A signal moment in Hubbard's narrative is the seven-thousand-mile voyage he took in 1923 from Seattle through the Panama Canal to Washington DC, wherre his father was being posted. One of his fellow passengers was Commander Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson of the US Navy Medical Corps. A neurosurgeon, a naturalist, and a former spy, Thompson made a vivid impression on the boy. “He was a very careless man,” Hubbard later recalled. “He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to press and change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department.… But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud’s.… When he saw me—a defenseless character—and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.21)
It soon became evident that the expedition was broke. There was no meat or fruit, and the crew was soon reduced to buying their own food in port. Hubbard didn’t have enough money to pay the only professional sailors on the ship—the captain, the first mate, and the cook—so he offered to sell shares in the venture to his crewmates and borrowed money from others. He raised seven or eight hundred dollars that way, and was able to set sail from Bermuda, only to become mired in the Sargasso Sea for four days.
After a meager supper one night, George Blakeslee, who had been brought along as a photographer, had had enough. “I tied a hangman’s noose in a rope and everybody got the same idea,” he wrote in his journal. “So we made an effigy of Hubbard and strung it up in the shrouds. Put a piece of red cloth on the head and a sign on it. ‘Our redheaded _____!’ ” Hubbard stayed in his cabin after that. The furious captain wired for money, then steered the ship back to Baltimore, pronouncing the expedition “the worst and most unpleasant I ever made.” Hubbard was not aboard as the “jinx ship,” as it was called in the local press, crept back into its home port. He was last seen in Puerto Rico, slipping off with a suitcase in each hand.
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WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-THREE, Hubbard married Margaret Louise Grubb, an aspiring aviator four years his senior, whom he called Polly. Amelia Earhart had just become the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic, inspiring many daring young women who wanted to follow her example. Although Polly never gained a pilot’s license, it wasn’t surprising that she would respond to Ron’s swashbuckling personality and his tales of far-flung adventures. They settled in a small town in Maryland, near her family farm. Ron was trying to make it as a professional magazine writer, but by that point—at the end of 1933—he had only half a dozen articles in print. Soon, Polly was pregnant, and Ron had to find a way to make a living quickly. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.26-7)
Hubbard’s actual life experiences seemed wonderfully suited for such literature. His first pulp story, “The Green God,” published in Thrilling Adventures in 1934, is about a naval intelligence officer (possibly based on Snake Thompson) who is tortured and buried alive in China. “Maybe Because—!,” published in Cowboy Stories, was the first of Hubbard’s forty-seven westerns, which must have drawn upon his childhood in Montana. Soon, however, there were stories about submarines and zombies, tales set in Russia or Morocco. Plot was all that really mattered, and Hubbard’s amazing capacity for invention readily colored the canvas. Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher. Because the magazines didn’t want an author to appear more than once in the same issue, Hubbard adopted pen names—Mr. Spectator, Capt. Humbert Reynolds, Rene Lafayette, Winchester Remington Colt, et cetera—accumulating about twenty aliases over the years. He said that when he was writing stories he would simply “roll the pictures” in his mind and write down what he saw as quickly as possible. It was a physical act: he would actually perspire when he wrote. His philosophy was “First draft, last draft, get it out the door.”
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Then, on New Year’s Day, 1938, Hubbard had a revelation that would change his life—and eventually, the lives of many others. During a dental operation, he received a gas anesthetic. “While under the influence of it my heart must have stopped beating,” he relates. “It was like sliding helter-skelter down into a vortex of scarlet and it was knowing that one was dying and that the process of dying was far from pleasant.” In those brief, hallucinatory moments, Hubbard believed that the secrets of existence were accidentally revealed to him. Forrest Ackerman, who later became his literary agent, said that Hubbard told him that he had risen from the dental chair in spirit form, glanced back at his former body, and wondered, “Where do we go from here?” Hubbard’s disembodied spirit then noticed a huge ornate gate in the distance, which he floated through. On the other side, Ackerman relates, Hubbard discovered “an intellectual smorgasbord of everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man—you know, how did it all begin, where do we go from here, are there past lives—and like a sponge he was just absorbing all this esoteric information. And all of a sudden, there was a kind of swishing in the air and he heard a voice, ‘No, not yet! He’s not ready!’ And like a long umbilical cord, he felt himself being pulled back, back, back. And he lay down in his body, and he opened his eyes, and he said to the nurse, ‘I was dead, wasn’t I?’ ” The nurse looked startled, and the doctor gave her a dirty look for letting Hubbard know what had happened. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.27-9)
According to Hubbard, he got into the action right away. He said he was aboard the destroyer USS Edsall, which was sunk off the north coast of Java. All hands were lost, except for Hubbard, who managed to get to shore and disappear into the jungles. That is where he says he was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (Actually, the Edsall was not sunk until March 1942.) Hubbard said that he survived being machine-gunned by a Japanese patrol while he was hiding in the area, then escaped by sailing a raft to Australia. Elsewhere, Hubbard claimed that he had been posted to the Philippines at the outbreak of the war with Japan, then was flown home on the Secretary of the Navy’s private plane in the spring of 1942 as the “first U.S. returned casualty from the Far East.”
According to Navy records, however, Hubbard was training as an intelligence officer in New York when the war broke out. He was indeed supposed to have been posted to the Philippines, but his ship was diverted to Australia because of the overwhelming Japanese advance in the Pacific. There he awaited other transport to Manila, but he immediately got on the wrong side of the American naval attaché. “By assuming unauthorized authority and attempting to perform duties for which he has no qualification he became the source of much trouble,” the attaché complained. “This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance.” He sent Hubbard back to the United States for further assignment. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.34-5)
The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists was John Whiteside Parsons, known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Technical Institute. (Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, developed solid rocket fuel.) Darkly handsome and brawny, later called by some scholars the “James Dean of the occult,” Parsons was a science-fiction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-story Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage, at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house had once belonged to Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former president Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Albert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home to William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baron Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.41-2)
The Church of Scientology admits that Hubbard was involved with Parsons and the OTO, characterizing it, however, as a secret mission for naval intelligence. The church claims that the government had been worried about top American scientists—including some from Los Alamos, where the atom bomb was developed—who made a habit of staying with Parsons when they visited California. Hubbard’s mission was to penetrate and subvert the organization.
“Mr. Hubbard accomplished the assignment,” the church maintains. “He engineered a business investment that tied up the money Parsons used to fund the group’s activities, thus making it unavailable to Parsons for his occult pursuits.” Hubbard, the church claims, “broke up black magic in America.”
EVEN IF HUBBARD WAS a government spy, as the church claims, the available records show him at what must have been his lowest point in the years just after the war. His physical examination at the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles in September 1946 notes, “No work since discharge. Lives on his savings.” (The VA eventually increased his disability to forty percent.) Sara noticed that he was having nightmares. That winter, they moved into a lighthouse on a frozen lake in the Poconos near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It was an unsettling time for Sara; they were isolated, and Ron had a .45 pistol that he would fire randomly. Late one night, while she was in bed and Ron was typing, he hit her across the face with the pistol. He told her that she had been smiling in her sleep, so she must have been thinking about someone else. “I got up and left the house in the night and walked on the ice of the lake because I was terrified,” Sara said in 1997, in an account she dictated shortly before she died. She was so shocked and humiliated she didn’t know how to respond.
Ron had begun beating her in Florida, shortly after her father died. Her grief seemed to provoke Ron—she assumed it was because she wasn’t being who he needed her to be. No one had ever struck her before. She recognized now how dangerous their relationship was; on the other hand, Ron’s need for her was so stark. He had been blocked for a long time, and Sara had been churning out plots for him, and actually writing some of his stories. Ron worried that he would never write again. He frequently threatened suicide. Sara didn’t believe in divorce—it was a terrible stigma at the time—and she still thought she could save Ron. “I kept thinking that he must be suffering or he wouldn’t act that way.” And so, she went back to him.
Ron took a loan and bought a house trailer, and he and Sara drove across the country to Port Orchard, where his parents and his undivorced first wife and children were living. Sara had no idea why people treated her so strangely, until finally Hubbard’s son Nibs told her that his parents were still married. Once again, Sara fled. Ron found her waiting for the ferry that was leaving for California. The engines of the ship grumbled as Ron hastily pleaded his case. He told her that he really was getting a divorce. He claimed that an attorney had assured him that he and Sara actually were legally married. Finally, the ferry left without her.
Soon after that, Ron and Sara set out for Hollywood. They got as far as Ojai, California, where Ron was arrested for failing to make payments on the house trailer they were living in. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.48-9)
A fascinating glimpse into Hubbard’s state of mind during this time is found in what I am calling his secret memoir. The church claims that the document is a forgery. It was produced by the former archivist for the Church of Scientology, Gerald Armstrong, in a 1984 suit that the church brought against him. Armstrong read some portions of them into the record over the strong objections of the church attorneys; others later found their way onto the Internet. The church now maintains that Hubbard did not write this document, although when it was entered into evidence, the church’s lawyers made no such representation, saying that the papers were intensely private, “constitute a kind of self-therapy,” and did not reflect Hubbard’s actual condition.
This disputed document has been called the Affirmations, or the Admissions, but it is rather difficult to define. In part, the thirty pages constitute a highly intimate autobiography, dealing with the most painful episodes in Hubbard’s life. Many of the references to people and events made in these pages are supported by other documents. It appears that Hubbard is using techniques on himself that he would later develop into Dianetics. He explores memories that pose impediments in his mental and spiritual progress, and he prescribes affirmations or incantations to counter the psychological influence of these events. These statements would certainly be the most revealing and intimate disclosures Hubbard ever made about himself.
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Through self-hypnosis, he hopes to convince himself of certain prescriptive mantras, including:
I can write.
My mind is still brilliant.
That masturbation was no sin or crime.
That I do not need to have ulcers anymore.
That I am fortunate in losing Polly and my parents, for they never meant well by me.
That I believe in my gods and spiritual things.
That my magical work is powerful and effective.
That the numbers 7, 25, and 16 are not unlucky or evil for me.
That I am not bad to look upon.
That I am not susceptible to colds.
That Sara is always beautiful to me.
That these words and commands are like fire and will sear themselves into every corner of my being, making me happy and well and confident forever!
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In this lesson, Hubbard tells himself, he will learn several important things:
You have no urge to talk about your navy life. You do not like to talk of it. You never illustrate your point with bogus stories. It is not necessary for you to lie to be amusing and witty.
You like to have your intimate friends approve of and love you for what you are. This desire to be loved does not amount to a psychosis.
You can sing beautifully.
Nothing can intervene between you and your Guardian. She cannot be displaced because she is too powerful. She does not control you. She advises you.
You will never forget these incantations. They are holy and are now become an integral part of your nature.
Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves.
You are not sleepy or tired ever.… Your Guardian alone can talk to you as you sleep but she may not hypnotize you. Only you can hypnotize yourself.
The desires of other people have no hypnotic effect on you.
Nothing, no one opposes your writing.… You can carry on a wild social life and still write one hundred thousand words a month or more.… Your writing has a deep hypnotic effect on people.
You will make fortunes writing.
Your psychology is advanced and true and wonderful. It hypnotizes people. It predicts their emotions, for you are their ruler.
You will live to be 200 years old.
You will always look young.
You have no doubts about God.
You are not a coward.
Your eyes are getting progressively better. They became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy. You have no reason to keep them bad.
Your stomach trouble you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing you. You are free of the Navy.
Your hip is a pose. You have a sound hip. It never hurts. Your shoulder never hurts.
Your foot was an alibi. The injury is no longer needed.
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The most thrilling thing in your life is your love and consciousness of your Guardian.
She has copper red hair, long braids, a lovely Venusian face, a white gown belted with jade squares. She wears gold slippers.
You can talk with her and audibly hear her voice above all others.
You can do automatic writing whenever you wish. You do not care what comes out on the paper when your Guardian dictates.
