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

by Tony Ortega

  She also continued to encourage other journalists to write about the documents seized by the FBI, and about her framing. She was pushing on multiple fronts, hoping that enough effort could deal a killing blow to the organization that had spent so many years trying to destroy her.

  She was getting so determined, so single-minded, she lost sight, briefly, that Scientology would never lie down and surrender to her. And at the very moment she should have been most careful, she didn’t anticipate its next operation against her.

  Scientology’s attempt to get Judge Richey to recuse himself after he convicted the first nine Snow White defendants in October was submitted late in the case and was technically flawed. Richey denied the motion, and then sentenced the nine to terms from six months to five years. (They paid $10,000 each the day they were sentenced so they could stay out of jail while they appealed their sentences.)

  Richey also decided that once he had sentenced the defendants, he could now, finally, make public the documents that had been seized by the FBI more than two years before. Scientology appealed that decision, but the appeal was denied on January 21, 1980.

  Paulette Cooper and Nan McLean were each in Washington DC and in line the very first day the Snow White Program documents were made available. Toronto Globe and Mail reporter John Marshall captured the scene. In a cramped, windowless room at the Justice Building, there was a long table covered with boxes of documents, a sizable portion (but not all) of the evidence seized in the 1977 raid.

  As they began going through the 23,000 documents made available by Judge Richey’s order, Marshall described Paulette as “a finely honed, long-haired accumulation of nervous energy.”

  “If you see anything about Operation Freakout, please let me know,” she told him.

  Besides Paulette and Nan McLean, there were nine other journalists and a couple of young Scientologists from the church’s magazine, Freedom. Outside, in a foyer, a U.S. marshal checked to make sure no original documents left the room. A copying machine was in constant use.

  Marshall knew Paulette’s story, and he knew that the FBI now considered her bomb-threat indictment all a frame-up by the church. And then he found a document that confirmed it.

  It was a June 1974 letter from Dick Weigand to Henning Heldt, describing a Guardian’s Office staff member’s work for the church: “Conspired to entrap Mrs. Lovely into being arrested for a felony which she did not commit. She was arraigned for the crime.”

  “Mrs. Lovely” was clearly Paulette, as other documents showed.

  And then, Paulette found the notes that had been written by Jerry Levin.

  “Oh, this is it,” Paulette said, and began to read them. But Marshall said it was too much for her. She copied the documents to read later.

  “I need to read these with friends beside me,” she told him.

  Later that night, at dinner with Marshall and Nan, she read Jerry’s notes about her. “We have Mrs. Lovely in a very perplexing position,” Jerry wrote to his GO bosses a few days after Paulette was indicted in May 1973.

  Paulette knew that she’d shared with him intimate details about her life, and here was proof of it. The time she had told him about her first sexual experiences—fooling around with Robert Smittini on the cruise back from Europe in 1960 when she was 18, and losing her virginity to a professor a couple of years later at Brandeis—she now read about in notes Levin had sent to the Guardian’s Office.

  At her lowest point, in the summer of 1973, she had told Jerry that she had contemplated suicide, and that was in there, too. At the time, Jerry had seemed very sympathetic about her emotional state. But now, she saw what he had written about her suicidal utterances to his spy bosses.

  “Wouldn’t this be a great thing for Scientology?”

  Finally seeing the Operation Freakout and Jerry Levin documents about her from the 1977 raid only made Paulette more determined than ever to make Scientology pay for what it had done to her. And then, after she had met Michael Flynn and was dazzled by his plans to bring down the church, Paulette met another man, Richard Bast, who said exactly the things she wanted to hear.

  She had been told about Bast by a private investigator, Tom Spinelli, a man she had met through his work for the American Medical Association. Spinelli told her that Bast was a well-known private eye in Washington DC and had been asking about her. Bast had worked with columnist Jack Anderson and with politicians who needed help getting out of sticky situations.

  Paulette wasn’t aware of his reputation. But on the advice of Spinelli, someone she already trusted, she contacted Bast and they started talking about Scientology.

  On February 13, 1980, Dick Bast took Paulette to dinner at The Palace, one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. The monument to decadence was at the eastern end of 59th Street, having opened five years earlier by Frank Valenza, the same daring restaurateur who had operated Proof of the Pudding, the place where Paulette had lived over more than ten years earlier on 64th Street and where the smell of garlic had motivated Paulette to work harder so she could afford to dine at such places one day.

  Dinner for the two of them would run about $200, Paulette knew, which was a fortune for a meal in 1980. But Bast wanted Paulette to know just how serious his mission was, and how serious was the money of the man backing him. As if to emphasize it, he carried a briefcase which he rested on the floor.

  Bast wouldn’t tell Paulette who his benefactor was; he would only tell her that he’d been hired by a wealthy Swiss man whose daughter had joined Scientology and then had committed suicide. The wealthy man wanted revenge, Bast said, and he was willing to pay dearly for it.

  Based on the work she had done in the past, they wanted Paulette on their team, and they were willing to pay her $2,000 a month plus expenses. She would do legwork for them, digging up documents, doing interviews, and helping Bast with plans to bring Scientology down.

