Going Clear by Lawrence Wright
During the ten months Hubbard was in hiding in Queens, he began plotting another way to destroy SMERSH. His escapade to take over the World Federation for Mental Health had been foiled, he believed, by those sinister forces. One day, Hubbard surprised Dincalci by asking him for the names of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs. Dincalci dutifully trotted to the library to look them up. He wouldn’t learn the real significance of Snow White for some time. Hubbard had set in motion an operation so daring and dangerous that it threatened to destroy Scientology forever.
On April 20, 1973, Hubbard wrote a secret order, “Snow White Program,” in which he noted a dangerous trend in the gradual reduction since 1967 of countries available to Scientology. He put the blame on the American and British governments, which he said were spreading false allegations against the church. He proposed to swamp the countries that had turned against the church in a vast campaign of litigation with the aim of expunging defamatory files and leaving Hubbard and the Apollo “free to frequent all western ports and nations without threat.”
In Hubbard’s absence, Mary Sue exerted increased control over the church’s operations. Hubbard had already appointed her the head of the Guardian’s Office, a special unit with a broad mandate to protect the religion. Among its other duties, the GO functioned as an intelligence agency, gathering information on critics and government agencies around the world, generating lawsuits to intimidate opponents, and waging an unremitting campaign against mental health professionals. It was the GO that Hubbard tasked with Snow White. Under Mary Sue’s direction, the GO infiltrated government offices around the world, looking for damning files on the church. Within the next few years, as many as five thousand Scientologists were covertly placed in 136 government agencies worldwide. Project Grumpy, for instance, covered Germany, where the Guardian’s Office was set up to infiltrate Interpol as well as German police and immigration authorities. In addition, there was a scheme to accuse German critics of the church of committing genocide. Project Sleepy was to clear files in Austria; Happy was for Denmark, Bashful for Belgium, and Dopey for Italy. There were also Projects Mirror, Apple, Reflection, and so on, all drawn from elements of the fairy tale. Projects Witch and Stepmother both targeted the UK, the source of Scientology’s immigration problems.
Project Hunter was the United States, where Scientologists penetrated the IRS, the Justice, Treasury, and Labor Departments, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as foreign embassies and consulates; private companies and organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Better Business Bureau; and newspapers—including the St. Petersburg Times, the Clearwater Sun, and the Washington Post—that were critical of the religion. In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS intelligence files of celebrities and political figures, including California governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and Frank Sinatra. Nothing in American history can compare with the scale of the domestic espionage of Operation Snow White.
IN SEPTEMBER 1973, learning that he was not going to be extradited to France after all, Hubbard returned to Lisbon, where the Apollo was in dry dock. He amused himself by going off on photo expeditions in Portugal, with his Messengers acting as porters. Then, in December, the Apollo lifted anchor and headed to the warmer climate of the Canary Islands. One day in Tenerife, Hubbard decided to take his Harley-Davidson motorcycle out for a spin on the twisty mountain roads. Miles away, in the lush volcanic landscape, the Harley hit a patch of oil or mud and crashed. Hubbard broke his arm and several ribs. Somehow he managed to right his bike and make his way back to the ship.
Some members of the Sea Org cite the motorcycle accident as the moment when Scientology changed course and sailed toward a darker horizon. Hubbard was in terrible pain, but he was fearful of doctors and refused to go to the hospital. Dincalci and the ship’s other medical officer, Kima Douglas, neither of whom had a medical degree, attempted to treat him. They strapped Hubbard’s injured arm to his side and wrapped his broken ribs, then sat him in a velvet reading chair, which he rarely left for the next six weeks, day or night.
The whole ship could hear him cursing and screaming and throwing plates and things against the wall with his one good arm. He was in too much discomfort to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, so the ranting and moaning went on almost nonstop. The medical officers had persuaded him to let a local doctor come aboard with a kind of primitive X-ray machine, which confirmed the broken bones. The doctor left Dincalci a prescription for pain pills. The first time Dincalci gave Hubbard the pain pills, however, Hubbard panicked and said that they had slowed down his heart. “You’re trying to kill me!” he shouted. Dincalci, who looked upon Hubbard as a father, both spiritually and emotionally, was devastated. Hubbard ordered him “beached”—dropped off in Madeira, the distant Portuguese atoll, where he remained for a year.
Other members of the Sea Org were having a hard time coping with the blatant contradiction between Hubbard’s legend and the crabby, disconsolate figure howling in his stateroom. “If he is who he says he is, why does he have so little staying power?” Hana Eltringham wondered. “He has a motorcycle accident, he doesn’t recover quickly, and he doesn’t use Scientology techniques on himself.”
By now, Eltringham had been promoted to Deputy Commodore, the highest post in the Sea Org after Hubbard himself. She had been off the ship for a couple of years, in Los Angeles, running the Advanced Orgs—the divisions responsible for producing Operating Thetans—and setting up a liaison office to supply the Scientology fleet. During that period, she began experiencing crippling headaches. Some days she was unable to work at all. She couldn’t even lie down because the pressure from the pillow was unbearable. The vibration of footsteps in the hall outside her room made the pain excruciating. She thought if she could only discover the body thetans that she must be harboring she could ease her misery. Every day, hour after hour, she audited herself on the E-Meter, probing for some stirring or a sign of recognition. Hubbard himself was her case supervisor, which made her anxiety all the greater. Despite her rank, she, too, worried about being beached or punished. Even worse, according to Hubbard’s dictates, she alone was responsible for her pain. So why was she doing this to herself?
