Tulsi Gabbard's political career was secretly directed by her guru Chris Butler. Under the pen name Bo Zhongyan (
柏忠言
), Butler also coauthored anti-Western books in China with his wife Wai Lana (Zhang Huilan,
张蕙兰
). They described Westerners as
"no more than dogs"
and dedicated their 1986 book to
"the great and magnificent Chinese nation"
—
这个伟大，壮丽国家的全体中国人民.
Source
Thousands of documents and emails from the covert Science of Identity political operation have been independently examined by the Washington Post. The content on this website is attributed solely to the site's author.
For 49 years, Tulsi's guru Chris Butler has run the Science of Identity Foundation like an intelligence operation: burn bags, PGP encryption, code names, parallel email domains, and punitive NDAs, all for a group that claims to teach yoga and meditation.
When I graduated college in 1995, I started seriously practicing meditation on my own. Soon after, a friend and I moved to Hawaii, where we met the Gabbards, and later Chris Butler. At first, it started out as an uplifting spiritual community. But over time, the toxicity became exposed. After I married someone linked to Science of Identity leaders, the noose tightened around me.
Butler's inner circle overlaps with Tulsi Gabbard's inner circle. It includes her money man, Sunil Khemaney; her close Texas friend, Richard Bellord; her friend Matthew Krohnert, who is also best friends with Tulsi's brother-in-law, Rupa Bellord; and her parents, Mike and Carol Gabbard. These are the people who worked together to try, unsuccessfully, to silence me.
Burn bags & shredders
Long before email, Butler's operation handled mountains of paper like it had something to hide. Burn bags. Mass shredding of documents. Butler would flip out if every security procedure was not perfectly followed.
Butler's whole premise was that it was all to help people learn meditation and yoga philosophy. No secrecy whatsoever would be needed for that actual purpose.
The layers of secrecy
Once the work moved to computers, encryption became the rule. The standard was PGP, the same public-key encryption used by journalists protecting sources and by people who really do not want to be read.
In the archive, the scale is plain. 3,199 emails carry encrypted attachments, and 2,931 reference PGP. Butler's political talking points went out as encrypted .docx.pgp files, with names like "POL TRS 2016 06 30 Allying with Assad Comment 4.28pm.docx.pgp." 1
The policies were unbelievably over-the-top. Members were supposed to keep two computers, one online and one offline, do their work, transfer the files, and keep their encryption key only on the offline machine that never touched the internet.
They ran their own private network
The operation did not run on campaign email or official government accounts. It ran on two private domains, nineisles.com and researchhq.org. The archive holds 2,981 emails from those domains, sent by at least 16 named operative accounts, including Allison Hoen, Sunil Khemaney, Kit Robinson, and Michael Bond. 2
"Sunil is holding all the NDA's"
The secrecy was also contractual. NDAs were pushed on everyone, including volunteers, with a financial penalty of $10,000 for every breach. When I asked for NDAs for a few part-time people in 2019, Tulsi Gabbard's mother, Carol Gabbard, answered in plain language. 3
"Sunil is holding all the NDA's, so he'll need to respond." Carol Gabbard, email to Rebecca, January 28, 2019.
Sunil Khemaney held the NDAs for everything. He was in charge of enforcing the secrecy and in charge of Tulsi's finances. He directed "Hinduphobia" smear campaigns. He is listed as the point of contact on business documents for Wai Lana Yoga, the empire built on CCP state television. And he was the forward man for Tulsi's official congressional trip to India, handling meetings with top BJP officials. 10
There were separate agreements for different layers of the operation:
- Campaign staff NDAs,
required of anyone working on Tulsi's political campaigns.
- Science of Identity volunteer NDAs,
required of people doing work for SIF operations.
- "Personal care" NDAs,
required of anyone connected to Butler, his wife Wai Lana (Huilan Zhang), or their personal orbit, the people who cooked, cleaned, drove, and waited on them.
Every NDA carried a $10,000 fine for each breach. For the NDA-bound "tourists," Science of Identity foreigners brought to the US to do unpaid labor, the penalty sat on top of the threat of deportation and ostracism. For poverty-stricken teenagers, the threat alone guaranteed silence. The NDAs protected Butler's personal control over his followers, his political influence over Tulsi, and the CCP-sponsored business empire of his wife. Everyone who signed was legally threatened into silence about all of it. 10
The "tourist" visa scheme
Sunil Khemaney and Jeannie Bishop, the Science of Identity president, ran an elaborate scheme to bring Science of Identity people from Eastern Europe into the US on fraudulent tourist visas. They were placed in Butler's facilities, where they worked 60 or more hours a week in exchange for a place to sleep on site and a little food. This went on for decades and involved dozens of people. 10
The students were sent with the approval of Science of Identity leader Johnny Midgett (also known as "Balakhilya Das"), who ran SIF operations in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as Canada. They were told it was "devotional service" that would advance their spiritual lives. If they left early, before their tourist visas expired, they faced being outcast and retaliated against by Science of Identity leaders in their home country. 10
Hidden names
Inside the operation, some people used code names and pseudonyms. One longtime political operative ran for years under a fake name, sending 180 emails under the alias on the group's private system. 4
A faceless account with the sender name "Please Confirm" pushed the talking points and transcripts out to the network. It sent 1,222 of them. 5
There were even memos on how to talk. A July 2016 memo instructed staff to stop using words like "she" or "he" on the phone, always say the person's full name, and verbally confirm every instruction with "I understand." 6
Another dictated how to refer to Butler in public, by his full spiritual title, "Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda (Chris Butler)." 7
The secrecy protected corruption and abuse
All of that machinery existed to protect the people at the top and to keep everyone else quiet.
Those who grew up in Science of Identity paid the harshest price. Any person born into this group lived with the constant threat of being instantly rejected by their own families, their friends, and their entire community if they so much as said something to an outsider when they shouldn't.
Some of the victims who came forward to me feared being completely cut off from their families if they were perceived as criticizing SIF leaders who covered up violent, horrific child rapes. Those who did dare to speak up were made an example. People like Sunil Khemaney and Allison Hoen helped organize the anonymous online attack apparatus.
The archive even holds a dedicated category of internal attack reports, 21 of them, including an anonymous "stop the hate" blog redrafted from version two through version nine, 8
and a report on getting ahead of the "Holy Hell" cult documentary. 9
Across the documents, "smear" appears 108 times, "anonymous" 94 times, and "blog" 219 times.
They used the same strategies on me that they used on many victims: employ one of their abusers to create an environment of constant fear and intimidation through violence, financial abuse, and ongoing threats to me and my children's safety.
In my case, the pressure point was my children. Leaders like Richard Bellord heavily influenced my ex-husband and coordinated with other abusers, including Tulsi Gabbard's lifelong friend Matthew Krohnert.
How I decrypted the files
I never followed the two-computer rule. It was ridiculous, so I kept a copy of my encryption key in my own email. I actually forgot I had it, until Tulsi's friends engaged in a bizarre, coordinated attack to try to silence me and destroy my life after I had spoken to a Washington Post reporter. Then I remembered: I had saved a copy of my PGP key in an old email account, back in 2014. I then sent Washington Post reporter Jon Swaine thousands of pages of Butler's transcripts.
