperactivity in children.

DESCRIPTORS:  PSYCHIATRY; SUITS; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CHILDREN–HEALTH;
              RITALIN (DRUG); HUBBARD, L RON; HYPERACTIVITY; MEDICAL
              TREATMENTS; POLITICAL ACTIVISM

SQUIRRELS

Heading # 3

01666705                  55290
THE BATTLE WITH THE ‘SQUIRRELS’
When the Doctrine Leaves the Church

Los Angeles Times (LT) – FRIDAY June 29, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 49  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 321

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY.

TEXT:
    The Church of Scientology hates “squirrels.”

    That is the scornful word L. Ron Hubbard used to describe non-church
members who offer his teachings, sometimes at cut-rate prices. Most are ex-
Scientologists who say they believe in Hubbard’s gospel but left the
church because its hierarchy was too oppressive.

    “We call them squirrels,” Hubbard once wrote, “because they are so
nutty.”

    Hubbard contended that only church members are qualified to administer
his self-improvement-type courses. Outsiders, he said, inevitably misapply
the teachings, wreaking spiritual harm on their subjects.

    But those who have launched “independent” Scientology-style centers say
Hubbard concocted this as an excuse to eliminate competition so he could
charge exorbitant prices for his courses.

    As far back as 1965, Hubbard demonstrated his disdain for breakaway
groups, ordering his followers to “tear up” the meetings of one such
organization and “harass these persons in any possible way.”

    The intolerance still exists.

    In 1988, the California Assn. of Dianetic Auditors–the oldest
Scientology splinter group in existence–said it uncovered a scheme by more
than 100 Scientologists to secretly infiltrate the association and seize
control of its board of directors.

    The association’s then-vice president, Jana Moreillon, said she
discovered the infiltration after scanning some Scientology publications.
There, she found the names of many of her group’s newest members listed
among Scientologists who had just completed church training.

    Moreillon said the association eventually purged or denied membership
to 116 suspected Scientologists.

    In recent years, a shadowy group of church members dubbed the
“Minutemen” crashed meetings of independent Scientologists. They heckled
speakers, screamed obscenities and threw eggs. Los Angeles police officers
had to be summoned by the owner of a Chinatown restaurant to evict militant
Scientologists who disrupted a fund-raising dinner held there by breakaway
church members.

    The church has denied any direct involvement in the raids. But a former
top Scientology official said in a recent court declaration that the
harassment campaign was ordered by church executives.

CAPTION:
Drawing: A drawing in a Scientology publication depicts former church
executive David Mayo as a “squirrel,” L. Ron Hubbard’s scornful term for
those practicing Scientology outside the church.
DESCRIPTORS:  HUBBARD, L RON; CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; CULTS; DISSIDENTS;

              THREATS; HARASSMENT; THEOLOGY

IRS

Heading # 2

01666706                  55291
THE BATTLE WITH THE I.R.S.
Neither Side Blinks in a Lengthy Feud

Los Angeles Times (LT) – FRIDAY June 29, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 49  Pt. A  Col. 5
Story Type: Series; Sidebar
Word Count: 521

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY.

TEXT:
    Among its many adversaries, the Church of Scientology’s
longest-running feud has been with the Internal Revenue Service. So far,
neither combatant has blinked.

    Over the past three decades, the IRS has revoked the tax-exempt status
of various Scientology organizations, accusing them of operating in a
commercial manner and of financially benefiting private individuals. From
the late 1960s through mid-1970s, IRS agents classified Scientology as a
“tax resister” and “subversive,” a characterization later deemed improper
by a judge.

    In 1984, the IRS’s Los Angeles office launched a far-ranging criminal
investigation into allegations by high-level Scientology defectors that the
movement’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had skimmed millions of dollars from
the church.

    The probe was dropped after Hubbard’s death in 1986. A Justice
Department source told The Times that, with the primary target gone, the
point was moot. But church executives say the IRS had no case because the
allegations were untrue.

