Breach 8
From Order of Contempt of 02-20-1998:
(h) In or about early October, 1997, in violation of the Order, Armstrong voluntarily and willingly participated in a videotaped interview during which he violated the terms of the above referenced Judgment. Armstrong was informed prior to the interview that it was being recorded for broadcast on British television. See Wilson declaration, Exhibit C.
[ Note: Wilson Declaration Exhibit C is actually Armstrong’s letter to Wilson of 08-15-1993. Should read Exhibit L.]
From Wilson Declaration of 12-01-1997:
22. Sometime in early October, in violation of the Order, Armstrong voluntarily and willingly participated in a videotaped interview during which he discussed CSI and other beneficiaries of the. Order. Armstrong was informed prior to the interview that it was being recorded for broadcast on British television. I have personally reviewed a transcript of the broadcast which was broadcast over television Channel 4 in Britain on November 19, 1997.
Attached hereto as Exhibit [L] is an accurate transcript of said broadcast. A copy of the videotape is in my possession and can be made available to the Court.
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[ Part 3 ] |
Exhibit L:
Scientology’s transcript follows. We have preserved typos and other errors from the original.
SECRET LIVES “L RON HUBBARD”
TRANSCRIPT
HANA ELTRINGHAM: We were saving the world. We were convinced
that Hubbard was the return saviour, and that his techniques and his
knowledge and his majesty would eventually bring all Mankind to an
enlightened state, and that was what we were doing.
There were some things about him that I did feel were rather
dangerous. I fell so much under his spell that I told my roommate
if I ever I told you I was going to marry this man, she should tie
me up and not allow me out of the house.
CYRIL VOSPER: I was overwhelmed. Here I am in the presence of
the most important individual in the cosmos. I mean, you know, this
isn’t just like meeting a film star or something, I’m meeting – I’m
meeting god with plus signs.
NARRATOR: Lafayette Ron Hubbard created one of the richest and
most controversial cults of our time, the Church of Scientology.
He spent much of his later life at sea, on the run from those who
accused him of being a crook and a charlatan. But to the millions
who, at one time or another, followed him, and to himself, he was
the greatest guru who ever lived.
RON HUBBARD There is one thing you can say about dianetics and
scientology, and I’m sorry if this sounds odd, but it isn’t
everybody who can write a book that turns the world on its ear.
NARRATOR: But or remarkable still, was the story of Ron
Hubbard’s life, the story of a science fiction fantasist, turned
self acclaimed messiah.
NARRATOR: Ron Hubbard was determined that from the start his
life would be the stuff of legend. He was born in 1911, and told of
how he was brought up on his grandfather’s ranch in Montana, which
he said in a newspaper interview covered a quarter of the state.
As a small child he was breaking broncos and hunting coyote.
He claimed he grew up with old frontiersmen and cowboys, and even
became a blood brother of the local Blackfoot Indians. These
were all splendid tales, but all that was known for use was more
mundane. He did used to visit a small livery stables his
grandfather owned, but he was brought up in an ordinary home, the
only child of ordinary American parents.
Towards the end of World War I, his father joined the American
navy, and the teenaged Hubbard spent holidays in Guam, where the
family was stationed. He traveled in China.
With a taste for adventure, he went prospecting for gold in
Puerto Rico. And as a student even led a sea exploration to find
pirates haunts in the Caribbean.
But he couldn’t resist gilding the lily. A scientology book
later recorded his claim to have communed with native bandits in!
the high hills of Tibet. But there is no evidence he ever went to
Tibet.
CYRIL VOSPER: He told so many stories of exploits of his in
South America and the West Indies and places, he would have had to
have been at least 483 years older to have had enough time to have
done all those things, but that doesn’t really matter. I mean it
was just very entertaining really, except that he turned it in to a
religion
ROBERT VAUGHN YOUNG: Even when he was a teenager in his
diaries, he was writing little stories, you know, sea adventures and
years, that sometimes when some of his own representatives found
them, they thought these were true. You know, there was an escapade
of him fighting an octopus that once his – one of his personal –
representatives was telling as a true story, and I tried to point
it to her later, no, this is just one of his stories that he’s
interspersing with his private diaries.
NARRATOR: When he was 22, Hubbard married his first wife,
Polly. They went to live on Puget Sound in Washington State, and
soon had two children. Hubbard’s joy in life was sailing and
exploring,but now he had to settle down and earn some money.
