Operation Freakout - Exposure and Aftermath

Exposure and Aftermath

Ultimately, Operation Freakout was never put into effect. On June 11, 1976, two Scientology agents—Michael Meisner and Gerald Bennett Wolfe—were caught in the act of committing attempted burglary at a courthouse in Washington, D.C. as part of the Guardian’s Office’s ongoing Operation Snow White. The Guardian’s Office was preoccupied for the next year with attempts to hush up the scandal, even going to the lengths of kidnapping Meisner and holding him incommunicado to prevent him from testifying. The Church sought to bring a quick end to the dispute with Cooper in December 1976 when it proposed to settle with her, on condition that she was not to republish or comment on The Scandal of Scientology and agree to assign the book’s copyright to the Church of Scientology of California.

On July 8, 1977, however, the FBI raided Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., seizing over 48,000 documents. They revealed the extent to which the Church had committed “criminal campaigns of vilification, burglaries and thefts ... against private and public individuals and organizations,” as the U.S. Government prosecutor put it. The documents were later released to the public, enabling Cooper and the world at large to learn about the details of Operation Freakout.

Although in the end nobody was brought to justice for the harassment of Cooper, the wider campaign of criminal activity was successfully prosecuted by the United States Government. Mary Sue Hubbard, Jane Kember, Henning Heldt, Morris Budlong, Duke Snider, Dick Weigand, Greg Willardson, Mitchell Hermann and Cindy Raymond were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of theft, burglary, conspiracy, and other crimes. With the exception of Kember and Budlong, the defendants agreed to uncontested stipulation of the evidence. Kember and Budlong were convicted separately after being extradited from the United Kingdom. All of the defendants were imprisoned, serving up to four years in jail. Coincidentally, they were tried, convicted and sentenced in the same courthouse that their agents had been caught robbing.

The Church of Scientology filed at least 19 lawsuits against Cooper throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which Cooper considered part of “a typical Scientology dirty-tricks campaign” and which Cooper’s attorney Michael Flynn said was motivated by L. Ron Hubbard’s declaration that the purpose of a lawsuit was to “harass and discourage”. Cooper discontinued her legal actions against Scientology in 1985 after receiving an out-of-court settlement.