The Secret of Standing Order #1

by Chris Owen

From	Chris Owen <chriso@lutefisk.demon.co.uk>
Subject	GO FILES: The secret of SO #1
Date	1999/04/23
Msg-ID	<TbwG0KARx7H3EwOs​@lutefisk.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups	alt.religion.scientology

YOU CAN ALWAYS WRITE TO RON

All mail addressed to me shall be received by me.

I am always willing to help. By my own creed, a being is only as valuable as he can serve others.

Any message addressed to me and sent to the address of the nearest Scientology Church will be forwarded to me directly.

L. RON HUBBARD

Standing Order #1 — the first sentence in the quotation above, which is from the frontispiece of the 1978 edition of What Is Scientology? — is one of the oldest and symbolically most important policy instructions in Scientology. It was reissued in HCO Policy Letter 18 December 1961, "Standing Orders" (though it appears to have been promulated some time earlier). It continues to be in force even now, 13 years after Hubbard's death, though obviously in a suitably modified form. SO #1 symbolises Scientology's openness and willingness to help any member with any problem whatsoever.

Or does it? The real purpose of SO #1 was rather different. First, it is quite apparent that Hubbard himself did not even see many (probably most) of the letters sent to him through SO #1 channels. During his periods in seclusion/hiding in the 1970s and 1980s, he cut himself off from the outside world (including Scientology); although he continued to direct his "church" and write new policies and doctrines, he did not take part in mainstream Scientology activities. Replies to SO #1 letters by and large came from members of his personal secretariat, the Hubbard Communications Office.

So what did happen to SO #1 letters? The answer is that they were used by Scientology's intelligence service, the Guardian's Office, to detect problems and troublemakers at an early stage, despite the supposed confidentiality of the SO #1 line. In the late 1960s, a document entitled "SO No I Line Write Up" was distributed to the staff of the United States Guardian's Office and to those at the headquarters of the GO, Guardian's Office World Wide (at Saint Hill Manor in England). This document was one of the thousands seized by the FBI in 1977 and later released to the public. I am not sure who its author was; it is signed simply, "Helen". The document was part of the training materials for new GO intelligence operatives in a section covering "internal security".

The "Write Up" states:

Put a line in with the LRH COMM AIDE of your liaison office (UKLO, USLO, [name deleted]) and arrange for a member of your office to see each SO No I Letter and the carbon of Ron's reply to it. This must include the entheta ones too.

Obtain a log book, … divide the page in two, and keep one half for "Good" letters and the other half for "Bad" letters. In the left hand margin write down all the orgs in your continent.

When you receive a batch of letters, do the following with each letter. Read the letter. If it is favourable mark a slash on the appropriate page for the month in which the letter was written, in the favourable column, of the nearest org to the origination point of that letter. If the letter is entheta or indicates that all is not well, mark a slash in the Bad column.

If there is data in an SO No I of interest to another [Guardian's Office] bureau, copy the letter and route to the bureau concerned. (letters indicating mishandling of celebrities, doctors etc goes to PR for their information, Gross tech outnesses or consistent tech outnesses go to D/G [Deputy Guardian] Tech. Copy letters concerning PTS's [Potential Trouble Sources], Mental cases, mixed practises, beefs from celebrities etc for your own files. Send to WW [World Wide] any letters of interest to them.

At the end of each month, the SO #1 letters were to be counted up and tabulated in the form:

   SO #1 LINE

   LONDON
      Favourable   - x
      Unfavourable - y

   SAINT HILL
      Favourable   - x
      Unfavourable - y
   

and by this means the relative success of individual orgs could be determined, to put alongside the all-important income and recruitment figures.

The Guardian's Office was obviously well aware that the effectiveness of the SO #1 line would be compromised if the use to which the letters were put was revealed. The "Write Up" cautions, "it should not be broadly known that you see them", showing a clear intention to deceive Scientologists as to the real nature of the SO #1 line. However, some of the letters "will require quiet looking into as real trouble can be averted by this", while "the SO I line also will give you insight into outnesses in the orgs".

Note that this offered a useful means of exposing those who dared complain, as the SO #1 line was useful in revealing situations such as "too many PTS's on lines". Many ex-Scientologists have reported their SO #1 letters being answered evasively, ignored or, in the worst case, landing them in disciplinary trouble. One cannot help but be reminded of schemes such as Mao's "Hundred Flowers of Thought" in the 1950s, where free discussion was encouraged to flush out dissenters, who were then ruthlessly purged.