The IRS issues a notice of deficiency (regarding tax
exemption) to the Church of Scientology of California. CSC appeals the decision.
(Criminal Time Track: Issue III, (15))
First thing I had to do in 1977 was handle the Toronto fire,
early in 77. The Org was burned down. By the way, this is
confidential GO data, but it's no use holding it this late in the
game.
The guy who burned down the Toronto Org - it burned completely
to the ground - was a plant. He was in there and he set the Mimeo
files on fire - you know, the hanging sheets with the Mimeo fluid
in them; they burn real well. It was done at night and the guy
disappeared. Couldn't find him of course. Actually, it was arson.
He burned the Org down at night. And there weren't many people
around and it was after-hours and nobody got killed, but they
lost everything in the Org - they thought.
Except Ed Brewer and myself went up and salvaged everything
and got them a new Org building in a Hotel, rented, for about the
same price that they were running, and got them back into Power
stats within one week. The same week the Org burned down (on
Friday night), by next Thursday they had 27,000 dollars in GI,
which was the highest stats they'd ever made since 5 FEBCs had
gone back in 1970. (I believe that was the highest stats they'd
ever made.) (CBR-debrief from 1982)
The former Cedars of Lebanon Medical Center in Hollywood purchased
by the Church of Scientology as a major center for Scientology in the Los
Angeles area. (CofS)
Then I did some PAC missions, (missions out in the PAC area),
and went out there to help with the Cedars refit. As CS-E, that
was the biggest project we had going in the whole world - was
refitting Cedars.
And that same year was the raid on the Church there when the
FBI had broken in and taken all the records in the B-1 files from
the Cedars area. And it's very interesting that those B-l files
are now reposing in an FBI secret headquarters in Encino,
California.
I have given all this data to the proper people in the Church,
but I don't think anybody's gone out there to see the files. I
have seen them. They're in the basement there. And since it's an
illegal place, the FBI's operating it under the name of an
Insurance Company, Zenith Insurance Company. It's not really an
FBI place, so there's no reason why we couldn't subpoena them and
get the files back.
But, of course, as I told you before, since Bob Thomas put
that thing in the file in 1968, everything I've said is really
"hallucinations". But no, nobody just goes and looks.
That's all I ask you to do. It's all LRH ever asked us to do was
just go look. Well, I've done the looking. Anybody else, I don't
give a damn whether they believe it or not, but if they ain't big
enough to go and look, then they ain' t big enough to know. And
they ain't big enough to go OT, either. (CBR-debrief from 1982)
On May 13, 1977, Gerald Wolfe went before U.S. District Judge Thomas A.
Flannery and entered a pleas of guilty to the one-count charge of wrongful use of a Government seal. Several weeks later he
was sentenced to a term of probation and was required to perform 100 hours of
community service.
However, immediately after sentencing, in the same courtroom he was served
with a subpoena ordering him to appear the same afternoon before the federal
Grand Jury, which was investigating the entries into the U.S. Courthouse.
Among the things the Grand Jury sought to learn from Wolfe was the identity
of the John M. Foster who had accompanied him on his visits to the courthouse.
He was also asked how he and "Mr. Foster" had obtained the counterfeit
IRS credentials they had used to gain admittance to the courthouse.
Wolfe related to the Grand Jury the same cover-up story he had earlier given
the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office. He had met Foster at a bar and with him
had gone to the Bar Association Library to study in order to improve his
prospects of obtaining a better-paying job. He used the xerox machines to copy
case histories from law books. He did not know Mr. Foster by any other name and
did not know where he lived.
After his appearance before the Grand Jury, Wolfe was debriefed by officials
of the Guardian's Office in Washington. A transcript of the debriefing was sent
to Los Angeles, where it was analyzed and exerpted by the Church's Legal Bureau.
Justice Department sources say that Meisner was given a copy of the debrief
transcript to read so that he could begin adjusting his own cover-up account to
conform to that given by Wolfe to the Grand Jury. (O. Garrison, Playing
Dirty, pg. 116/117)
Wolfe is
convicted of the forgery of credentials and is sentenced
to probation and community service. Ref:
"A Piece of Blue Sky", Jon Atack (1992), p. 240
(Timeline of Scientology versus the IRS)
June 20 - Meisner
packed a few things in a valise and decamped. He boarded a bus and went to a
bowling alley, where he placed a call from a public telephone to Assistant
United States Attorney Garey Stark in Washington, D.C.
