I PUSHED open the door of the decaying block of flats not far from Waterloo Station. The narrow hallway opened onto a room littered with papers and letters and ashtrays filled with cigarette ends. The summer afternoon air was stale and sour and the room was filthy. In the corner stood a single bed with a grubby white quilt. Sitting on it, clutching a large vodka and orange juice, was Scientology's very first 'Clear'.
'This place is just a dump,' said John McMaster. His voice had a theatrical ring about it. His hair was white and his face blotchy around the bright eyes which studied me intently. His hand swept to a chair where he bade me be seated. The man who had once been called 'the magician of the E-Meter' and the first 'Pope of Scientology' by Hubbard himself, is now a frail and emaciated figure. Clutching the vodka and orange, he sipped as he talked, travelling back down the time-track to the days as a young medical student in South Africa when his stepmother first introduced him to Scientology. 'It wasn't a religion then,' he said with some distaste. 'My stepmother used it as a weapon. I told her it was just a tool. That's what it is, a tool.' The tensions grew with his stepmother as John McMaster quit medical school and learned more about how to work the E-Meter. His father reluctantly bought him a one-way ticket to Saint Hill where John excelled as an auditor without ever meeting Hubbard. Then in March 1965 Hubbard offered him a key post.
The next two years were boom ones for Saint Hill. With only six staff in early 1965 and a turnover of L1,490 per week, McMaster helped boost this sevenfold within a year. On St Valentine's Day 1966 Hubbard issued a promulgation that the world's first Scientology 'Clear' had been achieved. McMaster was in Los Angeles at the time
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and was recalled to Saint Hill to undergo checks to ascertain if he really had passed the test. Hubbard's previous announcements of Dianetics 'Clears' had proved to be somewhat premature and did not stand up to scrutiny. But McMaster passed. On 9 March 1966 Anton James wrote to Hubbard, 'Dear Ron, It's with the greatest joy and happiness that I have to report to you that John McMaster has passed the "Clear" check and no doubt exists that he has erased his bank completely and it's gone. There is no meter reaction at all ...his presence in the environment brings about a calmness and safety .'
McMaster became a legend among the devoted followers of the 'tech'. The incarnate Clear's speaking style charmed thousands and his touch on the E-Meter brought people like author William Burroughs to be audited by him. Hubbard charged L2,500 for processing, with L50 for fifty hours with McMaster, who was receiving L4 per week. Then he upped it to L250 as McMaster's prowess grew.
While he was enjoying the limelight and the success, McMaster didn't look too carefully at Hubbard's flaws. But in the sixties Hubbard was anxious to expand Scientology into Africa. Barred from South Africa, although there were Scientology centres there, he fixed on Rhodesia, and the Boomiehills Hotel.
McMaster remembers a heavy-handed attempt by Hubbard to influence Prime Minister Ian Smith while he was living in Alexander Park in Salisbury. Ron had his chauffeur drive him out in his yellow Pontiac with two bottles of pink champagne, which he had to leave with the butler because Mrs Smith would not receive him. 'There are things like protocol, you know, just general decency,' says McMaster. 'You don't just barge in on somebody like a tramp steamer mis-docking. All these nuances of understanding, I began to realize, he didn't have.' With some distaste John McMaster adds, 'He told me Ian Smith was going to be shot because he was a "Suppressive". I now have no comment. But the real reason that Hubbard was kicked out of Rhodesia was that his cheques bounced.'
In the mid-sixties doors started closing in the Scientologists' faces all over the world. Whether it was from accident or design, most of the Church of Scientology target areas were in the old British Commonwealth - Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. The first door to slam was in Victoria where, in 1965, a Board of Inquiry persuaded the State legislature to pass the Psychological Practices Act which effectively outlawed Scientology in Victoria. Within half
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an hour,1 Australian police had raided the Melbourne org and confiscated some 4,000 documents, personal files and books. It was now punishable by a fine of $400 to use an E-Meter unless a trained psychologist and it became a criminal offence to receive or teach Scientology materials.
