Investigative Classics: Shining Light on Scientology’s Dark Sides

Investigative Classics: Shining Light on Scientology’s Dark Sides
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Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples  of the reporting craft. 

L. Ron Hubbard, above, was a prophet. In 1949, the science-fiction writer remarked: "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion."

The next year he published one of the bestselling books of all-time, joining a short list that includes the Bible). It was “
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.”

Before long, the Church of Scientology was born.

What’s more amazing is that Scientology endures, given the crimes and scandals that mark its history. In 1979, for example, the St. Petersburg Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its 14-part investigative series that used the criminal conviction of nine group members – including Hubbard’s wife, Mary – as a springboard for a look at its shady history and deceptive practices, across the U.S. and especially in Clearwater, Fla.

In the first article, Charles Stafford reported:

The documents reveal that the Church of Scientology came to Clearwater with a written plea to establish its program headquarters – its school of theology, so to speak – in the old Fort Harrison Hotel and to take control of the city. They show that United Churches of Florida was created as a front to protect church assets from seizure by the government.

They show that church officials conceived and carried out plots to discredit their “enemies” – the mayor who questioned their secrecy, reporters who investigated and wrote about Scientology, the editor and owner of the area’s largest newspaper, even local police departments.

They show that covert agents of the church took jobs with local newspapers, community agencies and law firms in order to spy.

They underscore what a spokesman for the Church of Scientology told a group of Clearwater High School students recently: We step on a lot of toes. We don’t turn the other cheek.

Government prosecutors, in a memorandum to Judge Richey urging maximum sentences, delivered this  judgment:

“The crime committed by those defendants is of a breadth and scope previously unheard of. No building, office, desk or file was safe from their snooping or prying. No individual or organization was free from their despicable conspiratorial minds. The tools of their trade were miniature transmitters, lock picks, secret codes, forged credentials and any other device they found necessary to carry out their conspiratorial schemes. It is interesting to note that the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote in his dictionary entitled  Modern Management Technology Defined ...  that ‘truth is what is true for you.’ Thus, with the founder’s blessings they could wantonly commit perjury as long as it was in the interest of Scientology. The defendants rewarded criminal activities that ended in success and sternly rebuked those that failed. The standards of human conduct embodied in such practices represent no less than the absolute perversion of any known ethical value system.

The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) had firsthand knowledge of the smear tactics. In a column published after the series had concluded, the newspaper’s editor, Eugene Patterson, told readers: 

By infiltration or burglary or both, operatives of the church stole communications between The Times and its attorneys, both its St. Petersburg lawyers and its Washington law firm. They were reading our mail. Theft was being practiced by members of a group calling itself a church.

The late chairman of  The Times
 board, Nelson Poynter, was falsely accused of being a CIA agent (Scientologists alternately considered smearing him as a communist, their documents show.) This writer was falsely called an FBI informant. So far as my wife knows, she never received the telephone call a Scientologist plotted to make to her in an effort to get her on tape saying, unwittingly, some uncomplimentary things they could use against me. 

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