Part 3 (1/2)

A few darker exemplars existed as well. Charles Manson, for one, studied Scientology in prison in the early 1960s, years before committing the Tate-l.a.b.i.anca murders, and would later go on to use some of its techniques on his followers. But he was the exception. Scientology was geared not toward the dropouts and runaway youths who panhandled in the Haight or caught steamers to Morocco, but toward kids like Jeff Hawkins, who were idealistic and eager for social change, and who, as Jeff would say, were ”looking for something that made sense.”

And Scientology, it seemed to many young people, did. It was not a ”cult” insofar as it did not require separation from mainstream society, nor from families-though it encouraged its acolytes to ”disconnect” from those who were critical of Scientology. But it presented itself as a movement of people who were deeply engaged with the world. Parents were not necessarily the enemy; they were potential converts. The church encouraged its young members to connect with their families, devising special drills and other technology to help members repair fractured relations.h.i.+ps and communicate their new beliefs. For those whose parents were hostile to Scientology, or to its costs-in 1968, as Jeff recalled, an introductory Scientology course package cost around $1,000; auditing, also sold in packages, began at roughly $175 for five hours-the church produced pamphlets and ca.s.sette tapes to better explain Scientology's beliefs and practices and to present Scientology in a positive light.

Jeff had always been close to his mother, who approved of his interest in Scientology. When it came to the cost, he paid the fees; as a graphic designer, he had no problem affording them. Besides, as he saw it, the courses were educational. ”These weren't someone's dusty old theories; they were 'technology,'” he said. ”I thought what I was learning was science.”

The first one Jeff took was called the Communications Course, which promised to help him become more comfortable in social situations. It consisted of a series of drills known as TRs, short for Training Routines, that students were told were used to train Scientology auditors. The drills were printed on white paper in red ink and bore the official-sounding t.i.tle ”Technical Bulletin.” The first TR involved closing your eyes and sitting in a chair, sometimes for hours. The second drill involved sitting across from a partner for an hour or two and staring at the person, immobile. A third TR, known as ”bull-bait,” required students to tease, joke with, or otherwise try to distract their partner, who had to maintain a straight face. Jeff's partner was a pretty girl; to his surprise, he seemed to have no trouble talking to her after a few practice drills-he had even made her laugh.

But the most stunning result of the TRs was the sense of peace that washed over Jeff whenever he practiced them. It was meditative, and at times the feeling was so all-encompa.s.sing it seemed he had left his body. He told the course supervisor, who smiled. This was a common experience in Scientology, he said: it was called ”exteriorization.” As Jeff advanced and gained more awareness in Scientology, the supervisor said, he would be able to leave and return to his body at will.

”It all seemed so unreal-I was completely electrified,” Jeff said. Back in the Sierra Madre Canyon, he began talking up Scientology to his girlfriend, Dixie. She was unimpressed. There was something weird about the people she met who were into Scientology, Dixie believed; they had an odd intensity, almost like religious fervor, but their G.o.d was neither a minister nor a guru, but a middle-aged science fiction writer. Though Scientology purported to promote total freedom, it was not free-virtually nothing, other than the introductory lecture, came without a price tag. And yet Jeff didn't even seem to see that part of it. ”I think it's a cult,” she told him.

”You don't know what you're talking about,” he said. ”It's about living up to your full potential.”

It was also, he and many other sixties converts believed, on a mission to save the world. Not only did Scientology promise to get rid of war, but it had a written program to do so: ”All we had to do was clear people of their reactive minds and they would become rational and ethical and sane, and see that war and violence were wrong,” Jeff said. ”To me, it sounded plausible. I couldn't just sit by and do nothing while the world went to h.e.l.l.”

If Dixie couldn't get behind that, then maybe the fault lay within her. One aspect of Scientology, which was not promoted until a person actually became a member, was the core belief that there were certain people in the world known as Suppressive Persons, or SPs. These were people who openly opposed Scientology-journalists, judges, politicians, tax collectors, psychiatrists-but they could also be hostile parents, or skeptical girlfriends. Maybe Dixie was one of them, several Scientologists suggested to Jeff; maybe she just didn't want him to get any better. Maybe she didn't want the world to get better. Maybe she was an SP.

Ultimately, Dixie gave Jeff an ultimatum: it was either her, she said in frustration, or Scientology. Jeff chose the latter. ”It was just too important,” he said.

