The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper

by Tony Ortega

  He explained that they didn’t have much time. In two days, on November 1, the Guardian’s Office had learned that a meeting would be held in a conference room on the fourth floor of the main IRS building—at 1111 Constitution Avenue, NW—and Scientology would be discussed.

  Their job, he explained, was to plug the device into a wall socket in the conference room before that meeting started. And they had only a day to figure out how to do it.

  Meisner had been preparing for this day for several years. Originally from Chicago, he had first learned about Scientology in 1970 from a friend while he was a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana. A few months later, he left school to work full time for the church. By August 1972, Meisner was running the mission in Urbana, and the following year, he was recruited to the Guardian’s Office by Duke Snider, a GO official who had apparently been named after the Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder.

  Meisner and his wife Patricia were sent to Washington D.C. in June 1973 so each of them could begin their GO training. Meisner was also sent for several months to Los Angeles for special training in B-I’s intelligence activities. By January 1974, he had returned to the nation’s capital and had achieved the position of Assistant Guardian for Information. And he was in that position as the Snow White Program was finally about to go into high gear.

  Since L. Ron Hubbard had formulated the plan for Snow White in April 1973 while he was hiding out in an apartment in Queens, the project to root out government documents about Scientology in the United States was still gathering steam.

  On November 21, 1973, seven months after Hubbard had green-lighted Snow White, Jane Kember wrote a letter to Henning Heldt telling him that she had learned that Interpol in Washington had files on Hubbard, and she wanted them intercepted. Kember was the Rhodesian woman who ran the WorldWide Guardian’s Office for the Hubbards from England. Henning Heldt was the top Guardian’s Office official in the U.S., and he worked out of Los Angeles. “It is important that we get cracking and obtain these files and I leave you to work out how,” Kember wrote to Heldt, trying to spur him to action. But the theft still hadn’t occurred when, in July 1974, Meisner was prodded by his boss, Duke Snider, to do something about it.

  By late 1974, Scientology had been making Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain documents legally, but the illegal side of the Snow White Program was lagging behind. That changed when Don Alverzo showed up in DC with his bugging devices on October 30.

  On the evening of November 1, after he’d spent the day busy with other matters, Meisner was told what had happened that day at the IRS building. The bugging device was taken into the building by Mitchell Hermann. He located the conference room on the fourth floor, and plugged the device into a wall socket. He noticed that the windows of the room faced the driveway of the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology across the street.

  He went back outside and joined Don Alverzo and the GO’s DC secretary, Carla Moxon, as they pulled a car into the museum’s driveway and tuned in the car’s FM radio to the device’s frequency, taping what they were able to hear.

  After the IRS attorneys held their meeting about Scientology, Hermann made his way back into the building and up to the conference room, retrieved the bugging device, and also picked up copies of the meeting’s agenda which the attorneys had left behind. He took those to Alverzo, who then flew back to Los Angeles with the tape recording, the documents, and the bugging devices.

  Reports about the successful bugging were sent to all of the Guardian’s Office top officials, including Duke Snider, Henning Heldt, Jane Kember, and Mary Sue Hubbard. Snider, in a note to his boss, a British GO official named Morris Budlong, warned that the Snow White Program had now moved into dangerous new territory. “We must be careful with this transcript as even in the distant future in the hands of the enemy the repercussions would be great. There are new laws on this federally and a strong post-Watergate judicial climate.”

  But plans were already underway to infiltrate the IRS on a more permanent basis. On November 14, just two weeks after the bugging of the conference room, the Guardian’s Office managed to get around a hiring freeze at the IRS and placed an agent, a young man named Gerald Bennett Wolfe, into a job as a typist in the tax division.

  A few weeks later, early in December, Meisner and Mitchell Hermann went to the IRS building and stayed around until after 7 pm, when most workers had gone home. Then they went up to the seventh floor to the Exempt Organization Division—which monitored Scientology as the agency fought giving the group tax-exempt status—and lifted files about the church to take back to the GO for copying. The documents in the files added up to a pile ten inches thick. The next day, after the copying, Hermann brought the files back.

