Some Background on Scientology’s Efforts to Destroy Enemies

 

Over the last few weeks, Chris Owen (author of many insightful writings about Hubbard and scientology, including his excellent book, Ron The War Hero) has done a series of posts with Tony Ortega on Substack describing the history of the harassment campaigns carried out by scientology. As is always the case with Chris, he is a meticulous researcher and summarizes the information in a concise and accurate way.

This is important information that should be as widely available as possible, so I am combining his 3 pieces into one longer article and reprinting it below.  It’s fascinating reading.

 

Leah Remini’s recent lawsuit does an excellent job of describing the policies set out by L. Ron Hubbard for the harassment of Scientology’s perceived enemies, and the effect that this has had on her life. But how does Scientology’s harassment system work behind the scenes?

Hubbard’s willingness to harass people who had crossed him began even before the creation of Scientology. In 1952, he wrote:

This universe is a rough universe. It is a terrible and deadly universe. Only the strong survive it, only the ruthless can own it. Given one weak spot a being cannot long endure, for this universe will search it out and enlarge it and probe it until that weak spot is a festering wound so large that the being is engulfed by his own sores.

Fighting this battle for survival, and fight it he must, a being in the [physical] universe cannot seem to afford decency or charity or ethics; he cannot afford any weakness, any mercy. The moment he does he is lost.

This philosophy has underwritten Scientology’s approach to its perceived enemies ever since.

Scientology’s organizational structure mandates the existence of a department to deal with intelligence, internal security, public relations, and litigation. That slot was occupied by the notorious Guardian’s Office (GO) before 1983 and by the Office of Special Affairs (OSA) since then. The Religious Technology Center (RTC) plays an important but less well-known part as well, outside of Scientology’s regular departmental structure.

OSA’s mission, like that of the GO, is to create “handled situations which result in the total acceptance of Scientology and its Founder throughout the area” and to “take responsibility for cleaning up the rotten spots of society in order to create a safer and saner environment for Scientology expansion and for all mankind.” Anyone who criticizes Scientology is deemed to be part of a “rotten spot.”

Formally, OSA answers to the Church of Scientology International (CSI). However, RTC’s former Inspector General Marty Rathbun said this corporate relationship was a sham and that it was micromanaged by Scientology’s leader David Miscavige, exercising his control through Rathbun.

OSA’s Investigations Officers have a mission that is identical to their GO predecessors: “TO HELP LRH INVESTIGATE PUBLIC MATTERS AND INDIVIDUALS WHICH SEEM TO IMPEDE HUMAN LIBERTY SO THAT SUCH MATTERS MAY BE EXPOSED AND TO FURNISH INTELLIGENCE REQUIRED IN GUIDING THE PROGRESS OF SCIENTOLOGY.” They are trained to “successfully investigate those impeding the forward progress of Scientology and furnish intelligence (prediction) data to management.”

Much of OSA’s work takes place at lower levels, managed by local Directors of Special Affairs who are responsible for overseeing OSA activities in their own countries. Judging from records seized by Greek police in the 1990s, their activities tend to focus on public relations, lobbying politicians and monitoring the activities of ‘enemies’ viewed by Scientology’s management as local rather than international threats.

Threats such as Leah Remini, whose public criticism of Scientology has undoubtedly had a huge impact, are dealt with at the very top. “The highest priority OSA matters that I had to monitor and report on several times a day to Mr. Miscavige were ones that involved his name,” Rathbun said.

“If a staff member left unannounced from the Scientology corporate headquarters, and the person had any personal knowledge of Mr. Miscavige by way of regular contact with him, I was required to personally direct a massive dragnet utilizing Sea Org staff from RTC and CSI, and private investigators, to hunt down that staff member. This occurred on average a couple of times per year. I was micromanaged on such manhunts by Mr. Miscavige personally. I would make sure the person was contacted, and put under control and sometimes order ongoing surveillance through OSA that could last up to several years.”

Similarly, if Miscavige was implicated in any litigation, Rathbun “oversaw every aspect of that litigation until Miscavige was no longer subject to inquiry.”

