In an earlier post I mentioned that the Manson Family, which tried to assassinate President Ford shortly before the Symbionese Liberation Army did, derived from a spinoff of Scientology; here are some details on that and on SLA/Family ties to the Ford assassination attempt:
Some books critical of Scientology and Dianetics / Scientology Booklist
L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? Corydon, Bent, and L. Ron Hubbard Jr. aka Ronald DeWolf. Lyle Stuart, Secaucus, NewJersey. 1987. ISBN: 081-840-4442. Revised, Updated and Expanded Edition (tradepaperback.) Corydon, Bent. Barricade Books, Fort Lee, New Jersey. 1992. ISBN:094-263-7577. (Note: L. Ron Hubbard Jr.'s name was taken off this edition for legalreasons.) A new 1996 edition includes an index; Brian Ambry organized and wrote theupdate and addendum sections for this new edition and the 1992 edition. ISBN for the 1996 edition: 156-980-009X. (This large book on Scientology is fairlydisorganized but it remains a vital source of first-hand testimony from ex-Scientologists about life aboard Hubbard's ship, the Apollo, and many alarming accounts of illegal and criminal activities within Scientology. Includes 21 photos,mostly of Hubbard, and two illustrations that compare Scientology's cross to that of the infamous Aleister Crowley. The two later editions are significantlydifferent from the original hardcover with several new added chapters and somerevisions to existing chapters.)
http://www.whyaretheydead.net/misc/Factnet/CORYDON.TXT
Piece of Blue Sky, a - Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed. Atack, Jon. Carol Publishing Group, New York. 1990. ISBN: 081-840-499X hardback (c) 1990 Jon Atack. Available in the UK by calling 01342 316129, or 0044 1342 316129 in the rest of Europe. (This is widely hailed as the best book on the subject of Scientology. Jon rolls up his sleeves and attacks the cult with impeccable referencing and the fullweight of documentation from the world's largest Scientology archive. On top ofthat, the book is captivating, absorbing, and very well-written.)
http://members.chello.nl/mgormez/books/a_piece_of_blue_sky/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D081840499X/001-3290441-1724818
Netherlands
http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/CoS/APieceOfBlueSky/index.html
A Piece of Blue Sky - Part 3, Chapter 7:
The usual trickle of defecting members who set up their own Scientological groups continued through the 1960s. A splinter group called Compulsions Analysis came into being in London, in 1964, under the direction of a couple named Robert and Mary Ann Moor, who called themselves the "De Grimstons." They later renamed their organization "The Process," and later yet, "The Church of the Final Judgment." Mass murderer Charles Manson was an enthusiastic supporter both of The Process, and of Scientology. Author Maury Terry is convinced that David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer, was also involved with The Process.
The Process Church of the Final Judgement - FT134
In 1963, two people met at the L Ron Hubbard Institute of Scientology on Fitzroy Street, London. They were both studying to be ‘auditors’. Based on his earlier system of Dianetics, ‘auditing’ was Hubbard’s method of discovering and eliminating ‘engrams,’ the psychic residue from past traumas. The aim of auditing was to become ‘clear,’ to wipe the psychic slate clean and become, in effect, a kind of superman, no longer enthralled to neurotic fears and hang-ups.
Robert DeGrimston Moore (left) and Mary Ann McClean were both fascinated by auditing and soon grew proficient. Although they came from considerably different backgrounds, both were enthusiastic Scientologists.
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In June, 1966, the DeGrimstons and a group of about 30 ‘Processeans’ – as they called themselves – left for Nassau. They were accompanied by the six Alsatian dogs the DeGrimstons had recently acquired – another suggestion from the divine powers. (Further suggestions included an $80,000 yacht and first class journeys to Turkey and Asia for the DeGrimstons.)
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By 1968 the cult had spread to the States, establishing churches in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco. They also canvased Europe; in Germany they sent representatives to the neo-Nazi NPD.
Always in search of intensity, Nazi chic attracted them. In Haight-Ashbury they visited the offices of the San Francisco Oracle, hoping to bring the underground newspaper over to the cause. The Oracle was too busy hyping the coming Age of Aquarius to give Satan much time. They paid a visit to the Black Pope, Anton LaVey, head of the Church of Satan, but he had no use for them either.
