You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

argosciv ago

(2/10)

Cuts & emphasis my own

[1]:

Aftermath and trial

~~On July 8, the FBI raided Church of Scientology locations in Los Angeles, Hollywood and Washington, DC.[17] The Los Angeles raid involved 156 FBI agents, the most that had ever been used in a single raid. It lasted 21 hours and filled a 16-ton truck with documents and other items.[8]

The raids not only turned up documentation of the group's illegal activities against the United States government,[44] but also illegal activities carried out against other perceived enemies of Scientology. These included "Operation Freakout", a conspiracy to frame author Paulette Cooper on false bomb-threat charges, and conspiracies to frame Gabe Cazares, mayor of Clearwater, Florida, on false hit-and-run charges.[45][46] The papers also revealed that Sir John Foster (author of the official UK Government inquiry into Scientology) and Lord Balniel (who had requested the report) were targets, along with the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH) and World Federation for Mental Health.[47]

Comparing the FBI to the Gestapo, the Church declared that all the files seized from the Church were taken illegally,[48] though the FBI produced a 40-plus page affidavit detailing 160 specific items they were looking for.[49]

By July 20, 13 days after the raid, a Washington judge ruled that the documents should be returned, at least temporarily, to the Church, and that none of the documents could be shared with branches of the government, unless that specific branch was investigating Scientology. Scientology's lawyers had successfully argued that in order to prepare for an August 8 hearing on the legality of the raid, they must be able to see the documents.[50] By July 27, a judge in Washington had ruled the warrant authorizing the raid was too broad and, as such, violated the Church's 4th Amendment rights.[51] In August, this ruling would be overturned, with Scientology promising to take the case to the Supreme Court,[52] which would, early in the next year, refuse to hear the case.[53]~~

[2. wiki: Operation Freakout]:

Operation Freakout, also known as Operation PC Freakout, was a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital. The plan, undertaken in 1976 following years of church-initiated lawsuits and covert harassment, was meant to eliminate the perceived threat that Cooper posed to the church and obtain revenge for her publication in 1971 of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered documentary evidence of the plot and the preceding campaign of harassment during an investigation into the Church of Scientology in 1977, eventually leading to the church compensating Cooper in an out-of-court settlement.

Background

Cooper, a freelance journalist and author, had begun researching Scientology in 1968 and wrote a critical article on the church for the British magazine Queen (now Harpers Bazaar) in 1969.[1] The church promptly sued for libel, adding Queen to the dozens of British publications that it had already sued.[2][3]

Undeterred, Cooper expanded her article into a full-length book, The Scandal of Scientology (subtitled "A chilling examination of the nature, beliefs and practices of the "now religion'"). It was published by Tower Publications, Inc. of New York in the summer of 1971. The church responded by suing her in December 1971, demanding $300,000 for "untrue, libelous and defamatory statements about the Church."[4]

1972–1976: Operations Daniel and Dynamite

Cooper was seen as a high-priority target by the church's Guardian's Office, which acted as a combination of intelligence agency, legal office and public relations bureau for the church. As early as February 29, 1972, the church's third most senior official, Jane Kember, sent a directive to Terry Milner, the Deputy Guardian for Intelligence United States (DGIUS), instructing him to collect information about Paulette Cooper so that she could be "handled."[5] In response, Milner ordered his subordinates to "attack her in as many ways as possible" and undertake "wide-scale exposure of PC's sex life", a plan which was named Operation Daniel.[6]

Cooper counter-sued on March 30, 1972, demanding $15.4 million in damages for the ongoing harassment.[7] However, the church stepped up the harassment, for instance painting her name and phone number on street walls so that she would receive obscene phone calls, and subscribing her to pornographic mailing lists. She also received anonymous death threats and her neighbors received letters claiming that she had a venereal disease.[8]

image: The second of the two forged bomb threats

In December 1972, the church launched a new attack called Operation Dynamite. That month, a woman ostensibly soliciting funds for United Farm Workers stole a quantity of stationery from Cooper's apartment. A few days later, the New York Church of Scientology "received" two anonymous bomb threats. The following May, Cooper was indicted for making the bomb threats and arraigned for a federal grand jury. The threats had been written on her stationery, which was marked with her fingerprints.

The charges were eventually dropped in 1975 with the filing of a Nolle prosequi order by the local US Attorney's office, but it was not until the fall of 1977 that the FBI discovered that the bomb threats had been staged by the Guardian's Office.[5] A contemporary memorandum sent between two Guardian's Office staff noted on a list of jobs successfully accomplished: "Conspired to entrap Mrs. Lovely into being arrested for a felony which she did not commit. She was arraigned for the crime."[8]

The church sued Cooper again in 1975 in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia in 1976.[9][10][11]

The church itself imported Cooper's books into foreign countries for the express purpose of suing her in jurisdictions where the libel laws were stricter than in the United States.[12]

1976: Operation Freakout

image: Part of the planning document for Operation Freakout, April 1976

In the spring of 1976, the Guardian Office leadership decided to initiate an operation with the aim "To get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks." The planning document, dated April 1, 1976, declared the aim to be "[t]o remove PC from her position of power so that she cannot attack the C of S [Church of Scientology]."[5]

In its initial form Operation Freakout consisted of three different plans (or "channels", as the Guardian's Office termed them), tailored to implicate her by her Jewish descent:

  1. First, a woman was to imitate Paulette Cooper's voice and make telephone threats to Arab consulates in New York City.
  2. Second, a threatening letter was to be mailed to an Arab consulate in such a fashion that it would appear to have been done by Paulette Cooper (who is Jewish).
  3. Third, a Scientologist volunteer was to impersonate Paulette Cooper at a laundromat and threaten the current president Gerald Ford and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A second Scientologist would thereafter inform the FBI of the threat.[5]

Two additional plans were added to Operation Freakout on April 13, 1976. The fourth plan called for Scientologist agents to gather information from Cooper so that the success of the first three plans could be assessed. The fifth plan was for a Scientologist to warn an Arab consulate by telephone that Paulette Cooper had been talking about bombing it. A sixth and final plan was added subsequently. It was effectively a re-run of the 1972 plot, requiring Scientologists to obtain Paulette Cooper's fingerprints on a blank piece of paper, type a threatening letter to Kissinger on that paper, and mail it. Guardian's Office staff member Bruce Raymond noted in an internal memo: "This additional channel [the sixth plan] should really have put her away. Worked with all the other channels. The F.B.I. already think she did the bomb threats on the C of S [in 1972]."[5]

On March 31, 1976, Jane Kember telexed Henning Heldt, the Deputy Guardian U.S., to update him on the situation:

"PC [Paulette Cooper] is still resisting paying the money but the judgement stands in PT [present time] ... Have her lawyer contacted and also arrange for PC to get the data that we can slap the writs on her. If you want legal docs, from here on we will provide. Then if she still declines to come we slap the writs on her before she reaches CW [Clearwater] as we don't want to be seen publically [sic] being brutal to such a pathetic victim from a concentration camp."[5]

See also: Exposure and aftermath:

~~Sometime during late 1977, according to an affidavit given by Margery Wakefield, a secret meeting was held at the Guardian's Office where two murders were planned. The first of which was of a young man who had defected from Scientology and had been recaptured, and the second was an assassination of Cooper in which they were planning to shoot her dead. It is unknown whether or not these plans were attempted.[13]

Although in the end nobody was indicted for the harassment of Cooper, the wider campaign of criminal activity was successfully prosecuted by the United States Government.

~~All of the defendants were imprisoned, serving up to four years in jail. Coincidentally, they were tried, convicted and sentenced in the same courthouse that their agents had been caught robbing.[5]