Then, one day in her auditing, she felt something. A kind of “flicker.” Was it a BT? She decided that it must be. An immense feeling of relief washed over her. Soon after that, she discovered more BTs—eventually, hundreds, thousands. Sometimes there was a feeling of lightness or of floating when the BT was expelled. Other times, Eltringham exteriorized from her body. But the headaches remained. Then something new arrived: quarrelsome voices inside her head. At first the voices were faint, but they grew louder and more insistent. Eltringham worried that she was going insane.
When she returned to the Apollo, she was shocked by the hellish changes that had taken place. In January 1974, Hubbard issued Flag Order 3434RB, creating the Rehabilitation Project Force. The stated goal was to rehabilitate Sea Org members whose statistics were down or who might be harboring subversive thoughts against Hubbard or his technology. Because the RPF provided a second chance for those who might otherwise be fired, Hubbard saw it as an enlightened management technique, the sole purpose of which was “redemption.” When Eltringham came aboard, she found dozens of crew members housed in the old cattle hold belowdecks, illuminated by a single lightbulb, sleeping on stained mattresses on the floor. They were dressed in black overalls, called boiler suits, and forbidden to speak to anyone outside their group. They ate using their hands from a bucket of table scraps, shoveling the food into their mouths as if they were starving.
Despite the confusion and the harsh punishment, there were many Sea Org members who experienced their days on the Apollo as a time of incomparable adventure, filled with a sense of mission and an esprit de corps they would never again recapture. Although Hubbard could be terrifying and irrational, and comically pompous
Hubbard developed many of the basic Scientology techniques aboard the Apollo. In one instance, de la Carriere was having no luck auditing a wealthy Scientologist with a long drug history, who kept falling asleep during their sessions. Hubbard theorized that the LSD he had taken must still be in his system; perhaps the drugs could be sweated out by putting him to work swabbing the decks. After six weeks, he was a changed man. De la Carriere says that was the beginning of the Scientology drug-treatment program, called the Purification Rundown.
A strapping crewman named Bruce Welch had what other crew members diagnosed as a nervous breakdown or a psychotic episode. In Scientology terms, he had gone “Type III.” He had a crush on one of the ship’s young women, and when he learned she was engaged, he went berserk. According to de la Carriere, Welch got a butcher knife from the pantry and threatened to kill Hubbard and other members of the crew. There were no designated security procedures or personnel trained to handle such a case. It took four crewmen to eventually subdue Welch and wrestle him into a cabin in the forecastle, the storage area above the bow, away from most of the crew, where he screamed continuously. There was a metal bed with a mattress, and a metal cabinet, but Welch managed to tear them apart with his bare hands and shove the pieces through the porthole.
A young Australian named Mike Rinder (who would eventually become the church’s chief spokesperson) had just arrived aboard the Apollo and was given the assignment of guarding Welch’s cabin. He sat on a trunk in the hallway, listening to Welch shouting, “Bring the Commodore here! I want the Commodore right now!” Then Welch would yank on the door, which was locked and lashed to the bulkhead with sturdy ropes. Several times, Rinder recalled, Welch beat up other members of the crew when he was escorted to the bathroom or given his meals.
Hubbard saw Welch’s rampage as an opportunity to experiment with the problem of acute mental breakdown. Total silence was enforced on the forecastle deck so that Welch would have nothing to stimulate him. Three times a day, Hubbard would write Welch a note, asking about his well-being. According to de la Carriere, Welch’s response might be, “You’re the devil incarnate. I’m going to enjoy plunging the knife in you.” Hubbard would respond that he understood, and by the way was there any special food that the chef could prepare for him? In this way, Welch’s rage began to subside. He allowed an auditor to visit him each day. After two weeks, the door to Welch’s cabin was unlocked and he emerged, serene and apparently cured.
“I have made a technical discovery which possibly ranks with the major discoveries of the twentieth century,” Hubbard boasted in one of his bulletins. “It is called the Introspection Rundown.” He explained that the psychotic break had long bedeviled psychiatry, which had attempted to treat it with drugs, lobotomies, and shock treatments. The key, Hubbard had discovered in his treatment of Welch, was to learn what had caused the person to “introspect” before his breakdown. “THIS MEANS THE LAST REASON TO HAVE PSYCHIATRY AROUND IS GONE,” Hubbard declared. “The psychotic break, the last of the ‘unsolvable’ conditions that can trap a person, has been solved.… You have in your hands the tool to take over mental therapy in full.”
