Supplementary material of this religioous Mafia from Hell:
https://www.watchman.org/articles/scientology/church-of-scientology-a-religious-mafia/Operation Snow White was a criminal conspiracy by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. This project included a series of infiltrations into and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, carried out by Church members in more than 30 countries.[1] It was one of the largest infiltrations of the United States government in history,[2] with up to 5,000 covert agents.[3] This operation also exposed the Scientology plot "Operation Freakout", because Operation Snow White was the case that initiated the U.S. government's investigation of the Church.[3]
Under this program, Scientology operatives committed infiltration, wiretapping, and theft of documents in government offices, most notably those of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Eleven highly placed Church executives, including Mary Sue Hubbard (wife of founder L. Ron Hubbard and second-in-command of the organization), pleaded guilty and were convicted in federal court of obstructing justice, burglary of government offices, and theft of documents and government property. The case was United States v. Mary Sue Hubbard et al., 493 F.Supp. 209 (D.D.C. 1979).[4][5][6][7]...
The GO's actual infiltration of the government likely began when Gerald Wolfe and Michael Meisner were able to gain employment at the IRS as clerk-typists. Under direction of the Guardian Office, Wolfe monitored files on tax-exempt organizations and, when requested, illegally made copies for Scientology.[17] Meisner supervised both Wolfe and the Information Bureau section in DC, and reported to the GO's Deputy Guardian for Information in the US.[23]
In November 1974, Operation Snow White took an unexpected turn for the GO when they received word that the IRS would be conducting a meeting on Scientology's tax-exempt status. In response, the church sent a spy to bug the room.[24] On the morning of November 1, the day before the meeting, a GO agent, Hermann, broke into the conference room and plugged the device into an electrical outlet. This device, in turn, then transmitted a signal on an FM frequency, which was picked up and recorded by Scientologists sitting in a car in the parking lot of the Smithsonian, which faced the office. After the meeting Hermann removed the device, and the taped recording of the meeting was sent to Los Angeles.[25]
By December, Wolfe, Herman, and Meisner had sent a shipment of stolen documents 20 inches thick to Duke Snider. Snider, in turn, sent notification to Mo Budlong in Los Angeles. By the end of December, Wolfe was stealing documents from the IRS's Chief Counsel's office. Just days after Christmas, Wolfe broke into the office of Barbara Bird, an attorney in the IRS's Refund Litigation Service. Bird had been present at the November 1st meeting. Instead of stealing files, Wolfe took them to a copier and made photocopies using government paper.[26]
Later, Wolfe met Meisner at a restaurant, where he reported on his most recent theft. Meisner took the documents and underlined selections that he believed his superiors would find interesting or relevant and wrote a summary of the important points. This was then routed through the Assistant Guardian for DC and on to the Deputy Guardian for the US, the Deputy Guardian for Information in the US, the Branch I Director of the Information Bureau, and the Collections Officer, all of which were in Los Angeles. A copy was also sent to Mary Sue Hubbard. This was typically standard procedure for Meisner.[26]
In early 1975, Operation Snow White expanded again as Sharon Thomas found employment in the U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence Agency and Nancy Douglass began work at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Douglass stole documents and made photocopies of others. These were transmitted to Hermann.[27]
By spring, attention had been called back to the IRS case as Mary Sue Hubbard had instructed Kember and Heldt to "use any method at our disposal to win the battle and gain our non-profit (tax) status".[28] Heldt wrote back telling that her request had been sent to the Information Bureau, who had been ordered to complete the collection of documents from the IRS and the Department of Justice's tax files within three months.[29]
In April, Meisner procured a directory of the Department of Justice and located the offices that would have files pertaining to Scientology litigation. When he found what he wanted he sent in Wolfe, who broke into the offices of two attorneys on three successive Saturdays. Wolfe copied twelve files and met up with Meisner, as before, at a restaurant. These files were especially useful to Scientology, as it detailed the government's strategy in various court cases.
