ON THE EVENING of May 21, 1976, two covert operatives from the Guardian's Office, Gerald Wolfe and Michael Meisner, both using forged government IDs, entered the U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., intent on breaking into the office of Nathan Dodell, an assistant U.S. attorney who was investigating Scientology. After informing the security guard that they were there to do legal research, the pair signed the log at the front desk, took the elevator to the law library, and then exited through a back door and walked down the hall to Dodell's office, where they entered with a stolen key. The men made copies of six inches of government files pertaining to the investigation, returned the originals, then left.
One week later, on the evening of May 28, Meisner and Wolfe returned to the same courthouse, and using the same tactic, removed and copied even more files from Dodell's office. On June 11, they attempted to do the same thing. But this time the night librarian, having noticed the men previously, had alerted authorities. Two FBI agents approached Meisner and Wolfe as they waited in the law library for a cleaning crew to vacate Dodell's office. Telling the agents that they were doing legal research, the men presented their identification and were allowed to leave. But Wolfe had mistakenly handed the FBI his actual identification card, resulting three weeks later in his arrest for use and possession of a forged government ID. By August, a grand jury investigation into the Wolfe case had turned up Meisner's name and connected him to the Church of Scientology.
At a hidden location in Los Angeles, Meisner, at the urging of Mary Sue Hubbard, among others, agreed to turn himself in. But he was kept waiting for eight months while the Guardian's Office sought to concoct an appropriate cover story. By the spring of 1977, a frustrated Meisner threatened to leave California and return to Washington if the situation was not resolved. Instead, he was put under watch by Scientology guards on orders from his Guardian's Office superiors. In June 1977, a full year after the courthouse incident, Meisner managed to escape his captors and placed a call to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., which phoned the FBI. He was later taken to Washington, where he agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy felony. Then he told all to the grand jury. Two weeks later, on the morning of July 8, 1977, FBI agents raided the Church of Scientology's headquarters in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and carted away close to fifty thousand incriminating documents. The government had uncovered Operation Snow White.
Hubbard's quiet small-town life in Florida didn't last long. Still paranoid, he'd fled Clearwater in February 1976, leaving the fledgling Flag Land Base behind when the Guardian's Office discovered that a local reporter was closing in on Hubbard's true identity. Mary Sue and a core group of Messengers joined him and found him a new refuge about two hours east of Los Angeles, in the desert community of La Quinta. They called this sprawling $1.3 million ranch their Winter Headquarters, which was immediately given a code name: "W." The large, hacienda-style main house, known as Olives, served as a dormitory, while another house, called Palms, became the dining hall. Hubbard's home, known as Rifle, was a bit removed from the main property, across several open fields. Aside from his Messengers, Hubbard's disciples were not told where he went. The Messengers simply said that he'd gone "over the rainbow."
Hubbard was now sixty-five, with thinning hair, an expanding belly, and a temperament that grew more bellicose by the day. But he had developed a new passion: the Commodore wanted to be a film director. At the ranch, Hubbard would eventually establish the Cine Org to produce instructional films for students learning to be auditors. He strolled the grounds dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, shouting orders at his young assistants, who quickly learned to operate camera and lighting equipment.
The Messengers had by now come to adopt Hubbard's mannerisms to a remarkable degree. "If Hubbard screamed at the Messenger when he issued his order, then the Messenger screamed at the person to whom the message was intended," one young Sea Org member, Sylvana Garritano, later recalled. "Some of the Messengers could duplicate Hubbard's voice almost perfectly." The longtime Scientologists who witnessed his behavior were appalled. "Hubbard had gotten to a point where he didn't have direct interactions or communications with anyone," said Alan Walter, who had watched the rise of the Messengers on board the Apollo between 1968 and 1975. "These kids became his voice."
But though the Messengers were closely involved with Hubbard, it was the Guardian's Office that had become the most powerful entity in the Church of Scientology, other than Hubbard himself. Based at Saint Hill, but with eleven hundred staff members all over the world, this extremely sophisticated branch stood outside the official chain of command, as a watchdog.