The red-haired Guardian Hubbard visualizes so vividly is a kind of ideal mother, who also functions as his muse and is the source of his astoundingly rapid writing. Hubbard loves her but reassures himself that his Guardian does not control him. In all things, he is the controlling force. She seems to be an artifact of the influence of Aleister Crowley. Jack Parsons had said that Hubbard called his Guardian “the Empress.”
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The judge in the Armstrong suit, where this document was presented as evidence, offered his own amateur diagnosis of Hubbard’s personality in a crushing decision against the church:
The organization is clearly schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder LRH. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. At the same time it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating, and inspiring his adherents.… Obviously, he is and has been a very complex person, and that complexity is further reflected in his alter ego, the Church of Scientology. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.51-5)
At the end of April 1949, Hubbard sent a note to Heinlein that he was moving to Washington, DC, for an indefinite stay. There was no word about Sara. Three weeks later, the thirty-eight-year-old Hubbard applied for a license in Washington to marry twenty-six-year-old Ann Jensen. The application was canceled the next day at the request of the bride. Perhaps she had learned that Hubbard was already married to his second wife and had previously committed bigamy. In any case, Ann Jensen’s name disappears from Hubbard’s life story.
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This was the most potent medicine ever discovered, Campbell continued, but also the most dangerous weapon imaginable if not properly handled. “With the knowledge I now have, I could turn most ordinary people into homicidal maniacs within one hour.” And yet, as an editor, Campbell recognized the commercial possibilities: “This is the greatest story in the world—far bigger than the atomic bomb.” He added in a postscript that he had also lost twenty pounds in twenty-five days—another commercial bonanza. Campbell was beside himself because Hubbard had yet to actually start writing the book. “The key to world sanity is in Ron Hubbard’s head, and there isn’t even an adequate written record!”
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Ron promised to send Heinlein a galley of Dianetics as soon as it was available. He reported that it was 180,000 words, “begun Jan. 12, ’50, finished Feb. 10, off the press by April 25.” When one of his followers asked Hubbard how he had been able to dash it off so quickly, Hubbard said that his guardian spirit, the Empress, had dictated it to him.
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Hubbard compares the engram to a posthypnotic suggestion. He describes a man in a trance who has been told that every time the operator touches his tie, the subject will remove his coat. When the subject is awakened, he is not consciously aware of the command. “The operator then touches his tie,” Hubbard writes. “The subject may make some remark about its being too warm and so take his coat off.” This can be done repeatedly. “At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s faces, that something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know that the touching of the tie is the signal which makes him take off his coat.” The hypnotic command in his unconscious continues to govern his behavior, even when the subject recognizes that it is irrational and perhaps harmful. In the same way, Hubbard suggests, engrams work their sinister influence on everyday actions, undermining one’s self-confidence and subverting rational behavior. The individual feels helpless as he engages in behavior he would never consciously consent to. He is “handled like a marionette by his engrams.”
Although there were no recorded case histories to prove his claim that hundreds of patients had been cured through his methods, through “many years of exact research and careful testing,” Hubbard offered appealing examples of hypothetical behavior. For instance, a woman is beaten and kicked. “She is rendered ‘unconscious.’ ” In that state, she is told she is no good, a faker, and that she is always changing her mind. Meantime, a chair has been knocked over; a faucet is running in the kitchen; a car passes outside. All of these perceptions are parts of the engram. The woman is not aware of it, but whenever she hears running water or a car passing by, the engram is partly restimulated. She feels discomfort if she hears them together. If a chair happens to fall as well, she experiences a shock. She begins to feel like the person she was accused of being while she was unconscious—a fickle, no-good faker. “This is not theory,” Hubbard repeatedly asserts. It is an “exact science” that represents “an evolutionary step in the development of Man.”
Hubbard proposed that the influence engrams have over one’s current behavior can be eliminated by reciting the details of the original incident until it no longer possesses an emotional charge.4 “Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime,” Hubbard writes. “When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the memory banks, all aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses vanish.” The object of Dianetics therapy is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind entirely, leaving a person “Clear.”
WRITTEN IN a bluff, quirky style, and overrun with patronizing footnotes that do little to substantiate its bold findings, Dianetics nonetheless became a sensation, lodging itself for twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and laying the groundwork for the category of postwar self-help books that would seek to emulate its success. Hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up around the United States and in other countries in order for its adherents to apply the therapeutic principles Hubbard prescribed. One only needed a partner, called an auditor, who could guide the subject to locate his engrams and bring them into consciousness, where they would be released and rendered harmless. “You will find many reasons why you ‘cannot get well,’ ” Hubbard warns, but he promises, “Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suffering and loss, its end is always laughter, so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which caused the woe.”
The book arrived at a moment when the aftershocks of the world war were still being felt. Behind the exhilaration of victory, there was immense trauma. Religious certainties were shaken by the development of bombs so powerful that civilization, if not life itself, became a wager in the Cold War contest. Loss, grief, and despair were cloaked by the stoicism of the age, but patients being treated in mental hospitals were already on the verge of outnumbering those being treated for any other cause. Psychoanalysis was suspiciously viewed in much of America as a European—mainly Jewish—import, which was time-consuming and fantastically expensive. Hubbard promised results “in less than twenty hours of work” that would be “superior to any produced by several years of psycho-analysis.”
The profession of psychiatry, meantime, had entered a period of brutal experimentation, characterized by the widespread practice of lobotomies and electroshock therapy. The prospect of consulting a psychiatrist was accompanied by a justified sense of dread. That may have played a role in Hubbard’s decision not to follow up on his own request for psychiatric treatment. The appearance of a do-it-yourself manual that claimed to demystify the secrets of the human mind and produce guaranteed results—for free—was bound to attract an audience. “It was sweepingly, catastrophically successful,” Hubbard marveled.
The scientific community, stupefied by the book’s popularity, reacted with hostility and ridicule. It seemed to them little more than psychological folk art. “This volume probably contains more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing,” the Nobel physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi wrote in his review of Dianetics for Scientific American. “The huge sale of the book to date is distressing evidence of the frustrated ambitions, hopes, ideals, anxieties and worries of the many persons who through it have sought succor.” Erich Fromm, one of the predominant thinkers of the psychoanalytic movement, denounced the book as being “expressive of a spirit that is exactly the opposite of Freud’s teachings.” Hubbard’s method, he complains, “has no respect for and no understanding of the complexities of personality.” He derisively quotes Hubbard: “In an engineering science like Dianetics we can work on a push-button basis.” But, of course, that was part of the theory’s immense appeal.
One of the most painful reviews of Dianetics, no doubt, was by Korzybski’s most notable intellectual heir (and later, US senator from California), S. I. Hayakawa. He not only dismissed the book, he also criticized what he saw as the spurious craft of writing science fiction. “The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured,” he wrote. The writer who produces “too much of it too fast and too glibly” runs the risk of believing in his own creations. “It appears to me inevitable that anyone writing several million words of fantasy and science-fiction should ultimately begin to internalize the assumptions underlying the verbiage.” Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
Not all scientists rejected Hubbard’s approach. One of his early supporters was Campbell’s brother-in-law Dr. Joseph Winter, a physician who had also written for Astounding Science-Fiction. Searching for a more holistic approach to medicine, Winter traveled to New Jersey to experience Hubbard’s method firsthand. “While listening to Hubbard ‘running’ one of his patients, or while being ‘run’ myself, I would find myself developing unaccountable pains in various portions of my anatomy, or becoming extremely fatigued and somnolent,” he reported. “I had nightmares of being choked, of having my genitalia cut off, and I was convinced that dianetics as a method could produce effects.”
Hubbard’s method involved placing the patient in a state of “reverie,” achieved by giving the command “When I count from one to seven your eyes will close.” A tremble of the lashes as the eyelids flutter shut signals that the subject has fallen into a receptive condition. “This is not hypnotism,” Hubbard insists. Although a person in a Dianetic reverie may appear to be in a trance, the opposite is the case, he says: “The purpose of therapy is to awaken a person in every period of his life when he has been forced into ‘unconsciousness.’ Dianetics wakes people up.”
Sara watched the effect that Ron was having on his patients. “He would hold hands with them and try to talk them into these phony memories,” she recalled. “He would concentrate on them and they loved it. They were so excited about someone who would just pay this much attention to them.”
Dr. Winter tried out Hubbard’s techniques on his six-year-old son, who was afraid of the dark because he was terrified of being choked by ghosts. Winter asked him to remember the first time he saw a ghost. “He has on a long white apron, a little white cap on his head and a piece of white cloth on his mouth,” the boy said. He even had a name for the ghost—it happened to be the same as that of the obstetrician who delivered him. Winter then asked his son to look at the “ghost” in his mind repeatedly, until the boy began to calm down. “When the maximum relaxation had apparently been obtained after ten or twelve recountings, I told him to open his eyes,” Winter reported. “It has been over a year since that short session with my son, and he has not had a recurrence of his fear of the dark in all that time.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.58-65)
On the night of February 24, 1951, Sara went to the movies and left her baby in the care of a young man named John Sanborne, who was studying at the foundation. Alexis had become a kind of celebrity, or at least a curiosity. Hubbard had been touting her as the world’s first “dianetic baby”—shielded since birth against any engram-forming disruptions or parental conflict. As a result, Hubbard boasted, Alexis talked at three months, crawled at four, and had no phobias. At about ten o’clock, eleven-month-old Alexis began crying in her crib, so Sanborne picked her up to comfort her. Suddenly, the infant said in a hoarse whisper, “Don’t sleep.” Sanborne was startled. He didn’t think a baby could talk like that. “It went through me in a funny way,” he later said. “The hair raising on the back of the neck type of feeling.”
At eleven p.m. there was a knock on the door. One of Hubbard’s aides appeared, wearing a topcoat, with his hand in his pocket. Sanborne believed he was carrying a gun. The man said that Hubbard was here to take his daughter. Hubbard himself then came through the door, also wearing a topcoat, with his hand in his right pocket. They took the child and disappeared.
Later that night Hubbard returned with two other men to abduct Sara. “We have Alexis and you’ll never see her alive unless you come with us,” Hubbard said. They tied her hands and dragged her out of bed into a waiting Lincoln. She says that Hubbard had her in a chokehold to keep her from screaming. Hubbard’s assistant, Richard de Mille (son of the famous movie director and producer Cecil B. DeMille), drove aimlessly, while Hubbard and Sara, who was wearing only a nightgown, sat in back. She warned him that kidnapping was a capital offense.
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For six weeks, Sara had searched for Alexis in Southern California, enlisting local police, sheriffs, and the FBI, but the authorities regarded the abduction as a domestic dispute. Finally, she filed a writ of habeas corpus demanding Alexis’s return, setting off a press uproar. On April 23, 1951, Sara added to the sensation by finally filing for divorce in Los Angeles County, revealing that Hubbard was already married when they wed. She accused Hubbard of subjecting her to “systematic torture,” including sleep deprivation, beatings, strangulations, and “scientific torture experiments.” She said that she had consulted medical professionals, who concluded that Hubbard was “hopelessly insane, and crazy.”
Soon afterward, Sara received a surprising letter of support from Polly:
If I can help in any way, I’d like to—You must get Alexis in your custody—Ron is not normal. I had hoped that you could straighten him out. Your charges probably sound fantastic to the average person—but I’ve been through it—the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits you charge—twelve years of it.… Please do believe I do so want to help you get Alexis.
Meantime, in Havana, Hubbard hired a couple of women to take care of the baby. They kept her in a crib with wire over the top. To de Mille, it seemed that Alexis was being held like a monkey in a cage.
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Hubbard eventually wrote a note to Sara to explain his whereabouts, saying that he was in a Cuban military hospital, about to be transferred to the States “as a classified scientist immune from interference of all kinds.” He adds, “I will be hospitalized probably a long time. Alexis is getting excellent care. I see her every day. She is all I have to live for. My wits never gave way under all you did and let them do but my body didn’t stand up. My right side is paralyzed.… I hope my heart lasts.… Dianetics will last 10,000 years—for the Army and Navy have it now.” He concludes by warning that in the event of his death, Alexis will inherit a fortune, but if Sara gains custody, the child will get nothing.