According to Mike Rinder, who headed OSA between 1987 and 2007, “Miscavige received a daily report concerning every legal case, every media action and every investigation ongoing in the world.” The OSA Daily Report was compiled by Rinder, passed to Rathbun and finally hand-delivered to Miscavige in an unmarked, sealed envelope without any indication of who it was written by or addressed to. Rinder explains that this was to ensure that there was no paper trail to link Miscavige to OSA’s activities. A separate Investigations Report, describing all ongoing intelligence activities, was also compiled and sent with a very limited distribution including Miscavige and Rathbun.

Rathbun commented that the briefing “was usually several pages [long] summarizing reports from private investigators and Scientologists serving as undercover spies watching and interacting with Scientology critics. The written briefing, contrary to established corporate policy, had no routing information on it. That is, the daily briefing had no indication who wrote the report or who it was directed to. If a report ever got out of the Church, it could not, on its face, be used to incriminate any of its author or recipients.”

After Miscavige had read the intelligence reports, according to Rathbun, they would routinely be shredded as “there could be no trace of it”.

As well as delivering the written report, Rathbun was required “to brief Miscavige verbally on any major developments on matters handled by the OSA network around the world or matters concerning security. My briefing to him would begin with major problems which he insisted he know about. My briefing included reports about handling the media stories, investigations, legal cases, security breaches, and potential security situations. That briefing would last anywhere from a few minutes on a quiet day with no major developments, to all day when something was afoot that riveted Miscavige’s attention.”

Miscavige frequently micro-managed the activities of OSA, calling at least daily to discuss the Daily Report and summoning Rinder and Rathbun to his office several times a day to discuss OSA’s affairs. Rathbun recalled that often, Miscavige “would instruct me to order OSA to direct an operative or private investigator to find out something to do concerning the target of infiltration or investigation. On other occasions, Mr. Miscavige would joke about what was reported about a particular target, or rant about the target’s activity.”

Orders were issued verbally by Miscavige to Rathbun, and Rathbun to Rinder. ”Most often”, Rathbun later recalled, “I would call Mike Rinder into my office and I would brief him verbally on Miscavige’s directives. Mr. Rinder would then return to his own office and type up the orders as written directives to OSA. Those directives would be worded as if the orders were originated by him, with no reference to me or RTC, and especially not to Mr. Miscavige.” Rathbun was responsible for supervising Rinder to ensure that Miscavige’s orders were only issued under Rinder’s name.

Rinder was closely managed by Miscavige when he was sent to ‘handle’ the BBC journalist John Sweeney in 2007 while the latter was making a documentary on Scientology. As Rinder followed Sweeney around the US, he was bombarded with often viciously abusive text messages demanding updates and berating him for supposed failures. The messages ostensibly came from Miscavige’s ‘Communicator’ (secretary), Laurisse Stuckenbrock, but were clearly relaying Miscavige’s own thoughts.

While OSA is responsible for most of Scientology’s intelligence activities, the Religious Technology Center (RTC) also plays a key role. Its remit is narrower than that of OSA – protecting Scientology’s trademarks and copyrights, rather than the whole of Scientology. It also does not have a worldwide network like that of OSA. However, its position in the Scientology hierarchy as the church’s senior management organization means that it has an outsize role in managing Scientology’s intelligence activities.

For many years, Miscavige and Rathbun oversaw OSA’s work together. Rathbun described his role as having been “a go-between for Miscavige and OSA.” RTC has also, for many years, carried out its own intelligence activities. As early as 1984, when Scientology was being challenged by breakaway groups – and before Miscavige had taken over RTC – an intelligence unit was set up within RTC with the task of putting Scientology defectors in jail.

While the Religious Technology Centre (RTC) and Office of Special Affairs (OSA) have continued Scientology’s long tradition of harassing critics, the way it’s done now is somewhat different to how it used to be. OSA’s predecessor, the Guardian’s Office (GO) was brought down by its wanton disregard for the law. Its use of ordinary Scientologists as agents enabled law enforcement agencies to link them directly to the GO leadership.

RTC and OSA avoid these problems through two key departures from how the GO operated. First, planned operations are said to be reviewed beforehand by in-house lawyers to ensure that they are legal (“awful but lawful”), or at least are unlikely to be prosecuted. Second, they make heavy use of private investigators (PIs).

This was in some respects a reversion to Hubbard’s original recommendations in his 1959 Manual of Justice, when he advised using PIs to investigate Scientology’s critics and enemies and “ruin them utterly” if necessary. Scientology used a number of PIs during the 1960s and 1970s, and even experimented with having GO staff trained and licensed as PIs. However, this approach was too expensive and impractical for the huge scale of the GO’s activities.

