> On the morning of November 1, the day before the meeting, a GO agent, Hermann, broke into the conference room and plugged the device into an electrical outlet. This device, in turn, then transmitted a signal on an FM frequency, which was picked up and recorded by Scientologists sitting in a car in the parking lot of the Smithsonian, which faced the office. After the meeting Hermann removed the device, and the taped recording of the meeting was sent to Los Angeles.
That would make a great movie. I'd cast Tom Cruise as Hermann. Travolta could be the one in the car.
I know that Scientology has historically had a lot of influence in the entertainment industry. But I feel like that has seriously waned since its peak in the 1970's or 80's, so I'm surprised you don't see more of these episodes turned into movies or TV series.
They're seizing it now still in a way, via legal means. They've been purchasing everything they can get their hands on in downtown Clearwater for at least a few years now.
From a person I talked to, so take with a grain of salt, the plan was to make the area uninteresting as to buy up even more that comes up for sale.
That's what I've heard from friends in the area. The downtown is dead and full of Scientologists, so people don't go there much anymore, so shops close and they buy them. Rinse and repeat.
Near-Clearwater here. There's absolutely no reason to go there at night unless you're Sea Org (easily identifiable by the vests they wear that make them look like hotel staff). There's no nightlife aside from one restaurant at the south end. If you make too much noise (ie screaming "You're in a cult! You can leave and get help!"), a white van will be dispatched and follow you for several miles. Some of the buildings are vacant, some contain Narconon-style substance counseling groups that 'help' you by introducing you to Dianetics. All in all, kind of otherworldly, but mostly boring.
Also, one hundred percent chance they're reading this.
Watching alt.religion.scientology in 1993 was very much like ogling a road accident. It was so weird how the adherents would attack the people that were leaking their church secrets - they literally had a playbook to follow - I guess there just modern public relations now.
Speaking of leaking secrets, Operation Clambake[1] was perhaps the most formative early-internet website I visited in my youth. Examining secrets and mysteries of another religion was crucial to turning that lens inward and examining my own religious upbringing and eventual atheism.
I don't think it's controversial to state that early internet had the same effect on many others as well.
I am regularly confounded by the existence of scientology; are cults just that popular? Are people really so easily duped? Is this all a social experiment that's gotten way out of hand?
When talking about cults, I'd rather shift the description of the target demographic from "gullible" to "desperate" and "vulnerable". Many people don't get an upbringing that produces a self-sustained, emotionally mature adult, many are isolated, are riddled with overbearing negative feelings like loneliness and abandonment. Otherwise not necessarily gullible people are willing to look away if they get what they really want, and these negative feelings make one really want for example human connections, and a part in a structure.
I'm deliberately writing this in this abstract level, because it's not just cults who get their members like this. Extremists employ the same tactics, as does the military, many influencers, self-help as an industry, and even a lot of cheating in relationship happens for the same reason.
The takeaway, I think, is that these bad things happen to normal humans, same as everybody. And the second one is that it really pays off for the individual to look inside, so that nothing festers unchecked. Many of the funny things happen in the dark corner where we're not willing to look.
Plenty of educated and well being people are religious so this is a mix of gullible, desperate, adverse to logical thinking, lazy, ...
I do not blame religious people, though. It is easier to be a believer and have pre-made and comfortable ideas about why you are here and what will happen after you dire than to think that you have a mix of happiness and despair in your life and then it's over.
Lazy is another descriptor that I'm wary of, similar to "gullible" [0]. These are great shortcuts when we want to distance us from somebody, but they are unhelpful when trying to understand behavior, individual scale or society scale.
It's a struggle for me, though, so at the end of the day I'm a mix of judgmental feelings and some conscious empathy. I have learned that when I shut down curiosity with judgment, then I get no further in the topic, but I have strong feelings too, against religion in general for example. Organized religion has not been doing a good job at being morally superior or supportive of the people, despite this being on the forefront of the organizations. Turns out that they behave exactly like how other power structures do, and even if they give some existential comfort at all, they take a lot in return.
Your other point is also well worth of consideration. Being educated doesn't mean that one is not susceptible to whatever false narrative, be that a cult's teachings, or the flat earth movement. It turns out that life is complicated, and just because people are good at one part of it, they can suck at another. It's like many of the facets of life don't have any "cross-talk" at all, you have to pay attention to all of them and "level them up" independently.
