L. RON HUBBARD Messiah or Madman ?
Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. a.k.a. Ronald DeWolf
Note
Note
No human being exists who was close to L. Ron Hubbard throughout his entire adult life.
Ronald DeWolf aka L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., Hubbard's oldest son who co-authored this book
is among the few living who spent a substantial stretch of time with him. Mary Sue
Hubbard (Hubbard's third wife) is another, but she is not talking. During the critical
formative years of Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), Hubbard was married to
Sara Northrup, his second wife.
An intelligent, literate and credible woman, Sara spoke with Bent Corydon shortly before
the publication of this book. It was an exclusive interview. Fearing for the safety of her
daughter, she had said nothing publicly for thirty-five years regarding her former
husband. She agreed to speak to Corydon because Hubbard had died, lessening the
threat, and because of her confidence in her attorney, who encouraged the interview.
Ron Jr. left the organization and his father in December 1959. Bent Corydon joined
Scientology in 1961. Corydon was a member of the Church of Scientology for some 22
years and became one of the most successful "mission holders" (a non-profit Church
"franchise" holder), building up the worlds largest single Scientology mission in
Riverside, California, and also another in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Riverside mission
occupied a forty thousand square foot building and, at its peak, had 180 full-time staff.
During this time he made many close friends, some of whom held high positions in the
Church where they spent thousands of hours working personally with Hubbard.
In 1976 Hubbard secretly moved to Riverside County, near Corydon's mission, setting
off a maelstrom of events which eventually swept Corydon and others towards a
confrontation with Hubbard; events which helped expose a great many of his secrets to
view. This combination of people and events has finally made the telling of this amazing
story possible.
Preface
In 1979 Omar Garrison, a professional writer who had previously written three books at
the request of L. Ron Hubbard's agents, was commissioned by him to write Hubbard's
biography. He was given access to thousands of private documents, many of which
Hubbard erroneously believed no longer existed. Garrison spent 18 months poring over
them and interviewing people from Hubbard's past. As he gained more and more
information, he came to a decision that he could not, in good conscience, write the "PR"
biography that had been intended.
In early 1984, disgusted by the entire affair and realizing he could not prevail over the
inevitable harassment and legal/financial obstacle course awaiting him, Garrison
accepted a large cash sum from Hubbard's agents not to write the biography which he
was then planning. This one would have given what was, in his own estimation, a
truthful account of Hubbard's life.
Garrison's efforts to bring out the truth turned out not to have been in vain. The
majority of the documents and information, on which he was to have based his
biography, were revealed in a trial in a Los Angeles courtroom in mid-1984. Gerry
Armstrong, who assisted Garrison by locating thousands of Hubbard documents, and
who was the subject of this trial, was consulted extensively.
These revelations backed up many of the stories told to me by Hubbard's first son, Ron
Jr.
In 1970 Paulette Cooper wrote, and had published, a book called The Scandal of
Scientology containing some biographical matter on Hubbard. She was hounded by
Church of Scientology agents for a decade and at one period was almost convicted on
Federal felony charges, having been framed by Church agents.
Recently, after the Church discovered that the book you are reading was being written, a
roughly six foot four inch, 250 lb. man in black leather jacket and gloves arrived at my
workplace asking for me. Failing to locate me, he told one of my assistants, "Since
Corydon is not here, you'll do." He then yelled, "You are standing in the way of Ron's
bridge!" and proceeded to punch him in the face and knock him around.
Obscene and threatening phone calls to my home became common place, often
occurring while I was out and directed at my wife, telling her, "We know you're alone."
L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. was contracted as co-author of this book and co-operated for more
than half of its writing, providing information. He was then offered an undisclosed
amount of money by Church of Scientology representatives to settle his claim against
his father's estate. There was, however, also a requirement that he must cease any
assistance on the book and remove his name from it.
He signed papers to that effect. Lyle Stuart, the publisher, having in hand a prior signed
contract, decided to go ahead regardless. The settlement ended a 26-year ordeal
imposed upon him by his father. Less than a year after Ron Jr. left his father's
organization in 1959, he was talking openly about his experiences. This was when his
father wrote an official Church policy stating:
If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always
find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace.
(Emphasis added)
In 1972, Ron Jr. had signed a letter saying, in effect, that statements he had made
about his father were false. He later claimed he did so after much harassment.
Whenever Ron Jr. has spoken publicly since then, the Church has trotted out his "signed
retraction."
Unfortunately for the Church, many other documents have surfaced in court that have
backed up the majority of what Hubbard's son had been saying. And nothing he has said
about his father has, to my knowledge, been disproven.
During my visits to his home in Carson City, Nevada, I found Ron Hubbard, Jr. a gentle
man who showed enormous affection for his wife and now grown children. He claimed
that the well-being of his then young family was the chief consideration in signing this
specious document.
*The "bridge" which would "Lead Man to a higher plateau of happiness and ability."
I felt this had a ring of truth. Especially when added to what I knew of the sinister ability
of Hubbard's agents to "persuade" others into complying with his intentions.
Ron Jr. is a diabetic. During the six months prior to his '86 settlement he had had part of
his foot amputated and hovered near death for three days during a subsequent
operation on his abdomen. These events, besides causing physical and emotional
trauma, had left him in a financially devastated condition.
Nevertheless, though Ron Jr.'s lips were being sealed, he refused, this time, to sign any
affidavit disclaiming his prior statements. Concurrent with "the Church making peace"
with Hubbard's eldest son, a woman now in her mid-thirties with red hair and
unmistakable features distinguishing her as a Hubbard whose first name is Alexis, was
paid a sum of money to settle her claim to part of Hubbard's estate.
She refused, however, to sign a document presented to her as part of the agreement by
Church of Scientology representatives. It spelled out a bizarre claim that L. Ron Hubbard
Junior is her real father. (The probate case being settled was based on the fact that the
deceased L. Ron Hubbard Senior is her real father. His name is on her birth certificate.)
This attempt to get L. Ron Hubbard's daughter by his second marriage to attest that
Hubbard's son is her real father was the latest in a long series of often shockingly
successful cover-ups.
_______________________
Who was Hubbard? What are the many secrets he worked (and now his Church works)
so hard to keep concealed ?
The story of L. Ron Hubbard is a study of the bizarre. The more one knows about him,
the more one feels he should have been impossible. It just could not happen. But there
he was: A chain-smoking enigmatic bundle of contradictions.
Ron Jr. and his stepmother for five years, Sara Northrup Hubbard, were witness to a
very different man from the one known to Scientology's zealous followers. Indeed they
probably know him better than anyone.
They had stepped inside a very private and secret universe and stepped out again. They
had entered the magic circle and escaped. And lived to talk about it. But barely.
Introduction
"Mankind Has No Better Friend"
"Best-selling author, Founder of Scientology, friend to millions," proclaims the headline
of a full-page paid announcement in the Los Angeles Times and other major newspapers
across the planet. Under a photograph of the Founder the text continues:
L. Ron Hubbard... a man whose tremendous contributions to virtually all walks of life
have made him the greatest humanitarian in history.
Indeed, few men have achieved so much in so many different fields. Author,
philosopher, educator, research pioneer, musician, photographer, cinematographer,
horticulturalist, navigator, explorer and humanitarian Mr. Hubbard has been widely
recognized for his contributions in all of these fields...
Presented are many eulogies, including :
"My only sorrow is that L. Ron Hubbard left before I could thank him for my new life."
Sonny Bono.
"Dynamic, dramatic, dynamatic this was the red-headed ball of fire I first met in 1937.
Ten years later I became his agent. He gave the world of science fiction and fantasy two
acknowledged masterpieces: Final Blackout and Fear. In both the literary world and the
mundane he left a mark on humankind that will be felt in the 21st century, a century
about which he frequently wrote and which in 'real' life he attempted to influence for the
better. I see him now, blazing away on that Typewriter in the Sky."
FORREST J. ACKERMAN,
Renowned Science Fiction
Agent and Author.
"L. Ron Hubbard set a star-high goal for us. He documented it with pure science. He
taught it with pure love. He's left nothing but pure inspiration."
CHICK COREA, award-winning
Jazz Composer and Musician.
A subsequent glossy memorial booklet was included as a supplement in issues of the Los
Angeles Times and New York Times.
____________________
A few days prior to the first advertised collection of eulogies...
27 January 1986 :
Scientology Churches and Missions all over the planet are ordered by International
Management to close their doors. Their staff and public are instructed to proceed to
specified locations where they will view a special event broadcast via satellite. Those
Scientologists from the Los Angeles area are told to proceed directly to the Hollywood
Palladium. The event is to start at seven P.M. sharp. Every seat is filled well before then.
Large speakers above the stage blast forth stirring music. The stage is decorated with
giant Scientology symbols and huge photographs of the Founder. The music and setting
have an obvious impact on the audience, representing the reach of Scientologists for
ultimate spiritual freedom and ability.
As the music reaches its finale, 24-year-old "Commander" David Miscavige appears. He
is a tiny man and his slim frame cuts a small figure on the large stage. Wearing a dress
naval uniform of the elite Sea Organization, he is resplendent with gold braid and
shoulder lanyard. Miscavige, the de facto third most powerful executive of the Church of
Scientology now that Hubbard is gone, begins to speak. (None of the people in the
audience is yet aware that Hubbard is dead).
MISCAVIGE:
I've very happy that you could all make it to this important briefing this evening.
In 1980 LRH moved off the lines so that he could continue his writings and research
without any distractions. For many years Ron had said that if he was given the time, and
if others wore their hats* and did their jobs in expanding the Church, he would be able
to concentrate on and complete all of his researches into the upper OT** levels, so that
the bridge*** would be laid out in full for all of us.
* Did their jobs.
** Operating Thetan. A spiritual being restored to his "native state" of godlike
abilities.
*** A gradient series of steps leading, supposedly, to O.T.
Over the past six years LRH has been intensively researching the upper bands of OT...
Approximately two weeks ago, he completed all of his researches he set out to do. The
crowd, awed and delighted, responds with oohs and aahs and abundant applause.
Commander Miscavige continues :
He has now moved on to the next level of OT research. It's a level beyond anything any
of us ever imagined.
This level is in fact done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior
from the body. At this level of OT, the body is nothing more than in impediment and
encumbrance to any further gain as an OT.
Thus at 2000 hours, the 24th of January, AD36, L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he
had used in this life time for 74 years 10 months and 11 days.
... He thought it was important that Scientologists be the first to become aware of this
fact.
... The body is a physical object. It is not the being himself. The being we know as L.
Ron Hubbard still exists; however, the body could no longer serve his purposes. His
decision was made at complete cause... He has simply moved on to his next step.
... LRH, in fact, used this lifetime in the body we knew, to accomplish what no man has
ever accomplished. He unlocked the mysteries of life, and gave us the tools so we could
free ourselves and our fellow man. L. Ron Hubbard completed everything he set out to
do and more. The fact that he causatively, willingly discarded the body, after it was no
longer useful to him, signifies his ultimate success: the conquest of life that he
embarked upon half a century ago.
After Dianetics (Hubbard's book Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health was
published in 1950).
Miscavige begins to clap, slowly almost mechanically. His ever-present fierce stare
becoming even more intense. The packed Palladium bursts into applause during which
the crowd is led in a series of Hip-hip hoorays! The applause lasts for some twenty
minutes until Miscavige finally stops, permitting the rest to do the same. Commander
David Miscavige is obviously pleased and, perhaps, a little relieved.
Miscavige introduces Earle Cooley, Boston lawyer and recently proclaimed
"Scientologist." He is a large man with a face reminiscent of a well-fed, aging Irish
boxer. Cooley announces that he has seen to the execution of the wishes expressed by
Hubbard in his will; that he has contacted the coroner's office and the funeral parlor, and
that the body was cremated the next day at three P.M. (less than 24 hours after his
death).
COOLEY:
There are several very important matters that I wish to bring to your attention.
First, the body of L. Ron Hubbard was sound and strong and fully capable of serving this
Mighty Thetan [Scientology word for Spiritual Being] for many years, had that suited his
purpose.
... Thus, by the decision to continue his work outside the confines of his body, and by
the decision to do it now, L. Ron Hubbard has given the ultimate expression of his love
for you.
He has, in effect, told us the Church is in good hands: "You can do it all. Your future is
assured. Secure in this knowledge I go about my work elsewhere. You have all of the
tools. You have all of the resources to take this planet and to save Mankind.
"Support and rally behind your leaders. Together you will win the total victory and
achieve the ultimate goals of Scientology. Take what I have given you with my love."
__________________
In 1949 a broke middle-aged science fiction writer authored a book which became a best
seller : Dianetics, the Modem Science of Mental Health. Mail arrived at his doorstep by
the sackload, and the money rolled in.
In 1952 that author, L. Ron Hubbard, unveiled a more spiritually oriented subject,
Scientology.
One year later, he founded the Church of Scientology, using his Dianetic following as a
base. Over the years it grew, becoming a multi-million dollar operation.
The Encyclopedia Britannica 1972 Yearbook states: "According to a study by Peter
Kowley [author of] New Gods in America... largest of the new religions is Scientology."
Werner Erhard, of EST fame, called L. Ron Hubbard the "greatest philosopher of the
twentieth Century."
Researchers in the field of para-psychology at Stanford Research Institute went so far as
to have many of the various Scientology counseling techniques applied to themselves.
For over a quarter of a century Hubbard lectured to audiences all over the world. He was
exciting, witty, charming and brilliant. Celebrities arrived seeking enlightenment. John
Travolta, Karen Black, Chick Corea, Stephen Boyd, Gloria Swanson, William Burroughs... the list goes on...
There are even those who claim to have witnessed him change his body's size, read
minds, move objects telekinetically, or zoom up ladders defying gravity ...
To his followers he is the reincarnation of the Buddha: The much-prophesied Messiah
awaited by untold millions in the Far East and throughout the world. The Meitreya; "He
whose name is kindness"; the one with the golden hair. It had been prophesied he
would appear in the West, some two and a half thousand years after Buddha's death.
Wrote Hubbard:
Everywhere you are
I can be addressed
But in your temples best
Address me and you address
Lord Buddha
Address Lord Buddha
And you then address
Maitreya.
PART I
(1967-1984)
THE ADVENTURES OF
THE COMMODORE
1.
A Seafaring Messiah with a
"Mission to Save the Planet"
In the fifties, when L. Ron Hubbard established himself as the "lighthearted" leader of
what was presented as an anti-authoritarian "scientific religion," it never occurred to
anyone that he would, eventually, become the Commodore of his own private navy, and
absolute dictator of an enormous authoritarian bureaucracy.
Scientology was a roaring financial success in the sixties, and purchasing a ship was well
within his means. So, late in 1966, he bought a yacht and two ships in England, and
another ship for crew training purposes in the States: a small flotilla. The largest of
these was the 342-foot ship Royal Scotsman (later renamed the Apollo), which had been
used, during the Second World War, as transport for Winston Churchill.
These years, and into the late seventies, marked the peak of Hubbard's drama, and are
noteworthy for, among other things, his defiance of the powers that be including the
United States government.
It was during this time that the bulk of the Church's assets (said by Church President
Heber Jenzsch to be a billion dollars) were accumulated, and during which he built the
Sea Organization. It was also during this period that Scientology completed its transition
into a militant cult; a transition that took a decade and a half. Hubbard did all this while
claiming that he had resigned from the Church management in 1966 (an announcement
which was carried by most of the major media at the time). He was merely a writer in
seclusion, he said.
