Fair Game Page 10

  On Saturday 2 December 1961, Truth published a ‘special investigation’ under the headline ‘Bunkumology – cult of experts at smear tactics’. The former dive bomber didn’t miss his target. ‘They are operating one of the most dangerous but profitable schemes ever tried in Australia,’ McKenna thundered. ‘It is time they were put out of business.’14

  Truth laid out a series of sensational allegations about the local Scientology operation. McKenna told the story of a 19-year-old chemistry student who had forgone asthma treatment because he was convinced his ailment was punishment for murdering his wife in a previous life. Another student who resisted signing up to Scientology was told ‘he had homosexual tendencies which they could cure’. A young Polish migrant had gone into hiding because ‘scientologists claimed to hold promissory notes he had signed for £600’.15

  McKenna also exposed Scientology’s bullying tactics when it came to silencing critics. Truth revealed that the Scientologists had threatened Catholic priest and broadcaster Dr Leslie Rumble and ABC TV journalist Gerald Lyons with security investigations.

  Dr Rumble was not the wisest choice of targets. In 1928, five years after the first radio station was licensed in Australia, Dr Rumble was given his own Sunday night radio program Question Box. The program had a simple formula. A listener would write in with a question and Dr Rumble would respond with a mini-sermon. Expected to run for four weeks,16 the show flourished for the next 40 years. Dr Rumble’s answers were syndicated in Catholic newspapers across the country. His books sold over seven million copies worldwide.17

  With a voice likened to worn sandpaper,18 Dr Rumble was known for giving no-nonsense advice. When ‘P O’N of Bexley’ wrote in asking ‘I would like your advice on the subject of Scientology,’19 Hubbard’s theology got the full sandblasting. ‘Have nothing to do with it,’ Rumble fulminated. ‘Only credulous and gullible people will be impressed by the high-brow term, as a fruit-shop proprietor hopes simpletons will be by the description of himself as a Fruitologist. In case his listeners had any doubts where Dr Rumble stood he added, ‘You flatter it by calling it a “science”. TIME magazine recently described “scientology” as compounded of “equal parts of science-fiction, dianetics and jabberwocky”!’20

  The year before Dr Rumble’s tangle with Scientology, Hubbard urged vengeance upon his critics. ‘People attack Scientology,’ he told his followers. ‘I never forget it, always even the score.’21 In his Manual of Justice, Hubbard’s form guide on how to deal with enemies, he encouraged the use of private investigators. ‘Of twenty-one persons found attacking Dianetics and Scientology,’ Hubbard wrote, ‘eighteen of them under investigation were found to be members of the Communist Party or criminals, usually both. The smell of police or private detectives caused them to fly, to close down, to confess. Hire them and damn the cost when you need to.’22

  Peter Williams, the head of Melbourne’s Scientologists, took his cues straight from Hubbard’s guidebook. He fired off a letter to Dr Rumble accusing the priest of allying himself with communists and threatened to investigate him. In part, it read:

  You will no doubt find the attacked [sic] article of great interest, for apparently by your utterance you have not only divorced yourself from the main international body of Catholic attitude to Scientology but have allied yourself further with international subversive communism. By attacking Scientology you are attacking one of the most ardent and vigorous groups in the field of combatting communism and maintaining national security.

  It is our policy to investigate subversives through our own channels as well as to co-operate with national security organizations.

  Scientology has never been a threat to the honest and upright of any nationality or belief. Only those who tread dark paths or are on the payroll of a specialized interest seeking to profit by the sickness and troubles of man would fight a group of people trying to help man. May these sick and troubled offer their forgiveness.23

  Meanwhile, Denny Gogerly from the Hubbard Association of Scientologists sent a letter to the Catholic newspaper Tribune, warning that Dr Rumble was now being investigated and that from previous inquiries, ‘facts uncovered in these investigations have generally been given to government security agencies, police etc’.24

  The Australian public was getting an early insight into Hubbard’s obsession with vengeance at any cost. McKenna’s investigation in Truth had also revealed that Dr CH Dickson, the Victorian Secretary of the British Medical Association, was also subjected to intimidation tactics. After Dickson had asked the Victorian government to investigate Scientology, letters were sent to federal and state MPs alleging Dr Dickson was ‘using smoke screen tactics to cover up his own irregularities’.25

  Hubbard had already accused the Medical Association of collaborating with communists26 and urged Scientologists to take on the doctors. ‘We have the technology, they don’t,’ he wrote. ‘We’re the experts. They aren’t.’27 Hubbard thought Australia could not only be the first ‘clear continent’, but the first continent cleared of medical surgery. ‘Let us pledge ourselves to work steadily and hard to make one nation on Earth free of knives, drugs and shocks used in the name of healing,’ Hubbard wrote in his Special Project Australia HCO Bulletin. ‘Let’s declare war in our own way, in a Scientology way, upon the enemy.’28

  Doctors soon found themselves being investigated for links to communism, with Hubbard boasting, ‘We are having Dickson investigated for Antisocial background, and if it ever comes to a court case, we’ll ruin him.’29 But Dr Dickson was causing more harm to the Scientologists than they were to him. Dickson sent a report to the Deputy Premier Arthur Rylah that led to action by the police.30 Under the headline ‘CIB probes practice of Scientology’,31 the Geelong Advertiser on 7 June 1960 reported that Scientology was being investigated following orders from the Deputy Premier.

  The wonderfully named Inspector Bent confirmed to the Geelong Advertiser that he had made inquiries into Scientology. Giving little away, Bent gave his local newspaper some cursory insights into his investigation.

  Reporter: Is Scientology being practised in Geelong at present?

  Inspector Bent: Yes.

  Reporter: How many Scientologists do you know of?

  Inspector Bent: One.32

  A copy of the Geelong Advertiser must have somehow made it back to Hubbard’s manor in the Sussex countryside. Three weeks after the article was published, he penned a bizarre letter to Inspector Bent. The nature of letter, and the fact that Hubbard would be bothered writing to a Police Inspector who was investigating one Scientologist in a far-off regional city of less than 100,000 people,33 gave some insight into the state of Hubbard’s mind.

  Hubbard told Inspector Bent that he had been given ‘bad data’ in relation to Scientology. He said Scientologists did not practice healing and mentioned that defamation action was already underway against media companies that had portrayed Scientology in a negative light. Hubbard warned Bent that, ‘we are in communication with the government and will be conducting a broad investigation in your area.’34

  Hubbard told Inspector Bent that he expected the police to be onside with Scientology, and raised a strange theory as to why the Geelong police were investigating his organisation:

  It is a serious thing when social organizations are attacked. Elsewhere in the world Scientology closely supports the police in their campaigns against subversion. Therefore it comes as a surprise to find an isolated case of attack by police. Scientologists are not doctors they are social workers.

  My personal feeling is that you have a subversive infiltration in your area. As one once trained as the Provost Marshal of Korea, I have a good grip on Asian subversion and do not intend it to ruin Scientology in any area.

  Just as we can undo brainwashing, so we can undo subversion as there are 12 Scientologists in Australia for every medical doctor. Please assist us to keep order in Australia.35

  Hubbard’s letter is notable for a number of reasons. He doesn’t claim Sci
entology to be a religion, but a ‘social organization’. He describes Scientologists as ‘social workers’, despite his internal demands for them to make more money. Once again he lies about his military record, stating he was Provost Marshal of Korea when his military files display no record of service in that country,36 and for good measure he signs off his letter with a reference to the fraudulent PhD he sourced from a Californian diploma mill.

  In case the Deputy Premier was interested in Hubbard’s thoughts on ‘Asian subversion’, a copy of the letter was forwarded from Inspector Bent to his office. A copy was also placed in the Department of Health’s freshly minted file on Scientology. As government officials began to receive more complaints about the local Scientology operation, they could get a unique insight into its founder’s mind by reading his bizarre letter.

  For an organisation so obsessed about public relations, Scientology was doing a stellar job of alienating all the wrong people. It was picking fights with the medical establishment, the Catholic Church, the police and the expanding Murdoch media empire. Truth was eventually issued with a writ for defamation. But Murdoch’s muckraking tabloid would not back down, launching a series of exposés over the next three years that would gleefully refer to Scientology, at all times, as ‘Bunkumology’. Murdoch would later look back with pride at his paper’s campaign against Scientology.37 Paradoxically, it would be another victim of Truth’s robust reporting methods whose actions further exposed Scientology and led to the world’s first state-sanctioned investigation into the cult.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SCAMMER SCAMMED

  EACH MORNING, PHILLIP WEARNE had to make a decision unfamiliar to most Labor men of his era. Did he drive the all-white sports MG to work or should he take the Jaguar?1 Wearne’s business, Australian Trade Union Press, had an office opposite Melbourne’s Trades Hall, the world’s oldest Trade Union building. Whichever car he drove, it always stood out in a sea of Holdens and Fords parked along Lygon and Victoria streets, near the eight-hour-day monument in inner-city Carlton.

  Wearne’s red and white Australian Labor Party (ALP) badge sat uncomfortably in the lapel of his expensive suit. Tall, dark-haired and well-fed, Wearne was a Toorak man making money out of Collingwood opinions. At the beginning of the 1960s, his business published over 50 trade union journals including Transport Worker, The Tanner and the gas workers’ periodical The Retort. Wearne also published the official newspapers of three state ALP branches, The New Age (Qld), The Western Sun (WA) and the Herald (SA).

  In the Melbourne telephone directory of 1961, Wearne listed himself as the ALP’s Publicity Officer, even though no such position officially existed. This would not have troubled Wearne. At the age of 36, he already had a lifetime’s worth of exaggeration and fabrication under his belt.

  Sydney’s version of Truth had exposed Wearne as a scam artist back in 1955. Under the headline ‘Play safe, don’t open your purse’, the businessman was fingered as being part of ‘a nest of Sydney’s most prolific company promoters’.2 Wearne had floated a company called Freehold and Brewery Properties Ltd, asking investors for £50,000. But the company had listed three companies, rather than individuals, as sole shareholders and directors, allowing Wearne and his colleagues to avoid liability if the money went missing.

  In the same year, Wearne was exposed in parliament for making £1000 a week from a bogus organisation named the Citizen’s Road Safety Council.3 The group solicited donations from people who had mistaken them for the Road Safety Council. Another of Wearne’s initiatives was to set up an Anti-TB Information Centre. The body had no concerns about public health. Wearne wanted to print pamphlets about tuberculosis so he could make money from selling advertising space.4

  Even the spooks were onto Wearne. An ASIO report from 1962 said, ‘There is little doubt that Wearne is certainly a go-getter, one might say con-man, who is prepared to approach anybody or anyone if he can see a chance of making a bit for himself.’5

  When Wearne got involved in Scientology it was all about making a buck. In fact, the Toorak businessman and Hubbard had much in common. Their lives had been derailed by bankruptcy, mental breakdown and divorce and they both made money from elaborate scams. Even Wearne’s war record read like Hubbard’s. He had enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in 1944, but managed to avoid combat. He failed his pilot course at Elementary Flying Training School and never earned the respect of his commanding officers. His superiors considered him ‘careless’, too ‘full of his self-importance’ and not possessing the ‘required aptitude’.6 The similarities did not end there. Like Hubbard, Wearne had a love of science fiction. Before he started dabbling in the publishing business, he wrote and drew a comic strip called The Legion of Space – An Inter-Planetary Adventure Strip.

  Yet even Wearne’s brief comic strip career was based on a scam. He had ripped off the title and story, The Legion of Space, from American artist Jack Williamson, turning the concept into four books.7 The original strip had appeared in Astounding Stories in 1934. After Williamson’s version was published in paperback in 1947 and reprinted in magazine form in 1950, Wearne was exposed as a plagiarist and forced to find work in another industry.8

  In many ways Wearne and Hubbard were similar characters. Yet Scientology’s founder had a blind spot when it came to the Toorak businessman. When his publishing companies failed to profit from Hubbard’s teachings, Wearne took action that would change Scientology forever. Hubbard would eventually find out the hard way about the perils of trying to shake down a fellow shakedown artist.

  Phillip Wearne had first read Dianetics in the early 1950s9. A friend gave him an informal processing session, asking questions and giving instructions from Hubbard’s book. But Wearne did not enjoy the experience. ‘I found them quite upsetting,’ he said. ‘It made me feel somewhat ill and I abandoned it straight away.’10

  Years later, when an entrepreneurial young Scientologist told Wearne he could help him increase his profits, Wearne had a change of heart. In January 1958, Roger Meadmore turned up unannounced at the businessman’s home. A mutual friend had suggested he call by. Meadmore told Wearne that Hubbard had ‘developed techniques of control and communication from his research in psychology, which showed tremendous advances, particularly in the field of selling and salesmanship’.11

  Hearing Roger Meadmore describe Hubbard as a ‘super salesman’,12 made all the difference. Wearne was always on the lookout for new ways to make money, and signed up for the Communication Course at Scientology’s Melbourne headquarters in Spring Street. Wearne wrote down an ambitious list of goals, including slim the waistline, space travel, establish paper, control sex desires and making £50,000 a week.13

  On his first night at Spring Street, Wearne listened to a brief lecture, before he and around 30 other new recruits were split off into pairs to do the first of their Training Routine Drills, or TRs as they are known in Scientology.

  First, Wearne had to undergo the ‘confronting’ drills. He was asked to sit a metre apart from a colleague and stare at them for an hour without blinking, moving or laughing. The routine put Wearne in a hypnotic state. ‘I was in a condition that I believed anything that was said to me and acted upon it,’ he said.14

  Next, he had to complete the ‘bullbaiting’ drill, once again staring at his opposite number, but this time with insults thrown in. Paulette Cooper described the routine in The Scandal of Scientology: ‘The other partner tries to make the immobile one “flinch” or react by insulting him, humoring him, taunting him, or leading him on – usually about his physical flaws or sexual problems.’15

  The repetitive drills continued with Wearne and his new colleagues forced to undertake the infamous Scientology drill of shouting at an ashtray. ‘They had everyone sitting down with an ashtray on a table,’ Wearne recalled. ‘One had to shout at this ashtray the same phrase over and over again until you became hoarse and exhausted.’16 Among the phrases Wearne was forced to yell at ashtrays were, ‘stand up’, ‘s
it down on that chair’ and ‘thank you’.

  Scientology historian Jon Atack says these drills can induce a state of uncritical euphoria: ‘Repetition is another way of inducing an altered or trance state,’ Atack says. ‘Following these procedures definitely makes the individual more susceptible to direction from Scientology.’17 Former Scientologist Margery Wakefield describes them as ‘a sophisticated set of mind-control processes designed to convert a newcomer into a confirmed Scientologist’.18 The drills certainly had that effect on Wearne. ‘I had the delusion that if a person who had received training in Scientology gave me a command I would carry it out because it would carry with it this mystic power,’ he said.19

  Wearne claimed his publishing business suffered as a result of the hypnotic drills. ‘I became confused,’ he said. ‘I could not make decisions. I could not handle the work.’20 After confronting Meadmore about his problems, he was told, ‘The only way out is through.’21 Wearne was offered individual processing and ‘intensives’. He was sold on the idea he could reach the exalted state of ‘clear’ or ‘Operating Thetan’ by signing up to another course.22

  While Wearne had believed that Scientology would help him make money, the more auditing he sought, the less time he spent running his business. At the peak of his success, he had offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, employed around a hundred staff23 and was making profits in excess of £20,000 a year, or over $500,000 a year in 2016 terms.24 He made enough to keep a home in Toorak, two houses in Sydney and two luxury cars parked in the garage.25

  The business model that generated Wearne’s wealth was simple. He published Labor Party newspapers and trade union journals at no cost to the labour movement, but made his profit by selling advertising space.26 On the surface it seemed like a legitimate business. But Wearne never quite left behind the nefarious ways that led to his exposure as a scam artist by Truth.