By the early summer of 1968, many of the hippies in the Sierra Madre Canyon were into Scientology. Either that, or they were into hard drugs. It was a fractured, confusing, disheartening time: in April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been a.s.sa.s.sinated, followed two months later by Robert Kennedy. Riots had erupted in Watts, and then at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The anti-war protests, b.l.o.o.d.y and embattled, now seemed futile. Increasingly, many young searchers who'd drifted to the Canyon, particularly those just back from Vietnam, were using heroin. Shady characters followed them, hanging around on the fringes, dealing drugs. The scene in the Canyon became increasingly tense. After one young man was killed in a gunfight near his house, Jeff Hawkins decided it was time to move on.

But where should he go? The Vietnam War loomed. Jeff had already received a letter from his draft board, ordering him in for a pre-induction physical. He'd managed to get himself a psychiatric interview, and posing as ”crazy”-something that only half-worked, he thought-was given a temporary deferment. But it was only temporary. He knew the army would eventually come for him.

To avoid this fate, one option was to become a Scientology minister and thus get a ministerial deferment. It was a bit of a ruse: being a Scientologist minister only meant that you could audit and perform Hubbard-approved birth and marriage ceremonies; actually doing ministerial duties was wholly voluntary. But the Scientology minister's course, which cost only around $15, was being sold to hundreds, if not thousands, of young men as a way to avoid the draft. Should he be ordained? Jeff considered it.

Then an even better option came along. Jeff was offered the chance to work for the Church of Scientology and leave the country entirely. The church published a number of magazines that Jeff thought were poorly designed. One day he approached a staff member at the Los Angeles Org and asked for a job. ”I said something like 'Listen, I'm a graphic artist, do you need some help? Because I get your magazine and frankly it's a piece of s.h.i.+t.'”

The staffer, who seemed eager to have him join the team, took him into the back room and showed him a stack of amateurish-looking layouts. ”These are all done at Saint Hill,” he said. ”We just fill in the information.”

”I looked at them and thought, I could do better than this,” Jeff said. But to do so, he'd have to move to England. ”So I began to think about it.” He'd decided to go ahead and get his minister's certificate-even if he left the country, it didn't mean he'd be able to escape the draft unless he became a minister. But no matter what, England would be a cool place to live for a while, he thought. To be at the center of Scientology, to join staff, which would elevate him above the level of a mere ”public,” or paying, church member; to use his artistic abilities to further the cause, and to be an ocean away from his draft board: who wouldn't want to go?

And so in June 1968, Jeff flew to England, excited to begin his new life at Scientology's worldwide headquarters at Saint Hill. Upon arriving, he was told that the church's promotions department had moved: the Publications Org, or Pubs, as it was called, was now located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Instead of settling into life at the manor, Jeff settled into a shabby, drafty, four-story building located ”in an alley behind an alley.” The place was filled with books, with a suite of editorial and design offices on the top floor. The hundred or so people on staff ranged in age from the early twenties to the midforties and had come to Edinburgh from America, England, Australia, and Scandinavia.

Scientology had taken off as a fad in the United States, and its popularity in the United Kingdom was nearly as high. At the close of 1967, the Church of Scientology in Great Britain reported it had made nearly $1 million that year -not as much as the Catholic Church, surely, but more than many new religious movements. At Saint Hill, where students now flocked from all over the world, the weekly income often averaged around $80,000. Working for Scientology, Jeff found out, was far different than simply doing Scientology. ”We have a planet to clear,” Jeff's supervisor told him on his first day on the job-a phrase he'd hear over and over again for many years to come. Staff members were paid 7 per week, which, amazingly, was enough for Jeff to rent a small flat with some friends, buy food and cigarettes, and still have a bit left over. He received most of his Scientology courses and auditing for free, but in return, he was expected to work every day and many nights, including weekends, with a day off only once every few weeks. ”We don't keep a wog schedule here,” the supervisor said.

Non-Scientologists were called wogs, a term thrown around liberally among church staff: ”wog ideas,” ”wog justice,” and ”wog science.” Hubbard began to use this offensive British slang term* in 1953 to denote any person who was not a Scientologist, in his estimation a ”run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid.” For Jeff, who after the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sinations and the conduct of the Vietnam War had, like many of his friends, bought into the idea of government conspiracies and other nefarious activities of ”the establishment,” wog was just another word for a member of mainstream society under the thumb of the Man.