Hubbard did return to the United States and hunkered down in Wichita, Kansas, where a wealthy supporter, Don Purcell, provided him sanctuary. Hubbard’s old friend Russell Hays was there, consulting for the Cessna Aircraft Corporation. Hubbard arrived with “a Cadillac so damn long he couldn’t hardly park it anywhere, and two concubines,” Hays marveled. When Sara discovered where her husband was, she sought to enjoin his assets. Hubbard retaliated by writing a letter to the US attorney general, explaining the peril he was in. “I am, basically, a scientist in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena,” he said by way of introduction. He said that his own investigation showed that Sara was tied to Communists who had infiltrated the Dianetics Foundation. This was at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. “I did not realize my wife was one until this spring,” Hubbard wrote. He named several of his disaffected followers, including Gregory Hemingway, son of the famous novelist. “When, when, when will we have a round-up?” he implored.
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IN THE SPACE of a year, Hubbard had gone from destitution and obscurity to great wealth and international renown, followed by a crashing descent. The foundation he had created to train auditors plummeted into debt and soon declared bankruptcy. Close supporters, such as John Campbell and Dr. Winter, deserted. Dianetics proved to be a fad that had swept the country, infatuating tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, but then burned itself out more quickly than the hula hoop.
2 A conspicuous example of Dianetic processing involved John Brodie, the outstanding quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, who suffered an injury to his throwing arm in 1970 that threatened to end his career. Despite the best medical attention and physical therapy, his elbow remained sore and swollen. Finally, he went to Phil Spickler, a Scientologist and Dianetic auditor, who asked Brodie to tell him about previous incidents that might be keeping his arm from healing. Brodie related that he had been in a severe traffic accident in 1963, in which his arm had been broken. As he explored the incident with Spickler, Brodie seemed to recall one of the ambulance attendants saying, “Well, that poor sonofabitch will never throw a football again.” And yet Brodie was unconscious at the time. How could he have such a memory? Spickler told him this was all part of an engram that was keeping him from getting well. “The ambulance attendant’s prediction had been simmering in my unconscious for seven years, agitating all my deepest fears of declining ability or failure,” Brodie later writes. “It had finally surfaced as this psychosomatic ailment in my throwing arm. Phil made me tell the story again and again and again, until no charge showed on the E-Meter” (John Brodie and James D. Houston, Open Field, p. 166). The swelling on Brodie’s arm diminished. He went on to have one of the greatest seasons of his career, and was voted the National Football League’s most valuable player that year. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.71-7)
Going Overboard
Given his biography, it would be easy to dismiss Hubbard as a fraud, but that would fail to explain his total absorption in his project. He would spend the rest of his life elaborating his theory and—even more obsessively—constructing the intricate bureaucracy designed to spread and enshrine his visionary understanding of human behavior. His life narrowed down to his singular mission. Each passageway in his interior expedition led him deeper into his imagination. That journey became Scientology, a totalistic universe in which his every turn was mapped and described.
Hubbard’s own logic was inclining him toward conclusions that he was at first reluctant to draw. By admitting the validity of prenatal memories, he was bound to confront a dilemma: What if the memories didn’t stop there? When patients began having “sperm dreams,” Hubbard had to accept the idea that prenatal engrams were recorded “as early as shortly before conception.” Then, when patients began to remember previous lives, Hubbard resisted the idea; it threatened to tear apart his organization. “The subject of past deaths and past lives is so full of tension that as early as last July 1950, the board of trustees of the [Dianetics] Foundation sought to pass a resolution banning the entire subject,” he confided. Still, the implications were intriguing. What if we have lived before? Might there be memories that occasionally leak through into present time? Wouldn’t that prove that we are immortal beings, only temporarily residing in our present incarnations? (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.79)
Sometimes in Hubbard’s writings, however, he puts forward what appear to be fantasies of a highly schizophrenic personality. In 1952, for instance, he began talking about “injected entities,” which can paralyze portions of the anatomy or block information from being audited. These entities can be located in the body, always in the same places. For instance, one of the entities, the “crew chief,” is found on the right side of the jaw down to the shoulder. “They are the ‘mysterious voices’ in the heads of some preclears,” Hubbard said. “Paralysis, anxiety stomachs, arthritis and many ills and aberrations have been relieved by auditing them. An E-Meter shows them up and makes them confess their misdeeds. They are probably just compartments of the mind which, cut off, begin to act as though they were persons.”
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Ron and Mary Sue, with their burgeoning family, began a restless search for a new home—for themselves and for the international headquarters of the church. In 1955, they moved to Washington, DC, but they stayed only a few months before moving to London. ..... (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.84-5)
Hubbard’s neighbors soon learned more about the new lord of the manor. Scientology’s expansion, coupled with the increasingly bold claims that Hubbard made about the health benefits that could be expected, brought the organization under scrutiny by various governments. The first blow was a 1963 raid by US Marshals, acting on a warrant issued by the Food and Drug Administration to seize more than a hundred E-Meters stored in the Washington church. The FDA charged that the labeling for the E-Meter suggested that it was effective in diagnosing and treating “all mental and nervous disorders and illnesses,” as well as “psychosomatic ailments of mankind such as arthritis, cancer, stomach ulcers, and radiation burns from atomic bombs, poliomyelitis, the common cold, etc.”2
The IRS began an audit that would strip the church of its religious tax exemption in 1967. At the same time, an Australian government board of inquiry produced a sweeping report that was passionate in its condemnation. “There are some features of Scientology which are so ludicrous that there may be a tendency to regard Scientology as silly and its practitioners as harmless cranks. To do so would be gravely to misunderstand the tenor of the Board’s conclusions,” the report began, then emphatically added: “Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and often mentally ill.” The report admitted that there were “transient gains” realized by some of the religion’s adherents, but said that the organization plays on those gains in order to produce “a subservience amounting almost to mental enslavement.” As for Hubbard himself, the board described him as “a man of restless energy” who is “constantly experimenting and speculating, and equally constantly he confuses the two.” “Some of his claims are that … he has been up in the Van Allen Belt, that he has been on the planet Venus where he inspected an implant station, and that he has been to Heaven. He even recommends a protein formula for feeding non-breast fed babies—a mixture of boiled barley and corn syrup—stating that he ‘picked it up in Roman days.’ ” Although Hubbard has “an insensate hostility” to psychiatrists and people in the field of mental health, the report noted, he is himself “mentally abnormal,” evincing a “persecution complex” and “an imposing aggregation of symptoms which, in psychiatric circles, are strongly indicative of a condition of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur—symptoms common to dictators.” The report led to a ban of Scientology in two Australian states,3 and prompted similar inquiries in New Zealand, Britain, and South Africa. Hubbard believed that the US Food and Drug Administration, along with the FBI and CIA, were feeding slanderous information about the church to various governments.
In the midst of all this upheaval, in February 1966 Hubbard finally declared another “first Clear.” This time it was John McMaster, a dapper, blond South African, in his mid-thirties, who was the director of the Hubbard Guidance Center at the church’s Saint Hill headquarters. Charming, ascetic, and well-spoken, McMaster had dropped out of medical school to become an auditor. He immediately proved to be a far more urbane representative of Scientology than Hubbard. His wry manner made him a welcome guest on talk shows and on the lecture circuit, where he portrayed Scientology as a cool and nonthreatening route to self-realization. Suddenly the idea of going Clear began to catch on. McMaster adopted a clerical outfit that befitted his designation as the church’s unofficial ambassador to the United Nations. At one point, Hubbard designated him Scientology’s first “pope.” It was a matter of puzzlement to Hubbard’s closest associates, given Hubbard’s disparagement of homosexuals in his books, that he would enlist a person to serve as the church’s representative who was obviously gay. “He was very pronounced in his affect,” one of Hubbard’s medical officers remembered. But Hubbard’s relationship to homosexuality was apparently more complicated in life than in theory.
CONVINCED THAT the British, American, and Soviet governments were interested in gaining control of Scientology’s secrets in order to use them for evil intentions, Hubbard began looking for a safe harbor—ideally, a country that he could rule over. England had taken steps to “curb the growth” of Scientology, and Hubbard took the hint. He also suffered from the damp weather. “I had been ill with pneumonia for the third time in England and on the suggestion of my doctor was seeking a warmer climate for a short while in order to recover,” he said, in an unprompted explanation to the CIA. He resigned as Executive Director of the Church of Scientology and sold his interests in the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, although he maintained actual control of the organization through his innumerable telexes. He journeyed to Rhodesia, the South African republic that had recently declared its independence from the United Kingdom (it later became Zimbabwe). Isolated, diplomatically spurned, and subject to international sanctions, the Rhodesian government served a clique of white colonists who ruled over an insurgent black majority. To Hubbard, Rhodesia seemed ripe for a takeover. He felt a kinship with the republic’s dashing and flamboyant founder, Cecil John Rhodes, who also had red hair and a taste for swashbuckling adventure. Hubbard believed he might have been Rhodes in a previous life, although it’s unclear whether he knew that Rhodes was homosexual.
Hubbard had a fantasy that he would be welcomed in Rhodesia, that the black population would embrace him like a brother, and that eventually he would become its leader, issuing passports and his own currency. However, the current prime minister, Ian Smith, was desperately trying to negotiate a settlement with the black nationalist movement that would preserve white-minority rule. Hubbard thoughtfully wrote up a constitution for the government that he claimed would accomplish just that, but he couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously.
While Hubbard talked about his big plans for developing the country, the government became increasingly suspicious of his motives and his resources. Ultimately, Hubbard’s visa was not renewed. “He told me Ian Smith was going to be shot because he was a ‘Suppressive,’ ” John McMaster said. “The real reason that Hubbard was kicked out of Rhodesia was that his cheques bounced.”
Hubbard returned to England with a new scheme. If the world’s governments were lining up against him, he would put himself beyond reach. Scientologists were whispering about a clandestine “sea project” that their leader was planning. He quietly began acquiring a small fleet of oceangoing vessels. Then he disappeared again.
This time, he went to Tangier, the Moroccan city on the Strait of Gibraltar, which was a famous hangout for hipsters and artists. There he began his research on Operating Thetan Level Three (OT III), his “Wall of Fire.” Mary Sue and the children remained in England, but Hubbard wrote to her daily, complaining of a barking dog that was interrupting his work, and various ailments—a bad back, and a lung problem that emerged from a lingering cold. He admitted that he was “drinking lots of rum” and taking drugs—“pinks and grays”—while he was doing his research. He would sign off on the letters, “Your Sugie.” Hubbard stayed only a month in Tangier before moving to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where one of his followers found him deeply depressed and surrounded by pills of all kinds. “I want to die,” he said. Alarmed, Mary Sue flew down to take care of him.
In September 1967, Hubbard made a recording for his followers to explain his absence and inform them of important discoveries in his OT III research. “All this recent career has been relatively hard on this poor body,” he relates. “I’ve broken its back, broken its knee, and now I have a broken arm, because of the strenuousness of these particular adventures. One wonders then, well, if he is in such good shape what is he doing breaking up his body? Well, that is the trouble. I have great difficulty getting down to the small power level of a body.”
He also notes that he had directed Mary Sue to find out who was behind the attacks on Scientology that were turning the governments against the organization. Mary Sue had hired “several professional intelligence agents,” who uncovered a conspiracy. “Our enemies on this planet are less than twelve men,” Hubbard discloses. “They own and control newspaper chains and they are oddly enough directors in all the mental health groups in the world.” Their plan was to “use mental health, which is to say psychiatric electric shock and prefrontal lobotomy, to remove from their path any political dissenters.” For the first time, he openly talks about the Sea Organization, or Sea Org, an elite group who would form the committed inner core of the religion, Hubbard’s disciples, a Scientology clergy.
