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

by Tony Ortega

  Wallace said Gaiman blamed the actions on “overzealous” members of the church. “Part of us, part of we the Guardian’s Office, fell into the arrogance of the ends-justify-the-means, which is wrong and alien to Scientology,” Gaiman said.

  Gaiman insisted that L. Ron Hubbard had nothing to do with the actions of the wrongdoers. But Wallace then confronted him with Hubbard policy letters which encouraged exactly the kind of behavior the church was accused of. “Gaiman still insisted we were taking Ron Hubbard’s words out of context,” Wallace said.

  What Wallace didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know, was that Gaiman himself had authored detailed instructions for how public relations officers in the church should attack journalists. Wallace also didn’t point out that Gaiman himself was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Snow White Program investigation. And it also never came up that it was Gaiman who met Paulette Cooper at the Edinburgh airport ten years earlier with what amounted to an intimidation attempt. Even so, the 60 Minutes segment was a powerful indictment of Scientology on the most-watched news program in the country, and Paulette was prominently featured.

  She could not have been vindicated any more thoroughly.

  But any euphoria she felt rapidly dissipated. What might have been her most satisfying moment was quickly turning into another nightmare.

  16

  The tapes

  A few days after the 60 Minutes broadcast, John Seffern called and asked Paulette to meet him at the Front Porch restaurant on 82nd Street and Broadway. He had something important to tell her. He and Paulette had both worked for Dick Bast. She had recommended John, knowing that he was desperate for cash after being disbarred. They had both been to Bast’s house, and had discussed the operations that Bast wanted to run against Scientology.

  “Sit down,” he told her when she arrived.

  He began telling her that he had concerns about Bast. She felt the blood draining from her face. What did he mean, he had concerns?

  “There is no client,” he said.

  Paulette didn’t understand. Was he saying that Bast himself was financing the fight against Scientology?

  “Well, there is a client, but it’s not who we thought it was,” he continued. “It’s Scientology.”

  Paulette thought she was going to pass out.

  “He’s working for them,” Seffern continued. “There’s no father wanting to avenge his daughter. No rich benefactor in Switzerland. It’s all been Scientology.”

  John said he’d discovered the truth when Bast asked him to tape his conversations with Paulette and admitted what was really going on. Paulette could hardly process what he was saying. It was the biggest and worst shock she’d received since that day in the New York grand jury chambers when she was told her fingerprint was on one of the bomb threat letters.

  Seffern tried to put a positive spin on it. This is great, he said. Now we’ll get them. I’ll make believe I’m going along with it and feed them disinformation.

  But Paulette wasn’t listening. She was still in shock. And she knew it was over. The grand jury looking into her harassment. Her lawsuits and all the time and money she’d spent on them. Her credibility in her fight against Scientology. Everything that she’d been working for.

  Seffern said that Bast had admitted he was really working for Benjamin Brown, an attorney for the Washington D.C. Church of Scientology. Seffern said Bast had offered him $10,000 to tape his conversations with her. Bast knew that Seffern was hard up for cash, and figured he’d do anything or that amount of money, including betray Paulette. But he’d miscalculated on that score.

  Paulette knew immediately that what Seffern was telling her made sense. Bast had insisted that everything be taped. Her phone calls. Her meetings. Even her talks with Bast in his office. She suddenly remembered seeing a red light on his VCR, and when she asked him about it, Bast said he was taping a television show.

  The attorney in Switzerland Paulette had tracked down, who was supposedly working for the shadowy millionaire that she now realized didn’t exist at all? That attorney worked for Bast, not the other way around.

  Her mind raced, thinking about what she’d been taped saying over the last few months. The conversations. The reports. The telephone calls.

  She’d walked right into another Scientology trap.

  At the same time that Richard Bast had been working Paulette Cooper, he was also looking into Judge Charles Richey. In fact, that may have been why Bast cultivated Paulette the way he did. Not so much for what Paulette knew, but for whom she knew. For years, Paulette had developed sources at newspapers, law enforcement agencies, and the FBI in particular. And Bast was looking for any way into the world of Judge Richey.