But as "Commodore" of the "Sea Org," he remained in control of the movement.
____________________
In the 1960s Scientology boomed. On five continents students of Scientology studied
intently in "academies" at their "local Churches." People arrived in droves to take
courses. Counseling techniques-directed toward resolving such things as learning
disabilities, psychosomatic ills, unwanted fears and compulsions, drug and alcohol
dependency, communication problems, upsets in life, and many other areas were
studied, practiced and applied. At L. Ron Hubbard's home, a large Georgian manor on a
40-acre estate in the rolling green countryside of Sussex, England, hundreds of eager
students were attending the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.
This course featured live lectures by L. Ron Hubbard until his departure in December
1966, when he began his "Sea Project." By this time there were also two other
"advanced organizations" where "upper level" counseling and training were done (in
Scotland, soon to be moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and in Los Angeles).
______________________
I had become involved in Scientology at the age of 19 in 1961, having been impressed
with Hubbard's books and the theory and practice of Scientology's counseling methods.
"Man is basically good," Hubbard had explained. And now with a truly workable science
of the mind and spirit, that basic goodness could be freed of aberrations the dark
impulses, pain, and confusions that had enveloped it.
Punishment and duress were now no longer necessary to maintain order and so allow
society to operate. Besides, punishment "didn't work," and was only a short-term
solution, making matters worse in the long run. With the know-how contained in
Scientology, Hubbard explained, Mankind could finally attain to a high level of
rationality. Mutual understanding and freedom were now possible.
"Ron," as we referred to him (he had encouraged us to feel that he was our personal
friend), had spoken to us in books and on tape about our unrealized mental and spiritual
abilities, of the state of "clear, " where an individual is not held down by negative or
traumatic experiences of the past, is fully alive in the "here and now," able to enjoy life
fully. A "clear" would operate at full mental capacity, and have the ability to recall
anything that has ever happened to him. He would be free of psychosomatic ills. These
ills, Hubbard had asserted, comprise 75 percent of all man's ailments. We, like most
Scientologists, believed we were on our way to creating a new civilization a truly sane
planet. Personal "success stories" abounded. Anyone listening to these stories and
watching the faces of the people could not but be impressed with their personal gains
and genuine enthusiasm. "Scientology Works" was the message.
Hubbard had told Scientologists to be great. Greatness meant that one continued to love
others despite all invitations to hate. He had said that the essential self, the soul or
"thetan," never dies; but simply "drops" one body and then goes off in search of
another, to be born once more and start another round.
He had, we believed, mapped out and "built a bridge" (a system of counseling
techniques that progressively get more advanced) which would increase a person's
awareness of himself and others, and increase his abilities even beyond "clear" to where
one could move around, perceive, manipulate objects and communicate without need of
a body. One would then be able to leave his body and, as a spirit, go off to smell the sea
breezes or soar among the mountain tops. This was called the state of "OT," meaning
"operating thetan."
The spirit of "thetan" could return to its "native state," a state wherein compulsive and
artificial reliance on a body has been overcome.
Hubbard was fond of relating the aims of Scientology, as it applies to the individual, to
the Buddhist goal of freeing oneself from the continuing cycle of birth and death.
At the highest state of "OT" one would have "Total Freedom. " This state was defined as
"the ability to be at cause knowingly and at will over thought, life, form, matter, energy,
space and time, subjective and objective."
The discoveries that would enable people to ultimately achieve this, he said, had come
partly from his study of nuclear physics, a subject he claimed to know a lot about, since
he "had attended the first class in nuclear phenomena taught at George Washington
University." A book by him called All About Radiation introduced him as a nuclear
physicist and an engineer; so, to many, he appeared to speak with considerable
authority.
His claimed credentials made him credible to a generation taught to admire the wonders
of modern science.
Besides, he had stressed that no one needed to believe what he said; they should check
it out for themselves. "What is true for you is what you have observed for yourself.
Nothing in Dianetics and Scientology is true for you unless you have observed it." This
principle came from Buddhism, another subject he apparently knew a lot about. He had,
he said, traveled extensively in the Far East and had drunk deeply of the wisdom
contained in the lamaseries and other centers of wisdom there. And although not much
publicized to outsiders Scientologists knew him as the reincarnation of the Buddha himself.
______________________
Mary, my wife, and I had arrived in England from New Zealand in August of 1967. We
had mortgaged our home and had hoped to meet Ron at his home, Saint Hill Manor. All
this to discover that, months earlier, he had left for places unknown, and was embarking
on the Sea Project. This was promoted as an all-out project to "Clear the Planet." The
Sea Project soon became the "Sea Organization."
To qualify for Hubbard's elite Sea Organization, referred to as the "Sea Org," recruits
were (and still are) required to sign a billion-year contract. Most of them fully expected
to serve the full billion years; after all, a thetan (spirit) never dies and, after the
inhabitants of this planet had achieved the state of clear, there would be other planets
out there in the universe that also needed to be "cleared."
There were wonderful, late-night conversations about the Space Org. This would be set
up after Earth had been made a "Scientology Planet." Artists painted space ships soaring
through the universe, with the Sea Org emblem on their bows. These paintings were
reproduced on the walls of the Scientology organizations throughout the world.
Many of these "orgs" had Hubbard's bronze bust in their front lobbies. His pictures were
everywhere: classrooms, halls, and offices. Per policy, an office was also set up for him,
usually impeccably decorated and furnished and awaiting his chance visit, even in orgs
that were desperately short of floorspace.
_____________________
After 1967, the hub around which all Scientology revolved was the flagship Apollo, an
immaculately scrubbed white ship cruising majestically through the blue waters of the
Mediterranean Sea. Here lived and worked the elite of Scientology in what was billed as
the sanest and safest space on earth. Here also worked L. Ron Hubbard, in a plush oak panelled office. He was in touch with all Scientology activities around the world by a
modern telex system that rivalled those of major corporations.
Of the 300 to 400 crew members, some 20 worked long hours just manning the telexes
and other communications systems between Hubbard and his world-wide organizations.
_______________________
The four-year-old boy could no longer cry. He had been nearly 40 hours in the chain
locker of the flagship Apollo and his entire body was aching from his efforts to chip off
rust. His knees and hands were raw with cuts and bruises. His voice was raspy from
crying, and he was desperately afraid. He was constantly making resolutions to never,
never again eat the Commodore's telexes the most recent crime of which he had been
accused.
Little Tony had entered the chain locker through the tiny manhole that led to it. The
metallic sound as the lid slammed shut sounded final somehow. The space was cramped
for even his small body, and he was enveloped by darkness. It was wet in there and
very, very scary. The chains of the ship's anchor took on the dimensions of a monster.
At one point a rat scuttled by him squealing. He was sure he was going to die.
The thin strips of yellow paper coming from the telex machines, like streamers of
birthday party confetti, had been just too tempting. It had been so boring and serious,
with everyone working constantly; but these strips of paper seemed to be enticing Tony
to play. He put them in his mouth and pretended they tasted sweet, like chewing gum.
The Commodore had been outraged, and just the fact that this person had a young body
was in no way going to prevent him from administering the appropriate penalty.
Little Tony was "out ethics," a "down stat" (someone who didn't produce adequately for
the group or who produced bad products and, thus, had "down statistics")
In 1965 Hubbard had redefined the term "ethics." Being "ethical" now meant,
essentially, being "upstat." "We award production and up statistics and penalize non production and down statistics. Always," wrote Hubbard, "reward the up statistic and
penalize the down... " (In Scientology a "down stat" has no rights.)
According to their statistic each individual was assigned an "ethics condition." Those
assigned a low "condition" (below "normal") had to work their way up through all those
above. These conditions are from the highest to the lowest :
Power Affluence Normal Operation Emergency Danger Non-Existance Liability Doubt
Enemy Treason Confusion With the advent of the Sea Org era, Hubbard further
redefined the term "ethics." Having one's "ethics in," for all intents and purposes, now
equated to aiding or obeying HIS intentions; and removing any distractions and
opposition to those intentions.
"The purpose of ethics," Hubbard wrote in 1968, "is to remove counter intentions from
the environment. And having accomplished that the purpose becomes to remove other
intentionedness from the environment." ("Intentionedness" is another bit of
Scientologese hopefully never to be incorporated into the English language.) In the
fifties, Hubbard had defined "ethics" or "being ethical.' as "rationality toward the highest
level of survival for the individual, the future race, the group, and Mankind. " In the eyes
of a good Sea Org member there was no problem in harmonizing both definitions.
Hubbard was, after all, the infallible Messiah, here to save Mankind. Any command he
gave was thus to be unquestionably obeyed. "Command Intention !"
This was Org-speak for "what Ron wants." Command Intention was expected to be uppermost in the minds of all loyal staff members, indeed all Scientologists.
The chain locker was dangerous. Located at the very bow of the ship under the waterline. It was the place where the section of the chain not in the water was stored. When the entire chain was brought up it filled most of this comparatively small, wet, dark, and sometimes rat-infested locker.
The only thing that was holding the chain in the locker was what is called a devil's claw, which was located well above the locker on the deck of the ship. If someone were to kick the claw, the entire chain would be pulled at high speed out of the locker by the weight of the anchor, and anyone down in the locker could very easily get caught in the outgoing chain and be yanked to his death.
One crew member told of the devil's claw being loosened by accident while he was in the chain locker. He expressed his terror at coming so close to dying. The chain "came alive" and gyrated around as it was being pulled out at high speed while he crouched, frozen by fear, as tightly as he could against the side of the locker. By some miracle he was unhurt.
Sometimes children would peer down into the chain locker where some other child had been assigned and teasingly threaten, "We're going to kick the devil's claw !" Tony's mother had left him in the care of another Sea Org woman while she was gone on a "mission" to "raise the stats" of an ailing land organization. When she returned she was shocked to discover that her son had been placed in the chain locker.
She was "handled," however, with explanations about how "out ethics" and "down stat" Tony had been. "He is really a very old thetan [spirit] with a young body," she was told. "He should not be permitted to use that young body to stir up sympathy. " (Interviewed in 1986, five years after leaving the Church, she expressed bewilderment as to how she could have accepted such explanations.) Prominent ex-Scientologist John McMaster, the "World's First Real Clear," was a major factor in the huge financial success of Scientology during the sixties. According to McMaster:
Hubbard had ordered a little girl who was a deaf mute down into the chain locker sometime in 1968. Hubbard was going to cure her deafness by shoving her down there! This came to my attention after she'd been there for about a week because the Master at Arms at the time, a beautiful girl, came to me and said, "John, I've got to have you come and see what's going on." I had just come back from a world tour promoting Scientology. And I said, "What is it" And she told me about this little girl. Her parents were from London. Her father and mother had separated, and the mother had brought three or four of her children onto the ship. I went down there and released her out of it. I pulled out the door pegs that were put down to make sure this poor little thing couldn't get out.
Then I went to Hubbard and said, "What the hell are you doing?" And he said, "John, what the hell are you talking about?" And I said, "What are you really doing!" I was screaming at him. And he said, "Oh God, release her. I didn't know she was in there "
Shortly thereafter, McMaster was made a galley hand and subjected to extreme physical labor, lack of sleep, and other hardships. "Hubbard wanted to break me," he said.
After he resigned from the Church of Scientology in late 1969, he was officially "declared" a "suppressive person" or "S.P." (evil psychotic) by Hubbard.
Talking about the inception of "heavy ethics" into the world of Scientology, John Ausley (a feisty Floridian who joined the Sea Org in 1968 and quickly rose to a top position) says :
John McMaster seriously bottom lined on the chain locker. Kids would get locked up in there. To John's mind you don't take a four-year-old and put him down in a hatch, and batten the hatch so he can't get out. You don't terrorize a kid..
Hubbard used a "shotgun" (right-hand mall who did his bidding) called Otto Roos. Otto and McMaster were very different ... There was a dude who had been slowly working out of "doubt." He was a mellow, friendly, shy guy. This was 1968.
You had to do 48 hours of non-stop amends in "doubt," at which point you were upgraded to "liability." Then you'd have to do another 24 hours of non-stop amends. I'm talking about hard physical labor at which point you're upgraded to... non-existence." You then have to do 12 more hours: with people all over your physical ass and your mental faculties. And as the person winds down, he becomes more and more vulnerable. So it's a wild trip.
Anyway this was a kid who stuttered. Otto didn't like him. I think he was about up to "non-existence" where he couldn't take it any more. So he went to bed after three days. This isn't a guy's average going to bed; when you hit horizontal you go out like a light ! Along about the second or third day, if you didn't continue in steady physical motion, you pass out on your feet.
Anyway, Otto grabbed this kid out of an upper bunk in the middle of a deep sleep, and body slammed him from five or six feet onto the floor. He put a knife blade to his throat and started screaming he was gonna kill him since he was a "down stat"!
Otto seriously freaked this kid out for life right there. I mean it didn't help his stuttering at all ! Some maniac with "upstat" braid, who is Hubbard's right-hand shotgun, is going to slit your throat for being a "downstat" and all this instantly after having already been body slammed from six feet up in the middle of a dead sleep.
Otto Roos wrote about his experiences in 1984 when no longer a member of the Church:
I believe I was the only one who would just walk into LRH's office with information when I was not able to get through to him any other way.
At times he called me into his office and even his bedroom to talk. This was when he wanted to sort something out, and needed someone to talk to. This went on all night sometimes, and I would just listen and acknowledge. He always thanked me very graciously. "Thank you for listening Otto," and, unless upset, he was extremely courteous. Otto Roos gave some of the rationalization behind the position he held and the way he had conducted himself :
Having myself experienced the atrocities of war, unlike many of my friends, I swore I wasn't going down into those rusty old tanks, for up to a week without sleep, chipping rust, while Masters at Arms checked outside to ensure the chipping didn't stop. This was too much like the concentration camps from my childhood days.
I determined that I would not also go through anything like one of our "S.P.s" [John O'Keefe], who had a fear of heights and had to be virtually winched up to the crow's nest (a little bucket at the top of the mast, too small to sit or lie in). This ritual, of winching him up and down from there, was repeated every alternative four hours for some 84 hours.
It must seem incredible that anyone would put up with such treatment. John O'Keefe, whose experience while aboard is very briefly glimpsed in Chapter 4, is still a loyal Church member. Prior to his joining the Sea Org, while at Saint Hill in England in 1966, a poem of his appeared in Advance!, an official Scientology magazine. It focused on the "wins" he was having in his counseling :
And as the world outside
Unheeding blindly reels along
I clear away the chains
Upon my being As men
have dreamed of doing
Through unrecorded time
And each night I grow
In understanding And potential
And soon now The job
will all be done
And I will fly
Higher and brighter
Than any bird or sun.
John O'Keefe could never have guessed the form in which he was destined to "fly higher."
Otto Roos continues :
This severe discipline started in earnest in September of 1967 when the condition of non-existence was accompanied by the penalty of no right to food. Hay Thacker [a woman in her fifties, at the time] was the first to have this condition assigned. Huddled in a corner, she was avoided by all, in compliance with the order. Occasionally she was thrown a crust of bread.
JOHN AUSLEY:
Hubbard had this big muster. We all lined up by division and stood at attention while he talked and his messengers recorded it all on tape. He made everyone stand at attention while he talked. He was running a General Patton flow rather than an enlightenment flow.
I leaned out of line and just stared at him. And he was this physical predator: like, "I'm making all these people stand at attention and I'm proud of it."
