IVy on the Wall

by Ken Urquhart, USA

USA Raging Floods: Muddy Waters
Chapter Ten in a Consideration of 'A Piece of Blue Sky' by Jon Atack

Part Five of the Atack book is `The Guardian's Office, 1974-1980'. Its three chapter headings are: The Guardian Unguarded; Infiltration; Operation Meisner. Part Six is `The Commodore's Messengers, 1977-1982'. It has five chapters: 1. Making Movies, 2. The Rise of the Messengers, 3. The Young Rulers, 4. The Clearwater Hearings, 5. The International Finance Police. In Part Five, Jon Atack details Guardian's Office [GO] activities for this period. He bases his facts on documents of court proceedings and documents introduced into court. Even if I had the resources to check each document, I would have little inclination to. The telling of the story rings true, and I accept it as told. The story is largely one of the infiltration of various U.S. government offices, mostly Federal, by the GO and of their access to (and use of) confidential and very sensitive information, until detected. I had an idea that it was going on, but no knowledge of its extent. Had I become aware of what was happening, I would have been alarmed that the GO were tempting fate by challenging the U.S. Government so brazenly, but I would not have objected to it on principle. After all, people in government are suppressive, right? Rereading these chapters today, I am horrified at the lengths the intelligent and very decent people of the GO went to serve paranoia and megalomania. Yes, Jon, we know that they blinded themselves and each other to the unsavoury realities of LRH's personal demons. They hypnotized themselves and each other on the benefits Scientology supposedly offered Mankind; they addicted themselves to a concept of mission and duty based on the vision of these benefits. We all did, to some extent. I state again that I have no defense or excuse for the trouble LRH caused his own people, their families, and the world. I still hold that in LRH's work there is a kernel of truth and sanity of universal and eternal value. I do not believe that he deliberately used his access to this level of truth to fool his followers and to attempt to fool the world. My considered opinion is that the side of him that could know and promote Truth lost the fight with his egotistical and material side - and then the demons took over. It all played itself out as it did, and perhaps there was no other way for it to go. The evolution has a lasting value, though: we can deduce better ways to support, serve, and discipline such a one, should we be fortunate enough to have another come our way. I have more direct observation concerning the Commodore's Messenger Organization [`CMO']. I had an office on the ship just across from LRH's, for several years. There was hardly a use he made of the messengers from there that I wasn't aware of. It is true that we came ashore in 1974 and that thereafter my office was not as close to his, while Jon's history covers 1977-1982, during which time I was in Florida and LRH in California. However, I was very familiar already with his use of messengers, and was still involved as LRH Pers. Com until 1978, when I was, thankfully, demoted. In Jon's story are many inaccuracies about the CMO and related matters, some of which I will correct here. A brief history of the evolution of the CMO as I observed it is in order, since an understanding of this history clarifies some of Jon's opinions and guesses. When I was first on the ship, in 1968, LRH had one messenger on duty with him on the Royal Scotman. I can't say for sure if he had one on duty while he slept. He used the messenger to run and ask his questions or give his orders, to inspect and report back, and to do errands. In late 1969, he created the post of LRH Personal Communicator and appointed me to it. One of my functions was to supervise his Personal Office. The Messenger Unit was part of this Office. My responsibility for the Messenger Unit was purely administrative; LRH allowed no-one to come between him and his messengers. In around 1969 or 1970, he had two messengers on duty with him on deck, and at least one standing by while he slept. Up to 1971, the Messenger duties were very much as they had been in 1969. By late 1972 or early 1973, the messenger watch increased to four messengers on duty on deck. On his return to the ship from his year in America, in 1972, LRH reorganized his management structure. He created the post of Staff Captain to oversee the Commodore's Staff Aides and the ship. The Messengers became the CMO, and were still in the Personal Office under me, administratively. The reorganization was at least in part a put-down of me. While he was away, I had not performed to the satisfaction of all - particularly those around Mary Sue Hubbard [`MSH'] who was in control of all matters in her husband's absence. Complaints reached Hubbard that I was not supporting her and thus increasing her load. The reorganization was partly my punishment for having brought criticism on him by opening myself to criticism. He justified his reorganization to me, grumbling: 'You are just a relay terminal', [i.e., a kind of messenger]. I think he later regretted this; anyway, we never worked again as well and as closely as we had before he left for the US in 1971. Some months after he had created the