The majority of current discourse on Scientology centers around insider revelations regarding the radical belief system coded within the pay-to-play hierarchy of the Church –– e.g. allusions to an alien god named Xenu, hydrogen bombs exploding in ancient volcanoes, auditing sessions with e-Meters, and parasitic past-lives in spirit-form covering human bodies known as Thetans. The deepest secrets of Scientology are only made available to members who have diligently climbed the ranks and dished out vast sums of money. Slowly but surely, these secrets have been published on the internet by disgruntled ex-Scientologists, and thus the discussions surrounding this controversial religion have been commandeered into sensational silos. Whether intentional or not, the end result is that the immense ties of the Church to intelligence and drug trafficking –– not to mention the intersection of both as it relates to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control program –– remain largely ignored.
Scientology’s methods and their extremely pervasive effects on the minds of its own cult members only truly begin to make sense when understood within the context of the non-redacted history of founder L. Ron Hubbard, including the Church’s primordial Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation connections to the intelligence community, and Hubbard’s own intelligence career. His role in under-discussed operations, on the behalf of US Naval and other intelligence agencies, include Hubbard’s work at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s –– the hot-bed of psychiatric research during Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke, the precursors to the infamous MK-ULTRA program –– in addition to his infiltration of Jack Parsons’ occult-influenced rocket program, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose work became the scientific foundation for NASA.
In 1953, The MK-ULTRA program was formally authorized by CIA Director Allen Dulles in order to close the “brainwashing gap” after the US learned of Korean mind-control techniques that had been used on American prisoners of war. As detailed later in this investigation, Scientology itself would later employ such tactics to direct fanatical members of the Church to infiltrate a handful of US agencies, including the IRS, the Treasury, and the FDA, among others, to enact an elaborate intelligence gathering operation in the largest infiltration of the US government in history –– Operation Snow White.
This piece, the first in a two-part series, attempts to abridge the history of the Church of Scientology from its formation through the mid-1990s in order to properly frame an ensuing article on Scientologist Sky Dayton and his numerous internet businesses strewn across his prolific data-mining venture portfolio.
Ultimately, Scientology is far more than just another run-of-the-mill religion. In fact, its mostly untold history paints a picture of an organization that much more closely resembles a tax-exempt intelligence operation –– signed off by the highest members of the CIA and its primordial OSS –– than a wacky cult of alien worshippers invented by a pulp science-fiction author.
St. Elizabeth’s, the OSS, and Project Artichoke
Remember one thing, we are not running a business, we are running a government. We are in direct control of people’s lives.
–– L. Ron Hubbard, Policy Letter from August 5, 1959
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born March 13, 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska, the son of a teacher and a US Navy officer. Hubbard spent his early childhood on various Navy bases, including a lengthy stay in the US territory of Guam. Before authoring the concepts of Dianetics and founding Scientology, Hubbard was a well-published science-fiction author. Hubbard began his ventures into the study of the mind after sailing alongside the former Navy spy and pioneering-yet-controversial psychoanalyst Commander Joseph “Snake” Thompson. His father, Harry Ross Hubbard, was ordered to return to the east coast, and thus the Hubbard family was deployed alongside Thompson on the USS Ulysses S. Grant in 1923. Despite the young Hubbard being only 12 years old at the time of meeting, the two engaged in friendly correspondence for years. Hubbard later attended George Washington University to study engineering, but would leave before graduating.
Hubbard encountered and befriended William Alanson White, a professor of psychiatry at the university. For the remainder of the 1930s, Hubbard stayed in Washington, D.C. and volunteered with the psychiatric community in the nation’s capital, including alongside White, who was then also serving as the Superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. His former shipmate, Thompson, soon became the Vice President of the Washington Psychoanalytic Association, of which White was President, and was also stationed at St. Elizabeth’s hospital. Scientologist John Galusha later penned a letter to the FBI in 1954 stating that Hubbard was “trained in psycho-analysis in Washington, D.C.” by both Thompson and White.
In a lecture given in June 1955, Hubbard himself confirmed this mentorship:
“And I came back to this very city in which we’re giving this congress, and I took engineering… And majored, in that engineering, in finite energies, and thought of the finest energy I could think of – it must be the human mind. Experimented to discover how memory was stored, and found by no computation I could ever compute, that it – a man couldn’t remember, certainly by this computation, more than three month’s worth. Because there wasn’t that much storage space because energies weren’t that small. And I was proposed, as a young engineer, a conundrum of such magnitude that I went over to my very good friend, the head of Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital… Dr. William Alan White. He said, ‘If you pursue along this line’ (…he was a golf friend of mine) – and ‘if you pursue along this line,’ he said, ‘you tell me about it from time to time,’ he says, ‘because I’ll be watching.’
Now, another fellow who had been more or less my mentor when I was a little kid – as a matter of fact, I followed in the footsteps of this man – Commander Thompson, who brought psychoanalysis straight from Vienna to the US Navy, and introduced psychoanalysis into the Navy… I told Commander Thompson about this work, I tried to get more information, and when I had turned to Commander Thompson and Dr. Alan White, I had turned to the only two probables in the country who could have shed any light on this subject at all.”
Despite a fondness for his former teacher White, White’s successor at St. Elizabeth’s, Winfred Overholser, became an object of Hubbard’s hatred following Overholser’s dismissal of his Dianetic research. Hubbard lectured in 1952 about the dangers of Overholser’s treatment of schizophrenics at the hospital’s Chestnut Lodge. The lecture even includes mention that three members of the staff from the Chestnut Lodge were sent to service Hubbard himself during the 1930s. This overlaps with CIA activity at Chestnut Lodge, which directly involved Overholser. According to the CIA, in 1942, then-OSS Chief William Donovan assembled “a half-dozen prestigious American scientists” tasked to “come up with a substance that could break down the psychological defenses of captured spies and POWs” in order to cause an “uninhibited disclosure of classified information.” Overholser was appointed chairman of the panel working on this “Truth Drug.”
According to a University of London research paper titled “The Role of Psychoanalytic Knowledge in CIA’s ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA Documents During the Years 1947-1963: Use and Misuse of Psychoanalytic Techniques,” the Chestnut Lodge “held CIA-cleared psychiatrists ‘for in-house employees and other sensitive cases’ and was officially ‘approved by the CIA Security Office for use’ in 1953.” The paper asserts that “the collaboration between US-intelligence and Chestnut Lodge psychiatrists and psychoanalysts” had began even earlier, during World War II. For example, Chestnut Lodge employees Mabel B. Cohen, Robert A. Cohen, and Alfred H. Stanton were “all security-cleared OSS-medical personnel” who were, at the time, “assigned to Henry A. Murray’s OSS Assessment Staff.” The paper also states that some of their OSS assignments were “conducted at the Lodge,” and that “this collaboration continued when the CIA superseded the OSS in 1947.” St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the Chestnut Lodge, and the CIA’s headquarters at Langley are all within a few miles of each other, and two CIA Directors, Richard Helms and Allen Dulles, employed the same psychoanalyst at the Chestnut Lodge for their personal care.
