Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (20 page)

IN THE SHIP
’
S LOG
of December 8, 1968, Hubbard mentions an organization he calls
SMERSH, a name taken from James Bond novels. Hubbard describes it as a “hidden government
…that aspired to world domination!”
Psychiatry is the dominating force behind this sinister institution. “Recently a check showed that we had never seen or heard of an ‘insane’ person who had not been in their hands,” Hubbard writes. “And the question arises, is there any insanity at all? That is not manufactured by them?” He said that SMERSH had made one big mistake, however; it attacked Scientology. He vowed revenge.

Hubbard had been wooing a young Florida woman, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to join the Sea Org. She had come from a prominent family in Tallahassee, Florida, and had studied in Europe. She spoke French, German, and Spanish. She had admirable social skills; moreover, she was a redhead, always a stamp of pre-eminence in Hubbard’s book. Finally, Kit agreed to join the
Royal Scotman
in 1969, just as the ship was being expelled from
Corfu. She was soon appointed to the “Missionaires
Elite Unit.” Hubbard already had an assignment in mind for her.

Hubbard set a course for
Cagliari, on the Italian island of
Sardinia. On the way, he personally tutored her in his plan to take over the
World Federation for Mental Health, which was headquartered in Geneva. Hubbard had learned that the organization had never bothered to actually incorporate itself in Switzerland. His grand idea was to set up an office in
Bern, the capital, posing as an American delegation of the WFMH bent on reforming the organization from within. The true scheme was to establish a presence in the country long enough to incorporate as the WFMH; and then, posing as the actual mental health organization, go to the
United Nations with a plan for enforced euthanization of the “useless or unfixable
” elements of society. Hubbard predicted that the outcry that would surely follow would turn the world against the WFMH. It would be a powerful strike against his most formidable enemy, SMERSH.

All the way to Sardinia Hubbard drilled Kit in the history of the health organization, its former presidents, and the policies it supported, such as
electroshock therapy. Kit didn’t need to be persuaded about the dangers of that practice; her own mother had been subjected to electroshock in the 1940s, without her consent, as treatment for postpartum depression. After that, her mother suffered from amnesia and a fear of change and losing control.

By the time the
Royal Scotman
docked in Cagliari, Kit was well schooled. She and another Sea Org member, Mary Pat Shelley, a trained Shakespearian actress from Cincinnati, traveled to Bern. They set up an office, purchased furniture, and covered the walls with phony certificates. They had business cards and stationery printed. Then they filed papers for incorporation as the World Federation for Mental Health.

Soon after that, they received a call from the
Federal Office of
Public Health in Switzerland demanding to know what they were up to. The two women were invited to explain themselves to the director himself.

Kit and Marjorie were both in their early twenties. They dressed in dowdy clothes and put powder in their hair to make themselves appear older. When they arrived at the office, they were shown to a conference room with about ten other people, including the director, a stenographer, and several lawyers. Mary Pat’s hands were trembling as Kit brazenly presented their case for taking over the WFMH. She claimed that the organization had long been misrepresenting itself; for instance, was the director aware that the WFMH never even bothered to incorporate in Switzerland? He was not. Nor was he a fan of some of the policies that the women said that WFMH championed, such as euthanasia. By the end of the meeting, the director seemed persuaded. “I like how you Americans work!
” he said enthusiastically.

The women emerged from the meeting elated, but the response to their telex to Hubbard surprised them. He ordered them back to the ship, “for your protection
.” As soon as they returned to Cagliari, Hubbard cast off lines and set a course through the Strait of Gibraltar for open water. He even changed the names of his ships, in order to erase the connections with Scientology. The
Enchanter
became the
Diana
, the
Avon River
became the
Athena
, and the flagship
Royal Scotman
turned into the
Apollo
. All were registered
with Panamanian credentials as belonging to the
Operation and Transport Corporation. The
Apollo
was now billed as “the pride of the Panamanian
fleet
,” “a floating school of philosophy,” and “the sanest space
on the planet.”

Hubbard was convinced that the Swiss authorities had laid a trap: they would arrest Kit and Mary Pat and force them to testify and expose his whole scheme. For months, he was afraid to touch land. The ship drifted aimlessly in the Atlantic; the crew was forced to live on its stores, and soon they were down to half-rations. Near Madeira, they were caught up in a fierce tropical storm, which threatened to swamp the
Apollo
. Immense waves swept over the funnel and shattered the two-inch-thick windows of the dining room. Water gushed into the engine room, where the seasick officer on watch tied a bucket around his neck. Terrified Messengers hauled themselves along the rails of the wildly pitching deck trying to deliver communications to the bridge; at times the nose of the ship was pointed directly down into the sea. The
storm lasted ten days, propelling the ship eight hundred miles north, all the way to the Azores.

Portuguese postcard of the
Apollo

Looking for a safe port, Hubbard turned toward
Morocco. He thought that an Arab country might be safer and less conspicuous for the Scientology fleet, which had gained too much unfavorable attention in European ports. In October 1969, he dropped anchor in
Safi, near Marrakesh. At last the crew, shaken and hungry, could take on stores. Hubbard began sizing up the country as a possible Scientology homeland. He picked Kit Gablehouse and
Richard Wrigley, another redhead, to lead an exploratory mission to the capital,
Rabat. The only order they got from Hubbard was to “secure Morocco
.”

