Tracing Danielle Ambert: the Lopez Affair II

Cults: France drops its guard

French police failed to track down three Scientologists for questioning over the 2006 suicide of Gloria Lopez: but at least one of them has maintained her links with Scientology. Now French daily Libération has weighed in to the battle.

Scientologists told French police investigating the death of one their members that they did not know where three key witnesses, all Scientologists, could be found. But one of them at least has stayed a part of the movement.

And now French newspaper Libération, in an astonishing five-page broadside, has cited the lack of progress in the case to illustrate the inertia they say is gripping the French authorities over the issue of cults.

Danielle Ambert is a person of interest in the December 2006 suicide of fellow Scientologist Gloria Lopez.

According to handwritten notes that Lopez left behind, Ambert acted as her financial adviser. When Lopez got a windfall of more than 200,000 euros from the sale of a property she had been gifted, it was Ambert who persuaded her to spend nearly all of it on Scientology courses.

Police here in France wanted to question her to get a clearer idea of what might have driven Lopez to kill herself. Senior Scientologists told investigators she had gone abroad – but that they did not know where she was.

But different sources, including public documents available in the United States, show that in the years following Lopez's death, Ambert spent much of her time in Clearwater, Florida, one of the movement's main hubs. And the latest evidence suggests she is on Freewinds, Scientology's cruise ship in the Caribbean.

Here's what we know about Danielle Ambert.

The entries in Kristi Wachter's database, based on Scientology's own publications, show that she has been a Scientologist at least since 1997. Entries in Scientology's business directory – listing members of the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE) – show that in the early 2000s she ran a business out of Marseille, on France's Mediterranean coast.

And an entry in issue N° 114 of Impact magazine, published in 2006, lists her as a Patron, which means she donated $40,000 to the cause – so she was not short of money.

Wachter's database also shows that as far back as 2004 Ambert had already completed Scientology's top auditing level, the new OT VIII, on Freewinds, the movement's cruise ship in the Caribbean. So when she left France after the death of Lopez, it was not to complete her journey up Scientology's Bridge to Total Freedom.

As an OTVIII – and with money to spare – Ambert was far from being a marginal figure on the French Scientology scene. But it was not simply because she had paid her own way up the Bridge: she also enjoyed a high profile because of her standing as a mission holder – and in Scientology, mission holders bring the money in.

In 2000, she opened her first mission in Marseille, on the French Mediterranean coast. (The previous year, a Marseille court had handed down fraud convictions against several senior Scientologists, including a past mission-holder there – so a vacancy had opened up.¹)

A few years later she launched another mission in Avignon, about 60 miles away – an event marked by a story still available on a Scientology website. She had opened the first mission in Marseille, she explained, because “... it was time to do something to help my fellow man”.

Then, in the summer of 2006 – just months before the suicide of Gloria Lopez – she inaugurated another Scientology mission in southern France – this time in Montpellier.

“For Scientologist and Mission Director, Danielle Ambert …, it has been a whirlwind of excitement and Scientology expansion in the South of France,” says a report at another Scientology website.

“With guests arriving from Marseille, Clemont-Ferrand, Saint-Etienne, Avignon and as far as Paris, to attend the grand opening of France’s newest Scientology Mission, it was a extraordinary event signaling a bright new future for the Montpellier community,” it added.

Marseille, Avignon and Montpellier: a golden triangle of three Mediterranean missions and a “bright new future”.

But just a few months later, Ambert had left the country.

Following the paper trail

Danielle Ambert had persuaded Gloria Lopez to spend more than 200,000 euros on Scientology courses. Rather than buying an appartment for herself outright Lopez ended up having to take out a mortgage to buy one just outside Paris – in a suburb she did not know and a flat she hated.

This much is clear from Lopez's handwritten notes, which her family found at her apartment after her death. “Danielle Ambert is clearly involved,” Lopez's son, Gwenn Le Berre, told Infinite Complacency. “My mother implicates her directly.”

They also found Ambert's business card. (The address on the card, at Codolet, is a town about half an hour's drive from Avignon.)