A published memo from Paul Gaynor, the CIA Security Research chief, to Project ARTICHOKE director, Morse Allen, reads: “It is imperative that we move forward more aggressively on identifying and securing a more reliable ready group, or groups, of human research subjects for ongoing Artichoke work.” According to the Alliance for Human Research Protection, the now defunct Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was created in 1953, the same year as the aforementioned memo was written, and “the CIA found it remarkably easy to gain HEW’s approval for use of Federal medical facilities as fronts for covert drug and interrogation experiments using unwitting human subjects.”
Allen later suggested to Gaynor in another memo titled “Artichoke Research Program” that “there are some four thousand American military men who are serving court martial sentences in the federal prisons at the present time,” and he suggested “offer[ing] reduced sentences” to these men in order to gain their consent to participate in Artichoke-related experimentation. About a week later, Allen tweaked the aforementioned memo to include “federal hospitals and institutions under the control of the [U.S.] Public Health Service.” Shortly after, Artichoke progress reports were sent to the CIA via Gaynor about “the experiments at three federal prisons,” in addition to experiments conducted at Hubbard’s former haunt, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
The aforementioned OSS agent in charge of St. Elizabeth’s staff, Henry A. Murray, later joined Harvard as a researcher, where he conducted the infamous Harvard Experiment, whose research subjects included Theodore Kaczynski –– more famously known as “The Unabomber” –– in addition to supervising Timothy Leary’s controversial work with psychedelic drugs. Leary’s deeper connections to Scientology and intelligence will be explored later in this piece. Murray remained secretly employed by the CIA during this time, leading many to theorize that Murray’s work were conducted as a part of MK-ULTRA or related projects. Murray was far from being the only intelligence-linked figure who served in a prominent role at Chestnut Lodge. For instance, Harry Stack Sullivan, the one-time head psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge and founder of the William Alanson White Institute, left the hospital before helping establish a CIA-precursor, the Office of War Information in 1942.
In a lecture titled “How to Handle Audiences” delivered by Hubbard on November 1, 1956, the Church’s founder confirmed his 1930s stint at the D.C.-area mental hospital, and even boasted of tricking the workers at St. Elizabeth’s using advanced hypnotism:
“I hypnotized one time the staff at St. Elizabeth’s. Told him they’d heard a good speech and left the stage. They all came around afterwards saying, ‘What a good speech that you gave!’ They might afterwards have suspected my knowledge of the mind, but certainly not my knowledge of hypnotism. It’s very easy to hypnotize groups.”
At the onset of World War II, Hubbard himself enlisted in the Navy after his stint at St. Elizabeth’s. There is much discrepancy about his rank and accomplishments during the war, but by nearly all accounts –– including critical biographers and the Church itself –– Hubbard served as an intelligence officer. In 1945, upon the war’s conclusion, Hubbard moved into an estate in Pasadena, CA owned by Jack Parsons, the aforementioned founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Parsonage
John Whiteside Parsons was born in Pasadena, CA in 1914 and spent his early life reading science-fiction and emulating his desires for space travel in his backyard with model rockets and fireworks with his childhood friend, Edward Foreman. After numerous craters were made in his mother’s backyard, and while still enrolled in high school, Parsons joined the Hercules Powder Company and began experimenting with solid-fueled rockets. He later left Hercules and, along with his childhood friend Foreman, joined the Halifax Explosives company based in the Mojave Desert. During their time at Halifax, in 1937, both of the aspiring rocketeers attended a lecture on the subject at Caltech, where they met Frank Malina.
Parsons, Foreman and Malina went on to pitch Theodore Von Karman of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) on their ideas of rocket propulsion, with Malina’s proposal for a doctorate eventually being approved by the “legendary aerodynamicist.” The trio, now with access to the labs and literature available via Caltech and GALCIT, began their experiments in earnest –– with their infamous explosive tendencies earning them the name the “Suicide Squad.” Their work formed the basis of the Jet Proposal Laboratory (JPL) on the outskirts of Parsons’ hometown. As mentioned previously, the JPL was eventually incorporated into NASA, and Malina’s son, Roger Malina –– the husband of Christine Maxwell, the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister to Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell –– later served as the first Director of this new joint venture.
Long before the JPL was formalized under the Executive Branch, Parsons and his crew received funding from the US Army in 1938 to develop rocket engines to assist in the launch of small aircraft. The military was pleased with the results on their JATO canisters –– “Jet Assisted Take Off” –– and funneled more money towards developing these fuel sources. The solid rocket fuel that had been developed by Parsons became “the basis of the Minuteman missile, the Titan rocket, and the Space Shuttle solid rocket booster.” Despite, by nearly all metrics, the success of the primordial JPL –– then-known as the GALCIT Rocket Project –– Parsons soon turned his eye away from the stars and, in 1939, began focusing on the works of English Occultist, Aleister Crowley.
Crowley, a member of The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn, joined the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in 1910, a Freemasonry off-shoot, that was quickly influenced by Crowley’s interest in his Thelemic religion, occult ceremonies, and “Sex Magick.” Parsons and his then-wife, Helen Northup, joined the OTO in 1939, and Parsons engaged in frequent correspondence with Crowley, eventually becoming the American representative of the OTO. In order to further his study of Crowley’s teachings and the OTO, Parsons purchased a mansion in Pasadena to create a commune of occultists he dubbed “The Parsonage.” The manor soon became a hot bed of lavish parties, orgies and occult rituals. Meanwhile, the military continued to pour funding into the GALCIT Rocket Project and, in 1942, the rocket builders founded the Aerojet Engineering Company to keep up with the increasing demand for militarized propulsion. The next year, in 1943, the military formally took over the GALCIT Rocket Project, and renamed it the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now under military control, JPL developed “several weapon deployment systems based on the liquid and solid fuel technology” including the WAC Corporal sounding rocket, which played a large part in the construction of “the first American rocket ever to exit the Earth’s atmosphere.”
As his interest in the occult deepened, the military became wary of Parsons’ ways, and strong-armed him into unloading his shares of the Aerojet Engineering Company. The ensuing payout provided further funding for his “spiritual” life and the Parsonage itself. At this time, in 1945, L. Ron Hubbard became acquainted with Parsons, and was quickly initiated into the OTO. Hubbard subsequently moved into Parsons’ Pasadena estate. In a letter to Crowley describing Hubbard, Parsons wrote, “I deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence. He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles.”
Hubbard and Parsons soon became inseparable, with the pair even sharing Parsons’ then-partner Sara Northrup –– the half-sister of Parsons´ first wife, Helen. In the winter and spring of 1946, Parsons and Hubbard toiled on a series of occult rituals in the Mojave Desert dubbed “Babalon Working,” in which the pair attempted to incarnate the Thelemite goddess Babalon onto Earth. Shortly after its conclusion, and having believed the ritual to be a success, Parsons sold the Parsonage for cash and looked to Hubbard for business concepts to pay back the hefty expenses from their years of occult investigations. Hubbard promptly took nearly all the funds from the sale of the estate, as well as Parson’s wife Sara. The pair then eloped in Mexico. While Parsons did eventually get his money back, Hubbard, Sara and Parson’s sailboat continued on without him.
