by Tony Ortega
The story also detailed the hit-and-run scheme that was designed to ruin the political career of Gabe Cazares.
The next day, Shaffer’s second story was all about Paulette.
“According to informed sources, FBI agents have found in church records evidence that the Scientologists framed Cooper by stealing her stationery and sending the bomb threat to themselves.
“The Scientologists deny they were involved in any such scheme. ‘It’s totally ridiculous and typical of outrageous false statements that some people feel they need to pass on regarding the church,’ George Layton, a Church of Scientology spokesman, said.”
Also that day, a story by another Post reporter, Timothy Robinson, revealed that the day before, after Shaffer’s first piece had come out, Scientology’s attorney, Phillip Hirshkop, had asked a judge to force Shaffer and the newspaper to turn over any FBI documents or notes on those documents that Shaffer had used. A judge refused. Clearly, Scientology was extremely unhappy that Shaffer had revealed what was in the FBI’s possession.
Less than a month later, on May 25, 1978, the Church of Scientology of California filed suit against Paulette Cooper, accusing her of helping the Post produce Ron Shaffer’s stories, which it said was a violation of the settlement agreement she had made with them at the end of 1976.
“Cooper will not utter, publish or republish to any public gatherings or in the press…information or material concerning the Book, Cooper’s prior writings and statements concerning Scientology, and past litigation between Cooper and Scientology, including but not limited to the terms and provisions of this settlement agreement,” the 1976 settlement read.
Scientology had no evidence that Paulette had discussed her book or the Queen magazine article or her prior litigation with the Post, and the agreement didn’t cover Scientology’s own behavior – surveilling Paulette, harassing her, or framing her, or planning to do more. But the church decided that the Post story was enough to convince a jury that Paulette had violated the agreement she signed to end all litigation in 1976.
Paulette was ready for a fight. She’d been on the defensive for years, but now, even if she didn’t have the Snow White and Operation Freakout documents in her possession yet, she knew they existed, and she knew the FBI was becoming as interested in seeing Scientology punished as she had been for many years.
Paulette filed a counterclaim against the California church, asking for $10 million in damages. In June, the Church of Scientology of New York filed its own breach of contract lawsuit against her. And in August, she counterclaimed against the New York church, asking $20 million in damages.
The litigation war was back on.
On August 15, 1978, nine members of the Guardian’s Office, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were indicted in federal court. (Two others – Jane Kember and Mo Budlong – lived in England, and extradition proceedings began against them.)
Their cases were then assigned to Judge George Hart, Jr., the same judge who, in 1976, had raised the question of L. Ron Hubbard being deposed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – a suggestion that had set off a Guardian’s Office investigation of Hart and the plundering of assistant US Attorney Nathan Dodell’s office, which itself eventually resulted in the arrest of Gerald Wolfe and Michael Meisner.
After a few months, when it looked like Hart wasn’t going to be receptive to their objections and legal maneuvers, Scientology’s attorneys, in January 1979, took an extraordinary step. They asked Hart to recuse himself because, they admitted, the GO had targeted him with overt and covert operations that might have been illegal. As a target of that kind of behavior, they argued, Hart couldn’t be impartial.
He agreed, and recused himself.
The cases were next assigned to Judge Louis Oberdorfer. But in 1969 he had handled a tax case involving the church. So he recused himself on Feb 5, 1979.
The cases then were assigned to Judge Charles Richey. Richey was a Richard Nixon appointee, but a liberal. Scientology’s attorneys initially said they were pleased that he had taken the case. To accommodate the defendants, Judge Richey traveled to Los Angeles in the summer of 1979 to hear three weeks of testimony and arguments about the FBI’s raid of the church. And because he had received several death threats, Richey traveled to LA with two federal marshals.