But when French police asked Scientology officials where she was, they got nowhere, said Le Berre. One of them told police that “he had heard” that Ambert had gone abroad – but he did not say where. And when police requested information from Scientology officials in the United States, they got no help there either.

That does seem extraordinary given that Ambert was the toast of the French Scientology community in 2006: all the more extraordinary given that the paper trail leads straight to one of Scientology's main centres of activity.

Clearwater, Florida is home to Scientology's Flag Service Organisation which boasts well over 1,000 staff members. It is, says the movement:

...a religious retreat which serves as the spiritual headquarters for Scientologists from all over the world. It is the hub of the Scientology worldwide community, a dynamic, multilingual organization and is the largest single Church of Scientology in the world.²

On January 5, 2007 – a little over two weeks after Gloria Lopez's suicide – Danielle Ambert was in Clearwater, Florida. There, she signed a document granting power of attorney to fellow Scientologist Josée Goudreault for a property deal at Madison Avenue, in Clearwater. (Goudreault, like Ambert, works in real estate).³

Public records – and one or two other sources – suggest that Ambert was probably based in Clearwater between 2007 and 2011. And as Kristi Wachter's database shows, she was taking Scientology courses at least up until 2008.⁴

An unexpected bonus is that someone entered French data into the US system by mistake: Ambert's French address – the one on her French business card – pops up in one database where it should not have.

What might have happened, one source explained, is that a US official took the French word “de” – from Place de l'Église in her French address – to be a reference to the US state of Delaware (DE). In any case, what those accidental entries indicate is that Ambert spent time in France between June 2007 and June 2008; and again in 2013.

From 2010 to late in 2013 another address appears on records: 118 N Forth Harrison Avenue, in Clearwater, just a few minutes' walk down the road from Scientology's Flag base.

This address is the relay office for Freewinds, Scientology's cruise ship where back in 2004 she took the highest level of Scientology's Bridge to Total Freedom: OT VIII. This official Scientology locator page gives the same address.

So this is what we have so far.

Barely two weeks after the suicide of Gloria Lopez, Ambert turns up in Clearwater, Florida and grants a fellow Scientologist power of attorney for a property deal. Public records suggest she lived in Clearwater for a few years. Then from 2010 to 2013 she gives as her forwarding address the relay office for Freewinds.

And the only thing Scientology officials could tell French investigators was that she had gone abroad somewhere.

Full circle

Another clue to her current whereabouts comes from a Facebook page in the name of Danielle Ambert. This particular page has no photo and – until recently at least – only two friends. But both those friends are relatively high-profile Scientologists from the French-speaking community.

One is Robert Galibert, whose profile picture is one of those cute Tribble-type creatures on the illustrated version of Scientology's Tone Scale.⁵

Galibert is president of “Non à la drogue, Oui à la vie”, a French offshoot of Scientology's Foundation for a Drug-Free World. He confirmed in an interview with the News of Marseille back in April 2012 that the French outfit was funded by Scientology.⁶

Ambert's other contact is Gisèle de Benoit, a Scientology activist in Switzerland. Some people there thinks she a little too active.

De Benoit heads up Des jeunes pour les droits de l’homme, the Swiss wing of Youth for Human Rights, another Scientology front group. Back in June 2013 Swiss paper La Tribune de Genève ran a story on her efforts to introduce a DVD on human rights into local classrooms there. She got a rap on the fingers from local officials, who rejected the DVD because of its links to Scientology and threatened legal action if she persisted.⁷

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ambert's Facebook page is that she gives Oranjestad, Aruba, as her place of residence. Aruba of course, is part of the Dutch Antilles, the chain of islands in the Caribbean where the Freewinds plies its trade.

So a decade after having completed OT VIII there, the evidence online – and from public records in the US – suggests that Ambert has come full circle and is back on board Freewinds. Though this time perhaps she may be a crew member rather than a paying customer.

Maître Rodolphe Bosselut is representing Gloria Lopez's family in the complaint they have lodged – against persons unknown – for alleging abuse of weakness, organized fraud, and failure to help a person in danger.

When we spoke to him last month for our first piece on this case over at Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker, he expressed frustration at the lack of cooperation from Scientology officials during the investigation.