HANA STRACHAN (now Hana Eltringham Whitfield) was one of the first young recruits admitted into the Sea Org. Her deranged and manipulative mother was a follower of Helena Blavatsky, the nineteenth-century spiritualist who was the founder of the Theosophical Society. When Hana was about fifteen, she learned that Blavatsky had prophesied a new race that would arise in the Americas in the 1950s; Hana was under the impression that it would be led by a man with red hair.
Hana escaped her traumatic family situation to become a nurse in Johannesburg, South Africa. A medical student there gave her a copy of Dianetics. It made immediate sense to her. She went to the local organization and said she wanted to learn more. “There’s a course starting tonight,” she was told. In the hallway of the office Hana noticed a photograph of Hubbard standing outside the Saint Hill headquarters. She was transfixed by his red hair. This must be the man Blavatsky was talking about, she decided. “That sealed it for me,” she said. She moved to Saint Hill and became Clear #60. For three weeks she was in a state of euphoria, feeling slightly detached from her environment and her body. “This is who we were in eons past,” she thought. She was convinced that Hubbard was a returned savior who would bring all humanity to an enlightened state.
Slender and stately, Hana was one of the first thirty-five Sea Org recruits. The mission of the Sea Org, according to the contract she signed, is “to get ETHICS IN on this PLANET AND THE UNIVERSE.” She agreed to “subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this group.… THEREFORE, I CONTRACT MYSELF TO THE SEA ORGANIZATION FOR THE NEXT BILLION YEARS.”4
Hana married another Sea Org member, an American named Guy Eltringham, but they were separated when Hubbard ordered her to Las Palmas, where he was refitting an exhausted fishing trawler called the Avon River. The decks and the hold were coated with decades of fish oil that had to be scraped away. During the two months the Avon River was in dry dock, Hubbard would often linger for dinner with his Sea Org crew, and afterward he would sit on the deck and regale them with stories. Hubbard’s depression had lifted and he seemed completely in control—relaxed and confident, even jovial. The crew were mainly drinking Spanish wines, but Hubbard favored rum and Coke—an eighth of a glass of Coke and seven-eighths rum—one after another through the evening. The heavens seemed very close in the dark harbor. Hubbard would point to the sky and say, “That is where the Fifth Invaders came from. They’re the bad guys, they’re the ones who put us here.” He said he could actually spot their spaceships crossing in front of the stars, and he would salute them as they passed overhead, just to let them know that they had been seen.
During a session with her auditor, Hana revealed the story of Madame Blavatsky’s prophecy of the red-haired man. Soon afterward, Hubbard came up on deck and gave her an intense look. From that point on, she became his favorite. He appointed her the first female Sea Org lieutenant. That day, she had a photograph made of herself in her Sea Org uniform—white shirt, dark tie and jacket, with a lanyard over one shoulder. She is young and elegant, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. After that, she rose through the Sea Org ranks with astonishing speed, often wondering if the revelation about the red-haired man was responsible for her rapid promotions. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.90-5)
Hubbard spent most of his time in the air-conditioned captain’s cabin on the promenade deck of the Royal Scotman, surrounded by windows to take in the ocean vistas. He rarely drank on the ship, except perhaps to take the chill off on a cold night on the bridge. Drugs were nowhere in evidence. His days were largely solitary, passed in auditing himself and writing policy papers. His office on the top deck was called the Research Room. It was behind a pair of highly polished wooden doors with brass handles. The floor was a bright red linoleum covered with Oriental rugs; there was a massive mahogany desk and a huge mirror above a fireplace. Crew members passing by on the upper deck could see him writing with his usual rapidity on foolscap, using a green pen for policy bulletins and a red one for the “tech”—that is, his vast corpus of coursework and procedures that comprised Scientology’s spiritual technology. His restless leg would be jiggling as his hand raced across the page, faultlessly, in handsome, legible script. For other writing, he turned back to his typewriter. “I think he was doing automatic writing,” said Jim Dincalci, one of his medical officers. “The pages would be flying. When he came out of it, he would blink his eyes, as if coming awake, and he did this thing with his lips, smacking.”
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After initially resisting the concept of past lives, Hubbard became passionately interested in the subject. “We Come Back” was the motto of the Sea Org. Hubbard began recalling many of his own previous existences, which the E-Meter validated. He claimed to have been a contemporary of Machiavelli’s, and he was still upset that the author of The Prince stole his line “The end justifies the means.” He said he had been a marshal to Joan of Arc and Tamburlaine’s wife. He told stories about driving a race car in the alien Marcab civilization millions of years before. He came to believe that in some of his past lives on this planet, he had buried treasure in various locations, so he launched an expedition to unearth his ancient hoards. He called it the Mission into Time. He selected a small crew to go on the Avon River. Because he wanted to keep the mission secret, he had two long rafts fashioned, which could be rowed ashore under cover of darkness and pulled up on the beach near where he imagined his ancient treasure was buried. When Hana Eltringham saw she wasn’t on the list, she wrote Hubbard, pleading to be included, saying she would be willing to perform any duty. To her surprise, Hubbard appointed her chief officer.
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THE AVON RIVER WAS traveling down the east side of Corsica when Hubbard gathered his crew and read them a new revelation. Nearby, in the north of Corsica, there was an underground space station, he said. He even provided the coordinates. There, a secret doorway would open by a palm print on the lock—but only one person’s hand would do the trick. Hubbard smiled suggestively, without saying whose hand that would be. The rock face would slide open, revealing an immense cavern harboring a mother ship and hundreds of smaller craft, all fueled and ready to go.
The space station would remain undiscovered, however. Word arrived that the Royal Scotman had run into trouble with the port authorities in Valencia, where Hubbard had hoped to make a permanent base. .......
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Incident Two is central to the OT III saga. This one took place seventy-five million years ago in the Galactic Confederacy, which was composed of seventy-six planets and twenty-six stars. “The world we live in now replicates the civilization of that period,” Hubbard said. “People at that particular time and place were walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute.… The cars they drove looked exactly the same, and the trains they ran looked the same, and the boats they had looked the same. Circa nineteen-fifty, nineteen-sixty.”
A tyrannical overlord named Xenu ruled the Confederacy. “He was a Suppressive to end all Suppressives,” Hubbard told his followers. Xenu had been chosen by a kind of Praetorian guard called the Loyal Officers, but they realized that their leader was wicked and they decided to remove him. Xenu had other plans, Hubbard said. “He took the last moments he had in office to really goof the floof.” Xenu and a few evil conspirators—mainly psychiatrists—fed false information to the population to draw them into centers where Xenu’s troops could destroy them. “One of the mechanisms they used was to tell them to come in for an income-tax investigation,” Hubbard related. “So in they went, and the troops started slaughtering them.” The preferred method was to shoot a needle into a lung, paralyzing the thetan with an injection of frozen alcohol and glycol. The frozen bodies were packed into boxes and loaded onto space planes, which resembled the DC-8 jetliner. “No difference—except the DC-8 had fans—propellers—on it and the space plane didn’t.” In this fashion, billions of thetans were transported to Teegeeack, the planet now called Earth, where they were dropped into volcanoes and then blown up with hydrogen bombs.
Thetans are immortal, however. Freed from their corporeal incarnations, they floated along on the powerful winds created by the explosion. Then they were trapped in an electronic ribbon and placed in front of a “three-D, super colossal motion picture” for thirty-six days, during which time they were subjected to images called R6 implants. “These pictures contain God, the Devil, angels, space opera, theaters, helicopters, a constant spinning, a spinning dancer, trains and various scenes very like modern England. You name it, it’s in this implant.” The implant included all world religions and “a motion picture studio” complete with screenwriters.
Xenu didn’t have much time to gloat over his victory. Some Loyal Officers remained, scattered around the galaxy. There was a civil war, and within a year, the Loyal Officers had captured Xenu and locked him up in an electrified wire cage buried in a mountain. “He is not likely ever to get out,” Hubbard said.
Because Teegeeack was a dumping ground for thetans, it became known as the Prison Planet, “the planet of ill repute.” The Galactic Confederacy abandoned the area, although various invaders have appeared throughout the millennia. But these free-floating thetans remain behind. They are the souls of people who have been dead for seventy-five million years. They attach themselves to living people because they no longer have free will. There can be millions of them clustered inside a single person’s body. Auditing for Scientologists at OT III and above would now focus on eliminating the “body thetans”—or BTs—that stand in the way of spiritual progress. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.99-105)
Hubbard set a course for Cagliari, on the Italian island of Sardinia. On the way, he personally tutored her in his plan to take over the World Federation for Mental Health, which was headquartered in Geneva. Hubbard had learned that the organization had never bothered to actually incorporate itself in Switzerland. His grand idea was to set up an office in Bern, the capital, posing as an American delegation of the WFMH bent on reforming the organization from within. The true scheme was to establish a presence in the country long enough to incorporate as the WFMH; and then, posing as the actual mental health organization, go to the United Nations with a plan for enforced euthanization of the “useless or unfixable” elements of society. Hubbard predicted that the outcry that would surely follow would turn the world against the WFMH. It would be a powerful strike against his most formidable enemy, SMERSH.
All the way to Sardinia Hubbard drilled Kit in the history of the health organization, its former presidents, and the policies it supported, such as electroshock therapy. Kit didn’t need to be persuaded about the dangers of that practice; her own mother had been subjected to electroshock in the 1940s, without her consent, as treatment for postpartum depression. After that, her mother suffered from amnesia and a fear of change and losing control.
By the time the Royal Scotman docked in Cagliari, Kit was well schooled. She and another Sea Org member, Mary Pat Shelley, a trained Shakespearian actress from Cincinnati, traveled to Bern. They set up an office, purchased furniture, and covered the walls with phony certificates. They had business cards and stationery printed. Then they filed papers for incorporation as the World Federation for Mental Health.
Soon after that, they received a call from the Federal Office of Public Health in Switzerland demanding to know what they were up to. The two women were invited to explain themselves to the director himself.
Kit and Marjorie were both in their early twenties. They dressed in dowdy clothes and put powder in their hair to make themselves appear older. When they arrived at the office, they were shown to a conference room with about ten other people, including the director, a stenographer, and several lawyers. Mary Pat’s hands were trembling as Kit brazenly presented their case for taking over the WFMH. She claimed that the organization had long been misrepresenting itself; for instance, was the director aware that the WFMH never even bothered to incorporate in Switzerland? He was not. Nor was he a fan of some of the policies that the women said that WFMH championed, such as euthanasia. By the end of the meeting, the director seemed persuaded. “I like how you Americans work!” he said enthusiastically.
The women emerged from the meeting elated, but the response to their telex to Hubbard surprised them. He ordered them back to the ship, “for your protection.” As soon as they returned to Cagliari, Hubbard cast off lines and set a course through the Strait of Gibraltar for open water. He even changed the names of his ships, in order to erase the connections with Scientology. The Enchanter became the Diana, the Avon River became the Athena, and the flagship Royal Scotman turned into the Apollo. All were registered with Panamanian credentials as belonging to the Operation and Transport Corporation. The Apollo was now billed as “the pride of the Panamanian fleet,” “a floating school of philosophy,” and “the sanest space on the planet.”
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Looking for a safe port, Hubbard turned toward Morocco. .....
For most of the next year, Kit lived in Rabat, reporting to the Apollo every couple of months. In July 1971, Colonel Allam invited her and two other Scientologists to watch a war-games exercise on the occasion of the king’s forty-second birthday. The games, which were held at the king’s summer palace in Skhirat, were a panoramic fantasia of Berber tribesmen on camels, followed by infantry formations and tank manuevers. The audience sat in tents and nibbled on endless hors d’oeuvres, and the pretty Scientology girls fended off advances from the Moroccan brass. They played poker with the generals to pass the time. Everything went smoothly, but suddenly, in the middle of the airshow portion of the exercise, two fighter aircraft emerged from a cloud and dropped out of formation, flying low over the panicked crowd. They trained their guns on the king’s tent, which was next to where Kit and the other Scientologists were sitting. Simultaneously, a thousand military cadets stormed the palace. A hundred people were killed in the coup attempt. The king escaped by hiding in the toilet. Kit and her companions were quickly shuttled back to their hotel. Unnerved, they turned on the television to see what had happened, only to watch the generals they had been sitting with lined up against a wall and shot. The coup attempt quickly fell apart. King Hassan fled to France and left the country in charge of General Oufkir, who was also given the post of minister of defense. There was no one else the king trusted. He was convinced that the CIA was determined to oust him.
