Disposing of Confidential Materials

And What is Considered Confidential

It is a standard practice to dispose of documents which are considered confidential. I personally shred my bills, credit card offers, and other correspondence which contain information that could cause me harm if they fell in the wrong hands. But, Scientology’s disposal of confidential information, and what they consider confidential, takes paranoia to a whole new level.

This Flag Order below states just what Hubbard considered confidential. Note any mimeo or photolithography waste was confidential. Also any old promo material and any and all material concerning Scientology or Dianetics or the Sea Org. It includes dispatches.

In other words, if the document so much as mentioned the word Scientology, Dianetics or Sea Org, it was considered confidential and had to be shredded before it was thrown away. And in the 1970’s, shredding was not done by machine, it was done by hand. Each piece of material had to be torn into tiny pieces and disposed of. We were actually required to take portions of each piece to separate trash receptacles rather than dispose of the entire hand-shredded document in one location.

In hindsight, that’s a high level of paranoia for an organization that’s supposed to clear the world. How in the world did promotional materials become confidential after they got old? But it was an ethics offense to simply throw away any document.

This included letters written on letterhead. Whether or not the letter said a word about Scientology, the letterhead itself made the letter confidential, so if you made an error and wanted to start over on the letter, you couldn’t simply ball up the letter and throw it in the trash, you had to tear it into tiny pieces and take it to several different trash cans for disposal. I do not know if this is still the case, or if this policy is still in the current Sea Org Handbooks. I would be curious to know if anyone who has recently left Sea Org could answer that question.

As for me, I had a very personal experience with disposing of confidential materials. I was leaving the Guardian’s Office after my former husband broke my arm and the Guardian’s Office decided that I was bad public relations for them. Heber Jentzsch, the titular President of the Church of Scientology came to my house with several of my GO files. We took them out on my balcony and had a burning ceremony over the hibachi. This, too was standard practice in the 1970s when documents needed to go away.

Another thing we did back then was use an exacto knife to cut out portions of documents that were deemed confidential. It was not uncommon in a court case for a document to be produced that was mostly holes. It was surprising (not really) how many documents simply disappeared as well.

Given Scientology’s penchant for keeping paper files on basically every word spoken by Hubbard and everything that is said by anything in anyone in their ersatz counseling sessions, a lot of paperwork went missing when I was there.