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

by Tony Ortega

  Meisner had Wolfe enter Zuravin’s office between July and November, periodically stealing copies of the Vaughn index that Zuravin was compiling. The Guardian’s Office then had a record of the number and location of the documents the IRS believed it had on file about Scientology, whether it intended to turn them over or not. It provided the Guardian’s Office with a road map of records to steal.

  It was almost too easy: Zuravin had even noted which documents were going to be released to the church, and which ones were being held back. So Meisner had Wolfe target the latter, and Wolfe methodically went down the list, using Zuravin’s index to tell him right where to look for documents the IRS didn’t think Scientology was entitled to.

  Into November 1975, Wolfe was still working down the list, stealing IRS documents by the foot. But then, a few days before the end of the month, the IRS suddenly moved its Scientology-related documents to a more secure location. Wolfe couldn’t get into it. After months of easy theft, the Guardian’s Office was suddenly stymied.

  After another month with no progress, it became obvious that something had to be done to get access to the remaining documents on Zuravin’s list.

  It was time, once again, to bring in Don Alverzo.

  11

  Locked doors and fake IDs

  On September 16, 1975, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a nolle prosequi to end the prosecution of Paulette Cooper. She had, a year earlier, fulfilled the requirement that she get psychiatric counseling since her trial had been put off at the end of October 1973. “Under the circumstances, the government does not believe that further prosecution of Paulette Marcia Cooper is necessary or in the public interest,” the government’s document read.

  Her case was now officially over. But she worried that there was still a cloud over her. It was still possible that a newspaper might learn that she’d been indicted. She still couldn’t really relax. But she continued to see Dr. Herbert Benglesdorf, well after she had been required to do so to fulfill her end of the bargain with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

  She wanted his advice about Roland, a Jewish Marcello Mastroianni look-alike with a French accent who had been born in Eastern Europe, lived for a while in Israel, then for many years in Montreal before moving to New York. He had a PhD and worked as the chief financial officer of a major corporation.

  Roland had spotted Paulette when she moved into the Churchill late in 1972 – he had received the smear letter about her planted by Scientologists, but he didn’t connect it with the attractive young woman he noticed around the building. Later he admitted that he would hang around the mail room hoping for a glimpse of her, but she was too preoccupied to notice.

  She told Benglesdorf that she had met Roland at a party in the building early in 1975. The party was at the apartment of her friend Sandy, who worked in advertising as an account executive and had known Paulette since her BBDO days.

  That night at Sandy’s someone was playing the album from the musical revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris over and over. The songs, in French and written by a Belgian, were significant and intoxicating for her, she told Benglesdorf, and she fell in love with the music and with Roland, who spoke the language.

  She was charmed, and fell hard. That summer, she turned 33, and for the first time since she was with Bob Straus, she began to think seriously about marriage. Roland was sophisticated and funny, and he helped her to forget that she had been through so much harassment, she told Benglesdorf. She said that the three of them – Roland, Barbara Lewis, and herself – were each damaged in their own way, and they joked about it. Barbara had never really recovered from her attack. Paulette was still damaged from her indictment and the ongoing harassment.

  And Roland, it was becoming increasingly clear, drank too much.

  Paulette began to suspect it when she would hear his refrigerator door open and close after she rang his doorbell. When he wasn’t looking, she’d open it and see the only thing in it was a glass of wine. She and Barbara also noticed that frequently, he came into the Churchill carrying a brown paper sack that appeared to have two bottles inside. But what most worried her is that he did his best to hide it from her.

  Benglesdorf surprised her by telling her to face facts: Roland was an alcoholic, and Barbara had her own troubles, and each of them were magnifying Paulette’s own problems. He suggested that she break off with both of them.

