That night, the architect of the coup was revealed: General Oufkir. It was announced that he had committed “suicide,” although his body was riddled with bullets.
The shaken king turned his attention to the Scientologists. He had long suspected that Scientology was a CIA front—a rumor that was spreading all over the Mediterranean. There was also gossip that the Apollo was involved in drug trafficking and prostitution, or that it was part of a pornography ring. In December 1972, the Scientologists were expelled from the country, leaving a trail of confusion and recrimination behind them.6
PAULETTE COOPER WAS studying comparative religion for a summer at Harvard in the late 1960s when she became interested in Scientology, which was gaining attention. “A friend came to me and said he had joined Scientology and discovered he was Jesus Christ,” she recalled. She decided to go undercover to see what the church was about. “I didn’t like what I saw,” she said. The Scientologists she encountered seemed to be in a kind of trance. When she looked into the claims that the church was making, she found many of them false or impossible to substantiate. “I lost my parents in Auschwitz,” Cooper said, explaining her motivation in deciding to write about Scientology at a time when there had been very little published and those who criticized the church came under concentrated legal and personal attacks. A slender, soft-spoken woman, Cooper published her first article in Queen, a British magazine, in 1970. “I got death threats,” she said. The church filed suit against her. She refused to be silent. “I thought if, in the nineteen-thirties people had been more outspoken, maybe my parents would have lived.” The following year, Cooper published a book, The Scandal of Scientology, that broadly attacked the teachings of Hubbard, revealing among other things that Hubbard had misrepresented his credentials and that defectors claimed to have been financially ripped off and harassed if they tried to speak out.
Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and Sara Hubbard’s daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that Alexis bring substantial identification to prove who she was, but when she opened the door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled, twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron and Sara’s marriage certificate.
Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her for four days. He identified himself as an FBI agent and said he had several pages of a letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It was clearly written by Hubbard. “Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to fire Sara because she was a “street-walker” and a Nazi spy. “In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie,” the letter continues. “She turned up destitute and pregnant.” Out of the goodness of his heart, Hubbard said, he had taken Sara in, to see her “through her trouble.” Weirdly, the letter was signed, “Your good friend, J. Edgar Hoover.”
After The Scandal of Scientology, Cooper’s life turned into a nightmare. She was followed; her phone was tapped; she was sued nineteen times. Her name and telephone number were written on the stalls in public men’s rooms. One day, when Cooper was out of town, her cousin, who was staying in her New York apartment, opened the door for a delivery from a florist. The deliveryman took a gun from the bouquet, put it to her temple, and pulled the trigger. When the gun didn’t fire, he attempted to strangle her. Cooper’s cousin screamed and the assailant fled. Cooper then moved to an apartment building with a doorman, but soon after that her three hundred neighbors received letters saying that she was a prostitute with venereal disease who molested children. A woman impersonating Cooper voiced threats against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford at a Laundromat, while a Scientologist who happened to be present notified the FBI. Two members from the Guardian’s office broke into Cooper’s psychiatrist’s office and stole her files, then sent copies to her adoptive parents. Cooper was charged with mailing bomb threats to the Church of Scientology. In the courtroom, the prosecutor produced a threatening letter with her fingerprint on it, and Cooper fainted. (Later, she remembered signing a petition, which may have had a blank page underneath it.) In May 1973, Cooper was indicted by the US Attorney’s office for mailing the threats and then lying about it before the grand jury.