After hearing evidence, Richey denied Scientology’s motion to suppress the documents the FBI had seized. With a trial looming, and the prospect of even more bad publicity, the defendants, including Mary Sue Hubbard, waived trial and agreed to sign a “stipulation of evidence,” a lengthy document written by the Justice Department that explained in detail the activities of Meisner and Wolf and the other GO operatives. For their part, the government dropped 23 of the 24 criminal counts. Most of the defendants were then facing a single count of conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Now, it was up to Judge Richey to make a decision. After reviewing the evidence, on October 26, he convicted all nine on the “overwhelming evidence of guilt.” He scheduled sentencing for the nine defendants on December 9.
But before that happened, Scientology did two things. It filed a motion to have Richey recused from the case, and it hired a Washington DC private investigator with a legendary reputation.
While the Guardian’s Office prosecutions were happening, Paulette Cooper was running into more legal trouble, and from a different source.
Ted Patrick billed himself as the father of “deprogramming.” He was a high school dropout from Tennessee who had moved to San Diego, and in the late 1960s he turned his interest in cults into a specialty in helping parents retrieve their children from abusive groups. Completely self-taught, Patrick used an aggressive style of confrontation and had even used force to isolate a target for his methods of persuasion.
On September 2, 1979, he detained a young Scientologist named Paula Dain in Laguna Beach, California. Dain’s parents had been referred to Patrick by Paulette Cooper, and shortly after Dain was detained, Nan McLean went to the scene to see if she could help Patrick, who paid her expenses to come.
After she got there, however, Nan realized that Dain was not there of her own volition, and was being held in a hotel room as a prisoner. She called Dain’s parents and said she was leaving, wanting to have nothing to do with it.
Dain’s parents persuaded her to return, saying they would pay her expenses. But when she returned, she was still convinced that Dain was being held against her will, and persuaded Patrick to let her go – 38 days after he had first isolated her.
Dain then filed a $30 million lawsuit against Ted Patrick, Paulette Cooper, and Nan McLean, but Paulette and Nan were later dropped for lack of evidence.
Still unhappy at the tactics Patrick had used, Nan agreed to testify against him on behalf of Paula Dain, and it became the first serious rift in her relationship with Paulette. Testifying against Patrick was the same as helping out the Church of Scientology, Paulette felt, and she couldn’t believe Nan would do it. She did what she could to talk Nan out of testifying on Dain’s behalf. (Dain later filed a $30 million lawsuit against Paulette for trying to keep Nan from testifying.) Years later, Patrick was ordered to pay only $7,000 to Dain because a jury found he did not have “evil intent” when he detained her.
If the case didn’t amount to much in the long run, it had a devastating effect on one of Paulette’s closest relationships. For years, she and Nan McLean had talked on the phone almost daily. Paulette had gone to McLean’s home – north of Toronto – many times, including for a wedding of one of Nan’s children. She was such a part of the family, she participated in a prank that was popular at the time – streaking with the rest of the wedding party and jumping in the lake. But now, their relationship was seriously strained, and wouldn’t really recover for many years.
15
Fifteen Sixteen Uniform
On October 20, 1979, somewhere 8,500 feet over the state of New York, the engine on a Cessna 206, tail number 1516U, suddenly stopped. A little more than an hour earl
ier, the small plane had taken off from Lawrence, Massachusetts after its pilot, a Boston attorney named Michael Flynn, had made a thorough pre-flight check which included examining the two wing-mounted fuel tanks and a fuel sump under the engine to make sure there were no signs of water.
Their lives suddenly in danger, the people in the airplane each reacted in different ways. Behind him, Flynn’s 12-year-old son sat still and didn’t say a word. An attorney next to Flynn’s son panicked and barfed. The Marine lieutenant and Vietnam veteran sitting next to Flynn in the front passenger seat grabbed a chart on Flynn’s directions and began looking for a place to land.
Flynn tried to remain calm as he calculated how far the plane could glide before hitting the ground. It was dropping at about 500 feet a minute, and he figured it could get about seven miles at that rate. The lieutenant located an airfield in the general direction they were flying: It was 15 miles away.
