Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(47)
The situation was much less restrained belowdecks. The Sea Org members were young and vigorous; sexual escapades were routine, and marriages quite fluid. Hubbard seemed to be oblivious, but Mary Sue was increasingly scandalized. When she learned that a crew member, who was nineteen or twenty, had slept with a fifteen-year-old girl on the ship, she got a dagger out of her cabin and held it against his throat and told him he had to be off the ship in two hours or else. In 1971, on New Year’s Eve, there was a drunken orgy of historic proportions. “Maybe a hundred Sea Org members were having sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship,” one of the participants recalled. Mary Sue had had enough. With two attractive teenage daughters of her own on the ship, she started cracking down on premarital sex. Hubbard observed that 1972 was a leap year, and said that any woman on the ship could propose to any man, leading to a sudden rash of weddings. Hubbard had forbidden babies on board, but so many women were getting pregnant that he began permitting the children to stay, rather than sending their parents to another post. The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be “offloaded” to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.7
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WORD ARRIVED while the Apollo was in dry dock in Portugal that the French government was going to indict the Church of Scientology for fraud, with Hubbard named as a conspirator (he would eventually be convicted in absentia and sentenced to four years in prison). Hubbard flew to New York the very next day. Few crew members knew where he was. Jim Dincalci, his medical officer, and Paul Preston, a former Green Beret who acted as Hubbard’s bodyguard, joined him and set up housekeeping in Queens.
It was an odd interlude. Abruptly freed from the daily responsibility of running the ship, training executives, and overseeing the entire Scientology enterprise, Hubbard suddenly had time on his hands. He spent it watching television and reading novels. Dincalci was designated to be the chef, which meant that fish sticks and pasta were on the menu until Dincalci learned how to expand his repertoire. He studied Adelle Davis’s popular health food book Let’s Get Well. Hubbard began to gain energy and lose weight. He would go for walks around the neighborhood, but always in a clownish disguise—a wig, a hat, and glasses with no prescription. Hubbard thought he was being nondescript, but Dincalci heard the comments the kids were making about how goofy he looked.
Dincalci had long since come to the conclusion that Hubbard was not an Operating Thetan. He was obese and weird and he failed to exhibit any of the extraordinary powers that are supposed to be a part of the OT arsenal. Moreover, he was under siege by various countries. Why couldn’t he simply set things straight? Wasn’t he supposed to be in control of his environment? How could he be so persecuted and powerless? What was he doing hiding out in Queens, wearing a wig and watching television when the planet needed salvation? At one point, Hubbard was talking about how pleasant it used to be to sit on a cloud, but now he complained to Dincalci, “I’m PTS to nations.” He meant that he was a Potential Trouble Source because entire countries were dysfunctional and suppressive. Dincalci thought, “Oh, that explains it,” but then it didn’t, really.
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.