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

founder’s version of events. The church itself, Davis conded, had been troubled by the
contradiction between Hubbard’s story and the official medical records. But he said there
were other records that did conrm Hubbard’s version of events, based on various
documents the church had assembled. I asked where the documents had come from.
“From St. Louis,” Davis explained, “from the archives of navy and military service. And
also, the church got it from various avenues of research. Just meeting people, getting
records from people.”
The man who examined the records and reconciled the dilemma, he said, was “Mr. X.”
Davis explained, “Anyone who saw JFK remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin
Costner’s character goes and meets a man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald
Sutherland.” In the lm, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the
Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In
real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the
Oce of Special Operations at the Pentagon. (Oliver Stone, who directed JFK, says that
Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the 1980s, Prouty worked
as a consultant for Scientology and was a frequent contributor to Freedom magazine.
“We nally got so frustrated with this point of conicting medical records that we took
all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis continued. Prouty told the church
representatives that because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records
were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was
military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence ocer. And,
essentially, they create two sets.” (Prouty died in 2001.)
The sun was setting and the Dunkin’ Donuts sign glowed brighter. As the meeting was
nally coming to an end, Davis made a plea for understanding. “We’re an organization
that’s new and tough and dierent and has been through a hell of a lot, and has had its
ups and downs,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is nobody will take the time and do
the story right.”
Davis had staked much of his argument on the veracity of Hubbard’s military records.
The fact-checkers had already led a Freedom of Information Act request for all such
material with the National Archives in St. Louis, where military records are kept. Such
requests can drag on well past deadline, and we were running short on time. An
editorial assistant, Yvette Siegert, flew to St. Louis to speed things along.
Meantime, Davis sent me a copy of a document that he said clearly conrmed
Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the US Naval Service,” dated December
6, 1945. The document species medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with
a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the
spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote me that the Navy uses gold
and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a
photograph of the actual medals Hubbard supposedly won, but two of them weren’t
even created until after Hubbard left active service.
There was a re in the St. Louis archives in 1973, which destroyed a number of
documents, but Yvette returned with more than nine hundred pages of what the
archivists insisted were Hubbard’s complete military records. Nowhere in the le is there