by Tony Ortega
(Hubbard’s notation suggests that he had considered the earlier scheme against Paulette, to get her indicted for the bomb threat letters, as an earlier form of “Operation Freakout.” But there are no other documents that confirm that.)
The top page of the planning document was dated April 5, 1976, and a handwritten notation said it was delivered to the North East Sector chief – Dick Weigand – the next day, April 6.
According to the plan, the first step—calling the consulates of two Arabic countries with the first fake Paulette call—would take place only two days after the operation was assigned.
Hubbard was in a hurry. He wanted Paulette ruined, and fast.
But it didn’t happen that way.
A few blocks from the Churchill, at 225 E. 44th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, Costello’s bar beckoned to the inkstained wretches who made a living in New York’s news business. Reporters from the Daily News and the Post would gather there after work. Australian journalist Steve Dunleavy was a regular.
When Paulette Cooper felt like seeing other writers after a day of work – freelancing for the National Enquirer could be a solitary pursuit – she’d go to the watering hole to kid around with the guys who covered the city.
It was during one of these nights at Costello’s that she noticed a man walking around, showing people a joke he’d typed out on a sheet of paper that was resting on a clipboard. Some of them laughed, some didn’t. But he was very insistent about it, wanting everyone to see it. Then he brought it over to Paulette. He held out the clipboard to her, trying to get her to take it from him.
She grabbed it and looked it over, and thought the joke wasn’t funny. She went back to her drink. And it wasn’t until she was walking home later that it dawned on her what had happened.
She became frightened, worrying that another Scientology operation was starting up. And she kicked herself, angry that she’d fallen for something so blatant. Sure, it was Scientology trying to get her fingerprint again, she thought, using an operative with a clipboard, just like with Margie Shepherd four years earlier.
For days, she wondered what was going to come of it. Would her fingerprint end up on something else that could get her arrested or indicted? And this time, would the government assume she was guilty and throw the book at her?
Around this time, she also noticed that someone was pretending to be her. Friends would call, asking why she had been so rude on the telephone when in fact, she hadn’t called the friend recently. Another time, when she went to a meeting of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, someone asked about her trip to Washington. When Paulette said she hadn’t been in the capital in a couple of years, she was told that she had called a few days earlier, saying she was in DC recently. Paulette realized that someone was either testing out their impression of her voice, or they were trying to make her friends think she was crazy.
But except for those signs that she was being targeted again, the other parts of Operation Freakout didn’t get played out.
L. Ron Hubbard may have been in a hurry, but the Guardian’s Office was methodical. It was cautious. It could take months to put the elements in place for an operation. It had been pilfering offices, stealing documents, fabricating letters, and so many other things, and had never been caught. And it wanted to keep it that way.
The Snow White Program that Hubbard finalized in April 1973 took more than a year to get going in earnest. And Operation Freakout also apparently took some time to get into action. Except for the attempt to get Paulette’s fingerprint with the joke at Costello’s bar and developing someone to make calls in her name, it was taking time to get the staff members into position to pull off the laundry caper and the bomb threats about Henry Kissinger. Months went by. And then, Paulette made it impossible to pull off the operation as it was written.
She moved away.
On April 14, 1976, during a hearing about a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, U.S. District Judge George L. Hart, Jr. asked a question of Assistant US Attorney Nathan Dodell in the presence of Scientology’s attorney, Walter G. Birkel, Jr.
“Have you all considered taking [L. Ron] Hubbard’s deposition?” the judge asked.
“It is an interesting thought, Judge Hart,” Dodell replied.
“Why don’t you take his deposition?” the judge pressed.
Dodell said he’d consult with his colleagues at the Justice Department about the possibility.
Birkel related the incident to his clients at the church. And once the exchange was relayed to the Guardian’s Office, near-panic set in.