Scientologists hoping to join the Guardian's Office went through a rigorous screening process, not unlike what an applicant to work for the CIA might endure. A typical background check would include a review of the aspirant's activities and friendships as well as those of his or her parents, grandparents, and other relatives and friends. All of this material was then compiled in secret dossiers, which made the Guardians especially vulnerable. Though any Scientologist, staff or public, could be subject to internal investigation, these dossiers gave the church particularly sensitive material that could be used against any Guardian who stepped out of line; stringent loyalty was the only line of defense. If staff members rebelled, they might be followed, their phone might be tapped, or their family harassed with threatening phone calls. "It freaked you out," says one former official. "You had no idea what they were going to do, except that you knew that you would be hunted down."
This kind of harassment fell under a Scientology policy known as "Fair Game." Originally written by Hubbard in 1965, the "Fair Game Law," as Hubbard called it, instructed Scientologists on how to handle Suppressive Persons, both within and outside the church. "A truly Suppressive Person or Group has no rights of any kind, and actions taken against them are not punishable," Hubbard wrote. He later explained that such enemies "may 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."
In 1968 Hubbard, concerned over the increasing international scrutiny of Scientology and its policies, issued an order to cancel Fair Game, stating that the phrase itself "causes bad public relations." But Hubbard did not ban the practice of Fair Game, which was implicit in his directions for how to treat journalists, judges, hostile lawyers, government agencies, psychiatrists, and myriad other forces that were, by Hubbard's definition, suppressive to Scientology.
To gather information on various targets, the Guardian's Office maintained a clandestine army of informants, both Scientologists and private investigators, all over the world. They were often "regular people you would never suspect, so they were never detected," recalled one former Guardian, and they often worked for free, performing tasks ranging from attending meetings of anti-Scientology groups to asking neighbors or friends about the person they were investigating. A special intelligence unit with the Guardian's Office Bureau of Information, known as Branch One, was charged with digging up sensitive material pertaining to the IRS, various psychiatric groups, and government agencies such as the FBI and the CIA. "If you wanted to apprentice in clandestine activities, that was the place to do it," recalled the former operative. "These guys were masters at deception."
Branch One was a self-contained cell that very few Scientologists, including other Guardian's Office officials, were aware of. It was headed by a longtime Scientology official named Jane Kember, a "fanatical Scientologist," as the writer Jon Atack described her, who served as the Deputy Guardian for Intelligence, working directly under Mary Sue Hubbard. Under Kember's direction, but with the blessing of Mary Sue (and, it is generally believed, that of L. Ron Hubbard), Branch One used illegal tactics to perpetrate what would later be revealed as the largest program of domestic espionage in U.S. history: Operation Snow White.
The scope of this operation, which was intended to "cleanse" Scientology of its negative image by purging any critical documents about the church or its founder, was enormous. Beginning in 1973, Branch One planted Scientology operatives inside the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, the Better Business Bureau, the American Medical Association, and many other local and federal agencies.* There they stole and copied tens of thousands of document files in hopes of gleaning information that could be used to threaten, or silence, opponents of the church. Guardian's Office operatives launched smear campaigns, bugged government offices, and engaged in breaking and entering. For these illegal acts, members received commendations, Scientology's equivalent of military medals. They penetrated anti-cult organizations and had even made moves to infiltrate U.S. military organizations, such as the Coast Guard. Though experienced agents of the Guardian's Office carried out the more sophisticated operations, many young Scientologists, believing they were protecting their religion from persecution, were pressed into service. "We were religious zealots, militants, in our viewpoint," recalls one former Guardian. "Our perspective was 'This is my religion, and I will do anything to help it survive, even kill for it.'"