As they glided to Earth, Flynn kept checking his gauges, but everything appeared normal. He switched up the fuel tanks and goaded the fuel pumps, trying to figure out what had happened. But mostly, he needed to find a field to land in.
“Fifteen Sixteen Uniform! Fifteen Sixteen Uniform!” he yelled into his radio, identifying his plane and declaring an air emergency.
With the ground rapidly coming up, he found a farmer’s field to land in that was flat and wide. There would be no trouble with trees or power lines. He guided the plane at the field, still calculating the rate of descent.
But then he noticed that the furrows in field were perpendicular to his approach. Flynn knew that after the wheels hit the ground, there was a good chance the furrows would cause the plane to flip.
He yelled at everyone to brace for impact and get their heads down between their knees.
Then, just hundreds of feet above the ground, the engine suddenly roared back to life.
Flynn gunned the engine and pulled up, powering back to 10,000 feet.
And then the engine died again.
As he prepared all over again for an emergency landing, the engine came on and off, sputtering to life and dying, and the plane yo-yoed up and down.
Now, he could see the airfield that the lieutenant had picked out from the chart, and he aimed for it. With the engine sputtering and the plane yo-yoing, Flynn managed to put down and roll to a stop.
His son had never said a word through the entire ordeal.
As Flynn and his passengers recuperated from their fright, a mechanic at the airfield began to take apart the plane to find out what had happened. He came over to Flynn and asked him where he’d flown from.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, about an hour and fifteen minutes of flying.
That’s impossible, the mechanic said.
Why? Flynn asked.
Because there’s enough water in your fuel tanks that this plane should never have got off the ground. There’s no way you took off from that far away.
But they had.
The mechanic drained the tanks and fuel injectors, put the parts back together, and told Flynn he could fly on. But Flynn had declared an air emergency, so he should file a report, the mechanic told him.
And Flynn eventually did. But first, he had a football game to catch. His three passengers got back into the plane, he started up the engine, and Flynn continued on to their destination – South Bend, Indiana, to see Notre Dame take on USC.
Flynn could never prove how so much water had appeared in his fuel tanks after he’d inspected them and flown for more than an hour. He was told that CIA operatives had been known to sabotage airplanes by putting water balloons into their fuel tanks so they would burst during the flight. But Flynn could never prove that someone had done that to his plane.
Earlier that year, Michael Flynn had agreed to represent a woman, LaVenda Van Schaick, who had left the Church of Scientology. She told Flynn about Scientology’s Guardian’s Office, about its use of secret codes and undercover agents. Flynn was intrigued, and he read what he could about Scientology, and learned about a writer named Paulette Cooper. After absorbing what he could, Flynn wrote a letter to the church on behalf of LaVenda, asking it to return her personal files, and for a refund of the money she had spent.
The church declined, and tried to intimidate Flynn.
So he sent a second letter, saying that LaVenda’s request was rescinded, and if the church wanted to work out a settlement short of litigation, it would need to be in the million-dollar range.
After sending that letter, Flynn then began getting calls from people he hadn’t heard from in years. Lawyers he’d worked with (or against) in previous lawsuits. Law school classmates. College classmates. Even high school classmates that he hadn’t talked to in decades.
The FBI, they all told him, was calling and asking about Flynn. What was happening, Mike?
Flynn knew that it wasn’t the FBI tracking down virtually everyone he’d ever known or worked with. He understood that he’d become the subject of a Guardian’s Office “noisy” investigation. He sent the church another letter, telling them that he was going to recruit more plaintiffs so he could file a class-action lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was after he had sent that letter that, in the air over the state of New York, his Cessna’s engine had quit.
