Willis Carto archive

Including information about his associates

More Lies from The SPOTLIGHT — October 26, 1998


IHR Update: Secret Coup Inside Scientology

October 15, 1998

IHR UPDATE is a temporary and irregular feature for SPOTLIGHT readers interested in facts surrounding the ongoing controversy resulting from the bizarre takeover of the Institute for Historical Review.

The story of the takeover of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) has been bizarre from the start.

Now, eye-opening new evidence has emerged pointing further toward a secret alliance between the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Church of Scientology that led to the evisceration of the IHR and the ongoing campaign to destroy Liberty Lobby that evolved from the coup that wrecked the IHR.

It turns out that Los Angeles attorney, Lawrence Heller, who served as chief counsel for Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein’s ADL-backed lawsuit against the IHR and Liberty Lobby in a Los Angeles courtroom is more than just another high-priced lawyer.

Heller is actually one of the secret behind-the-scenes controllers of the Church of Scientology for what can best be described as forces unknown. Here’s the story.

On September 19, 1991 Heller and his client, Mermelstein, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Liberty Lobby’s attorney, Mark Lane, who put Mermelstein’s 10-year long legal assault on Liberty lobby to rest.

Mermelstein and Heller threw in the towel after Judge Stephen Lachs ruled against them on all of the key elements of their case. This happened just one day after Heller publicly threatened Lane with violence for having dismantled their client’s case before Judge Lachs.

Although at that time Liberty Lobby knew that Mermelstein was being backed by the ADL, it wasn't until some years later, well after the 1993 coup e'tat that led to the destruction of the IHR, that Liberty Lobby learned of Heller’s association with the Church of Scientology. Liberty Lobby discovered (in 1996) that just prior to taking on Mermelstein’s case Heller had unsuccessfully represented the Church of Scientology in a high-profile case in which the church had been sued by a group of dissident former members who won a major judgment against Scientology.

This was deemed significant since Liberty Lobby had already determined that there had been a secret pact between the ADL and the Church of Scientology to destroy the IHR from within: Specifically, the ADL used its considerable clout in official Washington to arrange for the IRS to grant a highly lucrative tax exemption to Scientology — something that Scientology (under its founder L. Ron Hubbard) had been unsuccessfully seeking for years.

Thus, by no coincidence, on Oct. 1, 1993, the very day that the IRS granted the much-wanted tax exemption to Scientology, Scientologist Tom Marcellus (until then, the trusted longtime office manager of the IHR) sent a letter to Willis Carto advising the IHR founder that his (Carto’s) relationship with the IHR had been terminated and demanding that Carto turn over all of the assets and records of the IHR’s parent company to Marcellus and his co-conspirators, Mark Weber, Ted O’Keefe and secret Scientologist Greg Raven.

It just so happens that the initial arrangements between Scientology and the IRS were set in motion in 1991, less than one month after Scientology lawyer Lawrence Heller had been defeated by Liberty Lobby in the Mermelstein case.

The IRS Commissioner who laid the groundwork for the Scientology tax exemption was Fred Goldberg, a law partner of Kenneth Bialkin, long­time national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, in the Wall Street firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, long known as the ADLs primary legal arm.

During the Mermelstein case neither of the two IHR staff members at the time who were open Scientologists (Tom Marcellus and Michelle Matteau) ever mentioned Heller’s connection to their church, which of course, would have been an obvious red flag to Willis Carto and others that there was much more to the Mermelstein case than was apparent.

From the start, Marcellus, who maintained many Scientology connections in the Los Angeles area and who was especially active in the church, could not have failed to know precisely who Heller was, particularly because of the high-profile nature of the Scientology case in which Heller had been involved. (See side­bar on page 21.)

When The SPOTLIGHT first published the details regarding Heller’s ties to Scientology on March 4, 1996, Marcellus, Mark Weber and others who had staged the coup at the IHR tried to ridicule the idea that this pointed to any involvement by Scientology in the IHR affair.

What Liberty Lobby has now learned is this: Not only had Heller been associated with the Church of Scientology since at least 1982 — ­some nine years prior to his role in Mermelstein’s ADL-backed assault on Liberty Lobby and the IHR — but, in fact, the ubiquitous Mr. Heller is part of a small clique that secretly took control of the Church of Scientology upon the disappearance of L. Ron Hubbard and which now directs the church’s affairs from behind the scenes.

What makes this all the more bizarre is that neither Heller, nor all but one of his associates in the ruling clique, are apparently even followers of the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.

Based upon evidence that is now being circulated by Hubbard loyalists (who reject the new secret Scientology leadership), here’s what happened.

In May of 1981, shortly after Hubbard disappeared from public view, Heller’s then-law partner, Sherman Lenske, popped up and claimed to be Hubbard’s personal attorney.

Less than two months later, Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, was overthrown from her position as controller, where she held control over the corporate structure of Scientology, as well as over the copyrights of her husband’s voluminous writings and various trademarks relating to the conduct of church affairs.

In the months that followed, the entire corporate empire governing Scientology was restructured.

The most significant of the changes took place on May 28, 1983, when Lenske and his inner circle (including Heller) set up the Church of Spiritual Technology (CST) which, ultimately came into control of all intellectual property that L. Ron Hubbard and Mary Sue Hubbard had ever owned or controlled.

