Project Normandy was a top secret Church of Scientology operation wherein the church planned to take over the city of Clearwater, Florida, by infiltrating government offices and media centers.

Gabe Cazares Gabriel Cazares (January 31, 1920 – September 29, 2006) was a mayor of Clearwater, Florida, a Pinellas County commissioner, a civil rights advocate, and a critic of the Church of Scientology. He died September 29, 2006 in Clearwater at the ...

, who was the mayor of Clearwater at the time, used the term "the occupation of Clearwater".Original (huge)
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1980 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting
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History

In the 1970s, the Church of Scientology Corporation used a front group, called the "United Churches of Florida", to purchase the

Fort Harrison Hotel The Fort Harrison Hotel serves as the flagship building of the Flag Land Base, the Church of Scientology's spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, US. It is owned and operated by the Church of Scientology Flag Service Organization, Inc., ...

, for $3 million. The church established their headquarters in the Fort Harrison Hotel, and dubbed it their ''Flag Land Base''. In 1977, an

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, t ...

raid on Scientology headquarters uncovered internal Church of Scientology documents marked "Top Secret", that referred to their secret operation to take over Clearwater, as "Project Normandy". The document itself states its purpose is "to obtain enough data on the Clearwater area to be able to determine what groups and individuals B1 will need to penetrate and handle in order to establish area control". The document says its "Major Target" is "To fully investigate the Clearwater city and county area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed". On November 3, 1979, the '' Clearwater Sun'' ran an article with the headline "Scientologists plot city takeover" and later stories claimed that the Scientologists also had international plans to take over the world. The ''

St. Petersburg Times The ''Tampa Bay Times'', previously named the ''St. Petersburg Times'' until 2011, is an American newspaper published in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. It has won fourteen Pulitzer Prizes since 1964, and in 2009, won two in a single ...

'' won a Pulitzer Prize for one of their stories that exposed some of the criminal wrongdoings of the Church of Scientology. Cazares also noted that he found it odd that a religious group would resort to using code names for a project to take control of a town, and called the project a "paramilitary operation by a terrorist group".Gabe Cazares video interview for a Clearwater historical society.
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References

{{Scientology Scientology and law Scientology-related controversies 1970s in Florida

History

See also

References