  The offer stunned Paulette. It was enough money that she could quit freelancing and dedicate herself full time to digging up dirt on Scientology. She would be paid decent money to do what she wanted to do anyway. It was an offer nearly as tasty as the courses of food brought out by the Palace’s servers.

  Bast pushed Paulette for an answer, bringing out a contract for her to sign. The sooner she signed it, the sooner she’d start getting paid to work against Scientology. She looked it over, and noticed a clause that gave her a jolt: “The Independent Contractor herein expressly gives to the Employer her prior consent to intercept any of her wire/oral communications.”

  She asked Bast about it, saying that it seemed unusual for a simple employment contract.

  “It’s meaningless. Just standard language for a private investigator contract,” Bast said.

  She shrugged it off and signed. Here, finally, was what she had been looking for – someone with the money and will to expose Scientology fully, and she wanted to be a part of it. If she had any qualms about the language in the contract, they quickly melted with the butter and cream swimming in the Palace’s concoctions.

  Signing with Bast and his nameless Swiss benefactor felt like the best possible timing. Paulette was still fuming after what she’d read in the FBI documents a few weeks earlier, which not only vindicated her but revealed how gleefully the Scientology operatives had celebrated her misery and the misery of others.

  She was happier than she’d ever been in her life. She had the evidence that she’d been targeted for ruin, she had law enforcement finally on her side, and now she was even being paid a good wage to exact her revenge on Scientology.

  Things could not have been going better. She couldn’t wait to get to work for Bast.

  Two weeks after Paulette signed her contract with Richard Bast at the Palace in New York City, in the California town of Hemet, a man named John Brousseau opened up the back doors of a Ford van. Inside was a foam mattress and some bedding and pillows that Brousseau had laid down in the floor of the vehicle for the journey.

  Then he helped L. Ron Hu
bbard climb in. The 68-year-old man, his famously bright-red hair now greying and hanging in long unkempt locks, sat down on a corner of the mattress and rested his elbows on his knees. Then he held out a hand for Brousseau to shake.

  “All right, John. Thanks for everything. I’ll see you,” Hubbard said. Brousseau closed the doors.

  For several years, Brousseau had been Hubbard’s personal driver, part of a small staff that took care of the man’s needs as he lived in semi-seclusion in Southern California. He helped shuttle Hubbard from an apartment complex in Hemet to the 500-acre compound that was still being built out in a place called Gilman Hot Springs. He also went on walks with Hubbard, and coveted the private time he had with a man who had so many entertaining stories of his days as an aviator, or of what he saw in the war. Like other “Sea Org” workers, Brousseau considered L. Ron Hubbard a great man. But as his driver, he got to know him in a private way that few others did, and Brousseau treasured it. But now, he waved goodbye. A young couple named Pat and Annie Broeker got into the van, and Pat started it up and drove off.

  It was the last time Brousseau – and nearly everyone else in the Church of Scientology – ever saw Hubbard.

  He finally had gone completely into seclusion.

  Richard Bast lived in Virginia, outside Washington D.C., and over a three-month period Paulette made several trips to meet him. When she came to town, he rented her a room in the Washington Hilton. They would either talk at the hotel or at his office, which was in his house in a pricey enclave where his neighbors included U.S. senators. Even at home Bast was usually wearing an expensive suit, but his assistant, a man named Fred Cain, tended to be more casually dressed. Bast’s wife would also tiptoe in and out of the room.

  Paulette told Bast about the dozens of articles and programs about Scientology she was helping journalists put together with the use of the documents seized in the FBI raid. Some were harshly critical about the church, others less so. But Bast wanted to know about every story being prepared, and Paulette did her best to check on all of them.

  There was an NBC Prime Time investigation of a Scientology school. A Boston NBC program that would feature her attorney, Mike Flynn. A TIME magazine story that had been put on hold. A PBS documentary that would be sympathetic to Scientology’s claims that it was being harassed by the FBI and the Justice Department. There were also articles in the works by Christianity Today, the Religious News Service, American Lawyer, the Clearwater Sun, Australian News Limited, the Denver Post, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Boston Herald American, the Boston Globe, the Detroit Daily News, and the BBC.

  Paulette expressed frustration that the New York Times was dragging its feet about doing an article, but she was thinking of approaching Mother Jones, a publication that reached college kids targeted by Scientology.

  But most of all, the thing that excited Paulette and convinced her that the popular tide was really turning against Scientology were two big projects in the works – both of them with key help from her.

  An editor at Reader’s Digest, Eugene Methvin, was preparing a lengthy and harshly critical piece about the church, and a producer at 60 Minutes, Allan Maraynes, was working with Mike Wallace on a devastating piece about Scientology spying. Each of them were relying heavily on Paulette’s participation, and each of them were bound to reach huge audiences – perhaps as big as any print and television news stories could possibly reach.

  Bast insisted that Paulette audiotape all of her telephone calls with other journalists. She offered to paraphrase the conversations, but he said it wasn’t the same. He wanted to hear directly what they were saying about the stories as they were developing. When she resisted his assignments, the former Marine barked orders at her, and she didn’t want what was a dream job to end.