With such a prolific imagination he became a writer, starting
with adventures and fantasies with the penny dreadfuls.
Then he turned to science fiction and became a best seller.
Two books, Final Blackout and Fear, were considered sci-fi classics.
But Hubbard’s most amazing story was about himself.
His literary agent was Forry Ackerman, himself a sci-fi
fanatic. One night, deep in to the small hours, Hubbard told
Ackerman of a bizarre event in a hospital theatre. It was an event
that would shape his entire life.
FORRY ACKERMAN: He said that he had died on the operating
table, and he rose in spirit form, and he looked at the body that he
had previously inhabited, and he slugged the shoulders he didn’t
have any more, and he thought, well, where do we go from here.
Off in the distance he saw a great ornate gate, and looked kind
of interesting to him, so he walked over to it, and the gate, as
they do in supernatural films, just opened without any human
assistance. He floated through, and on the other side he saw an
intellectual smorgasbord of everything that had ever puzzled the
mind of man, you know, how did it all begin, what is god’s purpose,
where do it from here, are there past lives, are there future lives.
And like a sponge he was just absorbing all of this esoteric
information. And all of a sudden there was kind of a swishing in
the air and he heard a voice, no, no, not yet, he’s not ready, and
like a long umbilical cord he felt himself being pulled back, back
back. And he laid down in his body and he opened his eyes and he
said to the nurse, I was dead, wasn’t I?
Then he bounded off the operating table, I don’t know how you
die and the next minute you’re bounding off an operating table. He
got two reams of paper and a gallon of scalding black coffee, and at
the end of two days he had a manuscript called Excalibur or the Dark
Sword. And he told me that whoever read it either went insane or
committed suicide. And he said the last time he had shown it to a
publisher in New York, he walked in to the office to find out what
the reaction was, the publisher called for the reader, the reader
came with the manuscript, threw it on the table and threw himself
out of the skyscraper window.
NARRATOR: But was Hubbard’s extraordinary story true?
Excalibur became the secret text of Scientology. Hubbard said
it was too dangerous to publish.
But 40 years later, a treasure trove from Hubbard’s early
journals and manuscripts, believed to have been long lost, was
discovered by his staff.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: There were two and a half versions of
Excalibur. I read them and I didn’t go mad, and didn’t die.
They also include the information within related writings that
these came out of a nitro- oxide incident. Hubbard had a couple of
teeth extracted and it was while under the effect of nitro-oxide
that he came up with Excalibur.
NARRATOR: Hubbard’s death was in fact an hallucination under
the effects of anesthetic, so what was the intellectual dish he’d
fed on?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: it’s not particularly revolutionary. The key
to Excalibur was this great realization by Hubbard of survive as
being the one command that all existence and all life and all people
have that became the basis for a lot dianetics, and a lot of
scientology.
NARRATOR: This idea had a profound impact on Hubbard. In a
letter to Polly he wrote, I have high hopes of smashing my name in
to history, so violently that it will take a legendary form.
The Second World War brought a new dimension to the Hubbard
legend.
He said that while serving at sea he’d been blinded and
crippled, but that inspired by the insights he’d first glimpsed
when he died on the operating table, he’d dramatically been able to
cure himself
RON HUBBARD: By 1948, through my own processing and use of the
principles I had isolated up to that time, was able to pass a 100%
combat physical, which was very mysterious to the government. How
had I suddenly become completely physically well from being blind
and lame.
NARRATOR: It was an odd story, because Hubbard’s war record
shows he was invalided out because of a stomach ulcer. There are
earlier mentions of conjunctivitis, but none of blindness. Indeed,
in 1947, before his so-called cure, an eye examination only showed
some short-sightedness and a astigmatism and none of his Navy Medical
reports show blindness.
After the war, Hubbard went to Hollywood. As a successful
science fiction author, he was a welcome visitor to the Los Angeles
Science Fantasy Association.
Its members recall there was one power over the mind he
undoubtedly did possess; hypnotism.
FORRY ACKERMAN: Ron Hubbard came to our club and he hypnotized
all of the members except me, I wanted to remain in present time and
watched what was going on. And I remember it was fascinating. He
told one boy that he had a little kangaroo in the palm of his hands,
and the boy was going all around showing everybody this little
kangaroo that was hopping-around.
