Fair Game

by Steve Cannane

  The brazen breakins continued. Charles Zuravin, the IRS attorney who was defending Freedom of Information (FOI) cases against the Scientologists, also had his office looted by Wolfe. Zuravin had already provided Scientology lawyers with a list of IRS documents that were exempt from FOI. This list was passed on to Wolfe, who used it as a form guide for what to steal from Zuravin’s office.51

  The extraordinary success of Wolfe and Meisner’s mass theft of secret government documents led to an expansion of the operation. There were plans for up to 5000 Scientologists to infiltrate 136 government agencies across the world.52 Snow White Operating Targets, or SWOTs, had been drawn up for a range of countries.53 Project Shoes targeted Algeria, Project Bashful was aimed at Belgium. Project Dopey sought to seize government files in Italy. While in the UK, where the Aliens Act prohibited non-British residents from studying or working for Scientology, Projects Witch and Stepmother were invoked.54

  In Australia, The Guardian’s Office launched Project Dig. This operation wasn’t just about destroying government documents. Its more bizarre aims included prosecuting critics under the UN Genocide Convention and smearing conservative politicians. Hubbard was still smarting from the Anderson Inquiry and the bans that followed. The Guardian’s Office was ordered to draw up a list of critics, ‘including Anderson, psychiatrists, reporters, etc.’ and then petition the Attorney-General to invoke the Genocide Convention against them.55

  The Guardian’s Office was ordered to help get the Whitlam Labor government reelected. Scientologists were concerned the Opposition could reverse Lionel Murphy’s changes to the Marriage Act, and that the ban on Scientology in Victoria could be reactivated. The ‘genocide plan’ is described in the order as ‘an invitation for them to pull a Watergate on the opposition – which is to say, label them as criminals’.56

  The ‘genocide plan’ was too ludicrous to ever be carried out. But Snow White–style tactics were being implemented in government departments. On 10 April 1975, Victor Kirby pleaded guilty in a Sydney court to fraudulently obtaining a confidential government file on Scientology.57 Kirby, operating under the stage name of Peter O’Toole, had picked up the file from the NSW Premier’s Department under the pretence he was taking it to the Under-Secretary of the Department. When Kirby returned the file the following day he was caught, arrested and charged.

  In court, Kirby claimed he had been innocently having a sandwich in Martin Plaza, when a stranger offered him $10 to pick up the file. He denied in a police interview that he had any affiliation with Scientology, despite evidence he had attended 40 or 50 meetings of the cult. Kirby described himself as a salesman from Harris Street, Ultimo,58 the same street where the Guardian’s Office was located at the time.

  It’s highly likely that Kirby was working out of the Guardian’s Office (GO). The GO was separate from other Scientology buildings and part of a highly secretive operation. Agents had to employ cloak-and-dagger tactics to even get inside the building. To enter they had to make a call from a nearby public phone, mention a password or phrase, and then wait for an agent to come down and let them in. The covert operation of simply entering the building could only be done after dark.59

  One agent within the intelligence wing of the Guardian’s Office in Sydney was put through a journalism course at university to help him carry out undercover operations. Under the guise of being a working journalist, Peter Marsh, who requested I give him a pseudonym due to the undercover nature of his work back then, interviewed politicians, attended mental health meetings and turned up at protests. Marsh occasionally wrote articles in the newspaper Nation Review and Labor publications under various pseudonyms.

  In one article, Marsh launched an attack on NSW Liberal MP Tim Moore. The member for Gordon was considered a threat to Scientology because he had tried to initiate a parliamentary inquiry into the Children of God cult. ‘The research we did on him was extensive,’ says Marsh. ‘It was huge. We interviewed his friends from university, we got photos of him from his university years, including a picture of him dressed as a woman and calling himself the “Paspalum Princess”. It was part of a University prank at the time.’ After that, Moore’s political opponents used the ‘Paspalum Princess’ title to mock him in parliament.

  Part of Marsh’s role was to secure files from different sources to find out what information other organisations had on Scientology. Posing as a freelance journalist, Marsh was able to get his way into all the offices of Sydney’s main newspapers and photocopy their files on Scientology. He even charmed his way into the archives of the Catholic and Anglican churches, spending hours going through their files on Scientology. Marsh estimates he copied several thousand pages from various sources. But in a classic case of Scientology overreach, he pushed it too far.