In May, Willardson directed Meisner to implement "Project Horn", which called for Meisner to "provide a cover for PR and legal for the way they obtained IRS docs". The idea would be for the GO's Public Relations Bureau to view the documents without worrying about being connected to the theft. Willardson's idea called for Meisner to steal documents dealing with organizations other than Scientology. Willardson also called for the theft of IRS stationery, in order to forge letters from a (fictional) disgruntled IRS employee. The files on various organizations (including Scientology, of course) would then be sent out attached to the fake letter. The idea was that it would appear that an upset IRS agent had himself sent the files to numerous organizations. There would be nothing to tie it to Scientology. Wolfe stole both the stationery and, without permission, files on the Unification Church and Bob Jones University.[30].. On July 8, the FBI raided Church of Scientology locations in Los Angeles, Hollywood and Washington, D.C.[17] The Los Angeles raid involved 156 FBI agents, the most that had ever been used in a single raid. It lasted 21 hours and filled a 16-ton truck with documents and other items.[8]
The raids turned up documentation of not only the group's illegal activities against the United States government,[44] but also illegal activities carried out against other perceived enemies of Scientology. These included "Operation Freakout", a conspiracy to frame author Paulette Cooper on false bomb-threat charges, and conspiracies to frame Gabe Cazares, mayor of Clearwater, Florida, on false hit-and-run charges.[45][46] The papers also revealed that Sir John Foster (author of the official UK Government inquiry into Scientology) and Lord Balniel (who had requested the report) were targets, along with the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) and World Federation for Mental Health.[47]
Comparing the FBI to the Gestapo, the Church declared that all the files seized from the Church were taken illegally,[48] though the FBI produced a 40-plus page affidavit detailing 160 specific items they were looking for.[49]
By July 20, 13 days after the raid, a Washington judge ruled that the documents should be returned, at least temporarily, to the Church, and that none of the documents could be shared with branches of the government, unless that specific branch was investigating Scientology. Scientology's lawyers had successfully argued that in order to prepare for an August 8 hearing on the legality of the raid, they must be able to see the documents.[50] By July 27, a judge in Washington had ruled the warrant authorizing the raid was too broad and, as such, violated the Church's 4th Amendment rights.[51] In August, this ruling would be overturned, with Scientology promising to take the case to the Supreme Court,[52] which would, early in the next year, refuse to hear the case.[53]
In August 1978, 11 high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges. One of the indicted was Mary Sue Hubbard, wife of Scientology's creator L. Ron Hubbard. The other ten were Gerald Wolfe, Cindy Raymond, Henning Heldt, Duke Snider, Gregory Willardson, Richard Weigand, Mitchell Herman, Sharon Thomas, Jane Kember, and Mo Budlong. Kendrick Moxon and L. Ron Hubbard were named unindicted co-conspirators.[54]
Over the course of the investigation, the Church of Scientology attempted to have a judge removed,[54] and subpoenaed almost 150 federal agents in what appeared to be a large stalling scheme.[55] The Church also offered several shifting explanations for their actions.[56][57] Ultimately, these tactics failed and the defendants agreed to a plea deal.
Seven of the 11 members of the Guardian's Office pleaded guilty to just a single count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. One more pleaded guilty to a similar charge and a ninth pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. The Scientologists were allowed to argue for the suppression of the government's evidence. The remaining two Scientologists were in England, pending extradition.[58]...
On December 6, 1979, some five years after Operation Snow White began, it officially came to an end. Five of the Scientologists were sentenced to four years in jail, with four of the convicted being taken immediately. Mary Sue Hubbard, wife of L. Ron Hubbard, was sentenced to five years. Each of the six faced a fine of $10,000.[59] The next day the four remaining Scientologists were sentenced. Three of the four faced a fine of $10,000 and five years in jail. The fourth was fined $1,000 and sent to jail for six months. Upon release Mary Sue Hubbard was given five years of probation and community service. All of the Scientologists immediately appealed,[60] but the verdicts were confirmed.[61]
In November 1980, the two remaining Scientologists, Jane Kember and Mo Budlong, were finally convicted on nine counts of aiding and abetting burglary in connection with break-ins at government offices,[62] and were sentenced to six years.[63]
Kember and Budlong had claimed political asylum in the UK, arguing that they should not be extradited to the US because the burglaries had political objectives. Their application against extradition was denied by the British High Court on the grounds that it did not fall within the political offence exception to the Extradition Act 1870; - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
Supplementary #3:
Project Normandy was a top secret Church of Scientology operation wherein the church planned to take over the city of Clearwater, Florida, by infiltrating government offices and media centers. Gabe Cazares, who was the mayor of Clearwater at the time, used the term "the occupation of Clearwater"[1] and later characterized it as a "paramilitary operation by a terrorist group".[2]
In the 1970s, the Church of Scientology Corporation used a front group, called the "United Churches of Florida", to purchase the Fort Harrison Hotel, for $3 million. The church established their headquarters in the Fort Harrison Hotel, and dubbed it their Flag Land Base.
