Russell Miller (born c. 1938) is a British journalist and author of fifteen books, including biographies of Hugh Hefner, J. Paul Getty and L. Ron Hubbard.^[1]

While under contract to The Sunday Times Magazine he won four press awards and was voted Writer of the Year by the Society of British Magazine Editors. His book Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History: The Story of the Legendary Photo Agency (1999) on Magnum Photos, was described by John Simpson as "the best book on photo-journalism I have ever read".^[2] His oral histories of D-Day, Nothing Less Than Victory (1993), and the SOE, Behind The Lines (2002) were widely acclaimed, both in Britain and in the United States.^[2]

Life and work

Miller was born in east London and began his career in journalism at the age of sixteen.^[2]

In the early 1980s, Miller decided to write a biographical trilogy on the subjects of sex, money, and religion. The books that followed were Bunny (on Hugh Hefner, published in 1984), The House of Getty (on J. Paul Getty, 1985), and Bare-faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (on L. Ron Hubbard, 1987).

L. Ron Hubbard biography

In the 1980s Miller spent two years researching Bare-faced Messiah, a posthumous biography of the science-fiction author who had founded Scientology.^[3] The book challenges the official account of Hubbard's life and work promoted by the Church of Scientology^[4] and it was serialised in The Sunday Times.

External videos
2023 interview with Russell Miller covering his methods of investigating Hubbard for the book Bare-faced Messiah, the harassment and dirty tricks from the Church of Scientology and the lawsuits to stop publication of the book, and how different Scientology's hagiographic version of Hubbard is from what Miller found in the records.

While researching the book in the United States, Miller was spied upon. His friends and business associates also received visits from Scientologists and private detectives. Attempts were made to frame him for the murder of a London private detective, the murder of American singer Dean Reed in East Berlin and a fire in an aircraft factory.^[4][5][6] Senior executives at publishers Michael Joseph, and at The Sunday Times, which serialised the book, received threatening phone calls and also a visit from private investigator Eugene Ingram, who worked for the Church.^[3] Another private investigator, Jarl Grieve Einar Cynewulf, told The Sunday Times journalists that he had been offered "large sums of money" to find a link between Miller and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).^[7]