In 1950, Parsons lost his security clearance after the FBI began investigating the occult scientist for the theft of “rocket plans,” plans which the bureau claimed Parsons “had planned to exchange” with “the newly founded Israeli government in exchange for admission into Israel.” The US Air Force told the FBI that they had been “monitoring Parsons and his relationship with Crowley,” stating in a report that “a religious cult, believed to advocate sexual perversion, was organized at subject’s home at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California, which has been reported subversive.” According to statements made by the Church in December 1969 to the Sunday Times, Hubbard was sent by the US Navy to “[break] up black magic in America.” The Church wrote, “He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the situation and found them very bad… Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and destroyed.” In 1952, Parsons died suspiciously in an explosion at his workshop. Hours after the explosion, Parsons’ mother, Ruth, purposefully overdosed on sedatives and died the same day.
Shortly after splitting from Parsons and settling in with his now-wife Sara, Hubbard penned the beginnings of his life work with Scientology, then-known as Dianetics, publishing his first work on the subject in May 1950.
Dianetics and the CIA’s Influence on Scientology
Initially published as an article in the Astounding Science Fiction magazine’s May 1950 issue, “Dianetics: The Evolution of Science” was written by Hubbard over three weeks on an IBM typewriter. In April 1950, a month before the release of the article, the magazine’s editor John W. Campbell –– an extremely important figure in the blossoming science fiction scene having mentored and published Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Hubbard, among others –– worked with Hubbard to coalesce the pre-publication hype into a foundation to spread its teachings. This culminated in the founding of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. Coincidentally, the same month, the CIA’s mind control program Project BLUEBIRD was authorized by the CIA. According to letters from John Galusha –– a Board member of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International –– later released by the FBI, the idea for the formation of the Dianetics Research Foundation was suggested by Charles Parker Morgan.
In a declassified report from the FDA, files cited by ex-Scientologist investigator Mike McClaughry, “the Dianetic Research Foundation was incorporated in New Jersey, in April 1950, as a ‘non-profit, scientific and educational corporation, the primary purpose of which is to do research in the field of Dianetics and, for the correction of all psychosomatic ills of mankind’.” The report lists Hubbard as President, Parker Morgan as Secretary & General Counsel, Campbell as Treasurer, alongside Sara Hubbard and Donald H. Rogers as Trustees of the Foundation. The same report also lists Parker Morgan as a “former special agent for the FBI,” while his name also appears on a government-hosted list of OSS Agents, confirming the primordial intelligence ties to the formation of Scientology. An FBI Memo from the L. Ron Hubbard Files dated March 21, 1951 also refers to Donald H. Rogers, the Director of Research at the newly formed foundation, as a former FBI agent.
In January 1951, the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners filed a lawsuit against the Foundation, and Hubbard found himself in need of a new operational strategy for Dianetics. According to both McClaughry and The Royal Maze, two separate intelligence officers suggested that Hubbard incorporate Dianetics as a religion as a defense mechanism against these lawsuits. They were the aforementioned OSS/FBI agent Charles Parker Morgan, and John Starr Cooke.
In The Game Player by ex-CIA agent Miles Copeland, Copeland describes his political influence work with fellow agent Bob Mandlestam, which they referred to as “Occultism in High Places” or “OHP.” OHP was “a theory of political activism based on an impressively detailed study of ways in which leaders of the world based their judgements on one form or another of divine guidance.” Copeland further described the duo’s theory that “properly ‘charismatized’ leaders, placed in certain positions in the ‘free world’s’ ‘key’ bureaucracies, could be used as political levers by which an enlightened American foreign policy could uplift the world,” which would “enable a properly employed CIA to fulfill the Wilsonian pledge to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ while removing certain goings-on here and there that were inconveniencing the American way of life.” Consider, for example, the influence of Presidential spiritual advisors such as Ronald Reagan’s astrologer Joan Quigley, or Choi Soon-sil over former South Korean President, Park Geun-hye.
Copeland specifically mentions such “arrangements” with the Church of Scientology:
“When Bob Mandlestam made similar arrangements with Scientology, the brainchild of another nut, this one a science-fiction writer named Ron Hubbard, we were on our way to having a political action capability which would make the highly expensive, largely ineffective and largely overt ‘covert action’ of Bill Casey’s CIA seem trivial by comparison. ‘MRA will hit ’em high, and the Church of Scientology will hit ‘em low!’ Bob liked to boast, and he was right… we planted an agent in the Scientology cult who became a ‘clear’ under the tutelage of Ron Hubbard himself, and then demanded and got more and more ‘operation expenses’ to be turned over, in addition to his own life’s savings, to the cause of Dianetics.”
The 1985 book Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain confirms the agency’s infiltration, suggests that the aforementioned John Star Cooke had been the CIA proxy sent by Copeland and Mandlestam:
“A man of wealth and influential family connections, Cooke was no stranger to high-level CIA personnel. His sister, Alice, to whom he was very close, was married to Roger Kent, a prominent figure in the California state Democratic party; Roger’s brother, Sherman Kent, was head of the CIA’s National Board of Estimates (an extremely powerful position) and served as CIA director Allen Dulles’s right-hand man during the Cold War. John Cooke hobnobbed with Sherman Kent at annual family reunions and is said to have made the acquaintance of a number of CIA operatives while traveling in Europe.
Driven by an avid interest in the occult, Cooke journeyed around the world befriending an assortment of mystics and spiritual teachers. In the early 1950’s, he became a close confidant of L. Ron Hubbard, the ex-navy officer who founded the Scientology organization. Cooke rose high in the ranks of the newly formed religious cult. (He was the first “clear” in America, meaning he had attained the level of an advanced Scientology initiate.) Before long, however, he grew disillusioned with Hubbard and they parted ways.”
Cooke moved back to California, and became an important pillar in the blossoming occult scene, with numerous connections to Timothy Leary, the CIA, and many of the chemists and traffickers associated with the LSD movement. Cooke died at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1976, but not before being visited by Andrija Puharich, an ex-Military scientist and researcher, and Seymour “The Head” Lazare, a long-time affiliate of William Mellon Hitchcock, who will be discussed shortly.
Puharich was famous for his study on parapsychological phenomenon, and attempted to find military applications of such practices of remote viewing and telekinesis. His work led to the founding of the Stanford Research Institute, which employed high-ranking Scientologists Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann, Pat Price and Eli Primose. Puthoff had worked for the National Security Agency, and Swann for the United Nations. Their research, eventually merged under the CIA’s infamous Project Stargate, was directly supervised at Langley by John McMahon, the “second-in-command under [CIA Director] William Casey. “Many of the SRI empaths were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology,” according to a December 1996 report from Alex Constantine titled “CIA MIND CONTROL AT STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE”:
“Harold Puthoff, the Institute’s senior researcher, was a leading Scientologist. Two remote viewers from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ’s lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly, ‘fourteen Clears participated in the experiments, more than I would suspect.’ At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, ‘it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of an east-coast scientist.’”
According to the CIA, the SRI’s work was funded by the CIA, the Parsons-founded Jet Proposal Laboratory (now within NASA), ARPA and the Military. The CIA and the Church of Scientology had become direct partners in their advancement of psychic and paranormal research by the 1970s. However, the groundwork for this relationship appears to have started years earlier, given numerous connections between the CIA’s LSD trafficking scheme and Hubbard’s newly-formed personal navy, the Sea Organization.
Drug Running, LSD, and The Sea Org
“I give the CIA a total credit for sponsoring and initiating the entire consciousness movement counter culture events of the 1960s.”
– Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary, a student of former St. Elizabeth’s staff and OSS/CIA agent Henry A. Murray, became an FBI informant with numerous connections to the CIA over the course of his psychedelic missionary work across the United States. For starters, the estate where Leary conducted much of his LSD experiments was gifted to him by the Mellon banking family‘s William “Billy” Hitchcock after being visited numerous times by family friend and eventual CIA Director Richard Helms. The Mellon family had many family members serve in the OSS, including OSS Station Chief of London, David Bruce, who was coincidentally the son-in-law of former US Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon. Hitchcock himself had ties to intelligence-linked sexual blackmail operations, such as the Profumo Affair, and he also held an account at Castle Bank and Trust, a mob-affiliated bank founded in the Bahamas by the CIA banker Paul Helliwell. In addition, he was a frequent guest at Resorts International-owned properties –– known infamous meeting grounds of the mob, off-shore bankers, and the CIA. Hitchcock concurrently had served as the banker and financial advisor to the LSD cult and drug operation, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL).
Hitchcock evicted Leary off his estate in 1967, but shortly thereafter in the spring of 1968, Hitchcock traveled to the Bahamas with LSD chemist and BEL member, Nick Sand. Sand had been appointed the alchemist of Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion formed in September 1966 that “incorporated psychedelic drugs as sacraments.” Sand’s chemistry operations, culminating in the infamously pure LSD known as Orange Sunshine, were a product of a long-time partnership with David Mantell, a Scientologist who studied directly under Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige.
This trip to the Bahamas led to Hitchcock and Sand staying at an estate owned by Sam Clapp, a chair of the Fiduciary Trust Company, in addition to being a “college-chum” and long-time business partner of Hitchcock. According to Acid Dreams, Hitchcock and Clapp “arranged for Sand to open an account under a false name at Clapp’s bank,” while simultaneously looking “into the feasibility of setting up an offshore LSD laboratory on one of Bahamas secluded cays.” The book furthers Hitchcock’s financial activity during this trip, directly connecting his account at Clapp’s Fiduciary Trust with the CIA-front set up by Allen Dulles and Thomas Dewey known as the Mary Carter Paint Company (later renamed Resorts International):
“Hitchcock took full advantage of his unlimited borrowing privileges at Fiduciary. At Clapp’s urging he poured over $5,000,000 into unregistered ‘letter stocks’ (the kind that aren’t traded publicly but tend to show dramatic gains on paper) associated with the Mary Carter Paint Company, later known as Resorts International. It was the single largest chunk of money raised by Resorts, an organization suspected of having ties to organized crime. Resorts International proceeded to build a casino on an exclusive piece of Bahamian real estate called Paradise Island…”
The 1987 book, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt by R.T. Naylor, further details Hitchcock’s connection with the off-shore banking enterprise linked to intelligence and organized crime, alluding to his shares in Resorts being managed by the CIA-linked bank, Castle Bank & Trust:
“To finance these activities [various efforts to topple the government of Cuba], the CIA turned to Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau. The bank was established by Paul Helliwell, a former OSS China hand with a background in drug-trade intelligence. After the war, Helliwell had run CIA front companies in Florida. Through his Bahamian bank, and a companion institution in Florida, millions of dollars were funneled for covert military operations staged off Andros Island in the Bahamas. Castle also facilitated tax evasion, and, in its trust-company capacity, voted the shares of certain nonresident owners of Resorts International, the top [Meyer] Lansky-era casino operation on Nassau. When one of those shareholders so strongly objected to the way Castle was voting his shares that he sued the bank, the scheme began to unravel.
The shareholder was William Mellon Hitchcock, the New York stockbroker who had been using the Paravicini Bank of Berne, Switzerland, to circumvent the New York Fed’s margin requirements. Allegedly, Hitchcock also put his business experience to work in ‘high finance,’ along with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, whose clandestine California laboratories reportedly produced more than half the LSD that levitated political debate on American campuses in the 1960s. It was Hitchcock’s friend Timothy Leary, the era’s most publicized advocate of the chemical lobotomy, who got him involved with the LSD operation. The profits were laundered through the Paravicini Bank until its demise and through the IOS-controlled Fiduciary Trust in the Bahamas.
After Hitchcock’s lawsuit, the IRS made its move, anticipating the biggest tax-evasion bust in American history. But the CIA successfully lobbied for the inquiry to be buried, and many IRS veterans quit in disgust. But Castle Bank shut down its Caymans and Bahamas operations in 1977, and moved to the more congenial environment of Panama.”
The 1985 book Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain importantly connects Castle Bank founder Helliwell with the Sea Supply, a 1950s trafficking operation run by the CIA:
“Castle Bank was founded and controlled by Paul Helliwell, a Miami lawyer with long-standing ties to American intelligence. Helliwell’s career as a spook dates back to World War II, when he served as chief of special intelligence in China with the OSS. He stayed in the Far East when the CIA was formed and bossed a bevy of spies, including E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame. In the early 1950’s, Helliwell organized Sea Supply, a CIA proprietary company that furnished weapons and other material to anti-Communist guerrillas in the hills of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Based in the Golden Triangle, this mercenary army cultivated fields of opium poppies, and the CIA was drawn immediately into the drug connection. Helliwell also served as paymaster for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. A few years later he set up Castle Bank, serving in a dual capacity as CIA banker and legal counsel for the Cuban Mafia, which prospered by selling Southeast Asian heroin in the US. Helliwell’s law firm also represented [Meyer Lanksy Frontman] Louis Chesler and Wallace Groves, both partners in Resorts International.”
Sea Supply operated for a decade, before the former OSS and CIA officer Helliwell wound down the operation. Helliwell passed away at age 62 in 1976, but not before becoming infamous for advising Walt Disney to establish shell companies and “phantom cities” in Florida during the construction of Disney World in order for the organization to “avoid taxation and environmental regulation as well as maintain immunity from the U.S. Constitution.” Similar tactics were later employed by the Church of Scientology during their takeover of Clearwater, Florida in the 1980s.
While seemingly unconnected to the story of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard at first glance, Sea Supply seems to have served as an inspiration and template for Hubbard’s Sea Organization, with numerous connections to the aforementioned CIA-driven drug trafficking nexus.