Part of the reason for the existence of the GO was to protect the Hubbards from being hauled into court for depositions, and here a judge was suggesting that it happen. Within days, the GO ordered investigations into both Judge Hart and assistant US attorney Dodell.
On May 7, 1976, Michael Meisner and Gerald Wolfe went looking for Dodell’s office at the US Attorney’s Office in the federal courthouse on 3rd Street. They went to the third floor, which housed a legal library operated by the District of Columbia Bar Association. Close to the back door of the library and near a key-operated elevator were the offices of the Civil Division of the US Attorney’s Office, including Dodell’s office, which was locked. After trying to break in with a metal shim, they gave up and left.
Days later, Wolfe returned on his own around lunch time. When Dodell and his secretary left the office to eat, Wolfe rifled through her desk until he found a set of keys. He called Meisner, and they met to make copies. Then Wolfe went back and dropped the original keys in the corridor, thinking that the secretary would assume they had fallen out of her purse.
On the evening of May 21, Meisner and Wolfe went to the courthouse and showed a security guard their IRS cards, saying that they were going to work in the DC Bar Association’s library. The guard gave them a key to the elevator, and after they took out some books to make it look like they were doing research at a back table of the library, they went out the library’s back door to Dodell’s office.
Using their duplicate keys, they went into the office and began copying a stack six inches high of Scientology and Interpol documents in Dodell’s files. (Even before Judge Hart’s comment, the GO had intended to target Dodell when it learned that his office probably contained copies of Interpol records about Scientology. The GO had come into that information by placing a woman as a secretary in the Justice Department.) Meisner then prepared multiple memos for the Guardian’s Office about the things they had found in the documents.
A week later, on the evening of May 28, Meisner and Wolfe returned to the courthouse for another invasion of Dodell’s office, this time taking a stack of documents a foot high and duplicating them on a copying machine in the US Attorney’s Office down the hall.
When they were returning the originals, they were stopped by a man named Charles Johnson who worked as a night librarian for the DC Bar Association. He asked the two men if they had signed in to do their research. They admitted that they hadn’t. So Johnson had them sign in, and told them they couldn’t return unless they had specific permission from the day librarian.
Meisner and Wolfe returned the original documents to Dodell’s office and left. But Johnson had lingering doubts about the pair.
He looked through the library’s log and saw that they had signed in as “J. Foster” and “Hoake.” But a week earlier, two men with the same handwriting had signed in as “J. Foster” and “J. Wolfe.”
Johnson notified the US Attorney’s Office, telling them that he had seen two suspicious men using the copying machine in their office. The US Attorney’s Office in turn called the FBI, who told Johnson to notify them if he saw the two men in the building again.
The Guardian’s Office, meanwhile, was determined to get even more information out of Dodell’s office, and it wanted Meisner to target Dodell’s most personal information. On June 8, the GO approved “Project: Target Dodell,” which would “render Dodell harmless.”
&
nbsp; Meisner didn’t want any more trouble with the night librarian, so he requested, and got, a letter from the chief DC Bar Association librarian giving him permission to use the library.
On June 11, he and Wolfe went back to the courthouse on an evening visit. Meisner showed Johnson the letter giving him permission to use the facility. Meisner and Wolfe then went to the rear of the library so they could get into Dodell’s office, but they were stuck: Dodell’s office was being cleaned, so they had no choice but to sit and wait.
Meanwhile, Johnson called the FBI, as he’d been told.
13
The woman from the FBI
Two FBI special agents soon arrived. One of them was Christine Hansen, one of the first female agents in the FBI’s history. She and her partner confronted Meisner and Wolfe, who produced their IDs. Wolfe, rather than use his valid IRS card, produced a fake one that had the name “Thomas Blake” – the name of an actual IRS employee. Meisner showed his “John M. Foster” ID, and told Hansen that he had actually left the IRS and admitted to her that his ID was no longer valid. So Hansen said she was confiscating it.