NARRATOR:
Hubbard also dropped hints to his Hollywood friends about his
new science of the mind. In writing and conversations Hubbard began
to speak of his new science of the mind.
A scientologist literature would later depict, Hubbard claimed
that in addition to himself, he’d cured 11 war veterans, and
restored sanity to 40 mental patients.
JEAN COX: Rumours were beginning to circulate that this new
science of mind, or this new philosophy had a significance for
mankind that was greater than the discovery of the wheel, and equal
in significance to the discovery of fire.
NARRATOR: In the May-1950 edition of Astounding science Fiction
magazine, Hubbard published his stunning findings as fact.
Dianetics was truly born. Thousands of letters poured in to
the magazine. Hubbard had been pounding the typewriter keys for 30
days, to convert his article in to a 450 page book. It became a
best seller, dianetics a national craze.
Hubbard’s theory was that the human mind was bedeviled by
engrams, memories of painful events, often imprinted before birth on
the foetus. He claimed that under the direction of a dianetics
therapist, or auditor, as he called them, these engrams could be
relived and then cleared from the mind.
At this stage dianetics seemed just an exaggerated form of
psychotherapy.
FORRY ACKERMAN: Well, dianetics was so popular because it
promised a brave new world of everybody cleared, no more colds, no
more eye glasses, cured me of a fear of dogs.
JEAN COX: Among the various things said to be able to do, is
one person had lost a tooth and through dianetic auditing he regrew
the tooth. And almost any illness can be cured. Schizophrenia
could be cured.
FORRY ACKERMAN: Seemed like it opened up the whole world for
everybody to become perfect human beings.
NARRATOR: Hubbard sold dianetics auditing courses at $500 a go.
The money was rolling in, but he was about to be accused of being a
con man.
End part One.
NARRATOR: With his book, Dianetics, a bestseller, Hubbard was
America’s new guru.
In August 1950, at a lecture hall in Los Angeles, he presented
to a crowd of 6,000, the first person to be what he called a clear.
She was a student called Sonia Bianca. As a clear she was
supposed to have total recall.
JEAN COX: So various members of the audience called questions at
her, could she remember what was said on page 217 of her physics
textbook, she couldn’t. Could she remember what she had had for her
breakfast on the morning of August 17th 1946, she couldn’t.
Then various people called out for Hubbard to turn his back on
her, and see if she could remember the colour of his tie, she
couldn’t. And so that was – at that moment the whole business sort
of collapsed, people started leaving the auditorium.
NARRATOR; Suddenly Hubbard was in trouble. He was accused of
being a fraud, and dianetics a form of hypnotism. a technique at
which he was so expert. He recruited a bright, young PR woman,
Barbara Kaye, to repair his damaged image.
BARBARA KAYE: Well, I’ve always found that if it’s the mind of
a man that is most sexy. He was not really terribly physically
attractive, and he had a brilliant mind, no question about that.
And I surely thought this was a man who was interested in marrying
me, and whom I might be interested in marrying.
NARRATOR: Soon, the beautiful young woman, and 40 year old
OHubbard were having an affair, and moved in to an apartment in
Hollywood. But, by now, Hubbard had left Polly and was married to
his second wife Sarah. He’d led Barbara to believe the marriage
with Sarah was over. It wasn’t.
BARBARA KAYE: It was quite shocking when shortly after moving
some of my things in to that apartment, suddenly Sarah turned up
with the baby, and moved in. And I believe he was just as dismayed
as I, because the next day when he came to the office with some of
my belongings, like my cologne, and my toothbrush and so forth, he
looked very downtrodden and apologetic, and not happy about the
situation at all.
Dianetics was still in trouble. After the initial success of
the book money had rolled in, and rolled out just as fast.
Hubbard went to Palm Springs to try to recoup his fortune with
a follow up book, but the business, his marriage wish Sarah, and his
writing were in crisis. He asked Barbara to come to him.
BARBARA KAYE: He was certainly very depressed. He had lost the
colour in his face, his voice was very – was hardly audible. He
told me that he was totally blocked, he was working under a
publisher’s deadline, which he was failing to meet. He believed
that his inability to write was due to the sinister interventions of
other people, such as Sarah hypnotizing him in his sleep and
telling him he will never write again.
I found him paranoid, you know. He was clearly going through
clinical depression.
NARRATOR: Worst followed. Hubbard and Sarah finally split up.