The Sea Organization
In the Spring of 1966, Congressman J. William Fulbright, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, initiated an investigation into the CIA’s impact on foreign policy. Reporting from the Boston Globe specifically alluded to Sea Supply as an example of such operations by the intelligence agency. The report makes the case that “spying is a fact of modern international life; our enemies spy, and so must we,” before concluding that “increased congressional scrutiny of the CIA does not need to jeopardize national security.”
In May 1966, Congressman Fulbright appeared on NBC’s The Today Show to explain the reasoning for placing three committee members on a Congressional board to oversee CIA activities:
“The principle [sic] argument, I believe, is that most of the least publicized difficulties that have appeared in the press in recent years regarding the CIA have almost always been in the field of foreign relations. A number of the Committee feels that this is the area which has caused considerable question and in some cases criticism –– that it would be the responsibility of the committee to be represented there. And some of us, including myself, feel that if such a committee was created that it would improve the relations of the Senate and the public with the CIA.
Rather than being a reflection upon the CIA, I feel that it would be an improvement in our relations and would tend to modify, if not eliminate, to a great extent, the criticisms that I think sometimes arise out of a feeling that there is not sufficient and not as careful supervision of this agency as there ought to be.”
Richard Helms –– the godfather of MK-ULTRA, the long-time friend of Helliwell’s business associate Billy Hitchcock, and CIA Director since March 1966 –– went so far as to pen a letter that July in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat “expressing pleasure at a newspaper editorial critical of Fulbright.” Needless to say, the Central Intelligence Agency was losing agency and gaining Congressional oversight, much to the dismay of Helms, and the major aspects of the intelligence agency were in dire need of a rebrand that would allow them to continue operating far beyond the reach of the public sector.
At the start of 1965, Hubbard arrived in Spain’s Canary Islands to begin research and writing on the advanced “OT levels.” In fact, it was during a lecture given on the Canary Islands by Hubbard that the first inkling of OT III was announced –– the level that introduced Xenu to the highest level of Scientology’s initiates. At the end of June 1965, Hubbard gave a lecture titled “The Well-Rounded Auditor,” in which he exclaims that the US government has been “trying to seize Scientology in the United States.” In July 1965, CIA agent E. Howard Hunt is selected by Richard Helms to travel to Spain on behalf of the agency. The month before Helms officially became head of the CIA, Hubbard once again returned to the Canary Islands, in February 1966. According to ABC Spain, Hubbard signed a contract with Helms and the CIA that year, although no direct record of any such contract exists.
Shortly after, in July 1966, the IRS informed the Church they will be recommending the revocation of their tax exemption status. On September 1, 1966, Hubbard officially resigned from all Scientology management positions. Three weeks later, on September 21, 1966, Hunt returns to Washington, D.C. “from a highly secret assignment he has been on in Spain for a little over a year.” Shortly thereafter, Hubbard officially creates the “Sea Project” in a Scientology policy letter dated November 10, 1966. On November 22 of that year, the Hubbard Exploration Company Limited was incorporated in London, and by the end of the year, the primordial “Sea Org” secretly purchased its first ship – the Enchanter.
The Sea Organization was formally established in August 1967 by Hubbard and was initially compromised of three large ships. Sea Org membership was available to only the most devout of the Church, during which training for the highest levels of Scientology were delivered. According to documents shown to a former Scientologist, as documented in Jon Atack’s 1990 biography on Hubbard, A Piece of Blue Sky, the Sea Org believed that “the governments of the world were on the verge of collapse,” and that “the Sea Org would survive and pick up the pieces.”
According to a document supplied by the group to the IRS in 1992, initiates of the Sea Org were asked to pledge a billion-year term of service to Scientology, in alignment with their belief that humans were immortal beings. Former Scientologist and aforementioned author of A Piece of Blue Sky, Jon Atack, stated that the treatment of Sea Org members was a “careful imitation of techniques long-used by the military to obtain unquestioning obedience and immediate compliance to orders, or more simply to break men’s spirits.” According to The Week, a former Sea Org employee claims to have “worked 15-hour days as a teenager,” and was only allowed to “see her parents just twice between ages 12 and 18.” Another stated that “he never earned more than $17 a week for his work,” and “lived in a room so barren it lacked a door knob.”
In 2009, the FBI conducted an investigation of the Church of Scientology, specifically focusing on the Sea Org, due to human trafficking concerns. No charges were ever made as a result of their inquiries, which were conducted under the codename “Operation Overboard.” As for why no charges were filed, the Tampa Bay Times interviewed experts in 2013 who stated that the likely reason was a ruling in August 2010 by a federal judge in a civil case brought by two former Sea Org members. The judge had ruled in part that “the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion prevented the court from delving into whether the church’s discipline methods were reasonable,” and to do so would “entangle the court in the religious doctrine of Scientology and the doctrinally motivated practices of the Sea Org.”
Whatever the reason given by the Church for the formation of a paramilitary fleet of vessels predominantly stationed in international waters, public opinion has coalesced around the concurrent timing of Scientology’s loss of tax exemption status by the IRS earlier that same year. This action led author Stephen Kent to remark in his 2001 book, From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era, that “the less lofty reason behind Hubbard’s establishment of the Sea Org was that he had encountered opposition in the United States from the Food and Drug Administration and the IRS, from the governments of Australia, the United Kingdom, and Rhodesia, and from various media sources around the world, which motivated him to set sail on the high seas and thereby escape the control of any nation-state.”
While the revoking of tax exemption status was surely a plausible forcing function for Hubbard’s personal navy setting sail, Helms, Helliwell, and the CIA were also simultaneously looking for a replacement for their off-the-books, off-shore shadow operation.
According to the CIA, Sea Supply founder Helliwell was “deeply involved” in the financing of “covert forays between 1964 and 1975” against Cuba by “CIA operatives working from Andros Island,” the largest island in the Bahamas. During this time, in April 1966, the US spent $130 million on the Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center, an “antisubmarine base” on Andros Island to “experiment with new methods of seeking and destroying enemy submarines” with technology said to “surpase [sic] anything we know of in the entire world.” For known intelligence operatives like Helliwell, who were major players in the international maritime trafficking game, this type of naval research and technology could prove priceless. Further reports from the CIA describe the base as “important” to both the US and the United Kingdom, with another CIA report describing “the unrestricted ability of the US Coast Guard to operate in this area” which the agency notes is “largely taken for granted.” According to Guardian Order 1344 issued by Scientology’s intelligence branch, the Guardian’s Office, the Coast Guard began reporting on Scientology’s Sea Org ships, with reports dated July 1969 stating two of the Church’s ships were conducting “military drills” while “bearing Coast Guard insignia replicas.”
There is some significant evidence, in addition to the timeline provided above, that Hubbard was simultaneously helping fulfill the need of Helms’ CIA of escaping Congressional scrutiny –– creating an off-shore paramilitary intelligence fleet, staffed with fanatical seafarers –– while building the spiritual successor to Helliwell’s Sea Supply.
