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Toronto Globe and Mail
January 25, 1980
Files show spy reported woman's intimate words
Freelance writer Paulette Cooper is a finely honed, long-haired
accumulation of nervous energy. She was dressed with a New York flair
that seemed out of context in the small windowless room in the grey
dignity of the U.S. District Court building in Washington.
She sat beside me at a long table covered with cartons packed with
some of
the 33,000 documents seized from Church of Scientology files in 1977
by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"If you see anything about Operation Freakout, please let me know,"
she
said. More than once. Intensely.
Her obsession could be excused.
She had been living with it since the publication in 1971 of her book,
The
Scandal of Scientology, subtitled "A chilling examination of the
nature,
beliefs and practices of the 'now religion.'"
And from hearings in which the documents helped implicate U.S. cult
leaders in criminal conspiracies, she had learned Operation Freakout
was
the code name for one of the Scientologists' obsessions -- her.
Around the table and squatting on the floor in the cramped stuffy room
that day were nine other journalists, all from U.S. newspapers. A
copying
machine was rarely out of use.
Two young Scientologists from the cult publication Freedom were also
examining the documents, which told a bizarre story of spying, theft
and
electronic bugging by the cult, and of blackmail, poison-pen letters,
scandal-mongering and other kinds of harassment to silence critics.
A U.S. marshal posted in an anteroom kept looking through the door,
and he
checked all papers any of us took from the room.
Miss Cooper thought she was ready for anything she would find.
There were many documents about her. She could even joke about some.
There was one giving the purpose of Operation Freakout -- "to get P.C.
incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her
so
hard that she drops her attacks."
She'd had years to get ready for this day -- and the many more days
she
worked with the Scientologists' most secret files.
They had been nightmare years of borrowing money to defend herself
against
14 lawsuits filed against her by the litigious cult, and to file
counter-
suits.
She told of finding evidence that her telephone was tapped. She
received
anonymous threats that she would be killed. Neighbors received
disgusting
hate letters about her, such as one saying: "Her tongue is noticeably
swollen from an attack of venereal disease."
There were times when she considered suicide.
She lost the love of a male friend of six years, who said she had
changed
under the stress and was no longer fun to be with. His employers had
received smear letters about him.
Other friends of Miss Cooper also were harassed. Some received phone
calls saying they could be involved in legal action because of her.
And then came the topper. In May, 1973, she was indicted by a grand
jury
on two counts of making bomb threats against the Church of Scientology
and
of committing perjury by denying the accusations. There were
threatening
letters on her stationery and with her fingerprints on them.
Even her own lawyer urged her to confess. She refused. She passed a
lie-
detector test. She and a cousin told about the visit of a woman
soliciting donations for a union fund, during which the woman never
took
off her gloves. A box of Miss Cooper's stationery was in the room.
The
bomb threat was reported the next day.
The charges were finally dropped; but she did not feel her name was
cleared, she said, until the fall of 1977. That was when she learned
from
an FBI contact that evidence found in the July, 1977, raids on the
Scientology offices showed it had all been a frameup.
I found one of the references to it in the files released by the
Washington court that convicted nine U.S. Scientologists on charges
related to theft of government documents and obstructing justice.
In one file was a letter dated June, 1974, from Dick Weigand to
Henning
Heldt, two of the leaders sentenced last month to four years in
prison.
Included in a review of an operative's past activities for the cult
was
the observation: "Conspired to entrap Mrs. Lovely (code name for Miss
Cooper) into being arrested for a felony which she did not commit.
She
was arraigned for the crime."
The Mrs. Lovely name came up again and again. This time it was found
by
Miss Cooper as she sat beside me. "Oh, this is it," I heard her sigh.
She had in front of her pages of detailed reports from another cult
operative. She had expected they might exist, but she hadn't been
sure. He had, for a short while, been very close to her, and pretended to be
in love with her.
She began to read them, but found that she could not brave the attempt
there. Grim-faced, she duplicated them.
"I need to read these with friends beside me," she said. She did that
evening at dinner with myself and Nan McLean, a close friend from
Sutton,
Ont., who's a former Scientologist.
In a log entry for a few days after her indictment for the bomb
threat,
the agent wrote: "We have Mrs. Lovely in a very perplexing position."
She read it aloud to us. But it was tough going. Much of it she read
in
silence.
In the words of the man to whom she had confided her most intimate
memories, to whom she had given full trust, she read a description to
his
church leaders of how she had told him about her first youthful sexual
awakening.
Another page referred to a time when, depressed about her problems,
she
had spoken one dark night about suicide.
The secret agent told his superiors that on the outside he was
sympathetic
but inside he was laughing: "Wouldn't this be a great thing for
Scientology?"
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