Scientology-Verfassungsschutz.de

“In April, officials in Baden-Wuerttemberg posted bail and apologized to Swiss authorities when one of their police investigators gathering information on Scientology's activities in Baden-Wuerttemberg was arrested by Swiss police after interviewing a contact in Basel. The investigator was charged with espionage and violating Swiss neutrality.”

– U.S. State Department Annual Human Rights Report on Germany for 1998

The arrest by Swiss authorities on spying charges of Peter Goebel of the Baden-Wuerttemberg OPC was described by the British Broadcasting Corporation as "an embarrassing setback for the German government." But it was more than a setback, and it was worse than the farce it appeared to be. It illustrates what can happen when the OPC's powers are directed against individuals, not because of anything they have done, but because of what they believe.

The Baden-Wuerttemberg Office for the Protection of the Constitution was caught organizing a cloak and dagger operation against members of a religion. And not even in Germany, but in a foreign country!

Peter Goebel was apprehended by the Swiss police on April 6. Basel officers caught him in a garage near the Hotel Viktoria where he had been meeting with two Swiss zealots whose common denominator was prejudice against minority religions. The police put a bag over Goebel's head and took him to the Swiss Federal Attorney, Carla del Ponte, who interrogated him for several hours.

At first the arrest went unnoticed by the media. No press release was issued either by the Basel police or the Federal Attorney's Office. There was not much interest in revealing the OPC's politically sensitive plight. Swiss authorities planned to handle the matter outside public notice – an unfriendly act of their German neighbors to be dealt with on diplomatic lines if possible.

But the OPC's sources and collaborators panicked. Trying to suppress the scandal, they lost their nerve and accidentally blew it into the open. And the details slowly came out.

The OPC had been collaborating with “anti-cultists” in Switzerland for months. This itself is extraordinary. The Swiss federal government has refused to entertain the plans of these same “anti-cultists” and has publicly stressed that religious and cultural pluralism must be respected. In June 1998, the Swiss government announced that of hundreds of religious minorities active in Switzerland, only a few are inclined to questionable practices and it is wrong to criticize all groups collectively. Existing law, the government noted, is adequate to deal with any illegalities. Yet we have the bizarre spectacle of OPC agents conspiring to break the law with the very individuals deemed not credible by the Swiss government. Swiss officials – unlike in this country – have avoided similar embarrassments by showing a willingness to dialogue with religious minorities, including the Church of Scientology.

But the OPC is not a tool for dialogue. And so, in November 1997, Zurich zealot Odette Jaccard had been contacted by a “Mr. Fuchs” from the Baden-Wuerttemberg OPC. Fuchs asked if she could provide him with the names of persons who had completed courses in Churches of Scientology in Basel and Zurich.

Most officials in Switzerland gave Jaccard a wide berth because they recognized her extremism. She was known for grotesque “death’s head” stickers which would be stuck, under cover of fog or dark, on cars, letterboxes or at the work-places of members of certain religions. Jaccard had spent years accumulating the names and private details of Swiss Scientologists, without registering them with the Data Protection Office as required by law.

So, she was only too glad to hand over 1,600 names, addresses and personal details of Scientologists to the OPC. Some names were Swiss, some German, and the rest citizens of other countries. A number of those whose names were on the list she handed over have never been members of the Church of Scientology and have no connection with it.

In March 1998, the Baden-Wuerttemberg OPC again contacted Jaccard. This time she was told that an urgent matter required a meeting between her and “Mr. Goller”, whose real name was Peter Goebel of the OPC. Jaccard accepted, and arranged that an associate named Susanne Haller, a member of the Basel cantonal parliament, accompany her.

Unknown to Jaccard and the OPC, Haller took precautions to protect herself by informing the State Attorney's Office in Basel about the scheduled meeting. Despite receiving confirmation that Goebel's presence for espionage purposes would make the meeting illegal, Haller went along to it on April 6.

Goebel had a shopping list of requests. He wanted Haller and Jaccard to collect car licence numbers at an assembly of Scientologists in Rothrist, Switzerland on May 1 and 2. The material advertising the event described it as a “German-Swiss meeting.” Goebel apparently did not realize that in Switzerland, “German-Swiss” refers to the German-speaking part of the country, not to a meeting between Swiss and Germans. The event was to be a two-day seminar for Swiss Scientologists. Goebel appeared to conceive of this innocent gathering as some lip-smacking conspiracy.

While Haller had mixed feelings about taking part in the information gathering at Rothrist, Jaccard agreed.

After the meeting ended, the conspirators left by different routes. Goebel was immediately arrested. Jaccard was soon found, arrested and taken to Bern to be interrogated, like Goebel, by del Ponte.

She was eventually released and sent home. But next day, six policemen came to her three-room apartment and confiscated her secret lists of Scientologists and supposed Scientologists, her computer documents, fax-journals, and other evidence.

Seeking help, Jaccard contacted a sympathetic Swiss reporter, Hugo Stamm. He tried to help her by contacting the police to find out what was going on. But his amateurish efforts recoiled and by the evening of April 8, the Federal Attorney's Office, convinced the media was now onto the story, had no choice but to issue a press statement to confirm the arrest of the spy.

The story rapidly spread. Within minutes it was on the evening news of every major television station in Germany and Switzerland, and shortly afterwards was picked up in the United States. The OPC had a new, international spy scandal to add to its list.

Goebel was released four days later against a bond of 25,000 SFR paid by the OPC. The president of the Baden- Wuerttemberg OPC had to promise that his agent would return to Switzerland to appear in court. The Baden-Wuerttemberg Interior Minister formally apologized to the Swiss authorities. The German Ambassador was ordered into the Swiss Foreign Department to accept a letter of protest.

The Church of Scientology's human rights attorneys filed an official complaint with Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – pointing out that the German government continues to violate the rights of Scientologists despite repeated warnings from the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

That was not the end of the controversy. The president of the Baden-Wuerttemberg OPC, Helmut Rannacher, claimed that the meeting with Haller and Jaccard had been arranged to to take place not in Basel, but on the German side of the border. Haller, however, denounced this as a lie. If the meeting was supposed to occur in Germany, she responded sharp-wittedly, why would Goebel need false papers in the name of “Goller” for entry into Switzerland? A legitimate question! Especially in view of the interrogation records held by the Swiss Federal police, in which “Goller”, aka Goebel, had confessed to Susanne Haller his awareness that “the meeting in Basel is actually illegal.” 

The Swiss Federal Attorney's Office finished its report and transferred its files to the Basel State Attorney's Office, so the spy could be brought to trial on charges of conducting “illegal actions for a foreign state,” “political intelligence,” and “falsification of documents.” The Federal Attorney's Office rightfully alleged that Goebel was aware of the illegality of his actions.

So the question remains: What will happen with the list of Scientologists and non-Scientologists illegally brought to Germany and now with the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Stuttgart? Nothing! As long as the proceedings against Goebel are ongoing, the list is considered “evidence” and thus cannot be destroyed, according to the Stuttgart office.

Thus, thousands of unsuspecting Swiss and German citizens continue to have their personal details recorded in its files for no reason than their religious beliefs, or, in the case of those not Scientologists, for not even that reason. Either way, the Stuttgart OPC office is once again guilty of religious discrimination. The right to non-discrimination is a fundamental law and a human right. Preventing the law from being eroded and undermined, not doing so itself, is the proper duty of the Stuttgart office.

The repurcussions of the arrest of an OPC agent on foreign territory will cause the government embarrassment for many years to come. More so, because the illegal actions of the protectors of our constitution are once again being “legalized” retroactively.

As early as April 1998, it emerged from the interrogation of Odette Jaccard that Peter Goebel had stated “in about six months the whole subject will be legalized.” At the end of November 1998, the Baseler Zeitung reported that the Baden- Wuerttemberg Minister of Interior Thomas Schaeuble and his Swiss colleague Arnold Koller had met for the purpose of implementing a state contract dealing with “cross-border cooperation of the German and Swiss police.” Half a year later, in April 1999, this bilateral police-agreement was signed.

No doubt this agreement would have been realized eventually with or without the transgressions of the Baden-Wuerttemberg OPC. What brings an unpleasant taste is its enforcement in their immediate aftermath, right before the originally scheduled, though later postponed, opening of the trial against Goebel and Jaccard. As Badische Zeitung commented dryly, “Such operations are now possible in agreement with the authorities.”

Thus, what was illegal yesterday is simply made legal for the future. It is absurd but true that the German OPC can now do in Switzerland exactly what its Swiss equivalent has refused to do – carry out spying operations on members of religious minorities.

And we can predict that the newly acquired legal powers of the German OPC will spread their protective wings over Goebel and Jaccard, retroactively as it were, during their forthcoming trial, and will insulate them from the full consequences of their illegal actions.

The Stuttgart OPC, meanwhile, marches on heedless. “New Disgrace for Protectors of the Constitution” was the headline of the Stuttarter Nachrichten on July 23, 1999. The State Office, in its most recent report, had portrayed the leader of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Erwin Teufel, as an “espionage victim” of the Church of Scientology. The logic? Nine years previously, an unnamed Scientologist had been “interested in his (Teufel's) personal environment,” and had allegedly “spied on him.”

Teufel was not even informed about this account in the OPC report, an omission the media characterized as an “embarrassment.” But the characterization misses the real point. The Teufel story was contrived and invented so that the Baden- Wuerttemberg OPC would not appear to be completely emptyhanded when asked for “evidence” against Scientology.

The consequences of ordering the OPC into the role of “thought police” while refusing to dialogue was apparent in the Otto Dreksler scandal – an incident which again displayed the OPC as an eerie institution where the end is made to justify the means. It is an incident which has filled thousands of column inches of press and injured the repute of the Berlin Interior Ministry, at an additional price of millions in manhours and money. Harmed, too, was the reputation of the responsible politicians who would have much preferred to present themselves as pillars of Berlin's squeaky-clean brigade: ex-Senator of the Interior Joerg Schoenbohm, his successor Eckhart Werthebach, and under-secretary Kuno Boese, still at his desk in the Berlin Senate of the Interior.