Their divorce became a public sensation. Sarah accused Hubbard of
torturing her and declared him insane.
Hubbard denounced Sarah as a’Russian spy and kidnapped their 13
month old daughter.
Hubbard ended up in Wichita in Kansas, and got back in touch
with Barbara.
BARBARA KAYE: He sent me a wire telling me he’d been very ill,
and said he wanted to marry me, and when I went to Wichita he looked
terrible. He had hair down to his shoulders and fingernails were
like talons. And I found a note, very sweet note in my hotel room
saying, glad you’re here, I love you. But I saw that I had a man
there who had no prospects for one thing, and that he had some
psychiatric difficulties, and I didn’t see much of a life for myself
with that sort of individual, so I left.
NARRATOR: But Hubbard bounced back. He got married for the
third time to one of his students, Mary-Sue Whipp. This marriage
lasted, and Mary-Sue would become his devoted deputy. Sarah, his
second wife, was cleared from his memory, just like an engram.
RON HUBBARD: How many times have I been married, I’ve been
married twice. And I’m very happily married just now. I have a
lovely wife, and I have four children. My first wife is dead.
INTERVIEWER: What happened to your second wife?
RON HUBBARD: I never had a second wife.
NARRATOR: In 1952 Hubbard launched a revolutionary product,
Scientology. Dianetics originally covered this life only, but
a new book, Scientology, the History of Man, Hubbard revealed that
wasn’t enough. Human bodies were, in fact, inhabited by immortal
souls, or thetans, going back to primeval times.
The book stemmed from an unusual piece of drug driven research
Hubbard had conducted with Nibbs, Hubbard’s son from his first.
JIM DINCALCI: Ron Hubbard gave his son, Nibbs, some
amphetamines, Nibbs started talking, he said, but really going
talking fast, at speed. And he kept talking and he kept talking
rind his dad kept giving him speed, and all of it sudden he was
talking about his history when he was a clam, and ail these
different situations in early earth, and out of that came History of
Man.
FORRY ACKERMAN: Suddenly you’re a nobody. Oh, I’ve been
back three lives, you, know, I’ve been back seven, I was in the time of
Pharaoh. Well, when it got back to the individual who was a clam,
lying on a primordial seashore, with a grain of sand irritating a
pearl inside it, I decided that was as far back as I wanted to go,
and I just departed from Scientology altogether.
NARRATOR: In late 1952, Hubbard came to London. He was still
in financial trouble back home. A business partner had just issued
a warrant for the return of $9,000 Hubbard had borrowed.
To make money he needed to go international, and here,
instead of creditors, he found a new group of adoring fans.
PAM KEMP: He was really flamboyant. I mean he was – he was
full of life. I mean you’ve read about on his Harley motorcycle,
and he threw parties and he would play his guitar, and you know,
just sing and put on his cowboy hat. He was just lots and lots of
fun.
We’d all get together and then we would do various exercises
and we’d go out and see if just with thoughts we could knock off
policemen’s’ hats or, you know, what kind of power did we have in
terms thinking and thought and energy and that sort of thing. I
mean it was great fun.
CYRIL VOSPER: I thought it would give me total control over my
own life. I mean it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, but I mean put
in those terms that’s basically what Hubbard was saying. He was
saying that you and everyone else, with the use of scientology or
dianetics at that time, could become a god. And we were all, if you
like, fallen gods.
NARRATOR: The next step was to create a church for his new
gods.
Back in 1946, Hubbard had told the Eastern Science Fiction
Association, if you realty want to make a million, the easiest way
is to start a religion. That’s where the money is.
Now, five years on, the Church of Scientology was born.
In America, in particular, there were sound practical reasons.
RAYMOND KEMP: There are tax advantages, and there are
advantages in the constitution which says that the government may
not abridge the operations of a church. And I think that that, more
than anything else, made him agree to using that vehicle because it
is, and has today proved,-to be very difficult for any government to
abridge, the activities of a church.
NARRATOR: Hubbard found the perfect cathedral for his church,
Saint Hill manor, in East Grinstead in Sussex.
He played his new role, the country squire.
He told the locals that- he was a scientist researching plants,
and their reaction to pain.
He, and his young family, settled in to Sussex society,
bringing American razzmatazz to East Grinstead’s road safety
campaign.
But the locals hadn’t realized that Saint Hill was to become
the mecca of Scientology..
Debatees arrived from all over the world, to study at
their master’s feet.
They paid thousands of pounds for Hubbard’s courses.
RON HUBBARD: The mind, when it has an old experience, will add
data in to its current experience, and it keeps coming up with wrong
answers.
NARRATOR: Virginia Downsborough was on the first Saint Hill
clearing course.
VIRGINIA DOWNSBOROUGH: Ron had such an amazing ability for
making you feel that you were just so important to him, and so so
valued.
So many people wanted to do what he wanted. Wanted to show him
their best efforts, wanted to contribute, and wanted to be part, you
know. It was again, it’s wait for me, let me come along with this
wonderful game you’re playing.
NARRATOR: Central to the game was Hubbard’s E meter, form of
lie detectbr which he claimed could electrically detect emotional
charge.
Students spent hours, days, months, sometimes years, going over
painful events, or engrams, in this or their past lives, trying to
make the needle float, proof that the engram was now cleared from
their memories.
SCIENTOLOGIST: It’s like nothing else in the world it’s –
really, I feel quite free.
NARRATOR: Hubbard had designed an ingenious commercial product.
The more past lives, the more memories, the more engrams to be
cleared, all in the complex series of expensive courses.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: Making money; I think, to Hubbard was
paramount. He wasn’t that interested in it for at himself. He did
have perks, he did have his cars, his motorbikes, his books, his
good food, and things like that, and eventually he had his villas
and he had his estates. and so on, but the money that he wanted,
predominantly, was, for power.
NARRATOR:.: Hubbard wanted to create a worldwide army of
scientologists.
Going clear was only the first step. After that, further
courses could improve your IQ, improve your work, turn you into a
Superman.
PAM KEMP: The purpose of scientology was to make the able more
able, and he was always striving for that. And in everything he did
I think he was looking at that. Now his idea was, that if you could
get every single person looking in the same direction, then you have
a very powerful notion.
NARRATOR: This photograph, composed by Ron Hubbard himself,
betrays an extraordinary ambition he held for scientology.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: The entire objective was to find a place that
Hubbard could eventually turn into his own kingdom, with his own
government, his own passports, his own monetary system. In other
words, his own principality that he would be the benign dictator of.
That was the objective.
RAY KEMP: He had been having some auditing and doing some
investigative auditing and looking at past lives and at past
experiences. And he ran in to what he thought might be the past
life of Cecil Rhodes. So he went to Rhodesia to check out what he
had discovered in his auditing.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: He was there to attempt to create a
scientology community in the country, and eventually turn the
country over in to a scientology country. He was looking for a.
Home base for scientology.
NARRATOR: Hubbard’s vision of becoming a later day Rhodes
failed. The Rhodesian government became suspicious and his visa was
not renewed.
Back in England, Hubbard was also under attack. Parents were
worried by strange communications from children who’d fallen under
scientologists thrall.
SCIENTOLOGIST’S MOTHER: There was a letter from her saying that
she was disconnecting from me. You probably are familiar with this,
you’ve seen it in the paper.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, yes.
SCIENTOLOGISTS MOTHER: That I was destroying her, and that she
didn’t want to see me again. That’s it, Karen… never signed it.
NARRATOR: The newspapers were accusing him of being a fraud,
and lobbied the government to launch an inquiry.
Hubbard decided there was only one answer, he would take to the
high seas.
With his loyal band of disciples, he would move himself and his
empire outside any government’s jurisdiction.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: At one point he turned around and said to us,
in a very sort of masterful way, in a very, almost ambassadorial
sort of way, he said, it’s perfectly all right to step outside the
law, because the law itself is aberrated, so in order to achieve
our ends, that gives us license to step outside the law.
NARRATOR: Hubbard’s followers were about to see the
consequences of life beyond the law, as their messiah became their
dictator.
END OF PART TWO
PART THREE
NARRATOR: In 1967, with his own navy of scientologists, the Sea
Organization, Ron Hubbards set sail.
Hanna Eltringhan, then 24, went with him. She’d never crewed
on a large ship before, but Hubbard detected that she was unusually
well equipped for naval command.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: Hubbard called me in to his cabin and stood
right in the doorway of his cabin, fiddling with the E meter, and
started asking me questions about when I had last been a captain.
