[Today’s guest post is by Chris Owen]
The South China Morning Post has published a lengthy piece by Paul French on L. Ron Hubbard’s trips to Asia as a teenager in the late 1920s. While much about this time in Hubbard’s life is already known and recapitulated in the article, it does a good job of highlighting one of the more mysterious figures to cross Hubbard’s path – a character Hubbard describes in his writings as “Major Ian Macbean of the British Secret Service.”
As it happens, this is an encounter I’ve been looking at too, for its possible relevance to Hubbard’s decision 40 years later to set up his own spy/dirty tricks agency in the form of the infamous Guardian’s Office. Who was Macbean, said to have been a resident of 1920s Peking (now Beijing) in China, and how did Hubbard come to meet him?
Scientology’s accounts of his travels in China have varied a lot over the last 50 years. The 1978 edition of “What is Scientology?” claims that Hubbard was up and down the “China coast several times in his teens from Ching Wong Tow (Qingdao) to Hong Kong.” But according to Scientology’s later account in the 1996 book “Images of a Lifetime,” Hubbard only actually made two trips to China: one with his mother en route to Guam in 1927 and a tourist visit from Guam in the company of his parents in 1928.
Scientology’s “RON Adventurer/Explorer: Daring Deeds and Unknown Realms” pinpoints the time he met Macbean as on his “second Asian venture” in 1928, and claims that the major took “a seventeen-year-old L. Ron Hubbard through a tour of British intelligence efforts from Peking through northern China.” The reason why, it adds sagely, “is not known.”
Hubbard is purported to have faced many dangers in Macbean’s company, including an “encounter with Cantonese pirates, the engineering of a jungle road across Guam’s denser corner, and the evening he decked an Italian swordsman named Giovinni. (Although not before he took a saber cut across the left cheek, and Macbean nearly lost a hand.)”
In reality, Hubbard’s second visit to China was part of a tour by a number of US naval families from Guam aboard the USS Gold Star, taking place between October and December 1928. The ship visited Manila in the Philippines and traveled on to Qingdao (Tsingtao), from where Hubbard and his parents traveled inland to Beijing, before returning to the ship for transport to Shanghai and Hong Kong and finally back to Guam.
At some point, Hubbard was photographed aboard a 116-ton schooner, the Mariana Maru. Scientology claims in “RON: Letters and Journals” that he travelled to China aboard the vessel “in the spring of 1928.” However, this isn’t recorded in his journal and it’s contradicted by the accounts from schoolmates and his aunt. He was still at high school in Helena, Montana in the spring of 1928 and participated in a parade on May 4th, 1928, where – as a local newspaper recorded – he won a prize for his entry as a pirate.
A few days later he skipped school to go and stay with his aunt and uncle in Seattle. He subsequently managed to get aboard the transport USS Henderson to travel to Guam, where his parents were posted. The Henderson’s deck log records that “L.R. Hubbard, son of Lieutenant H.R. Hubbard USN, reported on board for transportation to Guam” at 1620 hours on Saturday June 30.
A different Scientology source, Galaxy Press’s “L. Ron Hubbard: Explorer of Far-Flung Realms,” claims that Hubbard boarded the Mariana Maru to go to China “within weeks” of having arrived in Guam at the end of July 1928. But again, this isn’t recorded in his journal.
An extract from Hubbard’s journal, as published by Scientology, does contain an entry for “May 30. At Sea” which gives a first-person account of experiencing a typhoon aboard a sailing ship – but as we’ve just seen, this is set weeks before Hubbard was supposed to have been aboard the Mariana Maru. At the time, he was in Washington State. Typhoon records published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also record no western Pacific typhoons in late May 1928.
The Mariana Maru was a Japanese-owned vessel used by a Japanese merchant to export copra (coconut kernels) from Guam to Yokohama, Japan via Saipan in the Mariana Islands, about 125 miles from Guam. It’s unclear that the vessel ever went to China; records of the ship’s journeys in the local Guam Recorder newspaper only show it travelling between Guam, Saipan and Yokohama. Hubbard supposedly signed up to be a supercargo aboard the Mariana Maru, but this is not independently corroborated. He is only recorded visiting Yokohama once, on a brief port stop during his first visit to China with his parents.
Scientology later claimed that Hubbard had “made his way deep into Manchuria’s Western Hills and beyond – to break bread with Mongolian bandits, share campfires with Siberian shamans and befriend the last in the line of magicians from the court of Kublai Khan.” According to Jon Atack, one of his unofficial biographers, these occurrences are not mentioned in the diary that Hubbard kept of his trip.
It’s thus very unclear how or when Hubbard met Macbean, who Scientology describes as “the regional head of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” There’s no doubt that Macbean existed. In the 1984 trial of former Scientology archivist Gerry Armstrong, an extract was shown from the China Yearbook 1929-30 showing the staff of the British legation in Peking, which included an entry for “Major Macbean I.G., M.C., Cypher Officer.” As Paul French shows in his South China Morning Post article, Macbean is also documented at the UK National Archives and in ”My Dancing Days,” the autobiography of his ballerina wife Phyllis Bedells.
After joining the Army, Ian Gordon Macbean served initially on the Western Front of World War I. He was awarded a Military Cross for “an act or acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy on land” but suffered a foot wound in 1914. Probably as a result of his injury, he switched from front-line duty to working as a cypher officer, responsible for encrypting and decrypting confidential communications.
Macbean was sent to the Macedonian Front in Greece in 1916 and subsequently went to Baku in present-day Azerbaijan. In a little-known episode just before the end of World War I, British forces seized control of the city to restore order before handing it to the newly-established but short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Macbean likely served as one of the 5,000 British troops commanded by the British military governor, General Sir William Thomson. Britain failed in its aim of keeping Azerbaijan out of Bolshevik hands after its withdrawal in 1919; the Red Army invaded and conquered the country in April 1920, incorporating it into the Soviet Union until 1991.
A cypher officer was not an intelligence officer, though he would have likely handled sensitive communications which could well have included some military intelligence. After the war, Macbean does seem to have had some kind of involvement in intelligence work in the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence. A surviving memo from him to several regimental commanders involved in counter-IRA work in December 1920 advises them to “increase and speed up Intelligence activity and encourage people to give information and even to oppose the [IRA] extremists.”
Macbean was subsequently posted to British-ruled Egypt before taking a temporary posting in Peking in early 1927. He went on his own, with his wife staying in London to pursue her career, though she recorded that he had “amusing parties to go to as well as the more official function which he had to attend.”
It’s likely that Macbean came into contact with Hubbard during one of those parties. The arrival of a group of naval families on tour from Guam would certainly have attracted the interest of the US naval delegation in Peking, who would likely have organised a reception for the visitors. As a fellow English-speaking Western military officer, Macbean would have been a natural invitee to such events.
There is no independent evidence for Macbean having accompanied him on his tourist visits in China, and certainly no explanation for why a 17-year-old might have been given “a tour of British intelligence efforts from Peking through northern China.”
During the 1984 Church of Scientology vs. Gerald Armstrong trial, a peculiar letter was submitted as evidence to corroborate Hubbard’s relationship with Macbean. Accompanied by an envelope with the stamp of the British Legation in Peking, it’s dated to January 1st, 1929 – six weeks after Hubbard went back to Guam – and reads:
Dear Red,
You’ll probably hear this officially soon but I want to let you know first. You’re still a “Lieutenant.” You’ve been retained in spite of all the fuss the Ambassador made. He tried to convince everyone that you also worked for the S.S. [British Secret Service] That is the best I ever have heard. With you so blotto that you don’t know one end of a gat from the other.
Don’t resign now when you get the cable. You’ve time to catch the Mariana Maru if you decide quickly. Please come back up for although you’ve only been gone three weeks we all feel frownish and ugly. One day of your method of carrying on our business and we’ll all be fine again.
Giovanni never came out of it poor devil. Of course we know that you think different. He was a damned devil, Red, but just (illegible) one now. (illegible) guess your face got all right. That was a damned nasty slash he gave you, but I caught one on the hand that is giving me hell. Loosen up some time and give me the whole story.
Well, you and your perpetual “Godamn” will be back here soon teaching more wops how to use their own swords so
Pip pip!
Mac
P.S. Please bring me a mestizio [sic] from Manila.
There is no way of proving the authenticity of this letter, but its language immediately raises questions. It reads very unlike something that a 1920s British army officer – a highly-educated product of elite schools – would have written. In fact, with its quick-fire sentences and use of American slang (“gat” for gun) it reads far more like something a young American with an obsession for writing pulp fiction might have written. The context of the letter is also very unclear – Hubbard later claimed that Macbean was an expert swordsman and the penultimate paragraph seems to refer to duelling. There’s no explanation of what was meant by Hubbard being a ‘Lieutenant’ – at his age, it certainly wouldn’t have been any official rank.
There is, however, a direct connection between the letter and Hubbard’s first forays into fiction. On his way back to Guam, Hubbard began filling his journal with one-paragraph synopses of short stories that he presumably planned to write. One of them was called ‘Secret Service’: ‘Adventure. All in a day’s work. Casual laddie in Hankow. Saves town. Joins Brit SS to carry out such orders as “Giovinni [sic] in Mukden exciting Communists. Use your own judgement. C13”.’ Was ‘Giovinni’ based on a real person, or was he one of Hubbard’s literary inventions?
Finally, was Macbean really the “regional head of British Intelligence”? Unfortunately the British Secret Intelligence Service – otherwise known as MI6 – doesn’t release its historical files to the UK National Archives. However, its authorised history by Keith Jeffery (“MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949”) does provide insights that strongly suggest that Macbean didn’t work for MI6.
According to Jeffery, MI6 was represented in China by a man named Harry Nathaniel Steptoe, who was a Shanghai-based consular official recruited to MI6 in early 1923. In 1925, Steptoe was posted to Peking, where he remained until 1934 despite suffering chronic ill-health. Steptoe was something of a ‘one-man band,’ partly as a result of a lack of funds for any extensive organisation but also due to his own preference for having a personal relationship with his Chinese agents. Steptoe effectively handled MI6’s China operations by himself, making it difficult to find even a temporary replacement for him. He was eventually replaced by a new MI6 representative based in British-ruled Hong Kong.
Given this account of Steptoe’s career, it seems very unlikely that Macbean played any role with “British Intelligence.” He may have exaggerated his own role, in which he probably did handle secret communications and likely did know some interesting people, for the benefit of the impressionable teenaged Hubbard. One observer quoted by Jeffery described Steptoe as being “afflicted with a weakness that I have noticed in so many other ‘hush hush’ men. He loves to weave a veil of mystery over his doings and whisper strange warnings. No doubt he has to be careful of what he does and says, but this pose is apt to defeat its purpose.” A similar affliction may have affected Macbean.
Whatever the truth, Macbean evidently made a lasting impression on Hubbard despite their brief acquaintance. Hubbard was still spinning anecdotes about the major thirty or forty years later. He continued to be fascinated by secrets and covert intelligence until, convinced in his paranoia that he was under attack by MI6, the CIA and the KGB, he started his own intelligence agency – with results that were eventually disastrous for Scientology and himself.
— Chris Owen
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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
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I smell a typical Lroonish load of bovine excrement. The 'cypher clerk' he may have met was just throwing shade at the young Lroon and it showed in the fake letter Lroon wrote. Nice catch Chris.
However, I take exception to the opening paragraph of French's story. "today, the name L. Ron Hubbard is automatically referenced as the founder of the Church of Scientology, the celebrity-laden super-rich pyramid faith that has spread around the world with controversies and scandals following at every step. "
$cientology is not 'celebrity laden and is not super rich. other mega church 'christian' groups have more money and more influence in the US. Sadly, I can't see the rest of the article, but ever since the violation of the hand over accords, the Peoples Republic of China has run Hong Kong and is now in complete control of Hong Kong media. I guess President Xi doesn't like $cientology either.
The letter reads as pure Hubbard. Pip, Pip my ass.