When AUSA Stark, who was handling the case of the courthouse entries,
answered the telephone, Meisner identified himself by his true name and told
Stark that he wished to come to Washington, face the criminal charges against
him, and cooperate with federal authorities who were still investigating the
incursions into the offices of the U.S. Attorney. (pg 118)
After Meisner's furtive departure from Los Angeles, his colleagues in the Guardian's Office did not suspect that he had betrayed
them. They concluded, rather, that he was hiding somewhere in the Los Angeles
area, while he did legal research in a library regarding his possible defense in
the Washington, D.C. case. (O. Garrison, Playing
Dirty, pg. 119/120)
Shortly after LRH arrived in Sparks, cash was needed so Pat Broeker
contacted his soon-wife-to-be, who was the Deputy Commanding Officer of the
CMO in Clearwater. They arranged between them for Annie to bring one million
dollars in cash from the church.
Annie brought the cash to Pat in a briefcase, and turned it over to him at
an airport.
This is the point where Broeker starts to cut the line between LRH and MSH
by editing letters between them. Over time, Miscavige and Broeker
systematically eliminate all of LRH’s comm lines except their own.
Gradually, every single person with whom Ron has a comm line, including his
wife and children, must communicate via the Broekers. Finally, the Broekers
are the only ones in direct comm with Ron. (Criminal
Time Track: Issue III, (8))
On July 4 at 2 a.m., Magistrate Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. of the U.S. District Court signed the warrant permitting the
FBI to
conduct a search of the premises of the Founding Church of Scientology in
Washington, D.C. The description of property to be seized under the warrant's
authority included 162 items. All but one of these were documents of various
kinds -memoranda, letters, files, cable messages, etc. Being properly identified
by description which included such indicatory data as names, dates, and
contents, they clearly met the particularity requirement of the First Amendment.
The 162nd and final item, however, was anything but specific. It read:
"Any and all fruits, instrumentalities, and evidence (at this time unknown)
of the crimes of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and theft of government
property in violation of 18 U.S. Code Sections 371, 1503 and 641 which facts
recited in the accompanying affidavit make out."
The wording of this item had been cleverly based upon a previous case in
which the Supreme Court had seemingly arrogated to itself the power to supercede
the Constitution by approving a general, exploratory search.
Two other search warrants with identical wording were issued by Magistrate
James J. Penne in the Central District of California. It commanded a search of
two Los Angeles area church premises. One was a seven-storey victorian building
known as Fifield Manor, at 5930 West Franklin Avenue, Hollywood. The other was
an eight-storey, multi-winged building complex known as Cedars-Sinai, which
occupied an entire city block and fronted on Fountain Avenue, also in Hollywood.
After a quarter of a century of trying, the federal Government at last had
"got something" on the Scientologists. Something big. (O. Garrison, Playing
Dirty, pg. 121/122)
The FBI raids Scientology's
headquarters in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. The GO is
taken by surprise and tens of thousands of incriminating
documents are seized, including complete records of the
infiltration and burglary of the IRS and other government
departments. Ref: Various,
including Los Angeles Times and other newspaper reports
(Timeline of Scientology versus the IRS)
MSH and 10 others are later convicted and go to jail. Thus, the beginning
of a group engram was laid in.
LRH and MSH are living together in La Quinta, California at the time. They
spend the next week discussing how to handle their legal situation. Then, he
leaves La Quinta with Pat Broeker and goes to Sparks, Nevada.
After the raid, the USGO Intelligence bureau had nightly all hands to
destroy evidence of crimes in their remaining intelligence files. It went on
for months. At the same time, Vicki Aznaran participates in a massive
document destruction program undertaken to destroy any evidence that LRH
controlled Scientology. Vaughn Young also participated in all of this
destruction of evidence. (Criminal
Time Track: Issue III, (22, 30))
The detailed Story behind the raid can be found in Omar Garrison's book
"Playing Dirty", Chapter 07.