RTC/OSA operates on a much more limited scale than the GO – principally because Scientology’s shrinkage means that it no longer has enough staff to carry out GO-style operations. Instead of firing wildly in all directions and targeting even trivial manifestations of hostility towards Scientology, it now focuses on what could be described as high-value targets, mainly using PIs.

PIs have major advantages over ordinary Scientologists, despite their high cost. State licensing gives them official permission to do things that unlicensed Scientologists could not. They are often much better trained than the old GO investigators, as many come from law enforcement backgrounds, or have had specialist PI training. They have been able to exploit this experience to obtain information from privileged sources and obtain specialist assistance for operations.

In one instance, a Scientology PI used contacts at a Florida college to recruit newly graduated PIs for operations against Scientology critics in the state in 2008. Another PI linked to Scientology hired overseas hackers to steal data from two prominent Scientology critics – a crime for which he was ultimately jailed.

They are also much better equipped than amateur investigators. PIs operating against Scientology’s enemies have displayed advanced technological capabilities comparable to those of the police or state intelligence agencies. They have reportedly used, among other tactics, GPS devices attached to vehicles to track targets’ movements, remote video surveillance of targets’ houses, email hacking, and cellphone interception using scanners. Some tasks have required Scientology’s PIs to hire outside assistance, such as retaining specialist contractors or finding additional PIs to help with big operations.

Scientology’s PI operations are reportedly highly organized. In Florida, Scientology PIs established an operations centre inside a warehouse overlooking a business run by an ex-Scientologist. As well as monitoring their nearby target from the warehouse, the PIs simultaneously managed multiple operations against different targets.

Cierra Westerman, a former Scientology PI who worked in the Florida operations center, says that it had “two big screen TVs, a computer, and a phone that was for contacting [Scientology PI] Terry Roffler. The TVs were used for monitoring all the cameras watching the ex-members’ houses. And it was also for watching the cars that all had tracking devices, which was illegal in Florida.” Similar large-scale operations were reportedly being undertaken simultaneously in Los Angeles, Denver, and Texas.

According to former senior OSA and RTC staff, PIs are nominally employed by church lawyers. The church covers the cost of the PIs as part of general ‘attorney fees’ paid to the lawyers. They have no role in directing the activities of the investigators. Instead, this is done directly by a small number of OSA and RTC case officers, who in turn report to the head of OSA and the RTC Inspector General, who both report directly to Miscavige.

According to former RTC Inspector General Mark ‘Marty’ Rathbun, Miscavige himself personally directed the activities of Scientology’s PIs: “Often, he would instruct me to order OSA to direct an operative or private investigator to find out something to do concerning the target of infiltration or investigation.” Some ex-Scientology PIs have said that they spoke directly to Miscavige to report their findings.

The GO was undone by the fact that its operatives, almost all of whom were Scientologists, could fairly easily be linked to Scientology. PIs, by contrast, are able to operate behind layers of obfuscation. Few appear to be Scientologists. In Cierra Westerman’s case, she was employed by a PI who was employed by a lawyer who was employed by Scientology who was reporting to either RTC or OSA officials. Thus, she was at least two layers distant from anyone in the church’s management.

The PIs’ work products were covered by legal privilege which protected them from being turned over to discovery in litigation. In one rare case where a PI targeting Scientology critics was prosecuted for a felony, his ultimate clients were never publicly disclosed, beyond the fact that he was working for lawyers and other PIs. The firewall had held; although the Scientology connection was publicised, the church faced no legal repercussions.

According to former senior church officials, the lawyers act as ‘cut-outs’ to ensure that there is no direct financial link between the church, as the ultimate paymaster, and the PIs. Former RTC executive Jesse Prince explains that the thinking behind this is “to keep as many arms’ lengths from the eventual victim as possible to limit liability. Simply stated, the scam is set up so that all can claim no one knows anything specific, especially those at the top doling out the money.”

Mike Rinder, head of OSA from 1987 to 2007, comments that “it gives a level of protection on disclosure [of] their activities, it provides plausible deniability to Scientology and it masks HOW MUCH they are paid.” “It had to be two or three steps removed,” Rathbun said, to ensure that the PIs’ conduct did not implicate the church. “We had to pretend like all that [covert] stuff was behind us”, he said. “But that was total subterfuge.”