Even in this chaotic and dangerous situation, Hubbard saw an opportunity. He proposed the creation of an elite guard to protect the king. He ordered Kit to instruct General Oufkir in the use of E-Meters as lie detectors in order to determine which members of the government had been a part of the rebel forces and root out subversion. She refused; her own sources told her it was far too dangerous, not only for her, but for everyone involved. Hubbard ordered her back to the ship and put her in charge of the snack bar. He sent another team, and they quickly began to uncover the plotters. Colonel Allam was marched out to the desert and shot, along with dozens of others.
When King Hassan II returned from France, in 1972, a squadron of Moroccan fighter jets accompanied his passenger jet. As soon as they left French airspace, however, one of the escort jets began firing on the king’s aircraft. The king, who was also a pilot, immediately grasped what was happening. He raced into the cockpit and seized control. “Stop firing! The tyrant is dead!” he shouted into the radio. Then he flew the jet on to Morocco.
That night, the architect of the coup was revealed: General Oufkir. It was announced that he had committed “suicide,” although his body was riddled with bullets.
The shaken king turned his attention to the Scientologists. He had long suspected that Scientology was a CIA front—a rumor that was spreading all over the Mediterranean. There was also gossip that the Apollo was involved in drug trafficking and prostitution, or that it was part of a pornography ring. In December 1972, the Scientologists were expelled from the country, leaving a trail of confusion and recrimination behind them.6
PAULETTE COOPER WAS studying comparative religion for a summer at Harvard in the late 1960s when she became interested in Scientology, which was gaining attention. “A friend came to me and said he had joined Scientology and discovered he was Jesus Christ,” she recalled. She decided to go undercover to see what the church was about. “I didn’t like what I saw,” she said. The Scientologists she encountered seemed to be in a kind of trance. When she looked into the claims that the church was making, she found many of them false or impossible to substantiate. “I lost my parents in Auschwitz,” Cooper said, explaining her motivation in deciding to write about Scientology at a time when there had been very little published and those who criticized the church came under concentrated legal and personal attacks. A slender, soft-spoken woman, Cooper published her first article in Queen, a British magazine, in 1970. “I got death threats,” she said. The church filed suit against her. She refused to be silent. “I thought if, in the nineteen-thirties people had been more outspoken, maybe my parents would have lived.” The following year, Cooper published a book, The Scandal of Scientology, that broadly attacked the teachings of Hubbard, revealing among other things that Hubbard had misrepresented his credentials and that defectors claimed to have been financially ripped off and harassed if they tried to speak out.
Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and Sara Hubbard’s daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that Alexis bring substantial identification to prove who she was, but when she opened the door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled, twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron and Sara’s marriage certificate.
Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her for four days. He identified himself as an FBI agent and said he had several pages of a letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It was clearly written by Hubbard. “Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to fire Sara because she was a “street-walker” and a Nazi spy. “In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie,” the letter continues. “She turned up destitute and pregnant.” Out of the goodness of his heart, Hubbard said, he had taken Sara in, to see her “through her trouble.” Weirdly, the letter was signed, “Your good friend, J. Edgar Hoover.”
After The Scandal of Scientology, Cooper’s life turned into a nightmare. She was followed; her phone was tapped; she was sued nineteen times. Her name and telephone number were written on the stalls in public men’s rooms. One day, when Cooper was out of town, her cousin, who was staying in her New York apartment, opened the door for a delivery from a florist. The deliveryman took a gun from the bouquet, put it to her temple, and pulled the trigger. When the gun didn’t fire, he attempted to strangle her. Cooper’s cousin screamed and the assailant fled. Cooper then moved to an apartment building with a doorman, but soon after that her three hundred neighbors received letters saying that she was a prostitute with venereal disease who molested children. A woman impersonating Cooper voiced threats against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford at a Laundromat, while a Scientologist who happened to be present notified the FBI. Two members from the Guardian’s office broke into Cooper’s psychiatrist’s office and stole her files, then sent copies to her adoptive parents. Cooper was charged with mailing bomb threats to the Church of Scientology. In the courtroom, the prosecutor produced a threatening letter with her fingerprint on it, and Cooper fainted. (Later, she remembered signing a petition, which may have had a blank page underneath it.) In May 1973, Cooper was indicted by the US Attorney’s office for mailing the threats and then lying about it before the grand jury.
IF THE RUMORS about Hubbard were true—that he had created a religion only in order to get rich—he had long since accomplished that goal. One of his disaffected lieutenants later claimed that Hubbard had admitted to “an insatiable lust for power and money.” He hectored his adherents on this subject. “MAKE MONEY,” he demanded in a 1972 policy letter. “MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE SO AS TO MAKE MONEY.” In order to siphon money into Hubbard’s personal accounts, a number of front organizations were established, including the Religious Research Foundation, which was incorporated in Liberia. In the mid-seventies that single foundation had an account in Switzerland containing more than $300 million. At one point, panicked that Switzerland was going to make a change in its tax laws, Hubbard ordered his medical officer, Kima Douglas, to move those funds from Switzerland to Lichtenstein. She described stacks of cash sitting in the bank vault, mostly hundred-dollar bills, four feet high and three to four feet wide, one pile in Hubbard’s name, the other in the church’s. “Church’s was bigger but his was big too,” she told Hubbard’s biographer Russell Miller. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., remembered shoeboxes full of money in his father’s closet. He later testified that Hubbard habitually kept “great chunks of cash” within easy reach, “so that if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.113-9)
WORD ARRIVED while the Apollo was in dry dock in Portugal that the French government was going to indict the Church of Scientology for fraud, with Hubbard named as a conspirator (he would eventually be convicted in absentia and sentenced to four years in prison). Hubbard flew to New York the very next day. Few crew members knew where he was. Jim Dincalci, his medical officer, and Paul Preston, a former Green Beret who acted as Hubbard’s bodyguard, joined him and set up housekeeping in Queens.
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In Hubbard’s absence, Mary Sue exerted increased control over the church’s operations. Hubbard had already appointed her the head of the Guardian’s Office, a special unit with a broad mandate to protect the religion. Among its other duties, the GO functioned as an intelligence agency, gathering information on critics and government agencies around the world, generating lawsuits to intimidate opponents, and waging an unremitting campaign against mental health professionals. It was the GO that Hubbard tasked with Snow White. Under Mary Sue’s direction, the GO infiltrated government offices around the world, looking for damning files on the church. Within the next few years, as many as five thousand Scientologists were covertly placed in 136 government agencies worldwide. Project Grumpy, for instance, covered Germany, where the Guardian’s Office was set up to infiltrate Interpol as well as German police and immigration authorities. In addition, there was a scheme to accuse German critics of the church of committing genocide. Project Sleepy was to clear files in Austria; Happy was for Denmark, Bashful for Belgium, and Dopey for Italy. There were also Projects Mirror, Apple, Reflection, and so on, all drawn from elements of the fairy tale. Projects Witch and Stepmother both targeted the UK, the source of Scientology’s immigration problems.
Project Hunter was the United States, where Scientologists penetrated the IRS, the Justice, Treasury, and Labor Departments, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as foreign embassies and consulates; private companies and organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Better Business Bureau; and newspapers—including the St. Petersburg Times, the Clearwater Sun, and the Washington Post—that were critical of the religion. In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS intelligence files of celebrities and political figures, including California governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and Frank Sinatra. Nothing in American history can compare with the scale of the domestic espionage of Operation Snow White. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.121-3)
Jim Dincalci, the medical officer who was still beached in Madeira, learned that the Apollo was headed in his direction. By now, he had made friends with many of the local people, and he was surprised to learn from them that the Apollo was widely suspected of being a spy ship for the CIA.8 He sent telexes warning the ship that it would be better to avoid Madeira, but Hubbard came anyway. Soon after the Apollo docked, a mob arrived and began stoning the ship. Hubbard ordered fire hoses turned on the crowd, which further infuriated them. There were motorcycles belonging to crew members and two of Hubbard’s cars which had been offloaded onto the pier; the mob shoved them all into the harbor, then loosened the moorings so that the ship drifted offshore. Mary Sue and some other members of the ship’s company were stranded in town and had to be rescued by the local authorities.
Quentin returned to the ship in bad shape. He had taken an overdose of pills in a failed suicide attempt. After his stomach was pumped at a local hospital, he was brought back to the ship, pale and weak, and put in isolation in his cabin, guarded night and day, becoming the second person to undergo the Introspection Rundown. Suzette was the only one to visit him. He looked like a broken doll.
Quentin was now twenty years old, popular and free-spirited, but in many ways still a soft-spoken, dreamy boy. Although he was small like his mother, and had her coloring, in other respects he bore a strong resemblance to his father. His facial features were almost an exact match: almond-shaped eyes under low, reddish brows; protuberant lips; and a deep cleft in the chin. Even though Quentin became one of the highest-rated auditors in the Sea Org, his father was constantly disappointed in his performance. “You have to improve,” he barked at Quentin in front of the other auditors. “It doesn’t matter that you’re a Hubbard.” Quentin would sit there and smile, seemingly unfazed, as the others cringed for him. Privately, he confided, “Daddy doesn’t love me anymore.”
Eventually, Hubbard sentenced Quentin to the Rehabilitation Project Force. His “twin” on the RPF was Monica Pignotti, an auditor in training at age twenty-one. As they practiced auditing each other, they became close. Quentin sneaked some peanut butter from the family pantry and shared it with Monica. They made up skits and played with his tape recorder. They never became intimate. Quentin told her that he had once become sexually involved with a woman, but when his father found out, she was sent off the ship. He knew that people regarded him as a homosexual, he said, but that was only something he told other women on the ship who were after him because he was Hubbard’s son.
HUBBARD SET a new course: due west, toward America. The destination was Charleston, South Carolina. The crew were thrilled that they would be returning to the States, only to be crestfallen when a message arrived from the Guardian’s Office, just as the ship was approaching port, alerting Mary Sue that agents from US Customs, Immigration, Coast Guard, DEA, and US Marshals were waiting for them to dock, plus 180 IRS agents waiting to impound the ship. The federal agents had a subpoena to depose Hubbard in a civil tax case in Hawaii. A Scientologist on shore realized what was happening when he was blocked from entering the dock area. He sent a pizza to a radio operator with a message inside to send to the ship. Hubbard was just five miles offshore, but he suddenly broadcasted a new course over the radio—due north for Halifax, Nova Scotia—then turned sharply south and headed to the Bahamas.
Hubbard was sixty-four years old in 1975, as the Apollo began its circumnavigation of the Caribbean. He weighed 260 pounds. He was still meticulously groomed, but his teeth and fingers were darkly stained from constant smoking. He was on the run from the courts, fearful of being discovered, marked by age, and visibly in decline. In Curacao, he suffered a small stroke and spent several weeks in a local hospital. It was becoming clear that life at sea posed a real danger for a man in such frail health. His crew rationalized his obvious decline by saying that his body was battered by the research he was undertaking and the volumes of suppression aimed at him. “He’s risking his life for us,” they told each other.
By now the rumor about the CIA spy ship had spread all over the Caribbean, making the Scientologists unwelcome or at least under suspicion everywhere they went. They were kicked out of Barbados, Curacao, and Jamaica. Moreover, the Arab oil embargo had sent the price of fuel skyrocketing, so the roving life was getting too expensive to support. It was time to come ashore.
