Uniquely for a "religion", the Church of Scientology has since 1955 organised systematic intelligence activities, including on occasions bugging, burglary, forgery, framing, infiltration and intimidation. Such activities are conducted alongside and in support of a sophisticated PR machine which specialises in producing distasteful personal attacks on those perceived as being opponents of Scientology.

These activities have been run through three agencies within the Church of Scientology: the Hubbard Communications Office, or HCO (from 1955-66); the Guardian Office or GO (1966-83), and its successor, the Office of Special Affairs or OSA (1983 to present). These pages expose aspects of all three organisations, the dirty tricks which have been carried out at the behest of Scientology's leaders and the philosophy which lies behind Scientology's extreme sensitivity to criticism.

This makes it all the more important that when drug abusers are treated for their addiction, the treatment should be effective. Treatment costs money, and money - whether it comes from the public purse or private pockets - is often scarce. Ineffective treatment is thus not only useless, it is worse than useless; money spent on useless treatments is money taken away from more effective treatments. This means that any drug rehabilitation therapy must address two questions: Does it work? Can it work?

In Narconon's case, there is strong evidence that the answer to both questions is "no". Critiquing Narconon is therefore not simply about "bashing" a worthy group; it is vital if drug addicts are to get the treatment they so desperately need, rather than wasting time and money on ineffective pseudoscientific "therapies". If there was no doubt about Narconon, such a critique would not be needed - but there is doubt, and it is only right that such doubts should receive a fair hearing. Unsurprisingly, Narconon itself chooses not to mention facts or views which contradict its own statements; this website aims to fill that gap.

The rosy picture of Hubbard's heroic wartime service ultimately was shattered in the US courts. Gerry Armstrong had by this time been declared a "Suppressive Person" and was expelled from Scientology for his insistence that Hubbard's life story had been grossly misrepresented over the years. He took with him a large number of highly sensitive documents, including material from Hubbard's Navy and Veterans' Administration files. He was subsequently taken to court by Scientology in a case that came to trial in May 1984. A keystone of Armstrong's defence was his contention that he was right about the incorrectness Hubbard's of publicised life story. In defence, Scientology put Hubbard's sometime second-in-command, former Lt. Thomas Moulton, in the witness stand to testify on Hubbard's war years. The subsequent cross-examination proved devastating for the Church of Scientology, which lost the case.

Although the interlinked, fractal nature of the "control agenda" can fairly readily be seen in today's Scientology, it has in fact developed in a very piecemeal fashion over about 30 years. It did not develop to any pre-determined plan and, due to Hubbard's insistence that nobody but he was allowed to amend Scientology doctrine, it has never been revised to resolve the numerous inconsistencies which crept in over the years. This is the root cause of the many contradictions which commentators have noted over the years. To make sense of those contradictions, it is necessary to examine how each thread of the control agenda developed and ultimately merged.

Hubbard himself involved psychiatrists in the development of Dianetics, right from the earliest days. The science fiction editor John W. Campbell in 1949 wrote to Dr. Winter informing him of Hubbard's researches: "With cooperation from some institutions, some psychiatrists, he [Hubbard] has worked on all types of cases." When Hubbard's first article on Dianetics was completed it was initially offered for publication to the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry. Both rejected it on the ground of insufficient clinical evidence of the technique's effectiveness.

Hubbard is here saying that Scientology's core goal is no longer the spread of his "tech" but the complete destruction of all other mental health practices. This was not idle talk, as the GO made strenuous efforts to attack psychiatrists — an effort which is still going on, in the shape of Scientology's continued denunciations of psychiatrists and psychiatric drugs such as Prozac. There is certainly little doubt that Scientology's current leaders share Hubbard's objective of the eradication (extermination?) of psychiatry. David Miscavige has been reported to have pledged that psychiatry will have been eliminated by the year 2000. No doubt this promise will quietly be dropped when the millennium comes around and psychiatry continues in rude good health.