  Meisner called his boss, Snider, and told him about the theft, explaining that it had been exceedingly easy to pull off. Snider in turn boasted to his boss in England, Mo Budlong, about the operation.

  “Duke, such news brings joy to my heart. ARC. Absolutely fantastic. ARC. I can’t wait to see the data,” Budlong replied in a telex, using the Scientology acronym, “ARC”—for “affinity, reality, and communication”—which generally represented harmonious agreement.

  Meisner was finally making happen what L. Ron Hubbard had formulated for the Snow White Program more than a year before, and his bosses were thrilled with his progress. But Meisner himself hadn’t met his own spy, Wolfe, who had been placed in the IRS offices.

  Hermann brought them together in an Arlington, Virginia parking lot in mid-December, and they went to Hermann’s home in Washington for a half-hour meeting. Wolfe wanted a code name, and Meisner began calling him “Kelly.” Meisner and Hermann explained to Wolfe how easy it had been for them to take files just a few days before. The told him they wanted Wolfe to begin taking files, targeting an IRS attorney by the name of Barbara Bird, who had been one of the people in the November 1 bugged conference meeting.

  On December 30, Wolfe went to Bird’s office to case it. He noticed that it had two doors, one of which was locked and blocked by a table. He managed to unlock that blocked door without Bird’s knowledge, and then at night or on weekends, after Bird had gone home and locked the main door, Wolfe went through the unlocked, blocked door past the table, and then he could take his time going through her files and copying documents relevant to Scientology.

  He passed them to Meisner, who then meticulously recorded and notated them before passing them on to his superiors, who included Mary Sue Hubbard.

  Washington DC wasn’t the only place where the Guardian’s Office was experimenting with burglary. Robert Louis Dardano became a member of the Boston Church of Scientology in 1972, but almost immediately he was in trouble.

  His mother objected to the money he was spending on Scientology. She made noise about it, and it got back to the church. Dardano was told he was a “potential trouble source” because of his mother, and he was removed from his job as an “expediter” – basically, he was a gofer with a car – and he was told he wouldn’t get his job back until he “handled” his mother.

  He got her to calm down, explaining that he wanted to be a member of Scientology and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. But two years later, she went to the Better Business Bureau, saying she wanted to take legal action against the church.

  As a result, Dardano was cut loose again by the Boston church because of his mother’s continued opposition. Eventually, he moved into a Tewksbury, Massachusetts house with another young church member named Bill Foster and five other Scientologists who had been in and out of church jobs.

  They were misfits, idealistic Scientologists who wanted to fit in but repeatedly found themselves labeled “potential trouble sources” or had “blown” – left their jobs – for various reasons. With a few other friends who didn’t live in the house, the group began to call themselves “Eric’s 11” – referring to Bill Foster’s code name.

  Between September 1974 and March 1975, “Eric’s 11” was a sou
rce of volunteers for the Guardian’s Office in the Boston area. Initially, Dardano was assigned “overt” work, mostly at local libraries. As part of a crew of five or six, he would go into a library and do research on groups that were attacking Scientology, taking notes that would be delivered to a man named Gerald “Deac” Finn with the Guardian’s Office B-I division, who would forward information to Los Angeles.

  By the end of 1974, Dardano was running the library crew, and then he was promoted to do “covert” operations. At the time, it had gotten back to Scientology that a reporter at the Boston Globe, John Wood, was working on a major story about the local church. The members of Eric’s 11 were dispatched to a number of undercover positions, each hoping to get information about what was being said about Scientology, including finding information on the Globe story.

  Dardano was asked to apply for a job as a security guard at the newspaper, and he got it. Other members were placed in positions at the Federal Reserve Bank, the Consumer’s Council, the Lindemann Mental Health Center, the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s office, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and other places. And a member named David Grace got a job with the cleaning company that serviced the law offices of Bingham, Dana & Gould – attorneys for the Globe.