He was using the idea that the world was about to blow up, and he had the only solution, as a recruiting method for slave labor.
In the early 1970s, Hubbard began surrounding himself with nubile teenage girls. These became his "messengers."
These young people had received no other education, since coming aboard, than their Sea Organization training, and had no real experience of anything outside of the world of the ship and Scientology. Hubbard seemed to trust his teenage messengers more than he did anyone. He was, however, also served by the teenagers' parents, as well as teachers, laborers, architects, doctors, lawyers and businessmen. These people also endured the rigors of Sea Org discipline, and they served him along with the youngsters, for room and board and a pittance of pocket money.
Tonja Burden, a 13-year-old daughter of Sea Org parents, who had proudly sent her to the Apollo to work for Ron (while they remained at a Sea Org installation in Los Angeles), was a Commodore's messenger in training. She claims that she saw people placed in the chain lockers on a number of occasions at the direct orders of Hubbard. Tonja wrote, in a legal affidavit, years after leaving the Sea Org :
I saw one boy held in there for thirty nights crying and begging to be released. He was only allowed out to clean the bilges, where the sewerage and refuse of the ship collected.
Tonja joined the ship in 1974. "She was about thirteen or fourteen," says Hana Eltringham, who was a top Scientology Executive working with Hubbard since before the inception of the Sea Org.
HANA (ELTRINGHAM) WHITFIELD:
Tonya was a little kid; a little blond-haired, child-faced girl. She joined the ship with the idea of becoming a Commodore's messenger. The main Commodore's Messenger duties at the time were to walk around with LRH, carry his ashtray and light his cigarettes (LRH smoked three to four packs of filterless Kools a day), and carry messages for him and bring answers back to him.
The messengers were extremely competitive, I mean they would vie for his attention.
The "qualified" messengers wore little white boots up to their knees with high heels on them. They had short mini-skirts with close to bikini halter tops tied in a knot between their breasts. Tonja was a "trainee," so, for most of the time that I saw her in '74 '75, she was in a subordinate position. (She had not yet achieved messenger status.)
She was either washing his clothes or ironing them as well as doing the other messengers' clothes. She did his household work. Other times I saw her working in the galley (possibly for punishment). She was up to her elbows in soap suds in one of those washing troughs. Perspiration was just dripping and her blond hair was plastered down to her scalp. She was looking very flushed and hot, with all these pans and things around; just a very unhappy face !
She slept below decks with the other trainees in conditions that were not good at all. You see, the Apollo was all metal. The areas that we mainly sailed in '73 '75, which was Portugal and Spain, then across the Atlantic into the Caribbean, are near equatorial and so are very hot and humid. In the summer time (and in the winter time to only a slightly lesser degree), where the sun is beating on the ship's metal decks and hull, the areas below decks get absolutely unbearable. I can only liken it to some of those metal punishment tanks and boxes that the prisoners of war were put into like the Japanese. That's what it was like.
So Tonya lived below decks ill a dorm, with maybe 12 to 16 people. And those dorms below decks smelled bad of body odor. No matter how much we cleaned, they stank. A more complete story of Tonja Burden is told in Chapter 10.
The more "productive" or "up-stat" crew members would be rewarded with one day off every two weeks, and counseling (usually called "auditing," derived from the Latin word "audire," meaning "to hear or listen"). This auditing often took on the aura of a Catholic confessional. However, in this case, the "sins" were searched out with the help of an "EMeter" (short for "electrometer"), which is an electronic measuring device with a dial and a needle, thoughts a person has which he feels uncomfortable that reacts to pictures that he flinches from looking at. 'ie about, or mental The E-Meter is functionally similar to what most people think of as a lie detector, and is a variation of the psychogalvanometer, long used by psychologists. It is a small portable instrument, some 13 inches by 10 inches by about 2 inches deep. A pair of electrical wires and two ordinary soup cans extend from it. These cans are held loosely in the hands and act as electrodes.
Everything of note that a person says while on this meter is written down by the auditor. Thoughts of the most intimate nature are recorded on paper; and the folder, containing all this material, is sent to a "case supervisor," for study and further instructions as to the next areas to be probed by the auditor.
On the ship the case supervisor was often Hubbard himself. Thus he knew his crew in a way that even their mothers and fathers had never known them.
This situation could obviously give him enormous power over the minds of those receiving the auditing. His motives were rarely under suspicion of course; but if suspicion were ever to arise, it would be quickly "cleaned up" with an "ethics handling. " (In this case a talking to in the first instance, and sterner measures as required.)
The practice of "handling down stats" by placing them in the chain locker, of hard physical labor used as punishment, of sleep deprivation, of throwing them overboard while the ship was at dock, and the other novel "ethics handlings" continued while the Commodore, and therefore most of the crew, turned his attention to more important matters. There was, after all, "a planet to take."
"The planet is ours!" Hubbard had proclaimed.
"A Scientology planet!" was the rallying cry.
Just as Hubbard had put "ethics in" on the "down stats" aboard the Apollo, so "ethics" had to be "put in" on Earth itself. "Ethics" had to be "put in" so that "tech" could then be "put in."
The "tech" was contained in Hubbard's voluminous writings and numerous taped lectures, and included the counseling or "auditing" techniques that he claimed would bring about the ideal state for an individual, and eventually for mankind as a whole.
The 300 to 400 on board, and the multitude of his adherents around the world, believed Hubbard when he claimed that he had, by himself, researched and written the "technology"; a task "comparable to the discovery of fire and greater than the invention of the wheel." To them he was not just the Commodore, he was Source !'
Hubbard had emphasized repeatedly that the technology had to be kept "100 percent standard," meaning that it was to be done exactly as he intended it be done. Anything considered to fall short of this standard, was called "out tech. " This applied both to the auditing tech and what he called "Admin Tech" administrative technology used to manage his organizations.
*A capital "S" is used when referring to Hubbard as source, in the same manner as a capital "G" is used for God.
In 1972 he decided that the Scientology organizations around the world were to be shocked out of what he considered their lethargic state. (They weren't producing enough income.) They therefore must have "out tech and out admin" (i.e., be violating his rules of auditing and administration).
He had been trying to make enough money for him to buy or influence a country, somewhat as Robert Vesco did in the Caribbean. This was to be the first step in "taking the Planet."
He determined that the orgs would have to become big money makers. In order to achieve that, he decided, they would have to come out of their three or four thousand dollar a week mentalities and start acting like multinational corporations.
This would require "ruthless managers," he concluded. So he directed his executives to become "unreasonable," meaning that they would henceforth accept no reason for low statistics. (In other words, dollars or else!)
The "Class Eight" course, run by Hubbard aboard the ship in 1968, had introduced the overboarding of public and crew in order to induce the "unreasonable attitude" which he wanted instilled, and exported via them, into auditors throughout his worldwide organizations.**
Now he needed similar "instant ethics" for executives. Towards this end, the "Flag Executive Briefing Course" was initiated and, during training of Sea Org personnel on this course, he was busy figuring out how to create the impact he wanted.
Hubbard used the idea of a pagan ceremony in order to instill the correct attitude into Laurel Sullivan and a friend who were called to his office to be "handled" regarding flubs they had made in auditing.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
The ceremonies were done below deck in a section of the ship that had been used as a classroom for crew study.
There a large idol, Kali, had been erected of papier-mache. It looked very solid and real and was painted all gold. The only light in this huge otherwise empty training room, down in the bowels of the ship was the flickering of a few candles.
*The ceremony where someone was tossed over the side of the ship while at anchor.
**According to John McMaster, this course was part of a project which "was intended to give Hubbard a telepathic control of Earth."
Sandra Wilson was one of those who went through the ceremony. She was brought forward and led up to Kali.
In front of Kali had been erected a cardboard representation of an organization, a shoe box with painted-on windows and so on. Some of the crew filed in ceremoniously, dressed in monks' cloaks and carrying flaming torches which left a strong smell permeating the room. She was handed a hammer and commanded: "Your proposed plan for your organization would have destroyed it. You are a student of Kali, the goddess of destruction.
"Destroy this organization !"
She solemnly smashed the, mocked-up organization with the hammer.
(Since the crime of destruction of a Scientology organization is indoctrinated heavily into Scientologists as the most evil act imaginable, to do so even in effigy was an excruciatingly painful experience for most.)
Then, following the ordeal relayed from LRH, she bowed down and chanted to the idol, admitting her "evil intention" to destroy her local organization, and dipped her hands in blood (or a solution which was a very good imitation), and smeared it onto the idol, after which chicken bones were strung around her neck.
She came out of there in shock and was overcome with grief for some 48 hours.
As I watched her in this terrible state I was quietly outraged by what had happened. But I hid my outrage; even doubted its validity. I had been thoroughly tainted that if I were being critical of LRH or his actions, it must be because of my own hidden misdeeds and crimes
"Man thrives on a challenging environment," Hubbard had written. The ship and its severe system of discipline would seem to have been designed to test this maxim to the limit!
During one phase of the Apollo's voyage in 1968, "offenders" were put into the air ducts below the engine room. In the high humidity, with their own perspiration stinging in their eyes, they would chip rust from the sides of the ducts with heavy short-handled hammers. Enough light bulbs had been strung throughout the ducts so that these inmates could see the rust they were removing.
They would continue at this at times for days, without sleep while they crouched or sat and took turns keeping each other awake. (Anyone falling asleep was detected by officers outside noticing the hammering had stopped would much prolong the ordeal for all.) They sang little songs and told each other stories.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
They were treated like criminals even rats. They would get their food delivered by way of buckets, lowered into the ducts. This punishment lasted anywhere from 24 hours to, on a few occasions, a couple of weeks. Since they were not allowed out to use toilet facilities, duct inmates had to find some comer to relieve themselves as best they could, creating the stench of human excrement and fiint. throughout the ducts.
The Sea Organization officially came into being in August 1967 while Hubbard was in the
Spanish Canary island of Las Palmas (having fled England's tax agencies). He had earlier
ordered a ship purchased in England which he called the Avon River. (It would later be
renamed the Athena, during a ceremony attended by Greek military dignitaries, while
tethered in Greece in the latter part of 1968.) This purchase was followed by the
acquisition of a larger ship the Royal Scotsman (which was renamed the Apollo in the
same ceremony).
The Apollo had been used as an Irish Channel ferry transporting cattle in its latter years, and the first Scientologists to board her had been treated to 16-hour days, scraping cow manure from the decks. This task was done between stints of seamans duties such as cooking or manning the helm.
It didn't matter that they had no sea experience or training. A phrase commonly heard those days was: "Make it go right!" During the winter of late 1967, the Apollo set off from Southampton in England and plowed through the waters of' the East Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea, where it met up with the Athena and a small yacht, The Enchanter, which sailed in from the Canaries, a group of Spanish islands off the coast of North Africa, where the "Sea Project" (forerunner of the Sea Org) was begun. The next several years were packed with adventure, drama and mystery. While the Apollo was berthed in the Moroccan port of Safi, a young American girl crew member named Susan Meister had been found dead on board, with a bullet hole through her forehead. It was reported to be a suicide. Her father, to this day, is convinced that his daughter was murdered.
In the late sixties, there were a number of parties aboard, with local dignitaries in attendance.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
LRH would attend these, and I watched him drink glass after large glass of rum and Coke: three-quarters rum and one-quarter Coke; some seven or eight in an evening. Yet he never slurred a word and never swayed or in any way acted the slightest bit inebriated.
Despite these displays of cordiality, things invariably turned sour in one port after the other.
Between the years 1967 and late 1974, the ships managed to wear out their welcome in every Mediterranean and North African port, following a different drama in each country.
The ships were initially warmly welcomed in most ports because of the fact that the crew was spending up to 50 thousand dollars a week for supplies. Quite a boost to some local economies.
In an attempt to quiet the bad public relations, a song and dance ensemble had been created, dubbed "The Apollo All-Stars," which performed for the locals in each port. They also produced a record album titled "The Power of Source."'
For a while, this seemed to be stemming the tide of bad reviews. In the long run, however, this solution turned out to be a band-aid, rather than a cure, for anti-Apollo sentiments.
The ship and its crew, of mostly young Americans, did not harmonize with anything the people of these countries had ever seen before, and in some countries the locals came to the conclusion that they must be a front for the CIA. This was rather ironic, considering that Hubbard was fond of blaming most of his and Scientology's problems on various government agencies such as the CIA, as well as psychiatry and the World Federation of Mental Health.
Amusingly enough, other countries came to the conclusion that they must be Communists since they had so many female crew and over a period of time two female captains (e.g., Mary Sue Hubbard and Hana Eltringham). To them only the Soviets would use women as crew and appoint them to the ranks of high officers.
The Scientologists in turn considered the locals ignorant "wogs." This term was used by the British, during their colonial days, to describe the Arabs of the Middle East. While considering Arabs the scum of the earth, the British sarcastically called them "Worthy Oriental Gentlemen," or wogs.
Hubbard took the term and altered its meaning to include all non-Scientologists. So while the locals viewed the denizens of the Apollo as strange, most of the Scientologists viewed them, and treated them largely, as a vastly inferior species.
And all public disclaimers to the contrary, they viewed L. Ron Hubbard as their own, in residence God.
Anyone freshly exposed to this scene, coming out of what passes for normal western society, could well be excused for asking what it all meant. Who was Hubbard? What did he really want? And how had all this come to be? Why was this ship cruising around the Mediterranean? And what were these 300 to 400 people up to, working some 16 hours a day for around $7 a week?
Occasionally a reporter would set out in pursuit of the ship to find answers to these questions. One from London's Daily Mail actually got himself an interview with Hubbard. The reporter decided that the chain-smoking, evasive Mr Hubbard was a bad fellow, and no further live interviews were ever granted.
Reporters are usually a cynical lot, many Scientologists concluded; and hadn't Ron often said that all reporters and their editors were interested in was violence, money and sex? Who could question the sincerity of a man who worked so hard to create a new civilization for mankind? Who except those with evil deeds to hide!
Hubbard had often told them that only those who had crimes of magnitude attacked Scientology. And "attacking Scientology" came to mean any probing interest in or critical questioning of the organization or, especially, L. Ron Hubbard himself : Scientologists were exhorted by him to unearth the lurid sex, violence and other crimes that his critics must have committed, and to feed these to the courts or press. People who left or attacked Scientology were publicly declared "Fair Game" until the end of 1968.
"Fair game" meant that enemies of Scientology, "may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist, without discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued, lied to or destroyed" (Hubbard Policy Letter of October 13, 1967). (Emphasis added)
After 1968 Hubbard wrote an ambiguous statement (to appease a British government investigation) purporting to cancel the "fair game" policy. In fact his wording cancelled the term "fair game" in name only. This method of handling enemies remained very much in force. The policy was in fact reaffirmed, but was to be exercised more covertly, in order to circumvent the huge public relations "flaps" it was generating.
Since the initial, essentially positive reviews of Dianetics by the press in early 1950, the news media had generally ridiculed L. Ron Hubbard and his "Science-Fiction Religion."
In the late sixties through 1975, the ship and its odyssey had fared no better with the "yellow gutter press," as Hubbard had dubbed it. There were regular highly critical articles, especially in the London newspapers.
The press also had a field day when, in July of 1968, the British Minister of' Health, Kenneth Robinson, had labeled Scientology "socially harmful," declared its founder an "undesirable alien," and refused him further entry into England.