CMO, he found out that the CMO was still reporting to me administratively, and he ordered them to be autonomous. The Atack History and a Truer One In opening his treatment of the CMO, Jon makes little of their primary duty, which he reduces to 'carrying messages', and much of their role as personal servants. One gets the impression that LRH only ever wanted and used messengers so he could have teenage girls primp him and cosset him. And that if one were to suppose that LRH were perhaps using them for illicit favours, Jon would certainly not consider himself any the less a historian and researcher. It wasn't until there were four messengers on watch with him on deck that they began to involve themselves greatly in the doings of the Household Unit, and their focus there was on the personal steward. They thus found themselves drawn into the functions of personal servants but it was by default rather than by their choice or LRH's. It began this way: The messengers stood eight-hour watches from the moment LRH got up until he went to bed. They needed 12 messengers at least to maintain a rota of four on each watch, and the CMO recruited energetically to get what they needed. The established messengers had to train the new ones. The new ones were put to work serving the older ones. But as far as LRH was concerned, the CMO now had plenty of people and plenty of time to do his bidding; to do his bidding was the be-all and end-all of any messenger. Since his return from the US, LRH had become much fussier than before about his personal needs. His food wasn't right. His clothes weren't right. His quarters couldn't be clean enough. The Household Unit, perpetrator of these crimes, fell apart over and over while various Household Officers tried to keep it together. LRH's solution was to send in the off-duty messengers to sort everything out. They got very busy. The outbursts of bad temper about the food, the clothes, and the cleaning didn't let up. To please him and to placate him, the CMO got more and more involved in all stewarding functions. In 1973, Hubbard fell off his motorbike. In terrible pain from a broken collarbone, he sat in his cabin and roared. His four on-duty messengers attended him. I was not in there with them; I do not know how he and they, his steward, and his on-board medical attendant, coped with his bodily needs. I was not getting involved in all that. He was too proud to get a doctor; I had little sympathy with his position although I hated that he was in such pain. At around the same time, LRH told the head messenger to design a messenger uniform. He approved her suggestion. No more of the uncool navy-blue (long) pants and blouses. Now messengers had white shirts, pants, and shoes: the pants extremely short and the shoes extremely high. I felt it was a mistake. I didn't personally observe LRH ask or demand that the messengers do such silly things as hold an ashtray to catch his cigarette ash as it fell - even out-of-doors. It doesn't seem to be something he would even think of. My impression was that one of the newer messengers, more anxious to propitiate him than to be real, started doing it; if so, and if he had accepted it, and then if he had smiled, and especially if he had said something like, 'Thank you, Honey', in his courteous way, the other messengers present would have noted it at once, and it would have become firm CMO routine from that point on. In his dealings with the messengers, he could be quite fatherly with them and I'm sure this had a profound effect on their feelings towards him, as well as on the lengths they would go to to please him, far as they were from their own parents. The point I am making here is that the picture Jon Atack paints of the CMO on the first page of his account of them is false inasmuch as it encourages us to believe the worst of LRH and of the CMO. He further wants us to believe that that worst existed from some point in the distant past and continued unabated as a continuing part of the lives of LRH and of the messengers. In fact, the situation was fluid; it changed and developed dynamically over several years. Corrections of some errors There is a number of errors of fact in Jon's account which I would like to address briefly, and two I will address at length. A few other points I will comment on. Page 246. Jon quotes a statement by Tonya Burden, a young messenger who came to the ship in 1973. Tonya came into that environment from a life in S. California; she could not cope with the emotional and physical stresses. She was not un-smart but was not highly gifted. Her testimony has some merits but on the whole, in my judgment, deserves a great deal of wariness Page 247. Jon's 'statement of fact': '...the Apollo finally ran out of ports in which to berth' as the reason why LRH left the ship in 1975. Fact: we had ports to go to in the Caribbean, and plenty more we could have opened up for ourselves. The Caribbean has many islands and each has at least one port. Few of them are rich enough to have not coveted the money we would have brought. I have stated before that MSH was eager to return to land, and that LRH was leaning in the same direction. From this point, Jon's account takes him to LRH's period on the West Coast from 1976. I stayed at Clearwater, Florida, so have no direct observation of LRH and the CMO in