In 1977, an FBI raid on Scientology headquarters uncovered internal Church of Scientology documents marked "Top Secret", that referred to their secret operation to take over Clearwater, as "Project Normandy". The document itself states its purpose is "to obtain enough data on the Clearwater area to be able to determine what groups and individuals B1 will need to penetrate and handle in order to establish area control". The document says its "Major Target" is "To fully investigate the Clearwater city and county area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed".[3]
On November 3, 1979, the Clearwater Sun ran an article with the headline "Scientologists plot city takeover" and later stories claimed that the Scientologists also had international plans to take over the world.[4] The St. Petersburg Times won a Pulitzer Prize for one of their stories that exposed some of the criminal wrongdoings of the Church of Scientology.[1] Cazares also noted that he found it odd that a religious group would resort to using code names for a project to take control of a town, and called the project a "paramilitary operation by a terrorist group".[5]
The Church of Scientology targeted Cazares, attempting to entrap him in a sex scandal.[6][7] Scientology also staged a phony hit-and-run accident with Cazares in an attempt to discredit him. Cazares and his wife sued the Church of Scientology for $1.5 million. The church settled with Cazares in 1986.[8]. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Normandy
Operation Freakout, also known as Operation PC Freakout, was a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital. The plan, undertaken in 1976 following years of church-initiated lawsuits and covert harassment, was meant to eliminate the perceived threat that Cooper posed to the church and obtain revenge for her publication in 1971 of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered documentary evidence of the plot and the preceding campaign of harassment during an investigation into the Church of Scientology in 1977, eventually leading to the church compensating Cooper in an out-of-court settlement.
Cooper, a freelance journalist and author, had begun researching Scientology in 1968 and wrote a critical article on the church for the British magazine Queen (now Harper's Bazaar) in 1969.[1] The church promptly sued for libel, adding Queen to the dozens of British publications that it had already sued.[2][3]
Undeterred, Cooper expanded her article into a full-length book, The Scandal of Scientology: A chilling examination of the nature, beliefs and practices of the "now religion”; it was published by Tower Publications, Inc. of New York in the summer of 1971. The church responded by suing her in December 1971, demanding $300,000 for "untrue, libelous and defamatory statements about the Church."[4]
1972–1976: Operations Daniel and Dynamite
Cooper was seen as a high-priority target by the church's Guardian's Office, which acted as a combination of intelligence agency, legal office and public relations bureau for the church. As early as February 29, 1972, the church's third most senior official, Jane Kember, sent a directive to Terry Milner, the Deputy Guardian for Intelligence United States (DGIUS), instructing him to collect information about Paulette Cooper so that she could be "handled".[5] In response, Milner ordered his subordinates to "attack her in as many ways as possible"
In December 1972, the church launched a new attack called Operation Dynamite, an attempt to frame Cooper for supposedly making bomb threats against the Church of Scientology.[9] That month, a woman ostensibly soliciting funds for United Farm Workers stole a quantity of stationery from Cooper's apartment. A few days later, the New York Church of Scientology "received" two anonymous bomb threats. The following May, Cooper was indicted for making the bomb threats and arraigned for a federal grand jury. The threats had been written on her stationery, which was marked with her fingerprints.