Well, this could only be past life, because I’d never been a captain
in this life. So I started, you know, thinking back, and came up
with this past experience about being a space captain of a space
ship, and being blown up in space, and the planet was being invaded,
and all these – all this fighting and blasting going on, and so
forth. And at the end of it he peered over the E meter at me and
he said, were you one of the loyal officers? And at that point I
got this uprush and I felt good, I must have been one of those loyal
officers, I must have been one of the elite, you know.
NARRATOR: The young Hana was appointed captain of Hubbard’s
number two ship, a 400 ton trawler.
His flagship was a 3,000 ton converted cattle ferry. On board,
Hubbard had a personal guard, called the Commodores Messengers.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: They took care of everything for him. They
dressed him. They got him ready for bed, they lit his cigarettes.
they held his ashtray.
MIKE GOLDSTEIN: Most of the messengers were young girls, 13,
14, 15. They were an extension of his communication, so when
somebody saw them on the ship or they came up to them, it was like
you were talking to him.
NARRATOR: On one occasion, Gerry Armstrong, who’d been sent on
shore errand, was visited by one of Hubbard’s messengers.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: This was Terri, who was later to be my wife,
and she came to me where I was working and she said the Commodore
wants to know, is it true that you went to the US Embassy and
applied for 30 some odd visas, and I said yes, Sir, because that’s
how you respond to the messenger. And her next message was, the
Commodore says you’re a fucking asshole.
NARRATOR: The attacks on Scientology had pitched Hubbard into
one of his periodic depressions.
His response was to take it out on his followers on sea and
land. He designed a new disciplinary code called ethics, which put
many of them into what he called lower conditions of existence, like
liability, doubt or treason.
To rise out of these conditions penances were required.
Liability, for example, required you to deliver an effective blow to
Scientology’s enemies.
VIRGINIA DOWNSBOROUGH: Everybody was supposedly in these lower
conditions which is quite astonishing because everybody really loved
Ron and wanted to contribute to having whatever his dreams might
be come true.
PAM KEMP: What happened was it became a very heavy, almost
military, organization. People changed. I think people became
scared. They were scared of ethics, scared of what would happen,
and so they became, I think, very intimidated.
NARRATOR: At sea, the cruelty extended to children. On one
occasion Hubbard was infuriated by a small boy who had unwittingly
chewed a telex.
RANA ELTRINGHAM: He put this four and a half year old little
boy, Derek Green, into the chain locker for two days, two days and
two nights. Its a closed metal container, its wet, its full of
water and seaweed, it smells bad. But Derek was sitting up on the
chain, in this place on his own, in the dark, for two days and two
nights. He was not allowed to go to the potty. I mean he had to go
in the chain locker on his own, soil himself. He was given food.
I never went near it, the chain locker, while he was in there, but
people heard him crying. That is sheer, total brutality. That is –
that’s child abuse.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: People were in awe of him, and people were
frightened of him. He was the boss, he was the dictator. He could
order anyone to do anything on board. He was ruthless, he could be,
at times, charming, but be could also be very belligerent, and
he could also be very uncaring and cruel.
Yet Hubbard’s disciples continued to believe in him. In 1968
he took a select few around the Mediterranean on his yacht, the
Enchanter, on a project he called the Mission into Time. The task
was to find treasure Hubbard had buried during his previous lives.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: We were in a tizzy, you know, all this
excitement of this upcoming very important mission. And I was
amongst one of the chosen; and we sailed off with our metal
detectors, and went to a variety of locations, and did find some
metal at the basement of what he claimed it used to be a temple in
which he had liaisons with some priestess during his trips to
Sardinia. There was metal buried down below. And he was very
triumphant during those times. It was very heady stuff for us
people. It had a very magical magnetic hypnotising effect on the
followers.
NARRATOR: Hubbard was also engaged on further great expansion of
Scientology. Once a Scientologist reached the state of clear, it
became an operating thetan, or OT.
As always in scientology, each OT level could only be reached
after an expensive course.
Did Hubbard believe it, or was he having his followers on?
CYRIL VOSPER: He probably always knew he was running a con, you
know, he must have known that much of the stuff he was talking about
was a load of rubbish. But I think after a while, when he found
there were thousands were of people in adulation around the planet
for this man, I think that started to take him over. I think he
began to believe that he was, if not god, then very close to god.
