Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [90]
Like the old Guardian's Office, OSA handled public-facing activities: legal affairs, public relations, and Scientology's various social betterment programs. It also handled its most secret undertakings and continued to use Scientologists as informants and operatives, as well as employing a cadre of private investigators. It had been OSA that had ruined David Mayo and destroyed his independent Scientology network, using private investigators like Eugene Ingram, who served OSA for many years. The Office of Special Affairs had also created Scientology's Crusade for Religious Freedom as a public relations strategy.
But whereas the Guardian's Office had been an impregnable entity so covert as to not even appear by name on the church's organizational chart, OSA was listed in Scientology's incorporation papers. "Where OSA differs from the Guardian's Office," explained one former Scientologist who was an operative for both intelligence bureaus, "is that OSA wants to seem above board and approachable. That makes Scientology seem more approachable, which, they hope, will help the church operate as a religion freely, without harassment." In service to this goal, OSA made more of an effort to create a legal wall between the church and any covert activities, relying much more on private investigators, and paying a legion of outside attorneys.*
They kept busy. Throughout the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Church of Scientology filed some two hundred lawsuits against the IRS, while more than twenty-three hundred individual Scientologists sued the agency over its refusal to allow them to claim their Scientology contributions as tax deductible. These "cookie-cutter suits," as Rathbun described them, soon became cases that cost Scientology tens of millions of dollars in legal fees—with presumably similar cost to the IRS.
At the same time, the church, long an expert on using the Freedom of Information Act, filed hundreds of requests for internal IRS documents. Some of their findings were published in Freedom, a magazine created by the Office of Special Affairs to shed light on various government agencies and their abuses. In Washington, D.C., OSA deployed Scientology operatives to flock Capitol Hill, attend congressional hearings, and network with Hill staffers. One former OSA official explained that for more than a year, she'd fed congressional aides information on the IRS's handling of groups as divergent as the Amish and owners of small businesses, to shed light on its often prejudicial auditing and investigative practices. "They all knew we were from the church. It was a public relations thing," she said. "We were trying to get people to come forward and show that there were attacks on other members of the public, not just on Scientology."
To further this effort, OSA created, and financed, a grassroots lobbying organization known as the National Coalition of IRS Whistleblowers to support IRS employees who wanted to expose corruption. The coalition was planned through Freedom magazine and hired as its president a former IRS agent named Paul DesFosses. Stacy Young, then the managing editor of Freedom, later told the New York Times that "the whole idea was to create a coalition that was at arm's length from Scientology so that it had more credibility."
By the summer of 1989, these efforts were beginning to pay off. The National Coalition of IRS Whistleblowers helped spark congressional hearings on IRS abuses, based on leaked documents and other records that showed, among other things, that several Los Angeles IRS agents had shielded a California apparel manufacturer from a tax investigation after the agents bought property from the manufacturer. The New York Times, in an op-ed published on July 24, 1989, predicted that the proceedings might be the "most startling Congressional hearings since Watergate."
The hearings did expose significant abuse within the agency. The Church of Scientology, emboldened, began to press for further