Scientology's FOIA suits spanned the very time when the
top-secret Scientology-based remote viewing program and budget were not only
being expanded, but were being utilized by the Department of Defense, the
President's National Security Council (NSC), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But
the documents being sought by the Guardian's Office were never released; the FBI
raided the church's offices in July of 1977, and the federal government filed
criminal charges accusing Mary Sue Hubbard and the Guardian's Office of
"criminal spying"--a strange irony.
The sensational case resulted in Mary Sue Hubbard and 10
Guardian's Office co-defendants being sentenced to jail without a trial by
federal Judge Charles R. Richey, which led to the ultimate disbanding of
Scientology's Guardian's Office.
This opened the way for a new senior corporation,
"Church of Spiritual Technology" (CST), doing business as the "L.
Ron Hubbard Library." It was set up in 1982--right after the Supreme Court
had upheld Mary Sue Hubbard's conviction--for the express purpose of gaining
receivership and control of L. Ron Hubbard's copyrights. But it was in the
founding of this corporation that the first hint of the cover-up by the federal
government lay buried.
In an EXCLUSIVE 1997 STORY, the PUBLIC RESEARCH FOUNDATION
reported that Meade Emory--former Assistant to the Commissioner of the Internal
Revenue Service and former Legislation Attorney, Joint Committee on
Taxation--had been a co-founder of CST, Scientology's most senior coporation.
That corporation now controls the copyrights for all of L. Ron Hubbard's
intellectual properties, once valued at close to $100 million. CST also enjoys
ultimate authority over all Scientology-related trademarks, including even the
name "L. Ron Hubbard."
But the discovery of Emory, a non-Scientologist, in such an
unusual position raised red flags, since Emory's involvement in setting up the
corporation had been hidden for fifteen years.
Then it was learned that Emory had been Assistant to
Commissioner of IRS Donald C. Alexander from 1975 through 1977. Strangely, those
were the very years that an IRS employee, Gerald Wolfe, was supposedly a
Scientology "double agent" guilty of numerous thefts of IRS documents
for Mary Sue Hubbard and the Guardian's Office--leading to the arrests and
convictions. (Public Research Foundation:
Press Release: 29.8.2000)
At six o'clock on the morning of 8 July 1977, 134 FBI agents armed with
search warrants and sledgehammers, simultaneously broke into the offices of
the Church of Scientology in Washington and Los Angeles and carted away 48,149
documents. They would reveal an astonishing espionage system which spanned the
United States and penetrated some of the highest offices in the land.(Miller:
"Bare-faced Messiah", pg. 352)
LRH left the ranch and went to Sparks.... With him were three messengers,
Diane Reisdorf, Claire Rousseau and Pat Broeker.
For the remainder of 1977, Hubbard stayed in hiding at Sparks. He cut off
all direct communications with the Guardian's Office and his family and relied
on his three messengers to maintain secret links with the Church hierarchy.
LRH went into writing film scripts. One of it... Revolt
in the Stars. (Miller:
"Bare-faced Messiah", pg. 352)
The first of the Los Angeles service organizations, Church of Scientology
of Los Angeles, moved into the former Cedars of Lebanon Medical Center
building complex. (CofS)
Universal Media Productions was reorganized as Source Productions
in La Quinta, California, to produce Scientology technical
instructional Films. (CofS)
(David) Miscavige recalls meeting the founder in 1977. Hubbard, then 66, wore a straw cowboy hat, slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and boots.
He was leaving a dining room when the teenager from Clearwater introduced himself. “Oh I know who you are,” he remembers Hubbard saying. “Welcome aboard.”
...Miscavige, a photography bug, quickly grasped filmmaking concepts such as camera angles and continuity, said Norman Starkey, who was on the camera crew and now is a high-ranking Scientologist. “He was always thinking ahead, thinking of the future, predicting it and taking action.”
Hubbard appointed Miscavige camera chief and considered him his best friend, Starkey said. And in the mornings, when the film crew gathered for work, “David Miscavige was always the first person whose hand he’d shake.”
(SPTimes: The Man behind
Scientology)
A few days after Christmas 1977, word arrived at Sparks that the Commodore
was unlikely to be indicted as a result of the FBI raid and he decided it was
safe to move back to La Quinta. There was just one problem. He suspected that
Mary Sue was still under FBI surveillance, so if he returned to Olive Tree
Ranch, she would have to move out. (Miller:
"Bare-faced Messiah", pg. 353)
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