Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

individuals and organizations around the country with a covering letter claiming that 'authorization'
had been received to release the material after the FBI had been supplied with a copy.
While Hubbard was skirmishing with the FBI, he was also tightening his grip on the Scientology
movement and urging his followers to take action against anyone attempting to practise
Scientology outside the control of the 'church'. He derided apostates as 'squirrels' and
recommended merciless litigation to drive them out of business. 'The law can be used very easily
to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well
knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease,' he
wrote in one of his interminable bulletins, casually adding, 'If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.'
In the same bulletin he offered the benefit of his advice to any Scientologists unlucky enough to be
arrested. They were instantly to file a $100,000 civil damages suit for molestation of 'a Man of God
going about his business', then go on the offensive 'forcefully, artfully and arduously' and cause
'blue flames to dance on the courthouse roof until everybody has apologized profusely'. The only
way to defend anything, Hubbard wrote, was to attack. 'If you ever forget that, you will lose every
battle you are ever engaged in.'[3] It was a philosophy to which he would adhere ardently all his life.
At the end of September, the Hubbards packed their bags once again, closed the house at Silver
Spring and departed the United States with their three young children for another extended visit to
London. Hubbard had taken a lease on a large apartment in Brunswick House, a mansion block in
Palace Gardens Terrace, a few minutes walk from Kensington Gardens. It became, temporarily, the
address of the Hubbard Communications Office, which maintained links with embryonic
Scientology groups in other countries (satellite churches had already been established in South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand).
Hubbard immediately took over the day-to-day running of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists
International, which was still operating from its dreary premises at 163 Holland Park Avenue,
although it had grown considerably in size. There was now a full-time staff of twenty auditors, most
of them young, like Cyril Vosper, who had been a nineteen-year-old biology student when he first
read about Dianetics and was a qualified professional auditor by the time he was twenty.
'I had no doubt that Hubbard's arrival in town was a historic event,' he recalled. 'I believed in him
totally, believed he was a genius and was convinced he knew a lot more about the human species
and the human condition than anyone else. The only reason I had any slight difficulty in accepting
that he was the world's greatest human being was that, to English eyes, he didn't look like a
Messiah. He used to wear very brash American clothes - loud check jackets and bootlace ties and
brothel-creepers. It wasn't quite the image we expected. But he gave a number of public lectures
around town and was interviewed by the media and was pretty well received. The newspapers at
that time were quite complimentary, they viewed him as an oddball who might just have come up
with something good.
'Ron presided over the staff meeting at the HASI at five o'clock every afternoon. It was all Christian
names at the HASI, everyone called him Ron, but there was no doubt he was absolutely in charge.
He wouldn't brook any other input: all the books were written by him, all the policy letters were
written by him. No one would ever question anything he said or wrote. I had read The History of Man
and I knew, as a biology student, that it was a load of bleeding nonsense but I explained it to myself
as an allegorical work. In any case, I could never have said to him, "Now listen, Ron, that's just not
true." No one would ever have done that.
'One of the things that began to worry me about Ron was that he was unpredictable. He could be