They set up a church at 407 Cole Street. Their neighbour at 636 Cole was someone who would cause them a lot of grief in a year or so. His name was Charles Manson, soon to become the head of the Family responsible for the gruesome Tate-Labianca murders in August of 1969.
[SNIP]
Sanders claimed that the Process more or less taught Charlie everything he knew. Sanders made connections. Both Charlie and the DeGrimstons were into Scientology. In 1968 Charlie sent Family member Bruce Davis to visit Process headquarters in London; while there Davis, too, had a brief stint with Scientology. Two Processeans visited Manson in jail; Manson later contributed a stream-of-unconsciousness rant for the Process "Death" issue, calling death "total awareness, closing the circle, bringing the soul to now." DeGrimston wrote of Satan and Christ coming together; to those in the know, that was just another name for Charlie.
The Process was keen on the Nazis. Manson carved a swastika in his forehead that bore a resemblance to the Process insignia.
[SNIP]
In 1968, the House of Commons enacted policy to restrict the growth of Scientology. The Process was hit by this when American recruits weren’t allowed into England, immigration officials figuring that one cult is as bad as another. DeGrimston sent his flock to the continent.
Possible Manson Connection to Zodiac
Possible Manson Connection to Zodiac Note from CharlieManson.com: The following article doesn't mention it, but William Mentzer was a major character in the book "The Ultimate Evil." Mentzer supposedly knew Charles Manson around 1969 (probably through Mama Cass Elliot). He was also referred to as "Manson II" in the same book. He was also the subject of the book "Bad Company."
Somewhat related, Howard Davis has long contended there was a connection in his book "The Zodiac/Manson Connection." He fingered Bruce Davis as the Zodiac killer, though.
This Man Could Be Frisco's Fiendish Zodiac Killer
By Jamie Schram
Monday, September 29, 2003
New York Post
The notorious San Francisco Zodiac Killer, who mysteriously dropped out of sight almost 30 years ago after a bloody reign of terror that left five dead, may have been "hiding" in plain sight - locked away in prison for two unrelated murders.
A Post investigation unearthed "compelling" links between 54-year-old killer William Mentzer - who's serving life without the possibility of parole - and the police profile of the Zodiac Killer, the San Francisco District Attorney's Office says.
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The Post discovered two dozen links between Mentzer, who is from Los Angeles, and the Zodiac Killer.
[SNIP]
Mentzer is serving a life sentence for the savage L.A. murders of New York theatrical producer Roy Radin in 1983 and of prostitute June Mincher in 1984.
Ed Sanders, The Family, 1990 edition, Chapter 27, p. 462
In October [1979] there appeared a widely noted newspaper article by long-time Manson family chronicler Mary Neiswender about a possible alliance between the M group and the Symbionese Liberation Army to raise money for an escape from prison. Neiswender quoted Sacramento police detectives as estimating that Manson family members and SLA associates in jail had accumulated about $1.5 million over the last two years with a sophisticated credit-card scam in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona.
Squeaky and Sara Jane From Newsweek, November 8, 1976
On Sept. 5, 1975, one of cult murderer Charles Manson's female disciples aimed a .45-caliber pistol at President Ford outside the Statehouse in Sacramento, Calif., and pulled the trigger. Fortunately, though there were four bullets in the clip, the firing chamber was empty. Secret Service men pounced on Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme. But barely two weeks later, on another Presidential visits to California, another woman—a quasi-radical bookkeeper who had once served as an FBI informant—also waited in ambush with a concealed handgun. As Ford strode from a San Francisco hotel to his waiting limousine, Sara Jane Moore fired a single wild shot before being disarmed and seized.
ABCNEWS.com : PrimeTime: Who is Sara Jane Olson? Transcript
Sara Jane Olson finds herself in a kind of time warp these days, defending her actions a quarter century ago when she had a different name, Kathleen Soliah, and the world was different, too. . .It was middle America’s worst nightmare. . .It was back in the early ’70s in the San Francisco Bay area when small bands of urban guerrillas engaged in terrorism. None was more notorious than the Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA. . .And Kathleen Soliah would find herself caught up in the turmoil. At Berkeley, where she studied acting, Soliah says she developed a close friendship with Angela Atwood, and through her met others who would later form the SLA.