"It was all very exciting, and also really confusing if you were a kid," recalled Nancy Many, who while a young staff member at the Boston Organization was trained in subterfuge by the Guardian's Office and then tasked with a number of "covert ops." Most involved getting herself hired for an administrative job at a government agency that collected information about Scientology. For example, Many worked for a year at the Boston Consumer Council, where, she said, her mission was steal and photocopy consumer complaints about the church, give them to her Guardian's Office handlers, and then replace the originals the following day. "I was nineteen or twenty, and though I knew what I was doing, I actually never thought it was illegal," she said. "I thought I was 'stealing Xerox paper,' as it had been explained to me. That's how naive I was."
Many was also asked to take part in the campaign against the journalist Paulette Cooper, the author of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology, published in 1971. It painted a scathing portrait of Scientology's recruitment practices, its auditing processes, and its battles against government oversight in both the United States and abroad, causing the church to sue Cooper for libel; over the course of the decade it filed at least eighteen other lawsuits against her (all of which have been settled). Church operatives tapped her phones, broke into her apartment, posted her number on bathroom walls, and handed out fliers to her neighbors, alleging that she was a prostitute. They also stole Cooper's stationery; then they framed her. Using her stationery, they sent several bomb threats to the New York Church of Scientology in 1973. As a result, Cooper was arrested and indicted on three counts of felony; she faced fifteen years in prison if convicted.
"For months, my anxiety was so terrible I could taste it in my throat," Cooper later wrote. "I could barely write, and my bills, especially legal ones, kept mounting. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, popped Valium like M&Ms, and drank too much vodka." Finally, in 1975, after Cooper took and passed a sodium amytal test (the "truth serum" test), the government decided not to pursue prosecution.
That same year, Nancy Many, working in the Boston Organization's covert intelligence office, was asked to break into the office of Dr. Stanley Cath, Cooper's psychiatrist during her student years at Brandeis University, in order to steal Cooper's psychiatric files. When Many refused—she clearly understood that breaking and entering was illegal, she said—another Scientologist in her office was tasked with the theft, which he committed with ease. About a week after this incident, Many said, the Boston Organization received a Telex from Hubbard, highly commending the Boston office for a job well done. "And that was the only thing we did," she said. "So anybody who says that LRH did not know what was going on—forget it. There was nothing else we had done to deserve a 'very well done' from Hubbard himself, except breaking and entering."
In 1976, Scientologists planned what they hoped would be their final offensive against Cooper, a five-point scheme known as Operation Freakout, intended to get the writer "incarcerated in a mental institution or jail," as the mission stated. Its central intent was to frame Cooper, who is Jewish, as the perpetrator of bomb threats against two Arab consulates as well as against Henry Kissinger and the president of the United States, Gerald Ford. Once again, Scientologists conspired to acquire a piece of paper with Cooper's fingerprints on it, similar to their tactic in using her stolen stationery. "One night, I was at this reporter's hangout in New York when someone came up to me and handed me a piece of paper, with a joke that wasn't funny," Cooper told me. "I couldn't figure out what that was all about and handed it back to him and continued joking with the other reporters. When I came home, I suddenly realized the guy who'd given me the paper had been wearing gloves indoors. And I just began shaking. The only reason he would have had to approach me like that with that piece of paper was to get my fingerprints again."
Fortunately for Cooper, Operation Freakout was never fully enacted, for by the summer of 1976, the Guardian's Office had become distracted by the apprehension of Meisner and Wolfe in Washington, D.C. By the following summer, the government had seized a huge cache of files from the church's headquarters in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., which revealed the full extent of Operation Snow White. Hubbard's name was not found on any of the documents. This, his aides knew, did not mean he was not involved: Hubbard had not only ordered Snow White, but he had also quite probably been aware of every aspect of the operation. Mary Sue, the "Controller," had always been careful to brief her husband verbally so as to prevent any documentation of his connection to sensitive Guardian's Office operations. Nonetheless, Hubbard worried that the FBI might come looking for him.