NARRATOR: Hubbard’s new cosmology was accompanied by new forms
of punishment on board ship. Crew members who displeased him were
liable to be thrown overboard before being retrieved in the harbor
below. If they reoffended, they were tied up and blindfolded first.
HANA ELTRINGRAM: I saw one woman, Julia Lewis Selman, from the
United States, thrown overboard. This woman must have been in her
50s. She was – had her hands and I think her ‘feet tied, maybe only
her hands tied and a blindfold, but she went over. She was so
panicked at the thought of being thrown over this way, she was
standing on the edge of deck, panicked, beside herself, shouting.
And I was standing on the A deck with Hubbard and his other aides
watching this going on, and Julia didn’t jump over, she had to be
pushed over, because she was incapable, she was in such a fit.
JIM DINCALCI: He saw everyone suspiciously and assumed everyone was
intentionally attacking him. Governments were attacking him,
and then everyone around who made a mistake, they also were
attacking him. And the only thing he could do would be to attack
back.
NARRATOR: In 1953 a French court started proceedings against
Hubbard for fraud. He had left his ship which was berthed in
Morocco, and went to live in hiding in New York, where he was looked
after by Jim Dincalci.
To turn the tables on his enemies, he devised a bizarre plan
called Snow White. Its stated aim was for scientology members to
infiltrate government departments.
Hubbard even issued his agents a reading list to learn the
black arts of espionage.
ROBERT VAUGHN YOUNG: He believed that there was an
international cabal that was in control of the attack on him around
the world, as well as the attacks on the various countries. And so
Snow White was written to find the cabal, find all the connections
between all these enemy groups, to expose him to destroy them. It
was done through infiltration, sometimes it was done through
burglary. It was just pure military intelligence.
NARRATOR: Having instigated Snow White, Hubbard rejoined his
ship in the Canary Islands. There he had a serious motorbike
accident, his mood dramatically worsened.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: This was his period which I call the pouting,
the crying, the mad period where he would cry and throw things
against the wall, the bulkheads and pout and scream. But right
towards the tail end of that he created the RPF, the Rehabilitation
Project Force.
NARRATOR The RPF was yet another correctional regime. Its
orders were fiercesome.
As ship’s captain, it was Hana Eltringham’s job to implement
them.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: I was absolutely horrified when I read them,
because they talked about the creation of this, pretty much like a
slave labour camp. Those weren’t the words used, but that was the
impression given, where two unwanteds, those found wanting,
seriously wanting were sent, and they were to be kept in this with
no rights, no freedoms, no privileges of any kind, pretty much the
basic rights they were allowed were a little bit of sleep each day,
food left overs, the harshest treatment. They were not allowed to
speak to any of the crew. It was very, very,very bad that this was
going on. But Hubbard’s statement to us was that it’s going to take
a lot more ethics and a lot more punishment than anyone has – can
easily face up to to get this whole world back in shape. And at
that point I believed that statement.
JIM DINCALCI: Human emotionary actions is the way humans were,
and he didn’t specially regard humans very highly. He liked the
idea that doll bodies that were in other civilisations. Doll bodies
didn’t have human emotions and reactions. They were, I guess, like
Spock, you know, just very analytical, or you just get the job done,
no emotions there, love is not a sentiment that’s known or cared for,
so.. And that’s, to me, the tragedy, because he put that, I feel, in
to the organisation, in to the way of being in the organisation.
NARRATOR: Hubbard even consigned his own son, Quentin, who was
a senior auditor on the ship to the RPF.
MIKE GOLDSTEIN: Quentin really was a real sweet kid. He was a
real nice guy and very soft spoken. And it was very difficult for
him, being Hubbard’s son, and being put on – in this very high
position, and I don’t think he was that interested in it, he just
wanted to be a pilot, and also the fact that he was gay, and that’s
a very tough thing in scientology to be gay. Because, especially
that kid, to be Hubbard’s son, and to be this top technical person,
and be gay, oh, that would be a horrible thing to be wrestling with
and suppressing all the time.
NARRATOR: Quentin was sentenced to the RPF after he committed
the sin of trying to commit suicide. Two years later he succeeded.
JIM DINCALCI: Hubbard saw it as a betrayal because everything was
referenced around him. The world was doing everything to him.
This technology that was supposed to work didn’t even work on the
senior person of all technology, you know, Hubbard and his son. No,
he just saw that as an attack from his son, and that’s ….You know
the love was gone. He didn’t – was not a – he had lost love.