The Church of Scientology spends huge sums on PI operations. When David Miscavige’s father Ron left Scientology, the younger Miscavige hired a paid of PIs to follow his father for over a year at a cost of $10,000 a week; the total cost of the operation was at least half a million dollars. In an even more extreme example, two different PIs were paid $32,000 a month to follow a single target over 24 years, at a cost to Scientology of between $10 and $12 million. The payments were reportedly made in amounts of under $10,000 to avoid alerting the IRS.

These were just two of hundreds of PI operations reportedly carried out by Scientology since 1988. In a 1992 submission to the IRS, the church stated its expenditure on “legal and professional fees” was approximately $1 million per month. In reality, Rinder says, this was a gross underestimate; at one point, OSA International alone was spending $2 million a month on lawyers and PIs.

Millions more dollars were spent by other Scientology corporations in the US and abroad. An investigation by the St Petersburg Times found that in 1988 alone, Scientology spent over $30 million on legal and professional fees, which would certainly have covered work done by PIs.

Rinder notes that even on Scientology’s own figures, if no change in the amount of spending is assumed the church has spent over $300 million on lawyers and PIs since 1992. Given the scale of Scientology’s legal and PR challenges from the late 1990s onwards, it is quite likely that it has in fact spent considerably more than this.

Individual Scientologists also play an important role, though in a more limited capacity than in the days of the GO. Rinder says that long-term Scientologists who are viewed as loyal and progressing well in Scientology are preferred as candidates for OSA recruitment.

An internal OSA spreadsheet from 2006, published by Rathbun, lists several hundred Scientologists in the Western US who volunteered for OSA work. Some are recorded as assisting OSA intelligence-gathering on demonstrators outside Scientology orgs, carrying out actions such as videoing picketers and taking photographs of their vehicle licence plates. A number are listed as “Internet volunteers”, carrying out activity against Scientology’s online critics.

One such volunteer was Patty Pieniadz Moher, a Connecticut Scientologist whose career in the church spanned over 27 years. She joined the Boston Guardian’s Office in 1979, running Scientology’s ‘social reform’ front groups in New England for a time until leaving in 1981 to start a family. She escaped the subsequent purges and abolition of the GO. She was eventually re-recruited as an OSA volunteer in the 1980s.

Her volunteer career, which lasted on and off for around 14 years, followed what appears to have been a fairly typical pattern as she gradually proved her trustworthiness to her OSA handlers. She began with ‘overt data collection’ against Scientology’s enemies (for instance, using public records to obtain information on them), then graduated to covert activity such as infiltration and stealing trash from those deemed enemies of Scientology.

“I truly believed that the sneaky activities I was involved in for the Church were for the ‘greatest good’,” Patty says of her years working for OSA. Critics of Scientology, in her mind, were “evil people and trying to stop the expansion of Scientology due to their horrific crimes against humanity. I completely justified my behavior in Scientology and working with OSA because I felt I was one of the good guys, trying to expose one of the bad guys. I was a true believer that happily went along with any and all things sanctioned by the C of S or LRH, and I was completely trusted.”

OSA’s use of volunteers in operations against Scientology’s enemies is highlighted by two internal documents published by Rathbun in 2011. One of them, the “Beatty Handling Program,” was a plan of attack against former Sea Org member and Scientology critic Chuck Beatty. Written in 2006 and published by Rathbun five years later, the plan’s stated purpose was to “end CB’s black PR of Scientology” through achieving two major targets: “Crimes on Beatty found and documented” and “CB dismissed as an attacker or totally restrained and muzzled.”

The plan called for the use of a number of covert human intelligence sources, described as “resources” — presumably OSA volunteers — in San Francisco and Pittsburgh, where Beatty lived and worked. One was to concentrate on sending him “defeatist” messages to discourage him from criticising Scientology. Another was to push him to “go out and start meeting girls at bars, clubs, etc,” while a third operative in Pittsburgh, named in the plan as ‘Sam,’ was to socialise with him and “verify if Beatty is into downloading child porn”. If he was, this was to be reported immediately to law enforcement.