For starters, one of the vessels making up Hubbard’s fleet –– the Aries –– was previously owned by Scientologist and informant Jerry McDonald, and featured in a sting operation against BEL lawyer Michael Metzger. That operation resulted in the arrest of Nick Sand’s partner and fellow Scientologist, David Mantell. McDonald is mentioned numerous times in files put together by the Church’s Guardian’s Office which were released during the Clearwater, Florida Commission Hearings, including allegations that the Church was trafficking drugs:
“Exhibit XII –
February through July 1970 – JM [Jerry McDonald] is reported as working with Customs and LAPD as an informant of the cycle set up by Milner to remove X-Scientologist drug runners off Scientology lines.
February 1970 – Milner tells JM that US customs believed Scientology was promoting and smuggling drugs because some expelled Scientologists were engaged in drug trafficking. And further that a person had been picked up by customs while smuggling drugs and claimed that he was on a secret mission for the Sea Org.
February 16, 1970 – US Customs official calls JM in Salt Lake City, Utah “to inquire about the Aires and JM’s involvement in Scientology”. He asks questions like – Why is Scientology going back and forth between Mexico and the US, is Scientology running dope? He also indicates that Scientology is under investigation by several gov’t agencies, including customs.
February 17, 1970 – Jack Enoch, US Customs, calls JM and tells him that the Scientology investigation is just local now but should soon be widespread. JM tells Enoch that he is no longer involved in Scientology but that his wife and kids are.” [emphasis added]
Other Guardian Office documents from October 1974 released by the FBI make direct note of McDonald’s ship in relation to the aforementioned Hitchcock-linked BEL, referred to simply as Brotherhood:
“Undated, unsigned note in US Coast Guard files – ‘owned by Scientology group – paramilitary’. McDonald – marijuana smuggling – followers almost military. Arrested couple of them from time to time. Hopkins boarded Makaira. Scientology founded by multi-millionaire who lives – L. Ron Hubbard. Brotherhood at Laguna – marijuana. (Brotherhood was a drug ring.)”
The Makaira was McDonald’s boat at the time, and was boarded in July 1970 by DEA agents, who found few drugs but loads of weapons, including 40 pistols and 10 long arms, onboard. Agents believed that the weapons cache “had been taken in trade for marijuana…from Mexico.” Another report ear-marked the weapons to be worth around $6000 at the time, and speculated many were stolen in recent burglaries targeting pawnshops in Garden Grove, CA. Yet another report quoted state narcotics agent Garrett Van Raam that he believed the Makaira “had entered San Francisco Bay in late May with as much as 2,200 pounds of Mexican pot.” In November 1970, McDonald was reported missing, having failed to report to preliminary hearings regarding charges on “possessing stolen property,” “possessing a tear gas gun” and “a sniper scope,” and “having a concealed weapon in a car.” Despite his failure to appear in court and the multitude of serious criminal allegations, McDonald was cleared of all charges the following month, in December 1970, alluding to suspicions of working on behalf of intelligence, in addition to his known informant position with U.S. customs.
In January 1972, Customs agents made their way upon the Sea Org vessel Asia –– later named Excalibur –– which was anchored in the harbor at Los Angeles, with McDonald being recognized by an agent and served a subpoena. The next month, in February 1972, the same ship was again boarded by Customs and Secret Service agents looking for drugs, confirming law enforcement inquiries into Scientology’s Sea Org as a trafficking enterprise. According to historian Chris Owen, published on author Tony Ortega’s The Underground Bunker, “the UK and US authorities were suspicious of the sealed packages that were regularly being couriered to the Sea Org fleet.”
The arms-for-drugs trade exemplified in McDonald’s work for Scientology was a key pillar in the CIA’s Operation Paper, in which Helliwell’s Sea Supply had played a major role in facilitating. CIA Director Helms commented on these agency’s operations, stating “this was a major operation” that “took specially qualified manpower” due to being “dangerous” and “difficult.” Helms further contended that the CIA did “a superb job.” Further testimony from former Church members alludes to McDonald being “specially qualified manpower,” as it relates to their new, apparent trafficking ring.
Former Sea Org Captain Scott Mayer provided an affidavit in the case of the “Church of Scientology International versus Fishman and Geertz,” in which Mayer spoke upon being given “instructions to kill” alongside McDonald:
“While I was in the Sea Org, I was instructed to kill another human being by the Scientology organization. At the time Scientology had an office on Beacon Avenue in Los Angeles, very close to McArthur Park. I was called in for a briefing by Alex Sibryski. At that time, Scientology had a ranch at Rosarito in Mexico which was being used as a nursery, a place for overflow kids that could not be housed in Los Angeles and a place to grow fruits and vegetables. Mexican bandits were allegedly harassing and hustling the ranch and stealing produce from it. Jerry McDonald and I were asked to put together a mission to go down to Mexico, take some infrared optics and some guns and rifles, wait for the Mexican bandits to attack the ranch again and then take care of them. We were told to kill them if necessary…
Jerry McDonald was widely rumored to have been a former mercenary and a paid assassin in Europe. He was known throughout the Sea Org for taking care of difficult problems. If someone was giving a problem in some area Jerry McDonald would just appear there. Because of his reputation as having been an assassin, if he came on the scene, people would fear for their lives. They believed that he was working totally for Scientology and that he would do anything for Hubbard. Additionally, he was also the kind of guy who would have people over to his house every now and then and would get out his automatic weapons, clean them and put them together in front of people. In this way, he would let people know that he was really conversant with his craft. He carried a 9 mm pistol on him all the time and he was always talking about arms sales and deals that he was doing. As things turned out, he and I were not required to carry out the instructions to kill that we had received. However, if the orders had not been canceled I have no doubt that he could have performed the task.”
Mayer additionally testified that “at various times” he was “responsible for preparing mission orders and briefing couriers that would smuggle money out of the United States.” He was hardly the only former Scientologist who gave testimony about moving large sums of money for the Sea Org. In the 1987 book, Messiah or Madman, former Sea Org member Hana Eltringham stated there was “lots of money aboard,” making note of a time when she helped “courier 7 or 8 million dollars in cash to Switzerland,” and “a later trip” in which “much more than that was couriered.” Eltringham referred to Hubbard as “really like a squirrel with nuts, stashing it,” before revealing that he “stashed gold bullion, too.”
Another Sea Org member, Mary Maren, recalled being given “about £3,000 in high-denomination notes to take out to the ship,” which she hid in her boots. Another Church member, Mike Goldstein –– the Banking Officer aboard the Apollo –– noted there “were drawers full of money everywhere and more than a million dollars in the safe, but no proper accounts.” Goldstein claimed the Sea Org “paid for everything in cash” and “were working with three different currencies –– Spanish, Portuguese and Moroccan.” Goldstein further explained “that if anyone wanted money for something they just asked for it.”
