L. Ron Hubbard's letter to the FBI, "Communist Activities", 7 September 1955

Box 242
Silver Spring, Md.
Sept. 7, 1955

TO THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Communist Activities

Gentlemen:

A series of sudden insanities and disturbances in Dianetic and Scientology groups reached seven last week on the West Coast.

In Atomic Energy's Richland, Washington a young boy who had never been treated with Dianetics or Scientology but whose father Verne McAdams is the local Scientology group leader in Richland suddenly and mysteriously became insane, so suddenly and so thoroughly that the head of the institution for insane in Richland, evidently of good security, suspects the use of LSD, the insanity producing drug so favored by the APA. Two of our ministers in that area at my request went further into the situation and by means we will not detail recovered from the boy information of which his family had been entirely ignorant. On instructions to find the "other psychiatrist" our ministers by this means located an unsuspected one in Atomic Energy's front yard, a man who had been the construction company doctor during the building of Richland and who had then turned psychiatrist and whose name strangely enough is Menkowski (sp?). The boy had evidently had some association with this man before this sudden onset.

With this information not yet cool long distance from San Francisco Bay Area notified us of the sudden and inexplicable descent into insanity of one Wanda Collins. She is ravingly insane and yet was completely sane a day ago. Her people and our people cannot account for missing nine hour period just before this onset. You should be interested in this because Wanda Collins resigned from the Communist Party some time ago, foreswore it and tried to make amends with Scientology and would be a logical candidate for an LSD attack.

Concurrently with this in Phoenix, Arizona

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our Mr. Edd Clark was suddenly arrested "for practicing medicine without a license", and this is very odd because he is the first Dianeticist or Scientologist in five years of world wide operation to be so accused. He could not have been practising medicine because Dianetics and Scientology seek only to assist able people to improve their talents and have no interest in sickness or insanity. He was arrested and without and search warrant all his papers and letters were seized even down to blank typewriter and were carried away, a fact which places this matter quite solidly in the field of the F.B.I.. Mr. Clark is a half-blind deaf old man. He was once a chiropractor but has long since ceased to be one. He was told by the County Attorney that the County Attorney meant to "get to the bottom of this thing about Hubbard and Scientology."

The "bottom of the thing" can be found in "Who Knows and What" and "Who's Who in the East" in the local library or from bookstores which carry my books. My own life is about as hard to investigate as a white rock on a summer's day.

It is not uncommon in the past five years to have judges and attorneys mad-dogged at about what a terrible person I am and how foul is Scientology. Persons never named or available step in, spread violent tales and accusations and vanish. This mad-dogging has evidently been done at this County Attorney to prompt such a foolish action. This makes the third civil official in that area to off half-cocked about Scientology. When it is all done and Scientology has been neatly ruined by the newspapers in the area and when all the charges have been quashed there is no one from whom any recompense can be drawn. "It was all a mistake".

In 1950 the Dianetics Foundations were violently attacked and discredited. The 200 Foundation employees, when screened, yielded 35 Communist-connected persons. That done the commotion stopped. After three quiet years in the Phoenix area we forwarded to the Defense Department data on brain-washing. Instantly

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we became the subject of violence. Four people were seized by psychiatrists in that area to date and to this day so far as I know are still being held, their sanity shattered.

After we so informed the Defense Department about brain-washing technologies in our hands and offered them, we have been in a state of siege. Understand that we accuse the D.D. of nothing.

Psychiatrists as far north as Seattle have said they were "out to get every Scientologist." An Internal Revenue official has used those very words before witnesses and said he was going to get to the bottom of this thing in Phoenix. People in suspicious condition were sent from one place in Southern California to be "treated by Scientology" for insanity and yet we have no interest in treating anyone, especially the insane. Now two more people go suddenly and inexplicably insane in widely different places both the same way. All manner of defamatory rumors have been scattered around about me, questioning even my sanity which is fortunately a matter of good record with the Navy as by statement "having no psychotic or neurotic symptoms whatsoever."

I have a wife and three little kids. I have a good many thousand people scattered around the world trying to help their fellow man and I am responsible for these people. I am trying to turn out some monographs on matters in my field of nuclear physics and psychology for submission to the government on the subject of alleviating some of the distress of radiation burns, a project I came east to complete. This lawless and brutal attack on Scientology now spreading evidently to three states will probably not end until a great deal of injustice and human suffering has occurred.

Would you please discover for me or for yourselves the exact names and whereabouts of the persons whose statements inflamed the County Attorney in Phoenix in arresting a half-blind old man and seizing all his books and papers. If we have those names and if we trace them back we will have someplace to start on this madness

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which now reaches us into three states. Can you do this for us?

I am getting additional copies of the material which was offered to the Defense Department since that agency has not acknowledged or returned anything shipped to it about brain-washing and when I have these copies I will send one to you for this is the only starting place I know about for this outbreak and the matter, while far from conclusive at least tells me that something went astray which was dangerous in the wrong hands.

Could you please have your Phoenix office obtain the names of the people who defamed us to the County Attorney? Your Bay Area and Richland offices have already been apprised of the incidents in those areas.

[signed L. Ron Hubbard]
L. Ron Hubbard