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

by Tony Ortega

  Meanwhile, back in LA, the Guardian’s Office discovered immediately that Meisner was gone, and that he’d left behind a note saying he would be unreachable for a week. While there was some panic about Meisner’s escape, Mary Sue Hubbard counseled calm. She figured that Meisner was worried about the time he’d have to serve in prison after he surrendered, and she predicted that he was researching the legal situation in a library somewhere to reassure himself, probably in the San Francisco area.

  On June 29, 1977, nine days after Meisner disappeared, a GO operative received a letter from Meisner postmarked from San Francisco, saying that he just needed some time to himself. Reassured that Mary Sue had been right, the GO continued to work on Meisner’s cover story, figuring that he’d be back soon.

  But that’s not what happened.

  14

  The raid

  In July 1977, Paulette Cooper’s travel writing career took her to Senegal and Gambia. She had been asked to write about the history of the slave trade, and had made the obligatory trip to Gorée Island, off of Dakar, where the majority of slaves bound for America were said to have begun their hellish cross-Atlantic trip. After she wrote her story, her editors at the New York Times asked Paulette to consult a historian to back up her material, and she was surprised when the historian told her that the story was apocryphal. A few slaves had been processed there, but it was hardly the hub that stories made it out to be. The Times never printed her story, and other newspapers kept printing the legend.

  On the flight home, Paulette picked up some newspapers to pass away the hours. And she was somewhere over the Atlantic when she started leafing through a copy of the International Herald Tribune. She noticed a short item that had been picked from the Washington Post wire. It said that on July 8, the FBI had conducted a massive raid in DC and Los Angeles, the largest raid in the bureau’s history, involving more than a hundred agents.

  The target: The Church of Scientology.

  The story was very short and contained no real detail. But Paulette read it over and over again. And tears streamed down her cheeks.

  At 6 am on July 8, teams of FBI agents swarmed two locations in Los Angeles. A smaller team ran into Fifield Manor, the French chateau on Franklin Avenue, heading for the sixth floor offices of Henning Heldt. About 80 agents, meanwhile, poured into the large complex on Fountain Avenue that had previously been the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. At the same time, another set of agents rushed into the Scientology church in Washington DC.

  The night before, the agents had been briefed on the 33-page affidavit that went with the warrants they would be serving. Based on what Michael Meisner had been telling the FBI in the two weeks since he had become a government witness, the agents had compiled a detailed list of 162 specific documents and files that had been stolen from government offices.

  The agents were instructed to find those documents to prove that the thefts had happened. They were told to be disciplined about their searches – Meisner had told them where the documents would probably be found, and they were not to go off searching elsewhere, inviting legal trouble from an organization which already, by 1977, had a litigious reputation.

  By 10 in the morning, the agents were finding so much evidence of the Snow White Program and the infiltration of government offices, a call went out for reinforcements. Eventually, 156 agents were poring over records in Scientology’s headquarters in three locations and 30 separate rooms, and 48,149 files with 100,124 pages of documents were seized in total. A large truck was needed to carry it all away.

  The raid lasted 21 hours, and the last of the agents didn’t leave the premises until after 3 in the morning.

  A week later, on July 15, L. Ron Hubbard abandoned a ranch east of Los Angeles where he’d been living since October and went to a secret location in Sparks, Nevada. In 1975, Hubbard had come back ashore after running Scientology at sea. While church agents began a surreptitious takeover of Clearwater, Florida under a front named United Churches of Florida, he had to flee when a local reporter heard he was in town from a local tailor Hubbard had purchased a suit from.

  With his cover in Florida blown, Hubbard grabbed his nurse, Kima Douglas, and her husband Mike, and the three began driving for New York. Hubbard was on his way to hide out in Queens again, just as he had two years earlier. But nearing the city, they thought better of it and headed for Washington DC, where they moved into a brownstone and set up the telexes.

  Through late 1975 and 1976, as Michael Meisner and Gerald Wolfe and Don Alverzo were burglarizing federal offices, L. Ron Hubbard was living just blocks away, and was kept informed about the project.

  He was also briefed about a GO operation in March 1976 that took place in one of his favorite places in town, Rock Creek Park. It was there that Michael Meisner and Sharon Thomas – the GO operative who had managed to become a secretary at the Department of Justice – staged a hit-and-run accident in order to discredit Clearwater mayor Gabe Cazares. The mayor, who had resisted Scientology’s takeover of his town, was in DC for a conference, and on March 14 Thomas had been introduced to him by a Scientologist pretending to be a local reporter. Thomas offered to show him the town in her car, and as she drove through Rock Creek Park, she seemed to lose control of her car and appeared to strike a pedestrian – it was Meisner, who played his part and flung himself as if he’d been hit and pretended to be injured. Thomas then sped off. The next day, GO operatives discussed how they might use the incident later to end the mayor’s political career.