On the other hand, many Scientologists wondered, where was the press with their big headlines when Sir John Foster, who headed a government inquiry into Scientology, had recommended lifting the ban on foreign Scientologists in 1972.
In his report to the House of Lords, Sir John stated : I am wholly satisfied that the great majority of the Scientologists are wholly sincere in their beliefs, show single minded dedication to the subject, spend a great deal of money on it and are deeply convinced that it has proved of great benefit to them.
Then Sir John noted dryly :
But it is only fair also to make the obvious point that none of this furnishes evidence of the sincerity of the Scientology leadership, whose financial interests are the exact opposite of those of their followers.
Elena Lorrel, in her early twenties at the time, was as close to being Hubbard's confidante as was possible with him, for over a decade. (She has young children. At her insistence it was agreed not to use her correct name to avoid Church harassment.)
ELENA LORREL :
In early 1968, with the Sea Org still in its infancy, we were just pulling out of Puerto Spain, and LRH came out of a solo auditing session (where he audited himself) with a big all-knowing grin on his face. He was going "Uh-huh! Uh-huh! Uh-huh!" He was just baiting someone to ask, "What's happening?" and beg him for an explanation. Someone did, and he revealed that he had actually been the author of The Prince. He was the Duke of Medici when he wrote it, he explained, and he had been ripped off posthumously. Machiavelli was a thief, not the author of this classic, having fraudulently published the stolen manuscript over his own name. On another occasion he let it slip that he had been Robespierre, the famous lawyer during the French revolution.
And he also claimed to have been Cecil Rhodes in Southern Africa up till 1902, and between Rhodes and this life beginning in 1911, a little boy who drowned. He would talk about the vast level of influence Rhodes had on the British crown. He explained that, as Rhodes, he was the darling of Queen Victoria. She and the Kaiser of Germany were squabbling monarchs. They argued often about where the boundaries of their colonies were in Africa, and he was very instrumental in helping to cool down the temper tantrums between them. At the same time Rhodes had hid big gold stashes in the Rhodesian and South African areas. LRH wanted to recover these while he was there in 1966. Of course, Scientologists had no inkling of any of this.
Another reason Hubbard went off to Rhodesia in 1966 was to make that a Scientology country.
He spent eight million of the Church's money on that venture in order to establish himself as a major entrepreneur and benefactor of that troubled country.
Explains Elena:
He failed. Then he set up the Sea Org. While he didn't succeed in his attempt to take over Rhodesia, he made enough political headway there to cause Ian Smith, the Prime Minister, to become concerned about him and, following a speech by LRH on national TV, the government cancelled his visa. (A report by the Rhodesia Herald, July 14, 1966, corroborates part of that story.)
Hubbard concluded from the Rhodesian Bilure that, no matter how super-capable or "OT" any individual is, he will be defeated by an organized group.
In support of this conclusion (which he claimed was the basic idea behind the formation of the Sea Organization), he explained in "Ron's Journal 1967":
... I have already made an experiment. I went off by myself into Southern Africa to see whether or not an OT would make it singly and all alone, without any assistance, against the environment around him. And I found out that he would not do too much good. But a group of OTs would be entirely irresistible, and necessary to carry off this type of operation.
John McMasters says that in 1969 Hubbard gave secret orders to him (he was Hubbard's emissary to that U.N. at the time), to cultivate a Black African state, with a seaport, and get them interested in Scientology. He was to persuade them that L. Ron Hubbard had their interests at heart. He was to tell them that this man had been banned from Rhodesia and South Africa, because he had tried to free the Black People.
ELENA LORREL:
Another reason we were in that part of the world sailing around on these ships was the fact, LRH explained, that he had been a corsair (pirate), sailing between the Mediterranean and the new world in the 1700s when the rum triangle was going on. Amongst other things, we were searching for the booty he said he had stashed in different places around the Mediterranean during that lifetime. Oh yes, we were there searching for gold. The real reason for the Sea Org initially was for him to go back and collect these stashes of gold. And then at the same time to amass a group of people to win him a country.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
In 1967, when it was still the Sea Project and we were just a small group, and another time in '68 on the Avon River during the whole track (a thetan's entire time span over thousands of lives) mission, LRH mentioned that the intention of the whole track recall mission was to dig up the treasure, secrete it again, possibly in Spanish banks. He had some idea about Spanish banks, and he wanted to work out a foolproof way that he would be able to identify and pick up the keys and combinations, in his next lifetime, to those same bank accounts.
He was very emphatic about having it stashed for a future life. But he had to devise a foolproof way of doing it. Where could he leave keys to a bank vault, he speculated aloud to me, that would be there at hand in the next lifetime, where he could recognize it, come by and pick it up and get the treasure. He had to somehow get that worked out and he hadn't done so fully yet. Because where could he leave keys like that, or something so that he could get at it again. This was not the announced reason for the Sea Org. There were a few different "shore stories"
There was also a "shore story" for the five-week cruise on the Avon River (renamed the Athena) and the small yacht Enchanter (renamed Diana) which Hubbard and a small crew embarked on in the beginning of 1968. (Leaving the Royal Scotsman Apollo berthed in the port at Valencia, Spain.)
Wrote L. Ron Hubbard in his book about that adventure, titled Mission Into Time : The purpose of the cruise was to test whole track recall [memory of past lifetimes]. Without giving away the fact that they were searching for what he believed to be his past-life hidden gold, he does explain in the book some of the methods he used to locate "target areas."
HUBBARD:
What I would do is write down "so and so and such and such and so and so and there you find the so and so and such and such." Then we would call the object or location of what we were looking for "the target."
With good Sea Org efficiency, we would organize the missions ... and the boats would go out. They'd check and cross-check to see if they could locate the target and whether or not the whole track recall of the situation was correct.
I would write up an area that I'd never been to this lifetime, describing the area precisely, and then parties would go out and exactly locate the target and ascertain whether or not these recalls were correct. There were four targets in all...
I should be careful about this sort of thing because my reputation is always at stake. There are tremendous numbers of people around who keep saying "Ron ought to be ... " My only answer to them is "Ron is."
Anyway, I was over in Carthage about the second or third century B.C., operating there with the Carthaginian Fleet.
There's a gag about this. Nobody was ever promoted in World War II who was in the battle zone. My crew once presented me, when I'd been passed over for promotion by reason of physical disability, with a commission that said, "Phoenician Navy 1003 b.c." That's funny because it's almost true.
I used to have a nice time around Carthage nice sailing water and so on. Around 200 b.c., I knew a girl over in Nora (it wasn't called Nora then) who was the current Goddess of Tanit and a good-looking girl. We had a lot of good-looking girls in Carthage, but they didn't come up to her. ...
It was usually a good thing that I called into Nora with a war vessel because it was almost a matter of war. The girl would say, "Hey, how are you?" and all the other guys didn't have a chance for a while.
The book goes on to detail how the missionaries found a temple entrance in Nora, and photos are shown of missionaries unearthing what is said to be this entrance. And Hana Eltringham is called upon, by Hubbard in his book, to "tell you whether or not this was a positive result": ... it was indeed a positive result. We found the base of the old temple right at the top of the hill... We scraped around the bottom of the ditch and found it was tiled underneath a thin layer of dust and dirt ...
The next mission was South to Tunisia, where the ancient city of Carthage lies, mainly underwater, off the coast. Here on land they again found their target area demonstrated by Hubbard in the form of a clay model and a map drawn by him. Again this is verified by a missionary.
HUBBARD :
Just as we were leaving we had asked for some sort of license to lie off the coast. You always have to have a piece of paper. We sent over an Arab interpreter of ours by the name of Mestasi. He got confused about the whole thing and said we were going to go underwater ...
These people were very confused and they tried to tell us that we mustn't go off the coast and do any diving because, if we did any diving they would have to confiscate the ship.
I thought that was very interesting. They could give us a piece of paper to permit us to dive but just the thought of us diving made them very upset. I thought, "What the devil is underwater around here that's so interesting to dive for?"
According to Hubbard's account, it turned out that the government had discovered the ancient city of Carthage under there and they were scared stiff somebody was going to come along and loot the place.
Hubbard makes no mention of it in his account, but he had divers go down at night to check it out for treasure.
HANA ELTRINGHAM :
As far as I knew no treasure was found or taken.
However, Larry Reeves (who joined the ship some time after the "Mission Into Time" project and has since left the Church), claims :
Because of legalities all this had to be kept secret, but I personally saw the treasure. It was in a huge wooden crate, built from two-by-sixes, the size of a small room. This carton was kept in the hull of the ship, near where I used to work. I'm a treasure buff, so when I opened up one of the boards and looked through, I knew what I was looking at! There were ancient gold coins, and jewels of all kinds. It was like looking at a huge pirates' chest.
Larry made it plain, when I interviewed him, that he believed it had been seized by divers from the Carthage ruins, during the "Mission Into Time" venture.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
There was lots of money aboard. We had to courier 7 or 8 million dollars in cash to Switzerland. And on a later trip much more than that was couriered. It was couriered from the Dutch Antilles island of Curacao, near Venezuela. LRH was really like a squirrel with nuts, stashing it. He stashed gold bullion too.
ELENA LORREL:
A mission was sent to a restricted area in Nora in Sardinia where their missionaries were caught in the act of trying to remove the gold. What happened was that they played stupid and got off.
HANA says:
Now LRH did have some special boats built in Valencia, Spain, after the "Mission Into Time" voyage.
Later on in 1968 they were brought onto the Apollo, while she was stationed in Greece. They were Aom-bottomed great big sled-like craft, about 12 feet long by about 5 and a half to 6 feet wide, about 2 feet deep and sturdily built. Liz Gablehouse had to scout around and find some quiet motors to put on them.
Their purpose was to do some secret missions; to go back to those particular treasure sites and, late at night, land on the beach. They were to pull the vessels up onto the sand, sneak ashore and dig up the treasure, bring it back, load it onto the craft, and return to the Apollo. In all honesty, I think there was something to the Mission Into Time. There were several sites found and witnessed by me that I felt corroborated what he had predicted. Through the use of P and M scopes. These consist of a flat disk, something like a Hoover or a vacuum with dials on the top. You run it across the ground like a Geiger counter. And it measures and detects metallic substances, like gold and silver, down in the earth.
There were a number of sites where we actually did that checking against paper grids, that were a smaller scale of the actual area. We'd run this thing up on the grid, marking where the actual sites were. We found one such site at Nora in Sardinia. We were investigating the temple of Tanit. On one corner of this temple floor it was definite and, to me, irrefutable evidence.
Where he had predicted there would be some precious metal, the scope went crazy.
At many of the sites we inspected where we were certain there was treasure, it turned out to be some historical site like Carthage and Nora. And, being historical sites, they were guarded.
Back in Valencia, the Apollo altered serious difficulties with the port authorities, due mainly to the incompetence of its crew. Hubbard was furious. This had caused him to cut off his searches for treasure and head the Athena back to Spain. There would be hell to pay !
Decent, often intelligent but somewhat naive people, whose dreams for a better world sometimes blinded them, were the income producers for this new religion. Hubbard found such people useful. Having good intentions themselves, they assumed he had the same. Thousands paid the outrageous prices for the Scientology courses and auditing. To give an idea of how much people are willing to pay in today's money, here is an example of a price charged for auditing taken from a recent official magazine from one of Hubbard's top organizations: Twelve and a half hour sections of a type of auditing called "Lists 10, 11, and 12" are priced at $13,000.00 per section. In other words, this auditing costs over $1000.00 per hour! And one must buy a minimum of 25 hours! One organization, the Flag Land Base which became the senior organization when the ships were sold in 197- was recently (late1985) reputedly taking in up to two million dollars a week, and averaging a million. "Flag," operated on 10 percent of its income, with the remainder going to accounts controlled by "upper management."
According to accounts by Hubbard's former personal aides, money tens of millions originating from Europe for Flag services were channelled into Hubbard's personal accounts. And according to the findings of a Federal Court judge, the ships were owned by a Panamanian corporation called Operation Transport Corp. (OTC), a "for profit corporation." Some 82 percent of the shares were owned by L. Ron Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue. "Non-profit" Scientology organizations around the world were told by the OTC that they owed untold millions for consulting services and training of their executives. They attempted to pay these "bills" as best they could, coming up with as much as 90 percent of their weekly gross income in payments to OTC. This was quite a setup.
The Panamanian corporation was in a position of having multi-millions in payments "owed" to it, while the "non-profit" churches could never fully pay these bills, which just kept mounting. They therefore had absolutely no profits to show the IRS. On the contrary, they were awash in paper "debts" to OTC. Hubbard had a lot going for him. He had a formula that enabled him to run his own church for huge profits accruing to him. He could write "scriptures" with a guaranteed market, getting for example $20,000.00 for one "Technical Bulletin." He had money rolling in from his special book publishing and distribution system, a system which netted him much more than mere royalties. And by 1977 he had an international intelligence operation of proportions comparable to that of some fairly sizeable countries. This kept him informed of the most intimate details of any and all organizations, governments and individuals who might try to spoil his game.
It is very easy for a person exposed to this information to jump to the conclusion that all
he was interested in was making lots of monthly. Not so. Hubbard wanted much more
than just money; he intended to have personal power on a scale that only a few in
history have ever credibly aspired to. In pursuit of this objective he was a man
obsessed, generating an energy that was, at times, seemingly superhuman.
MAGIC
One definition of magic is, "Total commitment to get, to achieve, to win with such totality that one's life itself becomes the ritual of that commitment." (It has been noted that, when that commitment "is malevolent, the magic is black.") For Hubbard, morality was a straitjacket worn by fools. Morality was utilized only when it aided him in reaching his objective. (He gave lip service to all sorts of noble humanitarian sentiments, but he also visibly, especially from the mid-sixties on, gave vent to base motives expressed in vindictive policies and writings.) His WILL was the supreme consideration. This philosophy has been described as "the ends justify the means." This vaguely says it all, but it describes neither the intensity nor the total commitment which appears to have driven him.
His life was indeed a ritual of total commitment to the achievement of power. Power concentrated exclusively under his control. Hubbard may have had this drive for power this obsession all his life. But the point at which it burst into a raging passion was, according to Ron Jr. sometime in his teens when Ron Hubbard and his mother visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. From that time on he was, more and more, able to support his obsession with a detailed, well-developed philosophy. His mother was at the Library tracing back her family's genealogy, while he was poking around trying to find something that interested him. He did. It was a tiny volume called The Book of the Law.
According to its writer, Aleister Crowley, The Book was "dictated" to him in Cairo, between noon and one P.M., on three successive days: April 8th, 9th, and 10th, in the year 1904. The "author" called himself Aiwas, and claimed to be "a messenger from the forces ruling this Earth at present." Aiwas, a spirit "possessing fantastic knowledge and powers," delivered the alleged dictation telepathically. This was Crowley's Bible, and perhaps the most important book in the life of L. Ron Hubbard. The Book proclaims "The Law of Thelema." This law consists of a "simple code of conduct":
"DO WHAT THOU WILT." Of The Book Crowley, towards the end of his life, wrote: Thelema is the Greek for "will." ... it is a sublime synthesis of all science and all ethics. It is the virtue of this Book that Man may attain a degree of freedom hitherto never suspected to be possible, a spiritual development altogether beyond anything hitherto known. Crowley's writings are impressively prolific. In his Magick in Theory and Practice he states: THE WHOLE AND SOLE OBJECT OF ALL TRUE MAGICKAL TRAINING IS TO BECOME FREE FROM EVERY KIND OF LIMITATION. (Crowley added a "k" to the word magic to differentiate his subject from that which had attracted "weaklings" and "dilettantes.")
Adopting the same stated purpose for Scientology, as Crowley had for his Magick, Hubbard says, in a 1952 taped Scientology lecture: OUR WHOLE ACTIVITY TENDS TO MAKE AN INDIVIDUAL COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT OF ANY LIMITATION... Old Aleister Crowley had some interesting things to say about this. He wrote the Book of the Law. In the same lecture series, Hubbard also states: The magical cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only modern work that has anything to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but is a fascinating work in itself, and that's the work of Aleister Crowley the late Aleister Crowley my very good friend... He signs himself "the Beast," mark of the Beast 666... Hubbard only mentioned the Crowley connection to his followers during the loose-lipped days of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures in December of 1952. To my knowledge he never said a word about it to anyone, other than his eldest son, after that time.
Francois Rabelais (c. 1495 1553) is not mentioned in The Book, but the "Law of Thelema" actually derives from a book penned by him. Rabelais, a priest and graduate of the Sorbonne Seminary, in Paris, wrote a book called Gargantua. It was written in the style of a farcical adult fairy tale, since it contained ideas that were greatly at variance to those of the Catholic Church of his day, ideas that could well have been officially labelled heresy (with the resulting death penalty) had they been seriously presented. Rabelais tells of "how the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner of living": All their life was not spent in laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good: They did eat, drink, lael, sleep when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. Nolle did awake them, nolle did over to constrain them to eat, drink, nor any other thing; for so had Gargantuan established it. In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed.
DO WHAT THOU WILT.
Because men that are free, well born, well bred, and conversant in honest companies have naturally an instinct and spur that prompted them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honor... (Emphasis added) So wrote Rabelais. Of course there is room for abuse of this injunction. What if "the instinct and spur that prompteth to virtuous actions" is lacking? What if one decides that one's "proper course" involves enslaving or overwhelming others? What if the application of one's "will" results in the denial of another's freedom?
Such action would, by definition, be "black. " When viewing the Commodore's ship Apollo, the law to be adhered to was more like, "Do What Ron Wilt," the officers and crew being subjected to the strictest of rigors, while Ron did as he pleased. His will was supreme. Robert Heinlein, a one-time friend of Hubbard's, suggested this well in a recent novel. He referred to his followers as "L. Ronners" and "Hubbardites." Some ex-Scientologists use the term "Rondroids." The stable dictum for his followers is his written or spoken intention: "DO WHAT RON SAYS."
Crowley's The Book of the Law adds a new and fiery twist to the Law of Thelema as
described by Rabelais. In the words of The Book: We have nothing with the outcast and
the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of Kings:
stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and
the joy of the world. ... I am of the snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight, and stir the
hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs... They
shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self ... Be strong oh man! lust, enjoy
all things of sense and rapture... ... the kings of the earth shall be kings forever: the
slaves shall serve. Them that seek to entrap thee, to over throw thee, them attack
without pity or quarter; and destroy them utterly. I am unique and conqueror. I am not
of the slaves that perish.
Be they damned and dead! Amen. Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler! (According to Ron Jr., his father never sincerely felt remorse or sympathy.) Did the young L. Ron Hubbard take special quote, when he read: ... in these runes ords and letters of The Book] are mysteries that no Beast [Crowley] shall devine [understand]. Let him not seek to try: But one coth after him... who shall discover the key to it all? (Emphasis and bracketed words added) According to Ron Jr. his father considered himself to be the one "who came after"; that he was Crowley's successor; that he had taken on the mantle of the "Great Beast. " He told him that Scientology actually began on December the 1st, 1947. This was the day Aleister Crowley died.
Who was the "Great Beast" Who was Aleister Crowley? "THE WICKEDEST MAN IN THE
WORLD... " was how the contemporary press described him. Raised by parents who
belonged to a fundamentalist Christian sect, and who believed that everyone outside of
their particular group would be damned eternally in hell fire, he was Many people
interpret The Book of the Law and Crowley's overall work in many ways. Here I am only
attempting to illustrate what appears to have been Hubbard's interpretation of The
Book. forbidden to read any book other the Bible until about the age of twelve. And read
it he did. In his teens he decided that he was none other than THE BEAST of
Revelations, and proclaimed himself as such. A shocking declaration, especially in the
Victorian Age. But Crowley was also an accomplished poet, chess master, painter,
master mountaineer and explorer.
He also claimed to have mastered Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, and, most of all, magick. Yet he was also a regular user of cocaine, opium, peyote, and hashish. At the age of forty-five he proclaimed himself a saint of the Gnostic Church, becoming a "god" in his own temple, by which time he was infamous in a number of countries, banned from some and forced to leave others. His reputation for wild sex and drug orgies, which he combined with the religious rites of his self-instituted order, was a major factor in his difficulties with various governments.
He established "The Abbey of Do What Thou Wilt" on the island of Cefalu, Sicily, where he lived with a collection of mistresses, performing sexual, narcotic, and occult experiments. It is perhaps co-incidental that Hubbard, in the late fifties, set up his headquarters at Saint Hill Manor in England, less than half an hour's drive from what had been Aleister Crowley's house in Tunbridge Wells. (The house is now owned and occupied by the lead drummer of Led Zeppelin's band another reputed admirer of Crowley. Certainly Crowley seems to have been popular with the Beatles, who presented his image among a group of "people we like" on their "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album.)
MAGICK AND DRUGS
Was Hubbard's WILL reinforced by the Magick, in which drugs played a major part? Could it be that Scientology's founder publicly vehemently anti-drug since the mid1960s, and having written extensively since that time on the harmful effects of drug use was himself a heavy drug user. Was Ron Jr. telling the truth when he said that his father began using drugs beginning in his teens, and continued at least until he (Ron Jr.) left the organization in December, 1959? Comparing the harmful effects of alcohol with various drugs, Hubbard wrote in the revered "first book" Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health): Opium is less harmful [than alcohol], marijuana is not only less physically harmful but also better in the action of keeping a neurotic producing phenobarbital does not dull the senses nearly as much and produces less after effect...
While few of his followers seem to be aware of the fact, in the same book he recommends the use of Benzedrine in certain cases to overcome the "reactive mind." Amusingly enough, he states in a policy letter, "Keeping Scientology Working": "We will not speculate here on... how I came to rise above the bank."' Ron Jr.: I need not speculate, I know! I remember in 1952 in Philadelphia, while he, was taking a needle in the arm, containing cocaine. He grinned at me, winked wryly and said, "Shades of Sherlock Holmes"! Dad gave a lot of his lectures on cocaine or stimulants of one kind or another. He could really get brilliant on the stuff. Hubbard's friend and "magick partner" of the late forties was a chemist named Jack Parsons. Parsons was the head of Crowley's Organization, the "Ordo Templi Orientis" in California. He scribed this verse which was printed in the February 21st, 1943 issue of the Oriflumuze, Journal of the O.T.O.: I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote, Marijuana, morphine and cocaine, I never know sadness, but only a madness, That burns in the heart and the brain. I see. each charwoman, ecstatic, illhurnan, angelic, demonic, divine. Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon That brims with ambrosial wine. Hubbard mentions Jack Parsons in the "Professional Auditor's Bulletin" of 15 April 1957: "Bank" = "reactive mind." It is similar to the "unconscious mind" that so fascinated Freud. Now I have been very fortunate in my life to know (like a few real genius fellows that really wrote their name really large in the world of literature and science...
One chap by the way, who gave us solid fuel rockets and assist take-off for airplanes too heavily loaded on aircraft carriers, and all the rest of this rocketry parlorulna, and who formed Aerojet in California and so on. The late Jack Parsons... According to Ron Jr. his father used drugs and self-hypnosis in order to beef up his WILL: For years he used even in the thirties-sound scribers. I think you would call it that... The original dictaphones, and IBM had one tot, ... , And he would read these what he called the "Affirmations" into, the dictaphone. This is when they were non-erasable. You know, the old Edison with the wax cylinder. He would write these up, or he'd take quotes from the Book of the Law, and other places; then he'd take whatever he had in the way of drugs and play 'em back. Usually he used headphones. Hardly anyone believed Ron Jr. when he told this story; but the "Affirmations," in their original hand-written version, were brought into evidence in open court in Los Angeles in mid-1984, and are part of the court record.
One of these "Affirmations" is: "All men shall be my slaves ! All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!" Ron Jr. states in a sworn affidavit: I have personal knowledge that my father regularly used illegal drugs including amphetamines, barbiturates and hallucinogens. He regularly used cocaine, peyote, and mescaline. According to statements made by attorney Michael Flynn, Hubbard, until at least February of 1980, filled out fraudulent "doctor's" prescriptions for a large array of medical drugs for himself.
And while the Church has sued attorney Michael Flynn more than a dozen times based on various accusations including libel (all of which suits have been dismissed to date), they have never mentioned Hubbard recommends as a "good book" Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception in his "Operational Bulletin no. 17" of Feb '56. This work of Huxley's deals with his experiences while experimenting with mescaline. Flynn's allegations regarding Hubbard's "illegal self-medication" in any of these suits. Other statements to the effect of massive self-medication are by Gerry Armstrong (who was a witness to Hubbard's diary and other documents), Sara Northrup Hubbard, and John McMaster, all of. whom I interviewed. Sara Hubbard explained that Hubbard was "self-medicated," but that during the five years they were married, she knew of no instances when he used "street drugs." Armstrong, told me, among other things, of a letter from Hubbard to his third wife Mary Sue when Hubbard was in Las Palmas during 1967 at the inception of the Sea Org.
This letter is now in the custody of the court. In it Hubbard tells his wife: "I'm drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys." John McMasters told me that on the flagship Apollo in the late sixties, he witnessed Hubbard's drug supply. "It was the largest drug chest I had ever seen. He had everything!" It was shown in the Armstrong trial in Los Angeles in 1984 that Hubbard even had blank prescription slips from the U.S. Navy, one of which had a prescription for phenobarbital (a barbiturate and hypnotic) written in Hubbard's handwriting. Also, in the Armstrong trial where the "Affirmations" were introduced, a letter by Hubbard to his first wife was revealed, the last sentence of which declared: "I do love you, even if I used to be an opium addict. "
If Hubbard was indeed a "druggie," his followers are not. While many Scientologists appear to be nicotine and caffeine addicts, that is as far as it goes.
Scientologists do not use drugs. And there is even a Scientology anti-drug program Narconon 7 originally established by an inmate of Arizona State Prison named William Benitez. It has been quite successful at times in getting people off drugs.
I'm told that "uppers and downers" are sometimes referred to as "pinks and greys." In this context, Ron Jr.'s statement that his father "was not a Scientologist," as startling as it may seem to some, begins to make some sense: He was not a Scientologist, and even said so publicly on several occasions, but people would just slide over it. For example, the wise and humanitarian sentiments expressed in his writings and lectures had nothing to do with him or how he conducted his affairs.
His private life was the antithesis of what he wanted his public image to be. He hardly ever took his own advice. It is possible, however, that Hubbard did follow the advice he gave during a Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture in December of 1952,** when he said: You should be able to drink as much as you want, abuse the body in any way you want. In the same lecture series Hubbard said: Just because I did something like Scientology people think I'm supposed to he perfectly controlled, and a perfect gentleman. That's a non-sequitur. Hubbard had a habit of describing himself while pretending to be describing another. This, perhaps, was the case in the following dissertation excerpted from one of his taped lectures. If so, it is revealing: Looking down the line at the spirit of men of great and murderous deeds... and you'll find out they're strange boys; very strange boys.
They just never, never kind of nailed down in there right place, and did just exactly the right things. You look in vain for the old school tie.
Of course, from the mid-sixties onward what may have been the "real Hubbard" began to show up, to some extent, in such things as the "Fair Game Law" and sadistic "ethics." But such vindictive or destructive sentiments were kept very "low profile."
"My father was high during most of these lectures," claims Ron Jr. "and he was, on occasion, very frank, revealing his true feelings." Not spotting this material in time to edit it out before it became widely circulated was a major blunder by the Church.
THE ADVENTURES OF THE COMMODORE
There was a great old fellow in China named Wang the Innovator. And Wang the Innovator practically turned China upside down and right side up again, and upside down, and left it that way. Rut he organized a lot of systems... he laid down the laws that are going to be this way and that way. He laid them all down very nicely and he had them all patterned out very beautifully. But he himself didn't kind of follow this. He was a wild man. Nobody could ride up along side of him. He had more women than he could count. It is of particular interest to note that he equates men of great deeds with men of murderous deeds: "... men of great and murderous deeds... "
next
"Mankind's Only Hope"
42s
This was Org-speak for "what Ron wants." Command Intention was expected to be uppermost in the minds of all loyal staff members, indeed all Scientologists.
_____________________
The chain locker was dangerous. Located at the very bow of the ship under the waterline. It was the place where the section of the chain not in the water was stored. When the entire chain was brought up it filled most of this comparatively small, wet, dark, and sometimes rat-infested locker.
The only thing that was holding the chain in the locker was what is called a devil's claw, which was located well above the locker on the deck of the ship. If someone were to kick the claw, the entire chain would be pulled at high speed out of the locker by the weight of the anchor, and anyone down in the locker could very easily get caught in the outgoing chain and be yanked to his death.
One crew member told of the devil's claw being loosened by accident while he was in the chain locker. He expressed his terror at coming so close to dying. The chain "came alive" and gyrated around as it was being pulled out at high speed while he crouched, frozen by fear, as tightly as he could against the side of the locker. By some miracle he was unhurt.
Sometimes children would peer down into the chain locker where some other child had been assigned and teasingly threaten, "We're going to kick the devil's claw !" Tony's mother had left him in the care of another Sea Org woman while she was gone on a "mission" to "raise the stats" of an ailing land organization. When she returned she was shocked to discover that her son had been placed in the chain locker.
She was "handled," however, with explanations about how "out ethics" and "down stat" Tony had been. "He is really a very old thetan [spirit] with a young body," she was told. "He should not be permitted to use that young body to stir up sympathy. " (Interviewed in 1986, five years after leaving the Church, she expressed bewilderment as to how she could have accepted such explanations.) Prominent ex-Scientologist John McMaster, the "World's First Real Clear," was a major factor in the huge financial success of Scientology during the sixties. According to McMaster:
Hubbard had ordered a little girl who was a deaf mute down into the chain locker sometime in 1968. Hubbard was going to cure her deafness by shoving her down there! This came to my attention after she'd been there for about a week because the Master at Arms at the time, a beautiful girl, came to me and said, "John, I've got to have you come and see what's going on." I had just come back from a world tour promoting Scientology. And I said, "What is it" And she told me about this little girl. Her parents were from London. Her father and mother had separated, and the mother had brought three or four of her children onto the ship. I went down there and released her out of it. I pulled out the door pegs that were put down to make sure this poor little thing couldn't get out.
Then I went to Hubbard and said, "What the hell are you doing?" And he said, "John, what the hell are you talking about?" And I said, "What are you really doing!" I was screaming at him. And he said, "Oh God, release her. I didn't know she was in there "
Shortly thereafter, McMaster was made a galley hand and subjected to extreme physical labor, lack of sleep, and other hardships. "Hubbard wanted to break me," he said.
After he resigned from the Church of Scientology in late 1969, he was officially "declared" a "suppressive person" or "S.P." (evil psychotic) by Hubbard.