  Split with her best friends? Paulette didn’t see that happening. The three of them, and sometimes with Sandy, would chip in for joint dinners at Paulette’s practically every night. Barbara would bring a steak, Paulette would put together a blue cheese salad, and Roland brought the wine. Barbara kidded Roland about his accent (“I luff you,” she imitated him saying to Paulette). Paulette teased Barbara about her habit of making ends meet by making things disappear. (“Great sirloin. Where’d you steal it?”) Barbara teased Paulette about not joining her friends in the women’s lib movement. “Paulette’s years behind in women’s lib,” she’d say, but Paulette already considered herself sufficiently emancipated.

  Then, in the fall, Paulette had a new suitor. An attorney in England named Eric Leigh-Howard who had been handling one of her lawsuits admitted that he’d fallen for her and wanted her to marry him. He was more than twice her age, so she didn’t take it very seriously, but he was persistent, and he asked her to come to London to see what kind of life he could give her. He was quite successful, had a large flat in the exclusive Knightsbridge area facing Hyde Park, and he sent her a first-class ticket to tempt her.

  By then, things with Roland were deteriorating. Eric had met him while he was in New York and told Paulette he was a loser, and she began to have second thoughts, mainly because of his drinking. But the more she pulled away, the more he tried to hold on to her.

  Adding to her stress, her tiny Yorkshire, Tiki, developed epilepsy, and medicine wasn’t helping the little dog fend off the attacks. While she worried that Tiki wouldn’t live much longer, she decided to accept Eric’s invitation once Roland offered to care for the dog. (She told him she was going to London for legal reasons.)

  It was December when she flew to London and spent a week by a fireplace in a large and gorgeous flat reading Agatha Christie novels, eating chocolates, and ringing a bell for a Filipino man and maid servant who brought her things like dishes of Scotch salmon.

  But in just a week, she could see that life with Eric wasn’t what she wanted. He offered her very little freedom, always wanting to know what she was up to. She was used to more independence. And she was especially upset the night she met Cyril Vosper, someone she had corresponded with for years.

  Vosper had written a book about Scientology, The Mind Benders, that came out the same year as hers. Like Robert Kaufman, he was a former member who described his experiences in the organization. He also had suffered harassment, and at one point he had been reported falsely to customs as a drug dealer when he was visiting Spain. His luggage had been torn apart and he was questioned intensely. Once he revealed he had written a book about Scientology, the customs agents said they understood and allowed him to go.

  Although she had told Eric she’d be gone only an hour, she and Cyril spent three hours talking about their experiences with Scientology. Eric was beside himself when she returned, saying he had been ready to call the police to look for her.

  Meanwhile, she called Roland daily, mainly to find out how Tiki was doing. He told her the dog was fine. But then, on her last day in London, he admitted that Tiki had died a few days earlier. Paulette dropped the phone and became hysterical. Eric frowned, “you’re crying about a dog?” That ended any chances the lawyer had with her. She packed her bags and went home.

  When she got back to her apartment, she found out that Roland had not taken Tiki to the vet when the dog became seriously ill. He claimed that he was afraid she would blame him for Tiki’s condition, but she wondered if he was just too paralyzed with alcohol to do anything a
bout it.

  Meanwhile, she learned that Barbara had told Roland what she had really been doing in London. When Paulette confronted her best friend, Barbara said, “I did it because I love you.”

  “What would you have done if you hated me?” Paulette asked.

  Incensed by what she considered Barbara’s betrayal, she realized that Benglesdorf may have been right when he said that Barbara and Roland weren’t her best friends but her best enemies.

  She broke it off with both of them. And as 1975 ended, she was alone again.

  The remaining documents listed on IRS attorney Charles Zuravin’s index that the Guardian’s Office wanted to get its hands on were being kept in two locked offices in a high-security area, within a “red seal.” One office was Zuravin’s, the other was the office of Lewis Hubbard. The GO wanted the documents in Hubbard’s office badly—they were from an audit of the Church of Scientology of California, the mother church. Michael Meisner was told that Don Alverzo was being sent out from Los Angeles to get into the two locked offices.