In Messiah or Madman, another ex-Church member under the alias Elena Lorrel described her time spent during the young Sea Org as “James Bond stuff” that was suggestive of intelligence-adjacent work:
“There are some missing chapters in the story of this period that are completely unknown even to many veteran Sea Org members. These missing chapters have enabled lots of myths to develop. They have to do with what the ships were really doing as opposed to what we proclaimed to Scientologists we were doing. What we were doing was James Bond stuff in all these different countries. Some of the missions that we undertook were real intelligence missions: to the U.N., and to the World Federation of Mental Health, for example, as well as to almost every government of the countries we visited. We were infiltrating these groups….trying to covertly back one political candidate versus another. All kinds of political manipulations like you’d never imagine were going on, and it was all being pulled off by very few people. Most Sea Org members were robotic, rigidly following Scientology think. Put under pressure and duress, they would just blab everything. So there was only a very small group of us that had to do it all over a period of 10 or 12 years. We’d been out on scenes where we had to break into presidential palace grounds, con our way past guards, and so on.”
An August 1978 report on the Sea Org hosted on the CIA’s Reading Room alludes to suspicions of the Apollo –– the Sea Org’s flagship vessel –– being associated with intentions that went far-beyond those of a simple religious sect. For starters, the Los Angeles Times article notes a State Department letter that quotes an officer from the Apollo, who stated that the “organization backed by money and friends in high places ‘would cause a nosy vice consul severe problems,’” before threatening “accidents could easily happen to people” inquiring about the Sea Org. The article correctly associated the Apollo with a Panamanian company titled the Operation and Transport Corp, Ltd. –– a Scientology front –– before describing a regular triangular course that Sea Org vessels followed between ports in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. According to the Times, the Apollo “transmitted coded radio messages to New York and points unknown,” while establishing “land bases in Casablanca and Tangier.” Despite being registered in Panama, the Panamanian Consul General was unable to schedule a meeting with Hubbard, leading to a rather telling comment upon the ship’s “gimmicks”:
“It is possible that Commodore Hubbard and his wife are philanthropists of some kind and/or eccentrics, but if one does not accept this as an explanation, there has to be some other, ‘gimmick’ involved in this operation. What this gimmick might be is unknown here, although people in Casablanca have speculated variously from smuggling to drug traffic to a far-out religious cult.”
The US Consulate in Tangier dispatched a “lengthy cable” to Washington, DC, as noted in the article, including mention of “rumors in town that the Apollo is involved in drug or white slave traffic,” with the former “undoubtedly stem[ming] from the fact that included among the crew of the Apollo are a large number of strikingly beautiful young ladies.” The article concludes with mention of a Trinidad tabloid, The Bomb, that speculated the ship was “linked to the CIA and Sharon Tate murders in Los Angeles.” (Charles Manson, whose followers were linked to the murder of Tate, has long been associated with both the CIA and MK-ULTRA and also listed himself as a Scientologist in July 1961 upon incarceration.)
In October 1974, the Apollo was meant to port in Charleston, South Carolina, when “a welcoming party consisting of agents from the Immigration Office, Drug Enforcement Agency, US Customs, Coast Guard, and US Marshals” was tipped off by the early arrival of the ship’s band, the Apollo All Stars. A Charleston newspaper reported there were “enough U.S. Customs Service agents in Charleston Wednesday to keep each of the crew members of the vessel Apollo under surveillance for possible drug smuggling,” and that “customs agents had gathered here from as far away as California to keep watch on the Apollo” due to suspicions “of carrying large quantities of narcotics.” Hubbard’s Guardian’s Office noticed the gathering of law enforcement, and his wife Mary Sue was able to warn the Apollo, which reversed course back to the Bahamas.
Jane Kember, the Deputy Head of Scientology’s Guardian’s Office, issued Guardian Order (GO) 1344 that same month, which ordered the intelligence branch of the Church to begin a large-scale operation against Customs and the Coast Guard. Specifically, GO 1344 called for “penetration of and theft of documents from the 11th District Coast Guard Intelligence and the National Headquarters of Coast Guard Intelligence, Washington, D.C.” GO 1344 built off the previously issued GO 732 from April 1973, in which Hubbard approved and first described the “Snow White Program.”
The escalation of the Guardian’s Office’s GOs quickly developed into a full-blown paramilitary intrusion of numerous departments of the United States government, in what is now considered the largest infiltration of the government in US history –– Operation Snow White.
Operation Snow White
The policy of Scientology’s Snow White program, now commonly referred to as “Operation Snow White,” simply states “Attack is neccessary [sic] to an effective defence.” The “plan” seemed rather innocuous enough, detailing the Church’s intention “to engage in various litigation in all countries affected so as to expose to view all such derogatory and false reports” against Scientology. This would culminate in efforts “to engage in further litigation in the countries originating such reports” in order to “exhaust resources in those countries.” At first, the Church mostly stuck to legal attempts at upholding Hubbard’s Snow White, including numerous requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). By the start of 1974 however, Hubbard and his then-wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, were overheard discussing infiltrating the IRS by Scientologist Kenneth Urquhart, according to Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky.
Evidence released in the case of The United States of America vs Mary Sue Hubbard et al from October 1979 suggests that Snow White developed into an extensive espionage operation that infiltrated “more than 30 countries” in addition to numerous US government agencies. Charges including “burglary, obstruction of justice, wiretapping, harboring a fugitive and conspiracy” eventually resulted in 11 church leaders, including Mary Sue Hubbard, serving prison terms.
In the summer of 1974, Cindy Raymond –– Collections Officer of the US Information Bureau of the Guardian’s Office –– sent “a directive” to Michael Meisner –– Assistant Guardian for Information, Washington, DC –– to “recruit a loyal Scientologist to be placed as a covert agent at Internal Revenue Service” for “the purpose of taking from that agency all documents which dealt with Scientology,” including “pending litigation initiated by Scientology against the United States Government.” By that September, the Church had found its man –– Gerald Bennett Wolfe –– to infiltrate the IRS on behalf of Scientology. In October 1974, Jane Kember, the aforementioned Head of GO issued Guardian Order 1361 to clarify the “operating targets” to include:
“10. Immediately get an agent into DC IRS to obtain files on LRH, Scientology, etc. in the Chief Council’s [sic] office, the Special Services staff, the intelligence division, Audit Division, and any other areas.
16. Collect data on the Justice Dept. Tax Division for the org board, the current terminals, and the people handling Scientology.
17. When the correct areas are isolated, infiltrate and get the files.
[GO 1361] also called for the placing of “an agent, trustworthy and well grooved in, to infiltrate the IRS LA office” (target 2). That “agent” was “to obtain any files on LRH, Scientology”, etc. from both the Intelligence Division (target 3) and the Audit Division (target 4) of the Los Angeles IRS Office. It also called for the location (target 20) and infiltration (target 22) of the IRS London Office in order to “obtain all documents” (target 22). 12/ Guardian Order 1361 directed that once documents had been obtained clandestinely, the designated bureau and official would create “suitable cover” to disguise the manner in which “the data was obtained” so that they may be released to “PR [Public Relations] for dead agenting,” that is, for possible use in impeaching those perceived as enemies of Scientology.¨
On November 1, 1974, Michell Hermann –– the Guardian’s Office’s Information Branch I Director –– successfully planted a radio transmitting bug in a conference room at the IRS’ Chief Counsel. This was to be the meeting place for a confidential discussion concerning the tax exemption status of Scientology, leading to the entire meeting’s recording and transcriptions being sent to the GO. A few weeks later, Scientologist Gerald Wolfe gained employment at the IRS as a clerk typist. From December 1974 through June 1976, Hermann, Wolfe, and Meisner stole tens of thousands of documents from the IRS in order to realize Mary Sue Hubbard’s “IRS Strategy,” which was described in a letter to Kember as “us[ing] any method at our disposal to win the battle and gain our non-profit status.