One week after the government raid, Hubbard and three of his Messengers got into his Buick station wagon just after dusk, drove through the gates of "W," and sped off into the desert. At the wheel was Pat Broeker, age twenty-nine, who was at the time one of the few male Messengers at La Quinta. With him was DeDe Reisdorf and a third Messenger, Claire Rousseau. They arrived later the next day in the low-rent city of Sparks, Nevada, on the Truckee River. Here, they decided, was an out-of-the-way spot where no one would think to look for the flamboyant Commodore. Broeker was charged with finding Hubbard a suitable hideout. To make the hunt for lodging look legitimate, he and Rousseau posed as a married couple. Reisdorf was a cousin, and Hubbard an elderly uncle. Four days later, after spending a few nights at a motel under assumed names, the group moved into an anonymous little two-bedroom apartment.
Hubbard spent the next six months in Sparks, highly paranoid (at one point, Reisdorf recalled, Hubbard, believing FBI agents might be lurking in the bushes, wouldn't even walk in front of a window for fear of being spotted). But he quickly settled into a routine. He arose late in the morning, had a snack, and then did a solo auditing session. Then he began writing film scripts. In the evening, Reisdorf and her "uncle," often disguised in a hunter's cap, would walk to the grocery store or to a nearby K-Mart. "Along the way he would make up songs and sing to me. His big joke was to try to push me onto those tiny little carpeted areas in these stores in Nevada that have the slot machines. Then he would say rather loudly, 'Look, she isn't twenty-one!! Arrest her!'" (Reisdorf, who was only nineteen when they left La Quinta, turned twenty in Sparks.) Back at the apartment, the group would watch a late movie. Then Hubbard would turn in for the night. In his bedroom, Reisdorf gave him a backrub while the other two Messengers sat on the floor with Hubbard's ashtray and a glass of water or juice as he told stories or chatted to them about his latest writing project.
Only Broeker maintained contact with the rest of the Church of Scientology. When Hubbard ran out of money, or needed to pass on important orders, Broeker would notify the ranch, then meet another Messenger in Los Angeles. Broeker, who'd joined Scientology in the late 1960s after graduating from high school in Buffalo, New York, was an adventurous young man who had previously worked as a finance courier for L. Ron Hubbard, traveling back and forth from the Apollo to Luxembourg with a suitcase of cash. A passionate reader of spy novels, he was nicknamed "007." Having studied up on all things espionage related, he took Hubbard's pronouncements about maintaining security very seriously. To avoid detection en route to and from California, he'd switch planes, dye his hair, change his clothes, or even, recalled Reisdorf, stuff cotton balls in his cheeks to alter his appearance. The La Quinta–based Messengers, in the meantime, would alert Broeker of the meeting place by putting an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times classified section, indicating the location: the Los Angeles International Airport, a movie theater, or someplace else.
By the late autumn, Hubbard was getting tired of being on the lam. He yearned to go home, though he realized it would entail significant risk. The church had taken the government to court, arguing that the FBI had violated Scientology's Fourth Amendment rights in the raid. It was a complaint that would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which, early in 1978, would refuse to hear the case. Meanwhile, word from La Quinta was that the FBI had Mary Sue and the ranch under constant surveillance. Hubbard's wife had stood by him and loyally refused to implicate him in any of the misdeeds of the Guardian's Office. Hubbard, nonetheless, worried she might still betray him. In Sparks, he tried to distance himself from her. "LRH would say over and over: 'I didn't know about what the GO was doing, right?'" said DeDe Reisdorf. "Pat and Claire and I would look at each other later and wonder if he was trying to convince us or himself. We all knew that Mary Sue ran pretty much everything by him ... maybe not the details of each mission, but up until then, he was very much in the loop on the Guardian's Office stuff."
In December, Hubbard caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Now he felt an even greater urgency to return to the warmth of southern California. But for Hubbard to arrive, Mary Sue and her staff would have to leave. This was upsetting to many of the Messengers, including Gale Reisdorf. "Mary Sue was a wonderful sweet delicate lady, very much of a lady," Gale noted. Having helped to raise many of the Messengers from childhood, she tended to treat them as if they were her children. She made sure they ate and slept, and had days off—something that was unheard of with Hubbard, who often demanded that his Messengers stay up all night.
