Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

IF THE RUMORS about Hubbard were true—that he had created a religion only in order to get rich—he had long since accomplished that goal. One of his disaffected lieutenants later claimed that Hubbard had admitted to “an insatiable lust for power and money.” He hectored his adherents on this subject. “MAKE MONEY,” he demanded in a 1972 policy letter. “MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY.” In order to siphon money into Hubbard’s personal accounts, a number of front organizations were established, including the Religious Research Foundation, which was incorporated in Liberia. In the mid-seventies that single foundation had an account in Switzerland containing more than $300 million. At one point, panicked that Switzerland was going to make a change in its tax laws, Hubbard ordered his medical officer, Kima Douglas, to move those funds from Switzerland to Lichtenstein. She described stacks of cash sitting in the bank vault, mostly hundred-dollar bills, four feet high and three to four feet wide, one pile in Hubbard’s name, the other in the church’s. “Church’s was bigger but his was big too,” she told Hubbard’s biographer Russell Miller. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., remembered shoeboxes full of money in his father’s closet. He later testified that Hubbard habitually kept “great chunks of cash” within easy reach, “so that if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.”