  A researcher working for Methvin, Jane Smith, read an entire rough draft of the Reader’s Digest story over the phone as Paulette secretly taped it. She played it back for Bast so he knew the entire contents of the story. She also pointed out how she’d saved Reader’s Digest some serious headaches by catching numerous passages that were not only factually incorrect but potentially libelous. The magazine was fortunate to have Paulette helping out.

  Paulette kept detailed notes of everything she was doing as she worked for Bast. On March 1, 1980, for example, her notes showed that she talked to a Boston cult deprogrammer about having dinner the next night. She picked up copies of news clips for another deprogrammer and Mayor Gabe Cazares of Clear-water. She spoke to a third deprogrammer and a man who had recently left Scientology. She photocopied a news article about Scientology’s chief litigation attorney, Phillip Hirschkopf, so she could get the copies to Ray Banoun – the assistant US attorney who was prosecuting the Snow White case – as well as to Judge Charles Richey, and several journalists.

  Her notes showed that she was actively encouraging reporters to write stories about Scientology, she was putting them together with law enforcement officials who could provide information, and was also trying to influence litigation against the church.

  Bast seemed thrilled. But he wanted more than just reports about what other journalists were doing. He and Paulette spent hours talking about more direct action against Scientology. Some of it, though largely hypothetical, was risky and probably illegal. They talked about having a young man Bast had recruited, Dave Williams, infiltrate the DC church. Once he was in place, he would need to know what to do that would cause the most distress for Scientology.

  Some of the plans were outlandish – they talked about planting drugs in the org so it would be found during a raid, for example – and there was crude talk, too. Bast swore constantly and used sexually suggestive language, and he encouraged Paulette to curse as well. Paulette mostly wanted to talk about the news stories she was helping to happen, but Bast seemed only partly interested in that; he kept coming back to ideas about sabotage, and even suggested that Paulette might sleep with people to get more information or place people in compromising situations.

  Bast told Paulette that she would have to keep their working arrangement a secret, even when she was deposed in her lawsuits with the church. Paulette told him not to worry, she was good at forgetting things.

  She had gotten used to hours and hours of questioning during depositions, and Scientology’s lawyers spent much of the time digging for information about her friends and sources. She was a hub of information, and she knew that if she named people, they could be harassed and sued. She had gotten used to saying that she didn’t remember things in order to protect other people.

  Paulette introduced to Bast the idea of bringing in her friend, John Seffern, the attorney who had worked with the Greens and Robert Kaufman, and who had become a close friend to Paulette. Because of his work with the Greens, Seffern had been targeted by the Guardian’s Office for harassment, and it managed to get him disbarred in 1976. Paulette told Bast that he could use some work, and Bast offered the attorney $150 a day. Seffern joined them for conversations at Bast’s office, and the three of them talked about the operation’s various schemes and subterfuges.

  Increasingly, Paulette became concerned that Bast was squandering money that she wanted to go to fighting Scientology. He spent lavishly on their meals and hotel costs. She became concerned that the Swiss millionaire bankrolling the operation didn’t realize that Bast was wasting money that could be better put to use.

  Paulette took some of the money Bast paid her and flew to Switzerland to warn their benefactor. She knew the name of his attorney. So Paulette tracked him down. Like Bast himself, the attorney wouldn’t tell her much about the man who was financing the operation, but he promised to get the man any message Paulette wished to give him. It seemed suspicious, but Paulette returned to the United States hoping that she’d done the right thing.

  On June 1, 1980, 60 Minutes aired its 17-minute story about Scientology taking over the town of Clearwater, focusing on the Florida town as an example of the subterfuge that had been discovered in the FBI docume
nts.

  Paulette was seen speaking at the Jack Russell Stadium rally the previous December. She then sat down with Mike Wallace, and succinctly described her situation after Scientology had faked the bomb threat letters.

  “I was arrested. I was indicted on three counts. I faced up to 15 years in jail if I was convicted. The whole ordeal fighting these charges took eight months. It cost me $19,000 in legal fees. I went into such a depression, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t write. I went down to 83 pounds. Finally I took and passed a sodium pentothal, or truth serum, test and the government dropped the charges against me in 1975.”

  Wallace then showed some of the Operation Freakout documents on screen, and noted that one scheme against Paulette involved the use of graffiti.

  “They put my name up on walls in New York City where I live, with my phone number, so people would call me. They put my name on pornographic mailing lists, so that I would get all kinds of disgusting mail. You see, for years I was saying that these types of things were going on and people thought ‘Well, what is she talking about? This is a church.’ And finally, after 11 years I see that everything I said was true and that Scientology turned out to be worse than anything I ever said or even imagined.”

  Wallace managed to convince two Scientology officials to sit down with him and answer questions about what was found in the FBI documents. One of them was David Gaiman, the church’s top public relations man in England and a high-ranking member of the Guardian’s Office.

  When Wallace confronted Gaiman with the documents spelling out Scientology’s smear attacks against Clearwater mayor Gabe Cazares and against Paulette, he looked disappointed and shocked. “Bizarre...I cannot defend the intention and the statements within this documentation,” Gaiman said.