The newspaper headlines at the time in Australia are a telegrammatic way of conveying the charges in the report which had been prepared by Mr Kevin Anderson QC.2 Scientology was variously held out as 'perverted', 'a form of blackmail', 'caused delusions', 'exploited anxiety', 'a menace', 'product of an unsound mind'. This last charge referred to the diagnosis of Hubbard from a distance by Dr E. Cunningham Crax, chairman of Victoria's Mental Health Authority, who gave evidence to the Board of Inquiry that Hubbard was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One cannot help feeling sympathy for Scientology, which seemed to be condemned without a proper hearing, if one reads the account of the episode in Garrison's *The Hidden Story of Scientology*, He tells how Hubbard had volunteered to testify to the Board if they paid his expenses, but it is difficult to accept the bona fide of this when one reads that Garrison congratulated Hubbard on his good sense in failing to turn up in person when the Australian legal profession began discussing whether he could be charged with fraud.
The South African government was considering holding a similar Inquiry into Scientology in 1966 and McMaster was dispatched by Hubbard to trouble-shoot. The Inquiry was not held until 1969, by which time a banning order had been brought in the UK preventing leaders of Scientology from entering Britain. (It remained in force until 1980, although a report by Sir John Foster to Parliament written in 1970 and published in 1971, recommended the ban be lifted.)3
To summarize, the mid-sixties were a turning point for Scientology. As it expanded into Anglo-Saxon corners of the globe, it met increasing hostility from governments and the medical profession. The reaction to this from Hubbard was increased paranoia and a series of poisonous and authoritarian HCOBs poured from his pen:
26 AUGUST 1965: The Ethics E-Meter check allowed the Ethics Officer (whose office and function had been introduced in May and June respectively) 'at any time (to) call in any staff member
1 on 7 December 1965. 2,3 *See pages 63-4*
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and do an Ethics E-Meter check...no question is asked...the EO records the position of the tone arm and the needle'.5 AUGUST 1965: The main characteristics of a Suppressive Person (SP) were defined and in December the 'handling' of the PTS and the suppressive group was outlined.
6 MARCH 1966: Rewards and Penalties. How to handle Personnel and ethics matters.
27 SEPTEMBER 1966: The 'anti-social personality', the 'anti-Scientologist'.
On and on they came, Hubbard's pen as prolific in defining, attacking, demanding as it had always been in churning out science-fiction. By September 1967 he had even defined a state of 'non-existence' for those who ran foul of his tyrannical paranoia. 'Must wear old clothes. May not bathe. Women must not wear make-up or have hair-dos. Men may not shave. No lunch-hour is given and such persons are not expected to leave the premises. Lowest pay with no bonuses.' On 1 October 1967 'Uses of Orgs' declared, 'There are two uses to which an org can be put: (1) To forward the advance of self and all dynamics towards total survival. (2) To use the great power and control of an org to defend oneself.' This was followed on 16 October by 'How to Detect SPs as an Administrator' and on 18 October by 'Penalties for Lower Conditions'. These included 'Suspension of pay and a dirty grey rag on left arm, and day and night confinement to org premises. TREASON: Black mark on left cheek.'
An enemy of Scientology became by definition a 'Suppressive Person' and thus was 'Fair Game': 'May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologists.' The Church of Scientology points out that Fair Game was cancelled by Hubbard in 1968, but it should be noted that he did this because it was causing adverse public relations, not because it was undesirable, and he added that it did not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of a SP. In other words, business as before - and the 'business', dirty tricks, spreading false information about critics, blackmail and threats - had been pretty busy and grisly until that point. If someone was in contact with a Suppressive Person they were required to 'disconnect' from them by writing a letter, At one time it was accepted practice to publish letters of disconnection in the *Auditor* magazine, and Wallis quotes one disquieting example of a member of a family writing such a letter:
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I, Heath Douglas Creer, do swear that I disavow and thoroughly disassociate myself from any covertly or overtly planned association with J. Roscoe Creer and Isabel Hodge Creer or anyone demonstrably guilty of SP acts as described in HC Policy Letters March '65. I understand that any breach of the above pledge will result in me being declared a Suppressive Person. *Signed*, H.D. Creer.