“For an organization as centralized as Scientology — as obsessed with documenting everything about its members — it is simply not credible that it can offer no useful information in this affair,” he said at the time.

We presented him with the evidence of where Danielle Ambert had spent the years since Gloria Lopez's death; evidence that suggested she had not cut her ties with Scientology – and that she had even returned to France for periods. He was particularly interested in that part.

“The people who would be useful to this investigation, we can't manage to reach them,” he noted. So he had only question: “If Scientology has nothing to reproach itself about in this affair, then why can't we get in touch with these people?”

Phone calls, emails and Facebook messages to Scientology officials – and the Scientologists named above – produced nothing conclusive.

One flustered girl at the Freewinds office in Clearwater swore blind that Mme Ambert was neither on board as a crew member nor a paying passenger. But that rather smacked of panicked improvisation – and certainly nobody more senior has been in touch to confirm or deny Ambert's presence.

Roger Galibert, asked how Ambert might be contacted on Freewinds, suggested a message via the ship's generic email address before ringing off, pleading pressing business. But again, this is hardly definitive confirmation.

De Benoit did not return my phone calls or respond to my messages. But some time in the last day or two she has dropped off Danielle Ambert's Facebook page.

The good news though, is I'm not the only one who has been looking.

Ils accusent!

Here in France, Thursday's edition of the left-leaning daily Libération devotes five pages – including the front page – to an attack on what it says is the French government's loss of nerve on the issue of cults.

They argue that there is a lack of political will at the top to tackle the issue of cults, which has led to inertia in the investigation of such cases.

Libération put a team of reporters on the Gloria Lopez affair and their report argues that the problems the investigation has had moving forward is symptomatic of this wider malaise.

One source close to the case told them that the way the investigation was conducted completely ignored Scientology's well-earned reputation for obstructing any outside inquiries into its affairs.

Whether Danielle Ambert is on Freewinds or back in France, the key question appears to have been resolved. She never really cut her links to Scientology and their leaders' claims that they could not help police find her were at best disingenuous. At best...

The case nevertheless looks set to be closed. That at least is the conclusion of the report from the judge investigating the case, which Libération has had sight of.

Unless of course someone steps forward with new information.

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1    Fraud-related convictions were handed down against five defendants by the Marseille court on November 15, 1999.

2   From Scientology's presentation of the Flag Service Organization.

3   You can consult the document online at the Pinellas County website. According to her Facebook page, Goudreault is from Quebec, Canada, though it looks as if she has been doing business in Clearwater since at least 1997. Back in 2007 she ran property business Chic Realty, which had an office at 28 N Fort Harrison Avenue, in Clearwater. That is just around the corner from Flag, where Gloria Lopez had been due to go once she started at the Sea Org.

4   Ambert's name also comes up in various county court property-related documents until at least the end of 2014 – though that does not necessarily mean she stayed in Clearwater that whole time.

5   I could be wrong, but I think it's 8.0: “exhilaration”.

Here's Scientology's explanation of the Tone Scale, which was devised by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Former members have criticised it as another tool for controlling people. Jon Atack wrote: “Through Tone Scale drilling, people learn to pretend emotions. The downside is that they can lose spontaneity by doing so. They can lose the capacity for natural emotions, or become confused about what their real emotions are.” ( From “Scientology is an Implant”, first posted to alt.religion.scientology

6   “La Scientologie, accro aux Drogues?” (“Is Scientology addicted to Drugs?”): the News of Marseille, April 10, 2012.

7   “La scientologie tente de s’inviter dans les classes vaudoises” (“Scientology tries to invite itself into Vaud's classrooms”). June 28, 2013: by Lise Bourgeois.

The Gloria Lopez Affair

A French investigation into the suicide of a Scientologist has stalled because police have been unable to interview key witnesses in the case. But the movement has not shared everything it knows about the affair.¹

(This story first ran on March 31 at Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker. Thanks again to Tony for helping us launch this investigation at his site.)

Gloria Lopez

A judge investigating the 2006 suicide of a Scientologist in France may finally close the case because police have not been able to track down key witnesses.

