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The Boston Globe
November 24, 1979
Scientologists Plotted To Frame A Critic as a Criminal, Files Show
By Gregory Gordon United Press International
WASHINGTON -- The Church of Scientology plotted to silence a New
York writer critical of the organization by framing her to become the
FBl's prime suspect in a series of bomb threats, According to
documents released yesterday.
Paulette Cooper,37, said the scientologists' plot was part of a
campaign of harassment that led to her being indicted on criminal
charges. She said she became deeply depressed and was forced to seek
psychiatric help.
Cooper said the church began harassing her in 1969, when it
learned she was working on a book about it. Shortly after "The
Scandal of Scientology" was published in 1971, she was indicted by a
federal grand jury on charges she sent a bomb threat to church
offices.
The charges were dropped in 1975, but the harassment continued, she
told a news conference yesterday. And she finally volunteered to take
sodium pentathol - truth serum - to prove to prosecutors she was
innocent of the bomb threats.
It was yesterday, when US district judge Charles Richey made
public thousands of documents the FBI seized in 1971 raids, that
Cooper got proof the church had tried to smear her reputation.
A document dated April 1, 1976, disclosed the church had plotted to
frame Cooper as a perpetrator of bomb threats.
The document described a proposed "Operation Freakout," in which a
scientologist with a voice similar to Cooper's would phone an Arab
consulate in New York City, screaming obscenities and threatening, "I
am going to bomb you."
The plan also called for sending a written bomb threat to an Arab
embassy after scheming to get Cooper's fingerprints on notepaper to be
used for the threat. The scientologists also plotted to send a member
masquerading as Cooper to a laundromat to make an angry bomb threat,
then tip off the FBI, a document showed. The goal of the plan, it
indicated, was "to get P.C. (Paulette Cooper) incarcerated in a mental
institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her
attacks.''
The files were among cartons of church files seized by the FBI that
led to the indictment of 11 church members. Richey recently found nine
members guilty of conspiring to infiltrate US agencies and steal
government documents.
This week an appeals court rejected church claims that the FBI raids
were too broad and approved the public release of the documents, which
detail scores of covert scientology attacks on perceived enemies.
The documents disclose that British-based scientologists:
-- Besides infiltrating the internal Revenue Service and the
Justice Department, plotted to steal State Department files
pertaining to the church and its founder, L. Hon Hubbard.
-- Plotted to infiltrate the US embassy in London to seek Sootland
Yard reports about the organization.
-- Sought to penetrate a company known as JWT Chicago, whose
offices were in Chicago's John Hancock building. To do so, the
church traced "the grandmaster key," which "will open all stairways,
bathrooms and offices in the building. The only peopIe who have a
grandmaster are the chief engineer, the security Supervisor and the
building manager," one memo said.
-- Created negative ''media attacks" on est, a sensitivity
training group headed by Werner Erhard. The motive for this
operation was not made clear.
-- Learning of state and local invesrigations of its activities in
Hawaii, Massachusetts and Oregon, plotted break-ins of government
offices to monitor the probes.
Cooper, who has filed two lawsuits against the church seeking a
total of $35 million in damages, said there "is a constant
confirmation" in the documents that her allegations are accurate.
She said she had spent $42,000 on legal fees defending herself
against 14 lawsuits filed by the church.
Cooper said there was evidence the church assigned members "to date
me to try to get information about me." She said four "horrible,
anonymous smear letters were sent about me, including to the tenants
in my apartment building." One letter alleged she had a venereal
disease.
She said two church members were convicted for possessing
burglary tools used in a break-in of her lawyer's office in Toronto
and "papers from my doctor's office and my lawyer's office disappeared
and were mailed to me and other people anonymously for years."
Responding to the disclosures about Cooper, church spokesman
Dennis McKenna said: "This situation is not in perspective until one
examines the extent to which Miss Cooper was covertly working with the
FBI and other federal agencies" to investigate the church.
Mr. Kenna said Cooper was involved with federal agencies in
"actions against the church" similar to those the FBI conducted on
private individuals in the J. Edgar Hoover era.
Another scientology official said the church "does not condone" the
actions against Cooper.
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