It was little wonder that Scientology acquired a reputation for being destructive of family bonds. What is probably more accurate is that Scientology is no more destructive of family connections than it is of relationships in general. What is more subtle is that once a person has made his whole life centre round the Church of Scientology, then being 'declared' (which is the verb for becoming a SP), poses a terrible threat of losing friends, job, home and perhaps family all at once. It is a chillingly effective tool for bringing dissenting voices into line.
'Out-ethics' are graded from errors to high crimes. The latter were more concerned with treason against the org itself, but ethics orders were issued holus bolus for the most trivial incidents. Failure to comply escalated the penalties and the non-conformist could soon find himself facing a Sec-Check prior to a Committee of Evidence (Comm Ev).
Among the questions asked on Sec-Checks were: 'Are you a pervert? Are you guilty of any major crimes in this lifetime? Have you been sent here knowingly to injure Scientology? Are you, or have you ever been, a Communist? Those familiar with the McCarthy witch-hunts of the early fifties will recognize the last question. But it should also be remembered that not only was the interviewee in a stressful situation but he or she was on meter and the E-Meter, as we have seen, has been compared in function closely to that of a lie-detector. In other words, a Sec-Check was a form of interrogation.
McMaster, who had been given the role of Scientology's unofficial ambassador to the United Nations, a grandiose gesture in keeping with Hubbard's pretensions, was appointed Pope of Scientology in August 1966, an event he recalls with derision. 'When Hubbard said to me, "I'm declaring you the first Pope", I thought he was joking. For me it was *never* a church. I did wear a ministerial collar at the UN and they'd say to me, "Oh, hello, Father McMaster - who would you like to see today?" and there was no problem. I was completely trusted.' Not by Hubbard, however, Even McMaster was removed from his post
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in September 1967, put in a state of 'non-existence' and forced to retrain.
In March 1985, McMaster had the satisfaction of returning to the stage where he was once lionized as a 'world-famous spiritual lecturer'. His audience was a new generation of Scientologists who had broken with the church. But McMaster is unaffected by this revived adulation. He returned to his shabby flat in Waterloo just as disenchanted with Scientology as the day in 1969 when he walked out on Hubbard, the man he had come to call Hitler: 'He was savage. He would just turn on people like he was a lion and we were the cubs. I had long since passed his tech but he had to be the greatest. The stuff I developed back then, they're now selling - but I don't want anything to do with being a guru or a prop for their status. I've been asked by these "opinion leaders", who are just another bunch of little Hitlers, to come in and give them credibility. They all want to be more important than anyone else.' He waves his hand dismissively and pours another drink. The aftertaste of Scientology is bitter.
John McMaster was one of the group who left Saint Hill in the mid-sixties when Scientology took to sea. The official reason given was that Hubbard had relinquished his post as Executive Director and turned over the orgs to his proteges after giving them all those HCOBs which told them everything they would need to run an org, including when to scratch their noses. His reason was that as a 'master mariner' he felt the call to go down to the sea again and had acquired a sailing yacht and also a converted channel ferry (*The Royal Scotsman*), which was renamed the *Apollo*. Another retrospective reason advanced by the Scientologists for the move to ships was that these provided the ideal training environment for the budding 'Clears'.
A more cynical view would discern that things were hotting up for Hubbard, with the possibility of governments moving against him for fraud and tax evasion. A life on the ocean-wave was a life free from restraint. Surrounded by his willing helpers, Hubbard's megalomania grew. The Commodore's Messenger Organization was set up from a corps of nubile young girls who would run errands around the ship for Hubbard. They were treated with great respect - an insult to them was an insult to Hubbard himself. He instituted a special task-force known as the Sea Organization. Its members signed 'billion-year contracts' to serve the org and Ron (presumably in this life and those to come) and dressed in naval-style uniforms with berets to match Ron's. They smoked cigarettes incessantly, just as Ron did. They talked
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org-speak as Ron wrote it down. And they policed one another for 'out-ethics'. Packed into the *Apollo* were five hundred of these shock troops, under the command of the 'Commodore'. If Hubbard had never tasted action during the war, he was surely determined to see some in the seaborne years that lay ahead.