Officers have been looking into the death of 47-year-old Gloria Lopez, who in December 2006 stepped in front of a speeding train at Colombes station just outside Paris.

But they have been unable to find three Scientologists the judge considers key to the affair, all of whom had dealings with Mme Lopez in the months leading up to her death.

After Scientology officials in France insisted they did not know where the three women were, police wrote to Scientology centers in both Copenhagen and the United States in a bid to trace them. They got no help there either.

But Infinite Complacency – with the help of ex-Scientologists, public records in Florida and an investigative team over at the French newspaper Libération – has established that the movement's executives have not been telling the whole story.

Gloria Lopez had been involved with Scientology since the mid-1990s. During that time her family estimates she spent around 250,000 euros on the movement.

Her two children say she was depressed in the months leading up to her death and they blame that on her involvement in Scientology. The family's lawyer, Maître Rodolphe Bosselut, dates her final crisis to a visit to Scientology's Copenhagen centre that she made in July 2006.

Strangely, she did not return on the appointed day,” he said. “When she did return, several days later, she said that Scientology had asked her to stay and she had not felt she could leave.”

Her work colleagues said they noticed a dramatic change in her mood after she came back from Copenhagen. “She was much more withdrawn,” one co-worker, who asked not to be named, told Infinite Complacency. “She hardly spoke at all… . She seemed sad, withdrawn, preoccupied.”

Documents her family found at her apartment after her death included a billion-year contract for the Sea Organization, Scientology's corps for its most dedicated, full-time members. She had signed it during her July visit to Copenhagen.

Other papers show she was expected to return to Copenhagen for further training and then travel on to Clearwater, in Florida. Yet she never told her family about her Sea Org membership or her plans to travel to the United States.

Gloria Lopez committed suicide on December 21, 2006: she had been due to start in the Sea Org in January 2007.

Lopez's family has filed a complaint against persons unknown alleging abuse of weakness, organized fraud and failure to help a person in danger. Scientology officials have repeatedly insisted that her death had nothing to do with them, and a Paris spokesman refused any further comment for this article.

In 2011, prosecutors abandoned the case after several years of investigation, arguing that there was not enough evidence to build a case. After the family filed a second formal complaint, an investigating judge was appointed to take another look. Like the prosecutor, he has the power to take the matter to court if he thinks there is a case to answer.

But now Maître Bosselut has sounded the alarm.

He fears the judge is about to close his investigation, at least in part because police cannot locate the key persons of interest to interview them. The judge's decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Persons of interest

These are the three Scientologists investigators want to interview:

Juliette Wagner

Juliette Wagner-Quercia, who introduced Lopez to Scientology and who, according to family and friends was a strong influence on her during her first years inside the movement. She was working at Scientology's Copenhagen base in 2006 and was Lopez's point of contact there;

Elisabeth Haley, Lopez's auditor at Copenhagen. Haley wrote twice to Lopez in the months that followed, trying to get her to return for further auditing. The contents of her letters make it clear she knew that Lopez was in difficulty;

Danielle Ambert

Danielle Ambert: a high-level Scientologist (OT VIII and a former mission holder in France), she acted as Lopez's financial adviser at a time when she came into a substantial sum of money – most of which she subsequently spent on Scientology. (This photo, from her Scientology page, is likely more than 10 years out of date.)

Gloria Lopez's behavior changed drastically on her return from Copenhagen in July, said Maître Bosselut. “She stopped taking courses and she became more withdrawn at work,” he explained.

During the same period, letters were arriving from Copenhagen urging her to return. But as Gloria Lopez sank into depression, the Scientologists around her failed to give her the help she needed, he added.

Lopez's son, Gwenn Le Berre said that when police searched Scientology premises in 2009 looking for documents relating to the case, all they found was an empty dossier with Gloria Lopez's name on it. And when officers interviewed Scientologists about his mother, none of them admitted to knowing her well, even though she had been a regular at the Celebrity Center for years.

“Nobody knew her, even those who wrote her letters with 'kisses, lots of love',” he said. “Even those people continue to say that they didn't know her. It's completely bizarre.”

