Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (21 page)

After
The Scandal of Scientology,
Cooper’s life turned into a nightmare. She was followed; her phone was tapped; she was sued nineteen times. Her name and telephone number were written on the stalls in public men’s rooms. One day, when Cooper was out of town, her cousin, who was staying in her New York apartment, opened the door for a delivery from a florist. The deliveryman took a gun from the bouquet, put it to her temple, and pulled the trigger. When the gun didn’t fire, he
attempted to strangle her. Cooper’s cousin screamed and the assailant fled. Cooper then moved to an apartment building with a doorman, but soon after that her three hundred neighbors received letters saying that she was a prostitute with venereal disease who molested children. A woman impersonating Cooper voiced threats against Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and President
Gerald Ford at a Laundromat, while a Scientologist who happened to be present notified the FBI. Two members from the Guardian’s office broke into Cooper’s psychiatrist’s office and stole her files, then sent copies to her adoptive parents. Cooper was charged with mailing bomb threats to the Church of Scientology. In the courtroom, the prosecutor produced a threatening letter with her fingerprint on it, and Cooper fainted. (Later, she remembered signing a petition, which may have had a blank page underneath it.) In May 1973, Cooper was indicted by the US Attorney’s office for mailing the threats and then lying about it before the grand jury.

IF THE RUMORS
about
Hubbard were true—that he had created a religion only in order to get rich—he had long since accomplished that goal. One of his disaffected lieutenants later claimed that Hubbard had admitted to “an insatiable lust
for power and money.” He hectored his adherents on this subject. “MAKE MONEY
,” he demanded in a 1972 policy letter. “MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY.” In order to siphon money into Hubbard’s personal accounts, a number of front organizations were established, including the
Religious Research Foundation, which was incorporated in Liberia. In the mid-seventies that single foundation had an account in
Switzerland containing more than $300 million
. At one point, panicked that Switzerland was going to make a change in its tax laws, Hubbard ordered his medical officer,
Kima Douglas, to move those funds from Switzerland to
Lichtenstein. She described stacks of cash sitting in the bank vault, mostly hundred-dollar bills, four feet high and three to four feet wide, one pile in Hubbard’s name, the other in the church’s. “Church’s was bigger
but his was big too,” she told Hubbard’s biographer
Russell Miller. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., remembered shoeboxes full of money in his father’s closet. He later testified that Hubbard habitually kept “great chunks of cash
” within easy reach, “so that if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.”

“Making
money, I think
, to
Hubbard was paramount,”
Hana Eltringham later speculated. “He wasn’t that interested in it for himself. He did have perks, he did have his cars, his motorbikes, his books, his good food, and things like that, and eventually he had his villas and he had his estates and so on, but the money that he wanted predominantly was for power.”

For all his wealth, Hubbard spent much of his time in his cabin alone,
auditing himself on the E-Meter and developing his spiritual technology. He may have been
grandiose and delusional, but the endless stream of policy letters and training routines that poured from his typewriter hour after hour, day after day, attests to his obsession with the notion of creating a step-by-step pathway to universal salvation. If it was all a con, why would he bother?

Hubbard and Mary Sue slept in separate staterooms. In the opinion of members of their household staff and others, by the time they boarded ship, Hubbard had lost interest
in Mary Sue sexually.
Yvonne Gillham had managed to get herself posted on another ship, out of range of Hubbard’s longing and Mary Sue’s wrath. For the most part, the Commodore left his female crew members alone. One exception was a tall, slender woman from Oregon. She approached Hana Eltringham with a big smile on her face and confessed that she was having an
affair with Hubbard. Soon after that, Hubbard busted the woman down to deckhand and assigned Eltringham to audit her. The woman would weep through the session. Eltringham would dutifully pass along the auditing files to Hubbard for review. “I could hear him chortling
,” she recalled.