The wog world, Jeff learned, was an ”enturbulated” place. Enturbulated was a word that Hubbard made up and defined as ”agitated and disturbed.” There were many new words to learn in Scientology. Some were pure invention; and others were familiar but redefined by Hubbard. Ethics, for example, was a significant term in Scientology, perhaps the most significant. It was defined as ”rationality toward the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics.” As one of the first lessons in Scientology, Jeff had learned that there were eight dynamics of existence, starting with your relations.h.i.+p with yourself, and then progressing to your relations.h.i.+p with your family, social group, society, plants, animals, the larger physical world, and ultimately, with the Supreme Being, however you chose to define that.

An ethical Scientologist, and an ethical person, in Hubbard's view, was someone who had successful relations.h.i.+ps on all dynamics. But the most important relations.h.i.+p was with the group, or the third dynamic, which was understood to be the Church of Scientology. Upstanding members who made gains in Scientology, furthering the group's overall goals, were considered ”in-ethics”: in line with organizational principles. Those who misbehaved in some way were ”out-ethics”: impediments, or even enemies, of the group, malfunctioning cogs in the Scientology machine.

Among Hubbard's outpouring of new technology in the mid- and late 1960s was something he called ”ethics tech,” which would become one of the most crucial elements of Scientology. Hubbard designed quasi-scientific formulas to measure a person's ethical level, which he called the ”Conditions of Existence,” with the constant goal being to ”improve conditions” for oneself and the group.*

Years earlier, Hubbard had divided the world into two eras: the dull past (Before Dianetics) and AD (After Dianetics), the glorious, Technicolor world of Now. In that now-AD 18, or 1968-virtually anything that didn't directly relate to Scientology was considered suspect, if not overtly suppressive. It was crucial for the overall ethical condition of the group, Jeff understood, that nothing seep into its world that was ”counter-intentioned,” or based on a goal against the interests of Scientology. A related concept, ”other intentionedness,” refers to ideas or philosophies that have nothing to do with Scientology. To be either counter-intentioned or other-intentioned was considered ”open-minded,” which in Scientology, Jeff learned, was a bad thing.

And yet these issues didn't much affect Jeff's daily life. He had made tremendous gains in Scientology: in just a year or two of auditing and courses, he'd lost his adolescent shyness and become far more confident and outgoing. He could talk to anyone, including the most beautiful women, and he felt better about his work too. Everyone he knew in Edinburgh was a Scientologist, and everyone believed the same thing: no questions, no doubts.

Like him, most of Jeff's co-workers were longhaired kids in their twenties, many onetime student radicals who shared not only beliefs, but a lifestyle. No one cared who you slept with or what you did. After a long day it was typical for everyone to troop off to a movie or to a restaurant, where they would take over a group of tables and order multiple bottles of wine. One of the Scottish Scientologists on staff took it upon himself to take the group on long pub crawls along Edinburgh's Rose Street, with the mission of drinking a pint of beer at every bar they pa.s.sed (usually, Jeff said, they'd make it only halfway before, too drunk to continue, they staggered home). Overall, it was like college, he thought-except without the drugs, and with extremely long hours and intensely demanding work.

A few months after Jeff's arrival, an alert was sounded throughout the Publications Org: all staff members were required to report for an emergency briefing. Jeff put down his drafting pencils and ran downstairs to the conference room, where a woman in heavy makeup, wearing a naval dress uniform, sat behind a desk. She waited until the room was full. Then she introduced herself as Warrant Officer Doreen Casey, the new commanding officer of the Publications Org.

Casey was a special emissary of L. Ron Hubbard, the Founder, as he was now known, who smiled down at his followers from portraits and photographs throughout the orgs. Where Hubbard was living, exactly, was a bit of a mystery. He had resigned as the executive director of the Church of Scientology in the fall of 1966, announcing that he was going back to his first love: exploring. It was ridiculous, of course-everyone on the inside knew that the Old Man, as some staff members called him, retained control of Scientology; he continued to issue numerous policy letters and directives via Telex. But the trick, as he told his followers, was to stay below the radar so that no one could see him. He was ”Fabian,” as he called himself, a shape-s.h.i.+fter.

Rumors abounded within Scientology of Hubbard's whereabouts. He was in Africa, some said; others said he was sailing the high seas. In fact, both stories were true. Concerned for Scientology's security after the release of the Australian Board of Inquiry's ”Anderson Report” in 1965-a doc.u.ment whose negative findings provided fodder for investigations into Scientology's activities in several other countries, including Great Britain-Hubbard had journeyed to the southern African nation of Rhodesia in April 1966, hoping to find a base for Scientology in a more remote location.* He purchased a house in the capital city, Salisbury, and began to eye a resort hotel on Lake Kariba where-unbeknownst to the sellers-he hoped to start a new Scientology organization. To ingratiate himself with the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, Hubbard personally delivered two bottles of champagne to Smith's home, though as one former a.s.sociate would recall, he was forced to leave the bottles with a butler when Smith wouldn't receive him.