And yeah, taking a pre-made idea is pretty attractive, instead of having to deal with all of this all the time. We don't create our food from scratch either, after all.
There are only tens of thousands of members[1]. That's comparable to the viewership of a popular Twitch streamer (there's a joke about differing business models in here somewhere...). If you're genuinely interested in the rise and fall of Scientology and have a half-hour to spare, I can recommend [2], and other videos in that series examining fringe religions.
I've seen my share of docu-minis about them - for better or worse I spent an amount of time on the 'chans back when the whole thing with 'anonymous vs scientology' all kicked off, which is partly why I'm so confounded by its apparent success; at risk of setting off some automoderation or angering xyz group - scientology feels more obviously culty and bs than the other bs cults, but people readily (literally) buy into it wholesale
It's probably more a desire to be part of a group, alongside shared ideological values, than genuine belief. I also think they have pretty attractive subtle recruiting techniques. Across the street from my university they were giving free real IQ tests out near 24/7. That gets lots of people in the door, and if you scored highly they offered quite lucrative (by university side-job standards) positions. That's more than enough to offer an overall quite positive impression, and probably netted them more than a few otherwise quite intelligent individuals who, some fraction of, likely went on to become full-on members.
Cults give actual benefits which is why they are hard to quit. They give a feeling of love and a feeling of being wanted by others, of belonging. The recruitment strategies for young people are often around this kind of enveloping loving community.
Its emotional not rational.
As another sibling comment says, it's how radical and terrorist politics works too. Emotional need for belonging.
Also there is a reinforcement loop where the outside says "you are wrong" and inside they say "the outside hates us".
Yes, people are easily duped. Some of them are lonely and eagerly accept whatever church will take care about them. To feel like you are a part of something more, to feel that your life has a meaning.
Also it is much easier to accept views of the skilled salesman than think by yourself.
It's a private club completely separate from the rest of the world, while still residing in it. I don't think they care if any of that stuff is really true, its all about the dynamics of being part of a controversy but going back to the safety of the group. What baffles me is why famous people would join. It's a stretch but I can only guess it's to be part of an exclusive social club they get to control, without the risk of morally alienating their fan base ("$FamousGuy says he's Christian but then did $badThing").
Famous people are as broken and needy as anyone else. Fame doesn't bring some kind of vaccination nor give them access to VIP external protection agencies. Becoming famous isn't a proxy for intelligence or emotional resilience, as much as many think that they should be role models. Cults give real benefits to people.
They are as susceptible to manipulation tactics too.
At this point, recruitment is pretty much dead. Scientology was only able to exist in the pre-internet era. Their tactics, by definition, cannot change with the times as any deviation from "source" is considered blasphemy.
At this point any "new" members are going to be mainly made up of people born into it, or without internet access.
It works on blackmail. You get an 'audit' and they hold it over you for life, implying buying the next level will free you when it just locks you in more. Eventually sunk cost, and the loss of family and social life are the prison, and your soul is gone.
Actually, if you look at the Talk and History pages, it's pretty tame. The edit protection of course helps a lot.
If you want to see a page receiving constant drive-by editing and people who flat out ignore warnings because "they know better", look at the page for Electrocution [0], which has a terrible recurring war about whether it just means death, or death and (severe) injury.
instead of wiki begging for funds, they should hold yearly supreme-court style argument about controversial topics. For electrocution, let's have 9 "justices", all professors in english, medicine, and electrical engineering/physics. Each side presents their arguments, judges publish their opinions, charge broadcast rights, make it a media event.
See also the comedy "Bowfinger" with Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy.
Martin, the writer, changed the name of the cult in the script from "Scientology" to "Mind-Head" to avoid legal action, but the script depicts and skewers how fully the cult wants to control the lives of its brainwashed members.
Theres an apartment complex I pass by sometimes that has huge buses with “FLAG” written on them going back and forth from “Flag Building” in Clearwater constantly. The buses are operating at like 3am sometimes. I wonder what they are doing.
> As early as 1960, L. Ron Hubbard had proposed that Scientologists should infiltrate government departments by taking secretarial, bodyguard or other jobs.
