‘Ruin them utterly’: How PIs and volunteer members work against Scientology’s enemies

[Former Scientology private investigator Cierra Westerman]

In this second part of a three-part deep dive by historian Chris Owen into the inner workings of Scientology’s harassment operations, we’ll take a look at how the church uses private investigators and volunteers to investigate and harass critics. See part one here.

While the Religious Technology Centre (RTC) and Office of Special Affairs (OSA) have continued Scientology’s long tradition of harassing critics, the way it’s done now is somewhat different to how it used to be. OSA’s predecessor, the Guardian’s Office (GO) was brought down by its wanton disregard for the law. Its use of ordinary Scientologists as agents enabled law enforcement agencies to link them directly to the GO leadership.

RTC and OSA avoid these problems through two key departures from how the GO operated. First, planned operations are said to be reviewed beforehand by in-house lawyers to ensure that they are legal (“awful but lawful”), or at least are unlikely to be prosecuted. Second, they make heavy use of private investigators (PIs).

This was in some respects a reversion to Hubbard’s original recommendations in his 1959 Manual of Justice, when he advised using PIs to investigate Scientology’s critics and enemies and “ruin them utterly” if necessary. Scientology used a number of PIs during the 1960s and 1970s, and even experimented with having GO staff trained and licensed as PIs. However, this approach was too expensive and impractical for the huge scale of the GO’s activities.

RTC/OSA operates on a much more limited scale than the GO – principally because Scientology’s shrinkage means that it no longer has enough staff to carry out GO-style operations. Instead of firing wildly in all directions and targeting even trivial manifestations of hostility towards Scientology, it now focuses on what could be described as high-value targets, mainly using PIs.

PIs have major advantages over ordinary Scientologists, despite their high cost. State licensing gives them official permission to do things that unlicensed Scientologists could not. They are often much better trained than the old GO investigators, as many come from law enforcement backgrounds, or have had specialist PI training. They have been able to exploit this experience to obtain information from privileged sources and obtain specialist assistance for operations.

In one instance, a Scientology PI used contacts at a Florida college to recruit newly graduated PIs for operations against Scientology critics in the state in 2008. Another PI linked to Scientology hired overseas hackers to steal data from two prominent Scientology critics – a crime for which he was ultimately jailed.

They are also much better equipped than amateur investigators. PIs operating against Scientology’s enemies have displayed advanced technological capabilities comparable to those of the police or state intelligence agencies. They have reportedly used, among other tactics, GPS devices attached to vehicles to track targets’ movements, remote video surveillance of targets’ houses, email hacking, and cellphone interception using scanners. Some tasks have required Scientology’s PIs to hire outside assistance, such as retaining specialist contractors or finding additional PIs to help with big operations.

Scientology’s PI operations are reportedly highly organised. In Florida, Scientology PIs established an operations centre inside a warehouse overlooking a business run by an ex-Scientologist. As well as monitoring their nearby target from the warehouse, the PIs simultaneously managed multiple operations against different targets.

Cierra Westerman, a former Scientology PI who worked in the Florida operations centre, says that it had “two big screen TVs, a computer, and a phone that was for contacting [Scientology PI] Terry Roffler. The TVs were used for monitoring all the cameras watching the ex-members’ houses. And it was also for watching the cars that all had tracking devices, which was illegal in Florida.” Similar large-scale operations were reportedly being undertaken simultaneously in Los Angeles, Denver, and Texas.

According to former senior OSA and RTC staff, PIs are nominally employed by church lawyers. The church covers the cost of the PIs as part of general ‘attorney fees’ paid to the lawyers. They have no role in directing the activities of the investigators. Instead, this is done directly by a small number of OSA and RTC case officers, who in turn report to the head of OSA and the RTC Inspector General, who both report directly to Miscavige.

According to former RTC Inspector General Mark ‘Marty’ Rathbun, Miscavige himself personally directed the activities of Scientology’s PIs: “Often, he would instruct me to order OSA to direct an operative or private investigator to find out something to do concerning the target of infiltration or investigation.” Some ex-Scientology PIs have said that they spoke directly to Miscavige to report their findings.

The GO was undone by the fact that its operatives, almost all of whom were Scientologists, could fairly easily be linked to Scientology. PIs, by contrast, are able to operate behind layers of obfuscation. Few appear to be Scientologists. In Cierra Westerman’s case, she was employed by a PI who was employed by a lawyer who was employed by Scientology who was reporting to either RTC or OSA officials. Thus, she was at least two layers distant from anyone in the church’s management.

The PIs’ work products were covered by legal privilege which protected them from being turned over to discovery in litigation. In one rare case where a PI targeting Scientology critics was prosecuted for a felony, his ultimate clients were never publicly disclosed, beyond the fact that he was working for lawyers and other PIs. The firewall had held; although the Scientology connection was publicised, the church faced no legal repercussions.

According to former senior church officials, the lawyers act as ‘cut-outs’ to ensure that there is no direct financial link between the church, as the ultimate paymaster, and the PIs. Former RTC executive Jesse Prince explains that the thinking behind this is “to keep as many arms’ lengths from the eventual victim as possible to limit liability. Simply stated, the scam is set up so that all can claim no one knows anything specific, especially those at the top doling out the money.”

Mike Rinder, head of OSA from 1987 to 2007, comments that “it gives a level of protection on disclosure [of] their activities, it provides plausible deniability to Scientology and it masks HOW MUCH they are paid.” “It had to be two or three steps removed,” Rathbun said, to ensure that the PIs’ conduct did not implicate the church. “We had to pretend like all that [covert] stuff was behind us”, he said. “But that was total subterfuge.”

The Church of Scientology spends huge sums on PI operations. When David Miscavige’s father Ron left Scientology, the younger Miscavige hired a paid of PIs to follow his father for over a year at a cost of $10,000 a week; the total cost of the operation was at least half a million dollars. In an even more extreme example, two different PIs were paid $32,000 a month to follow a single target over 24 years, at a cost to Scientology of between $10 and $12 million. The payments were reportedly made in amounts of under $10,000 to avoid alerting the IRS.

These were just two of hundreds of PI operations reportedly carried out by Scientology since 1988. In a 1992 submission to the IRS, the church stated its expenditure on “legal and professional fees” was approximately $1 million per month. In reality, Rinder says, this was a gross underestimate; at one point, OSA International alone was spending $2 million a month on lawyers and PIs.

Millions more dollars were spent by other Scientology corporations in the US and abroad. An investigation by the St Petersburg Times found that in 1988 alone, Scientology spent over $30 million on legal and professional fees, which would certainly have covered work done by PIs.

Rinder notes that even on Scientology’s own figures, if no change in the amount of spending is assumed the church has spent over $300 million on lawyers and PIs since 1992. Given the scale of Scientology’s legal and PR challenges from the late 1990s onwards, it is quite likely that it has in fact spent considerably more than this.

Individual Scientologists also play an important role, though in a more limited capacity than in the days of the GO. Rinder says that long-term Scientologists who are viewed as loyal and progressing well in Scientology are preferred as candidates for OSA recruitment.

An internal OSA spreadsheet from 2006, published by Rathbun, lists several hundred Scientologists in the Western US who volunteered for OSA work. Some are recorded as assisting OSA intelligence-gathering on demonstrators outside Scientology orgs, carrying out actions such as videoing picketers and taking photographs of their vehicle licence plates. A number are listed as “Internet volunteers”, carrying out activity against Scientology’s online critics.

One such volunteer was Patty Pieniadz Moher, a Connecticut Scientologist whose career in the church spanned over 27 years. She joined the Boston Guardian’s Office in 1979, running Scientology’s ‘social reform’ front groups in New England for a time until leaving in 1981 to start a family. She escaped the subsequent purges and abolition of the GO. She was eventually re-recruited as an OSA volunteer in the 1980s.

Her volunteer career, which lasted on and off for around 14 years, followed what appears to have been a fairly typical pattern as she gradually proved her trustworthiness to her OSA handlers. She began with ‘overt data collection’ against Scientology’s enemies (for instance, using public records to obtain information on them), then graduated to covert activity such as infiltration and stealing trash from those deemed enemies of Scientology.

“I truly believed that the sneaky activities I was involved in for the Church were for the ‘greatest good’,” Patty says of her years working for OSA. Critics of Scientology, in her mind, were “evil people and trying to stop the expansion of Scientology due to their horrific crimes against humanity. I completely justified my behavior in Scientology and working with OSA because I felt I was one of the good guys, trying to expose one of the bad guys. I was a true believer that happily went along with any and all things sanctioned by the C of S or LRH, and I was completely trusted.”

OSA’s use of volunteers in operations against Scientology’s enemies is highlighted by two internal documents published by Rathbun in 2011. One of them, the “Beatty Handling Program,” was a plan of attack against former Sea Org member and Scientology critic Chuck Beatty. Written in 2006 and published by Rathbun five years later, the plan’s stated purpose was to “end CB’s black PR of Scientology” through achieving two major targets: “Crimes on Beatty found and documented” and “CB dismissed as an attacker or totally restrained and muzzled.”

The plan called for the use of a number of covert human intelligence sources, described as “resources” — presumably OSA volunteers — in San Francisco and Pittsburgh, where Beatty lived and worked. One was to concentrate on sending him “defeatist” messages to discourage him from criticising Scientology. Another was to push him to “go out and start meeting girls at bars, clubs, etc,” while a third operative in Pittsburgh, named in the plan as ‘Sam,’ was to socialise with him and “verify if Beatty is into downloading child porn”. If he was, this was to be reported immediately to law enforcement.

A Pittsburgh PI was to be tasked to disrupt Beatty’s relationship with his sister, with whom he was living, by getting him “signed up to receive kinky materials (at the house).” OSA’s investigations chief was also tasked with sending Beatty links to porn websites and ”materials and URLs for local sex locations that he would be interested in going to.” The ultimate goal was to “Expose this and get CB dismissed as an attacker.”

Another campaign from 2006 is said to have been directed against Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor David S. Touretzky, a vocal Scientology critic. It similarly appears to have relied heavily on OSA volunteers. As with the Beatty plan, much emphasis seems to have been placed on infiltrating the target’s social and professional circles.

Rathbun said that in 2006, Touretzky was the subject of “dozens of …. daily reports” compiled from intelligence provided by OSA informants and private investigators. A leaked report indicates that OSA was “activating” Scientologist CMU alumni to use as assets against Touretzky. One OSA volunteer at CMU was described as ”43 years old and he will be used to befriend Touretzky, and find names of current CMU students who can then be surveyed to get their parents contacted and stirred up.”

In the next and final part of this series, we’ll look at two essential ingredients of Scientology’s strategy to defeat its enemies and win global power – its lawyers and its influence operations.

— Chris Owen

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