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7
The Future Is Ours
Now that he was rmly in control of the church, Miscavige sought to restore the
image of Scientology. The 1980s had been a devastating period for the church’s
reputation, with Hubbard’s disappearance and eventual death, the high-prole
lawsuits, and the avalanche of embarrassing publicity. Miscavige hired Hill & Knowlton,
the oldest and largest public relations rm in the world, to oversee a national
campaign. The legendarily slick worldwide chairman of Hill & Knowlton, Robert Keith
Gray, specialized in rehabilitating disgraced dictators, arms dealers, and governments
with appalling human-rights records. As representatives of the government of Kuwait,
Hill & Knowlton had been partly responsible for selling the Persian Gulf War to the
American people. One of the company’s tactics was to provide the testimony of a
fteen-year-old girl, “Nayirah,” to a human-rights committee in the US House of
Representatives in October 1990. Nayirah described herself as an ordinary Kuwaiti who
had volunteered in a hospital. She tearfully told the House members of watching Iraqi
soldiers storm into the prenatal unit. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took
the incubators, and left the babies on the cold oor to die,” she said. The incident could
never be conrmed, and the girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to the United States and had never volunteered at the hospital. The
propaganda operation was, at the time, the most expensive and sophisticated public
relations campaign ever run in the United States by a foreign government.
Gray had also worked closely with the Reagan campaign. He regaled the
Scientologists with his ability to take a “mindless actor” and turn him into the “Teon
President.” Hill & Knowlton went to work for the church, putting out phony news
stories, often in the form of video news releases made to look like actual reports rather
than advertisements. The church began supporting high-prole causes, such as Ted
Turner’s Goodwill Games, thereby associating itself with other well-known corporate
sponsors, such as Sony and Pepsi. There were full-page ads in newsmagazines touting
the church’s philosophy, and cable television ads promoting Scientology books and
Dianetics seminars.
Then, in May 1991, came one of the greatest public relations catastrophes in the
church’s history. Time magazine published a scathing cover story titled “Scientology: The
Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” by investigative reporter Richard Behar. The exposé
revealed that just one of the religion’s many entities, the Church of Spiritual
Technology, had taken in half a billion dollars in 1987 alone. Hundreds of millions of
dollars from the parent organization were buried in secret accounts in Lichtenstein,
Switzerland, and Cyprus. Many of the personalities linked with the church were savaged
in the article. Hubbard himself was described as “part storyteller, part imam man .”