Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [49]
Mary Sue Hubbard received in this missive her appointment as Chief Guardian and Controller of the Church of Scientology, reflecting her leadership of a special organ of the church known as the Guardian's Office. Created by Hubbard in 1966, its job was to enforce church policy and "safeguard Scientology orgs, Scientologists, and Scientology," as Hubbard put it. Guardians held the highest posts on Scientology's board of directors. They ran its legal apparatus, its finance office, and its public relations and social outreach bureaus, which targeted such areas of concern as drug and criminal rehabilitation, education reform, and "eradicating mental health abuse"; the latter was handled by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an advocacy group formed by the Guardian's Office in 1969. The Guardian's Office also ran a highly sophisticated intelligence operation that collected and maintained files on Scientology's growing list of enemies. Its guiding principle was attack. Under Mary Sue's leadership (though always, it was understood, with the approval of her husband), the Guardian's Office filed dozens of libel suits against media outlets that had run negative stories about Scientology; gathered intelligence on members of various state, local, and national governments; and launched myriad propaganda campaigns and attacks on psychiatrists and psychiatric organizations.
Hubbard directed his war through written proclamation; his operatives carried it out. On March 26, 1969, for example, the leader issued an order, titled "Zones of Action," instructing his followers to "invade the territory of Smersh" and "purify the mental health field." Several months later, the Guardian's Office, acting on Hubbard's orders, initiated a strategy to take over England's National Association of Mental Health. The plan was fairly simple: Scientologists, seeing that NAMH membership was open to the public, began joining the organization in large numbers—in October 1969, the NAMH, after receiving no more than 10 or 15 membership applications per month, suddenly saw the number jump to 227. By November, there were 302 new members. The organization's annual meeting, in which it elected new leaders, was scheduled for November 12, 1969; suddenly, there came a flurry of nominations from the new members, suggesting eight of their own for positions on the council.
As the British journalist C. H. Rolph pointed out in his 1973 book on the attempted takeover, Believe What You Like, the staff of the NAMH became suspicious when they noticed that all of the new membership applications had been mailed from either East Grinstead or a post office on Tottenham Court Road, the location of Scientology's London Org. Notifying the authorities, the group, just two days before the election, uncovered the scheme, which included a plan to elect the Scientologist David Gaiman, a member of the Guardian's Office, to the position of chairman. The Scientologists were subsequently asked to resign.*
Hubbard was careful to portray psychiatry not just as "barbaric," but also as barbarism endorsed by the state. It was the state that stuck with Jeff—Hubbard rarely attacked psychiatry without linking it in one way or another to Western governments or institutions. This wasn't outrageous; it was simply revolutionary, Jeff thought. But the voice of Scientology became increasingly strident. Psychiatrists were rapists, killers. They were fascists—indeed, psychiatrists were behind Hitler's death camps. The nefarious SMERSH, and its agents throughout the Wog World (including, Hubbard believed, Time magazine, whose purpose, he once wrote, was to "cause riots and disaffection" ), needed to be destroyed. Only they, the Scientologists and L. Ron Hubbard, could do it.
It was within this increasingly combative mentality that Jeff found himself working for Warrant Officer Doreen Casey, who'd come to Pubs, it seemed to him, to reinforce the fact that