Operation Freakout, also known as Operation PC Freakout, was a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital. The plan, undertaken in 1976 following years of church-initiated lawsuits and covert harassment, was meant to eliminate the perceived threat that Cooper posed to the church and obtain revenge for her publication in 1971 of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered documentary evidence of the plot and the preceding campaign of harassment during an investigation into the Church of Scientology in 1977, eventually leading to the church compensating Cooper in an out-of-court settlement.
Background
Cooper, a freelance journalist and author, had begun researching Scientology in 1968 and wrote a critical article on the church for the British magazine Queen (now Harper's Bazaar) in 1969. The church promptly sued for libel, adding Queen to the dozens of British publications that it had already sued.
Undeterred, Cooper expanded her article into a full-length book, The Scandal of Scientology: A chilling examination of the nature, beliefs and practices of the "now religion"; it was published by Tower Publications, Inc. of New York in the summer of 1971. The church responded by suing her in December 1971, demanding $300,000 for "untrue, libelous and defamatory statements about the Church."
1972–1976: Operations Daniel and Dynamite
Cooper was seen as a high-priority target by the church's Guardian's Office, which acted as a combination of intelligence agency, legal office and public relations bureau for the church. As early as February 29, 1972, the church's third most senior official, Jane Kember, sent a directive to Terry Milner, the Deputy Guardian for Intelligence United States (DGIUS), instructing him to collect information about Paulette Cooper so that she could be "handled". In response, Milner ordered his subordinates to "attack her in as many ways as possible" and undertake "wide-scale exposure of PC's sex life", a plan which was named Operation Daniel.
Cooper counter-sued on March 30, 1972, demanding $15.4million in damages for the ongoing harassment. However, the church stepped up the harassment, for instance painting her name and phone number on street walls so that she would receive obscene phone calls, and subscribing her to pornographic mailing lists. She also received anonymous death threats and her neighbors received letters claiming that she had a venereal disease.
In December 1972, the church launched a new attack called Operation Dynamite, an attempt to frame Cooper for supposedly making bomb threats against the Church of Scientology. That month, a woman ostensibly soliciting funds for United Farm Workers stole a quantity of stationery from Cooper's apartment. A few days later, the New York Church of Scientology "received" two anonymous bomb threats. The following May, Cooper was indicted for making the bomb threats and arraigned for a federal grand jury. The threats had been written on her stationery, which was marked with her fingerprints.
The charges were eventually dropped in 1975 with the filing of a nolle prosequi order by the local US Attorney's office, but it was not until the fall of 1977 that the FBI discovered that the bomb threats had been staged by the Guardian's Office. A contemporary memorandum sent between two Guardian's Office staff noted on a list of jobs successfully accomplished: "Conspired to entrap Mrs. Lovely into being arrested for a felony which she did not commit. She was arraigned for the crime."
The church sued Cooper again in 1975 in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia in 1976.
The church itself imported Cooper's books into foreign countries for the express purpose of suing her in jurisdictions where the libel laws were stricter than in the United States.
1976: Operation Freakout
In the spring of 1976, the Guardian's Office leadership decided to initiate an operation with the aim "To get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks." The planning document, dated April 1, 1976, declared the aim to be "[t]o remove PC from her position of power so that she cannot attack the C of S ."
In its initial form Operation Freakout consisted of three different plans (or "channels", as the Guardian's Office termed them), tailored to implicate her by her Jewish descent: