Operation Snow White: Scientology's Infiltration of the U.S. Government

The Story

This one starts in a law library, at night, with a suspicious librarian. On May 21, 1976, according to a federal appeals court, the night librarian at the D.C. Bar Association library in the U.S. Courthouse in Washington saw two men come in and then use the photocopier in the U.S. Attorney's Office. They came back a week later. He called the U.S. Attorney's office, which called the FBI.

On June 11 the men returned, and two FBI agents asked for ID. Each produced what looked like an official IRS identification card. One said 'Thomas Blake.' The other said 'John M. Foster.' The agents let them go. Three days later, the FBI realized the man with the Blake card was not the real Thomas Blake.

The order, according to the appeals court, 'called for an all-out attack on the Internal Revenue Service.'

On June 30, an agent happened to spot 'Blake' in a hallway of the IRS National Office Building. This time he showed an IRS card in his real name, Gerald Bennett Wolfe, and was arrested. Wolfe told prosecutors a story about meeting a stranger in a Georgetown bar who taught him legal research, and about making the fake IDs on a 'drunken lark.' The prosecutor, the court notes dryly, 'did not believe this story and he told Wolfe so.'

The real story came out a year later, when 'Foster' turned himself in. He was Michael Meisner, who had been the Church of Scientology's Assistant Guardian for Information in Washington. According to the court's summary of his statement, which documents later seized by the FBI confirmed, it went back to early 1974. That was when Guardian Order 1361, issued by Guardian World-Wide Jane Kember in England, 'called for an all-out attack on the Internal Revenue Service,' including lawsuits, a public relations assault, and 'infiltration of IRS by agents of Scientology.'

Wolfe was recruited and by November 1974 was working at the IRS as a clerk-typist. On November 1, 1974, according to the court, a Scientology operative and a technician from Los Angeles slipped into the IRS building and 'placed a listening device in a conference room' that was about to host a high-level IRS meeting on Scientology. They taped the meeting.

Then came the after-hours visits. The court describes repeated nighttime entries into IRS offices, and later into the Justice Department's Tax Division, to copy files on Scientology and send them to the Guardian's Office in Los Angeles. Meisner and Wolfe broke into the IRS identification room and made themselves fake ID cards. A Scientologist got a job as personal secretary to the Justice Department lawyer handling the church's lawsuit against INTERPOL, and took documents from his files.

The trail led to an assistant U.S. attorney's office behind the courthouse library. Wolfe, the court says, spotted a secretary's keys on her desk, had four of them copied at a locksmith, then dropped the originals in the hallway so she would think they had fallen from her purse. On May 21 and May 28, 1976, the pair copied stacks of files on the U.S. Attorney's own machines. That was the photocopying the librarian saw.

After the FBI encounter, the court says, Meisner went into hiding in California, shaved his mustache and had his hair cut and dyed. When he later wanted to go back and face the charges, he was placed under 24-hour guard and on one occasion was 'handcuffed and gagged.' In June 1977 he called federal prosecutors and surrendered.

On July 8, 1977, the FBI executed search warrants at Scientology premises in Washington and Hollywood. One item on the warrant list was a Guardian Order 'generally identified as "Snow White,"' the name that has stuck to the whole affair. On August 15, 1978, a grand jury returned a twenty-eight-count indictment.

The defendants agreed to be judged on a stipulated record. Mary Sue Hubbard, wife of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000. Other officials received prison terms of up to five years. On October 2, 1981, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed. Operation Snow White is not a theory. It is a closed federal case.