The people of Rhodesia had no idea about Hubbard's plans. In several media interviews, he said he had come to Africa as a tourist, claiming to have distanced himself from Scientology. But Hubbard's strategy fell apart when the Rhodesian government, apparently suspicious of his motives, refused to renew his visa. Returning to England, Hubbard began to consider the future. For Scientology to flourish, he knew, it needed a secure home away from government oversight. There weren't many places in the world where that could be found. Then it came to him: 75 percent of the earth's surface was free from the control of any government. It was ocean.

That fall, Hubbard purchased a small fleet of s.h.i.+ps and set off for North Africa. The first s.h.i.+p, a fifty-foot Bermuda ketch called the Enchanter, sailed from England to the Canary Islands at the end of 1966, followed by a trawler, the Avon River, and later a larger, more impressive s.h.i.+p, the Royal Scotsman, the flags.h.i.+p of the fleet. For the better part of the next ten years, these s.h.i.+ps plied the waters of the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, finding temporary ports in Las Palmas, Tangier, Valencia, Corfu, Lisbon, Tenerife, Madeira, and many points in between. Hubbard was now commodore of this small fleet; Mary Sue was a captain, and his teenage daughter, Diana, a redhead like her father, was lieutenant commander. And those serving Hubbard and his family-a private navy, complete with uniforms-were called the Sea Organization.

These were Hubbard's closest disciples: longtime Scientologists who'd been with Hubbard since the 1950s, a.s.sociates who had worked with him at Saint Hill, and increasingly, a cadre of younger and even more dedicated followers. Their work was highly confidential, and few other Scientologists knew anything about this shadowy team. Jeff's knowledge of the Sea Org was nil, except for the fact that Doreen was a member. And now she was running the show at Pubs.

”We are in the middle of a war, and this organization has been slack, slack, slack!” Casey screamed at the a.s.sembled Scientologists. ”That's ending right now.” Jeff almost laughed. Did she mean a literal war? Who was this woman? Then he looked around. The organization's leader, David Ziff, an heir to the Ziff-Davis publis.h.i.+ng dynasty, was nowhere to be found. Casey announced that Ziff had been removed from his post and sent away for ethics handling. Scientology was on a campaign to get Hubbard's books into as many bookstores around the world as they could. But they were failing, said Casey, because Pubs failed to deliver the books. Now the Sea Org would be in control, and she had come to get this organization ”back on the rails.” From now on, everyone would report to her-and address her as ”sir,” she informed them. The ”hippie atmosphere” would no longer be tolerated. Long hair was to be cut short, beards were to be shaved, and workers were to call all of their superiors ”sir,” even if the sir in question was a female.

Under this new military-style discipline, which would soon be reflected throughout Scientology, if a design wasn't finished on time or a production order not met, staffers would be ordered to sleep among the books on the cold cement floor of the stockroom. Those who still did not produce and s.h.i.+p books fast enough would be ”offloaded”: sent to a smaller, more remote organization as punishment. ”Either you are one hundred percent with me or you are against me,” Casey said, in a threatening way. ”And you will be dealt with accordingly.”

We are at war. This, in fact, was a proclamation coming from L. Ron Hubbard himself, though Jeff had always taken it to be a metaphor. Hubbard first hinted at this conflict in a taped message, t.i.tled ”Ron's Journal '67,” that began to make its way through Scientology organizations in early 1968. Speaking to his followers for the first time since his disappearance, the Founder said nothing about his whereabouts other than that he was on an island, with a view of ”the wide blue sea with s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing by, a few fleecy clouds overhead, and the bright sun s.h.i.+ning down.” Jeff, who had heard the tape months before Casey arrived, concluded that wherever Hubbard was, it sounded amazing. But far more astounding was what Hubbard had to say.

”I am giving you this short talk because you might have wondered what I was doing,” Hubbard began. What he'd been doing, as it turned out, was discovering whole new levels of existence. He explained that he had been researching the most extraordinary realm of consciousness, a realm he had only just discovered, known as ”Operating Thetan.” An ”OT,” Hubbard said, was the most enlightened being in the universe, capable of operating ”totally independent of his body, whether he had one or didn't have one.” No one prior to the birth of Scientology had ever achieved this exalted state. Now, however, select Scientologists would be able to learn the techniques that made this possible, through a series of auditing processes known as the ”OT levels.”