On January 2, 1978, Hubbard returned to La Quinta. Prior to his arrival, Mary Sue Hubbard had left the ranch in her BMW, moving into a house in the Hollywood Hills, secured for her by the church. After nearly twenty-six years of marriage, she would never live with L. Ron Hubbard again.
For now, Hubbard was in the clear, but elaborate plans were made to protect him in La Quinta. "W" was now a secret hideout. Security guards patrolled the property day and night, scouting for FBI agents, journalists, or other curious parties. Scientology books, tapes, and paraphernalia were kept strictly out of view, so as to maintain the cover story that the ranch was simply a movie studio. His young Messengers, staff, and crew were instructed to adopt "civilian" clothes—most wore jeans, T-shirts, and shorts—and when applying for driver's licenses or other identification, doctored their social security numbers and used "safe addresses," which had been arranged for them by the Guardian's Office so as not to reveal their actual residence. They were also designated aliases, which they were instructed to use even among themselves.
"My name was Steve something or other, and I had an ID saying I was from La Jolla," said Sinar Parman, a Los Angeles–based Scientologist who joined the Sea Org in 1977. A chef by training, he was sent to Rifle in June 1978 to work as Hubbard's cook. Though it was only two and a half hours from Los Angeles, getting to La Quinta took almost two days, he recalled. "First, I was dropped off at a motel on Sunset Boulevard. The next day, someone picked me up and took me to a shopping center in the Valley. There, this other guy met me and drove me out to the desert." The driver took the longest and most circuitous way possible, he recalled, so as to shake anyone who might be following them. Finally they arrived at the gates of "W," where a teenage girl dressed in hot pants came out to greet Parman. "Welcome aboard," she said. "The Commodore welcomes you." Then she took him to the kitchen.
Hubbard by now had grown tremendously finicky and at times believed his cooks were trying to poison him. Suffering from ulcers and high blood pressure, among other ailments, he ate only bland food, banning onions, leeks, and garlic from his table. Some cooks prepared several meals at once for "The Boss." Frequently, he rejected a dish immediately upon tasting it. "Things changed," said Parman, who ultimately learned to adopt a Zen-like attitude in the face of Hubbard's many eccentricities. "One day he'd love what you made him, the next day he'd throw it across the room."
A team of Messengers washed Hubbard's clothes, always by hand, using filtered water and then rinsing the clothes in buckets, sometimes more than a dozen times. "We'd go through this about ten times for every single piece of clothing," said Maureen Bolstad, a Messenger who was charged with cleaning Hubbard's shirts. "Then we'd have to hang them up and hand-press them and dry them with fans. And then the clothes would get sniffed to make sure they didn't smell of anything."
Bolstad, who'd joined Scientology in 1979 as a thirteen-year-old, had been recruited for the Sea Organization with the promise of help in finishing her high school education and paying for college. Instead, she'd been given a Scientology education, which consisted solely of learning how to serve L. Ron Hubbard. "I learned how to hold an ashtray and follow him around. Then I learned how to hold the ashtray and also hold a tape recorder at the same time. " Messengers recorded his every word and then transcribed it later. "I was trained to carry his bag filled with sunscreen and stuff, to look after his every need."
In addition to La Quinta, the church maintained a summer headquarters for Hubbard, known as "S." This was located on the site of a dilapidated resort in Gilman Hot Springs, an outpost thirty-six miles from Palm Springs. Purchased for $2.7 million in cash, the Gilman complex was set on over five hundred acres and featured a faded golf course, a worn motel, and several other ramshackle buildings. No one in the local San Jacinto area knew that L. Ron Hubbard was anywhere in the vicinity, nor that Scientologists had bought the resort. The new owners referred to themselves, variously, as the Scottish Highland Quietude Club, and the Western States Scientific Communications Association. Richard Hoag, a Los Angeles attorney affiliated with the church, claimed to have purchased the resort for a condominium project.