The situation was much less restrained belowdecks. The
Sea Org members were young and vigorous; sexual escapades were routine, and marriages quite fluid. Hubbard seemed to be oblivious, but Mary Sue was increasingly scandalized. When she learned
that a crew member, who was nineteen or twenty, had slept with a fifteen-year-old girl on the ship, she got a dagger out of her cabin and held it against his throat and told him he had to be off the ship in two hours or else. In 1971, on New Year’s Eve, there was a drunken orgy of historic proportions. “Maybe a hundred Sea Org
members were having sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship,” one of the participants recalled. Mary Sue had had enough. With two attractive teenage daughters of her own on the ship, she started cracking down on premarital sex. Hubbard observed that 1972
was a leap
year, and said that any woman on the ship could propose to any man, leading to a sudden rash of weddings. Hubbard had forbidden babies on board, but so many women were getting pregnant that he began permitting the children to stay, rather than sending their parents to another post. The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be “off-loaded” to another Scientology organization or flown to New York
for an
abortion.
⁷

WORD ARRIVED
while the
Apollo
was in dry dock in Portugal that the French government was going to indict the Church of Scientology for fraud, with Hubbard named as a conspirator (he would eventually be convicted in absentia
and sentenced to four years in prison). Hubbard flew to New York
the very next day. Few crew members knew where he was.
Jim Dincalci, his medical officer, and
Paul Preston, a former Green Beret who acted as Hubbard’s bodyguard, joined him and set up housekeeping
in
Queens.

It was an odd interlude
. Abruptly freed from the daily responsibility of running the ship, training executives, and overseeing the entire Scientology enterprise, Hubbard suddenly had time on his hands. He spent it watching television and reading novels. Dincalci was designated to be the chef, which meant that fish sticks and pasta were on the menu until Dincalci learned how to expand his repertoire. He studied
Adelle Davis’s popular health food book
Let’s Get Well
. Hubbard began to gain energy and lose weight. He would go for walks around the neighborhood, but always in a clownish disguise—a wig, a hat, and glasses with no prescription. Hubbard thought he was being nondescript, but Dincalci heard the comments the kids were making about how goofy he looked.

Dincalci had long since come to the conclusion that Hubbard was not an
Operating Thetan. He was obese and weird and he failed to exhibit any of the extraordinary powers that are supposed to be a part of the OT arsenal. Moreover, he was under siege by various countries. Why couldn’t he simply set things straight? Wasn’t he supposed to be in
control of his environment? How could he be so persecuted and powerless? What was he doing hiding out in Queens, wearing a wig and watching television when the planet needed salvation? At one point,
Hubbard was talking about how pleasant it used to be to sit on a cloud, but now he complained to Dincalci, “I’m PTS to nations
.” He meant that he was a
Potential Trouble Source because entire countries were dysfunctional and suppressive. Dincalci thought, “Oh, that explains it,” but then it didn’t, really.

During the ten months Hubbard was in hiding in Queens, he began plotting another way to destroy
SMERSH. His escapade to take over the
World Federation for Mental Health had been foiled, he believed, by those sinister forces. One day, Hubbard surprised Dincalci by asking him for the names of
Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs. Dincalci dutifully trotted to the library to look them up. He wouldn’t learn the real significance of Snow White for some time. Hubbard had set in motion an operation so daring and dangerous that it threatened to destroy Scientology forever.

On April 20, 1973, Hubbard wrote a secret order, “Snow White Program,” in which he noted a dangerous trend in the gradual reduction since 1967 of countries available to Scientology. He put the blame on the American and British
governments, which he said were spreading false allegations against the church. He proposed to swamp the countries that had turned against the church in a vast campaign of litigation with the aim of expunging defamatory files and leaving Hubbard and the
Apollo
“free to frequent
all western ports and nations without threat.”

In Hubbard’s absence, Mary Sue exerted increased control over the church’s operations. Hubbard had already appointed her the head of the
Guardian’s Office, a special unit with a broad mandate to protect the religion. Among its other duties, the GO functioned as an intelligence agency, gathering information on critics and government agencies around the world, generating lawsuits to intimidate opponents, and waging an unremitting campaign against mental health professionals. It was the GO that Hubbard tasked with Snow White. Under Mary Sue’s direction
, the GO infiltrated government offices around the world, looking for damning files on the church. Within the next few years, as many as five thousand Scientologists were covertly placed in 136 government agencies worldwide. Project Grumpy, for instance, covered
Germany, where the Guardian’s Office was set up to infiltrate
Interpol as well as German police and immigration authorities. In addition, there was a scheme to accuse German critics of the church of committing genocide. Project Sleepy was to clear files in Austria; Happy was for Denmark, Bashful for Belgium, and Dopey for Italy. There were also Projects Mirror, Apple, Reflection, and so on, all drawn from elements of the fairy tale. Projects Witch and Stepmother both targeted the UK, the source of Scientology’s immigration problems.

Project Hunter was the United States, where Scientologists penetrated the
IRS, the Justice,
Treasury, and
Labor Departments, the
Federal Trade Commission, and the
Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as foreign embassies and consulates; private companies and organizations, such as the
American Medical Association, the
American Psychiatric Association, and the
Better Business Bureau; and newspapers—including the
St. Petersburg Times
, the
Clearwater Sun
, and the
Washington
Post
—that were critical of the religion. In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS intelligence files of celebrities and political figures, including California governor
Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor
Tom Bradley, and Frank Sinatra. Nothing in American history can compare with the scale of the domestic espionage of Operation Snow White.

IN SEPTEMBER
1973
, learning that he was not going to be extradited to France after all, Hubbard returned to
Lisbon, where the
Apollo
was in dry dock. He amused himself by going off on photo expeditions in Portugal, with his
Messengers acting as porters. Then, in December, the
Apollo
lifted anchor and headed to the warmer climate of the
Canary Islands. One day in Tenerife, Hubbard decided to take his Harley-Davidson
motorcycle out for a spin on the twisty mountain roads. Miles away, in the lush volcanic landscape, the Harley hit a patch of oil or mud and crashed. Hubbard broke his arm and several ribs. Somehow he managed to right his bike and make his way back to the ship.

Some members of the Sea Org cite the motorcycle accident as the moment when Scientology changed course and sailed toward a darker horizon. Hubbard was in terrible pain, but he was fearful of doctors and refused to go to the hospital. Dincalci and the ship’s other medical officer,
Kima Douglas, neither of whom had a medical degree,
attempted to treat him. They strapped Hubbard’s injured arm
to his side and wrapped his broken ribs, then sat him in a velvet reading chair, which he rarely left for the next six weeks, day or night.

The whole ship could hear him cursing and screaming and throwing plates and things against the wall with his one good arm. He was in too much discomfort to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, so the ranting and moaning went on almost nonstop. The medical officers had persuaded him to let a local doctor come aboard with a kind of primitive X-ray machine, which confirmed the broken bones. The doctor left Dincalci a prescription for pain pills. The first time Dincalci gave Hubbard the pain pills, however, Hubbard panicked and said that they had slowed down his heart. “You’re trying to kill me!
” he shouted. Dincalci, who looked upon Hubbard as a father, both spiritually and emotionally, was devastated. Hubbard ordered him “beached”—dropped off in Madeira, the distant Portuguese atoll, where he remained for a year.

Other members of the
Sea Org were having a hard time coping with the blatant contradiction between Hubbard’s legend and the crabby, disconsolate figure howling in his stateroom. “If he is who
he says he is, why does he have so little staying power?”
Hana Eltringham wondered. “He has a motorcycle accident, he doesn’t recover quickly, and he doesn’t use Scientology techniques on himself.”

By now, Eltringham had been promoted to Deputy Commodore, the highest post in the Sea Org after Hubbard himself. She had been off the ship for a couple of years, in
Los Angeles, running the
Advanced Orgs—the divisions responsible for producing
Operating Thetans—and setting up a liaison office to supply the Scientology fleet. During that period, she began experiencing crippling headaches. Some days she was unable to work at all. She couldn’t even lie down because the pressure from the pillow was unbearable. The vibration of footsteps in the hall outside her room made the pain excruciating. She thought if she could only discover the
body thetans that she must be harboring she could ease her misery. Every day, hour after hour, she
audited herself on the
E-Meter, probing for some stirring or a sign of recognition. Hubbard himself was her case supervisor, which made her anxiety all the greater. Despite her rank, she, too, worried about being beached or punished. Even worse, according to Hubbard’s dictates, she alone was responsible for her pain. So why was she doing this to herself?