Life on board the *Apollo* was a bizarre mixture of an educational cruise, being on the *Bounty* with Captain Bligh, and a version of the movie farce 'Carry on Cruising'. An inexperienced crew on a large ship can wreak havoc and the *Apollo* was no exception. Bungled navigation, incompetent and ill-trained youngsters cooped up together, it was potentially a recipe for disaster.
Ron solved the problem by making his crew into slaves. Crews mutiny, but not slaves. Penalties were draconian. 'Chain-lockering' was introduced by Hubbard as a punishment. McMaster remembers once being asked by the Master at Arms to come and help her, He pulled up the wedge from the chain-locker, a dank and unhealthy part of the ship into which offenders were flung without food as a punishment. Out crawled a little girl who turned out to be a deaf-mute who had been unable to write her name and had incurred the Commodore's wrath. The bilges were another favourite punishment cell (known as 'in the tanking'). Another penalty was being made to climb the dizzy heights to the crow's nest and stay there for a whole watch. But by far the most used (and abused) of the bully-boy tactics was 'overboarding' - Captain Hubbard's version of walking the plank. It originated in Melila when Dutchman Otto Roos, then Senior Auditor, had let a line slip as the *Apollo* was making a botched berthing. Roos is now a rich businessman. His macho manner and tough-guy approach meant that he was rarely on the side of those who were bullied. He discovered the traumatic effects of overboarding on some and declares that he ordered it stopped forthwith. But it didn't prevent McMaster being put overboard four times. The fifth and last time was on 5 November 1969. It was the last straw and when he went ashore he vowed to quit. A young lady chaplain had come to fetch McMaster from the hold because Hubbard wanted to present him with something on the poop deck to 'honour all he had done'. He says he knew right away it was a Judas kiss and Hubbard accused him of betrayal. His daughter Diana 1 (who occupied a senior position on *Apollo*) read out a list of 'high crimes' which McMaster says were all lies, and then eight burly Scientologists flung him overboard. He broke his shoulder in the fall.
1 One of Hubbard's seven children by his three marriages. (The daughter of Mary Sue.)
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Otto Roos has written a diary of those years on board ship. It is peppered with org-speak, but it is a fascinating insight into the period which is now idealized by Scientologists as a golden period when Ron was developing his higher tech and sailing around the Mediterranean discovering archaeological sites where he had lived in his past lives. Extracts from Roos' diary have been widely circulated among the independent movement, since he is now among the Suppressive Persons and 'squirrels'. Here are some extracts from the Flying Dutchman's log:
'I was not all innocent and sweetness and light. Far from it. I had decided there were only two kinds of people there: those who got into the tanks and those who put them in, and that I was not going to get in, no way!...Having myself as a child experienced the atrocities of war, when many of my friends hadn't, I wasn't going down into those tanks. Rusty old tanks, way below in the ship, filthy bilge water, no air except via oxygen tubes, and hardly sitting height, in which sinners were put from 24 hours to a week, day and night, to hammer rust off the insides with Masters of Arms checking outside to hear if the hammering continued, and occasional food out of a bucket. This was like the concentration camps of my childhood days....'I would also have refused the crow's nest, which meant spending 4 hours in the nest and 4 hours on deck, alternating for some 84 hours. The nest, a tiny bucket at the top of the mast, too small to sit or lie in, gets cold at night. One of our SPs (named O'Keefe) had a fear of heights and virtually had to be winched up there and down again every 4 hours.
'The severe "unreasonability" started in earnest in September '67 when Non-Existence included no right to food, and Ray Thacker, huddled in a corner, would be avoided by all and occasionally thrown a crust of bread....
'The Flag Orders at the time (instructions from HQ) usually dealt in "smashing THEM" (our "enemies") and smashing them we did, if not our enemies at least ourselves and most of our port relations.
'To say that LRH could not have known about this, can only be answered by "How could he not have?" on a little ship and holding all the comm. lines, after *originating* the policies. One walks around on a ship and looks. LRH has never been renowned for an inability to look.
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'...There was continued data about SMERSH (from James Bond books), the "Enemy", bankers, psychiatrists, newspapers, port officials, etc. Port flaps were all "their" doing. Our unreasonable (and very often unseamanlike and very unprofessional) methods had "nothing to do with it"....'The billion-year contract was signed of our "free will' (and some Swedes, who objected, were immediately "beached" [sent away], "never to be given upper-level materials", and "declared"). "Beaching" I have seen many times and it did not improve port relations. A beachee, put ashore with his passport and no money (except his Sea Org "pay" sometimes) to make his way home, would go to his Consulate for help and have some explaining to do. Another way to bring on the "enemy".
