RIVERSIDE — A Superior Court judge here upheld a search warrant Tuesday used by authorities to raid the local mission of the Church of Scientology in search of evidence of possible bank loan fraud. But at the same time, Judge Ronald Deissler delayed action on a church motion that the 17 boxes of Scientology records seized during the June 13 raid be returned. A hearing on that matter has been set for Aug. 20. More than two dozen Riverside County sheriff's ...

RIVERSIDE (AP) —The Church of Scientology has filed suit to retrieve documents seized in a sheriff's raid on the church's Riverside Mission and to quash a search warrant used in the June 13 raid. "The seizure," said Christopher Ashworth, a Los Angeles attorney representing the church, "was offensive to the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens who were part of the church." The suit contends: — That most of the information used in support of the warrant was more than a year ...

Church of Scientology officials said they will attempt to repay any defaulted loans they may have taken out fraudulently by Scientology members in Riverside, an attorney for the organization said Friday. Christopher Ashworth, a Century City attorney, said the church will take a nationwide collection from its members to set up a trust fund to reimburse any lender "who may have been harmed by credit misrepresentation." The offer came a week after Riverside sheriff's deputies raided the church's Riverside mission in ...

Riverside Mission is Searched for Evidence of False Loan Scheme Sheriff's deputies seized 17 boxes of documents from the Riverside mission of the Church of Scientology Wednesday in a search for evidence that possibly as many as 100 past and current members fraudulently obtained bank loans and then gave the money to Scientology. More than two dozen Riverside County sheriff's deputies spent six hours searching through the offices of the mission for tax, payroll and other records on 20 named individuals ...

LONDON (AP)—The Church of Scientology lost a London court battle Friday to prevent two of its members from being extradited to the United States on charges of counseling and procuring burglary of American government offices. But the church immediately announced an appeal to the Divisional Court in London and said that if necessary it would pursue the appeal through the House of Lords and the European Court, which has jurisdiction because of Britain's membership in the European Economic Community. Magistrate William ...

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals took under submission Monday arguments by the Church of Scientology of California that a July, 1977, search by 130 FBI agents of Scientology headquarters here was illegally conducted. An estimated 90,000 pages of documents were seized by the agents operating under a court-approved search warrant and much of the data was used to obtain criminal indictments against Scientology's top leaders in the United States and Great Britain earlier this year. ...

A former follower of the controversial Church of Scientology has filed suit claiming she was harassed and shamed into contributing more than $7,000 to the church. Saundra Haynes, in a fraud suit filed Thursday by attorney Hiram M. Martin, claimed that she went along with the urgings because she hoped the church's "auditing" procedures would enable her to "go clear," as the church calls it, and "rid her of her deep depressions and suicidal attempts." At one point, she claimed in ...

The U.S. Justice Department, at least for the next month, cannot disseminate to the public or other governmental agencies documents seized by the FBI from the Church of Scientology July 8, 1977, the U.S. 9th Circuit Circuit of Appeals has ruled. The appellate court said materials seized from the Scientology headquarters here can be presented to federal grand juries, but to no one else pending appeal of the court's order. A hearing on the merits of the Scientology suit seeking to ...

U.S. Customs Service officials did not violate constitutional guarantees against prior restraint of speech when they detained and reviewed thousands of documents sent to Los Angeles by the Church of Scientology in England two years ago, a three-judge federal panel has ruled. The unanimous opinion written by U.S. Dist. Judge William P. Gray held that a federal statute prohibiting importation into the United States of written material advocating treason, forcible resistance to any federal law or threats to harm or kill ...

"Who would have dreamed that U.S. inteligence agencies would attempt to destroy a religious movement born in America?" By Jeff Dubron In 1950, the book "Dianetics: The Modem Science of Mental Health" by L Ron Hubbard was first published. It was an immediate bestseller. It was also the target of an intelligence campaign covertly carried out by many federal agencies such as the State Department, FBI, CIA, Air Force Intelligence and others. Perhaps we will never know the original reason for ...

The Church of Scientology Wednesday filed a $1 million lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court against Times Mirror and two Times reporters, alleging conspiracy to interfere with civil rights. The lawsuit stems from a series of articles dealing with the Church of Scientology written by reporters Robert Rawitch and Robert Gillette and published earlier this week in The Times. The lawsuit charged that the reporters acted in concert with representatives of the FBI and the Department of Justice to publish ...

The Church of Scientology contends that for more than 20 years it has been the target of a systematic campaign by the United States government, together with "vested-interest pressure groups" such as the medical professions, to "suppress the church's spiritual practice and expansion." The church advances this accusation as the fundamental rationale for its aggressive policies of defense-by-attack against individual critics, private groups and government agencies perceived as "harassing" Scientology. Church spokesmen, moreover, expand upon the allegation of systematic persecution to ...

