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Sunday Times Magazine 15 Nov 87 Farce and Fear: Operation Snow White, Trying To Hide The Dirt / The Church of Scientology (803) AT THE age of 62, Ron HUBBARD began to ponder his place in posterity. By making use of the United States Freedom of Information Act, the church discovered that government agencies held a daunting amount of material on Scientology and its founder, much of it less than flattering. HUBBARD, who had never been fettered by convention or strict observance of the law, conceived an audacious plan to improve his own image and that of his church for the benefit of future generations of Scientologists. All that needed to be done, he decided, was to infiltrate the agencies concerned, steal the relevant files and either destroy or launder any damaging information they contained. To a man who had founded both a church and a private navy this was a perfectly feasible scheme. The operation was given the code name Snow White, and Hubbard's wife, Mary Sue, was put in charge of it. They found it ridiculously easy to infiltrate, bug and burgle United States government offices, and by the beginning of 1975, there were agents in the Internal Revenue Service, the US Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Gerald Wolfe, a Scientologist working at the IRS in Washington as a clerk-typist, stole more than 30,000 pages of documents relating to the church and the Hubbards. He was known by the code name 'Silver'. But the risks were considerable, both to the agents themselves and to their church superiors. HUBBARD approved a proposal to infiltrate agents into the US Attorney's offices in Washington and Los Angeles with the specific task of providing early warning of any legal moves against him. He was not too worried about who would take the rap if Operation Snow White was exposed, as long as it was not him. A key figure in the operation was Michael Meisner, who was 'running' all the agents and who had personally taken part in several burglaries at the Department of Justice in Washington and had organised the copying of tens of thousands of secret government files. For almost 18 months, his agents sneaked in and out of government buildings - until the evening of June 11, 1976, when the FBI discovered Meisner and agent Silver in the US Courthouse library at the foot of Capitol Hill. The two men were waiting for cleaners to vacate an office from which they were going to steal files, but they told the FBI agents they were doing legal research. They presented fake identification documents and were allowed to leave. But the incident agitated HUBBARD, who surmised, correctly, that there was trouble in store. He was in hiding at the time and knew little of what was happening to Mary Sue because his staff censored her letters. If she sent bad news, the messengers cut out the offending passages with a razor blade, believing it to be their duty to keep such problems 'off his lines'. Meanwhile, Mary Sue had much to complain about because she had no doubt that she was going to have to take the rap for Operation Snow White. 'HUBBARD abandoned her,' said Ken Urquhart, once a dedicated Scientologist, 'and made it quite clear .. that he had abandoned her. It's the one thing I find hard to forgive - that he was prepared to allow his wife to go to jail for crimes he was equally guilty of .. I was put to work making up reports to show that he did not know what was going on. In other words, I was to cover his ass. He was privy to almost all of it and was as guilty as Mary Sue.' On August 15, 1978, a federal grand jury in Washington indicated nine Scientologists on 28 counts of stealing government documents, burglarising government offices, intercepting government communications, harbouring a fugitive, making false declarations before a grand jury and conspiring to obstruct justice. Heading the list of those indicted was Mary Sue HUBBARD. She faced a maximum penalty, if convicted, of 175 years in prison and a Dollars 40,000 fine. After a bargain between the government prosecutors and defence attorneys to avoid a lengthy trial, the nine pleaded guilty to one count each. Mary Sue and two others were fined Dollars 10,000 and jailed for five years; the rest received similar fines and prison sentences of between one and four years. Sentencing Mary Sue (who was eventually released from jail after serving one year), the judge said: 'We have a precious system of government in the United States ..For anyone to use those laws, or to seek under the guise of those laws, to destroy the very foundation of the government is totally wrong and cannot be condoned by any responsible citizen.'
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