_____________________
Talking about the inception of "heavy ethics" into the world of Scientology, John Ausley (a feisty Floridian who joined the Sea Org in 1968 and quickly rose to a top position) says :
John McMaster seriously bottom lined on the chain locker. Kids would get locked up in there. To John's mind you don't take a four-year-old and put him down in a hatch, and batten the hatch so he can't get out. You don't terrorize a kid..
Hubbard used a "shotgun" (right-hand mall who did his bidding) called Otto Roos. Otto and McMaster were very different ... There was a dude who had been slowly working out of "doubt." He was a mellow, friendly, shy guy. This was 1968.
You had to do 48 hours of non-stop amends in "doubt," at which point you were upgraded to "liability." Then you'd have to do another 24 hours of non-stop amends. I'm talking about hard physical labor at which point you're upgraded to... non-existence." You then have to do 12 more hours: with people all over your physical ass and your mental faculties. And as the person winds down, he becomes more and more vulnerable. So it's a wild trip.
Anyway this was a kid who stuttered. Otto didn't like him. I think he was about up to "non-existence" where he couldn't take it any more. So he went to bed after three days. This isn't a guy's average going to bed; when you hit horizontal you go out like a light ! Along about the second or third day, if you didn't continue in steady physical motion, you pass out on your feet.
Anyway, Otto grabbed this kid out of an upper bunk in the middle of a deep sleep, and body slammed him from five or six feet onto the floor. He put a knife blade to his throat and started screaming he was gonna kill him since he was a "down stat"!
Otto seriously freaked this kid out for life right there. I mean it didn't help his stuttering at all ! Some maniac with "upstat" braid, who is Hubbard's right-hand shotgun, is going to slit your throat for being a "downstat" and all this instantly after having already been body slammed from six feet up in the middle of a dead sleep.
Otto Roos wrote about his experiences in 1984 when no longer a member of the Church:
I believe I was the only one who would just walk into LRH's office with information when I was not able to get through to him any other way.
At times he called me into his office and even his bedroom to talk. This was when he wanted to sort something out, and needed someone to talk to. This went on all night sometimes, and I would just listen and acknowledge. He always thanked me very graciously. "Thank you for listening Otto," and, unless upset, he was extremely courteous. Otto Roos gave some of the rationalization behind the position he held and the way he had conducted himself :
Having myself experienced the atrocities of war, unlike many of my friends, I swore I wasn't going down into those rusty old tanks, for up to a week without sleep, chipping rust, while Masters at Arms checked outside to ensure the chipping didn't stop. This was too much like the concentration camps from my childhood days.
I determined that I would not also go through anything like one of our "S.P.s" [John O'Keefe], who had a fear of heights and had to be virtually winched up to the crow's nest (a little bucket at the top of the mast, too small to sit or lie in). This ritual, of winching him up and down from there, was repeated every alternative four hours for some 84 hours.
It must seem incredible that anyone would put up with such treatment. John O'Keefe, whose experience while aboard is very briefly glimpsed in Chapter 4, is still a loyal Church member. Prior to his joining the Sea Org, while at Saint Hill in England in 1966, a poem of his appeared in Advance!, an official Scientology magazine. It focused on the "wins" he was having in his counseling :
And as the world outside
Unheeding blindly reels along
I clear away the chains
Upon my being As men
have dreamed of doing
Through unrecorded time
And each night I grow
In understanding And potential
And soon now The job
will all be done
And I will fly
Higher and brighter
Than any bird or sun.
John O'Keefe could never have guessed the form in which he was destined to "fly higher."
Otto Roos continues :
This severe discipline started in earnest in September of 1967 when the condition of non-existence was accompanied by the penalty of no right to food. Hay Thacker [a woman in her fifties, at the time] was the first to have this condition assigned. Huddled in a corner, she was avoided by all, in compliance with the order. Occasionally she was thrown a crust of bread.
JOHN AUSLEY:
Hubbard had this big muster. We all lined up by division and stood at attention while he talked and his messengers recorded it all on tape. He made everyone stand at attention while he talked. He was running a General Patton flow rather than an enlightenment flow.
I leaned out of line and just stared at him. And he was this physical predator: like, "I'm making all these people stand at attention and I'm proud of it."
He was using the idea that the world was about to blow up, and he had the only solution, as a recruiting method for slave labor.
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In the early 1970s, Hubbard began surrounding himself with nubile teenage girls. These became his "messengers."
These young people had received no other education, since coming aboard, than their Sea Organization training, and had no real experience of anything outside of the world of the ship and Scientology. Hubbard seemed to trust his teenage messengers more than he did anyone. He was, however, also served by the teenagers' parents, as well as teachers, laborers, architects, doctors, lawyers and businessmen. These people also endured the rigors of Sea Org discipline, and they served him along with the youngsters, for room and board and a pittance of pocket money.
Tonja Burden, a 13-year-old daughter of Sea Org parents, who had proudly sent her to the Apollo to work for Ron (while they remained at a Sea Org installation in Los Angeles), was a Commodore's messenger in training. She claims that she saw people placed in the chain lockers on a number of occasions at the direct orders of Hubbard. Tonja wrote, in a legal affidavit, years after leaving the Sea Org :
I saw one boy held in there for thirty nights crying and begging to be released. He was only allowed out to clean the bilges, where the sewerage and refuse of the ship collected.
Tonja joined the ship in 1974. "She was about thirteen or fourteen," says Hana Eltringham, who was a top Scientology Executive working with Hubbard since before the inception of the Sea Org.
HANA (ELTRINGHAM) WHITFIELD:
Tonya was a little kid; a little blond-haired, child-faced girl. She joined the ship with the idea of becoming a Commodore's messenger. The main Commodore's Messenger duties at the time were to walk around with LRH, carry his ashtray and light his cigarettes (LRH smoked three to four packs of filterless Kools a day), and carry messages for him and bring answers back to him.
The messengers were extremely competitive, I mean they would vie for his attention.
The "qualified" messengers wore little white boots up to their knees with high heels on them. They had short mini-skirts with close to bikini halter tops tied in a knot between their breasts. Tonja was a "trainee," so, for most of the time that I saw her in '74 '75, she was in a subordinate position. (She had not yet achieved messenger status.)
She was either washing his clothes or ironing them as well as doing the other messengers' clothes. She did his household work. Other times I saw her working in the galley (possibly for punishment). She was up to her elbows in soap suds in one of those washing troughs. Perspiration was just dripping and her blond hair was plastered down to her scalp. She was looking very flushed and hot, with all these pans and things around; just a very unhappy face !
She slept below decks with the other trainees in conditions that were not good at all. You see, the Apollo was all metal. The areas that we mainly sailed in '73 '75, which was Portugal and Spain, then across the Atlantic into the Caribbean, are near equatorial and so are very hot and humid. In the summer time (and in the winter time to only a slightly lesser degree), where the sun is beating on the ship's metal decks and hull, the areas below decks get absolutely unbearable. I can only liken it to some of those metal punishment tanks and boxes that the prisoners of war were put into like the Japanese. That's what it was like.
So Tonya lived below decks ill a dorm, with maybe 12 to 16 people. And those dorms below decks smelled bad of body odor. No matter how much we cleaned, they stank. A more complete story of Tonja Burden is told in Chapter 10.
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The more "productive" or "up-stat" crew members would be rewarded with one day off every two weeks, and counseling (usually called "auditing," derived from the Latin word "audire," meaning "to hear or listen"). This auditing often took on the aura of a Catholic confessional. However, in this case, the "sins" were searched out with the help of an "EMeter" (short for "electrometer"), which is an electronic measuring device with a dial and a needle, thoughts a person has which he feels uncomfortable that reacts to pictures that he flinches from looking at. 'ie about, or mental The E-Meter is functionally similar to what most people think of as a lie detector, and is a variation of the psychogalvanometer, long used by psychologists. It is a small portable instrument, some 13 inches by 10 inches by about 2 inches deep. A pair of electrical wires and two ordinary soup cans extend from it. These cans are held loosely in the hands and act as electrodes.
Everything of note that a person says while on this meter is written down by the auditor. Thoughts of the most intimate nature are recorded on paper; and the folder, containing all this material, is sent to a "case supervisor," for study and further instructions as to the next areas to be probed by the auditor.
On the ship the case supervisor was often Hubbard himself. Thus he knew his crew in a way that even their mothers and fathers had never known them.
This situation could obviously give him enormous power over the minds of those receiving the auditing. His motives were rarely under suspicion of course; but if suspicion were ever to arise, it would be quickly "cleaned up" with an "ethics handling. " (In this case a talking to in the first instance, and sterner measures as required.)
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The practice of "handling down stats" by placing them in the chain locker, of hard physical labor used as punishment, of sleep deprivation, of throwing them overboard while the ship was at dock, and the other novel "ethics handlings" continued while the Commodore, and therefore most of the crew, turned his attention to more important matters. There was, after all, "a planet to take."
"The planet is ours!" Hubbard had proclaimed.
"A Scientology planet!" was the rallying cry.
Just as Hubbard had put "ethics in" on the "down stats" aboard the Apollo, so "ethics" had to be "put in" on Earth itself. "Ethics" had to be "put in" so that "tech" could then be "put in."
The "tech" was contained in Hubbard's voluminous writings and numerous taped lectures, and included the counseling or "auditing" techniques that he claimed would bring about the ideal state for an individual, and eventually for mankind as a whole.
The 300 to 400 on board, and the multitude of his adherents around the world, believed Hubbard when he claimed that he had, by himself, researched and written the "technology"; a task "comparable to the discovery of fire and greater than the invention of the wheel." To them he was not just the Commodore, he was Source !'
Hubbard had emphasized repeatedly that the technology had to be kept "100 percent standard," meaning that it was to be done exactly as he intended it be done. Anything considered to fall short of this standard, was called "out tech. " This applied both to the auditing tech and what he called "Admin Tech" administrative technology used to manage his organizations.
*A capital "S" is used when referring to Hubbard as source, in the same manner as a capital "G" is used for God.
In 1972 he decided that the Scientology organizations around the world were to be shocked out of what he considered their lethargic state. (They weren't producing enough income.) They therefore must have "out tech and out admin" (i.e., be violating his rules of auditing and administration).
He had been trying to make enough money for him to buy or influence a country, somewhat as Robert Vesco did in the Caribbean. This was to be the first step in "taking the Planet."
He determined that the orgs would have to become big money makers. In order to achieve that, he decided, they would have to come out of their three or four thousand dollar a week mentalities and start acting like multinational corporations.
This would require "ruthless managers," he concluded. So he directed his executives to become "unreasonable," meaning that they would henceforth accept no reason for low statistics. (In other words, dollars or else!)
The "Class Eight" course, run by Hubbard aboard the ship in 1968, had introduced the overboarding of public and crew in order to induce the "unreasonable attitude" which he wanted instilled, and exported via them, into auditors throughout his worldwide organizations.**
Now he needed similar "instant ethics" for executives. Towards this end, the "Flag Executive Briefing Course" was initiated and, during training of Sea Org personnel on this course, he was busy figuring out how to create the impact he wanted.
Hubbard used the idea of a pagan ceremony in order to instill the correct attitude into Laurel Sullivan and a friend who were called to his office to be "handled" regarding flubs they had made in auditing.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
The ceremonies were done below deck in a section of the ship that had been used as a classroom for crew study.
There a large idol, Kali, had been erected of papier-mache. It looked very solid and real and was painted all gold. The only light in this huge otherwise empty training room, down in the bowels of the ship was the flickering of a few candles.
*The ceremony where someone was tossed over the side of the ship while at anchor.
**According to John McMaster, this course was part of a project which "was intended to give Hubbard a telepathic control of Earth."
Sandra Wilson was one of those who went through the ceremony. She was brought forward and led up to Kali.
In front of Kali had been erected a cardboard representation of an organization, a shoe box with painted-on windows and so on. Some of the crew filed in ceremoniously, dressed in monks' cloaks and carrying flaming torches which left a strong smell permeating the room. She was handed a hammer and commanded: "Your proposed plan for your organization would have destroyed it. You are a student of Kali, the goddess of destruction.
"Destroy this organization !"
She solemnly smashed the, mocked-up organization with the hammer.
(Since the crime of destruction of a Scientology organization is indoctrinated heavily into Scientologists as the most evil act imaginable, to do so even in effigy was an excruciatingly painful experience for most.)
Then, following the ordeal relayed from LRH, she bowed down and chanted to the idol, admitting her "evil intention" to destroy her local organization, and dipped her hands in blood (or a solution which was a very good imitation), and smeared it onto the idol, after which chicken bones were strung around her neck.
She came out of there in shock and was overcome with grief for some 48 hours.
As I watched her in this terrible state I was quietly outraged by what had happened. But I hid my outrage; even doubted its validity. I had been thoroughly tainted that if I were being critical of LRH or his actions, it must be because of my own hidden misdeeds and crimes
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"Man thrives on a challenging environment," Hubbard had written. The ship and its severe system of discipline would seem to have been designed to test this maxim to the limit!
During one phase of the Apollo's voyage in 1968, "offenders" were put into the air ducts below the engine room. In the high humidity, with their own perspiration stinging in their eyes, they would chip rust from the sides of the ducts with heavy short-handled hammers. Enough light bulbs had been strung throughout the ducts so that these inmates could see the rust they were removing.
They would continue at this at times for days, without sleep while they crouched or sat and took turns keeping each other awake. (Anyone falling asleep was detected by officers outside noticing the hammering had stopped would much prolong the ordeal for all.) They sang little songs and told each other stories.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
They were treated like criminals even rats. They would get their food delivered by way of buckets, lowered into the ducts. This punishment lasted anywhere from 24 hours to, on a few occasions, a couple of weeks. Since they were not allowed out to use toilet facilities, duct inmates had to find some comer to relieve themselves as best they could, creating the stench of human excrement and fiint. throughout the ducts.
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The Apollo had been used as an Irish Channel ferry transporting cattle in its latter years, and the first Scientologists to board her had been treated to 16-hour days, scraping cow manure from the decks. This task was done between stints of seamans duties such as cooking or manning the helm.
It didn't matter that they had no sea experience or training. A phrase commonly heard those days was: "Make it go right!" During the winter of late 1967, the Apollo set off from Southampton in England and plowed through the waters of' the East Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea, where it met up with the Athena and a small yacht, The Enchanter, which sailed in from the Canaries, a group of Spanish islands off the coast of North Africa, where the "Sea Project" (forerunner of the Sea Org) was begun. The next several years were packed with adventure, drama and mystery. While the Apollo was berthed in the Moroccan port of Safi, a young American girl crew member named Susan Meister had been found dead on board, with a bullet hole through her forehead. It was reported to be a suicide. Her father, to this day, is convinced that his daughter was murdered.
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In the late sixties, there were a number of parties aboard, with local dignitaries in attendance.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
LRH would attend these, and I watched him drink glass after large glass of rum and Coke: three-quarters rum and one-quarter Coke; some seven or eight in an evening. Yet he never slurred a word and never swayed or in any way acted the slightest bit inebriated.
Despite these displays of cordiality, things invariably turned sour in one port after the other.
Between the years 1967 and late 1974, the ships managed to wear out their welcome in every Mediterranean and North African port, following a different drama in each country.
The ships were initially warmly welcomed in most ports because of the fact that the crew was spending up to 50 thousand dollars a week for supplies. Quite a boost to some local economies.