'Nobody ever *dared* say anything about these things and risk losing his OT levels for "making the Commodore wrong".
'Our lives were completely mapped out 24 hours a day, *personal* lives exactly prescribed, especially 2D [relations with the opposite sex]...The day started with "Musters", sing-songing KSW, followed by a mantra of "LRH, LRH, LRH", after which work, work, work, for little or no pay...'
Roos was by now a Class XII auditor, the top rank, and was auditing Hubbard himself, a dangerous task which proved his undoing.1 The Commodore had some bad readings on the meter which were duly noted by Roos, but Hubbard would not accept these. The relationship which had flourished with LRH calling Otto up to his cabin to bounce ideas off him, deteriorated rapidly. Hubbard yelled and screamed to see his folders (which is not allowed). When Roos refused, Hubbard sent some 'hefty guys' to collect them and became even more agitated when he saw some meter-reads which did not fit in with either his 'tech' or his self-image. When Mary Sue Hubbard declared that LRH did not 'have such reads', Roos knew his number was up. MSH had previously been an ally and had ripped up the results of several 'Comm Evs' called on Roos for his sexual activities. He had been astute in avoiding supervision up to this point. Apart from LRH/MSH he had no seniors and only once had fallen foul of Hubbard when he refused a posting to run the new advanced org in Scotland and was put on pot-scrubbing duties as a penance. McMaster was the great 'tech man' and was not a senior post holder. He therefore had no hold over Roos either. Indeed,
1 The auditing of members of LRH's family was case supervised by Ron himself.
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the two men could not have been more different - the fey and thespian McMaster and the tough, macho Dutch ex-merchant seaman. There was no love lost between the two and McMaster even alleges that at one time Hubbard ordered Roos to kill McMaster. But they both paint a picture of the voyages of the *Apollo* which make it sound like a concentration camp afloat.
Roos left with only $100 in his pocket and made a fortune in business. His verdict on Hubbard: 'His great tragedy is that he finally penalized himself horribly by denying himself the only thing that could have saved him: his own creation - auditing.' McMaster is more jaundiced. When he left Scientology he was forcibly subjected to a Sec-Check before he threatened to call the police. He told his interrogaters: You will never see me again. The World's First Real Clear has a right to think, doesn't he?' Indeed he does, but as McMaster finished his tale of those early years, I could not resist the conclusion that he was also the World's First Victim of Scientology.
The roll of honour of the fleet of the Church of Scientology is a glossy magazine, *High Winds*, the journal of the Sea Organization. It has a running series of 'tales from the early days of the Sea Org'. These are exploits in which the Commodore features largely. In one, he grabs the wheel and steers the *Apollo* through a jagged reef off Sicily onto which pirates are trying to lure passing ships. In another, the yacht *Enchanter* (later renamed *Diana*) is being blown in a shrieking storm onto rocks when Hubbard barks at a young sailor to climb the topmast and rig the sail while he guides the yacht clear.
I heard another story fresh from the lips of an old salt, Frank Macall, in Clearwater. He was a carpenter and second mate on the *Apollo* but served on the two other yachts - *Diana* and *Athena* (originally called *The Avon River*). Frank Macall had been in the Royal Navy when he came across Hubbard in 1966 when LRH had quit Rhodesia and was advertising in London for volunteers 'to go on an adventure'. 'He didn't tell me it was for life,' laughs Macall behind twinkling sea-blue eyes that are the acceptable face of the Sea Org. Now he works on models in the workshop at the Flag HQ in Clearwater which will adorn an exhibition celebrating the org's former life on the ocean wave.
His first voyage was to discover former lives of a different kind. *Enchanter* set off in 1966 on what Hubbard called 'Mission into Time', an attempt to trace his own past lives. 'We went to one volcanic island,' says Frank Macall, 'and LRH told me what to expect up the
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end of a volcanic track, but I found nothing where he said. Then on the other side I saw a little blockhouse and he reminded me how we were both there in 1682 when I was gunner's mate on his ship and he was Captain of a Portuguese man of war. Suddenly I found I had *deja vu* and could point out all the landmarks and knew every nook and cranny of the place.'
