During the continual process of Dianetics research, both as an auditor and as an observer of other auditors, Mr. Hubbard naturally came into contact with a wide variety of cases. And, it was inevitable that these would include those who had been in the hands of psychiatrists closely allied to the intelligence community.
Thus it came about, fully twenty-five years before the facts were made public by Congress, that Mr. Hubbard was the first to announce and decry government mind manipulation programs. Eventually, of course, these and other revelations of Central Intelligence Agency criminality would entirely reshape public perception of this group of spies from a patriotic and somewhat glamorous image to that of a rogue agency of dirty tricksters, with its own citizens as victims.
The vehicle was his 1951 book Science of Survival, and in it he described in no uncertain terms the combined use of pain, drugs and hypnosis as a behavioral modification technique of the worst kind. It was, he said, so extensively used in espionage work, it was long past the time people should have become alarmed about it. It had taken Dianetic auditing to discover the widespread existence of these brainwashing techniques, and, he added, the only saving grace was that Dianetics could undo their effects.
With such covert government activity so openly addressed by Mr. Hubbard and Dianeticists, he had compounded his “crime”: In his first book, he offended psychiatrists; in his second, the intelligence community. That the two, already closely connected, should now draw even closer in the common effort to stop him, was not surprising. What was surprising was the velocity and frequency of subsequent attacks. By the mid-1950s, as we shall see, at least half a dozen Federal agencies were brought into the effort to suppress Dianetics and its assault on the mental health field, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“You would have thought that at the very least I was inciting whole populations to revolt and governments to fall,” a slightly bemused Mr. Hubbard later wrote of these events. “All I really was doing was trying to tell man he could be happy, that there was a road out of suffering and that he could attain his goals.”
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