  At the time, the Church of Scientology was obsessed by Australia’s domestic security intelligence service, ASIO. It believed agents were acting beyond ASIO’s charter and had played a major role in spreading false information that had led to Scientology being banned in three states.60 Marsh was sent off to the ASIO offices in Kirribilli to see if he could access the agency’s files on Scientology. Not surprisingly, his mission was unsuccessful. But the visit did help ASIO gain more information about Marsh. He had foolishly parked his car near the front of the ASIO building’s security cameras. Soon after, Marsh got a knock on the door of his home at 4 am from officials claiming to be from the Attorney-General’s department, asking him what he was up to.

  The Scientologists did work out the nature of at least some of the information being held in ASIO files. On 29 August 1974, Michael Graham, the President of the Church of the New Faith, wrote to the Director-General of ASIO, Peter Barbour:

  It has come to our notice that your dossier system contains information disseminated in Victoria by the late Phillip Bennett Wearne and others. Such data remaining on your file is a source of false, defamatory and damaging statements in respect of our Church and its Australian membership.61

  Graham asked that a legal representative be able to view ASIO’s Scientology files and offer correction to any ‘false statements’. Barbour declined the request, responding in classic spook speak:

  I am not prepared to disclose to you whether or not any information concerning your Church or its membership is in the possession of my Organization; and I am not prepared to comply with the request in the penultimate paragraph of your letter that a legal representative of your Church be permitted to examine records of my Organization.62

  This was not the last ASIO would hear from Michael Graham. When the Whitlam government established the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security in 1974, Graham fired off a 27-page submission to the inquiry, accusing ASIO of conspiring with the CIA in a ‘well coordinated, covert intelligence operation’63 which targeted Scientology. The church submitted that ‘it has clear evidence that indicates that the Australian security services played a hidden but direct role in the events which led to the improper banning of a religious movement in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia’.64

  The 27-page document was littered with hearsay, supposition and inaccuracies. ASIO described it as, ‘Though well presented, [it] appears to be a farrago of little fact, vivid imagination and false conclusions.’65 The CIA/ASIO conspiracy is based on claims made by Wearne that he had close contact with a CIA employee, and ongoing contact with ASIO to such a high level that he was given a code name.66 Declassified ASIO files from the time show Wearne did make regular contact with the agency, but he was not considered a reliable source. ASIO’s Assistant Director-General at the time described his office as being ‘pestered’ by Wearne,67 ‘peddling his claim that Scientology is a Communist plot’.68 Wearne was assessed as ‘unstable and obsessed about security work’ and the Assistant Director-General of ASIO had begun the process of blacklisting him when he died in 1970.69

  Michael Graham also claimed in his submission to the Royal Commission that Kevin Anderson did not write all of The Anderson Report, and was
helped by Labor MP Jack Galbally and others. Graham went on to argue that Galbally had connections with ASIO and therefore must’ve been part of a cover-up. While providing no evidence of Galbally’s so-called connections with ASIO, Graham ignores the fact that the longstanding Labor MP disagreed with some of Anderson’s key findings, and voted against the bill that banned Scientology, considering it to be a ‘direct assault on freedom of speech, thought and ideas’.70

  Michael Graham saw spies and conspirators wherever he looked, including in the parliament, the judiciary and the newspapers. Justice Kevin Anderson QC was considered to be in on the plot because he’d served in naval intelligence during World War II.71 Scientology’s submission also fingered Sol Chandler from Truth as being a British spy, and Truth’s campaign against the Scientologists as part of the conspiracy. ‘Wearne swears that Chandler told him he worked for MI6,’ wrote Graham.

  Whether Chandler, who dedicated his life to exposing secrets, was also into keeping them, is unproven; all we have to go on are the claims made by Wearne. In patching together another piece of his conspiracy, Graham was patently wrong. He described Chandler as ‘the editor of Truth in Melbourne prior to and during the Inquiry’. According to former Truth reporter Evan Whitton, Chandler became editorial adviser of Truth in late 1965.72 The inquiry sat from December 1963 to April 1965. Truth’s ‘Bunkumology’ series of articles began in 1961.