California. Nonetheless, there are errors and I wish to correct some of them. Page 247. Jon gives various reasons why LRH chose to seclude himself with messengers in secret locations rather than with anyone else. He took the CMO with him because it was the easiest and most natural choice for him, organizationally. He needed the CMO to help keep his communication lines operating. He relied on them to help keep his personal arrangements comfortable. They were mobile. He was their focus, not some other part of the organization. Moving them about did not disrupt functioning organizations. Besides, whom else had he to trust? He had lost faith in the GO; he had long since recognized that I would not follow him blindly. Jon says that the CMO were 'ferociously dedicated' to him. They had no other choice: for one thing, each could spare no moment from the task of having him not lose his temper at her. For another, their power depended entirely on his favour; no-one else would have tolerated their arrogance for one moment had LRH just once demonstrated lessening of confidence in the CMO. Page 250. Jon quotes someone who talks about LRH's 'terrible, screaming, filthy language'. I have heard the same from others who observed him in his West Coast period. I never heard him indulge in it at Saint Hill, on the ship, or while he was in Florida, no matter how angry he became. Jon reports that LRH often exploded into furious tantrums, keeping the crew under constant and terrible pressure and neglecting their basic needs. These are all trends of behaviour I had seen before, but now they were running unchecked. LRH's supposed ill-health Page 255. Jon: LRH 'continued to suffer from heavy colds'. This is news to me, and I saw him virtually every day (with lapses) from 1964-66, 1968-76. He rarely had a cold. If he developed regular colds in California, this was a big change in him. Also: LRH 'chain-smoked three to four packs of cigarettes a day'. In all the years I knew him, I never saw him chain-smoke - that is, to light a new cigarette from the embers of the stub of the last one. He never smoked more than half a cigarette before he put it out. At his desk, he did not hold a cigarette in his hand but left it in the ashtray, where many of them burned out unsmoked or little smoked. I never counted how many packs a day he consumed. I remember hearing gossip in Clearwater that he was giving up smoking. If he chain-smoked in California this was another big change for him. And: 'In 1965 he was bedridden and thought he was going to die. This feeling recurred almost annually.' I was with LRH in 1965, as Household Officer, when he went down with bronchitis for a week or more. He seemed very ill and was very depressed. He told me he was sick because of his research, that his lungs were a weak point, and that this had occurred before because of his research. I don't think he told me he thought he would die, but he certainly was very sorry for himself and I can believe he said it to somebody. That he felt once a year or so that he would die is untrue. He was rarely sick enough to take to his bed. I never saw him as ill and depressed as he was in 1965. 'Early in 1967 he was bedridden, this time because of drug abuse.' What drugs, Jon? Who has reported what about it? Were they self-administered? Are we supposed to conclude that LRH was doing dope? 'In 1972, he went into hiding in New York for almost a year, again very ill for much of this period.' Hmmm. Who is the source of this information? I e-mailed one of the men who spent that year in New York with LRH. His answer: 'Well, he was not in great shape initially but was not `very ill'. He was the same as on the ship - stressed out and making mountains out of molehills. That all diminished in our time there in New York. He slept well, ate well, and had time off. I don't remember him being ill. There was a long recovery (three months) from being on the run and in hiding, and not being able to control much anymore. We developed our routines and he came more and more uptone. I had him on a good vitamin program, too. Overall, he did quite well in New York; when he returned to the ship he was in quite good shape.' [August 2002] Jon A: 'His bursitis has never ceased to plague him'. Not one word did I ever hear from him or another about bursitis: he was not one to withhold a complaint if he had one. 'He was usually grossly overweight.' He was overweight. He developed middle-aged spread and let it go. He had a large frame. He was an imposing figure of a man and one's attention (while I knew him) was drawn to the upper part of his body. He did not have multiple chins, huge flabby arms and legs, and I have seen much larger bellies on much smaller frames. CMO and Management Page 257. [In 1976] 'The Guardian's Office had let him down, and so had Sea Org management. The Commodore's Messenger Organization had been concerned with Hubbard's personal welfare, and with his personal projects.' As I stated before, the CMO had its origins in the single messenger who stood watch with LRH up until 1969 or 1970. Then he had two on watch, and then four. The more he had on watch, the more he had them into the management of the ship, the International management, and then the different senior organizations he was close to. When he operated out of California, the CMO had contingents in Clearwater and in LA, and those contingents were routinely, daily, and purposefully involved [some might say meddling] in the management of every unit at those locations (excepting the GO). Jon has no idea of the history, development, and reality of the CMO. Odds and Ends I have to agree that LRH did himself no good by hustling his new Purification Rundown thus: 'I want Scientologists to live through WW III'. That was cheap and disgusting. Jon mentions snatches of some stories - for example, a project to have Hubbard awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1976, Hubbard's intention, as I remember it, was to get the prize and to turn it down - for publicity. Jon mentions LRH's film script for 'Revolt in the Stars,' which is Hubbard's telling of the OT III story. 