NARRATOR: In 1975, Hubbard decided it was time to come ashore. He sent
scouts to look for a suitable landbase. They settled on
Clearwater in the rich state of Florida.
HANA ELTRINGHAM: He stated, coming ashore would be profitable,
because we could get so many more people to the Flagland base, as it
was to be called for auditing and training. And he also wanted to
concentrate on getting professionals to the land base, because, of
course, they had more accessible money. They had pension funds,
they had children education funds, and some of these he named, that
were accessible.
NARRATOR: Hubbard knew scientology would be welcome, so he
devised a top secret battleplan. He called it Operation Goldmine.
Using a cover name, the United Churches of Florida, Hubbard issued
secret orders to take over the town.
GABRIEL CAZARES: These orders, in effect, very clearly stated,
move in to this area, find out who your friends are, develop them,
find out who your enemies are, destroy them, and then move in to
every possible area of community life, business, social, religious,
education.
NARRATOR: The plan worked.
Clearwater is a scientology bastion.
Scientology owns 22 prime sites.
Big name scientologists like Lisa-Marie Presley have moved in.
MIKE GOLDSTEIN: You could get all the big big rollers, you get
the people with the dollars, and you can make a fortune. And I
believe the income for a week, this was like in 1978, ’79, was
somewhere at sort of half a million a week. I mean that’s where the
big bucks started to be made, when you could do that.
NARRATOR: With the money rolling in Hubbard moved to
California, where he’d play his last great role.
His ambition was to film sci-fi blockbusters based on his
books. They ended up as Scientology training films.
JIM DINCALCI: The movie mogul, Cecil B DeMille, you know, it
was like he was, he tried to be bigger than life, but he just
wasn’t. So he would make these extravagant sets, they were
ludicrous. They were not big productions, they were just silliness.
They were an ego maniac. He tried be flustery and big and powerful,
but if you look – just stepped and observed, you could see that he
had fear about everything. And finally the fear came down to dust
particles, little teeny dust particles.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: He had phobias about dust, he had phobias
about dust smells. He had phobias about sounds, as though he would
hear sounds that weren’t there, and he would scream at the sound
technician. And he would see things that weren’t there, and he
would scream at the people who were framing the shot. And he would
smell smells that weren’t there, and he’d have people rinse his
clothing some 13 or 15 or however many times.
NARRATOR: In 1977, while Hubbard was away making movies, the
FBI caught up with the Snow White operation scientology headquarters
in Los Angeles and Washington.
Hubbard’s wife, Mary-Sue, and eight other scientology
executives took the wrap, and was sent to prison for conspiracy and
stealing government documents. Hubbard disappeared, never to be seen again.
After living in a succession of hiding places, he ended up on
this secluded ranch in the California Hills.
Secrecy has veiled his final years. But one man, Robert Vaughn
Young, who was then a scientology public relations officer, was
later given a description of Hubbard by one of his guardians. This,
and evidence from Hubbard’s autopsy report paint a sad picture.
ROBERT VAUGHN YOUNG: He had grown a beard, he had grown his
long hair. The nails were long, very much the same problem as they
found with Howard Hughes, unkempt nails. Neighbours, there was a
neighbour that walked in on him one day, and he had become very
frightened, and suddenly scurried out of the barn. He was
frightened to meet people. He was terrified of meeting any new
people. He was disappearing down, down, down in to this little
strange world of his, that he had created. And the irony of this is
this is a man that was promulgating and telling the world that my
technology and ideas you can get bigger and bigger and bigger and
yet he was shrinking down until finally he was hiding.
NARRATOR: On January 24th 1986, Ron Hubbard died.
The Church of Scientology said he’d simply quit his body to
continue his work elsewhere.
ROBERT VAUGHN YOUNG: Him dying suddenly made him very mortal,
and the last thing we could have is to have Hubbard be mortal. So a
story had to be designed, and the story is that he went off to
research the next level. And what’s amazing is I bought this, without
bought it.
NARRATOR: Today, the L Ron Hubbard image is carefully protected
by the Church of Scientology.
It says he is the greatest humanitarian in history.
Hollywood has named a street estimated $80 million roll every
year.
It continues to preach ti teachings can cure the met world.
The personal tragedy is, one mind scientology did not appear to
help was that of its founder.
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