  On January 17, 1976, Alverzo arrived and met with Meisner, showing him the lock-picking tools he’d brought with him. While Alverzo picked one office door, he wanted Meisner to work on the other one.

  The next day, Sunday, January 18, Gerald Wolfe signed in Meisner and Alverzo with his IRS identification card. He took them to the third floor, where the two locked doors to the offices of Zuravin and Hubbard were just a few feet apart.

  Wolfe kept a watch out as Alverzo and Meisner went to work. But more than an hour later, neither one of them was having any luck with the tools that Alverzo had brought with him. Frustrated, Meisner punched Zuravin’s door, and it suddenly opened. The three men hurried into Zuravin’s office to grab files, run them to another floor to do copying, and then return them to their original place.

  Then Alverzo went back to work on the other locked door, the one to Lewis Hubbard’s office. He was still having no luck with his tools. So he tried an old trick—he took out a piece of cardboard, and slipped it between the door and the jamb, hoping it might slide back the latch. And it worked. The three rushed in again, rapidly went through Hubbard’s files looking for things the church didn’t already have, copied them, and left.

  They departed the building at 2 am, and later that day, the 19th, Alverzo was on a flight back to Los Angeles with a foot-high stack of documents. Meisner followed him less than two weeks later. He spent most of the month of February in Los Angeles as the GO’s top executives spent some time reviewing the progress of the Snow White Program.

  So far, almost everything Meisner had been asked to steal from the IRS in DC had been taken. But it still wasn’t enough: They gave him six more names of IRS officials whose files they wanted, and sent him back.

  On March 4, after getting instructions from Meisner, Gerald Wolfe went to a suite of offices at the main IRS building at 1111 Constitution Ave, NW, used by IRS employee Joseph Tedesco, and surreptitiously removed a doorknob. Later in the evening, after other workers had gone home, he went back to the door missing its knob and pushed his way into Tedesco’s offices.

  Wolfe took the files he copied to a pool hall in Alexandra, Virginia where he handed them over to Meisner. Meisner’s report on the theft was forwarded to the top GO officers, including Mary Sue Hubbard. Six days later, Wolfe made another foray for more files, this time from the office of another target on the list. Wolfe seemed to be doing very well. But in mid-March Meisner was asked by his superiors to get an IRS identification card of his own so he could join Wolfe on the burglaries.

  On March 15, Wolfe signed Meisner in and the two of them went to the IRS identification room, forcing their way in with a metal shimmy, and finding their way around with a flashlight. Following the directions they found in a booklet, they fashioned fake ID cards for themselves. The name they typed on Wolfe’s was “Thomas Blake,” and on Meisner’s was “John M. Foster.” Over the next three months, they made fake ID cards for another five GO operatives.

  The Guardian’s Office invasion of the IRS was going so smoothly, an even more audacious scheme was proposed: To infiltrate the offices of a Deputy U.S. Attorney General at the Department of Justice, where the GO suspected that changes to the Freedom of Information Act itself were being planned.

  Again, things went surprisingly well. Using their IRS cards (Wolfe used his own valid card, Meisner used his fake “John M. Foster” ID), the two entered the Justice building at 9th and Pennsylvania Ave, NW, and broke into the office of Deputy Attorney General Harold R. Tyler, Jr., using a metal shim to lift a lock latch.

  Tyler was a Princeton grad, a WWII Army veteran, and had served as an assistant US Attorney and a federal judge before he had, for the second time in his career, become a deputy U.S. attorney general, in 1975. Meisner and Wolfe rifled through his office, and found the proposed changes to the Freedom of Information Act. They copied the documents and sent them on to Los Angeles, including to Mary Sue Hubbard.