Among the papers that Lopez's children found at her home after her death were writings in her own hand from the final months of her life. In them, she expressed her distress at the financial difficulties she was experiencing, as well as a sense of failure – the antithesis of what Scientology promises its followers.

The financial advisor

These writings also revealed the role that Danielle Ambert played in advising Lopez on her financial affairs, said Maître Bosselut.

Lopez had inherited a property in Spain, which she had told her family she would sell so as to buy an apartment just outside Paris. The handwritten documents found at her apartment make it clear however that instead of buying the French apartment she spent the money on Scientology courses.

“Ambert advised Mme Lopez that no bank would lend to her for Scientology courses but that she would be able to get a loan to buy an apartment,” Me Bosselut explained.

So despite having received a large sum of money from the sale of the property in Spain – more than 200,000 euros – she ended up having to borrow to buy an apartment near Paris.

Ambert's business card, which Lopez's family found at her apartment after her death, describes her as a “counsellor in independent investment”.

Lopez's handwritten notes show that she had paid in advance for most of Scientology's advanced Operating Thetan (OT) levels. “A first part of the money allowed me to get to Clear,” she wrote.

The state of Clear is the position half-way up Scientology's scale of courses. Attaining it opens up the route to the more advanced – and far more expensive – Operating Thetan (OT) levels. Paying for levels I to VII effectively meant she was paying for courses years in advance.

Ten days later she attended a seminar on a push to get 10,000 OT VIIs. “The next day I paid the levels up to OT VII,” she wrote.

The original 2009 Paris court judgment convicting two Scientology organizations of organized fraud noted that the movement's practice of hard sell meant that members were pressured into paying for training years in advance and thus driven into debt – as this site reported at the time.

The 2013 Cour de Cassation ruling that rendered those convictions definitive also specifically mentioned Scientology's hard-sell policies and referred to how Scientology's victims were:

...quickly led to commit to several years of courses, auditing sessions, purification cures forming part of the Scientology doctrine, for the financing of which they spent all their savings, got themselves into debt and in the end found themselves in a particularly difficult situation, both materially and morally...²

One former Scientologist has already explained to investigators how relentless the movement's salesmen can be in getting people to buy more courses, said Maître Bosselut. And despite the vast sums Lopez had spent on courses, the papers found at her apartment also show that Scientology was telling her she owed them money.

“Oppressive and aggressive”

Lopez's growing desperation is evident from the writings she left behind, said the lawyer. She wrote:

For the moment I am losing money instead of earning for the Bridge [her courses] (I have to get the money together to pay the expenses for when I will be in Denmark and the United States for the OT levels.) … Despite everything I have understood, I am not getting better, at work I am making mistakes.

The police unit that investigated Gloria Lopez's death was the Office for the Repression Violence against Persons (ORCVP). Their report, submitted to the prosecutor's office concluded:

…[I]n 2000 Gloria Lopez broke with her family and friends, lost custody of her children, sold her house and left her job with the sole aim of moving closer to the Paris Celebrity Center. She invested all her money, which was in fact a substantial amount, in Scientology and got into debt to pay for her expenses and an apartment... .

The report also described Scientology's operating method as “commercial, very organized, oppressive and aggressive,” designed to ensure maximum profits for its directors.

Despite those findings however, the prosecutors office at Nanterre, just outside Paris, decided in June 2011 to drop the case. They argued that there was not enough evidence to show that Gloria Lopez had been subjected to undue influence.

For Maître Bosselut, that decision betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Scientology operates; and it ignores crucial evidence in the documents written by Mme Lopez herself in the final months of her life.

Now however, it looks as if the investigating magistrate, Jean-Michel Bergès, might follow suit.

Maître Bosselut argues that the failure of Scientology officials in France and abroad to provide any leads that would help investigators to find these three women is evidence of their bad faith.

“For an organization as centralized as Scientology – as obsessed with documenting everything about its members – it is simply not credible that it can offer no useful information in this affair,” he said. Scientology officials had failed to turn over Mme Lopez's files or even to say who her auditors had been, he added.

Gloria Lopez's son, Gwenn le Berre, says he is determined to keep fighting to find out more about what drove his mother to kill herself.