'Hubbard itched to make OT 3 public.' Everyone connected with OT III knows the frantic efforts LRH had people make to keep its material private. What he itched to do was to parallel the story in fiction closely enough that seeing it would restimulate populations. In their restim, he figured, they would revolt against their governments. In the chaos, Hubbard would come to the rescue, the white knight upon the white horse of the S.O., the C of S, and Scientology. This I learned from dispatches that LRH wrote about the film in the mid-late 70's. I can add something to the story of the newly re-created post of Executive Director, International. This was in 1980. I had been removed as LRH Personal Communicator, had done a stint in the RPF, and was at last working in the Tech Division, preparing to become an auditor. The first and only Executive Director of Scientology had been LRH until about 1967 or 68. The first person appointed to this post in 1980 was not the first choice of those filling it. I was. When approached, I hedged. I asked questions about how this post was to relate to the GO and the CMO, and had no answers. I suspected (a) that the CMO would interfere with the post as they did with all others, (b) that the CMO would set up the first occupant to fall noisily and messily as a warning to #2, who would take note and be tractable. I must say I was sorely tempted; I already knew my first action would be to visit every org in the world, and speak to its staff and public. And as soon as I decided that I would do that, I realized it would never be allowed. I refused the posting. However, the CMO appointed me. It was David Mayo who did me the great favour of dissuading them. The other victim got the job. And the messy fall. Actually, so did #2. Always persistent, the CMO got what it wanted in #3. He's still doing his duty like a man. Page 265. Jon tells how Miscavige 'tricked' MSH into resigning, arguing that as a convicted felon she couldn't remain as Guardian, and that as LRH's wife her position as Guardian weakened any legal assertion that LRH was not involved in church management. The information I got from someone who was very close to LRH at that time is that Miscavige empowered himself to confront MSH this way: LRH had angrily and desperately issued an order to the GO that he was to be isolated from possibility of suit. MSH responded to this by writing to him to point out that by law anybody in the US can sue another for anything; it's up to the courts to decide if the suit has merit. Miscavige had control of LRH's communication lines. He received MSH's message on its way to LRH and so was able to present it to him in the light he (Miscavige) wished: as `counter-intention' to LRH's command. Miscavige could represent to LRH that MSH intended not to follow this urgent, highest-priority order - and that it was all right by her that he should remain susceptible to suit. Miscavige got LRH into a furious outburst against MSH, saying terrible things that Miscavige could make note of - and run off to comply with. In so doing, he obtained her resignation. Was he not entrusted as a messenger with gaining exact compliance with LRH's stated intentions? Do I know this account be true for a fact? No. But I respect the validity of the account and it rings true. Page 268. We hear all about `gang sec-checking'. 'A group of messengers would fire questions, and while the [GO] recipient [on the meter] fumbled for an answer, yell accusations at him. Answers were belittled, and the Messengers all yelled at once.' Jon seems to present this activity as an innovation on the part of the CMO in their campaign to break up the GO. In fact it was the GO that developed gang sec-checking back in the mid-seventies. I heard about it while I was LRH Pers. Com., and it horrified me. I wanted to know what LRH material they were basing it on and justifying it with. I considered it vicious nonsense and a perversion of technology. But MSH had evidently approved it. Her defense of the GO was savage at the lightest. I didn't dare question what I had no hope of clarifying. LRH as executive Page 269. 'Hubbard had trained messengers to censor information going to him to shield him from upsetting news'. The barefaced silliness of this bull-poop boggles the mind. I was in a position to observe LRH in action very closely for extended periods between 1964 and 1967. I was directly on LRH's communication lines, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from late 1969 to early 1975. 90% of the information he received was in writing. 