    Scientology, for its part, has brought numerous lawsuits against the
IRS, accusing the agency of everything from harassment to illegally
withholding public records. In the 1970s, overzealous Scientologists went
so far as to bug an IRS office in Washington, D.C.–a crime that led to
their imprisonment.

    More recently, through a group called the National Coalition of IRS
Whistleblowers, Scientologists have embarrassed the very branch within the
agency that initiated the criminal investigation of Hubbard.

    The coalition, founded in the mid-1980s by the Church of Scientology’s
Freedom magazine, helped fuel a 1989 congressional inquiry into alleged
wrongdoing by the former chief of the IRS’s Criminal Investigations
Division in Los Angeles and other agency officials.

    Based on public records and leaked IRS memos, the coalition disclosed
that the former Los Angeles supervisor and several colleagues bought
property from an El Monte firm being audited by the IRS. Soon after, the
audit was dropped with a finding that the firm owed no money. The
supervisor has denied acting improperly.

    The whistle-blowers coalition, whose members also include past and
present IRS employees, provided the information to a House subcommittee,
which was investigating the IRS at the time. The allegations received
nationwide exposure during later hearings by the subcommittee, prompting a
promise from IRS Commissioner Fred T. Goldberg Jr.to toughen ethical
standards in the agency.

    The coalition’s spokeswoman, Scientologist Lisa Lashaway, also appeared
on NBC’s “Today” show with a subcommittee member, where the two criticized
the conduct of the IRS unit.
    Although Scientologists do much of the legwork for the coalition, its
president and chief point man is retired IRS agent Paul DesFosses, a
non-Scientologist who left the IRS in 1984 after a stormy relationship with
the agency.

    “They’ve given us a lot of support,” DesFosses said of the
Scientologists in a recent interview. “That’s understandable because people
who are under attack by the IRS are suddenly very concerned with IRS
abuse.”

    Despite his close working relationship with Scientology, DesFosses said
church members never told him that Hubbard was under criminal investigation
by the IRS when they offered to organize and assist his whistle-blowers
group.

    “No, I wasn’t aware of it,” DesFosses said when informed by The Times.
“I would be very surprised to learn that.”

DESCRIPTORS:  CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY; INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE;
              INVESTIGATIONS; FEUDS; HUBBARD, L RON; UNITED STATES–SUITS;
              INFORMERS

YANEY

01666707                  55292
A Lawyer Learns What It’s Like to Fight the Church
Joseph Yanny represented the movement until a falling out. Now he says
lengthy litigation and mysterious harassment indicate he’s become ‘Public
Enemy No. 1.’

Los Angeles Times (LT) – FRIDAY June 29, 1990
By: ROBERT W. WELKOS; JOEL SAPPELL; TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Edition: Home Edition  Page: 49  Pt. A  Col. 1
Story Type: Series; Sidebar; Profile
Word Count: 843

MEMO:
Series: THE SCIENTOLOGY STORY.

TEXT:
    Los Angeles attorney Joseph Yanny was driving through rural Ohio in the
pre-dawn hours in 1988 when he was pulled over by police, who had received
a tip that he was carrying a cache of cocaine and guns in his rental car.

    A telephone caller had supplied authorities in Ohio with Yanny’s name,
the car’s description and license number, and the route he would be
traveling to his sister’s house after a rock concert by one of his clients,
the Grateful Dead.

    Yanny was frisked and the vehicle was searched. No drugs or firearms
were found, and he was released.

    Police later concluded that the tipster had given a false name, leading
them to speculate that Yanny had been set up for harassment.

    And Yanny, though he can’t prove it, is certain he knows by whom: his
former client, the Church of Scientology.

    “I am,” he said with some pride, “probably Public Enemy No. 1 as far as
they are concerned.”

    Today, Yanny and Scientology are locked in bitter litigation. Their
dispute illustrates how battles with the Church of Scientology often
degenerate into nasty, costly wars of retribution and endurance.

    Yanny worked for the church from 1983 to 1987, earning, by his
estimate, $1.8 million in legal fees.

    His chief job was to represent Scientology in a suit it brought against
a former top church executive accused of conspiring to steal the church’s
secret teachings. In 1986, Yanny scored a major victory for the church
during a pretrial hearing.