  Grace was instructed to gain access to the offices after hours, and look through the files of attorney James McHugh. The B-I believed McHugh was working with Wood on the Globe’s story, and the Scientology spy division also believed Wood and McHugh were getting help from a woman named Paulette Cooper.

  Grace did what he was told, and one night brought home from the office a thick file from the law office. Grace brought the file back to the Guardian’s Office quarters at the Boston church, where Dardano and others sifted through the file, looking for things the GO might need. They were excited when they found in the file a rough draft of Wood’s article which McHugh had been reviewing for libel.

  At about the same time – February or March, 1975 – another group was sent to a psychiatrist’s office in nearby Belmont, Massachusetts. Dardano drove, and he and Bill Foster dropped off Gary Brown and Peter Marquez. Dardano and Foster waited in the car as Brown and Marquez broke into the office of Dr. Stanley Cath, Paulette’s college psychiatrist.

  After some time, they came out of the building with a thick file, and Dardano and Foster drove them back to the Tewksbury house. They sat in the kitchen, passing around Paulette Cooper’s most intimate medical records and therapy notes. It was the high point of Dardano’s career as a Guardian’s Office volunteer. Later, Bill Foster read to the team a commendation the GO had given all of them.

  But soon enough, there was trouble. The methods of Eric’s 11 – with so many GO volunteers living together, and sitting around a kitchen table handing each other documents – was completely against GO protocol, which called for individual operatives to know nothing about what anyone else was doing. In March 1975, after the break-in of Stanley Cath’s office and the burglarizing off the Globe’s attorneys, the house was broken up, and Dardano and Foster and the others were ordered to go their separate ways.

  During the first months of 1975, Gerald Wolfe was bringing out so many documents from the IRS in Washington DC—a stack that would eventually reach ten feet high—the Information Bureau gave up trying to label and excerpt them.

  The sheer amount of material Wolfe was bringing out wasn’t the only problem. Scientology actually wanted to use those documents and make some of them public. But how to do that without making it obvious that they had been stolen?

  In May, Meisner was told by another GO employee, Gregory Willardson, about a scheme he had dreamed up to deal with that problem. Willardson had named it “Project Horn,” and it was Meisner’s job to implement it.

  Meisner explained it to Wolfe, and instructed his spy to begin taking not just Scientology files, but others as well. Wolfe continued to target the office of Barbara Bird, but also another attorney, Lewis Hubbard (no relation to the Scientology founder).

  Wolfe gathered documents about other organizations that the IRS had been investigating—Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (the Moonies) and Bob Jones University, whose tax exempt status was under review because of its segregationist policies. Wolfe was also instructed to smuggle out blank copies of IRS letterhead paper, so that fake letters could be created as if written by a fictional, disgruntled IRS employee. The GO wanted to create an IRS whistle-blower who was sending documents about Scientology or the Moonies to those organizations, providing cover for how the documents would be made public.

  A “staff member in the IRS,” Willardson wrote in his description of Project Horn, “mails out IRS files to the persons/ groups mentioned in their files...[it] will provide a cover for [Scientology’s] PR and legal [divisions] to expose the documents.”

  In other words, Scientology had its Snow White Program spies steal documents and letterhead so it could create a fake story to explain why it had possession of other documents it had already stolen.

  The job of making photocopies of Paulette’s records from Dr. Cath’s file took several weeks, for some reason, and then the GO volunteers had to break back into Cath’s office to replace the original documents. But perhaps because they were in a hurry, they misfiled Paulette’s folder.

  Later in 1975, as the Guardian’s Office moved on to the next phase of its operation against her, Paulette began receiving copies of her medical and psychiatric records in envelopes with no return address. The harassment was starting up again – after she’d managed to survive the indictment and put her immediate legal troubles behind her. And this time, it devastated her.

  The year before, pages from her teenaged diary had been delivered (by Len Zinberg, but she didn’t know that) to her father’s office. The pages had been chosen for embarrassing comments she had written about her parents when she was 17. She still had no idea how Scientology had managed to get copies of pages from her diary, which she kept in a closet at her apartment.

  But now, it was her medical records that were coming in mailed envelopes. She knew they could only be coming from one place. And it suddenly brought back to her how she had felt when she went to Dr. Cath as a college freshman. She was having a personal crisis after, that summer, traveling to Belgium and reuniting with her sister Suzy for the first time since they were separated after the war. Her survival of the concentration camp in Belgium – and the deaths of her biological parents, whom she saw in a photograph for the first time – were almost too much for her. She loved her adoptive parents, but she fought with them like any teenager would, and had written in her diary that she hated them. She also dealt with feelings of survivor’s guilt, and feelings of never being good enough for Ted and Stella Cooper and it all combined to send her into an existential crisis in her first semester at Brandeis.

  Now, those feelings welled up again as she realized that Scientology agents must have broken into Cath’s office. She called him, explaining what was going on. He went to check her file.

  “It’s missing,” he said, not realizing that the burglars had misfiled it.

  Scientology, she knew, had some of her most intimate secrets, and the thought of what they might do with them made her nauseous.

  In April 1975, the Guardian’s Office had Michael Meisner turn his attention to a new target. The church had been locked in litigation regarding the tax exempt status of its church in Hawaii, and it wanted the documents that had been obtained by the government’s attorneys in that case, who worked in the Tax Division of the US Department of Justice.

  On Meisner’s instructions, on May 3, 10, and 17, Wolfe used his IRS identification to enter the Justice Department’s Star Building, at 1101 11th Street, NW, and made his way to the offices of two attorneys involved in the Hawaii litigation. He copied documents from 12 files he found there, and each day delivered those copies to Meisner.

  Once again, the Scientology spies had found it easy to get into government o
ffices, take the information they wanted, and get out again without being discovered. But now, with so many tens of thousands of documents in their possession, even the Guardian’s Office began to wonder about the penalties they might face if their activities were discovered. Memos about the legal definitions of “burglary,” “breaking and entering,” and “unlawful entry” flew back and forth between Guardian’s Office executives.

  On May 27, Mary Sue Hubbard grew tired of the hand-wringing over what they were doing. She sent a note to Jane Kember, the highest-ranking person in the Guardian’s Office World Wide after Mary Sue herself: “Our overall strategy with the IRS shall be as follows: 1. To use any method at our disposal to win the battle and gain our non-profit status. 2. To buy all the time we can in terms of years...so we work to win, but also to delay as time works on our side, not theirs.”

  On June 18, the GO’s top man in the US, Henning Heldt, sent a response to Mary Sue and Jane Kember, assuring them that he was following those instructions, and that he expected the data-gathering project to finish up soon. The aim, he wrote, was “to use any method at our disposal to win the battle and gain our non-profit status...Bureau I’s actions are moving along steadily and full completion is expected in two to three months.”

  By the time Heldt sent that message, the operatives in Washington had already identified yet another IRS office they wanted to target for more document thefts. They had received information that files about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology were being held by the IRS Office of International Operations (OIO), and Meisner was tasked with figuring out how to get “Silver” into it. (By now, Wolfe himself was being called “Silver” after the code name had originally been applied to the IRS.)

  Meisner was given a deadline: Get Silver into OIO by August 30. Meanwhile, Scientology had more information than ever about where documents about Hubbard and the church were located in government files. In July, Scientology had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the IRS. That request went to an IRS attorney named Charles Zuravin. By law, it was Zuravin’s task to track down all of the documents that might refer to Scientology in IRS hands, and then work from that list to determine which documents the church was actually entitled to under the Act. (Such a list was known as a “Vaughn index.”)