SCI
page 2 / 4
caper."
In a taped briefing to his staff, Hubbard said: "MONEY! REPEAT
MONEY! REPEAT MONEY! REPEAT MONEY!" (2)
Scientology had long had a network of "missions," small Scientology
organizations accessible to the public which offered beginning
Scientology services. The owners of these missions were probably the
only entrepreneurs in Scientology, and many of them did very well
financially with the missions.
Until 1982, these missions were loosely organized by the Scientology
Missions Office World Wide. But in 1982, Scientology, under its new
leadership, and presumably masterminded by Hubbard, decided to
"nationalize" these missions and milk the affluent owners of their
assets.
It was announced to these mission holders that a new umbrella
organization was being established, the Scientology Missions
International. Many of the mission holders were required to buy a
$35,000 "mission starters packet" even though their missions had been
operating for years.
To add insult to injury, the mission holders were informed that
their missions were to be visited by the "International Finance Police,"
who would be going over their finances -- a privilege for which the
mission would be billed at the rate of $15,000 per day. The
"International Finance Police" were organized by an "International
Finance Dictator."
Through these and other acts of terrorism, a full scale purge took
place throughout Scientology in which many of the long standing
Scientologists were thrown out or forced out
of the organization by the new management, the children who had grown up
under Hubbard and who now ruthlessly seized power in the organization.
"I have never lied to you," Hubbard once assured his followers. And
yet, in an article called What Your Donations Buy, he wrote
benevolently:
I know that Dianetic and Scientology services should be free and I
wish they were.
Personally I have tried to do my part in this. None of the
researches of Dianetics and Scientology were ever actually paid for out
of organizational fees. With my typewriter I paid for the research
myself.
Independent of research costs, the 13-1/2 million dollars that
churches owed me for services rendered, the usual author's royalties,
lectures, loans, things paid out of my own pocket, I forgave and never
collected.
So the donations you make for services do not go to me....
Hubbard then claimed that the money from Scientology was spent in
"keeping the church alive and functioning and the environment safe."
So where did Hubbard get his money?
In the 1960s, Hubbard told a reporter from The Daily Mail in
England that he had 7 million dollars in a Swiss bank, money he claimed,
that he had inherited in oil lands in Montana.
Defectors from Scientology in the early 1980s portray quite a
different picture. According to the Forbes magazine issue of
October 27, 1986, in 1982 at least 40 million dollars had gone directly
to Hubbard, channeled through various Scientology corporations.
One defector, Homer Schomer, says that in 1983, he was personally
making out checks to Hubbard each week for a million dollars from
Scientology funds. In other words, Hubbard was making 52 million dollars
a year from Scientology. A dozen different corporations were set up to
disguise these payments to Hubbard. According to one ex-member:
The problem was how were we going to get the money for Hubbard? He
was not supposed to take the money personally. So separate corporations
were set up. This is RRF, Religious Research Foundation. We used to call
it Ralph. That was a code name.
Money would be put into Ralph, that would be accounts in
Lichtenstein. This is a Liberian Corporation. And he would draw from it.
So in other words all of this money actually made its way over to Ralph.
It went through these various people and various organizations, and from
Ralph, then it went right to Hubbard. (3)
Later, an even simpler means of channeling money to Hubbard was
devised, which was for Hubbard to bill Scientology retroactively for his
various services and research. For example, the church was billed 85
million dollars by Hubbard for the use of the E-meter, which he claimed
to have developed.
If not already obvious, the mercenary nature of Scientology can be
clearly seen in many of its policies and practices.
One example is a policy by Hubbard called How to Sell
Scientology, which is an interesting title for the policy of a
"church" In this policy he instructs his followers to talk about the
brutalities of psychiatry, saying that "if you get real insistent, even
oddly accusative of listener, even slightly angry on this point and
stress it over and over, you should get some people willing to come to a
(lecture)."
Another bulletin announces the "Overwhelming Public Popularity"
campaign, in which a media blitz in the San Francisco area will "get the
broad general public knowing about and wanting Scientology."
How many churches have a trained corps of salespersons working on a
commission basis to provide a constant supply of paying public to the