A Pittsburgh PI was to be tasked to disrupt Beatty’s relationship with his sister, with whom he was living, by getting him “signed up to receive kinky materials (at the house).” OSA’s investigations chief was also tasked with sending Beatty links to porn websites and ”materials and URLs for local sex locations that he would be interested in going to.” The ultimate goal was to “Expose this and get CB dismissed as an attacker.”

Another campaign from 2006 is said to have been directed against Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor David S. Touretzky, a vocal Scientology critic. It similarly appears to have relied heavily on OSA volunteers. As with the Beatty plan, much emphasis seems to have been placed on infiltrating the target’s social and professional circles.

Rathbun said that in 2006, Touretzky was the subject of “dozens of …. daily reports” compiled from intelligence provided by OSA informants and private investigators. A leaked report indicates that OSA was “activating” Scientologist CMU alumni to use as assets against Touretzky. One OSA volunteer at CMU was described as ”43 years old and he will be used to befriend Touretzky, and find names of current CMU students who can then be surveyed to get their parents contacted and stirred up.”

During the 1960s and 1970s, Scientology gained a justified and still-lingering reputation for being extraordinarily litigious. Its Guardian’s Office (GO) would sue at the slightest provocation, rarely winning cases but racking up huge legal costs for its opponents. In 1983, the church’s Office of Special Affairs (OSA) and Religious Technology Center (RTC) inherited the GO’s formidable litigation machine.

Scientology also retained the GO’s standard playbook, which one journalist summarised as “sue the critics, sue the government and sometimes overwhelm the judges. Whenever necessary, use private investigators to probe your opponents’ weaknesses and exploit them.” That said, Scientology is much less litigious now that it used to be, and it has been many years since the church last sued a media organisation.

Despite Scientology’s unpleasant reputation, it has consistently been able to find top-flight lawyers to fight its cases. As one lawyer said in 1980, “These people pay their bills – top dollar and on time – which is more than I can say for most of my unpopular clients. This case will finance a lot of pro bono work.” Others have had higher motives, seeing Scientology as a persecuted victim of the government or seeking the opportunity to expand constitutional protections.

By the late 1990s, Scientology was reported to employ over 20 lawyers at a dozen firms in the US. According to former OSA head Mike Rinder, the church’s lawyers fall into three categories. Many key legal cases, particularly those involving specialised issues of First Amendment or copyright law, are managed by non-Scientologist lawyers from major law firms.

The church also has its own in-house stable of Scientologist lawyers who handle activities that are regarded as more sensitive, such as hiring private investigators. They are bound by Hubbard’s policies and the church’s draconian disciplinary system, as well as its code of secrecy.

Finally, a third tier of lawyers comprise non-Scientologists from small law firms who are largely or entirely dependent on the church’s patronage.

Scientology gained a reputation for being serially litigious during the 1960s and 1970s, suing for libel at seemingly every opportunity. However, few of its lawsuits actually came to court; instead, the church often kept its cases alive for years without ever bringing them to trial, draining its opponents’ resources and discouraging further criticism of Scientology. This tactic, the English courts have ruled in a non-Scientology case, is an abuse of process aimed at gagging critics.

Under the direction of Scientology leader David Miscavige and the then RTC Inspector General Mark ‘Marty’ Rathbun in the 1980s and 1990s, Scientology adopted a different approach. Lawsuits were brought to trial much more often, particularly in cases where Scientology’s trademarks or copyrights were under threat. Its defensive tactics against lawsuits have been ferociously uncompromising.

Whereas ordinary litigants might settle cases to keep down costs and legal exposure, Scientology often makes a point of pursuing them as far as possible. Miscavige himself has publicly called Scientologists “the antimatter of quitters … When the going gets tough, pitbulls call a Scientologist.” As one US judge has put it, the church views “litigation as war.”

The church’s huge financial resources have been key to this approach. Los Angeles lawyer Dan Leipold comments that “for every nickel we spend [in litigation against Scientology], they spend $1.” Another lawyer, Ford Greene, describes Scientology litigation as “fearsome … They litigate by mud and by volume and behind-the-scenes intimidation.”

This has reportedly included opposing lawyers being pursued by private investigators, dealing with complaints to the Bar Association and facing derogatory rumours being spread to their clients and neighbours. According to lawyer Graham Berry, a California law firm dropped litigation against Scientology in 1995 after church officials threatened to expose extramarital affairs of several partners in the firm.