Macall remembers Hubbard as a man of many moods. 'He could dramatize them: pound the desk in fury or anoint my eyes as he did once when they were sore after welding. I'm not a worshipper or a handclapper but if there's anyone in this base with respect for LRH, it's me. Once I had spent twenty-four hours working on an engine. LRH was standing drumming his fingers, then he pushed me aside and in three or four minutes he had it working and we upped anchor. He called it "Bypass-handle" and afterwards he explained it to us.'
As Macall talked, surrounded by all the mementoes of the voyages - the model of the *Apollo*, its ship's wheel and bell - he explained why he had stayed the course in Scientology. 'If it didn't work, I wouldn't have anything to do with it, 'cos I'm a nuts and bolts man. It's the most decent, purposeful, full of integrity thing I've come across and if you comply with its laws you live in harmony with the environment. There are only a few of us old-stagers around here. We're happy to let go of the LRH thing and let him slip away.' It was hard to reconcile these tales of an old sailor with the memoirs of Roos and McMaster. Frank Macall was a gentle man whom I could not imagine thrusting deaf-mutes down into the bilges. But his view was from below decks, the gunner who looked up to his captain from 1682 onwards. Roos and McMaster had a better view from high on the bridge and had further to fall.
As mentioned earlier, the mid-sixties was a period of great fluctuation in the fortunes of the Church of Scientology. While *Apollo* was at sea, governments began to take notice of the Anderson Report of 1965 in Victoria, Australia. It was unambiguous in its denunciation of Scientology: 'Scientology is evil; its techniques evil; its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, socially, and its adherents sadly deluded and mentally ill. The principles and practice of Scientology are contrary to accepted principles and practices of medicine and science and constitute a grave danger to...the mental health of the community. Scientology is a grave threat to family and home life.' You can't say much stronger than that. Perhaps the Church of Scientology deserves sympathy for this verdict which appears to
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be a case for the prosecution rather than an objective assessment. It would certainly agree that the Anderson Report influenced other governments to act who might not have done so without a clear-cut condemnation.
The Minister of Health in Britain, Mr Kenneth Robinson, addressed the House of Commons in the following terms in July 1968: 'The Government is satisfied, having reviewed all the available evidence, that Scientology is socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other and attributes squalid and disgraceful motives to all who oppose it; its authoritarian principles and practices are a potential menace to the personality and well-being of those so deluded as to become its followers; above all, its methods can be a danger to the health of those who submit to them.' Mr Robinson went on to announce a ban on Scientology students entering the UK.
In 1968 acts were passed in South and Western Australia. In 1969 the South African government instituted a Commission of Inquiry into Scientology, and in the USA the FDA won a decision ordering the destruction of the E-Meters seized in 1963, while in the same year, 1969, the tax-exempt status of the Church of Scientology in Washington DC was revoked. Only in New Zealand was there any comfort for Hubbard and his crew when the Commission of Inquiry reported in mild tones in 1969 recommending no legislation provided Scientology kept its nose clean.
The Church of Scientology responded by modifying some of its penalties for 'lower conditions'. Then it won an appeal on the FDA case in 1969 when the E-Meter was judged to be a religious artefact and as long as E-Meters were labelled as ineffective in treating illness they were permissible. In 1971 the Foster Report in Britain modified the tone of previous criticism by declaring it would be contrary to the best traditions of the Anglo-Saxon legal system to ban Scientology as in Australia. Although the British ban on foreign Scientologists working in the UK remained in force until 1980 and Scientology did not win final recognition as a religion (and therefore zero payroll tax) in Australia until 1983 by a decision of the High Court, the intense heat was off in 1970. Not so on the high seas, however, for by 1970 the shipboard operation was turning sour. The *Apollo* was meeting with a less than ecstatic reception at the Mediterranean ports at which she docked.
Hubbard was interested in establishing another centre to rival Saint
1 revoked by stiffer penances in HCOPL dated 16 November 1971.