On June 25, 1971, a young Colorado woman named Susan Meister died in an apparent suicide aboard the Apollo, the 3,280-ton flagship of the Church of Scientology and for nearly a decade the personal yacht of the church's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. In mid-July that year, according to State Department correspondence obtained by The Times, Miss Meister's father traveled from Colorado to the Moroccan port of Safi, 125 miles south of Casablanca, where the Apollo was then moored, to inquire into ...

"If anyone is getting industrious trying to enturbulate (sic) or stop Scientology or its activities, I can make Captain Bligh look like a Sunday-school teacher. There is probably no limit on what I would do to safeguard Man's only road to freedom against persons who . . . seek to stop Scientology or hurt Scientologists." — L. Ron Hubbard, Aug. 15, 1967 It was not the first time that private investigator Eual R. Harrow had interviewed jurors following a verdict, but ...

"The DEFENSE of anything is untenable. The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every battle you are engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal conversations, public debate, or a court of law." — L. Ron Hubbard For more than a decade, the worldwide Church of Scientology, one of the burgeoning new religions of the 1960s and '70s, has conducted sophisticated intelligence and propaganda operations on an international ...

[Picture / Caption: FOUNDER — L. Ron Hubbard bust in lobby of Scientology administrative building.] Like the Romanesque bronze busts of L. Ron Hubbard displayed in churches of Scientology, the official biographies of Scientology's founder seem larger than life. Born in Tilden, Neb., on March 13, 1911, to Navy Comdr. Harry Ross Hubbard and his wife, Dora May, he is said to have spent his early childhood on the Montana cattle ranch of his maternal grandfather, "where long days were spent ...

On May 14, 1951, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard wrote to the U.S. attorney general to plead for help in fending off a Communist conspiracy, dedicated, he averred, to destroying him. "When, when, when," he wrote, "will we have a roundup?" Rambling through seven single-spaced typewritten pages, the letter was, to all appearances, the heartfelt cry of a troubled man. A successful science fiction writer in the 1940s, L. Ron Hubbard, as he signed himself, had gone on to bigger things. ...

One hundred ministers, priests and rabbis in the San Diego area Monday presented a petition to a San Diego newspaper, declaring that "spying or deceitfully obtaining membership in a religious organization is unethical" and violates religious freedom. The petition, launched by the Church of Scientology of San Diego, was prompted by a two-part series on Scientology last month in the San Diego Union by reporter Leigh Fenly. Two Scientologists filed a $10,000 invasion-of-privacy suit in San Diego Superior Court Aug. 9, ...

The controversial Church of Scientology has planted an unspecified number of its members within the FBI in an effort to leak information to the church, Justice Department attorneys charged in Los Angeles federal court Thursday. Asst. U.S. Atty. Richard Stilz said the FBI learned of the alleged infiltration by church members while reviewing some of the more than 23,000 documents seized in raids on two church locations in Los Angeles July 8. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that a ...

SAN DIEGO — Two Church of Scientology members Thursday sued the San Diego Union for more than $10,000, alleging two articles that have not yet been published were an invasion of privacy. Union Acting Editor Peter Kaye described the lawsuit as "harassment aimed at preventing the paper from printing the stories." He said church leaders had offered to try to stop the lawsuit if the newspaper would kill the articles. The civil suit was filed in San Diego Superior Court by ...

The Church of Scientology won a major victory Wednesday when a Washington, D.C., federal judge ruled that an FBI raid July 8 on the church's headquarters there was based on an illegally broad search warrant. U.S. Dist. Judge William B. Bryant ordered the FBI to return all those documents seized in the Washington raid, but then stayed his order for 10 days to give the Justice Department an opportunity to appeal his ruling. In previous hearings and again Wednesday, Bryant expressed ...

Church of Scientology offices in Hollywood and Washington, D.C., were raided Friday by scores of FBI agents searching for more than 150 documents stolen from the U.S. Courthouse in Washington in a series of burglaries last year. The dawn raids at three locations in the two cities netted an unknown quantity of the allegedly stolen documents, informed sources said. Using power saws, crowbars and boltcutters to knock down doors and cut open cabinets, FBI agents executed search warrants based primarily on ...

FBI agents raided Church of Scientology headquarters in Hollywood and Washington at dawn yesterday. They seized some of the 150 documents allegedly stolen from the U.S. Courthouse in Washington in a series of burglaries last year. The simultaneous raids were conducted on the basis of information provided to the FBI by a onetime high-level official of the church who has admitted taking part in the burglaries in May and June, 1976. An FBI affidavit accompanying the search warrants states that the ...

'I just don't believe' federal claims on files sought by church, jurist says Declaring "there is something fishy going on" and he can no longer believe the government, a Los Angeles federal judge Monday ordered three federal agencies to give him documents being withheld from the Church of Scientology. "I'm not going to accept anything the government tells me in this case, said U.S. Dist. Judge Warren J. Ferguson, "because it has gotten to the point I just don't believe them." ...

The first libel suit to come to trial over a 1971 book, "The Scandal of Scientology," was interrupted this week in Los Angeles Superior Court while Scientologists discussed the settlement of seven suits filed about the book [...]