Safe Environment Fund
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The Safe Environment Fund was a Scientology front organization, a forerunner of the International Association of Scientologists, and formed in 1978 in the Finance Bureau of the Church's Guardian's Office World Wide, which was located at Saint Hill, England. Herbie "Jack" Parkhouse, the deputy Guardian for Finance WW, supervised this enterprise.
The purpose of the Safe Environment Fund was to raise money to defend criminally indicted Scientology executives of the Guardian's Office who were involved in Operation Snow White, the largest incident of private domestic espionage in the history of the United States. Under this program, Scientology operatives committed infiltration, wiretapping, and theft of documents in government offices, most notably those of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Eleven highly placed Church executives, including Mary Sue Hubbard (wife of founder L. Ron Hubbard and second in command of the organization), pleaded guilty or were convicted in federal court. The case was United States vs. Mary Sue Hubbard et al., 1979.
Reportedly, the true purpose of the SEF was never acknowledged or announced at any of the fund-raising events, whose donors thought they were contributing to a patrotic group promoting the U.S. Constitution, despite the fact the organization was based in the UK It was not a tax-exempt charity.
According to Stacy Brooks, a former Scientologist, while she was a member of the Lisa McPherson Trust:
"To raise money for their defense, the Guardian's Office created a new organization called the Safe Environment Fund, or SEF. Everyone was told that the purpose of SEF was to create a War Chest to fight Scientology's enemies.
There were big SEF briefings and all the public Scientologists had to donate tremendous amounts of money to defend the GO execs. At that time the people in charge of the global conspiracy to destroy Scientology were not Bob Minton, the German government and the LMT. Back then the U.S. government -- particularly the FBI -- was in charge of it. (That was before the IRS rolled over and gave Scientology its tax exemption and the U.S. government became Scientology's most ardent defender.)
The money collected by SEF was used to cover the costs of all the dirty tricks Scientology carried out to try (unsuccessfully) to derail the criminal case against Mary Sue et al. A private investigator named Dick Bast, for example, was hired to set up the judge in the case, Judge Ritchey, with a prostitute to destroy his career. The set-up worked beautifully, and Judge Ritchey had to remove himself from the case. An article ran in one of Scientology's internal publications proclaiming what a big win this was for Scientology's expansion on the planet." [1]
After guilty verdicts and sentencing of the defendants occurred in December 1979, the SEF was quietly phased out of existence in 1982.
[edit] References
- Testimony of Ginger Ross Breggin (February 3, 1994)
- The Barnes Letters (XenuTV)
- Reasons to Picket — Where does the money go? (Markus Grahn, alt.religion.scientology, 11 July 1999)