What similar situation can you think of doing the same but based on ideologues and targeting primarily universities?
They are really successful with that, aren't they? But by mentioning The Long March through the institutions, OP hinted at the liberal, left intellectual elite.
> It was one of the largest infiltrations of the United States government in history
Really? There isn't a single group of people more motivated than the Scientologists who've tried to infiltrate the US government?
The US government is the most powerful institution in human history. It controls more money in a year than the totality of almost every other individual country's annual GDP. It can kill billions of people in a couple of hours. The power here is staggering.
And the Scientologists with 5k agents is one of the most serious attempt at getting into the guts of that and corrupting it? Seems unlikely, somehow. I'd suggest that the Scientologists were just crazy enough that the conspiracy was unwound. US federal politicians have a totally reasonable and expected corruption problem; this probably isn't one of the most major attempts. The US army routinely purges countries, purging unfavourable records is just so small-biscuits it is hard to believe.
>There isn't a single group of people more motivated than the Scientologists
Motivated maybe, but nation state actors have a much harder time. The WSJ just ran an article yesterday about how difficult it is for the US to rebuild espionage networks in China after a relatively large bust a decade ago[1].
The Soviet Illegals program never included that many people, it's fiendishly difficult to get people into influential positions of a hostile government. It's much easier for a cult who has access to tons of already citizens to just get a job somewhere. I mean, with all the religious protections, they could do it half openly almost. Case in point, the fact that Scientology still exists as an entity despite all these bizarre operations probably wouldn't work for many other actors
While anything is possible, hypothetically speaking, if the US had rebuilt their spy network quite quickly (or it wasn't hit that badly) what would you expect to see? I draw your attention to the fact that the WSJ is not, in fact, a reliable guide to the US clandestine programs. We might even expect the US officials to lie and claim that their spy networks are disrupted as a convenient form of misdirection.
The game theory suggests that at almost literally no point should countries want their papers trumpeting that their foreign spy networks are extensive, robust and well established to the point where they survived an attempt at disruption. Especially if that were true.
That's very true. In general, any information coming out more or less directly from a secret agency, from any state, can only be trusted to mean "the agency wants this message to be heard". It is absurd to believe public statements by people who are paid to hide the truth. Their motivation for stating something is never going to be "because that is true" (even when it is!), it is always calculated.
And it's pretty clear that the WP doesn't have its own operatives monitoring US intelligence and Chinese counter-intelligence inside China. So they're getting their information directly from US intelligence (or, very unlikely, from Chinese intelligence).
The thing is, the US government has a large security apparatus that is actively trying to prevent and discover foreign influence, and there are explicit laws requiring them, and other agencies, to do so.
In contrast, preventing individuals to infiltrate the government based on religion is entirely illegal, and there are good chances no one high up in the intelligence community even thought of the danger of Scientology before this was discovered.
Preventing people from participating in government based on their religion is illegal, but Scientology's aim is subversion, which the government correctly guards against. Normally religions brazenly reach for government control in board daylight so it's easy to respond. Scientology's convert infiltration tactics were fairly novel and so caught a lot of people off guard.
Yes yes, I'm not saying the government illegally acted against this infiltration.
Just that, because of the protected status of religion, it was much harder for the government to use the same mechanisms it uses against foreign nationals attempting similar things. So, even though Scientology has nowhere near the levels of motivation and resources as China or the USSR did, it was far easier for them to conduct such an operation (before they were caught once).
It doesn’t have to be a nation to count as an infiltration. My guess would be that both the drug cartels and the weapon manufacturers are highly motivated to infiltrate the executive and law making functions of the USA.
> this probably isn't one of the most major attempts
Perhaps one of the most major failed attempts. Also do we have to think about what groups might be most able to go undetected while infiltrating the IRS?
It’s possible. You have to have a lot of US citizen operatives to be able to pull off an infiltration and though places like China have the resources to pull it off (and probably do), it’s not all that easy.
Not realated to any current, past, or future conflict. Still, to any non-American it is mind-numbing, and even moreso that so few Americans apparently even notice it
That would make a great movie. I'd cast Tom Cruise as Hermann. Travolta could be the one in the car.