98% of that came and went through me. He did give and receive verbal briefings. I was present at most of them and recorded (in writing) salient points from all of those I attended. He regularly chatted with people during his working day, as he took walks on the deck, or came across them as they came and went by his office. If he issued any verbal orders he would tell me about them. He had his messengers report to me orders that they conveyed to people from him. Much of what he told the messengers to do or to say I heard, being only a few feet from his office, and he usually kept its door open. I make a case, therefore, of having become very familiar with the flows of information etc., that he received, and of his responses to it. And of course with what he himself originated. Of all this information Jon Atack observed not one syllable. Yet he feels himself entitled to assert that LRH made a point, in managing the ship, the Sea Org, and international Scientology, of filtering out `upsetting news'. LRH liked good news. He liked things to go his way. Genuine accomplishments and triumphs of others delighted him. He could celebrate wins, his own and others'. A day without problem, distraction, or disturbance could be a joy to him. He craved competence from those around him and warmly appreciated it when he got it. He could be kindness itself in dealing with a subordinate who hadn't got it right but was putting her heart into it. On the other hand, he did refuse to address matters he felt were irrelevant to him. He could not tolerate a report that was incomplete, false, or unclear. To not receive information he wanted, or was entitled to, or had to have to do his job infuriated him. When he was genuinely interested in a situation, he investigated it very thoroughly before taking action. His personal policy as an executive was to handle something he needed to handle so completely that he would not have to handle it again. To be so effective, he'd need to know a great deal about the situation. He persisted and insisted until he was satisfied he had it all. He trained his messengers to ferret out what might otherwise go undetected or unreported. He trained them personally to probe, to discern, to dig, to penetrate any pretence or barrier. He would get upset if he couldn't get the satisfaction he wanted, no matter how unpleasant the truth might be. Nobody involved or observing him in this activity could have the slightest suspicion that there might be something he would not want to know because it might be `upsetting'. At the same time, there was a side of LRH that was addicted to `upsetting news'. He had a need to find fault, to criticize, to complain, to accuse, to feel himself betrayed by the ignorance, antagonism, or incompetence of another or others. In such a closed and crowded community such as ours, he could always find something to blow up about. There were so many molehills to make mountains out of, and he made them. If he didn't find a molehill to his satisfaction, he would send messenger after messenger into an area or to an individual. The barrage would either uncover or produce some confusion worthy of his ire. Angry he would be until the outpouring had exhausted his need to display his bullying force. L. Ron Hubbard was not a simple person. Nor was he a little person. He was not the caricature that ignorance and spite inspired Jon Atack to conjure out of the mists rising from his suburban cauldron in which boiled and bubbled his prejudices, biases, irritations, envies, and misconceptions. No researcher or historian can ever presume that he or she can truly understand who and what LRH was or what life around him was like without first understanding that LRH was so very extraordinary and unusual a person, very human in his weaknesses but powerful as a whole being to a degree far beyond what anyone experiences even in the unusual walks of life on Earth. And therefore, possibly, a being whom the researcher/historian does not yet understand and appreciate in full. Jon Atack's accounts make very obvious that the historian/researcher needs to gauge very conscientiously the quality of the reporter as well as the quality of the report. So many people, so many complaints Throughout this part of his book, on the CMO, Jon quotes people who were at Flag or at the California units, who had bad experiences and complained bitterly. There was indeed a great deal of nonsense in the daily routines at all levels. Not all of it was by any means LRH's direct doing but he sure gets blamed for it all. There was a great deal of good in what LRH began, but it started going wrong, stumbled, and fell into a pit of complexity in which a lot of people hurt themselves. One of these complaints I will take up. Jon quotes someone who lost his wife to a possibly treatable disease that Scientologists said was mental in origin and susceptible to resolution through auditing. The husband and wife had both been highly-trained Scientologists of long standing. The man gave evidence at a Public Hearing in Clearwater in 1982 to `investigate' Scientology. Witnesses were invited to complain to it. 