As well as brute legal force, the church’s approach has also reportedly encompassed what might be termed social engineering: finding lawyers with social connections to judges, enabling them to bring influence to bear outside the courtroom. Such ex parte communications are not illegal; they are however, generally prohibited under rules of legal conduct, as they threaten judicial impartiality and give one side an unfair advantage in a case.

In one late 1990s example when the church was looking to launch a federal lawsuit in Texas, Rathbun said that Miscavige ordered him to find “Texas legal counsel so connected to the local judiciary as to assure victory to the Church … with such connections that he could walk unannounced into the [judges’] chambers.” In another mid-1980s case, according to Rathbun, a church lawyer bonded with the presiding judge over a shared love of sports. When the case looked like it would go against Scientology, Rathbun said, the lawyer made a social visit to the judge to make a personal appeal to reverse an adverse decision. The decision was indeed subsequently reversed.

As this highlights, lobbying and influencing is an integral part of the way that Scientology seeks to thwart its enemies and grow its power. Hubbard understood that organizations depend on individuals; therefore you target the individuals as much as the organization. OSA trainees are required to demonstrate their understanding of a number of maxims: “If it’s a group problem, find the key person and influence him”; “Only action upon individuals is productive”; “Forget they. Find him or her”; “Never abandon an attack until you have found and contacted the key person.”

OSA carries out a sophisticated political influence program to find potential allies for Scientology. It maintains a “power communication lines database,” which Rathbun described as “a computer database that culls from every source of information they can find, through going out and doing public record checks, through an intelligence network, through parishioner files, through counseling folders, through everything to find every connection they can find from a Scientologist or people hired by Scientology to people in positions of power in Scientology communities.”

The church has surveyed its members to identify their connections with influential people. Scientologists are currently required to submit a highly detailed “Life History” detailing virtually every aspect of their lives, including connections with those in influence. The database enables the church to exploit those links to contact, groom and ultimately recruit influencers to take its side.

In Clearwater, Florida, for example, it reportedly identified a local political consultant as a top mover and shaker and ”a key player in the community that had to be dealt with one way or another,” as Rathbun put it. According to Rathbun, she had a connection with a Clearwater Scientologist engaged in PR activity for the church. By exploiting that link the church was able to bring her onto its side and establish links through her to other important figures in the area, to build goodwill and gain influence.

Much of this work takes place through OSA’s Directors of Special Affairs – its regional representatives. In one example from the 1990s, OSA’s Greek representative, Ilias Gratsias, reported that he had used Scientologist volunteers to infiltrate meetings of Scientology’s critics and hired lawyers and private investigators to aid the campaign against them. He worked closely with OSA branches elsewhere in Europe and with the continental and worldwide Scientology headquarters in Copenhagen and Los Angeles respectively.

Gratsias reported that he had developed and used non-Scientologist allies to obtain benefit for the church. He kept records on numerous individuals of interest including politicians, business figures, celebrities, journalists, and other public figures. A long list of public figures was identified as “allies” of Scientology, while others – chiefly journalists and anti-cult campaigners – were designated as “enemies.” The enemies were targeted through lawsuits, surveillance and intrusive investigation, such as going through their garbage. Gratsias also organised public relations campaigns intended to improve Scientology’s image, such as cleaning up parks and planting trees.

OSA’s approach to covert influencing has strong similarities to the agent recruitment cycle described by CIA staff historian Randy Burkett. This consists of six steps: identifying individuals who can meet intelligence needs, assessing whether they are able to deliver the desired services, developing an initial relationship with them, carrying out the actual recruitment, holding subsequent meetings for taskings and debriefings, and either continuing to run the agent or terminate the relationship.

According to Burkett, successful agent recruitment depends on six factors known collectively as RASCLS: Reciprocation, Authority, Scarcity, Consistency, Liking and Social proof. Reciprocation means providing an amenity for the agent, creating an obligation that they feel they have to repay. Presenting the recruiting organisation as powerful and wealthy enables the recruiter to present the agent with an air of authority. Human psychology causes scarce items to be seen as more attractive and therefore worth making a greater effort to obtain. The desire to be seen as self-consistent motivates the agent to justify providing further assistance once the initial ethical breach has been made. The innate desire to “like people who like us” encourages the agent to cooperate, particularly if they are being flattered or given tokens of esteem. Finally, social proof – the herd instinct to follow what others are doing – reassures the agent that their own actions are correct.