Hubbard’s recipe for curing psychosis was to isolate the subject, with the attendants “completely muzzled (no speech).” By discovering the last severe conflict that triggered the episode, and then helping the subject discharge the emotions surrounding it, the auditor can begin to untangle the mental knots that have thrown the subject into his present state of wrestling with “the mystery of some incorrectly designated error.” The subject should be given vitamins, especially Vitamin B, along with calcium and magnesium, in order to restore his physical well-being. He should be examined on the E-Meter for discordant moments in his life, such as someone accusing him of something he hadn’t done, or being told he was a Potential Trouble Source when he wasn’t, or having his identity questioned. These steps are simple, Hubbard said, but “its results are magical in effectiveness.” The goal is to take the highly introverted personality, who is trapped in an endless loop of self-criticism, and bring him out of himself.
The subject should be able to look at the world once again and see it as “quite real and quite bright.”
“Do it flawlessly and we will all win,” Hubbard promised.
“THIS PLANET IS OURS.”
The Apollo crew were in awe of their leader. They had seen the transformation with their own eyes. “A madman was made sane on the high seas,” de la Carriere said. “To do that, you have got to have a certain amount of greatness.”
ONCE A WEEK, there was a movie night on the aft deck, with a recently released film flown in. Popcorn was made, a screen erected, and when everyone was settled Hubbard would descend from the prom deck, resplendent in his Commodore’s uniform, with Mary Sue and the children in tow.
In the interest of public relations, Hubbard staged free concerts at various ports of call, using the ship’s ragtag band, the Apollo Stars. He wanted to “revolutionize music,” and composed original songs for the band to play. He started a modern dance troupe as well. Quentin wanted to join the dancers, but his father sternly told him that he had other plans for him. By 1974, Hubbard had decided that his two oldest children by Mary Sue—Diana, twenty-two, and Quentin, twenty—were to take over the major management and technology functions of Scientology. Diana was enthusiastic—she had been the Lieutenant Commander since the age of sixteen and was often at her father’s side—but everyone knew that Quentin’s great ambition was to fly. His cabin was full of model airplanes, suspended from the ceiling with dental floss, and books about flying. He was often seen weaving along the deck with his arms outstretched, making engine noises, completely absorbed in being a plane.
Jim Dincalci, the medical officer who was still beached in Madeira, learned that the Apollo was headed in his direction. By now, he had made friends with many of the local people, and he was surprised to learn from them that the Apollo was widely suspected of being a spy ship for the CIA.8 He sent telexes warning the ship that it would be better to avoid Madeira, but Hubbard came anyway. Soon after the Apollo docked, a mob arrived and began stoning the ship. Hubbard ordered fire hoses turned on the crowd, which further infuriated them. There were motorcycles belonging to crew members and two of Hubbard’s cars which had been offloaded onto the pier; the mob shoved them all into the harbor, then loosened the moorings so that the ship drifted offshore. Mary Sue and some other members of the ship’s company were stranded in town and had to be rescued by the local authorities.
Quentin returned to the ship in bad shape. He had taken an overdose of pills in a failed suicide attempt. After his stomach was pumped at a local hospital, he was brought back to the ship, pale and weak, and put in isolation in his cabin, guarded night and day, becoming the second person to undergo the Introspection Rundown. Suzette was the only one to visit him. He looked like a broken doll.
Quentin was now twenty years old, popular and free-spirited, but in many ways still a soft-spoken, dreamy boy. Although he was small like his mother, and had her coloring, in other respects he bore a strong resemblance to his father. His facial features were almost an exact match: almond-shaped eyes under low, reddish brows; protuberant lips; and a deep cleft in the chin. Even though Quentin became one of the highest-rated auditors in the Sea Org, his father was constantly disappointed in his performance. “You have to improve,” he barked at Quentin in front of the other auditors. “It doesn’t matter that you’re a Hubbard.” Quentin would sit there and smile, seemingly unfazed, as the others
Eventually, Hubbard sentenced Quentin to the Rehabilitation Project Force. His “twin” on the RPF was Monica Pignotti, an auditor in training at age twenty-one. As they practiced auditing each other, they became close. Quentin sneaked some peanut butter from the family pantry and shared it with Monica. They made up skits and played with his tape recorder. They never became intimate. Quentin told her that he had once become sexually involved with a woman, but when his father found out, she was sent off the ship. He knew that people regarded him as a homosexual, he said, but that was only something he told other women on the ship who were after him because he was Hubbard’s son.
Quentin Hubbard, circa 1973
HUBBARD SET a new course: due west, toward America. The destination was Charleston, South Carolina. The crew were thrilled that they would be returning to the States, only to be crestfallen when a message arrived from the Guardian’s Office, just as the ship was approaching port, alerting Mary Sue that agents from US Customs, Immigration, Coast Guard, DEA, and US Marshals were waiting for them to dock, plus 180 IRS agents waiting to impound the ship. The federal agents had a subpoena to depose Hubbard in a civil tax case in Hawaii. A Scientologist on shore realized what was happening when he was blocked from entering the dock area. He sent a pizza to a radio operator with a message inside to send to the ship. Hubbard was just five miles offshore, but he suddenly broadcasted a new course over the radio—due north for Halifax, Nova Scotia—then turned sharply south and headed to the Bahamas.