DAVID BERESFORD investigates the activities of Scientology's secret intelligence unit whose director is based in Britain IT WAS a familiar beginning to an American public scandal: soon after 7 pm on the night of June 11, 1976, two burglars were caught in the US Court House in Washington DC. In the Watergate tradition frantic attempts were made to localise responsibility. But the cover-up finally cracked and disclosures followed which were to lead, not to the top of the Republican Party, but ...

Toronto ON — Narconon, Scientology's drug rehabilitation program, soon will be deprived of a free listing among the emergency numbers inside the front cover of the Metro Toronto telephone directory. The listing, which has appeared for the past five years, will be replaced by the number of the Addiction Research Foundation because Bell Canada has revised its policy to give precedence to organizations that have been created by government legislation. Narconon received another setback last week when the Ontario Ministry of ...

Toronto ON — I must admit, John Marshall's series The Scientology Papers (Jan. 22, et seq) were not pleasant reading for myself or other members of the Church. I would have hoped that among all the revelations he wrote of, some attempt to analyze the reasons for and causes of the action taken by the Church of Scientology in the United States would have been made. Apparently, the story behind the scenes is not good copy. But the background story is ...

A 1977 order from the top level of the Church of Scientology sought to silence criticism of the cult by a New York-based organization dedicated to investigating UFOs and claims of psychic wonders.

Freelance writer Paulette Cooper is a finely honed, long-haired accumulation of nervous energy. She was dressed with a New Yorker flair that seemed out of context in the small windowless room in the grey dignity of the U. S. District Court building in Washington.

Toronto ON — L. Ron Hubbard, the former science fiction writer who publicly resigned in 1966 from leadership of the Church of Scientology, continued to give orders to its leaders into 1977, a Washington court has been told. Evidence obtained in 1977 in raids on U. S. offices of the cult by the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed there was a detailed program to cover up Mr. Hubbard's involvement in the leadership of Scientology. Called Operation Bulldozer Leak, it was part ...

New light has been shed on the Canadian operations of the controversial Church of Scientology by files made public by a U.S. District Court in Washington. The evidence refutes denials by Toronto cult leaders of information I reported more than five years ago in a series of articles based on internal cult documents and interviews with defectors. Other accounts since then of clandestine operations by the cult in Canada are also supported by the files, submitted in court after being seized ...

About 100 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation learned on July 6, 1977, that they would be participating two days later in an operation unprecedented in the United States. The notification, described two years later in a Washington court room, said the agents would be raiding offices of an organization that some governments, in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, officially classified as a religion — the Church of Scientology.

Confidential documents from various Ontario Government offices including an attorney-general's communication about police intelligence operations have been found in U.S. Church of Scientology files. The documents were part of the evidence submitted by federal attorneys in the Washington prosecution of U.S. leaders of the cult on charges of conspiring to steal government documents and obstruct justice by cover-ups and by kidnapping an informer. Of 12 indicted, including two in Britain and the informer, nine have been tried, convicted and sentenced by ...

The Church of Scientology of Michigan opened its new state headquarters Monday in the former Burton Abstract & Title building in downtown Detroit. The church group, which claims 4,000 adherents in Michigan, bought the 50-year-old, four-story stone structure from Burton in October for $650,000 cash. The church headquarters had been at 3605 Rochester Road in Royal Oak. Citing a desire "to be more centrally located for our parishioners," Suzanne Lee, Scientology's local public relations director, said the church spent the last ...

CLEARWATER — The Church of Scientology's infiltration of Clearwater government apparently went deeper than church files released by the federal government show, City Manager Tony Shoemaker said Monday. He based that conclusion on a list of documents returned to the church after FBI agents raided a Scientology building in California. Shoemaker said the list included files on City Commissioner Karleen De Blaker, Clearwater Police Chief Frank Daniels and "Clearwater government." But a federal court ordered the Justice Department to return close ...

A woman who was a member of the Church of Scientology for seven years and who has now filed a $200 million class action suit against the church, said of her experience that “it was a whole menagerie of lies.” Lavenda Van Schaick, a 29-year-old native of Texas who joined the church in Las Vegas, recited a list of experiences that her attorney, Michael Flynn, said, can only be described as “Orweilian,” referring to George Orwell’s depiction of a future society ...