going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

a n d correspondence relating to Operation Snow White and other possible criminal
activity that the FBI had not seized, making sure that Hubbard’s name was excised from
any damning evidence.
Mary Sue still commanded the loyalty and aection of many Scientologists who saw
her as a martyr. Moreover, she refused to divorce Hubbard or to resign her position as
head of the Guardian’s Oce. The sprawling intelligence apparatus that she built still
operated in secret, behind locked doors. The Commodore’s Messengers Org and the
Guardian’s Oce were parallel and sometimes competing arms of their founders, and
they had often struggled for power, in a kind of bureaucratic marital spat. Now that
Miscavige was fully in control of the CMO, he concluded that the GO had to be ripped
out of Mary Sue’s grasp—but without upsetting her to the point that she sought revenge.
In the spring of 1981, a delegation of Commodore’s Messengers—including Miscavige
a n d Bill Franks—went to meet Mary Sue at a conference room in the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Each of them wore a hidden microphone. Miscavige’s
audacious plan was to seize control of the GO and place it under control of the
Messengers, who numbered only about fty at the time. Several thousand Guardians
were still working for Mary Sue. She had treated them kindly, paying them decent
wages and allowing them to live in private homes. Most of them remained loyal to her
and thought that she was being made a scapegoat. They would have to be purged.
Mary Sue received the delegation of Messengers coolly. Her case was still on appeal,
but the outcome was clear: she was taking the fall for a program that Hubbard, after all,
had put in motion. She understood the inuence she still wielded in the church and the
threat she represented. She demanded to deal with Hubbard himself, but Miscavige
refused. He controlled access to the church’s founder so thoroughly that even his wife
couldn’t talk to him. Indeed, they hadn’t spoken in more than a year. Mary Sue cursed
Miscavige and threatened to throw a heavy ashtray at him. But her negotiating position
was not strong, unless she was willing to betray everything she had worked to build
with the man she still believed was a savior.
It must have been galling for her to negotiate with Miscavige, who was twenty-one at
the time—the age Mary Sue was when she married Hubbard. Privately, she called him
“Little Napoleon.” In exchange for her resignation from the GO, the Messengers oered
a house and a nancial settlement. Mary Sue had substantial legal bills and no other
means of support. Under the guise of having to sort out the messes that would be left
behind in the wake of her resignation, Miscavige went over a number of dierent
subjects, even including a couple of murders that were alleged to have been committed
by a member of the GO oce in London. He wanted Mary Sue on tape, confessing to
other crimes, which could then be fed to the government. This was done, Bill Franks
asserts, with Hubbard’s knowledge: “Hubbard wanted her out of the way. He wanted all
guns pointed at her so he could go about his old age without worrying about being
thrown in jail.”
Mary Sue lost her last appeal. She began serving a ve-year sentence in Lexington,
Kentucky, in January 1983. Hubbard never visited her in prison. Her letters went
unanswered. “I don’t believe he’s getting them,” she later reasoned. Mary Sue was