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misunderstand the tenor of the Board’s conclusions,” the report began, then
emphatically added: “Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to
the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and
often mentally ill.” The report admitted that there were “transient gains” realized by
some of the religion’s adherents, but said that the organization plays on those gains in
order to produce “a subservience amounting almost to mental enslavement.” As for
Hubbard himself, the board described him as “a man of restless energy” who is
“constantly experimenting and speculating, and equally constantly he confuses the
two.” “Some of his claims are that … he has been up in the Van Allen Belt, that he has
been on the planet Venus where he inspected an implant station, and that he has been
to Heaven. He even recommends a protein formula for feeding non-breast fed babies—a
mixture of boiled barley and corn syrup—stating that he ‘picked it up in Roman days.’ ”
Although Hubbard has “an insensate hostility” to psychiatrists and people in the eld of
mental health, the report noted, he is himself “mentally abnormal,” evincing a
“persecution complex” and “an imposing aggregation of symptoms which, in psychiatric
circles, are strongly indicative of a condition of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions
of grandeur—symptoms common to dictators.” The report led to a ban of Scientology in
two Australian states, 3 and prompted similar inquiries in New Zealand, Britain, and
South Africa. Hubbard believed that the US Food and Drug Administration, along with
t he FBI and CIA, were feeding slanderous information about the church to various
governments.
In the midst of all this upheaval, in February 1966 Hubbard nally declared another
“first Clear.” This time it was John McMaster, a dapper, blond South African, in his midthirties,
who was the director of the Hubbard Guidance Center at the church’s Saint Hill
headquarters. Charming, ascetic, and well-spoken, McMaster had dropped out of
medical school to become an auditor. He immediately proved to be a far more urbane
representative of Scientology than Hubbard. His wry manner made him a welcome guest
on talk shows and on the lecture circuit, where he portrayed Scientology as a cool and
nonthreatening route to self-realization. Suddenly the idea of going Clear began to catch
on. McMaster adopted a clerical outt that betted his designation as the church’s
unocial ambassador to the United Nations. At one point, Hubbard designated him
Scientology’s first “pope.” It was a matter of puzzlement to Hubbard’s closest associates,
given Hubbard’s disparagement of homosexuals in his books, that he would enlist a
person to serve as the church’s representative who was obviously gay. “He was very
pronounced in his aect,” one of Hubbard’s medical ocers remembered. But Hubbard’s
relationship to homosexuality was apparently more complicated in life than in theory.
CONVINCED THAT the British, American, and Soviet governments were interested in gaining
control of Scientology’s secrets in order to use them for evil intentions, Hubbard began
looking for a safe harbor—ideally, a country that he could rule over. England had taken
steps to “curb the growth” of Scientology, and Hubbard took the hint. He also suered
from the damp weather. “I had been ill with pneumonia for the third time in England