“I would certainly like to have at least some answers from a few people named in the file, and if we could go after Scientology as an organization then that would be really great.” Because as important as the three missing witnesses are, this is not just about individuals, he insists.

“Clearly, it's the organization, because in this organization there are people who are just bad to the core, who do bad things, who ought to be convicted; and there are others who are the victims and who are in a way used by these people...

“[T]here are people who know. There are people who are paid to organize this fraud. And there are those who profit, clearly.”

Infinite Complacency has established that the movement's executives have not been telling the whole story about the missing Scientologists.

Public records in Florida show that at least two of the missing women, – Danielle Ambert and Juliette Wagner – spent the years following Gloria Lopez's death in Clearwater, one of the major centres for the movement.

And French paper Libération has tracked down one source who confirmed that Danielle Ambert has been working for the movement on Freewinds, Scientology's cruise liner in the Caribbean.

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Up next: 2 Tracing Danielle Ambert

1    This story first ran on March 31 at Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker. Thanks again to Tony for helping us launch this investigation at his site.

2  See here for the complete text of the judgment.

From the Archives I: 1972

A 20-minute French programme on Scientology from 1972 includes interviews with some key figures from the movement. Can you help name some of the other members interviewed?

Here's a little gem that turned up during a rummage around the website of France's broadcasting archive, l'Institut national de l'audiovisuel.

This is an extract from a 20-minute report on Scientology, broadcast in January 1972. It was filmed mainly at Saint Hill, East Grinstead, southern England – Hubbard's base in the 1960s until the authorities made it clear he had outstayed his welcome.

It's a fascinating little time capsule, featuring at least two senior figures from the movement at that time. But who were the others? If you can brave the best-forgotten hair styles and fashions, perhaps some of you can help put some names to the faces.

In this opening segment we get six people introducing themselves, some of whom we don't see any more of in the full report.

Pause and savour the title, as it unrolls across the screen 34 seconds in: “La Scientologie”, it says, in the typographical equivalent of flare jeans.

The scene now is a Scientology church service – they have those all the time, right? – featuring a self-conscious looking choir singing what sounds like a tailor-made hymm for Scientology.

Listen hear all you beings near and far,

There's a way you can change the way you are,

You can be free, free just like me,

I found the road that will reach the stars...

Does anyone know if this was one of Hubbard's efforts?

A minister walks to the pulpit and begins reciting the Creed of the Church of Scientology. As the clip ends, he's telling us how all men are created equal and that the spirit can be saved.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of what I've heard from former members suggests that this kind of service was for show, to impress outsiders with Scientology's religious credentials.

I was curious to know who the others were, so I ran a short preview of this piece over at Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker earlier and appealed to them to fill in the blanks. They delivered, as I knew they would.

Before I went to the Bunker, of the six people who introduce themselves at the beginning I had only identified David Gaiman, one of Hubbard's most capable lieutenants, who died in 2009. You can find an official tribute to him here.

So who are the others? Here are the names the Bunker came up with: unless otherwise specified, I had at least two credible sources. UPDATE: I've been able to add some more names after some emails from contacts and a very helpful exchange at the Ex-Scientologist Message Board (ESMB). This is the line-up we now have:

1. The spokesman for Scientology is David Gaiman;
2. The Commanding Officer is John Aczel;
3. A communicator: blonde woman, couldn't catch the accent; sources at ESMB think this might be Eva (Eva?) Isaacson/Marinowicz/Ronnqvist.
4. Commanding officer of the college is Malcolm Nieman;
5. Deputy for Policy Knowledge: I think the consensus is now that this is Donat Perbohner, but if you don't agree have a look at the debate over at ESMB;
6. The Registrar is Heidi Keeley (now Vos).

We have also made progress identifying the choir, though there is still some uncertainty about the rather uncharismatic Scottish minister.¹

Here's a screen shot of that Scottish minister (Tony Ortega has another at his site). A number of people have suggested that this is Ian Logan (or perhaps Iain, given he was Scottish).

