Origins and the Guardian Office

The Guardian Office was created in 1966 by L. Ron Hubbard as a body within the Church of Scientology responsible for legal affairs, intelligence, and public relations. Its commanding officer from its founding to its dissolution was Mary Sue Hubbard. The office maintained its own organizational structure, an internal numbering of directives ("Guardian Orders"), and reporting lines distinct from the Church's general management.

By the early 1970s the Church had accumulated a substantial adversarial relationship with several U.S. government agencies. The Internal Revenue Service had revoked the Church's federal tax exemption in 1967, and the two were in extended litigation. The Food and Drug Administration had brought a 1963 case against the Church's E-meter devices. The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation held files on the Church and on Hubbard personally. Foreign agencies — among them the British and Australian governments — held similar files. The Church's general position throughout this period was that the materials in these files were inaccurate and that the agencies were operating, in part, on misinformation.

Guardian Order 732, dated April 20, 1973, set out the framework for what became Operation Snow White. The order directed the Guardian Office to identify and, by available means, to remove or correct documents held in U.S. and foreign government files which Hubbard considered to be false statements about him or the Church. The objective stated in the order was the clearing of those files, with the long-term aim of restoring the Church's preferred standing with the relevant agencies.

The Snow White name was drawn from the Disney film. Sub-operations within the program were named for the film's characters — Operation Goldmine, Operation Italian Fog, and others. The naming convention was internal to the program; the documentary record establishes that "Snow White" was the Guardian Office's term for the entire coordinated effort against the targeted agencies' document-holdings.