Over the past year, Hubbard said, he'd been on a search for the deepest mysteries of the universe, a journey that took him through what he called the ”Wall of Fire.” The quest had been risky, and just that past winter, he said, he'd become very ill as a result of his efforts. And yet he managed to learn the truth and survived the experience, though barely. ”The material involved ... is so vicious that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it,” he warned. ”I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.”

Hubbard didn't elaborate too much on the tape about what his adventures had entailed, nor what he had discovered. But he hinted that an incident of catastrophic proportions had occurred seventy-five million years ago, an event so traumatic that its residuals were still being felt on Earth to this day. His new OTs, represented initially by the Sea Org, would lead the charge to rehabilitate the planet against a small but powerful band of opponents.

”Our enemies are less than twelve men,” he said via ”Ron's Journal '67.” ”They are members of the Bank of England, and other higher financial circles. They own and control newspaper chains, and they are all, oddly enough, directors in all the mental health groups in the world.” Most of the world's leading heads of state, including Britain's prime minister, Harold Wilson, were, according to Hubbard, under the control of these individuals.

The church now had private investigators in its employ, digging into the backgrounds of various bankers, journalists, and politicians. Scientologists would learn more about these activities, though only in vague references, as Hubbard issued many more directives pertaining to the battle ahead. ”We are rolling up the heavy guns quietly and getting things exactly timed,” he said in a letter to his staff on November 4, 1968. Several weeks later, Hubbard announced that he had isolated the enemy and was readying a counterattack.

Then, on November 29, 1968, Hubbard made his most dramatic declaration to date in a memo to all staff, t.i.tled ”The War.” Hubbard revealed that the twelve individuals he had formerly referred to were merely a front for a much larger, more dangerous enemy: the World Federation of Mental Health. Hubbard often called it SMERSH, a reference to both the Stalin-era counterintelligence units of the Soviet army and the fictional nemesis of James Bond. This organization had been behind every attack on Dianetics and Scientology since 1950, Hubbard said. The Founder had begun to view psychiatrists as not simply suppressive but the ancient enemy of mankind, responsible for the enslavement of the human race. Psychiatry and the broader field of mental health, he explained, were chosen long ago as ”a vehicle to undermine and destroy the West.” But the Church of Scientology had stood in its way. Now, Hubbard said, Scientologists had ”the goods” on SMERSH and intended to battle its forces worldwide, using every legal means at their disposal. ”We don't stoop to murder and rough house. But man, the effectiveness of our means will become history,” he wrote, though he never specified which tactics would be used. ”It's a tough war. All wars are tough. It isn't over.”

War. That was pretty much the opposite of what Jeff Hawkins, pacifist, ex-hippie, onetime anti-war protestor, stood for. One of the reasons he'd joined Scientology was because of its doctrine of world peace. But those thoughts would come much later-years later. At the time, Hubbard's directive, his ”battle plan,” as his missives were often called, seemed thrilling-a cause! Few staff members had time to wonder about all the evildoers. A wave of panic now washed over the organizations. The future of the world was at stake and they, the Scientologists, weren't doing enough. They had to do more. ”In all the broad Universe,” Hubbard said, ”there is no other hope for Man than ourselves.”

By the beginning of 1969, Scientologists around the world were dedicated to fighting Hubbard's war on psychiatry. In Britain, where L. Ron Hubbard had been declared an ”undesirable alien” and his movement denounced in Parliament as a ”pseudo-philosophical cult,” Scientologists began to picket the London offices of national mental health organizations, carrying banners that said BUY YOUR MEAT FROM A PSYCHIATRIST and PSYCHIATRISTS MAIM AND KILL. In Edinburgh, Jeff and his Pubs colleagues conducted a late-night raid of what they were told was the local headquarters of the World Federation of Mental Health. ”We rushed through the building, putting up lurid posters depicting psychiatrists as leering death's-head skulls, terrorizing innocent citizens,” he said. ”It seemed like a college prank.”