  On June 11, Meisner and Wolfe were stopped and questioned by Christine Hansen at the federal courthouse, and after he was told about it, Hubbard predicted that it would result in big trouble. He told Kima Douglas that it was time to abandon another residence, and they took a flight to Los Angeles, where once again he was in temporary digs until something more permanent could be found. In October, Hubbard moved to the ranch in La Quinta, and he appeared to relax. Then, on November 17, news arrived that his oldest son by Mary Sue, Quentin Hubbard, had committed suicide in Las Vegas.

  “That stupid fucking kid! Look what he’s done to me!” Hubbard was heard to say. Quentin’s homosexuality had been a nuisance to Hubbard. Now, Hubbard took his son’s suicide as a personal slight.

  As 1977 began, Hubbard turned his focus to a process he was developing to combat drug abuse. He called it the Purification Rundown, and he came up with it after researching LSD addiction by talking to two drug users. Hubbard claimed that he’d made a great discovery, a combination of sauna use and niacin intake that he thought might win him a Nobel Prize.

  But his ruminations about Nobel success were cut short with the news of the FBI raid in July. A week after it happened, he left in the middle of the night from the La Quinta ranch, being driven in a car whose headlights were kept off until it reached the main highway. The car didn’t stop until reaching Sparks, a low-rent town in Nevada where Hubbard holed up while he waited to see if the FBI was coming after him. And while he waited, he noticed that the world seemed to have gone mad for the kind of science fiction – space opera – that he spent so many years cranking out in the 1930s and 1940s.

  In May, a movie called Star Wars had opened, and by July it was a phenomenon. Director George Lucas had created a major motion picture that paid homage to his favorite childhood serial, Flash Gordon, and it was setting box office records. Hubbard could be forgiven for thinking he could cash in. While he hid out from the FBI in an apartment in Sparks, he began turning Scientology’s most secret upper-level teachings – space opera about a genocidal galactic overlord named Xenu – into a screenplay, calling it Revolt in the Stars.

  While Hubbard scribbled away at a script about space battles, the church itself was locked in a very real war.

  Almost immediately, the July 8, 1977 FBI raid on Scientology became a battle royal of litigation. And in DC, at least, the church found some success: On July 27, Judge William B. Bryant agreed with Scientology that the FBI’s warrant had been invalid, and ordered the
government to return the documents it seized at the DC org. The government appealed, and Bryant’s decision was overturned. But Bryant then found that even if the warrant was valid, the FBI had improperly used it to go on a fishing expedition during its search for records. That decision was also overturned.

  The church also attacked the searches in Los Angeles, and while those matters were being litigated, the FBI and the Department of Justice were under instructions to do nothing with the seized documents.

  So while the government had to remain silent about why it had raided the church, Scientology went on a public relations campaign to portray itself as a victim of outrageous federal overreaching. Church spokesmen told reporters who were curious about the raid that Scientology had actually been investigating government wrongdoing, which is why the government had then retaliated with a show of force.

  The church put together binders of documents and news reports going back 20 years in order to portray itself as a victim of government meddling. The binders were sent out to friendly columnists, who then portrayed the FBI as heavies picking on Scientology.

  In August, syndicated conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick obliged, writing that “Over a period of 23 years, commencing in 1954, the federal government has thrown its whole massive weight into a malicious persecution of this religious sect.”

  Liberal columnist Mary McGrory also received a copy of the binder put together by the church. “The church has always excited the unfriendly interest of the government, nobody is entirely sure why,” she wrote.

  But if the FBI agents and prosecutors at the Justice Department couldn’t talk publicly about what was in the documents, they were rapidly going through them, and began building a case. And that included reaching out secretly to someone they were surprised to find named in Scientology’s records.

  On October 12, Paulette was working at her desk in her apartment when her telephone rang. A man on the line identified himself as Russ Cicero, and said he was a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Sure he was, she thought.

  Assuming it was a Scientology trick, Paulette told him to give her a number at the FBI where she could call to make sure he was telling the truth.

  He gave her a number.

  She called it, and it turned out to be the FBI. She asked for Cicero, and was patched through. So why was the FBI calling her? she asked.

  Cicero said that what he had to tell her was confidential, but the Bureau wanted to know if she was interested in helping out with an investigation. He could only tell her a few general things about the results of the raid on Scientology, and the tens of thousands of documents that the FBI had seized. For the last three months, agents had been painstakingly going through them, and were stunned by what they found. Not just documents that spelled out the Snow White Program, but many other things. Including, he said, documents about Paulette.

  Had she ever heard, he asked, about something called Operation Freakout?

  Paulette wept after she put the phone receiver back down, not only because Cicero told her the FBI had documents which showed that the church planned to frame her in 1976 in something called Operation Freakout, but he also described other documents which made it clear that she had been framed with the bomb threat letters in 1972.

  Finally, after eight years of harassment, an indictment, the lawsuits, the expense, the harm to her career – finally, she was going to be publicly exonerated. When, she didn’t know. But now that the FBI was on her side, things were going to be very different.

