Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [58]
But in the opinion of the parents of his young converts, particularly those in the United States (where in a pre-Internet era, news of Scientology's travails in England and Australia traveled slowly, if at all), the eccentric and volatile L. Ron Hubbard was no Peter Pan, but rather a Pied Piper, captivating their children with his idealistic vision of a cleared planet and then spiriting them away into a life of utter dedication to Ron and his mission. From the late 1960s onward, the FBI was flooded with mail from worried parents, urging the bureau to investigate the mysterious and, according to some, "sinister" and "subversive" church that seemed to have taken control of their children. ("I am literally petrified at this point that [my son] has been brainwashed by the 'processing' he has undergone in 'Scientology,'" one anguished father wrote to J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1970s. "I have seen my son's personality deteriorate and become progressively worse to the point where now there seems to be no sanity present.")
Aboard the Apollo, Hubbard urged his crew to write to their families—"If your parents or friends are the kind who worry about you, BE SURE AND WRITE THEM AN AIRMAIL LETTER regularly," he declared on May 2, 1969. "Otherwise they give us [problems] by asking the government to check up on you to see if you're all right."
But finding the Commodore and his crew would prove difficult. The Apollo had been ejected from Greece in 1969, after the Greek government received complaints about Scientologists proselytizing on Corfu. Hubbard and his Sea Org set out to find a new home. In 1971, the Sea Org set up a small land base outside Tangier, using what by now had become their new cover name: the Operation and Transport Corporation. If asked, they were to say that they were employees of an international business-management company.
Just a year later, Hubbard pulled up stakes again, after receiving word that the Church of Scientology in France was about to be indicted for fraud. Fearing he might be extradited from Morocco to Paris to testify, and worried about Morocco's worsening political situation, he decided to skip out of Europe altogether and spent most of the next year in New York City, hiding out from French authorities among its populace of eight million people.
It was Hubbard's first time in the United States since the mid-1960s and, accompanied by a bodyguard and a private nurse, he spent most of the year sequestered in an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, watching TV. "He really wanted to see what was going on in the culture," said his former nurse, Jim Dinalci. "He wasn't very impressed, but he kept the TV on all the time because he wanted to understand the mindset, the buttons he'd have to push to get people into Scientology."
After ten months in New York, Hubbard flew back to Europe. He returned to the Apollo, now anchored off Lisbon, and set sail for the Canary Islands. In Tenerife, in early 1974, Hubbard suffered a motorcycle accident, breaking an arm and several ribs. Convalescing for several months, Hubbard spent most of the time in a red velvet chair, a throne of sorts, with various pillows and foot cushions, screaming at his aides. "The red chair to us became a symbol of the worst a human being can be," one young aide, Doreen Smith, later recalled. "All we wanted to do was chop it up in little pieces and throw it overboard."
In his isolation, Hubbard was coming to resemble the reclusive Howard Hughes. He'd insist that the ship, and any other place he ventured to, be given