'You must realize', the unfortunate widower declared to the Inquiry, 'both of us were totally persuaded that the source of all illness was mental, except for, say, a broken leg, and the way of curing it is with auditing.' LRH, Scientology, and Physical Health We need to examine that misperception of Scientology as it is not uncommon and certainly is very much used against Scientology. In the fifties and early sixties, LRH usually expressed an attitude of contempt for the body in general, and for bodily illness in particular. The other side of this coin was the belief that the thetan, when audited enough, could acquire or regain the power to remold a sick body into a healthy one. It was all part of the Operating Thetan mythology. LRH propagated this set of attitudes in his writings and recorded lectures of the period. Many of these recorded lectures and earlier writings were required study on many courses into the eighties (and probably still are). Some people trained in the early years adopted Hubbard's attitudes towards the body and illness. So did some of the people who trained later and heard the old recorded lectures and read the written materials. Notwithstanding all this, Hubbard at no time while I knew him omitted to make sure that anyone within his responsibility who had definitely physical symptoms or possible symptoms received medical attention. One of his first instructions to me when I joined his household in 1964 was that if one of his children had a temperature I was to call the doctor at once and then to inform their mother or himself. In the early seventies, as he refined his instructions to auditors and to those who supervised auditors, he very explicitly ordered them to ensure that any medical condition received medical treatment. He practiced this repeatedly and constantly, himself, on the ship. The man who bemoaned the terrible and horribly regrettable loss of his wife to sickness due to the fact that he, she, and the people around them, assumed that auditing would `cure' her fatal condition was complaining to this Public Inquiry not about Scientology but about his own laziness. He had no excuse as a highly-trained auditor, to not be familiar with, to know, and to use the most relevant material LRH produced through time - none of which had been withheld from the husband. What the man glossed over was that LRH maintained that physical illness is preceded by spiritual disharmony that predisposes the person to illness or injury. LRH forbade auditing while a person is dealing with a sick or injured body as a continuing and severe problem. He recognized that in the presence of such stress, regular auditing is not only impossible but harmful. He designed certain procedures to help the body's owner reduce his/her own stress about the body's problem, and to help the body deal with its stress. He also made it very clear that a person suffering an illness or injury must be handled very deftly and gently. The auditor and case supervisor must pick their way through the available charge to get the recipient feeling strong and confident enough to address the spiritual disharmony that preceded and precipitated the illness or injury. To err in this process can be to put the recipient under more stress than he/she can handle. Once they locate that disharmony and resolve it, physical healing becomes much more likely, faster, and more thorough. To make this complete, let me add only that Hubbard stated that sometimes the spiritual disharmony is the result of abuse of the victim by someone in his/her life that the victim accepts and suffers from. Or it might be that someone in the person's life reminds him/her of abuse that occurred in an earlier life. In either case, Hubbard had procedures he insisted upon; here he insisted on ethics action to locate and identify the source of the abuse - from whom or which the victim had to disconnect, or directly confront and handle before resuming auditing (or training). A Conclusion It is not unreasonable to accuse Hubbard of this wrongdoing or that. To accuse another repeatedly is to accuse only oneself. To charge another with stupidities he was careful not to commit and indeed forbade, is to condemn only oneself. Jon quotes at length the moanings of victims of this or that abuse or injustice in Scientology. I'm personally sorry that they suffered. On the other hand, their complaints convey a satisfaction, even a relish, in being able to display such terrible wounds and to portray their abusers (LRH and Scientology) as cruel tormentors. The complainers empower themselves as martyrs and decorate their wounds in frazzle. We have come full circle: I said a while ago that there was a side of LRH that needed to find fault, to criticize, to complain, to accuse, to feel betrayed by the ignorance, antagonism, or incompetence of another or others. The freedom he gave to that side of himself as he aged enabled it to contribute to the `ecology' of the Scientology community that he created directly and by default. That `ecology' attracted to it (amongst others) many people with similar needs to his. And those people ended up where they wanted to be - with plenty of experiences to fit their needs. They found themselves in positions to find fault, to criticize, to complain, to accuse, to feel betrayed by the ignorance, antagonism, and incompetence of L. Ron Hubbard and of Scientology. Neither LRH nor the others were completely in the wrong: not one of them could be in any way right. © Kenneth G. Urquhart 2002.

More to come