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[1st set of plates: 8 pages; 12 photos]
1 An early picture of L. Ron Hubbard
2 *Above:* Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex with castle complex, designed by L. Ron Hubbard, on the left
3 *Left:* London HQ of the Church of Scientology in Tottenham Court Road
4 *Above:* Candacraig House, Strathdon, Scotland
5 *Below:* Robin Scott, his wife Adrienne and their family
6 *Above:* View of Municipal Buildings, Clearwater, from the Penthouse at the Fort Harrison Hotel, with Bay of Tampa in background
7 *Below:* The author examining an E-Meter at Flag HQ
8 *Right:* Room stocked with confidential pc folders in 'Flag HQ' (Fort Harrison Hotel, Clearwater)
9, 10 *Above and left:* 'Old salt', Frank McCall, remembering past voyages with a model of *Apollo* and ship's wheel
11 *Right:* Hubbard and film crew working in Southern California in the late seventies. The youth directly below Hubbard is David Miscavige
12 Hubbard on location
[end of 1st set of plates]
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Hill, but the British ban prevented it being in the UK. He was convicted *in absentia* of fraud in France. The IRS were following their success in wiping out the tax-exempt status of the rounding Church of Scientology in Washington DC by looking into the affairs of the Church of Scientology (California Corporation) which was a thriving centre and one through which funds were channelled to the *Apollo*. The other areas in which the orgs were strong, as we have just seen, were subject to government interference. Hubbard did two things: (1) To handle the money, he set up the RRF (Religious Research Foundation) in Luxemburg with bank accounts there. Money was channelled there, especially the income from non-US nationals and then onto the *Apollo*. Those who imagine that Hubbard's resignation as Executive Director and 'Supreme Commander' in 1966 was anything other than a cosmetic gesture were deluding themselves. LRH was very much in charge and that meant especially of the money. (In a later chapter we shall look at this highly important factor in Scientology.) (2) Hubbard then looked around the Mediterranean for a Mecca and intuitively he turned for Greece, from whence the very names of his ships were derived. It was hoped to establish a 'University of Philosophy' in Corfu, but the project blew up in the church's face when unjustified claims of Greek government support were made. The Scientologists claim that their enemies in the USA and Britain tainted them with black propaganda. A less polite version is that the Church of Scientology could not resist pulling a few dirty tricks and the Greeks saw through its methods. The Sea Org fleet was ordered out of Corfu ignominiously in March 1970 halfway through a refit.
The next prospect was Tangier in Morocco. The Sea Org fleet stayed in the Western Mediterranean, also sailing to Portugal, the Canaries and Spain in this period. The *Apollo* went into dry dock in Lisbon in 1972 and on 3 December 1972 Hubbard and his wife were given twenty-four hours to leave Tangier. They flew to Lisbon but there Hubbard was advised that he could be extradited to France following the fraud case brought in his absence, so he flew back to the United States and went into hiding with his medical officer Jim Dincalci in an apartment in the suburb of Queens, NY City.
Hubbard was not in good health but managed to work on several 'Operations' to get back at the Enemy, among them 'Operation Snow White' (*see p. 79*). He returned to the *Apollo* in September 1973 and she sailed mainly in the East Atlantic.
In October 1974 the *Apollo* sailed into Madeira off the Canary Islands where the 'Apollo Allstars' planned to take part in a rock
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festival. But the plan went horribly wrong. A crowd stormed the ship believing that she was part of a cover operation for the CIA, and the *Apollo* was forced to put to sea, with one crew member killed in the fracas.
The ship crossed the Atlantic and arrived off South Carolina, but could not berth because the FBI were waiting. She went on to Nassau, then Curacao, where in 1975 Hubbard suffered a stroke and was taken ashore to the Hilton Hotel in Cabana. The West Indies were not happy to receive the *Apollo*. The worldwide reputation of the Church of Scientology was bad enough but unstable governments of small islands needed a boat-load of Scientologists pouring ashore like they needed a hole in the head. Jim Jones found Guyana as a home for his deadly cult, but for Hubbard there was to be no bolt-hole. It was then that he devised a better plan. He would take over a whole town in his own country, the United States.
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