For the choir, one source suggested, left to right: Lynn Collins, Doris Brown Annie Watts, Catherine Layton (Barton) and Marion Barton. Collins, Brown and Marion Barton have been named by at least one other source, Barton by her daughter, which I think settles it. (The video above gives you close-ups of them all.)

David Gaiman pops up a little later in the programme, doing a decent job of presenting Scientology as a reasonable way of life. He was rather good at that – better, certainly, than some of his more excitable successors.

“He was a delightful man,” one source told me. “He was what you would call a real mensch. He always tried to do the right thing, whatever the difficulties.”

In the early 1980s, John Aczel was one of the victims of the purge carried out by Miscavige. According to several sources he was victim of one of the notorious “spitting orders” issued by Hubbard, which is to say at least one senior executive spit in Aczel's face in compliance with a written order from Hubbard. Several sources tell me they saw the order: others witnessed Aczel's humiliation.

This is how one former colleague, Joe Howard, described Aczel during a discussion a few years ago over at Marty Rathbun's blog:

John Aczel was the mildest mannered person I ever met in the S.O. [Sea Org]. English, educated at Cambridge. His passion was poetry. He loved cats. Kind of eccentric but very intelligent and a very, very sweet person. I considered him a very good friend... I still consider [him] a friend. One of the many still in the S.O. that I miss.

Scroll down that discussion and you'll find more than one person agreeing with that assessment. Among them is Chuck Beatty, who posts a picture of Aczel, apparently taken in 2008: so far as anyone knows, he is still in Scientology.

The full report also features an interview with another major player from that period: Jane Kember.

Kember, who is is described as the Commander in Chief, would I think at that time already have been the most senior figure in the Guardians Office after Mary Sue Hubbard and the Commodore himself.

Jane Kember

“Ron Hubbard is the greatest man on this planet,” she tells the interviewer. “There is no doubt in my mind of that.” Much good her devotion did her when the U.S. Courts went after them for wholesale espionage a few years later.

She has been showing up on Scientology Service Completion announcements (in their own publications, as recently as 2011).

“She is a powerful personality,” Terril Park writes over at ESMB. “I recall OTs trembling at rebutting her comments,” he adds. (OTs are Scientologists doing the advanced levels, members who are themselves meant to be powerful personalities.)

Here she is during the interview: is it me, or has she adopted a characterisically Hubbardian pose (which he himself borrowed from Crowley)?

Patrick Deluz (sp?)

As you might expect, the team interviewed a number of French-speakers among the followers. This young man, described as a supervisor, talks about the joie de vivre and the sense of power Scientology has given him.

“I have found a practical philosophy that gives me and gives my friends, desirable changes in life,” he says. One source over at ESMB thinks this might be Patric Deluz (sp?).

This woman, another Francophone, tells the interview how happy she is, adding: “The whole world would be happier if everyone was a Scientologist.”

“And will that happen, one day?” asks the interviewer.

“Yes,” she answers, without hesitation.

The documentary films standard Scientology practice, such as the clay demo exercises that are supposed to help you learn things by expressing them in a tangible manner through clay models.

There is also an extended sequence showing one of the early Training Routines, where two students try to stare at each other without flinching. “To learn to control oneself but also to control other people, is one of the basic exercises,” says the commentary. Someone's done their homework.

Another French member tells how she was recruited in Australia eight years earlier (which would make it around 1964) She explains how she had left France in 63 and met a Scientologist in the house where she was staying. She asked about his beliefs, he gave her a book and everything followed from there.

Asked why she had chosen Scientology and not another system, her response echoes the kind of thing Hubbard says in his lectures and writings. It was something she could observe, understand and apply, she explains.

“I didn't want to – like the intellectuals – learn something and sit on the divan to impress the neighbours. I wanted to really use what I learned in Scientology, you see.”

Describing the benefits of being Clear and then OT II – well into the advanced levels of Scientology training – she says: “I am very sure of myself now, I had much more certainty than I had before, and my ability to learn work and to perform – ” she clicks her fingers “ – is very fast.”

But her most important ability is to be able to love, she says: she really know what love is. By now, the camera has gradually pulled away from its initial close-up of her in front of a window to show her standing beside a giant photograph of Hubbard.

