JANE KEMBER DIES: Led Scientology’s 1970s worldwide spy corps in ‘Snow White Program’

A close family friend to Jane Kember informed us yesterday that the former Scientology spymaster died on Wednesday. She was 85.

Kember was a major figure in Scientology history, given a lifetime appointment as “Guardian” by founder L. Ron Hubbard and charged with overseeing the Guardian’s Office, a worldwide intelligence operation that infiltrated government offices in several nations, resulting in a 1977 FBI raid in Los Angeles and Washington DC that led to 11 top Scientologists going to prison.

Two of those Scientology officials, including Kember, were extradited from England to stand trial in the US. Kember was charged with running an elaborate government infiltration scheme, dubbed the “Snow White Program” by Hubbard. (It became known as “Operation Snow White” by the press at the time.)

The Snow White Program involved hundreds of Scientology operatives infiltrating government agencies, including break-ins, in order to obtain documentation of what those agencies had on Hubbard.

Kember oversaw it all, the top spymaster working for Hubbard and his wife, Mary Sue Hubbard.

Mary Sue and Kember were both convicted in the Snow White prosecution, but L. Ron Hubbard himself was only named an unindicted co-conspirator and was not charged. After her conviction in November 1980, Kember was sentenced to two to six years in prison, and in 1982 Scientology assured reporters that it had “deposed” both Kember and Mary Sue Hubbard so that they were no longer in positions of influence.

Years later, we learned that Kember was still a Scientologist and was taking courses at Saint Hill Manor, Scientology’s UK headquarters. She might no longer be in a position of authority, but she remained a loyal member of Scientology to the very end.

In 1964, Jane and her husband Kevin Kember had twin boys, Peter and Charles “Chaz” Kember. When we were researching the Snow White Program for The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, our book about Paulette Cooper and the elaborate operations run by Kember and the Guardian’s Office that were intended to destroy her, we managed to find some information about Jane and her children.

We learned that Chaz remained in Scientology in Los Angeles (and still is) but that Peter had by then left the church. In fact, at the time our book came out in 2015, Peter Kember was working as an IT consultant for Scotland Yard which, given his mother’s felonious past, we found intriguing.

Doing that research, we read numerous accounts about what the Guardian’s Office was like under Kember, and the picture that emerged was of a woman who ran a worldwide espionage network through an intimidating presence. The men who worked for Jane Kember were clearly terrified of her. But she never spoke publicly of her years as Scientology’s Guardian, which ended as a new contingent of Scientology executives, including a very young David Miscavige, displaced the Guardian’s Office in the early 1980s.

The close family friend told us that just recently, Jane Kember had told her that what was keeping her going in her 80s was her son Peter’s energy. He was not only considered a wizard in IT, but he was something of a polymath and enjoyed a large circle of friends and admirers.

[Jane Kember and her son Peter in 2018]

He was also, the friend told us, active at the ESMB message boards, using a handle and discussing his conflicted views about his involvement in Scientology.

The friend, who is also a former Scientologist, told us that although Peter was no longer a member of the church, he had absorbed many of L. Ron Hubbard’s views, including his disdain for the medical profession.

“In the church we weren’t supposed to take drugs. Peter still believed firmly in all of that and felt he could heal his own body, but he had incredibly high blood pressure and refused to take his medicine. He told me not too long ago that his doctor told him he was amazed that Peter was still alive.”

That refusal to take medicine apparently caught up with Peter Kember. He died of a heart attack on November 21. He was only 58 years old. His funeral is scheduled for Monday.

His mother didn’t live to see it. She died in her sleep at a hospital on Wednesday.

Jennifer Catherine Neilsen-Wood — known as Jenny to her family — was born in 1937 in Nairobi, Kenya. She was a British citizen and was married to Henry Kevin Kember when she became Mary Sue Hubbard’s lieutenant as Jane Kember.

In his 1990 book about Scientology history, A Piece of Blue Sky, Jon Atack called Kember a fanatical Scientologist, and he quoted a 1966 success story written by her:

Before Scientology I couldn’t have a baby, having miscarriage after miscarriage. I have recently had twin boys, after training and processing in Scientology. Before Scientology I had kidney trouble. I have no kidney trouble now. Before Scientology I had skin trouble, chronic indigestion, was very nervous, very unhappy, highly critical of all around me, felt inferior, inadequate and unable to cope with life. Now the skin troubles have gone and the chronic indigestion. I am no longer nervous, feel happy, have lost my inferiority complex and feel no need to criticize others.

“No wonder,” Atack wrote, “Kember later ran the Guardian’s Office with steely and unswerving devotion.”

On March 1, 1966, Hubbard created the office of Guardian, giving it this definition: “To help LRH enforce and issue policy, to safeguard Scientology orgs, Scientologists and Scientology and to engage in long term promotion.”

Hubbard named his wife Mary Sue as the original Guardian, but then in January 1969 the title was passed to Kember, who held it for the next 13 years, working directly under Mary Sue, who was named “Controller.”