  He nosed around until he made contact with a federal marshal named Jim Perry who had been one of Richey’s bodyguards during the Los Angeles trial in the summer of 1979. Bast discovered that he had a mutual friend with Perry, who told Bast that Perry had been grousing about missing out on some disability pay. Bast engineered a meeting with the unhappy marshal, and used his inside information to get the man talking. Eventually, after he’d loosened up, Perry said that he’d seen quite a lot of things in his nine years as a marshal, enough to make a good book. Bast encouraged him, and said he’d pay Perry an advance of $2,000 to produce a manuscript.

  Perry got to work, not realizing that he was actually writing notes for a Scientology operation. And his notes included the allegation that during the summer trial, when Richey was with Perry and another marshal staying at the Brentwood Holiday Inn, the judge had paid for prostitutes.

  Bast told Perry that his book needed confirmation before they could print such an allegation, and that’s the excuse he used for flying Perry out to Los Angeles to track down one of the women who had supposedly been paid by Richey. Bast then paid the woman $300 a day for her time as he interviewed her and had her sign a sworn statement that Richey had paid her for sex. In July 1980, Judge Richey formally pulled out of the trial against the two remaining Snow White defendants, citing health reasons.

  For his work for the Church of Scientology, Bast was paid $321,000 plus $84,000 in expenses.

  Paulette made a vodka and tonic to dull the pain as she sat down to listen to hours of tapes that Bast had made of her once copies of them were turned over in litigation. She needed to listen to them and take notes, her attorneys said, and it was a chore she wasn’t looking forward to. They needed to know the worst.

  On tape after tape, Paulette was heard plotting against Scientology. She thought she had the backing of a wealthy, unnamed European millionaire. She was ready to do to the church what it had been doing to her for years.

  In one scheme, she and Bast talked about sending a friend inside the Washington DC church, and once he had infiltrated it, he could plant drugs for a raid that Paulette would then call down with her contacts in law enforcement.

  Paulette: The point I want to make is if we have any kind of police raid this gay friend of mine.... probably get us some, a couple of things you might want to consider leaving them there that might make much bigger headlines. Like cocaine.

  Bast: Ho, ho, beautiful.

  Paulette: Because he snorts with his friends.

  Bast: Ho, ho. We could set them up there. A drug bust would be a much bigger thing. We get the DEA in there, we have friends in the DEA. So why don’t you get some ... and knock out a little plan for that. I mean if we’re gonna do it, we, who knows, maybe the material that Dave got will check out.

  Paulette: Well, that’s what I’m saying, it’s gonna be right in that area. Dave’s gotta watch his fingerprints on the thing—everything else. I’m saying that in any depositing of any glassine envelope has to be sure there’s no prints on it. But I think that can be arranged.

  Bast: OK, beautiful. In other words your friend can get glassine envelopes and we can just....

  Paulette: I know this guy has snorted coke with his friends, OK?

  Bast: How tight
are you with him?

  Paulette: Very.

  Nothing was ever done to plant her friend or the drugs, but simply hearing herself discuss it was painful. She also trashed Nan McLean, her old friend, for Nan’s “stupid honesty.” When the two of them had copied thousands of pages of Snow White documents, Paulette had fibbed about the amount she’d copied in order to pay less, but Nan refused to cheat. Now, Paulette made fun of her to Bast.

  Paulette: You know, getting back to Nan and her stupid honesty. Do you know what I managed to cheat down my photocopy bill down to? Get this . . .

  Bast: What’s that?

  Paulette: $89.50.

  Bast: Really?

  Paulette: Now, Nan and I photocopied, I did three-quarters of what she did, OK? That’s the way it generally went. . .

  Bast: Yeah.

  Paulette: She’s paying an $800 bill.