  ASIO made it clear in its response to the Royal Commission that it was not that interested in the activity of Scientologists.

  The Church of Scientology has been of marginal interest to ASIO in a security context. ASIO has not investigated the Church but some of its publicised activities have been recorded. Routine inquiries of (redacted) substantiated ASIO’s assessment that the organization should not be regarded as subversive … ASIO was not involved in the Victorian inquiry into that organization or with any alleged police action against it.73

  It was not to be the end of the matter. The Church of Scientology would eventually issue a writ against ASIO for smearing and harassing its members, taking it all the way to the High Court.74 But back in the US, it was Scientology’s own intelligence agency that was playing a dangerous game. While it was accusing ASIO and the CIA of conspiracies and cover-ups, the Guardian’s Office was knee deep in dirty tricks and criminal behaviour that would soon blow up in its face.

  BY THE END OF 1975, L. Ron Hubbard was becoming more and more concerned that he could be implicated in the illegal activities conducted in the name of Operation Snow White. On 5 December, ‘Guardian’s Program Order 158 – Early Warning System’ was issued. It was designed to give notice of any potential legal action against Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue.75 The order directed agents be placed in the US Attorney’s Offices in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, the IRS Office of International Operations, and that agents already in the DEA, IRS and the Coast Guard monitor the situation closely. The newly placed agent in the IRS Office of International Operations was ordered to steal any files on the Hubbards as it was thought a tax evasion case was being prepared.

  Over the next few months the breakins continued across the Justice Department and the IRS. Even the Interpol Liaison Office was raided, with important files stolen concerning terrorism and Interpol’s history. The agents from the Guardian’s Office were becoming increasingly audacious. They burgled the Office of the Deputy Attorney-General of the United States, Harold Tyler, a former judge who had put away former Tammany Hall leader and onetime Democratic kingmaker Carmine DeSapio.76

  The Scientologists had a particular loathing for Nathan Dodell, an assistant US Attorney who had represented the government in a number of Scientology cases. He was the target of Operation Big Mouth, a plan to discredit him and get him fired from his job.77

  On 14 April 1976, when Dodell mentioned during a case hearing that he was open to the possibility of taking sworn evidence from L. Ron Hubbard, the Guardian’s Office decided it was time to strike. Meisner and Wolfe by this time had made their own forged IRS identity passes. They used their fake IDs to get into the United States Courthouse building where Dodell’s office was located. After one fruitless attempt to break into his office, Wolfe discovered a set of keys left on a secretary’s desk. He copied them and the pair returned to the Courthouse building on 21 May under the guise of doing research in the nearby Bar Association library. Over two nights they copied around 3000 pages from Dodell’s files.78 But Operation Snow White was about to come unstuck, courtesy of a fastidious librarian.

  As Meisner and Wolfe returned to Dodell’s office through the library, to replace the photocopied files, Charles Johnson stopped them. The night librarian asked them whether they had signed in. When Meisner and Wolfe said they hadn’t, Johnson told them not to return without specific authorisation from the regular librarian. Johnson notified the US Attorney’s office and contacted the FBI. When Meisner and Wolfe returned two weeks later with a letter of authorisation, Johnson once again called the FBI. Special Agents Christine Hansen and Dan Hodges arrived and confronted the two Scientologists at one of the library’s back tables. After being questioned for 15 minutes, Wolfe and Meisner were allowed to leave.

  After 18 months of covert operations, infiltrating US government departments, breaking into the offices of high-ranking government officials and stealing tens of thousands of documents, the criminal activities of the Church of Scientology had finally been halted by a diligent librarian. Wolfe was arrested at his desk at the IRS. Meisner was harder to track down. On 30 August 1976, two Special Agents with the FBI arrived at the Church of Scientology in Washington, DC with a warrant for his arrest. For the next nine months the Guardian’s Office hid Meisner, changing his identity, and at various times holding him against his will. At one point, two Scientology bodyguards removed Meisner from his hideaway by handcuffing him, gagging him and dragging him out of the building.79

  In June 1977, Meisner escaped, surrendered himself to the FBI and confessed. The following month, over 150 FBI agents, armed with warrants and sledgehammers, raided Church of Scientology buildings in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, seizing over 100,000 pages of documents.80 Hubbard went into hiding leaving Mary Sue to face the music. Hubbard’s wife and ten other officials from the Guardian’s Office would eventually be imprisoned in relation to stealing documents, breaking and entering, forging government credentials and bugging at least one government meeting.

  Among the documents seized by the FBI were the Guardian’s Office plans for Operation Freakout, a conspiracy to frame journalist and Scientology critic Paulette Cooper for bomb threats against Arab consulates, and threats against US President Gerald Ford and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

  Janis Gillham, who was one of the Commodore’s Messengers at the time Operation Snow White was devised, believes Hubbard was intimately involved in the criminal operations that saw Mary Sue Hubbard go to jail while he remained free. ‘Oh, he was in on it,’ says Gillham. ‘Definitely. Mary Sue would not have done that on her own. He was definitely in on it. I overheard him talking to her about it. He talked to her a lot about Snow White. He was also in on the Paulette Cooper stuff. He knew exactly what was going on with that.’81

  CHAPTER 14

  DEEP SLEEP

  BARRY HART WOKE UP from a deep sleep in agony and distress. He was vomiting blood and unable to move his arms or legs. Each breath he took caused paralysing chest pain. He had no idea where he was or what was wrong with him. Hart was close to death. He was suffering from double pneumonia, deep vein thrombosis, pleurisy, a pulmonary embolus and anoxic brain damage. No-one was by his side to ease his torment.

  Ten days earlier, the 37-year-old gym owner and part-time model and actor had arrived at Chelmsford Private Hospital in peak physical conditional. At 188 cm and a muscular 90 kg, Hart was fit and in demand, having acted in advertisements for Bonds singlets, Jockey underpants and Magic Tan. Now he was lying naked and nearly lifeless on a trolley, with rubber tubes up his nose and an overwhelming feeling that
his head was exploding with white light.1

  When he tried to alleviate the pain by moving his arms, Hart realised he was shackled. ‘Get these things off!’ he screamed. He could not understand what was going on, or what version of hell he had descended into.

  ON A STICKY FEBRUARY afternoon in 1973, Hart had taken a long cab ride from his gym in the beach-side Sydney suburb of Coogee to Pennant Hills in Sydney’s north-west to see psychiatrist Dr John Herron at Chelmsford Private Hospital. His shirt clung to his muscular torso with sweat from the heat and the apprehension. Hart was suffering from anxiety brought on by botched plastic surgery. The surgeon had removed herniated fat from under his eyelids, but had taken away too much tissue, leaving him permanently bug-eyed. He was in a state of great distress. He believed his face was deformed and that his acting and modelling career was over.

  A tall, dark-haired woman at the hospital reception asked Hart to sign a form. As he scanned the sheet of paper he noticed a disclaimer giving permission to perform electric shock treatment. Hart recoiled in horror. ‘I’m not signing that!’ he said. He already knew something about shock treatment from the film Fear Strikes Out and wanted nothing to do with it. He was simply there to see a psychiatrist about his anxiety. A nurse asked him if he was nervous. When he admitted he was, the nurse gave him a pill to help calm his nerves. That was the last thing he remembered before he woke up shackled and near death.

  For ten days Barry Hart was sedated with near-fatal doses of barbiturates, and while in a drug-induced coma, was given electric shock treatment on six occasions without his consent. His respiratory rate rose from 16 breaths per minute to 150. His temperature peaked at 39.9°C. He became incontinent, cyanosed and went into shock.

  Hart was a victim of gross medical negligence and abuse, but he was lucky to be alive. Between 1963 and 1979 over 1000 patients were subjected to deep sleep therapy at Chelmsford.2 Of those patients, 24 died at the hospital,3 and another 24 committed suicide within a year of their release, although it’s hard to pinpoint how many of these suicides related to pre-existing mental health conditions.4 The Church of Scientology played a major role in exposing the atrocities committed at Chelmsford, a rare instance where the Scientologists used their undercover operations as a force for public good.