Wrigley and Gablehouse set up in the
Hôtel La Tour Hassan, where diplomats typically stayed. Wrigley became friendly with an African envoy and drifted off to the Ivory Coast, leaving Kit to secure Morocco by herself. She established an office titled the
American Institute of Human Engineering and Development, and sold a project to develop hydroponic farming to the Moroccan government. That project went nowhere, but it gave her legitimate cover. With her social skills, she soon found herself hobnobbing with the royal palace’s inner circles—in particular, she made friends among some high-ranking military officers, including a tall, handsome intelligence officer named
Colonel Allam.

As it happened, Colonel Allam and Kit shared a birthday, May 17, so she found herself invited to a soiree at the governor’s palace in Marrakesh. In the middle of the party, there was a great stir caused by the arrival of General
Mohammed Oufkir, the truculent minister of the interior. General Oufkir cast a long shadow over the nation, which had long been terrorized by the tyrannical rule of King
Hassan II. Kit immediately sized him up as a shady figure—tall, hollow-cheeked, his eyes hidden by dark glasses, the blood of so many of his countrymen on his hands.

Her Moroccan friends bluntly warned Kit to keep her distance from the military, but
Hubbard was pressing her to do the very opposite. He and Mary Sue rented a villa in Tangier. Mary Sue was thrilled
; she hated being cooped up aboard ship. The prospect of taking over
Morocco began to seem not so far-fetched.

For most of the next year, Kit lived in Rabat, reporting to the
Apollo
every couple of months. In July 1971, Colonel Allam invited her and two other Scientologists to watch a war-games exercise on the occasion of the king’s forty-second birthday. The games, which were held at the king’s summer palace in Skhirat, were a panoramic fantasia of Berber tribesmen on camels, followed by infantry formations and tank manuevers. The audience sat in tents and nibbled on endless hors d’oeuvres, and the pretty Scientology girls fended off advances from the Moroccan brass. They played poker with the generals to pass the time. Everything went smoothly, but suddenly, in the middle of the airshow portion of the exercise, two fighter aircraft emerged from a cloud and dropped out of formation, flying low over the panicked crowd. They trained their guns on the king’s tent, which was next to where Kit and the other Scientologists were sitting. Simultaneously, a thousand military cadets stormed the palace. A hundred people were killed
in the coup attempt. The king escaped by hiding in the toilet. Kit and her companions were quickly shuttled back to their hotel. Unnerved, they turned on the television to see what had happened, only to watch the generals they had been sitting with lined up against a wall and shot. The coup attempt quickly fell apart. King Hassan fled to France and left the country in charge of General Oufkir, who was also given the post of minister of defense. There was no one else the king trusted. He was convinced that the CIA was determined to oust him.

Even in this chaotic and dangerous situation, Hubbard saw an opportunity. He proposed the creation of an elite guard
to protect the
king. He ordered Kit to instruct General Oufkir in the use of
E-Meters as lie detectors in order to determine which members of the government had been a part of the rebel forces and root out subversion. She refused; her own sources told her it was far too dangerous, not only for her, but for everyone involved. Hubbard ordered her back to the ship and put her in charge of the snack bar. He sent another team, and they quickly began to uncover the plotters. Colonel Allam was marched out to the desert and shot, along with dozens of others.

When King Hassan II returned from France, in 1972, a squadron of Moroccan fighter jets accompanied his passenger jet. As soon as they left French airspace, however, one of the escort jets began firing on the king’s aircraft. The king, who was also a pilot, immediately grasped what was happening. He raced into the cockpit and seized control. “Stop firing!
The tyrant is dead!” he shouted into the radio. Then he flew the jet on to Morocco.

That night, the architect of the coup was revealed: General Oufkir. It was announced that he had committed “suicide
,” although his body was riddled with bullets.

The shaken king turned his attention
to the Scientologists. He had long suspected that Scientology was a
CIA front—a rumor that was spreading all over the Mediterranean. There was also gossip that the
Apollo
was involved in drug trafficking and prostitution, or that it was part of a pornography ring. In December 1972
, the Scientologists were expelled from the country, leaving a trail of confusion and recrimination behind them.
⁶

PAULETTE COOPER WAS
studying comparative religion for a summer at Harvard in the late 1960s when she became interested in Scientology, which was gaining attention. “A friend came to me
and said he had joined Scientology and discovered he was Jesus Christ,” she recalled. She decided to go undercover to see what the church was about. “I didn’t like what I saw,” she said. The Scientologists she encountered seemed to be in a kind of trance. When she looked into the claims that the church was making, she found many of them false or impossible to substantiate. “I lost my parents in Auschwitz,” Cooper said, explaining
her motivation in deciding to write about Scientology at a time when there had been very little published and those who criticized the church came under concentrated legal and personal attacks. A slender, soft-spoken woman, Cooper published her first article in
Queen,
a British magazine, in 1970. “I got death threats,” she said. The church filed suit against her. She refused to be silent. “I thought if, in the nineteen-thirties people had been more outspoken, maybe my parents would have lived.” The following year, Cooper published a book,
The Scandal of Scientology,
that broadly attacked the teachings of
Hubbard, revealing among other things that Hubbard had misrepresented his credentials and that defectors claimed to have been financially ripped off and harassed if they tried to speak out.

Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and
Sara Hubbard’s daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that Alexis bring substantial identification to prove who she was, but when she opened the door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled, twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron and Sara’s marriage certificate.

Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her for four days. He identified himself as an
FBI agent and said he had several pages of a letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It was clearly written by Hubbard. “Your mother was with me
as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to fire Sara because she was a “street-walker
” and a Nazi spy. “In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth
, New Jersey, writing a movie,” the letter continues. “She turned up destitute and pregnant.” Out of the goodness of his heart, Hubbard said, he had taken Sara in, to see her “through her trouble.” Weirdly, the letter was signed, “Your good friend, J. Edgar Hoover
.”