On Saturday, December 15, 1979, Clearwater city councilman Richard Tenney organized an anti-Scientology rally that drew 10,000 local residents to Jack Russell Stadium, the spring training home of the Philadelphia Phillies. Two weeks earlier, Tenney had held a gathering of about 3,000 people at Clearwater City Hall. In the wake of the FBI documents becoming public, with revelations that besides the spying and burglarizing in the nation’s capital Scientologists had also infiltrated the local government and the local newspapers, people in Clearwater who had stood by to watch Scientology take over the downtown had had enough.
The local citizenry had been inflamed in part by a November 27 editorial by the Clearwater Sun. “The cult has been here four years. For a time, the possibility might have existed that a form of detente could be worked out between the Scientologists and the people of Clearwater. But the recent release of thousands of Scientology documents in Washington, D.C. has put such a possibility forever behind us,” said the newspaper. “Scientology is not a religion, as it claims to be, but rather a for-profit group that uses religion as a guise to escape taxes and separate credulous men and women of large sums of money in exchange for superficial training in mental and emotional disciplines...Scientologists of both high and low rank have in behalf of the cult, engaged in lying, theft, burglary, breaking and entering, conspiracy, and illegal harassment of private citizens.”
(About a month earlier, the Sun had written about the FBI documents and referred to the Scientology plans as “Operation Snow White.” The name stuck, and the press ever after called it by that name. But in Scientology documents, it was always known as the Snow White Program.)
Two of the people who attended the December 15 rally at Jack Russell Stadium were Paulette Cooper (who spoke to the crowd and received three standing ovations), and Michael Flynn. It was the first time the two of them met.
Paulette was dazzled by Flynn, who not only talked about Scientology like no other attorney she’d met, but was also handsome, with penetrating blue eyes. Paulette soon found that Flynn’s female associates and clients talked about his looks as much as they did his cases.
For years, Paulette had been frustrated by attorneys who had counseled her to be cautious, and told her that it might be better not to be so outspoken. Flynn said the opposite. He knew her story well, having read most of the articles that had come out since the Washington Post first made her story public in April. He said he was horrified by what had been done to her, and she believed him. But more than sympathizing with her, Flynn said he was determined to do something about it. He wanted to put Scientology out of business.
It was precisely what she wanted to hear. The FBI documents were so damaging, she didn’t see how t
hey could fail. With Flynn gathering together numerous clients who had been harmed by Scientology, they could go directly at the church in a way that had never been done before.
Between Flynn’s heady suggestions, and the validation of 10,000 admiring Clearwater citizens at the December 15 rally, Paulette was feeling more confident than ever that she had it in her power to help destroy Scientology, and that its days were actually numbered.
That attitude was reflected in the newsletter she had begun mailing around the country.
Every quarter, she collected news about Scientology, typed up summaries of press reports, and mailed them out to hundreds of people, including members of the government and even the White House. She called it “Scientology Clearing-House: A Quarterly Summary of Scientology news (non-objectively) edited by Paulette Cooper.”
Around the same time she had met Flynn that December, her optimism about Scientology’s numbered days was reflected in articles she typed up that predicted its imminent demise.
“SCIENTOLOGY REALLY SEEMS TO BE HURTING,” she wrote in one of her newsletters. “I’m sure most of you will be pleased to hear that missions seem to be closing and orgs seem to be losing people en masse.... Large orgs like Phoenix and Washington D.C. have very few people in them. Many major orgs (New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania) have moved from the affluent suburbs into bad sections of N.Y., Detroit & Philadelphia. Scientologists always told their people that public opinion of them was good but that just the press and the government disliked them. Now they are telling their people ‘we’ve got 7 months to turn public opinion around’!”
Paulette was sure that momentum was shifting against Scientology in a major way, and she was determined to help accelerate it. The FBI and the Department of Justice not only were trying to put the leaders of the Guardian’s Office into prison, but they told Paulette they wanted to punish the people who had framed her over the bomb threat letters. While a New York grand jury contemplated charging people criminally over her harassment, Paulette had filed her own litigation against the church, and she began to think it would be more effective if she put it into the hands of Michael Flynn.
