Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

French and Arabic, the arrival of 'Operation and Transport Corporation Limited, International
Business Management' immediately attracted the attention of Howard D. Jones, the local American
consul general. He became even more interested a few days later when, at a party in Tangier, he
met a nervous American girl who admitted working for OTC but would say nothing about it. 'I am
here with a Panamanian corporation,' she said, 'but that is all I can tell you.'
Nothing could have been more calculated to prompt the consul to make further inquiries. He soon
made the connections between OTC, the 'mystery ship' Apollo and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of
Scientology, but he discovered very little more, to judge by a frustrated cable he despatched to
Washington on 26 April 1972: 'Little is known of the operations of Operation and Transport
Company here, and its officers are elusive about what it does. However, we presume that the
Scientologists aboard the Apollo and in Tangier do whatever it is that Scientologists do elsewhere.
'There have been rumours in town that Apollo is involved in drug or white slave traffic. However, we
doubt these reports . . . The stories about white slave traffic undoubtedly stem from the fact that
included among the crew of the Apollo are a large number of strikingly beautiful young ladies.
However, we are skeptical that a vessel that stands out like a sore thumb, in which considerable
interest is bound to be generated, and with a crew numbering in hundreds, would be a reasonable
vehicle for smuggling or white slaving.'[15]
The US consul, although he had no way of knowing it, was looking in the wrong direction. Very little
was happening on the ship that would have been of interest to Washington, but a great deal was
happening ashore. The Operation and Transport Corporation was relentlessly trying to make
inroads into Moroccan bureaucracy, undeterred by numerous setbacks. It acquired an inauspicious
foothold with a government contract to train post office administrators on the assurance that
Scientology techniques would accelerate their training, but the pilot project soon foundered. 'We
took half the students,' said Amos Jessup, 'while the other half were trained in the traditional way.
We spent a month trying to teach them certain study techniques but they got so anxious that the
others were forging ahead learning post office techniques that they walked out.'
Jessup, who spoke French, led OTC's next assault - on the Moroccan army. He and Peter Warren
made friends with a colonel in Rabat and demonstrated the E-meter to him. 'He was properly
amazed by it,' said Jessup, 'and arranged for us to give a presentation to a general who was said to
be a friend of the Minister of Defence and the right hand man of the King. We were taken to this
gigantic, luxurious house, where we did a few drills. The general said he was very interested and
would get back to us. We waited in a little apartment in Rabat the Sea Org had rented to us, but
didn't hear anything so went back to the ship. Shortly afterwards, the general led an unsuccessful
coup and committed suicide. We realized then that he wouldn't have passed word about the Emeter
to the King.'
Another OTC mission was having more success with the Moroccan secret police and started a
training course for senior policemen and intelligence agents, showing them how to use the Emeter
to detect political subversives. The Apollo, meanwhile, sailed for Lisbon for her re-fit and
Mary Sue and Ron moved into the Villa Laura in Tangier. Hubbard seemed strangely depressed;
Doreen Smith reported that he often talked about 'dropping his body', which was Scientology-speak
for dying.
Loyal wife that she was, Mary Sue took it upon herself to deal with one of the sources of her
husband's troubles - his estranged son, Nibs. After 'blowing the org' in 1959, fortune had not
smiled on Nibs. He had drifted from job to job, finding it ever more difficult to support his wife and
six children, and as the realization dawned that he would never be allowed back into Scientology,