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

Acknowledgments and a Note on Sources
Compared with other religions I have written about, the published literature on
Scientology is impoverished and clouded by bogus assertions. Some crucial details one
would want to know about the church have been withheld—for instance, the number of
people who are members of the International Association of Scientologists, which would
be the best guide to knowing the true dimensions of the church’s membership. The
church promised to provide an organizational chart, but never did so; in any case, it
would have been more notional than actual in terms of the ow of authority and
responsibility, since many of the church’s executive hierarchy have been quarantined for
years in the Hole at the direction of the only individual who controls the institution.
L. Ron Hubbard’s extensive—indeed, record-breaking—published works form the core
of the documentary material that this book draws upon. Hubbard expressed himself
variously in books, articles, bulletins, letters, lectures, and journals; one cannot
understand the man or the organization he created without examining his work in each
of these media. The church has published a useful compendium of Hubbard’s thought in
What Is Scientology? Although the church employs a full-time Hubbard biographer and
has commissioned several comprehensive works in the past, there is still no authorized
account of Hubbard’s life. One of the previous Hubbard biographers, Omar Garrison, did
write a full-scale account of Hubbard’s life, which was suppressed. The church has
published a series of Ron magazines, which have been compiled as a highly selective
encyclopedia. For years, the church has been mopping up other documents—journals,
letters, photographs—and withholding them from public view, which makes it dicult
for independent researchers to fill in blanks in the historical record.
There are several important repositories of information that I have used in this book,
however: the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; the Heinlein Prize Trust
and the UC Santa Cruz Archives; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University
of Kansas; and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The
Stephen A. Kent Collection on Alternative Religions, University of Alberta, Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada, houses an important collection of Scientology material, and Professor
Kent graciously allowed my assistant, Lauren Wolf, to work in his archive. In addition
to being an endless source of memories on the history of the church, Karen de la
Carriere made her extensive photographic archive available. Many thanks to these
valuable resources for their cooperation.
There are three major unauthorized biographies of L. Ron Hubbard: Russell Miller’s
excellent Bare-Faced Messiah (1987) was the rst in-depth look at the man. Scientology
unsuccessfully sued Miller, a British journalist, who says that while researching his book
he was spied upon, his phone was tapped, and eorts were made to frame him for a
murder he did not commit. Soon thereafter, Bent Corydon’s L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or
Madman? (1987) appeared, followed by Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky (1990). The
church attempts to discredit both of these authors because they are former Scientologists