But Hubbard's goals were deadly serious. As early as 1960, Hubbard had been considering how Scientology might take over society. ”We are masters of IQ and ability,” he wrote in a policy letter t.i.tled ”The Special Zone Plan.” ”We have know-how. Any of us could select out a zone of life in which we are interested and then, entering it, bring order and victory to it.” A housewife, for example, might take over her local garden club, and then, using Scientology's communications technology, could begin to present various Hubbardian ideas on marriage and child rearing. A junior executive might use the same techniques and ”if only as 'an able person' he would rapidly expand a zone of control, to say nothing of his personal standing in the company.” Hubbard also advised that the same techniques could be used in a more sophisticated sphere, such as government. ”Don't bother to get elected,” he instructed. ”Get a job on the secretarial staff [of a politician] or [be] the bodyguard, use any talent one has to get a place close in.” From that trusted post, he argued, Scientologists could wield tremendous power.

Hubbard also had instructed his troops how to do battle. ”If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace,” he instructed in one policy letter. ”Don't ever defend, always attack. Don't ever do nothing. Unexpected attacks in the rear of the enemy's front ranks work best.”

Now, in a memo to his wife written on December 2, 1969, Hubbard laid out the purpose of his war: ”To take over absolutely the field of mental healing on this planet in all forms.” That was not the original purpose of Scientology, he noted. ”The original purpose was to clear Earth.” But the various battles Scientology had engaged in over the years had led him to the inevitable conclusion that the enemy, psychiatry and its many front groups, would have to be eradicated.

Mary Sue Hubbard received in this missive her appointment as Chief Guardian and Controller of the Church of Scientology, reflecting her leaders.h.i.+p of a special organ of the church known as the Guardian's Office. Created by Hubbard in 1966, its job was to enforce church policy and ”safeguard Scientology orgs, Scientologists, and Scientology,” as Hubbard put it. Guardians held the highest posts on Scientology's board of directors. They ran its legal apparatus, its finance office, and its public relations and social outreach bureaus, which targeted such areas of concern as drug and criminal rehabilitation, education reform, and ”eradicating mental health abuse”; the latter was handled by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an advocacy group formed by the Guardian's Office in 1969. The Guardian's Office also ran a highly sophisticated intelligence operation that collected and maintained files on Scientology's growing list of enemies. Its guiding principle was attack. Under Mary Sue's leaders.h.i.+p (though always, it was understood, with the approval of her husband), the Guardian's Office filed dozens of libel suits against media outlets that had run negative stories about Scientology; gathered intelligence on members of various state, local, and national governments; and launched myriad propaganda campaigns and attacks on psychiatrists and psychiatric organizations.

Hubbard directed his war through written proclamation; his operatives carried it out. On March 26, 1969, for example, the leader issued an order, t.i.tled ”Zones of Action,” instructing his followers to ”invade the territory of Smersh” and ”purify the mental health field.” Several months later, the Guardian's Office, acting on Hubbard's orders, initiated a strategy to take over England's National a.s.sociation of Mental Health. The plan was fairly simple: Scientologists, seeing that NAMH members.h.i.+p was open to the public, began joining the organization in large numbers-in October 1969, the NAMH, after receiving no more than 10 or 15 members.h.i.+p applications per month, suddenly saw the number jump to 227. By November, there were 302 new members. The organization's annual meeting, in which it elected new leaders, was scheduled for November 12, 1969; suddenly, there came a flurry of nominations from the new members, suggesting eight of their own for positions on the council.

As the British journalist C. H. Rolph pointed out in his 1973 book on the attempted takeover, Believe What You Like, the staff of the NAMH became suspicious when they noticed that all of the new members.h.i.+p applications had been mailed from either East Grinstead or a post office on Tottenham Court Road, the location of Scientology's London Org. Notifying the authorities, the group, just two days before the election, uncovered the scheme, which included a plan to elect the Scientologist David Gaiman, a member of the Guardian's Office, to the position of chairman. The Scientologists were subsequently asked to resign.*

Hubbard was careful to portray psychiatry not just as ”barbaric,” but also as barbarism endorsed by the state. It was the state that stuck with Jeff-Hubbard rarely attacked psychiatry without linking it in one way or another to Western governments or inst.i.tutions. This wasn't outrageous; it was simply revolutionary, Jeff thought. But the voice of Scientology became increasingly strident. Psychiatrists were rapists, killers. They were fascists-indeed, psychiatrists were behind Hitler's death camps. The nefarious SMERSH, and its agents throughout the Wog World (including, Hubbard believed, Time magazine, whose purpose, he once wrote, was to ”cause riots and disaffection” ), needed to be destroyed. Only they, the Scientologists and L. Ron Hubbard, could do it.