  On a tape made February 20, 1980, Paulette could be heard criticizing Nan for the way she couldn’t shade the truth during depositions. From her disbarred friend Seffern, she said, Paulette had learned some tricks about how to be less than truthful under oath.

  Paulette: Yeah, this is where Nan and I fight so badly. She refuses to have lapses of memory. The one thing we have compromised on is that on some things, during depositions, she says “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Paulette. That’s all Paulette told me.”

  Bast: Who says that? Nan does?

  Paulette: Right. We’ve agreed to a semi-lie. If she won’t totally lie then she’s to say . . .

  Bast: Then at least lie halfway.

  Paulette: . . . then she is to say . . . for example, “Am I in touch with Mike Meisner?”

  Bast: Yeah.

  Paulette: “mmm, mmm . . . . No, but Paulette is.”

  Bast: Yeah.

  Paulette: In other words, so that she can then pass the buck, and then I say “I’m not in touch with him,” because as far as I’m concerned . . . I have a very . . . I have a lawyer friend who’s extremely dishonest, and he, on the side, has trained me that when you are in touch with someone, put up your finger, then we are in touch. If we write letters, we’re not in touch. I mean, in other words, he says you can take every single thing and comfortably lie about it.

  Bast: Yeah.

  Besides the cute trick about being “in touch,” Paulette implied that she was talking to Michael Meisner, the key witness against Scientology in the Snow White prosecutions. It was another surprising claim, since Meisner had gone into a witness protection program, and had vanished. (Paulette later insisted she never communicated with Meisner, and was just trying to impress Bast that she had important connections.)

  The material on the tapes seemed devastating. Paulette knew that if she ever tried to testify in court again, the things she’d said to Bast would be brought out to impeach her. Her credibility as a witness was shot.

  But the federal grand jury looking into her frame-up was having other troubles. Scientologists who had taken part in the scheme against her and who were brought in to testify simply refused to speak. James Meisler, the public relations man at the New York church, said he wasn’t going to talk, not because he was taking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, but because he claimed the First Amendment protected what he’d done in the name of his religion.

  One Guardian’s Office operative, Charles Batdorf – who had been listed as “Max” in the Operation Freakout documents and whose job it was to type up a bizarre letter to be sent to Henry Kissinger in the scheme – went to jail for eight months rather than testify to the grand jury.

  FBI agents told Paulette that the documents seized in the 1977 raid spelled out clearly that she’d been targeted, but in order to get indictments and then convictions, they needed more specific details about what the church operatives had actually done.

  As it became clear that eleven of the church’s top officials were going to prison for what they had done in Snow White, Paulette was told by her FBI sources that she should take some solace in that, since some of the same people were involved in both operations.

  The grand jury looking into her harassment, however, returned no indictments after her comments about her memory ruined her credibility, and her own discussions of dirty tricks against Scientology became known.

  Meanwhile, Scientology wasted no time using the Bast tapes to its advantage in its litigation with Paulette. Merrell Vannier, the GO volunteer who had helped Don Alverzo break into the offices of attorneys representing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1974, had joined the Guardian’s Office itself in 1980, and was put to work transcribing the tapes from the Richard Bast operation. He then used what he found in them to trip up Paulette in her lawsuits with the church.

  Vannier zeroed in on the tape Paulette had made of herself with Reader’s Digest researcher Jane Smith. Paulette had also talked with Eugene Methvin, the editor whose byline would appear on the May story, “Scientology: Anatomy of a Frightening Cult.”

  Paulette had told Bast that she was reluctant to discuss her connections to other journalists when she was being deposed – she knew the church would only harass or sue people who dared to work with her. Knowing that she would minimize her role in the Reader’s Digest story, Vannier submitted questions about it for Scientology attorney Jonathan Lubell to ask during a deposition, asking Lubell to drop the questions in intermittently so Paulette wouldn’t catch on that the church already knew the answers from hearing the Bast tapes. In other words, it was another setup, and only further eroded her credibility as a court witness.

  And then, after the set-ups and schemes to destroy her, Scientology reached out to Paulette Cooper in the strangest way possible.