FROM THE APOLLO, Hubbard sent a couple of delegations to locate a land base for Scientology—specifically, a town that the church could take over. One team arrived in the Florida retirement community of Clearwater—a resonant name for Scientologists—to look over a dowdy downtown hotel called the Fort Harrison, which had earned a place in popular history when Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics for “Satisfaction” beside the swimming pool in 1965. Hubbard purchased the Fort Harrison and a bank building across the street using a false front called the United Churches of Florida, which he calculated would not disturb the staid moral climate of the conservative community. When the mayor of Clearwater, Gabriel Cazares, raised questions about the extraordinary security that suddenly appeared around the church buildings, Guardian’s Office operatives tried to frame him in a staged hit-and-run accident and planted false marriage documents in Tijuana, Mexico, to make it appear that Cazares was a bigamist. Several months passed before the flabbergasted citizens discovered that Clearwater had become the Flag Land Base for the Church of Scientology. (Scientologists would simply call it Flag.)
Hubbard had been keeping a low profile in a condominium nearby, but in January 1976 his tailor leaked the news to a St. Petersburg Times reporter that the leader of Scientology was in town. As soon as Hubbard heard this, he grabbed twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, collected Kima Douglas, his medical officer, and her husband, Michael, and lit out in his Cadillac for Orlando. The next day, he announced that they were going to his old hideout in Queens. The Cadillac was too conspicuous, so he sent Michael out to buy a nondescript Chevy hatchback. The trip to New York took three days, with Hubbard smoking continuously in the backseat and crying, “There they are! They’re after us!” every time he saw a police car. When they finally arrived, Kima judged Queens too depressing, so they turned around and went to Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, agents from the Guardian’s Office raced to Southern California to look for remote properties where Hubbard could operate more discreetly. Soon, Hubbard and Mary Sue, along with her Tibetan terriers, Yama and Tashi, set up in their new quarters on three large properties in La Quinta, California, a desert town south of Palm Springs. Hubbard grew a goatee and let his hair hang down to his shoulders. “He looked like Wild Bill Hickok,” one Sea Org member recalled. He kept a hopped-up Plymouth and half a million dollars in cash ready for a quick getaway.
Left behind in Clearwater, and without his father hovering over him, Quentin became freer and more assertive. He befriended an older Scientologist from New Zealand, Grace Alpe, who arrived at Flag Base with terminal cancer. “She looked like a witch, with gray hair and a hooked nose, like she was in a haunted house,” said Karen de la Carriere, who was Alpe’s auditor. During auditing sessions Alpe would just rock back and forth, crying, “I’m going to die! I’m going to die!” Everyone kept a distance from the woman, except Quentin, who took over her case. He actually let her move into his room and sleep in his bed, while he slept on the floor. Then he made a catastrophic mistake.
Dennis Erlich, the chief “cramming officer” at Flag, who supervised the upper-level auditors, noted jarring disparities between Quentin’s upbeat reports on Alpe and her glaring lack of progress. Erlich called Quentin in for a meeting. “Quentin, or ‘Q’ as his friends called him, was 22 at the time,” Erlich later wrote. “He looked 15 and acted 5.” During the interview, Quentin continually zoomed his hand through the air and made airplane noises. He calmly told Erlich that he had falsely reported the results. “I think a lot of my father’s stuff doesn’t work,” he said. “So I false report whenever I need to. Personally, I think my father’s crazy.”
Not only was Quentin the founder’s son, he was also one of the highest-ranked auditors in the church, and yet he had committed an unpardonable offense. Erlich had no choice but to tell him that he would have to surrender all of his training certificates and start the entire Scientology series all over again—years of work. Quentin seemed completely nonchalant.
What happened after this is full of contradiction and mystery. Tracy Ekstrand, who was Quentin’s steward, set a cookie on his bedside table that evening. It was still there the next night. The bed had not been slept in. Erlich was expecting Quentin to show up to go over his new training program, but he didn’t appear that day or the next. Word went out that Quentin had “blown”—in other words, he had fled. He left a confused note, full of references to UFOs, saying that he was going to Area 51, the secret airbase north of Las Vegas, Nevada, where the CIA has developed spy planes; in popular culture, Area 51 was said to be where an alien spacecraft was stored. Quentin had only just learned to drive a car, in the parking garage of the condominium, where he accidentally ran into the wall with such force that the entire building registered the shock. He was scarcely qualified to drive all the way across the country by himself. Quentin had repeatedly requested a leave to take flying lessons, but Hubbard was convinced that Quentin couldn’t be trusted to fly a plane under any circumstances.
Frantic, Mary Sue dispatched three hundred Guardian’s Office operatives to find him. Weeks passed, as the Scientologists checked hotels and flying schools in multiple states. A cover story was put out that Quentin had been given flying lessons as a present from his parents, and he was driving to California to fulfill his lifelong ambition.
Quentin was indeed headed for Nevada. It was one of the very few times in his life when he was on his own and free. He stopped in St. Louis on his drive west and took a VIP tour of the giant aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. He was enthralled by the display of aircraft and artifacts of the Mercury and Gemini space programs; he even got a ride in one of the company’s business jets. “He was so happy,” Cindy Mallien, who had lunch with him that afternoon, recalled. “He was just beaming.” But only a few days later, Las Vegas police were trying to identify a slight young man with blond hair and a reddish moustache who had been discovered comatose in a car parked on Sunset Road facing the end of the runway of McCarran Airport. He was naked. He was five feet one inch tall, and weighed just over a hundred pounds. There were no identifying marks on his body and no personal identification. The license plates had been removed. The engine of the white Pontiac was still running when he was discovered. The windows were rolled up, and a vacuum tube led from the exhaust through the passenger’s vent window. Two weeks later, on November 12, 1976, the young man died without regaining consciousness. Las Vegas police were finally able to connect the Pontiac with Quentin through a Florida smog sticker and the vehicle identification number.
An agent from the Guardian’s Office came into Hubbard’s office in La Quinta as he was having breakfast and handed him the report on Quentin’s death. “That little shit has done it to me again!” Hubbard cried. He threw the report at Kima Douglas and ordered her to read it. The report said Quentin had died of asphyxiation of carbon monoxide. It also noted that there was semen in his rectum. When Hubbard told Mary Sue that Quentin was dead, she screamed for ten minutes. For months, she was disconsolate, hiding behind dark glasses. Everyone knew that Quentin was her favorite.
A spokesman for the church said that Quentin had been on vacation. Meantime, Mary Sue arranged for three further autopsies to be performed. In the last one, the cause of death was said to be unknown. She put out the word that he had died of encephalitis. Hubbard himself was convinced that Quentin was murdered as a way of getting at him.
8 The CIA at the time was taking note of Hubbard, mainly through newspaper clippings. “There is no indication that HUBBARD or members of his organization have been engaged in intelligence or security matters,” an agency dispatch notes. “Rather, HUBBARD appears to be a shrewd businessman who has parlayed his Scientology ‘religion’ into a multi-million dollar business by taking advantage of that portion of society prone to fall for such gimmicks” (“Scientology/L. Ron HUBBARD,” CIA dispatch, Mar. 18, 1971). (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.130-4)
Others who passed through Scientology at the same time as Paul Haggis were actors Tom Berenger, Christopher Reeve, and Anne Francis; and musicians Lou Rawls, Leonard Cohen, Sonny Bono, and Gordon Lightfoot. None stayed long. Jerry Seinfeld took a communication course, which he still credits with helping him as a comedian. Elvis Presley bought some books as well as some services he never actually availed himself of. Rock Hudson visited the Celebrity Centre but stormed out when his auditor had the nerve to tell him he couldn’t leave until he finished with his session, although the matinee idol had run out of time on his parking meter. The exemplary figure that Hubbard sought eluded capture.
VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier.
After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain.
The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.”
One of the doors the federal agents opened during the raid in Los Angeles led to the darkened basement of the old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on Fountain Avenue, newly christened as Scientology’s Advanced Org building. There were no lights, so the heavily armed agents made their way down the stairs with flashlights. They found a warren of small cubicles, each occupied by half a dozen people dressed in black boiler suits and wearing filthy rags around their arms to indicate their degraded status. Altogether, about 120 people were huddled in the pitch-black basement, serving time in the Rehabilitation Project Force. The ranks of the RPF had expanded along with the church’s need for cheap labor to renovate its recently purchased buildings in Hollywood. The federal agents had no idea what they were seeing. Within moments, a representative of the church’s Guardian’s Office arrived and began shouting at the agents that they were exceeding the limits of their search warrants. Seeing that the Sea Org members posed no threat to them, the agents shrugged and moved on.
It is instructive to realize that none of the Sea Org members consigned to the RPF dungeon took the opportunity to escape. If the FBI had bothered to interrogate them, it’s unlikely that any of them would have said that they were there against their will. Most of them believed that they were there by mistake, or that they deserved their punishment and would benefit by the work and study they were prescribed. Even those who had been physically forced into the RPF were not inclined to leave. Despite federal laws against human trafficking and unlawful imprisonment, the FBI never opened the door on the RPF again.
Jesse Prince, one of the very few black members of the Sea Org, was among those being punished. He had been attracted to Scientology by the beautiful girls and the promise of superhuman powers. He recalls being told he would learn to levitate, travel through time, control the thoughts of others, and have total command over the material universe. In 1976, when he signed up for the Sea Org, Scientology had just purchased the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, part of the real-estate empire that the church was acquiring in Hollywood, along with the Chateau élysée and the old Wilcox Hotel, which functioned as Sea Org berthing. The hospital was a mess; there were leftover medical devices and body parts in laboratory jars; there was even a corpse in the basement morgue. The Sea Org crew slaved to convert the hospital into a dormitory and offices. One night Prince was awakened after an hour of sleep and ordered to report to a superior, who chewed him out for slacking off. Prince had had enough. “Fuck you, I’m outta here,” he said. His superior told him he wasn’t going anywhere. “He snapped his fingers and six people came and put me in a room,” Prince recalled. “I was literally incarcerated.” It was March 1977. Prince was placed in the RPF with two hundred other Sea Org members, doing heavy labor and studying Hubbard’s spiritual technology. He would be held there for eighteen months. “They told me the only way to get out is to learn this tech to a ‘T’ and then be able to apply it.”
[page]The question posed by Prince’s experience in the RPF is whether or not he was brainwashed. It is a charge often leveled at Scientologists, although social scientists have long been at war with each other over whether such a phenomenon is even possible. The decade of the 1950s, when Scientology was born, was a time of extreme concern—even hysteria—about mind control. Robert Jay Lifton, a young American psychiatrist, began studying victims of what Chinese Communists called “thought reform,” which they were carrying out in prisons and revolutionary universities during the Maoist era; it was one of the greatest efforts to manipulate human behavior ever attempted. In 1949, a number of Americans and Europeans who had been imprisoned during the Maoist revolution emerged from their cells apparently converted to Communism. Then, during the Korean War, several United Nations soldiers captured by Chinese troops defected to the enemy. Some American soldiers among them went on camera to denounce capitalism and imperialism with apparent sincerity. It was a stunning ideological betrayal. To explain this phenomenon, an American journalist and CIA operative, Edward Hunter, coined the term “brainwashing.” Hunter described robotic agents with glassy eyes, like zombies or the products of demon possession. A popular novel, The Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959, and a film of the same name that came out three years later, capitalized on this conception of brainwashing as being the total surrender of free will through coercive forms of persuasion.
Lifton’s early work on thought reform has become the basis for much of the scholarship on the subject since then. Lifton defined thought reform as having two basic elements: confession, which is the renunciation of past “evil,” and re-education, which in China meant refashioning an individual in the Communist image. “Behind ideological totalism lies the ever-present human quest for the omnipotent guide—for the supernatural force, political party, philosophical ideas, great leader, or precise science—that will bring ultimate solidarity to all men and eliminate the terror of death and nothingness,” Lifton observes. In facing the commonplace charge that psychiatry, or the Marines, or Catholic schools all engage in forms of brainwashing, Lifton developed a set of criteria to identify a totalistic environment, and contrasted these with more-open approaches to reshaping human behavior.