(In a 1992 U.S. Court of Claims ruling, Sherman Lenske had been named as one of the special directors of the CST, along with his brother Stephen, who, along with Heller, had been his law partner, and Heller himself.)

One of Lenske’s other partners in the founding of the CST was Meade Emory, who served as an attorney for the Joint Committee on Taxation for Congress from 1970 to 1972 and then, from 1975 to 1977, served as assistant to the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. It was during the period that Emory served at the IRS that an IRS employee named Gerald Wolfe was stealing IRS documents and passing them on to Scientology’s Guardian Office that was under the control of Mrs. Mary Sue Hubbard.

Then, several years later, when the theft of the documents was unveiled, it played a major part in the overthrow of Mrs. Hubbard (who was prosecuted and held responsible) and led to the ultimate power grab by Emory, Lenske, Heller and the others in the CST inner circle. When the flamboyant and all-powerful Scientology leader L. Ron Hubbard disappeared, the Lenske-Heller group moved in and grabbed control of the foundation of the Scientology movement and now command the lucrative publishing rights to the prolific Hubbard’s writings that are sold (at fantastically high prices) to devoted Scientology students worldwide.

Many Hubbard loyalists (who have since left Scientology) claim that the new controllers of the Hubbard literary legacy have actually altered Hubbard’s writings, although for what end we can only speculate.

Ironically, it appears that upon Hubbard’s disappearance (and reported death in 1986) coupled with Mrs. Hubbard’s overthrow following a tenacious Justice Department prosecution, the Church of Scientology fell victim to a coup d'etat orchestrated by outside forces with an interest in gaining control of Scientology, its vast wealth and its wide-ranging global power network.

Then, as is now clear, Scientologists (including Tom Marcellus) were manipulated by their new controllers (including Heller) into playing a part in the subsequent coup at the IHR.

Former high-ranking American diplomat Stephen Koczak (who had been stationed in Israel) privately told The SPOTLIGHT in 1994 that, according to his sources, Scientology had been taken over by Israel’s Mossad, in conjunction with elements of the CIA. So it does appear that Heller and his group were those involved in the takeover.

And bear in mind that Scientology (which is mind control in its classic form) would be of special interest to both the CIA and the Mossad.

Although the CIA’s infamous mind control experiments have been widely publicized, what is largely suppressed is that they were conducted under the supervision of James J. Angleton, the Israeli loyalist who headed the Mossad liaison desk at the CIA. Several scientists linked to these mind control operations were associated with Scientology.

CULT MEMBERS

Through controlling cults, intelligence agencies such as the CIA and Mossad can utilize cult members to infiltrate a wide variety of political groups, research institutes, banks, etc. As a process of the so-called brainwashing they've undergone, cult members do the bidding of their controllers.

When the CIA and Mossad controllers decide to carry out some particular intelligence operation — such as taking over a targeted organization — they are then able to use their cult members who are in place within those groups.

This is what happened within the IHR. One secret and two open members of the Church of Scientology who were employed by the IHR were used in the conspiracy to take over the IHR. The plot not only thickens, but it comes full circle.

There is now absolutely no question not only that the Church of Scientology did play a role in the IHR affair but also that even the church itself has fallen into the hands of those who actually have others' not-so-noble interests at heart.

Although many initially doubted that Scientology was linked to the seizure of the IHR, the remarkable facts that are now emerging shed a stark new light on what really happened to the revisionist movement and why.

Insider Played Key Role in IHR Debacle

Tom Marcellus, one of the employees who played a major role in the coup at the IHR, was so entrenched in Scientology that for some 10 consecutive years he spent his annual vacations at Scientology headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, taking Scientology courses for which he paid vast donations to the church.

He worked so diligently to advance himself in the church and endear himself to the church hierarchy that at one point his fellow Scientologist, Michelle Matteau, bragged that Marcellus was way up in the church.

And within one month prior to the coup at the IHR, Marcellus twice received personal visitors at his IHR office for the first time ever in the 14 years he worked there: they were two uniformed officials from Scientology’s elite insider’s clique known as the Flagship organization. Notably, both Willis and Elisabeth Carto were out of town at the time of the visit.

Marcellus is also known to have donated some $41,600 to the International Association of Scientologists, which was the primary sponsor of Scientology’s anti-revisionist publicity campaign against Germany. Marcellus donated this money at the very time that he was proclaiming his devotion to revisionism, despite the fact that his church was engaged in a major effort to refute the basic conclusions of revisionist scholarship enunciated by David Irving, Arthur Butz, Robert Faurisson and others.

Why Destroy the IHR?

Why would Israel’s Mossad and the ADL have an interest in destroying the IHR? The bottom line is that the Mossad had a very definitive reason for putting an end to the IHR’s historical revisionist work into such sensitive areas as the Holocaust.

As IHR founder Willis Carto noted in his afterword to the book Best Witness: Without The Holocaust image there would be no state of Israel nor its burden on American taxpayers who would be some half a trillion dollars richer.* The Holocaust, in short, has been worth trillions to Israel since 1948 and if more and more people began having doubts about the official stories about the Holocaust, it could have a major impact on disrupting the flow of sympathy money to Israel.

* Best Witness, shown above, tells the story of Mel Mermelstein’s attack on the IHR. It is available at $10 per copy from Liberty Library, 300 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, D.C. 20003.