Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (48 page)

At seven o’clock on the
evening of June 11, Meisner and Wolfe signed in. This time Wolfe was using a
card in the name of “Thomas Blake.” Meisner showed librarian Johnson the
written permission he had obtained. They followed their usual route through the
back of the library, but found that cleaners were still at work in Dodell’s
office.

While Meisner and Wolfe were
waiting at the back of the library, two FBI agents approached them. Librarian
Charles Johnson had reported their earlier visit to the US Attorney’s Office.
Little was made of it at the time, but Johnson was instructed to call the FBI
if the two suspicious IRS men returned. Meisner presented his false IRS
credentials, and said he had since resigned from the IRS. One of the agents
stayed with Meisner and Wolfe, while the other went to find an Assistant US
Attorney.

Meisner said they were doing
legal research, and had been using the photocopier to copy legal texts. He gave
an address a few doors from his own to FBI agent Christine Hansen. After about
15 minutes of questioning, Meisner asked if they were under arrest. When he was
told they were not, he said they were leaving. The other agent, Dan Hodges saw
them on his way back to the Library. Meisner called to him to say Hansen had
given them permission to leave. Once again Meisner had faced out the enemy.

They walked for several
blocks to make sure they were not being followed, and then took a taxi to
Martin’s Tavern restaurant. Meisner phoned his superior, Mitchell Hermann, in
Los Angeles, and in a roundabout way told him they had been stopped. Hermann
told him to call him back from a public telephone. In the subsequent
conversation, Hermann told Meisner to wait at the restaurant, and phone back an
hour later, so Hermann could contact the Deputy Guardian for Information US,
Richard Weigand.

Meisner’s incredible luck
had finally turned. The GO operation in Washington was finished. A “Church” had
penetrated US government agencies willy-nilly. They had come and gone
undetected for 18 months, copying tens of thousands of government files,
including very sensitive and restricted material. It is little wonder that when
the FBI raid against the Church of Scientology finally came, a year later, it
was a show of strength. Few people would understand the reason for such a show.
It was intended for those in the Guardian’s Office, who would understand only
too well.

The GO ordered Wolfe to turn
himself in, as part of the operation to conceal their involvement. He was
arrested at his desk at the IRS before he had chance to surrender. The FBI had
simply checked every record where “John M. Foster” had signed into official
buildings. Then they had checked the identifications given by the man with him.
“W. Haake” and “Thomas Blake” had not turned up anything, but sometimes Wolfe
had used his real IRS credentials. He was arrested for using false credentials
the other times. The FBI proved that the monolithic US Government agencies were
not quite as stupid as the GO had come to believe.

Wolfe told the FBI he had
been doing legal research under his own steam, and said he had never known the
other man as anything other than “Foster.” The story was manufactured in the
GO, and Wolfe was drilled on it. He maintained it through a grand jury hearing,
adding perjury, and conspiracy to obstruct justice to his other crimes.

Two months later, at the end
of August 1976, an FBI agent arrived at the Church of Scientology in Washington
with a warrant for the arrest of Michael Meisner. In the Courthouse library, he
had given an address a few doors from his own. The FBI had traced him by
talking to his neighbors. Michael Meisner became a fugitive from justice.

Instead of turning Meisner
in, the GO added harboring a fugitive to its growing list of crimes. The GO was
in a state of panic, and suggestions of how best to handle the situation
multiplied. The first plan was to fly Meisner to Europe to wait it out. His appearance
was immediately changed. He was to create “the image of an aging guy wanting to
look hip,” shave his head, wear contact lenses, have a tooth capped, lose or
gain weight, and wear “earth shoes” to change his posture. He went through a
rapid succession of identities, becoming first “Jeff Burns,” then “Jeff Marks,”
and then “Jeff Murphy.” Controller Mary Sue Hubbard wrote to one of her
juniors: “He would be better ‘lost’ in some large city where it would be
difficult to find him.”