The totalist paradigm begins with shutting off the individual’s access to the outside world, so that his perceptions of reality can be manipulated without interference. The goal at this stage is to provoke expectable patterns of behavior that will appear to arise spontaneously, adding to the impression of omniscience on the part of the controlling group. Those who are involved in the manipulation are guided by a sense of higher purpose that permits them—actually, compels them—to set aside ordinary feelings of human decency in order to accomplish their great mission. Those who are being manipulated may come to endorse the goals and means of the group—as Prince did—or simply abandon the will to resist. In either case, the individual is robbed of the chance for independent action or self-expression.
Because the moral climate is entirely controlled by the group, the “sins” that one is made to confess function as pledges of loyalty to the ideals of the movement. The repetitive nature of these confessions inevitably turns them into performances. When the treasury of real sins is emptied, new ones may be coined to satisfy the incessant demands of the inquisitors. In Scientology, one can conveniently reach into previous existences to produce an endless supply of misdeeds. Lifton points out that in totalist hands, confession is used to exploit vulnerabilities, rather than to provide the solace or forgiveness that therapy and religion seek to provide. The paradoxical result can be the opposite of total exposure: secrets proliferate, and doubts about the movement go underground.
The dogma of the group is promoted as scientifically incontestable—in fact, truer than anything any human being has ever experienced. Resistance is not just immoral; it is illogical and unscientific. In order to support this notion, language is constricted by what Lifton calls the “thought-terminating cliché.” “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” he writes. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” For instance, the Chinese Communists dismissed the quest for individual expression and the exploration of alternative ideas as examples of “bourgeois mentality.” In Scientology, terms such as “Suppressive Person” and “Potential Trouble Source” play a similar role of declaring allegiance to the group and pushing discussion off the table. The Chinese Communists divided the world into the “people” (the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie) and the “reactionaries” or “lackeys of imperialism” (landlords and capitalists), who were essentially non-people. In a similar manner, Hubbard distinguished between Scientologists and “wogs.” The word is a derogatory artifact of British imperialism, when it was used to describe dark-skinned peoples, especially South Asians. Hubbard appropriated the slur, which he said stood for “worthy Oriental gentleman.” To him, a wog represented “a common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid”—an individual who is not present as a spirit. Those who are within the group are made to strive for a condition of perfection that is unattainable—the ideal Communist state, for instance, or the clearing of the planet by Scientology.
When a preclear voices a criticism of Scientology or expresses a desire to leave the church, the auditor’s response is to discover the “crimes” that the client has committed against the group. In Scientology jargon, those crimes are called “overts and withholds.” An overt is an action taken against the moral code of the group, and a withhold is an overt action that the person is refusing to acknowledge. Hubbard explained that the only reason a person would want to leave Scientology is because he has committed a crime against the group. Paradoxically, this is because humanity is basically good; he wants to separate himself from the others in order to protect the group from his own bad behavior.
In order to save the preclear from his self-destructive thoughts, the E-Meter is used in a security check (sec-check) to probe for other thoughts or actions. For extreme cases, Hubbard developed what he called the Johannesburg Confessional List. The questions include:
Have you ever stolen anything?
Have you ever blackmailed anybody?
Have you ever been involved in an abortion?
There are further questions asking if the respondent has ever sold drugs, committed adultery, practiced homosexuality, had sex with a family member or a person of another race. It winds up by inquiring:
Have you ever had unkind thoughts about LRH?
Are you upset about this Confessional List?
The result of the sec-check procedure is that the person expressing doubts about the church is steered into thinking about his own faults that led him to question Scientology in the first place. In the Chinese Communist example, Lifton points out, the combination of enforced logic and clichéd discourse creates a kind of melodrama, in which formulaic thoughts and handicapped language substitute for real emotions and complex understandings of human nature. Once inside the powerful logic of the group, one drifts further and further from the shore of common understanding.
According to Lifton, factors such as these award the group life-and-death authority over individual members. And yet, despite the Communists’ absolute control of the environment, of the forty victims that Lifton studied, only three were “apparent converts” to the ideology. That figure has been used to discredit the notion of brainwashing, although Lifton himself later said that he was impressed by the extent to which minds could be altered and “truth blurred to the point of near extinction.”
The CIA, alarmed by the reputed success of Chinese indoctrination, started its own research into mind control, through a program called MKUltra. In the mid-1950s, the agency began funding Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born American citizen who was then directing the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. Cameron was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of his time: earlier in his career, he had been a part of the Nuremberg tribunal that examined the atrocious human experiments of Nazi doctors; later he became president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and—when the CIA stumbled onto his work—president of the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron hoped to cure mental illness by eliminating painful memories and reordering the personality through positive suggestion. The agency’s goal was somewhat different, of course; the stated reason was to uncover effective methods of mind control and then train American soldiers in ways of resisting such efforts. The CIA eventually destroyed the files of the MKUltra program, saying that it had acquired no useful information, but the real intention of the agency may have been to learn scientific ways of extracting information from unwilling subjects. (After 9/11, documents emerging from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base showed that the methods used by US interrogators to question al-Qaeda suspects were based on Chinese Communist techniques.)
The methods that Cameron used to erase his patients’ memories certainly meet the definition of torture. Electroshock therapy was administered to break the “patterns” of personality; up to 360 shocks were administered in a single month in order to make the subject hyper-suggestible. On top of that, powerful drugs—uppers, downers, and hallucinogens—were fed to the incapacitated patients to increase their disorientation. According to author Naomi Klein, who wrote about these experiments in The Shock Doctrine, when Cameron finally believed he had achieved the desired blank slate, he placed the patients in isolation and played tape-recorded messages of positive reinforcement, such as “You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your company.” Some patients were put into an insulin coma to keep them from resisting; in that state they were forced to listen to such mantras up to twenty hours a day. In one case, Cameron played a message continuously for more than a hundred days.
Cameron was a perfect archetype for the evil that science has done in the name of mental health, and in the minds of many Scientologists, his work justifies the campaign the church has waged against psychiatry. It is intriguing to compare these actual experiments with Hubbard’s mythic vision of Xenu and the R6 implants, in which the disembodied thetans were forced to sit in front of movie screens for thirty-six days of programming at the hands of psychiatrists.
Although it is unlikely that Hubbard would have known about MKUltra when it was going on, he had become fascinated by the mind-control scare. In 1955, he distributed a pamphlet, which he probably wrote, called “BrainWashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.” For some former Scientologists, “BrainWashing” provides a codex for Hubbard’s grand scheme. There is an eerie mirroring of the techniques described in the pamphlet and some Scientology practices, especially those put into effect in the RPF.
The pamphlet opens with what is claimed to be a purloined speech given by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police under Joseph Stalin, to American students studying at Lenin University, on the subject of “psychopolitics.” The term is defined as “[t]he art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through ‘mental healing.’ ”
The text specifies how to realign the goals of the individual with those of the group. The first task is to undermine the ability of the person to act and to trust himself. Next, his loyalty to his family is destroyed by breaking the economic dependency of the family unit, lessening the value of marriage, and turning over the raising of children to the State or the group. The individual’s trust and affection for his friends is shattered by anonymous reports to the authorities, supposedly from people close to him. Ultimately, all other emotional claims on the person have been broken; only the State or the group remains. “A psychopolitician must work hard to produce the maximum chaos in the fields of ‘mental healing,’ ” Beria says in his introductory speech. “You must labour until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.140-7)
Travolta generously credited the church for advancing his career and giving him the poise to handle his burgeoning celebrity. “You always have the fear, ‘Success is terrific now, but will it last forever?’ ” he observed in one interview. “When you hit it quickly, you don’t know where it will go.… Scientology makes it all a lot saner.” He introduced a number of fellow actors to Scientology, including Forest Whitaker, Tom Berenger, and Patrick Swayze, as well as the great Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. (Travolta’s friend Priscilla Presley was the only one who actually stuck with the church.) Spanky Taylor was a visible reminder of Travolta’s increasing devotion to Scientology, as well as the church’s investment in his fame, which could be jeopardized by the indiscreet behavior of a talented but entitled movie star.
When the FBI raid on the Church of Scientology took place on July 8, 1977, Taylor was six months pregnant and living with her husband, Norman, in the squalid Wilcox Hotel. Norm was an executive in the legal bureau. Early on the morning of the raid, he frantically called Spanky and told her to get over to Yvonne’s office right away to get the loaded gun she had been given by a friend, which she kept in her desk. By the time Taylor arrived, there were FBI agents everywhere—more than 150 of them at two Scientology buildings, the Advanced Org and Chateau élysée. It was the largest FBI raid in history, and it went on all day and night. They brought battering rams and sledgehammers to break the locks and knock down walls. In addition to the 200,000 documents they were carting off—many of them purloined by Guardian’s Office operatives from government workplaces—they found burglar tools and eavesdropping equipment. Taylor dutifully made her way through the chaos to Yvonne’s office and slipped the gun into her purse. She didn’t allow herself to think how crazy it was to be carrying a weapon past all these lawmen.
Outside the gates, reporters were clamoring to get in. Just then, a school bus pulled up, full of kids from a religion class at the Pacific Palisades high school. Taylor recalled with alarm that they were coming to take a tour that she had previously arranged. The wide-eyed teens watched as Taylor explained to the teacher that this wasn’t the best time for the tour. (They never rescheduled.)
Within the church, the explanation for the raid was that some Scientologists were being charged with stealing the Xerox paper they used when they had copied the reports on the church in government files—in other words, it was just another example of jackbooted government goons twisting the Constitution in order to crack down on religious freedom. But when the indictments came out the following year, the scale of Operation Snow White was plainly exposed. Eleven Scientology executives, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were indicted in Operation Snow White. Her husband was named as an unindicted co-conspirator, although it had arisen from his original plan. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.151-2)
Taylor wouldn’t be a part of it, however. As soon as the movie was over and the credits were rolling, several Scientology executives, including Yvonne’s former husband, Heber Jentzsch, escorted Taylor to an office and told her to call Travolta and cancel their date for dinner the following night.
“I can’t do that!” Taylor said.
[page]“There have been all sorts of efforts to recover him, and we can’t let you get in the way of that,” Jentzsch told her. “Call him right now.”
“It’s after midnight!”
Travolta was furious when he heard what she had to say. “We had a deal!” he said.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“How could you do this?” he demanded. “How could you leave your baby?” For the first time in their relationship, he raised his voice. “My mother died, and you weren’t there!”
Taylor began to bawl so hard she couldn’t speak. She recalled that Travolta was asking questions she couldn’t answer, questions she had been afraid to pose herself. He seemed to know what she was going through. “Unless you killed somebody, which I don’t think you did, there’s no reason for you to be where you are,” Travolta told her. He had never said an unkind word to her in their entire relationship, and his frankness was devastating.
“I’m doing this so I can be better!” Taylor sobbed. “So I can help you more.”
Meanwhile, Jentzsch was jabbing his finger at her and mouthing the order to hang up the phone. She quickly said good-bye and set the phone in the cradle. Then she was escorted back to RPF.
All that night she cried and cried, but when the sun came up, she was flooded with clarity. “I am so f*cking out of here!” she decided. “I don’t know how, but I’m getting out.”
It wasn’t obvious how she could escape. She had been placed in RPF in March; now it was September. There hadn’t been time to plan because she was working constantly. She didn’t know where to turn. It didn’t occur to her to call her parents because she was so apprehensive that she might bring shame on Scientology if anybody knew what had happened to her. In any case, she was forbidden to speak to anyone outside the RPF, even to other Sea Org members. And even if she did escape, she realized, she actually knew very little about what was going on in the world. Since she had joined Scientology at the age of fourteen, she had never read a book that hadn’t been written by L. Ron Hubbard.