An even more secret hideout, known only as "X," was also purchased in 1978. In March of that year, the La Quinta property was permanently closed down, and Hubbard moved with his staff to "X," a faceless apartment complex fourteen miles from "S," in the tiny town of Hemet. A sleepy agricultural town once surrounded by orange groves but now vanishing under layers of dust, Hemet was as far off the beaten track as Sparks, Nevada. The apartment complex couldn't have been more pedestrian: it was located behind an acupuncture clinic and next to a Pick 'n Save supermarket.
The Commodore's Messengers shuttled back and forth between "X" and "S" in weekly shifts. They typically took a circuitous route and traveled in the middle of the night. "It was real CIA stuff," said Parman, then twenty-five, who found it thrilling: switching locations every week; driving, four people to a car, through the desert to arrive at a secret hideaway known only by an initial; using aliases; and relaying information covertly, by pay phone or by meeting in person to exchange information in supermarkets—a practice known as "cookie drops."
Some Messengers dreaded their weeks in Hemet because Hubbard was often in a black mood. The female Messengers suspected he missed his wife. "Mary Sue was always a calming influence on LRH and when she was around him, he was not as moody," recalled Messenger Julie Holloway.* "However, with her gone to L.A. he had major mood changes." He railed at his staff, exploding into tirades and then sinking into a sulky silence.
Hoping to one day live at "S," Hubbard ordered that a new house be built for him at the Gilman resort, perched on high. He specified that it be "dust-free, defensible," and surrounded by high walls with "openings for gun emplacements," according to one account. On most days, Hubbard went to Gilman to work on his movies and to oversee progress at the house, a rambling Tudor-style home named Bonnie View, with a sweeping view of the San Jacinto Valley.
In Los Angeles, Mary Sue Hubbard was trying to stay out of jail. On August 15, 1978, she and ten other Scientologists, including Jane Kember, who remained in England, had been indicted by a federal grand jury on twenty-eight counts of theft, burglary, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice for their roles in Operation Snow White. If convicted, Mary Sue faced a fine of $40,000 and up to 175 years in prison. She and eight other defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges, and for the next year, a score of Scientology lawyers fought tirelessly to prevent the case from coming to trial. Finally, on October 8, 1979, Mary Sue Hubbard and six other Guardian's Office executives reached an agreement with the government to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy,* signing their names to a 282-page document detailing their various misdeeds, in lieu of a trial. Federal prosecutors petitioned the court, insisting the defendants be shown no mercy. "The crime committed by these defendants is of a breadth and scope previously unheard of," it stated. "No building, office, desk, or file was safe from their snooping and prying. No individual or organization was free from their despicable conspiratorial minds."
On October 26, 1979, the defendants, minus Kember and another church official, who were still fighting extradition,† stood before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey and formally pleaded guilty to conspiracy in Operation Snow White. Mary Sue Hubbard and three other Guardian's Office executives each received a five-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. The others received lesser sentences and fines, but all nine appealed on the grounds that the evidence against them had been acquired illegally. In April 1982, Mary Sue Hubbard lost her final appeal, and in January 1983, she was sent to a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. By then suffering from health problems, she served one year and was released. L. Ron Hubbard was named an "unindicted co-conspirator" in Operation Snow White. None of the seized Guardian's Office files linked him directly to the crimes, and the federal prosecutors failed to make a persuasive case for his involvement.
Though Hubbard remained free, he grew increasingly worried that he might be subpoenaed, or harassed by the FBI, the IRS, or attorneys for several disaffected Scientologists who were suing him for fraud. Since the late 1970s, several top aides had left Scientology, including Hubbard's longtime nurse, Kima Douglass. The Operation Snow White documents had been unsealed, meaning that the scope of Scientology's covert operations was now open to scrutiny by the press. Not even his top-secret new home seemed secure enough. On Valentine's Day, 1980, Hubbard fled Hemet with his trusted aide Pat Broeker and Broeker's wife, Annie. For the next six years, the press, federal investigators, and even his own children searched for him. He was never seen publicly again.