In an attempt to quiet the bad public relations, a song and dance ensemble had been created, dubbed "The Apollo All-Stars," which performed for the locals in each port. They also produced a record album titled "The Power of Source."'
For a while, this seemed to be stemming the tide of bad reviews. In the long run, however, this solution turned out to be a band-aid, rather than a cure, for anti-Apollo sentiments.
The ship and its crew, of mostly young Americans, did not harmonize with anything the people of these countries had ever seen before, and in some countries the locals came to the conclusion that they must be a front for the CIA. This was rather ironic, considering that Hubbard was fond of blaming most of his and Scientology's problems on various government agencies such as the CIA, as well as psychiatry and the World Federation of Mental Health.
Amusingly enough, other countries came to the conclusion that they must be Communists since they had so many female crew and over a period of time two female captains (e.g., Mary Sue Hubbard and Hana Eltringham). To them only the Soviets would use women as crew and appoint them to the ranks of high officers.
The Scientologists in turn considered the locals ignorant "wogs." This term was used by the British, during their colonial days, to describe the Arabs of the Middle East. While considering Arabs the scum of the earth, the British sarcastically called them "Worthy Oriental Gentlemen," or wogs.
Hubbard took the term and altered its meaning to include all non-Scientologists. So while the locals viewed the denizens of the Apollo as strange, most of the Scientologists viewed them, and treated them largely, as a vastly inferior species.
And all public disclaimers to the contrary, they viewed L. Ron Hubbard as their own, in residence God.
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Anyone freshly exposed to this scene, coming out of what passes for normal western society, could well be excused for asking what it all meant. Who was Hubbard? What did he really want? And how had all this come to be? Why was this ship cruising around the Mediterranean? And what were these 300 to 400 people up to, working some 16 hours a day for around $7 a week?
Occasionally a reporter would set out in pursuit of the ship to find answers to these questions. One from London's Daily Mail actually got himself an interview with Hubbard. The reporter decided that the chain-smoking, evasive Mr Hubbard was a bad fellow, and no further live interviews were ever granted.
Reporters are usually a cynical lot, many Scientologists concluded; and hadn't Ron often said that all reporters and their editors were interested in was violence, money and sex? Who could question the sincerity of a man who worked so hard to create a new civilization for mankind? Who except those with evil deeds to hide!
Hubbard had often told them that only those who had crimes of magnitude attacked Scientology. And "attacking Scientology" came to mean any probing interest in or critical questioning of the organization or, especially, L. Ron Hubbard himself : Scientologists were exhorted by him to unearth the lurid sex, violence and other crimes that his critics must have committed, and to feed these to the courts or press. People who left or attacked Scientology were publicly declared "Fair Game" until the end of 1968.
"Fair game" meant that enemies of Scientology, "may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist, without discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued, lied to or destroyed" (Hubbard Policy Letter of October 13, 1967). (Emphasis added)
After 1968 Hubbard wrote an ambiguous statement (to appease a British government investigation) purporting to cancel the "fair game" policy. In fact his wording cancelled the term "fair game" in name only. This method of handling enemies remained very much in force. The policy was in fact reaffirmed, but was to be exercised more covertly, in order to circumvent the huge public relations "flaps" it was generating.
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Since the initial, essentially positive reviews of Dianetics by the press in early 1950, the news media had generally ridiculed L. Ron Hubbard and his "Science-Fiction Religion."
In the late sixties through 1975, the ship and its odyssey had fared no better with the "yellow gutter press," as Hubbard had dubbed it. There were regular highly critical articles, especially in the London newspapers.
The press also had a field day when, in July of 1968, the British Minister of' Health, Kenneth Robinson, had labeled Scientology "socially harmful," declared its founder an "undesirable alien," and refused him further entry into England.
On the other hand, many Scientologists wondered, where was the press with their big headlines when Sir John Foster, who headed a government inquiry into Scientology, had recommended lifting the ban on foreign Scientologists in 1972.
In his report to the House of Lords, Sir John stated : I am wholly satisfied that the great majority of the Scientologists are wholly sincere in their beliefs, show single minded dedication to the subject, spend a great deal of money on it and are deeply convinced that it has proved of great benefit to them.
Then Sir John noted dryly :
But it is only fair also to make the obvious point that none of this furnishes evidence of the sincerity of the Scientology leadership, whose financial interests are the exact opposite of those of their followers.
2.
Searching for Treasure
Stashed in Previous Lives
"I know with certainty where I was and who I was in the last 80 trillion years."
L. Ron HUBBARD.
Elena Lorrel, in her early twenties at the time, was as close to being Hubbard's confidante as was possible with him, for over a decade. (She has young children. At her insistence it was agreed not to use her correct name to avoid Church harassment.)
ELENA LORREL :
In early 1968, with the Sea Org still in its infancy, we were just pulling out of Puerto Spain, and LRH came out of a solo auditing session (where he audited himself) with a big all-knowing grin on his face. He was going "Uh-huh! Uh-huh! Uh-huh!" He was just baiting someone to ask, "What's happening?" and beg him for an explanation. Someone did, and he revealed that he had actually been the author of The Prince. He was the Duke of Medici when he wrote it, he explained, and he had been ripped off posthumously. Machiavelli was a thief, not the author of this classic, having fraudulently published the stolen manuscript over his own name. On another occasion he let it slip that he had been Robespierre, the famous lawyer during the French revolution.
And he also claimed to have been Cecil Rhodes in Southern Africa up till 1902, and between Rhodes and this life beginning in 1911, a little boy who drowned. He would talk about the vast level of influence Rhodes had on the British crown. He explained that, as Rhodes, he was the darling of Queen Victoria. She and the Kaiser of Germany were squabbling monarchs. They argued often about where the boundaries of their colonies were in Africa, and he was very instrumental in helping to cool down the temper tantrums between them. At the same time Rhodes had hid big gold stashes in the Rhodesian and South African areas. LRH wanted to recover these while he was there in 1966. Of course, Scientologists had no inkling of any of this.
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Another reason Hubbard went off to Rhodesia in 1966 was to make that a Scientology country.
He spent eight million of the Church's money on that venture in order to establish himself as a major entrepreneur and benefactor of that troubled country.
Explains Elena:
He failed. Then he set up the Sea Org. While he didn't succeed in his attempt to take over Rhodesia, he made enough political headway there to cause Ian Smith, the Prime Minister, to become concerned about him and, following a speech by LRH on national TV, the government cancelled his visa. (A report by the Rhodesia Herald, July 14, 1966, corroborates part of that story.)
Hubbard concluded from the Rhodesian Bilure that, no matter how super-capable or "OT" any individual is, he will be defeated by an organized group.
In support of this conclusion (which he claimed was the basic idea behind the formation of the Sea Organization), he explained in "Ron's Journal 1967":
... I have already made an experiment. I went off by myself into Southern Africa to see whether or not an OT would make it singly and all alone, without any assistance, against the environment around him. And I found out that he would not do too much good. But a group of OTs would be entirely irresistible, and necessary to carry off this type of operation.
John McMasters says that in 1969 Hubbard gave secret orders to him (he was Hubbard's emissary to that U.N. at the time), to cultivate a Black African state, with a seaport, and get them interested in Scientology. He was to persuade them that L. Ron Hubbard had their interests at heart. He was to tell them that this man had been banned from Rhodesia and South Africa, because he had tried to free the Black People.
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ELENA LORREL:
Another reason we were in that part of the world sailing around on these ships was the fact, LRH explained, that he had been a corsair (pirate), sailing between the Mediterranean and the new world in the 1700s when the rum triangle was going on. Amongst other things, we were searching for the booty he said he had stashed in different places around the Mediterranean during that lifetime. Oh yes, we were there searching for gold. The real reason for the Sea Org initially was for him to go back and collect these stashes of gold. And then at the same time to amass a group of people to win him a country.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
In 1967, when it was still the Sea Project and we were just a small group, and another time in '68 on the Avon River during the whole track (a thetan's entire time span over thousands of lives) mission, LRH mentioned that the intention of the whole track recall mission was to dig up the treasure, secrete it again, possibly in Spanish banks. He had some idea about Spanish banks, and he wanted to work out a foolproof way that he would be able to identify and pick up the keys and combinations, in his next lifetime, to those same bank accounts.
He was very emphatic about having it stashed for a future life. But he had to devise a foolproof way of doing it. Where could he leave keys to a bank vault, he speculated aloud to me, that would be there at hand in the next lifetime, where he could recognize it, come by and pick it up and get the treasure. He had to somehow get that worked out and he hadn't done so fully yet. Because where could he leave keys like that, or something so that he could get at it again. This was not the announced reason for the Sea Org. There were a few different "shore stories"
There was also a "shore story" for the five-week cruise on the Avon River (renamed the Athena) and the small yacht Enchanter (renamed Diana) which Hubbard and a small crew embarked on in the beginning of 1968. (Leaving the Royal Scotsman Apollo berthed in the port at Valencia, Spain.)
Wrote L. Ron Hubbard in his book about that adventure, titled Mission Into Time : The purpose of the cruise was to test whole track recall [memory of past lifetimes]. Without giving away the fact that they were searching for what he believed to be his past-life hidden gold, he does explain in the book some of the methods he used to locate "target areas."
HUBBARD:
What I would do is write down "so and so and such and such and so and so and there you find the so and so and such and such." Then we would call the object or location of what we were looking for "the target."
With good Sea Org efficiency, we would organize the missions ... and the boats would go out. They'd check and cross-check to see if they could locate the target and whether or not the whole track recall of the situation was correct.
I would write up an area that I'd never been to this lifetime, describing the area precisely, and then parties would go out and exactly locate the target and ascertain whether or not these recalls were correct. There were four targets in all...
I should be careful about this sort of thing because my reputation is always at stake. There are tremendous numbers of people around who keep saying "Ron ought to be ... " My only answer to them is "Ron is."
Anyway, I was over in Carthage about the second or third century B.C., operating there with the Carthaginian Fleet.
There's a gag about this. Nobody was ever promoted in World War II who was in the battle zone. My crew once presented me, when I'd been passed over for promotion by reason of physical disability, with a commission that said, "Phoenician Navy 1003 b.c." That's funny because it's almost true.
I used to have a nice time around Carthage nice sailing water and so on. Around 200 b.c., I knew a girl over in Nora (it wasn't called Nora then) who was the current Goddess of Tanit and a good-looking girl. We had a lot of good-looking girls in Carthage, but they didn't come up to her. ...
It was usually a good thing that I called into Nora with a war vessel because it was almost a matter of war. The girl would say, "Hey, how are you?" and all the other guys didn't have a chance for a while.
The book goes on to detail how the missionaries found a temple entrance in Nora, and photos are shown of missionaries unearthing what is said to be this entrance. And Hana Eltringham is called upon, by Hubbard in his book, to "tell you whether or not this was a positive result": ... it was indeed a positive result. We found the base of the old temple right at the top of the hill... We scraped around the bottom of the ditch and found it was tiled underneath a thin layer of dust and dirt ...
The next mission was South to Tunisia, where the ancient city of Carthage lies, mainly underwater, off the coast. Here on land they again found their target area demonstrated by Hubbard in the form of a clay model and a map drawn by him. Again this is verified by a missionary.
HUBBARD :
Just as we were leaving we had asked for some sort of license to lie off the coast. You always have to have a piece of paper. We sent over an Arab interpreter of ours by the name of Mestasi. He got confused about the whole thing and said we were going to go underwater ...
These people were very confused and they tried to tell us that we mustn't go off the coast and do any diving because, if we did any diving they would have to confiscate the ship.
I thought that was very interesting. They could give us a piece of paper to permit us to dive but just the thought of us diving made them very upset. I thought, "What the devil is underwater around here that's so interesting to dive for?"
According to Hubbard's account, it turned out that the government had discovered the ancient city of Carthage under there and they were scared stiff somebody was going to come along and loot the place.
Hubbard makes no mention of it in his account, but he had divers go down at night to check it out for treasure.
HANA ELTRINGHAM :
As far as I knew no treasure was found or taken.
However, Larry Reeves (who joined the ship some time after the "Mission Into Time" project and has since left the Church), claims :
Because of legalities all this had to be kept secret, but I personally saw the treasure. It was in a huge wooden crate, built from two-by-sixes, the size of a small room. This carton was kept in the hull of the ship, near where I used to work. I'm a treasure buff, so when I opened up one of the boards and looked through, I knew what I was looking at! There were ancient gold coins, and jewels of all kinds. It was like looking at a huge pirates' chest.
Larry made it plain, when I interviewed him, that he believed it had been seized by divers from the Carthage ruins, during the "Mission Into Time" venture.
HANA ELTRINGHAM:
There was lots of money aboard. We had to courier 7 or 8 million dollars in cash to Switzerland. And on a later trip much more than that was couriered. It was couriered from the Dutch Antilles island of Curacao, near Venezuela. LRH was really like a squirrel with nuts, stashing it. He stashed gold bullion too.
ELENA LORREL:
A mission was sent to a restricted area in Nora in Sardinia where their missionaries were caught in the act of trying to remove the gold. What happened was that they played stupid and got off.
HANA says:
Now LRH did have some special boats built in Valencia, Spain, after the "Mission Into Time" voyage.
Later on in 1968 they were brought onto the Apollo, while she was stationed in Greece. They were Aom-bottomed great big sled-like craft, about 12 feet long by about 5 and a half to 6 feet wide, about 2 feet deep and sturdily built. Liz Gablehouse had to scout around and find some quiet motors to put on them.
Their purpose was to do some secret missions; to go back to those particular treasure sites and, late at night, land on the beach. They were to pull the vessels up onto the sand, sneak ashore and dig up the treasure, bring it back, load it onto the craft, and return to the Apollo. In all honesty, I think there was something to the Mission Into Time. There were several sites found and witnessed by me that I felt corroborated what he had predicted. Through the use of P and M scopes. These consist of a flat disk, something like a Hoover or a vacuum with dials on the top. You run it across the ground like a Geiger counter. And it measures and detects metallic substances, like gold and silver, down in the earth.
There were a number of sites where we actually did that checking against paper grids, that were a smaller scale of the actual area. We'd run this thing up on the grid, marking where the actual sites were. We found one such site at Nora in Sardinia. We were investigating the temple of Tanit. On one corner of this temple floor it was definite and, to me, irrefutable evidence.
Where he had predicted there would be some precious metal, the scope went crazy.
At many of the sites we inspected where we were certain there was treasure, it turned out to be some historical site like Carthage and Nora. And, being historical sites, they were guarded.
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Back in Valencia, the Apollo altered serious difficulties with the port authorities, due mainly to the incompetence of its crew. Hubbard was furious. This had caused him to cut off his searches for treasure and head the Athena back to Spain. There would be hell to pay !
3.
L. Ron and the Beast
Science fiction editor and author Sam Moscowitz tells of the occasion when Hubbard
spoke before the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark, New Jersey in 1947:
Hubbard spoke... I don't recall his exact words; but, in effect, he told us that writing
science fiction for about a penny a word was no way to make a living. If you really want
to make a million, he said, the quickest way is to start your own religion. It sure worked
for him. Being the commodore of one's own private navy is not exactly the normal, runof-the-mill hobby of aging science fiction writers. Decent, often intelligent but somewhat naive people, whose dreams for a better world sometimes blinded them, were the income producers for this new religion. Hubbard found such people useful. Having good intentions themselves, they assumed he had the same. Thousands paid the outrageous prices for the Scientology courses and auditing. To give an idea of how much people are willing to pay in today's money, here is an example of a price charged for auditing taken from a recent official magazine from one of Hubbard's top organizations: Twelve and a half hour sections of a type of auditing called "Lists 10, 11, and 12" are priced at $13,000.00 per section. In other words, this auditing costs over $1000.00 per hour! And one must buy a minimum of 25 hours! One organization, the Flag Land Base which became the senior organization when the ships were sold in 197- was recently (late1985) reputedly taking in up to two million dollars a week, and averaging a million. "Flag," operated on 10 percent of its income, with the remainder going to accounts controlled by "upper management."