All six factors can be seen in an account by Marty Rathbun of how Scientology influenced a Clearwater lawyer who was representing a client in conflict with the church in the early 2000s. Rathbun recalled that one of the church’s lawyers made friends with the Clearwater lawyer. They set up a personal meeting with Miscavige at the church’s gleaming ‘Mecca’, the Flag Land Base. Miscavige was able to create what Rathbun described as “this little bonding scenario… over months.”

The lawyer received numerous perks, such as sought-after tickets to the 2003 Super Bowl, gifts of expensive cufflinks, invitations to celebrity galas and personal meetings with Scientologist celebrities. By the end of it, Rathbun said, the lawyer was representing Miscavige’s interests more than his actual client’s. Although he very likely did not see it as such, the lawyer had effectively become Scientology’s agent.

OSA also seeks to influence media coverage of Scientology through worldwide media monitoring and rapid-reaction rebuttals. According to Marc Headley, who was a senior Sea Org member at Scientology’s secretive Gold Base facility in California, OSA compiles daily reports of worldwide press coverage of Scientology, divided into good and bad (“Black PR”) categories.

“These almost always had notes for each article,” Headley says, “and what the proposed handlings that would be done to Black PR the reporter or sources for the bad article.” Scientology has created publications and anonymously-published websites to ‘dead agent’ – discredit – particularly troublesome individuals and publications.

Leaked documents suggest that OSA recruited journalists as informants for covert intelligence-gathering and influencing. According to an internal memo posted by Rathbun and attributed to the current OSA CO, Linda Hamel, Vanity Fair contributing editor John Connolly gathered intelligence in 2006 for OSA on Andrew Morton, the British author of an unauthorised biography of Tom Cruise.

The memo describes information from a conversation Connolly had with Morton, who was evidently unaware of Connolly’s links. The relationship was evidently a two-way one; the memo records that “He has been given background documents that we [OSA] have on Morton and on [Paul] Barresi who we know that Morton has been using.” Connolly was reported to be looking to write a story to “attack Morton on his reputation questioning the credibility of his sources.”

The memo also records that an unnamed UK reporter was separately involved in the covert campaign against Morton. “He is willing to continue to feed information and documents to the UK tabloids to discredit Morton,” it notes. The reporter proposed to write “a pre-emptive positive book about Mr. Cruise” in advance of Morton’s book, but this was rejected. Instead, he “will continue to be used for feeding information and stories to the UK tabloids about Morton.”

According to Rathbun, Connolly had been an OSA informant “for nearly two decades. He has infiltrated several journalists doing stories on Scientology during that time, posing as a like-minded investigative journalist working on a Scientology story.” He told the New York Observer that the journalist had been an operative of the private investigator Gene Ingram, a long time OSA contractor.

For years, Rathbun said, “I periodically saw his name in programs and reports as an active source of information and stories.” For years, according to the Observer, Connolly had “repeatedly, almost obsessively, called a variety of prominent ex-Scientologists … to keep up with them, all under the pretense of developing stories for Vanity Fair.”

Former OSA head Mike Rinder comments that Connolly was “a resource to deal with media problems.” He says that Ingram would tell him, “‘Connolly can handle this; he’ll find out what’s going on and he’s got lines into all media.’ That was something I heard many, many times.” Connolly was paid for his services to Scientology, according to both Rathbun and Rinder. “No one ever does work like that for free,” comments Rinder. “Not for the church.” Connolly, who died in 2022, denied the claims.

OSA volunteers also play a frontline role in trying to influence coverage. In 2000, OSA deputy head Janet Weiland began recruiting volunteers for a new front group, the Scientology Parishioners’ League (SPL). It was reportedly created to act on OSA intelligence of forthcoming negative media coverage about Scientology.

SPL members were tasked with pressuring media outlets to drop the planned coverage by bombarding editors and producers with angry calls, faxes and emails. Although this sometimes worked, most of the time the volume of negative coverage was so overwhelming that it was beyond the SPL’s ability to control.

The SPL was defunct by around 2008, but a successor group called Scientologists Taking Action Against Discrimination (STAND League) was created in 2015 to do similar work, mainly on social media. While its tactics are often crude, they can be effective by creating an artificial cloud of controversy around a target, potentially deterring risk-averse organisations from working with them.

— Chris Owen