In 1967, Hubbard took to sea after things had become uncomfortable for him in both the US and UK. For the next eight years he ran Scientology from a ship, initially called Royal Scotman, but later changed to Apollo, and sailed the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and finally the Caribbean.

In 1973, Hubbard spent most of the year away from the ship and holed up in Queens, New York, as he considered what to do about the shrinking number of ports that would accept him. He blamed the US and UK for what they were saying about him to foreign governments, and he became determined to do something about it.

That April, he wrote up plans for what he called the Snow White Program, to find out what was said about him in documents held by numerous governments. The plot finally got going in earnest in 1974 when Mary Sue Hubbard and Jane Kember began urging Guardian’s Office operatives to infiltrate government agencies.

Department of Justice filings explained that Kember would direct Scientology’s lawyers to file Freedom of Information Act requests for documents about Hubbard and then, once an agency had gathered them in one place in an attempt to assess which records to release, GO operatives would break into the offices and make copies of them all, whether they were entitled to them or not.

Kember’s signature on documents signing off on burglary plans or issuing commendations after they were accomplished made her guilt undeniable.

She and another GO official in England, an American named Mo Budlong, were extradited and tried in the US, where nine other executives, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were also convicted.

In a sentencing memo, the government made its case for why Kember and Budlong should go to prison…

The evidence which led the jury to return these guilty verdicts revealed that during the years 1973 to 1976 the defendants ordered the commission of brazen, systematic and persistent burglaries of United States Government offices. Their purpose was to ransack these offices of all documents of interest to the organization which they led — the Guardian’s Office of the Church of Scientology — in order to secure total exemption from taxation and to protect Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. In the process, from their headquarters in East Grinstead, England, they challenged and attempted to undermine the judicial and governmental structure of the United States.

…These crimes included: The infiltration and theft of documents from a number of prominent private, national, and world organizations, law firms, newspapers, and private citizens; the execution of smear campaigns and baseless law suits for the sole purpose of destroying private individuals who had attempted to exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of expression; the framing of private citizens who had been critical of Scientology, including the forging of documents which led to the indictment of at least one innocent person; and violation of the civil rights of prominent private citizens and public officials. These are but a few of the criminal acts of these two defendants which, we submit, give the Court a glimpse of the heinous and vicious nature of their crimes.

After receiving sentences of two to six years in prison, Kember and Budlong appealed, and remained out on bail while they waited for a court ruling. Atack describes how Mary Sue Hubbard and Kember tried in 1981, despite their criminal convictions, to keep control of things as a new crew of executives had arrived, led by Bill Franks and with L. Ron Hubbard’s approval, to begin dismantling the Guardian’s Office:

Upon hearing of Franks’ moves, Mary Sue Hubbard reappointed herself Controller…Franks and his team were physically ejected from GO headquarters in Los Angeles. The locks were changed. Mary Sue appointed Jane Kember Temporary Controller.

Franks, as Executive Director International, maintained his occupation of the Controller’s office itself, and Kember visited him there with a group of GO heavies…

For three days the screaming match continued, with David Miscavige and other high-ranking Messengers joining in. They played on Kember’s fear of a schism in the Church. Eventually, she was shown an undated Hubbard dispatch which suggested that the GO should be put under the [Messengers] when its senior executives went to prison. Jane Kember and Mary Sue Hubbard admitted defeat.

Mary Sue ended up serving only a year in prison of the four she was sentenced to. Kember’s actual prison stay was probably also relatively brief. But after the dismantling of the Guardian’s Office, neither of them held positions of influence in Scientology.

By the time they came out of prison, L. Ron Hubbard had gone into permanent hiding. He never saw his wife Mary Sue again before he died in seclusion in 1986. Mary Sue herself spent her final years in a kind of house arrest, as Bruce Hines described for us recently, and she died of breast cancer in 2002.

Jane Kember remained loyal to Scientology despite never again holding high office in it, and she remained associated with Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England.

We told Paulette Cooper last night that Kember, the woman who had directed so many elaborate operations to destroy her, had died.

“I just wish she had talked,” Paulette said.

We also asked for a statement from Mike Rinder, who recently published a major new history of Scientology and his role in it, A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology.

“The best word I can think of to describe Jane Kember is imperious,” he said. “She ruled the Guardian’s Office like an Amazonian queen, overseeing its most notorious crimes. Like Mary Sue, her loyalty to Hubbard and Scientology wasn’t reciprocated. She was despised by Hubbard, David Miscavige, and all of us who had to ‘clean up her mess.’ She remained a pariah, though eventually was allowed back onto org lines to ‘retrain from the bottom up’ in order to keep her from disaffecting. Sadly, she remained a loyal Scientologist to the end — she would have had quite a story to tell had she chosen to do so.”

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Your proprietor on the Intertubes

Had a fun conversation with Aaron McNally at his podcast, Curiosophy Now, and thought you might find it interesting.

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