The charges were eventually dropped in 1975 with the filing of a nolle prosequi order by the local US Attorney's office, but it was not until the fall of 1977 that the FBI discovered that the bomb threats had been staged by the Guardian's Office.[5] A contemporary memorandum sent between two Guardian's Office staff noted on a list of jobs successfully accomplished: "Conspired to entrap Mrs. Lovely into being arrested for a felony which she did not commit. She was arraigned for the crime."[8]
The church sued Cooper again in 1975 in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia in 1976.[10][11][12]
The church itself imported Cooper's books into foreign countries for the express purpose of suing her in jurisdictions where the libel laws were stricter than in the United States.[13]
1976: Operation Freakout
n the spring of 1976, the Guardian's Office leadership decided to initiate an operation with the aim "To get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks." The planning document, dated April 1, 1976, declared the aim to be "[t]o remove PC from her position of power so that she cannot attack the C of S [Church of Scientology]."[5]
In its initial form Operation Freakout consisted of three different plans (or "channels", as the Guardian's Office termed them), tailored to implicate her by her Jewish descent:
- First, a woman was to imitate Paulette Cooper's voice and make telephone threats to Arab consulates in New York City.
- Second, a threatening letter was to be mailed to an Arab consulate in such a fashion that it would appear to have been done by Paulette Cooper.
- Third, a Scientologist volunteer was to impersonate Paulette Cooper at a laundromat and threaten the current president Gerald Ford and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A second Scientologist would thereafter inform the FBI of the threat.[5]
Two additional plans were added to Operation Freakout on April 13, 1976. The fourth plan called for Scientologist agents to gather information from Cooper so that the success of the first three plans could be assessed. The fifth plan was for a Scientologist to warn an Arab consulate by telephone that Paulette Cooper had been talking about bombing it. A sixth and final plan was added subsequently. It was effectively a re-run of the 1972 plot, requiring Scientologists to obtain Paulette Cooper's fingerprints on a blank piece of paper, type a threatening letter to Kissinger on that paper, and mail it. Guardian's Office staff member Bruce Raymond noted in an internal memo: "This additional channel [the sixth plan] should really have put her away. Worked with all the other channels. The F.B.I. already think she did the bomb threats on the C of S [in 1972]."[5]
On March 31, 1976, Jane Kember telexed Henning Heldt, the Deputy Guardian U.S., to update him on the situation:
PC [Paulette Cooper] is still resisting paying the money but the judgement stands in PT [present time] ... Have her lawyer contacted and also arrange for PC to get the data that we can slap the writs on her. If you want legal docs, from here on we will provide. Then if she still declines to come we slap the writs on her before she reaches CW [Clearwater] as we don't want to be seen publicly [sic] being brutal to such a pathetic victim from a concentration camp.[5]
Ultimately, Operation Freakout was never put into effect. On June 11, 1976, two Scientology agents—Michael Meisner and Gerald Bennett Wolfe—were caught in the act of attempted burglary at a courthouse in Washington, D.C., as part of the Guardian's Office's ongoing Operation Snow White—a criminal conspiracy by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The Guardian's Office was preoccupied for the next year with attempts to hush up the scandal, even going to the lengths of kidnapping Meisner and holding him incommunicado to prevent him from testifying.[5] The church sought to bring a quick end to the dispute with Cooper in December 1976 when it proposed to settle with her, on condition that she was not to republish or comment on The Scandal of Scientology and agree to assign the book's copyright to the Church of Scientology of California.
On July 8, 1977, however, the FBI raided Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., seizing over 48,000 documents. They revealed the extent to which the Church had committed "criminal campaigns of vilification, burglaries and thefts ... against private and public individuals and organizations", as the U.S. Government prosecutor put it.[5] The documents were later released to the public, enabling Cooper and the world at large to learn about the details of Operation Freakout....
The Church of Scientology filed at least 19 lawsuits against Cooper throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which Cooper considered part of "a typical Scientology dirty-tricks campaign" and which Cooper's attorney Michael Flynn said was motivated by L. Ron Hubbard's declaration that the purpose of a lawsuit was to "harass and discourage".[16][17] Cooper discontinued her legal actions against Scientology in 1985 after receiving an out-of-court settlement.[18] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout
