Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

His image as a family man was a pose, since he evinced little interest in his own children. Nibs
rarely managed to please his father and his sister, Catherine, then twenty-one, had started working
for the organization in Washington but saw little of Hubbard. She married a Scientologist in 1956
which would have pleased her father except he did not like the man; the marriage could not survive
his disapproval and she divorced in 1957. Hubbard made no attempts to see Alexis.
The same month as the Freedom Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency opened a file, No.
156409, on L. Ron Hubbard and his organization. CIA agents trawled through police, revenue,
credit and property records to try and unravel Hubbard's tangled corporate affairs. It was a task of
herculean difficulty, for the Church of Scientology was a cryptic maze of ad hoc corporations. The
printed notepaper of the Academy of Scientology gave only a hint of its labyrinthine structure - on the
left-hand side of the page was a list of no less than seventeen associated organizations, ranging
from the American Society for Disaster Relief to the Society of Consulting Ministers.
Agents traced a considerable amount of property owned either by Hubbard, his wife, son, or one of
the daunting number of 'churches' with which they were associated, but the report quickly became
bogged down in a tangle of names and addresses: 'The Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences
is currently engaged as a school for ministers of religion which at the present time possesses
approximately thirty to forty students. The entire course consists of $1500 to $1800 worth of actual
classroom studies . . . The public office is located at 1810-12 19th Street N.W. The corporations
rent the entire building . . .
'The Hubbard Guidance Center, located at 2315 15th Street, N.W., occupies the entire building
which consists of three floors and which was purchased by the SUBJECT Organization. The center
also rents farm property located somewhere along Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, on a
short-term lease. The center formerly operated a branch office at 8609 Flower Avenue, Silver
Spring, Maryland. In addition to the Silver Spring operation, the center has a working agreement
with the Founding Church of Scientology of New York, which holds classes at Studio 847, Carnegie
Hall, 154 West 57th Street, New York City. Churches of this denomination number in excess of one
hundred in the United States . . .'
One agent was assigned the thankless task of reading through all Hubbard's published work at the
Library of Congress in order to gain an 'insight' into Scientology. 'Hubbard's works', he noted
glumly, 'contain many words, the meaning of which are not made clear for lay comprehension and
perhaps purposely so.'
The District of Columbia Income Tax Division reported that the 'church' had applied for a licence to