By July 1977, 150 FBI agents raided the Scientology headquarters in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. According to a report hosted on the CIA’s Reading Room, the raid revealed “an astounding haul,” including “lock picks, pistols, ammunition, knockout drops, a blackjack, bugging and wiretapping equipment,” and “even a small vial labeled ‘vampire blood.’” Over 23,000 documents were impounded by the FBI, alleged to have been “taken from the private files of federal prosecutors, correspondence between U.S. Cabinet members, and church memoranda on producing false identification papers, tailing people, laundering money and committing blackmail” including documents stolen from “the Federal Trade and Atomic Energy Commissions; the National Security, Defense Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agencies; the Departments of Labor, the Army and the Navy; the U.S. Customs Service; Interpol, and numerous U.S. police departments.”
While a US Judge ruled the raid unconstitutional later that month, eleven Scientologists, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were “convicted of conspiracy and imprisoned for between two and six years.” The Church’s founder and leader, L. Ron Hubbard, then went into hiding in California and stayed hidden until his death in January 1986. It was in his absence that David Miscavige, the Church’s current leader, seized control of Scientology.
During the 1980s, the Church hired former CIA agent and former Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy, L. Fletcher Prouty, to produce an affidavit on the US government’s attacks against Scientology. Notably, Prouty was previously the “Pentagon’s chief briefing officer assigned to the White House during the Eisenhower administration” who “worked closely with CIA Director Allen Dulles in coordinating military support for the clandestine political operations undertaken by the agency.” In his report, Prouty explained that “copies of intelligence messages about Scientology activities throughout the world were frequently routed to the state department, National Security Agency. Army, Navy, and defense department’s Office of Special Operations,” and that specifically “the CIA routinely received 16 copies of each message.” Prouty explained that this was “a very rare order of distribution for messages of this type and indicates a very high classification and security handling of what is otherwise unclassified information,” leading him “to believe that the government is hiding its activities behind a cloak of secrecy.”
According to reporting from the New York Times, records on file at the IRS demonstrate that “the church was earning about $300 million a year” by the early 1990s. In October 1991, now-Scientology leader Miscavige and Marty Rathbun, another senior Scientology official, held an unscheduled meeting with IRS Commissioner, Fred T. Goldberg Jr. Miscavige offered to cease Snow White’s operations and to “drop all the suits against the IRS” if Scientology was once again “given tax exemption.” For reasons unknown, not only did Goldberg agree to the Church’s demands, the IRS went so far as to create “a special five-member working group” in order “to resolve the dispute” –– an “exceptionally unusual arrangement” that bypasses the agency’s exempt organizations division, which normally handles those matters. As part of the settlement, the IRS even “agreed to distribute a fact sheet describing Scientology and Hubbard.” “It is very complete and very accurate,” Miscavige recalled. “Now, how do I know? We wrote it! And the IRS will be sending it out to every government in the world.”
Goldberg left the IRS only a few months after the decision, in January 1992, to join the Treasury department. Goldberg cited privacy laws which “prohibited him from discussing Scientology or his impromptu meeting with Miscavige.” The now-infamous meeting never appeared on Goldberg’s appointment calendar, which was later obtained by The New York Times through the Freedom of Information Act. His predecessor at the IRS, Lawrence B. Gibbs, called it “a very surprising decision.” Gibbs added that “It was even more surprising that the service made the decision without full disclosure, in light of the prior background.”
The War Is Over
While Miscavige and the Church declared “the war is over,” in reality, the battle for Scientology had barely begun. The proliferation of the internet drastically pushed forward the front of the information war. For example, public releases of top-secret Church literature, including the Xenu story present in OT III, was published in a Calgary, Canada newspaper as early as December 1974. But due to the difficulty of distribution innate to physical publications, the Church was able to mostly keep access to such secrets locked-up within the hierarchy of the organization. This all changed with the July 1991 founding of the Usenet newsgroup, alt.religion.scientology, as Scientology secrets –– once costing thousands and thousands of dollars –– were suddenly flooded all over the internet, available to millions of readers for the low price of a monthly subscription to an internet service provider.
Naturally, Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs (OSA) –– the name of the Guardian’s Office since 1983 –– sprung into action, leading to a memo from OSA’s Elaine Siegel that detailed plans to handle both electronic criticism and the proliferation of Church secrets. Ironically, Siegel’s letter was later published “more than a dozen times on Internet,” including the details of the OSA’s newly-formed internet strategy. The memo, dated May 11, 1994, stated that “as a group, we will NO longer put up with our religion being criticized, harassed and denigrated on the Internet,” in addition to “some legal actions, which you will be further briefed on.” She furthered “It will be quite simple, actually,” including plans to have “40-50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days,” which would “run the SPs [suppressive persons] right off the system.”
After calling the Church’s critics, “jerks,” Siegel told The Tampa Bay Times that “Scientology is going to get its own link to Internet.”
Founded by second-generation Scientologist Sky Dayton, with funding sourced from Scientologists, and with a management and board of directors featuring Scientologists, the pioneering internet service provider EarthLink was registered on June 6, 1994 –– less than one month after the circulation of Siegel’s memo.
Understanding that the future of Scientology relies heavily on the Church’s ability to surveil dissidents, push back on criticism, censor the publication of copyrighted materials, and spread their teachings across the world to potential initiates, EarthLink’s Dayton quickly set out to gain substantial footholds in the data infrastructure layer of the blossoming internet. The second piece in this two-part series on Unlimited Hangout will investigate EarthLink’s founding and evolution, and further examine Dayton’s impressive portfolio of companies and investments as well as his proximity to political power.
As will be noted in this forthcoming article, in addition to EarthLink, Dayton helped incubate one of the most popular websites of all time, NeoPets; founded Boingo Wireless, the world’s largest WiFi provider, which services the majority of the world’s major airports and US military bases; advised and invested in Swarm Tech, the acquired company behind SpaceX’s world-leading satellite fleet; advised and invested in Ring, the leading home and neighborhood surveillance system later acquired by Amazon; invested and sat on the board of Age of Learning, a government-partnered educational software company featured in over a third of US public libraries and used by 65,000 teachers in North America; founded City Storage Systems, since acquired by disgraced Uber founder Travis Kalanick, which launched the “internet food court” CloudKitchens at the onset of COVID lockdowns; in addition to his current leading Partner position at Craft Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by the current US AI & Crypto Czar, David Sacks.
Dayton’s expansive web of ventures, and his simultaneous devotion to the Church and its data-hoarding pedigree, suggests that Scientology’s intelligence-adjacent operations were anything but neutered by the advent of the internet, and in fact remain more influential and consequential than ever.
To Be Continued