America's Al-Qaeda: The SLA-Venceremos Connection
Even Sara Jane Moore, serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, puts on a Charlie Manson crazy act when questioned about the SLA.
[SNIP]
One of the murkier episodes in the SLA/Venceremos history was the murder of Wilbert "Popeye" Jackson, a low-rent crook and police informant who was publicly denounced by Sara Jane Moore. Moore later became famous for the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.
Before the botched hit on Ford, Moore had been an FBI informant until she told Venceremos members that what she had been up to and they rejected her. The FBI rejected her too, because she had grown too close to the radicals.
"Popeye" Jackson had been enlisted by Randolph Hearst to seek contacts with the SLA underground after the horrific LAPD/SLA shoot-out that killed about half of the SLA. Hearst rightly judged at that point the FBI did not care if they killed his daughter. Jackson was connected with the United Prisoners Union (UPU) and was a police informant.
Much fuss has been made of identifying police informants; in the seventies, being identified as such could easily lead to assassination, as Popeye Jackson would discover, to his shock. But too much can be made of the label "snitch" - any convict is a potential informant if the possibility of parole is offered by prosecutors. As Max Crawford's The Bad Communist makes clear, being a police informant, as long as you were honest about it, did not necessarily mean that Venceremos would stop talking to you. They got a lot of good information from "snitches". So the "snitches" and the "revolutionaries" were one force.
According to what I've read, Sara Jane Moore was 1) in attendance at the SLA rally in Berkeley where Kathleen Soliah spoke in favor of the SLA, and so was Popeye Jackson and Emily Harris; 2) Moore befriended Popeye Jackson and they both worked for Hearst's "People In Need" Foundation food giveaway; 3) Kathleen Soliah took the name Sara Jane Olson shortly after Sara Jane Moore's attempt on the life of President Ford; 4) Moore was the bookkeeper for People in Need; 5) Moore had a falling out with Popeye Jackson, denounced him in a letter to various movement people, and several days later, Jackson was shot dead along with his police control agent while they sat in a car in the Mission District of San Francisco.
One interesting thing about my typo is that in looking up links to post this correction, I've learned one investigator has argued there were links between the two Sara Janes:
Four days after the September 1975 San Francisco bust effectively crushed the Symbionese Liberation Army, Sara Jane Moore, a middle-aged doctor’s wife, who vacillated between being an FBI informant and a radical groupie, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford on the steps of the St. Francis Hotel. For those who had flirted with political violence and assassination, the President represented the ultimate target.
Since June 21, 1999 – five days after the FBI surrounded Ms. Soliah-Olson’s minivan, ending over 23 years on the lam – I’ve argued that Kathleen, desperate for a new name, took "Sara Jane" because of it’s radical significance. As Bill "Teko" Harris noted in the first SLA communique following the catastrophic May 17, 1974, shootout in L.A. that left six comrades dead, "We have taken many different meaningful names." Patricia Hearst's given nom de guerre, Tania, was that of a German-Argentine communist who had died with Che Guevera in Bolivia in 1967. In the week that Soliah-Olson fled, the most famous "propagandist of the deed" was Sara Jane Moore -- without the "h."
The link between Soliah-Olson and Moore is far more substantive than this one-time temporal and spatial coincidence. Their paths crisscrossed repeatedly in the wake of the Hearst kidnapping. Their's were paths of violence. And intertwined into their two stories is the story of the New World Liberation Front which gives us a different, and perhaps better, paradigm for understanding Kathleen Soliah than does the SLA/Patty Hearst angle.
I hope to put to rest, once and for all, the myth that Ms. Soliah was just some marginal activist in the early '70s who happened to show a little compassion to three surviving members of the SLA. Whether the material's sufficent to convict her, I'll leave to the jury. But that it demonstrates that she was at the center of Bay Area radical violence and at least proximate to would-be presidential assassin, Sara Jane Moore, is beyond dispute. A good journalist would have mined that history and used it when questioning Soliah.