  A few days later, one of Meisner’s bosses, a woman named Cindy Raymond, explained to him why they needed him to go back and break into Tyler’s office again. At the time, Scientology had made a records request with the Drug Enforcement Agency, but the DEA had turned it down. So the church was appealing the case, and wanted information about the DEA that might help it win its appeal. Raymond learned that the Justice Department had been conducting a widespread investigation into corruption in the DEA, and a copy of that investigation—the “DeFeo Report”—was likely to be in Tyler’s office.

  There was bound to be a lot of damaging information about the DEA in those papers. Raymond instructed Meisner to get copies of it so it could be leaked to the press to undermine the DEA’s credibility and might help Scientology in its legal appeal.

  On April 9, Meisner and Wolfe went back to the Department of Justice, and broke into Tyler’s office again. In their previous trip, Wolfe remembered seeing papers he thought might be the DeFeo Report, and he quickly found them again, contained in three files which they copied and replaced. Meisner forwarded copies of the stolen documents to Raymond and to Mary Sue Hubbard.

  Two weeks later, on instructions of the top officer of the GO’s Information Bureau—Bruce Raymond, Cindy’s husband—Meisner called up a reporter at the Village Voice, pretending to be a disgruntled Justice employee. He mailed the reporter half of the DeFeo Report, promising to give the rest at a later time.

  Also in April, Meisner was directed to break into the offices of the IRS Office of International Operations (OIO)—which he had been told to infiltrate the year before. This time, there was more urgency because the GO had learned that L. Ron Hubbard and Mary Sue were being audited, and documents pertaining to it were held by an OIO employee named Thomas Crate.

  At about 7 pm on April 14, using their ID cards, Wolfe and Meisner signed into the IRS building at 1325 T. Street, NW, where the OIO was housed. They went to Crate’s office on the tenth floor, but the door was locked. As they tried the door and then talked about what to do, a cleaning lady noticed them, thought they looked suspicious, and called a security guard.

  After thefts of thousands of government documents over nearly a two-year period, it was the first time they’d come close at all to being caught. When the guard confronted them, they simply showed him their IDs. The guard had the cleaning lady unlock the office door.

  Inside, they found the audit of the Hubbards in several large files in the desk of Crate and his supervisor. But they didn’t see a copying machine. So Meisner and Wolfe carried the files back to the main IRS building, copied the documents, went back to the OIO building, signed in again, and replaced the files. It was about 11 pm when they were finally done.

  (In those OIO files, Scientology found evidence that Paulette Cooper had been feeding information about the Guardian’s Office to the IRS in 1974. A document showed that she had encouraged an OIO investigator to talk to Nan McLean, who supplied the investigator with a stack of documents.)

  A month later, they
did it all over again so they could get even more up-to-date records in the Hubbards’ audit. Once more, the cleaning lady let them into Crate’s office.

  In April 1976, Meisner also began making incursions into the Justice Department building to steal files from the Interpol Liaison Office. Finally, more than a year after she first made the request, Jane Kember’s instructions to get Interpol’s files on L. Ron Hubbard were underway. Meisner ended up taking so many documents Scientology had records of Interpol’s history going back to the early 1950s.

  But that same month, a simple question asked in a courtroom by a judge stopped the Guardian’s Office in its tracks and changed the focus of the Snow White Program.

  Things were also changing for the people who worked directly with L. Ron Hubbard as he decided finally to come back to land. Tonja Burden was only 13 years old when her parents joined Scientology and put her into the Sea Organization, encouraging her to sign a billion-year contract on March 3, 1973. She moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Los Angeles, where she was put into the Cadet Organization, and lived in squalid conditions with 400 other Scientology kids in two three-story buildings.

  After she was interrogated to make sure she wasn’t connected to someone who wanted to do harm to Scientology, she was flown to the yacht Apollo in September—shortly after L. Ron Hubbard himself had returned to the ship after his 10-month stay in Queens, New York.

  She was flown to Lisbon, but the Apollo had already sailed. So she caught up with it in Madeira. Surprised by how dilapidated the ship was, she struggled through a difficult conditioning process to turn her into a hardened sailor.