An archive of independent research and documentation on Scientology

One of the most controversial aspects of that controversial organisation, the Church of Scientology, is its financial dealings. The Church's corporate structure is fiendishly complicated, involving scores of entities in dozens of countries, which are supposedly "each totally and legally independent from one another, connected only by ecclesiastical bonds" 1 . The complexity of the structure failed to deter the US Internal Revenue Service from investigating Scientology's financial dealings following the Church's exemption from taxes in 1957. The exemption was revoked in 1967, leading to a 26-year legal battle which was resolved in somewhat peculiar circumstances in 1993, with exemption restored to Scientology and its associated entities. What had the IRS discovered and why did they mount against Scientology what insiders claim to have been the biggest investigation in its history? The answer was simple: Scientology had operated corruptly and fraudulently for years under the cover of a respectable tax-exempt religious institution. 2

The story of Scientology's corruption by its leaders is an extraordinary and unedifying one, but the story really begins many years before Scientology's foundation in 1952. It begins, as does all else in Scientology, with that extraordinary and perplexing man, L. Ron Hubbard. [...]

On 1 October 1993, the Church of Scientology obtained tax exemption from the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This ended 26 years of what the Church itself has described as a "war" against the IRS, in which it used extraordinary and in many cases illegal tactics - bugging of government offices, theft of mountains of classified files, private detectives pursuing senior government officials, thousands of lawsuits, full-page attack adverts in US daily newspapers, and so on.

So perhaps it is not such a great surprise that the settlement itself came about in some very unusual circumstances, raising questions about the actions of both the Church of Scientology and the IRS. Neither party has been willing to provide answers, with the IRS refusing to disclose the terms of the exemption agreement in defiance of a court order and US taxation law. But with the leak in December 1997 of the secret agreement, the relationship between Scientology and the IRS is under greater scrutiny now than ever before.

Unfortunately, the scientific veracity of Scientology falls apart under even modest scrutiny. Most noteworthy are Hubbard's views on atomic radiation, which betray what an eminent Australian radiologist described as "complete and utter ignorance of physics, nuclear science and medicine"

The evidence is clear and unambiguous: a variety of books, periodicals and papers from inside and outside Scientology, produced over the last 40 years, details how the Church of Scientology actively supported the forces and philosophy of apartheid for many years. I have made use of these materials to chronicle what I have termed "Scientology's fight for apartheid". To say the least, it shows Scientology to have behaved in a way which totally belies its stated goals...

One particularly curious point is that his original research notes have never been published. They probably show him to be a complete fruitcake, if a fascinating lecture entitled "Electromagnetic Scouting: Battle of the Universes" (April 1952, exact date unknown) is anything to go by. Back in 1952, this lecture was just another part of Scientology — there wasn't anything secret or, for that matter, sacred about it (this was in the days when it was explicitly stated that it was a science, not a religion). It wasn't until the start of the 1960s that such material began to be designated "confidential" as part of the OT courses. Access to this particular tape is highly restricted these days, so presumably it forms part of the OT materials.

The life of L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) was surely one of the most extraordinary which this century has seen. He already has an entire Web site devoted to him, at the handsomely-produced http://www.lronhubbard.org. The account of his life given there is, however, a rather limited one - perhaps not surprisingly, given that the site belongs to Hubbard's brainchild, the Church of Scientology. This site contains copies of a number of publicly-available documents about Hubbard. The items listed below all come from public sources in the US. Most were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); some come from the still-sealed exhibits of the 1984 case Church of Scientology of California vs Gerald Armstrong (but were obtained legally, both here in Europe and in the US). They present a rather different picture of Hubbard, showing him to have a much darker side than is officially admitted by Scientology.

Hubbard publicised the booklet in late 1955 as the first stage in a 40-year war against psychiatry which the Church of Scientology continues today. Hubbard had been convinced for some years that communists and psychiatrists were separately conspiring against him to do him and Dianetics/Scientology down and sent a lengthy series of letters to the FBI denouncing various of his associates, including his wife, as communist agents provocateur. In August 1955 a Scientologist named Edd Cark was arrested in Phoenix, AZ for practising medicine without a license (perhaps as a result of a complaint from local medical authorities). Hubbard was livid and for the first time denounced psychiatrists as working for communist — specifically Soviet — interests.