  But that’s also what made her break down after the call. She thought about what she had lost. She thought of Bob Straus. They had talked of marriage. He had wanted lots of kids. But her depression during those days had pushed him away, and the smear letters had made him doubt her innocence. Now, she knew there was proof of it. But it had been more than three years since they last saw each other. She didn’t even know if he was still single. If he was, she still thought there was a possibility for them. She steeled herself, and called Bob’s office. She reached Bob’s secretary, and put on a cheery tone.

  “I’m an old friend of Bob’s, and I was putting together my Christmas card list. But I’m embarrassed, I can’t remember the name of Bob’s wife. Can you help me out?”

  Paulette thanked the woman after she reeled off not only the name of Bob’s wife, but also their two children.

  Paulette hung up. Somehow she had already known that it was far too late to resurrect what she had with Bob. Maybe she just wanted him to know that she had been right, and that he shouldn’t have doubted her. He had believed she was innocent, she knew. But the smear letters, the harassment, had turned out to be too much. She could understand why he felt that way. The Church of Scientology’s campaign against her had, in this case, been successful and had done immense harm to her life.

  But now, things were turning, and her disappointment about Bob Straus gave way to the elation she felt after her call from Russ Cicero. He asked Paulette, did she want to help the FBI prosecute the Church of Scientology?

  Oh, did she.

  The only people she told about the phone call from the FBI were her parents, who were both relieved and concerned – they still worried about her 1973 indictment becoming known and what it might do to her career, even if the FBI now believed she was innocent. They told her they always believed her, and they begged her not to get involved again. Forget the whole thing, they said, worrying that if she helped the FBI, the harassment would intensify again.

  But she told them there was no way she couldn’t help the FBI in the investigation. Finally, law enforcement was on her side, and she told them she wanted Scientology to pay for the years it had stolen from her. She wanted badly to see the documents about her that the agents had seized. But she was told she wasn’t going to see them, not while they were still being litigated in court.

  Even as agents began coming over to her apartment at the Churchill to talk to her about Scientology, they were careful not to show her the Operation Freakout documents or anything else referring to her. It was disappointing, and she had no idea how long she’d have to wait before she could see what they had found.

  But they did show her photographs. And what they showed her stunned her.

  One showed Paula Tyler. She was the young woman from California Paulette had helped get an apartment in her building. The young woman who had been introduced to Paulette by Margie Shepherd after Margie had showed up at her door canvassing for Cesar Chavez. The woman who, after moving into the Churchill, had come over constantly to talk with Paulette about her troubles. The woman who had introduced her to Jerry Levin. The woman who suddenly had to go to Europe after Paulette had spotted a photograph of someone who looked like her in a Scientology magazine.

  That Paula Tyler.

  The FBI showed Paulette photographs they had taken of Scientologists in their investigations, and she spotted Paula. She told them about her. And about Margie Shepherd. And about Jerry Levin. All of them, she now began to realize, were working for Scientology.

  She thought of her teenage diary, tucked way back in her coat closet. It was Jerry, she suspected, who had taken it out and copied pages of it for the church so they could be dropped off at her father’s office three years ago. It was Jerry who always wanted her to come up to the roof. To look at the view from the ledge, where she always felt nervous.

  It was Paula and Jerry she had confided in, telling them her fears as she was at her absolute lowest, while awaiting trial in 1973. And everything she had told them, she knew, had gone right to Scientology.

  She wanted to throw up.

  Despite the FBI’s caution with her documents, and Paulette’s own care speaking only to her parents about what she was going through, the story about her frame-up that was spelled out in the documents seized by the FBI finally became public on April 28 and 29, 1978 in two stories by journalist Ron Shaffer in the Washington Post.

  Paulette was taken by surprise. Although
Shaffer had talked to two of her attorneys – Paul Rheingold and Virgil Roberts – Paulette herself was in Europe on a travel writing assignment in the days leading up to the story and hadn’t heard it was coming out. But someone in the Bureau had talked to Shaffer, and had spelled out pretty clearly what was in the Snow White Program and Operation Freakout documents.

  Finally, five years after it had happened, the indictment of Paulette Cooper was public information.

  In 1973, it was her greatest fear that newspapers would find out she had been arrested and indicted, and she had decided she would kill herself if a trial actually happened. But now, it was finally out in the open, and she was thrilled. Finally, she could talk about what she’d been through.

  “The ‘attack and destroy’ campaign carried out by the Church of Scientology’s ‘Guardian’s Office’ to silence critics has involved illegal surveillance, burglaries, forgeries and many forms of harassment, according to sources close to an intensive federal investigation of the Scientologists’ activities,” Shaffer wrote in the first of his two stories, and briefly described Paulette’s situation without actually naming her: “Scientologists obtained the personal stationery of a woman, typed a bomb threat on it, mailed it to a Scientology office and reported the threat to police. The woman, who had written a book critical of Scientology, was arrested, charged with making a bomb threat, and then charged with perjury when she denied doing it. She suffered a nervous breakdown before the case eventually was dismissed.”