  A few months after the Bast operation ended, Paulette received a phone call from one of Scientology’s legal affairs officers, a man she had gotten to know slightly during numerous days of depositions. She was surprised to hear from him, especially after what the church had just done to her. But she heard him out.

  He told her that Scientology planned to sue 60 Minutes over its June 1 segment. Naturally, she knew what was coming – she was going to be sued as well. Many of her lawsuits were the same. She was pulled in as a defendant based on another person’s book or article or radio program. And now, she’d find herself dragged into a suit with CBS.

  But she was told there was an alternative. It was clear to Scientology that she had been instrumental to the segment, and had worked closely with its producer, Allan Maraynes. Maraynes was more important to them than she was. Would she be willing to help gather information about the producer in return for being left out of the lawsuit?

  Paulette could hardly believe what she was hearing. She was told that someone from Scientology could come over to her apartment to “set up some things” – presumably imaging equipment – and then Paulette should invite Maraynes over and get him talking.

  She could tell, from the way it was pitched to her, that the idea was for her to seduce Maraynes, sleep with him, and get him to say things about how 60 Minutes had intended to make Scientology look bad. If she did that, she wouldn’t find herself defending yet another lawsuit.

  Not interested, she said, and hung up. Later, she told Maraynes about it and they laughed. She had gotten to know him during the filming of the segment, but he was recently married and had never expressed an interest in Paulette. She assumed Scientology had listened to the Bast tapes and heard the way Bast salaciously suggest that she sleep with people to get information and had gotten some ideas.

  It was just the way Scientology operated, she knew.

  The Bast operation only made Mike Flynn angrier. He told Paulette that the Bast tapes would only end up helping her in court, not the opposite. “Whatever is on them, the fact that they hired someone to befriend you, given your vulnerabilities, will only backfire on them. Whatever you said would pale in comparison to what they put you through,” he told her.

  Looking over the things Paulette had said to Bast, Flynn told her that they only show
ed how damaged she had become after years of harassment. If anything, they would only make a jury more sympathetic.

  “If a jury heard the whole thing? In fact, we may even introduce the tapes as evidence,” he told her.

  On March 9, 1981, Flynn filed his first lawsuit on Paulette’s behalf, against the Boston church, L. Ron Hubbard, and Mary Sue Hubbard, asking for $25 million.

  The suit named specific grievances related to the Boston organization—the burglarizing of Paulette’s medical records from Dr. Cath’s office, for example. But it also referred to her entire history of harassment, as well as schemes carried out by the Boston church that had little or nothing to do with Paulette. (The infiltration of the Boston Globe, for example.)

  Flynn wrote the complaint to encompass the entire Scientology conspiracy as described in the FBI documents, and focused it on Hubbard and his wife. “L. Ron Hubbard and Mary Sue Hubbard throughout the period set forth in this complaint have been engaged in illegal and criminal activities designed to perpetrate a nationwide scheme of fraud and infliction of personal injury. As a result, they have established a nomadic life-style for the specific purpose of avoiding legal process.”

  Mary Sue Hubbard was actually appealing her Snow White conviction and was not in hiding. It was her husband who had gone into seclusion the year before. But clearly, the language in the lawsuit made it obvious that Flynn was aiming high. This wasn’t just a lawsuit about the Boston church and its involvement in breaking into Cath’s office for Paulette’s records. It was the first salvo from Flynn and Paulette in a larger battle.

  He was still talking about a massive class-action lawsuit, and he knew Paulette would help him attract more clients ready to take on the church. If the government had let her down with its grand jury, Paulette still believed that with Flynn, the tide was turning against Scientology.

  But her life wasn’t only about fighting the Hubbards. After her disastrous months working with Bast, Paulette returned to her work for the National Enquirer. She enjoyed working with the editors of the paper, and she liked the pace: she often had a dozen or more stories working at any one time, which helped feed her need for constant intellectual stimulation.