    But then Yanny and Scientology had a falling out. He says he severed
ties because he disagreed with the tactics the group uses against its
critics. Scientology says Yanny was dismissed because his performance was
“inadequate.” They call him an “anti-church demagogue.”

    Scientology lawyers sued Yanny, accusing him of switching allegiances
and of violating the canons of his profession. They say he fed confidential
church information to former members locked in legal battles with
Scientology. He denies the accusation.

    They further accused him of submitting “extremely inflated” bills and
of working while intoxicated, an allegation that was subsequently dropped.

    Since the litigation began, Yanny says, he and his friends have been
the target of harassment.

    He says that his Century City law firm was burglarized four times and
that Scientology-related documents turned up missing; that he has been
spied upon by a church “plant” working as a secretary in his office; and
that private investigators have camped outside his Hermosa Beach residence
and shadowed him when he left.

    Jon J. Gaw, a Riverside-area private investigator who has handled a
number of Scientology-related probes in recent years, said in a deposition
that he used as many as “seven or eight” investigators to conduct
surveillance of Yanny between June, 1988 and March, 1989. Two of his
operatives took up residence on a nearby street, Gaw said, and tailed Yanny
whenever he ventured outside.

    Gaw said he later learned that private detectives for another agency
hired by Scientology lawyers had been spying on Yanny at the same time.
That agency employed a woman to live next door to him.

    The woman, Michelle Washburn, said in a deposition that she was hired
by Al Bei, a former Los Angeles police officer who has worked as a private
investigator on Scientology-related cases.

    She said Bei instructed her to take notes on Yanny’s “comings and
goings.” She also sat by her window photographing everyone who visited him.
She said she regularly gave Bei the film and her notes. Bei declined to
comment.

    In Bellaire, Ohio, police who searched Yanny’s rental car for drugs and
guns later discovered that a team of out-of-state private investigators in
four vehicles had been tailing the attorney.

    Police Capt. Robert Wallace said one of the private detectives he
questioned initially tried to mislead officers, claiming the detectives
were there to subpoena someone in a neighboring town.

    Wallace said the private detective then said he had been hired to
follow Yanny by Williams and Connelly, a prominent Washington, D.C., law firm
that represents Scientology on tax issues. An attorney who handles
Scientology matters at the firm declined comment when questioned by The
Times recently. In a published report in late 1988, however, he said he had
no knowledge of the episode.

    Yanny, for his part, is pursuing a strategy that is reminiscent of the
take-no-prisoners tactics of the church.

    He and his anti-Scientology allies have submitted sworn court
declarations designed to discredit the church.

    Earlier this year, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury agreed that Yanny
had not submitted inflated bills to the church and awarded him $154,000 in
damages. The judge who presided over the case is now weighing whether Yanny
should be allowed to assist individuals in litigation against his former
client, the church.

    Yanny said he initially agreed to be one of Scientology’s lawyers
because he thought the controversial church was being denied its day in
court.

    “There came a point where I was rudely awakened that Scientology wanted
their day in court,” Yanny said, “but they wanted to assure nobody else got
them.”

CAPTION:
Photo: Los Angeles Attorney Joseph Yanny and, at left, his Hermosa Beach
residence. An apartment in building at right was rented by a woman hired by
private investigators to monitor church critic Yanny’ activities. Photo at
right was taken by private investigtors seeking to link Yanny to a former
Scientologist and church opponent. Yanny is in swim trunks at the far left,
the former Scientologist is next to him.
LARRY DAVIS / Los Angeles Times

This File Passed Through:
———————————————————-
CHRISTIAN BBS ABBA II                        619-487-7746

– Specializing in Apologetics    – Information about Cults
– Bible Studies and Discussions    – Daily News from Israel
– Home of Christian Press Report – Active Message Areas
– High-Quality Christian Files  – Informative Discussions

+ Files and Programs from the Christian Research Institute
———————————————————-

Doc Viewed 13278 times

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

Average rating / 5. Vote count:

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.