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

that the CIA was determined to oust him.
Even in this chaotic and dangerous situation, Hubbard saw an opportunity. He
proposed the creation of an elite guard to protect the king. He ordered Kit to instruct
General Oufkir in the use of E-Meters as lie detectors in order to determine which
members of the government had been a part of the rebel forces and root out subversion.
She refused; her own sources told her it was far too dangerous, not only for her, but for
everyone involved. Hubbard ordered her back to the ship and put her in charge of the
snack bar. He sent another team, and they quickly began to uncover the plotters.
Colonel Allam was marched out to the desert and shot, along with dozens of others.
When King Hassan II returned from France, in 1972, a squadron of Moroccan ghter
jets accompanied his passenger jet. As soon as they left French airspace, however, one
of the escort jets began ring on the king’s aircraft. The king, who was also a pilot,
immediately grasped what was happening. He raced into the cockpit and seized control.
“Stop ring! The tyrant is dead!” he shouted into the radio. Then he ew the jet on to
Morocco.
That night, the architect of the coup was revealed: General Oufkir. It was announced
that he had committed “suicide,” although his body was riddled with bullets.
The shaken king turned his attention to the Scientologists. He had long suspected that
Scientology was a CIA front—a rumor that was spreading all over the Mediterranean.
There was also gossip that the Apollo was involved in drug tracking and prostitution,
or that it was part of a pornography ring. In December 1972, the Scientologists were
expelled from the country, leaving a trail of confusion and recrimination behind them. 6
PAULETTE COOPER WAS studying comparative religion for a summer at Harvard in the late
1960s when she became interested in Scientology, which was gaining attention. “A
friend came to me and said he had joined Scientology and discovered he was Jesus
Christ,” she recalled. She decided to go undercover to see what the church was about. “I
didn’t like what I saw,” she said. The Scientologists she encountered seemed to be in a
kind of trance. When she looked into the claims that the church was making, she found
many of them false or impossible to substantiate. “I lost my parents in Auschwitz,”
Cooper said, explaining her motivation in deciding to write about Scientology at a time
when there had been very little published and those who criticized the church came
under concentrated legal and personal attacks. A slender, soft-spoken woman, Cooper
published her rst article in Queen, a British magazine, in 1970. “I got death threats,”
she said. The church led suit against her. She refused to be silent. “I thought if, in the
nineteen-thirties people had been more outspoken, maybe my parents would have
lived.” The following year, Cooper published a book, The Scandal of Scientology, that
broadly attacked the teachings of Hubbard, revealing among other things that Hubbard
had misrepresented his credentials and that defectors claimed to have been nancially
ripped off and harassed if they tried to speak out.
Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and Sara Hubbard’s
daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that