Aftermath and institutional changes

The Guardian Office was dissolved by the Church of Scientology in 1983. The Church has stated since that time that the Guardian Office's actions in Operation Snow White were unauthorized by senior Church leadership, that the officials involved acted on their own initiative in violation of Church policy, and that the dissolution of the Guardian Office represented a comprehensive institutional response. The intelligence, legal-affairs, and public-relations functions previously performed by the Guardian Office were reconstituted within the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), the Church's current body in those areas.

David Miscavige assumed the chairmanship of the Religious Technology Center in 1987, succeeding to general leadership of the Church following Hubbard's death the previous year. The OSA, like the Guardian Office before it, has been a recurring subject of academic and journalistic attention; the standard contemporary scholarly treatment of the Church and of Snow White is Hugh Urban's The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011), which treats the case in detail and within the broader institutional history.

The seized documents from the 1977 raids continue to be referenced in academic and journalistic treatments of the Church's history. The Church's tax-exempt status, which had been the original adversarial focus of the program, was reinstated by the Internal Revenue Service in 1993 in an agreement that resolved long-running disputes between the two parties. The terms of the 1993 agreement were not published at the time and have been the subject of subsequent journalism.

Operation Snow White is included on the present site because it is the best-documented case of coordinated institutional infiltration by a non-state religious organization in U.S. history, and because its documentary record — produced by ordinary federal prosecution and now in the public domain — is unusually complete. The disciplined statement remains: the events occurred as described in the Stipulation of Evidence; the Church's stated position is that they were unauthorized and that the institutional response was sufficient; readers can consult the court record and the academic literature to form their own assessment.