Mary Sue Hubbard also
acknowledged receipt of a copy of Meisner’s arrest warrant, and continued to
discuss various concocted alibis for Meisner with Guardian Jane Kember and
other GO officials. The FBI discovered these exchanges in their 1977 raid.

Lieutenant Warren Young, a
Scientologist in the San Diego police, checked the National Crime Information
Center computer records to see how the hunt for Meisner was progressing. The
FBI questioned Young, who claimed he had arrested Meisner for a pedestrian
violation.

The GO in Washington
supplied false samples of Meisner’s handwriting to the FBI. These were to be
compared to the signatures in the logs of various government buildings. Mary
Sue Hubbard requested a list of buildings illegally entered by Meisner. It was
impressive, 11 were listed in the reply: the Department of Justice, the
Internal Revenue Service, the Office of International Operations, the Post
Office, the Labor Department’s National Office, the Federal Trade Commission,
the Department of the Treasury, US Customs, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the offices of the American Medical Association’s attorneys,
and the offices of The
St
Petersburg Times
’ attorneys in
Washington.

One of Meisner’s seniors
even toyed with the idea of creating a cover for Meisner whereby he would claim
to have been researching the poor security of government buildings.

By the end of October,
Meisner, in hiding in Los Angeles, was expressing concern at the vacillations
of his superiors. He was assured that Mary Sue Hubbard was working on his case
personally. Indeed she was, and a few days later suggested that Meisner turn
himself in, saying the whole affair had arisen out of his jealousy of his
wife’s consistently superior performance in the Guardian’s Office. To outdo
her, he had organized the burglaries of government offices, unbeknown to any of
his GO colleagues.

Then it was suggested that
Meisner turn himself in, plead guilty, and take the Fifth Amendment (refuse to
answer questions because they might incriminate him) if asked about his
superiors. Meisner was willing to be the scapegoat, and willing to go to prison,
such was his devotion to the cause: but the sooner the “shore story” was
settled the better. Otherwise the FBI might hit paydirt. He was fearful of the
consequences for Scientology, and aware that his own fate could only be
worsened by delay.

While in hiding, Meisner
continued to work for the Guardian’s Office, and to receive Scientology
auditing. His pleas for a swift resolution were repeatedly rejected, and he
threatened to leave, for either Washington or Canada, if decisive action was
not taken. This was the situation in April 1977, 10 months after the Courthouse
library incident. He had been a fugitive for eight months. The GO responded to
Meisner’s threat by turning his “case officer,” Brian Andrus, into his jailer.

Andrus and three heavies,
accompanied by two high officials of the Guardian’s Office, visited Meisner. He
was told he could no longer make “demands and threats on the Church,” and that “he
was to start becoming a decent, co-operative, contributing part of the venture
and nothing else was to be tolerated.” His apartment was searched, and anything
which might conceivably connect Meisner to Scientology removed. As usual, Mary
Sue Hubbard was informed.

A month later, Andrus
visited Meisner and told him he was going to be moved to another apartment. He
refused to leave, and the “two guards handcuffed him behind his back, gagged
him and dragged him out of the building. Outside, they forced him onto the
floor in the back of a waiting car. In the car, one of the guards held Meisner
down with his feet.” This account comes from the Stipulation of Evidence signed
by Mary Sue Hubbard and eight senior GO officials, as do all of the principal
details of this chapter. There is no conjecture. There are reams of uncontested
documents.

Meisner gradually persuaded
his captors that he was willing to co-operate, and by the end of May he was
down to a single guard. One day, Meisner broke away and leapt into a taxi. He
went to a bus station and from there to Las Vegas. Despite everything, Meisner
was still devoted to Scientology. He felt his captors had failed to take the
proper course for the good of Scientology, and wanted time to think the
situation through.

The next day, Meisner phoned
the GO and told them he was in Las Vegas. They had already worked out a new
angle or “shore story” in case Meisner had gone over to the “enemy”: “the only
thing I can think of is that we work a cover story that he is trying to
blackmail the Church for money by pretending that the Church harbored him for
the last months,” Cindy Raymond wrote.

Meisner agreed to meet one
of his former guards, Jim Douglas, in Las Vegas. At the meeting, Meisner
refused to return to Los Angeles. It was too late, the GO had found out where
he was staying, and another official met him there, and persuaded him that
everything had changed with the removal of a senior GO executive.

The Scientologists
constantly excuse reprehensible acts by blaming them on a Suppressive who has
subsequently been removed. Hubbard first used this scapegoat approach in 1952
with his outlandish attack on Don Purcell. This is what comes from believing in
the evil influence of Suppressives, and their magical power for disruption.
Most Scientologists accept the excuse every time it is trotted out. Meisner
did, and he returned to Los Angeles.

In fact, Andrus had ordered
that a new apartment be found for Meisner, “a place where he could be locked in
a room that has no or a very small window,” and where he would have “no outside
contact.” Meisner was installed in the apartment immediately upon his return to
Los Angeles.

In June 1977, in Washington,
DC, Gerald “Silver” Wolfe was sentenced to probation and community service,
having pleaded guilty to the forgery of credentials. On the day he was
sentenced, Wolfe was subpoenaed to appear the same afternoon before a grand
jury, which had been investigating the entries into the US Courthouse. The FBI
was hot on the trail.

Wolfe paraded his carefully
drilled story, claiming he had gone to the Courthouse library to “learn how to
do legal research,” so he would be able to get a better job. He said his
accomplice was only known to him as “John Foster” (Sir John Foster conducted
the British government’s enquiry into the cult). After his appearance, Wolfe
was meticulously debriefed by the GO.

Meisner managed to
ingratiate himself with his captors again. From June 17, 1977, he was no longer
guarded at night. Three days later, he collected a few clothes and left the
apartment. He watched his back carefully to make sure he was not being followed,
and changed buses twice en route to a bowling alley. From there he made a
collect call to an Assistant US Attorney in Washington, pretending to be Gerald
Wolfe, just in case the GO had an operative in the Attorney’s office. Two hours
later, Meisner surrendered himself to the FBI.

While the GO was concocting
a story about Meisner having tried to blackmail them after setting up the
Washington operations on his own initiative, the FBI, with Meisner to help
them, was moving at full speed. Meisner contacted the GO to say he was thinking
things over. They were put off guard. In fact, Meisner had at last thought
things over, and concluded that there was something very wrong with an
organization which resorted to the criminal tactics of the Church of
Scientology. He had broken out of the Kafkaesque nightmare, and made his
confession, this time not to a Scientology Auditor, but to the FBI. On July 7,
1977, the FBI carried out one of the largest raids in its history: on the
Guardian’s Office of the Church of Scientology, simultaneously in both Los
Angeles and Washington, DC.

As a result 11 GO officials,
including Guardian Jane Kember and Controller Mary Sue Hubbard, were eventually
imprisoned.

1.
   
The majority of this chapter is taken from the Stipulation of Evidence
in USA v. Mary Sue Hubbard et al., District Court, Washington, DC, criminal
case no.78-401.

PART six

“When you move off a point of power, pay
all your obligations on the nail, empower all your friends completely and move
off with your pockets full of artillery, potential blackmail on every erstwhile
rival, unlimited funds in your private account and the addresses of experienced
assassins and go live in Bulgravia [sic] and bribe the police.”

—L. Ron
Hubbard, HCO Policy Letter
The Responsibilities of Leaders
,
12 February 1967
¹

Chapter twenty-seven

“Did he ever like those films to be
bloody...”

—Adell
Hartman

In the late 1960s aboard the
Apollo
, Hubbard used the
children of Scientologists to run messages. He set them up with their own
“Org,” and their own child Ethics Officers, one of whom was only eight years
old.
²
Eventually they came to be known as the Commodore’s Messenger
Org, or CMO. They grew up around Hubbard, usually separated from their parents.