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By Root 1123 0

lam. He yearned to go home, though he realized it would entail significant risk. The church had taken the government to court, arguing that the FBI had violated Scientology's Fourth Amendment rights in the raid. It was a complaint that would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which, early in 1978, would refuse to hear the case. Meanwhile, word from La Quinta was that the FBI had Mary Sue and the ranch under constant surveillance. Hubbard's wife had stood by him and loyally refused to implicate him in any of the misdeeds of the Guardian's Office. Hubbard, nonetheless, worried she might still betray him. In Sparks, he tried to distance himself from her. "LRH would say over and over: 'I didn't know about what the GO was doing, right?'" said DeDe Reisdorf. "Pat and Claire and I would look at each other later and wonder if he was trying to convince us or himself. We all knew that Mary Sue ran pretty much everything by him ... maybe not the details of each mission, but up until then, he was very much in the loop on the Guardian's Office stuff."

In December, Hubbard caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Now he felt an even greater urgency to return to the warmth of southern California. But for Hubbard to arrive, Mary Sue and her staff would have to leave. This was upsetting to many of the Messengers, including Gale Reisdorf. "Mary Sue was a wonderful sweet delicate lady, very much of a lady," Gale noted. Having helped to raise many of the Messengers from childhood, she tended to treat them as if they were her children. She made sure they ate and slept, and had days off—something that was unheard of with Hubbard, who often demanded that his Messengers stay up all night.

On January 2, 1978, Hubbard returned to La Quinta. Prior to his arrival, Mary Sue Hubbard had left the ranch in her BMW, moving into a house in the Hollywood Hills, secured for her by the church. After nearly twenty-six years of marriage, she would never live with L. Ron Hubbard again.

For now, Hubbard was in the clear, but elaborate plans were made to protect him in La Quinta. "W" was now a secret hideout. Security guards patrolled the property day and night, scouting for FBI agents, journalists, or other curious parties. Scientology books, tapes, and paraphernalia were kept strictly out of view, so as to maintain the cover story that the ranch was simply a movie studio. His young Messengers, staff, and crew were instructed to adopt "civilian" clothes—most wore jeans, T-shirts, and shorts—and when applying for driver's licenses or other identification, doctored their social security numbers and used "safe addresses," which had been arranged for them by the Guardian's Office so as not to reveal their actual residence. They were also designated aliases, which they were instructed to use even among themselves.

"My name was Steve something or other, and I had an ID saying I was from La Jolla," said Sinar Parman, a Los Angeles–based Scientologist who joined the Sea Org in 1977. A chef by training, he was sent to Rifle in June 1978 to work as Hubbard's cook. Though it was only two and a half hours from Los Angeles, getting to La Quinta took almost two days, he recalled. "First, I was dropped off at a motel on Sunset Boulevard. The next day, someone picked me up and took me to a shopping center in the Valley. There, this other guy met me and drove me out to the desert." The driver took the longest and most circuitous way possible, he recalled, so as to shake anyone who might be following them. Finally they arrived at the gates of "W," where a teenage girl dressed in hot pants came out to greet Parman. "Welcome aboard," she said. "The Commodore welcomes you." Then she took him to the kitchen.

Hubbard by now had grown tremendously finicky and at times believed his cooks were trying to poison him. Suffering from ulcers and high blood pressure, among other ailments, he ate only bland food, banning onions, leeks, and garlic from his table. Some cooks prepared several meals at once for "The Boss." Frequently, he rejected a dish immediately upon tasting it. "Things