She humours the interviewer with a few scraps in response to questions about past lives, but it is clear she thinks he is trying to make her look foolish.

“Do you believe you are immortal?” the interviewer asks. “I don't believe,” she replies: “I know.”

Cut to a ceremony where an official is presenting an ecstatic student – Ina Weiss? – with her certificate for having qualified from the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course as a Hubbard Senior Scientologist.

Ina Weiss?

The venue looks a little like a village hall with a podium covered with a dark green-and-gold Scientology symbol. (According to "Techie", over at the bunker, this is the chapel at Saint Hill, "...site of the famous Clearing Course films and and the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course." He reckons it held about 60 people.) 

The mistress of ceremonies struggles to generate the kind of charisma and humour that came so easily to Hubbard. The consensus over at ESMB is that this is Sheila Massey-Hicks, from South Africa. (And a trawl back through the message board's archives suggests that she was not universally loved.)

Sheila Massey-Hicks

The scene switches to  another interior, another service, this time on board the Athena. The team interviews the vessels captain, identified only as Captain Spence, but this would probably be Mitch Spence.

He pops up in the accounts of one or two former members and according to Travers Harris, who posts as “Lexmark”, over at the Ex-Scientologist Message Board, he is now dead.

His name appears on this Scientology document, which includes a long list of people declared suppressive. (He's at the bottom of page 21 – and it's a two-column list that runs for nearly 35 pages. No doubt it's got a lot longer since then.)²

Mitch Spence

Spence tells the interviewer that he had spent four years in the United States navy (and perhaps also the Merchant navy – it's hard to catch because of the French voiceover). Certainly he looks the part, and of all those interviewed he comes across as the most natural.

The report does offer a brief interview with Cyril Vosper, one of the few former members to speak out in those day. His exposé, The Mindbenders, had been published a year earlier, in 1971³

He explains how he was kicked out of the movement after 14 years because he no longer believed in the system. Scientology has become a fascist organisation obsessed with power and control over people, he tells the interviewer.

The piece closes with Kember giving a sermon and more choir girls singing – exactly the kind of religious service that many ex-members say were staged strictly for visiting journalists and other investigators.

“The Scientologists have been in France for three years,” says the voiceover.⁴

This programme played on Fr3, one of France's state channels, on its Le troisième oeil slot (The Third Eye). It went out on January 28, 1972.

The commentary is limited, though they do mention that Hubbard is now persona non grata in Britain and that the movement has suffered a string of convictions around the world. Mainly though, the film-makers sit back and let the Scientologists say their piece.

This rather softly-softly approach – giving their interview subjects enough rope, so to speak – is quite effective. Light years away, certainly, from some of the more aggressive investigations of recent years.⁵

The programme was directed by André Weinfeld, a French-born writer and director. As he explains on his website, from the mid-1960s he made dozens of programmes for French television, covering the music scene in the Paris into the 1970s.

Along the way, he also worked as a war correspondent and made a detour into advertising at McCann Erickson. Later, he covered the music scene in the States, rubbing shoulders with the legends of that era, everyone from Hendrix and Joplin to the Stones and The Who.

And then there was the 10 years married to Raquel Welch – so tough all round really.

If you want to see the full 20-minute programme on Scientology – in French, no sub-titles – you can download it from the INA archives here. It will only cost you two euros.

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1  When I hear his delivery I can't help but think of Rikki Fulton's Rev I M Jolly.

2  The document, Flag Executive Directive 2830, is dated September 10, 1990. But since it is an updated list, Spence may well have been declared much earlier. Any details gratefully received.

3  Atack acknowledges Vosper's help in the introduction to his A Piece of Blue Sky.

4  In fact they claim to have been in France as far back as the 1950s, but the reference in the documentary may be to the opening of their first public office – I'll try and get back to you on that.

5  This edition of Le Troisième Oeil went out of FR3 on January 28, 1972. It features interviews with senior Scientology figures from that period, including Neil Gaiman and Jane Kember. “Ron Hubbard is the greatest man on this planet. There is no doubt in my mind of that,” Kember tells the interviewer.