Meisner said that he and his friend “Blake” were doing legal research at the library, and had used the US Attorney’s Office copying machine because it was close by. While Hansen questioned them, her partner went to call an assistant US Attorney. Meisner gave a fake home address and asked if they were under arrest. No, Hansen answered. So Meisner told Wolfe they were leaving, and they made their way out of the building, ignoring Hansen’s partner as he tried to call them back.
Meisner and Wolfe walked for several blocks to make sure they weren’t being followed, then they hailed a cab and went to Billy Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, where Meisner called Mitchell Hermann in Los Angeles and used coded language to let him know something major had happened. Hermann replied in code, telling him to hang up and then call again to a pay phone near Hermann’s office, where Hermann could speak more freely. Then Meisner told him what had happened.
Hermann told him to sit tight while other Guardian’s Office employees retrieved Meisner and Wolfe’s cars at the IRS building and the US courthouse and picked the two men up at the tavern. Meisner was taken to a hotel for the night. The next morning, he flew to Los Angeles.
On the sixth and seventh floors of the Fifield Manor—a 1920s building in the style of a French Chateau on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood that had once been home to retired actors which Scientology had bought in 1969—the Guardian’s Office top man in the United States, Henning Heldt, and another top official, Dick Weigand, considered Meisner’s report about what had happened the evening before at the US courthouse.
Their chief concern, they explained to him, was to prevent the FBI from making the connection between Meisner and Wolfe and the Church of Scientology. If Wolfe was arrested, they told Meisner, he needed to plead guilty to whatever he was charged with, giving a cover story for why he had given a fake ID and was using the US Attorney’s Office copy machine. Meisner would then need to turn himself in to the FBI and give the same cover story and also plead guilty.
The next day, however, the Guardian’s Office executives changed their minds. There were just too many ways that the FBI could eventually trace Meisner and Wolfe back to Scientology. Heldt argued that it might be better to make Meisner and Wolfe disappear by sending them out of the country.
But Weigand said that would only make the FBI more suspicious, and would increase the likelihood that they would keep investigating until they discovered the Scientology connection. Weigand said the best plan was still to have Wolfe give a cover story and plead guilty if he were arrested, and then have Meisner surrender and give the same cover.
Heldt agreed, and the next day they all planned to meet again and prepare the cover story with Wolfe, who was flying out to Los Angeles to join them. The next morning, June 14, the Guardian’s Office began to transform Meisner’s appearance. His hair was dyed red and cut short, and he shaved off his mustache. He was given money to obtain contact lenses later that day to replace his eyeglasses.
In the cover story they came up with, Meisner and Wolfe were drinking buddies who, on a lark, made fake IRS identification cards when Wolfe was showing him around where he worked. Wolfe then asked Meisner to help him do legal research, and they had used the DC Bar Association’s library at the courthouse because it was conveniently located between the two of them. They hadn’t realized that the copying machine they had used was in the US Attorney’s office.
That night, still on the 14th, Wolfe flew back to DC and met the next day with Mitchell Hermann, who helped him go over the cover story again. Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Meisner continued his transformation. He was now “Jeff Murphy,” and he moved in with Weigand and prepared a report about all the burglaries and other illegal activities he had overseen as the Assistant Guardian for Information in DC, a post he now had to give up. He was given a new title: National Secretary for the US, a position bestowed on him by Jane Kember.
Back in DC, Special Agent Christine Hansen hadn’t given up on the case. The “John M. Foster” ID she’d taken from Meisner turned out to be a fake, and the “Thomas Blake” who worked for the IRS did not turn out to be the man at the courthouse with Foster – the second man’s ID was a fake badge as well. And it bothered her. Why were two men using fake IDs to get into a legal library in the US Courthouse, and why were they seen using a copy machine in the US Attorney’s office? She found that the IRS was also concerned, and agency officials told her they were willing to cooperate to figure out how and why fake identification cards had been created. Hansen procured a warrant for the arrest of the two men if she could find them again.
On June 30, 1976, Hansen was at the main IRS building, where she’d been talking to technicians about how ID cards were made, when she saw a familiar face in a hallway. It was one of the two men she’d questioned at the DC Bar library. She stopped him and demanded his ID. He clearly recognized her and looked shocked to see her. She, meanwhile, was stunned at her sheer luck.
And so, in a hallway of the IRS building, Christine Hansen arrested Gerald Bennett Wolfe, and the largest infiltration of the US federal government in its history began, slowly, to unravel.
Wolfe was charged with using a forged government pass and was released on his own recognizance on the same day, after providing handwriting samples. The highest levels of Scientology now watched nervously to see what would happen next. In a letter to Weigand, Mary Sue Hubbard complained that they had made everything too easy for the FBI: “All they had to do was trace the common entry points of the log back to both Mike and the FSM [Wolfe] until they arrived at the point where the FSM used his correct ID card” at his IRS job. (Mary Sue didn’t know that Hansen’s arrest of Wolfe was a result of sheer luck, after she spotted him at the IRS building while she happened to be there.)
Other letters and messages were passed between the top executives as they wondered if Wolfe’s cover story—about making fake IDs as a lark—would hold up. At the end of July, however, Wolfe was ordered to testify to a Grand Jury, and on August 5, a magistrate judge then issued a warrant for the arrest of Michael Meisner.
As the GO prepared to send Meisner even further undercover, Mary Sue Hubbard wondered how the FBI had made the connection between “John M. Foster” and Meisner, who had not given his actual identity the night he was questioned by FBI agents, and had also given a fake address—but one that was only a few doors down from where he really lived.
What they didn’t know was that Christine Hansen, the FBI special agent, was determined to figure out what was really going on.
She went to the address “Foster” had given, and showed his ID badge to people in the neighborhood until someone recognized him – and told her the man’s name was really Michael Meisner. She also learned much earlier than the church realized that Scientology was involved.
Still puzzled about Wolfe and Meisner being seen in the US Attorney’s offices, she went to each of the lawyers and th
eir staffs, asking if they were missing any documents, and who might be interested in rifling through their desks. When she got to Nathan Dodell, he told her he knew exactly who would want what was in his office: The Church of Scientology.
The what? she asked.
She quickly began learning about the organization and why it might be burglarizing US government offices.
In Los Angeles, the Guardian’s Office was panicked about Wolfe’s arrest and Meisner’s warrant. Weigand told Meisner that he needed to cut off all ties with the Guardian’s Office and keep himself hidden. Meisner moved out of Weigand’s house and into a Glendale motel under the name “Jeff Burns,” then days later he moved to a Los Angeles motel as “Jeff Marks.” After three more motel changes, he settled into a hotel in Burbank on September 15.
A few days later, Weigand and Mary Sue Hubbard discussed their options. Weigand figured there were only two: Meisner would turn himself in and keep his mouth shut about the church, and would face about five years in prison. Or, Meisner would keep in hiding for five years, when the statute of limitations would run out for the kinds of charges he might face
Meanwhile, the Guardian’s Office wanted to know more about Meisner’s warrant. So it had a Scientologist police lieutenant in San Diego check the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer for details on the warrant, which turned out to be for forgery of a government ID. That NCIC check alerted the FBI, and Christine Hansen had the San Diego FBI office question the police lieutenant about making the NCIC inquiry. The lieutenant made up a story about arresting Meisner in San Diego on a jaywalking charge and then doing a routine check on him. GO executives considered it a good false lead to waste FBI resources.
But Hansen wasn’t distracted. In late September, she told the DC Scientology church that she wanted handwriting samples for Meisner as the FBI continued to look for him. Mary Sue Hubbard concluded that the FBI was going to search for Meisner’s handwriting on sign-in logs at DC buildings, so she asked for the GO to get a full list of all the places Meisner had broken into.