According to accounts by Hubbard's former personal aides, money tens of millions originating from Europe for Flag services were channelled into Hubbard's personal accounts. And according to the findings of a Federal Court judge, the ships were owned by a Panamanian corporation called Operation Transport Corp. (OTC), a "for profit corporation." Some 82 percent of the shares were owned by L. Ron Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue. "Non-profit" Scientology organizations around the world were told by the OTC that they owed untold millions for consulting services and training of their executives. They attempted to pay these "bills" as best they could, coming up with as much as 90 percent of their weekly gross income in payments to OTC. This was quite a setup.
The Panamanian corporation was in a position of having multi-millions in payments "owed" to it, while the "non-profit" churches could never fully pay these bills, which just kept mounting. They therefore had absolutely no profits to show the IRS. On the contrary, they were awash in paper "debts" to OTC. Hubbard had a lot going for him. He had a formula that enabled him to run his own church for huge profits accruing to him. He could write "scriptures" with a guaranteed market, getting for example $20,000.00 for one "Technical Bulletin." He had money rolling in from his special book publishing and distribution system, a system which netted him much more than mere royalties. And by 1977 he had an international intelligence operation of proportions comparable to that of some fairly sizeable countries. This kept him informed of the most intimate details of any and all organizations, governments and individuals who might try to spoil his game.
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MAGIC
One definition of magic is, "Total commitment to get, to achieve, to win with such totality that one's life itself becomes the ritual of that commitment." (It has been noted that, when that commitment "is malevolent, the magic is black.") For Hubbard, morality was a straitjacket worn by fools. Morality was utilized only when it aided him in reaching his objective. (He gave lip service to all sorts of noble humanitarian sentiments, but he also visibly, especially from the mid-sixties on, gave vent to base motives expressed in vindictive policies and writings.) His WILL was the supreme consideration. This philosophy has been described as "the ends justify the means." This vaguely says it all, but it describes neither the intensity nor the total commitment which appears to have driven him.
His life was indeed a ritual of total commitment to the achievement of power. Power concentrated exclusively under his control. Hubbard may have had this drive for power this obsession all his life. But the point at which it burst into a raging passion was, according to Ron Jr. sometime in his teens when Ron Hubbard and his mother visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. From that time on he was, more and more, able to support his obsession with a detailed, well-developed philosophy. His mother was at the Library tracing back her family's genealogy, while he was poking around trying to find something that interested him. He did. It was a tiny volume called The Book of the Law.
According to its writer, Aleister Crowley, The Book was "dictated" to him in Cairo, between noon and one P.M., on three successive days: April 8th, 9th, and 10th, in the year 1904. The "author" called himself Aiwas, and claimed to be "a messenger from the forces ruling this Earth at present." Aiwas, a spirit "possessing fantastic knowledge and powers," delivered the alleged dictation telepathically. This was Crowley's Bible, and perhaps the most important book in the life of L. Ron Hubbard. The Book proclaims "The Law of Thelema." This law consists of a "simple code of conduct":
"DO WHAT THOU WILT." Of The Book Crowley, towards the end of his life, wrote: Thelema is the Greek for "will." ... it is a sublime synthesis of all science and all ethics. It is the virtue of this Book that Man may attain a degree of freedom hitherto never suspected to be possible, a spiritual development altogether beyond anything hitherto known. Crowley's writings are impressively prolific. In his Magick in Theory and Practice he states: THE WHOLE AND SOLE OBJECT OF ALL TRUE MAGICKAL TRAINING IS TO BECOME FREE FROM EVERY KIND OF LIMITATION. (Crowley added a "k" to the word magic to differentiate his subject from that which had attracted "weaklings" and "dilettantes.")
Adopting the same stated purpose for Scientology, as Crowley had for his Magick, Hubbard says, in a 1952 taped Scientology lecture: OUR WHOLE ACTIVITY TENDS TO MAKE AN INDIVIDUAL COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT OF ANY LIMITATION... Old Aleister Crowley had some interesting things to say about this. He wrote the Book of the Law. In the same lecture series, Hubbard also states: The magical cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only modern work that has anything to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but is a fascinating work in itself, and that's the work of Aleister Crowley the late Aleister Crowley my very good friend... He signs himself "the Beast," mark of the Beast 666... Hubbard only mentioned the Crowley connection to his followers during the loose-lipped days of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures in December of 1952. To my knowledge he never said a word about it to anyone, other than his eldest son, after that time.
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Francois Rabelais (c. 1495 1553) is not mentioned in The Book, but the "Law of Thelema" actually derives from a book penned by him. Rabelais, a priest and graduate of the Sorbonne Seminary, in Paris, wrote a book called Gargantua. It was written in the style of a farcical adult fairy tale, since it contained ideas that were greatly at variance to those of the Catholic Church of his day, ideas that could well have been officially labelled heresy (with the resulting death penalty) had they been seriously presented. Rabelais tells of "how the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner of living": All their life was not spent in laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good: They did eat, drink, lael, sleep when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. Nolle did awake them, nolle did over to constrain them to eat, drink, nor any other thing; for so had Gargantuan established it. In all their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be observed.
DO WHAT THOU WILT.
Because men that are free, well born, well bred, and conversant in honest companies have naturally an instinct and spur that prompted them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honor... (Emphasis added) So wrote Rabelais. Of course there is room for abuse of this injunction. What if "the instinct and spur that prompteth to virtuous actions" is lacking? What if one decides that one's "proper course" involves enslaving or overwhelming others? What if the application of one's "will" results in the denial of another's freedom?
Such action would, by definition, be "black. " When viewing the Commodore's ship Apollo, the law to be adhered to was more like, "Do What Ron Wilt," the officers and crew being subjected to the strictest of rigors, while Ron did as he pleased. His will was supreme. Robert Heinlein, a one-time friend of Hubbard's, suggested this well in a recent novel. He referred to his followers as "L. Ronners" and "Hubbardites." Some ex-Scientologists use the term "Rondroids." The stable dictum for his followers is his written or spoken intention: "DO WHAT RON SAYS."
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Be they damned and dead! Amen. Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler! (According to Ron Jr., his father never sincerely felt remorse or sympathy.) Did the young L. Ron Hubbard take special quote, when he read: ... in these runes ords and letters of The Book] are mysteries that no Beast [Crowley] shall devine [understand]. Let him not seek to try: But one coth after him... who shall discover the key to it all? (Emphasis and bracketed words added) According to Ron Jr. his father considered himself to be the one "who came after"; that he was Crowley's successor; that he had taken on the mantle of the "Great Beast. " He told him that Scientology actually began on December the 1st, 1947. This was the day Aleister Crowley died.
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He also claimed to have mastered Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, and, most of all, magick. Yet he was also a regular user of cocaine, opium, peyote, and hashish. At the age of forty-five he proclaimed himself a saint of the Gnostic Church, becoming a "god" in his own temple, by which time he was infamous in a number of countries, banned from some and forced to leave others. His reputation for wild sex and drug orgies, which he combined with the religious rites of his self-instituted order, was a major factor in his difficulties with various governments.
He established "The Abbey of Do What Thou Wilt" on the island of Cefalu, Sicily, where he lived with a collection of mistresses, performing sexual, narcotic, and occult experiments. It is perhaps co-incidental that Hubbard, in the late fifties, set up his headquarters at Saint Hill Manor in England, less than half an hour's drive from what had been Aleister Crowley's house in Tunbridge Wells. (The house is now owned and occupied by the lead drummer of Led Zeppelin's band another reputed admirer of Crowley. Certainly Crowley seems to have been popular with the Beatles, who presented his image among a group of "people we like" on their "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album.)
MAGICK AND DRUGS
Was Hubbard's WILL reinforced by the Magick, in which drugs played a major part? Could it be that Scientology's founder publicly vehemently anti-drug since the mid1960s, and having written extensively since that time on the harmful effects of drug use was himself a heavy drug user. Was Ron Jr. telling the truth when he said that his father began using drugs beginning in his teens, and continued at least until he (Ron Jr.) left the organization in December, 1959? Comparing the harmful effects of alcohol with various drugs, Hubbard wrote in the revered "first book" Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health): Opium is less harmful [than alcohol], marijuana is not only less physically harmful but also better in the action of keeping a neurotic producing phenobarbital does not dull the senses nearly as much and produces less after effect...
While few of his followers seem to be aware of the fact, in the same book he recommends the use of Benzedrine in certain cases to overcome the "reactive mind." Amusingly enough, he states in a policy letter, "Keeping Scientology Working": "We will not speculate here on... how I came to rise above the bank."' Ron Jr.: I need not speculate, I know! I remember in 1952 in Philadelphia, while he, was taking a needle in the arm, containing cocaine. He grinned at me, winked wryly and said, "Shades of Sherlock Holmes"! Dad gave a lot of his lectures on cocaine or stimulants of one kind or another. He could really get brilliant on the stuff. Hubbard's friend and "magick partner" of the late forties was a chemist named Jack Parsons. Parsons was the head of Crowley's Organization, the "Ordo Templi Orientis" in California. He scribed this verse which was printed in the February 21st, 1943 issue of the Oriflumuze, Journal of the O.T.O.: I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote, Marijuana, morphine and cocaine, I never know sadness, but only a madness, That burns in the heart and the brain. I see. each charwoman, ecstatic, illhurnan, angelic, demonic, divine. Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon That brims with ambrosial wine. Hubbard mentions Jack Parsons in the "Professional Auditor's Bulletin" of 15 April 1957: "Bank" = "reactive mind." It is similar to the "unconscious mind" that so fascinated Freud. Now I have been very fortunate in my life to know (like a few real genius fellows that really wrote their name really large in the world of literature and science...
One chap by the way, who gave us solid fuel rockets and assist take-off for airplanes too heavily loaded on aircraft carriers, and all the rest of this rocketry parlorulna, and who formed Aerojet in California and so on. The late Jack Parsons... According to Ron Jr. his father used drugs and self-hypnosis in order to beef up his WILL: For years he used even in the thirties-sound scribers. I think you would call it that... The original dictaphones, and IBM had one tot, ... , And he would read these what he called the "Affirmations" into, the dictaphone. This is when they were non-erasable. You know, the old Edison with the wax cylinder. He would write these up, or he'd take quotes from the Book of the Law, and other places; then he'd take whatever he had in the way of drugs and play 'em back. Usually he used headphones. Hardly anyone believed Ron Jr. when he told this story; but the "Affirmations," in their original hand-written version, were brought into evidence in open court in Los Angeles in mid-1984, and are part of the court record.
One of these "Affirmations" is: "All men shall be my slaves ! All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!" Ron Jr. states in a sworn affidavit: I have personal knowledge that my father regularly used illegal drugs including amphetamines, barbiturates and hallucinogens. He regularly used cocaine, peyote, and mescaline. According to statements made by attorney Michael Flynn, Hubbard, until at least February of 1980, filled out fraudulent "doctor's" prescriptions for a large array of medical drugs for himself.
And while the Church has sued attorney Michael Flynn more than a dozen times based on various accusations including libel (all of which suits have been dismissed to date), they have never mentioned Hubbard recommends as a "good book" Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception in his "Operational Bulletin no. 17" of Feb '56. This work of Huxley's deals with his experiences while experimenting with mescaline. Flynn's allegations regarding Hubbard's "illegal self-medication" in any of these suits. Other statements to the effect of massive self-medication are by Gerry Armstrong (who was a witness to Hubbard's diary and other documents), Sara Northrup Hubbard, and John McMaster, all of. whom I interviewed. Sara Hubbard explained that Hubbard was "self-medicated," but that during the five years they were married, she knew of no instances when he used "street drugs." Armstrong, told me, among other things, of a letter from Hubbard to his third wife Mary Sue when Hubbard was in Las Palmas during 1967 at the inception of the Sea Org.
This letter is now in the custody of the court. In it Hubbard tells his wife: "I'm drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys." John McMasters told me that on the flagship Apollo in the late sixties, he witnessed Hubbard's drug supply. "It was the largest drug chest I had ever seen. He had everything!" It was shown in the Armstrong trial in Los Angeles in 1984 that Hubbard even had blank prescription slips from the U.S. Navy, one of which had a prescription for phenobarbital (a barbiturate and hypnotic) written in Hubbard's handwriting. Also, in the Armstrong trial where the "Affirmations" were introduced, a letter by Hubbard to his first wife was revealed, the last sentence of which declared: "I do love you, even if I used to be an opium addict. "
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If Hubbard was indeed a "druggie," his followers are not. While many Scientologists appear to be nicotine and caffeine addicts, that is as far as it goes.
Scientologists do not use drugs. And there is even a Scientology anti-drug program Narconon 7 originally established by an inmate of Arizona State Prison named William Benitez. It has been quite successful at times in getting people off drugs.
I'm told that "uppers and downers" are sometimes referred to as "pinks and greys." In this context, Ron Jr.'s statement that his father "was not a Scientologist," as startling as it may seem to some, begins to make some sense: He was not a Scientologist, and even said so publicly on several occasions, but people would just slide over it. For example, the wise and humanitarian sentiments expressed in his writings and lectures had nothing to do with him or how he conducted his affairs.
His private life was the antithesis of what he wanted his public image to be. He hardly ever took his own advice. It is possible, however, that Hubbard did follow the advice he gave during a Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture in December of 1952,** when he said: You should be able to drink as much as you want, abuse the body in any way you want. In the same lecture series Hubbard said: Just because I did something like Scientology people think I'm supposed to he perfectly controlled, and a perfect gentleman. That's a non-sequitur. Hubbard had a habit of describing himself while pretending to be describing another. This, perhaps, was the case in the following dissertation excerpted from one of his taped lectures. If so, it is revealing: Looking down the line at the spirit of men of great and murderous deeds... and you'll find out they're strange boys; very strange boys.
They just never, never kind of nailed down in there right place, and did just exactly the right things. You look in vain for the old school tie.
Of course, from the mid-sixties onward what may have been the "real Hubbard" began to show up, to some extent, in such things as the "Fair Game Law" and sadistic "ethics." But such vindictive or destructive sentiments were kept very "low profile."
"My father was high during most of these lectures," claims Ron Jr. "and he was, on occasion, very frank, revealing his true feelings." Not spotting this material in time to edit it out before it became widely circulated was a major blunder by the Church.
THE ADVENTURES OF THE COMMODORE
There was a great old fellow in China named Wang the Innovator. And Wang the Innovator practically turned China upside down and right side up again, and upside down, and left it that way. Rut he organized a lot of systems... he laid down the laws that are going to be this way and that way. He laid them all down very nicely and he had them all patterned out very beautifully. But he himself didn't kind of follow this. He was a wild man. Nobody could ride up along side of him. He had more women than he could count. It is of particular interest to note that he equates men of great deeds with men of murderous deeds: "... men of great and murderous deeds... "
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