Taylor managed to slip away to visit her ten-month-old daughter in the Child Care Org across the street. To her horror, she discovered that Vanessa had contracted whooping cough, which is highly contagious and occasionally fatal. The baby’s eyes were welded shut with mucus, and her diaper was wet—in fact, her whole crib was soaking. She was covered with fruit flies. Taylor recoiled. The prospect of losing both her unborn baby and her daughter seemed very likely.
She finally conceived a plan. Explaining to her guards that she had to telephone the doctor, she managed a brief call to Travolta’s office and asked Kate Edwards to meet her the next day at a certain time, giving the address of the Child Care Org. She hung up without even hearing Edwards’s response.
The next day she was allowed a brief visit to the nursery. Taylor put an extra diaper in her purse. She had four dimes, all the money she had in the world, and a toothbrush. Fortunately, Edwards arrived, right on time.
Taylor explained to her Scientology escort that Edwards was her sister-in-law who had come to take Vanessa to the doctor.
“Is this approved?” he asked.
“Oh, absolutely!” Taylor opened Edwards’s door and handed her the baby. Edwards stared in bewilderment as Taylor loudly told her to call as soon as she found out what the doctor said. Then, under her breath, she added, “Kate, when I shut this door, please drive away as quickly as you can.” Edwards nodded, then Taylor jumped in. Edwards hit the gas.
“Spanky, no!” the escort cried.
Taylor hadn’t planned any further than this.
She was still dressed in a man’s black boiler suit, with the sleeves and legs rolled up. Edwards fetched some clothes from her mother that would fit Taylor’s emaciated frame and picked up some diapers for Vanessa, then checked them in to the Tropicana Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard. Taylor finally called her husband in the Guardian’s Office. Another executive picked up the line. “Spanky! They’re looking for you everywhere! Where are you?” he demanded. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.156-7)
If he had known that his friend had been declared a Suppressive, Haggis would have had a difficult choice to make. It was one he would face soon in any case. In 1983, Haggis’s writing partner on the TV series Diff’rent Strokes, Howard Meyers, who was also a Scientologist, decided to follow a splinter group led by David Mayo, who had been one of the highest officials in the church. Haggis told Meyers that he couldn’t work with him anymore. Because Meyers was the senior writer on the show, Haggis resigned and went looking for other work. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.162)
A journeyman theater and film director before taking over the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Katselas had directed the 1972 film Butterflies Are Free, starring Goldie Hawn and Edward Albert (Eileen Heckart won an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). He was a vital link to the Hollywood celebrity machine that Scientology depended upon. The list of his protégés included Al Pacino, Goldie Hawn, George C. Scott, Alec Baldwin, Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Gene Hackman, George Clooney, and many other now-familiar names. His invitation-only Saturday master class was seen by many young actors as a portal to stardom. He attained OT V status and was one of the most profitable sources of recruits for the church, receiving in return a ten percent commission on the money contributed by his students. At one point, Katselas asked if he could join the Sea Org, but Hubbard told him it was more important to continue doing what he was doing.
When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script of “Revolt in the Stars,” Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to Hollywood to make a deal. After the Moroccan adventure, Hubbard had appointed her his Personal Public Relations Officer. Gablehouse came from a moneyed background, and she knew how to talk about finances. She shopped the script around and found a buyer willing to offer $10 million—which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told. The Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf. Gablehouse wound up being sent to the RPF, and when she balked at that, she was demoted even further—to the RPF’s RPF, alone, in the furnace room under the parking garage of the Clearwater base. The script never did get made into a film.
Hubbard’s location was a deep secret. Scientologists who asked were told he was “over the rainbow.” Meantime, a full-fledged movie studio, the Cine Org, was set up in a barn at Hubbard’s La Quinta hideaway. With his usual brio, Hubbard assumed that he was fully capable of writing, producing, and directing his own material, but his novice staff often frustrated him. He would do scenes over and over again, exhausting everyone, but he was rarely satisfied with the outcome. He walked around the set bellowing orders through a bullhorn, sometimes right in the face of a humiliated staff member.
Hubbard was becoming increasingly cranky and confused. He slept with guards outside his door, hiding in the tamarind trees that flanked his cottage. One morning he accused the Messenger outside his door of abandoning his post. “Someone came in and exchanged my left boot for a boot half a size smaller,” he said. “They even scuffed it up to make it look the same. Someone is trying to make me think I’m crazy.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.163-4)
It must have been galling for her to negotiate with Miscavige, who was twenty-one at the time—the age Mary Sue was when she married Hubbard. Privately, she called him “Little Napoleon.” In exchange for her resignation from the GO, the Messengers offered a house and a financial settlement. Mary Sue had substantial legal bills and no other means of support. Under the guise of having to sort out the messes that would be left behind in the wake of her resignation, Miscavige went over a number of different subjects, even including a couple of murders that were alleged to have been committed by a member of the GO office in London. He wanted Mary Sue on tape, confessing to other crimes, which could then be fed to the government. This was done, Bill Franks asserts, with Hubbard’s knowledge: “Hubbard wanted her out of the way. He wanted all guns pointed at her so he could go about his old age without worrying about being thrown in jail.”
Mary Sue lost her last appeal. She began serving a five-year sentence in Lexington, Kentucky, in January 1983. Hubbard never visited her in prison. Her letters went unanswered. “I don’t believe he’s getting them,” she later reasoned. Mary Sue was released after serving one year. She never saw her husband again. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.174)
IN 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought $25 million for emotional distress caused by “brainwashing” and emotional abuse. He said he had been forced to disconnect from his family and locked for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, California, deprived of sleep, and fed only once a day. After attaining OT III status, Wollersheim said, his “core sense of identity” had been shattered. “At OT III, you find out you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent,” he later recalled. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.”
In order to substantiate the charges, Wollersheim’s attorney introduced Scientology’s most confidential materials—including the OT III secrets—as evidence. At this point, those materials were still unknown to the general public. The loss of Scientology’s chest of secrets was not just a violation of the sanctity of its esoteric doctrines; from the church’s perspective, open examination of these materials represented a copyright infringement and a potential business catastrophe. Those who were traveling up the Bridge would now know their destination. The fog of mystery would be dissipated.
The Wollersheim suit had been filed in 1980, but Scientology lawyers had been frantically dragging it out with writs and motions. An undercover campaign was launched to discredit or blackmail Wollersheim’s lawyer, Charles O’Reilly. His house was bugged and his office was infiltrated by a Scientology operative. There was an attempt to trap him or his bodyguards in a compromising situation with women. The church also harassed the judge in the case, Ronald Swearinger. “I was followed,” the judge later said. “My car tires were slashed. My collie drowned in my pool.” A former Scientology executive, Vicki Aznaran, later testified that there was an effort to compromise the judge by setting up his son, who they heard was gay, with a minor boy.
When the case finally came to trial, the church stacked the courtroom with OT VIIs. “They thought OT VIIs could move mountains,” Tory Christman, a former Sea Org member, said. Although she was only an OT III at the time, she persuaded church officials to let her into the room. The Scientologists directed their intentions toward the judge and the jury, hoping to influence their decisions telepathically.
On a Friday afternoon, the judge announced that the OT III documents would be made public at nine a.m. the following Monday, on a first-come, first-serve basis. This was the disaster the church had been dreading. When the courthouse opened that Monday, there were fifteen hundred Scientologists lined up. They filled three hallways of the courthouse, and overwhelmed the clerk’s office with requests to photocopy the documents in order to keep anyone else from getting their hands on the confidential materials. They kept it up until the judge issued a restraining order at noon, pending a hearing later in the week. Despite these efforts, the Los Angeles Times managed to get a copy of the OT III materials and published a summary of them.
“A major cause of mankind’s problems began 75 million years ago,” the Times account begins. In a studiously neutral tone, the lengthy article reveals Scientology’s occult cosmology. The planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. Although the details were sketchy, the secrets that had stunned Paul Haggis were suddenly public knowledge. The jury awarded Wollersheim $30 million.3 Worse than the financial loss was the derision that greeted the church all over the world and the loss of control of its secret doctrines. The church has never recovered from the blow.
The other court challenge that year involved Julie Christofferson Titchbourne, a young defector who had spent her college savings on Scientology counseling. She argued that the church had falsely claimed that Scientology would improve her intelligence, creativity, communication skills, and even her eyesight. For the first time, much of Hubbard’s biography came under attack. The litigant said that Hubbard had been portrayed as a nuclear physicist and civil engineer. The evidence showed that he attended George Washington University but never graduated. In response to Hubbard’s claim that he had cured himself of his injuries in the Second World War, the evidence showed he had never been wounded. Other embarrassing revelations came to light. The church stated that Hubbard was paid less than the average Scientology staff member—at the time, about fifteen dollars a week—but witnesses for the plaintiff testified that in one six-month period in 1982, about $34 million had been transferred from the church into Hubbard’s personal bank from a Liberian corporation.4 One former Scientologist described training sessions in which members were hectored and teased over sensitive issues until they were desensitized and would no longer react. In two such instances of “bull-baiting,” Christofferson Titchbourne saw the eight-year-old son of the registrar repeatedly put his hands down the front of a woman student’s dress and a female coach unzipping the pants of a male student and fondling his genitals. The jury seemed most disturbed by testimony that members of the Guardian’s Office had culled the auditing files of members, looking for salacious material that could be used to blackmail potential defectors. Christofferson Titchbourne had originally sought a $30,000 refund from the church. The jury awarded her $39 million. At the time, that sum could have bankrupted Scientology.
That evening, Miscavige and other members of the church hierarchy had a gloomy meeting in a condo in Portland, Oregon. One of the executives vowed that Christofferson Titchbourne would never collect because he was going to kill her. “I don’t care if I get the chair,” he said. “It’s only one lifetime.” There was a lengthy silence, and then Miscavige said, “No, here’s what we’re going to do.” And on the spot, he came up with the Portland crusade.
As many as 12,000 Scientologists came from all over the world in May and June 1985 to protest the judgment in what they called the Battle of Portland. Day after day they marched around the Multnomah County courthouse, shouting “Religious freedom now!” and carrying banners reading WE SHALL OVERCOME! Chick Corea flew in from Japan to play a concert, along with other musicians affiliated with the church, including Al Jarreau, Stanley Clarke, and Edgar Winter. Stevie Wonder phoned in and sang “I Just Called to Say I Love You” as the crowd cheered.
The most notable presence in Portland was John Travolta. It was a decisive moment in his relationship with the religion. The church had made enormous efforts to persuade him to attend. Two years before the Portland crusade, Travolta had told Rolling Stone that although he still believed in Scientology, he had not had any auditing for the past year and a half. When asked if he was being exploited by the church to promote its cause, he responded, “I’ve been something of an ostrich about how it’s used me, because I haven’t investigated exactly what the organization’s done. One part of me says that if somebody gets some good out of it, maybe it’s all right. The other part of me says that I hope it uses some taste and discretion. I wish I could defend Scientology better, but I don’t think it even deserves to be defended, in a sense.”
But here he was in Portland, unshaven and exhausted, having flown his own plane in at midnight for a two-hour visit. “Once in a while you have to stand up for what you believe in, and I’m here tonight, I’ve had counseling, I give counseling, and I don’t want to lose that,” he declared. “And it’s as simple as that.” The Portland march was one of the greatest triumphs in Scientology’s history, capped by the judge’s declaration of a mistrial. He ruled that Christofferson Titchbourne’s lawyers had presented prejudicial arguments to the jury by saying that Hubbard was a sociopath and that Scientology was not a religion but a terrorist organization. Church members who had been in Portland would always feel an ecstatic sense of kinship. (A year and a half later, the church settled with Christofferson Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.)
3 In 1989, an appellate court reduced the judgment to $2.5 million, which the church finally paid in 2002, plus interest, which brought the sum to $8.6 million. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.178-81)
Another recruiter persuaded Rathbun that he would be better able to deal with his brother’s problems if he had more training, which he could afford if he joined the Sea Org. Rathbun signed the billion-year contract in January 1978.5
A few months later, Rathbun was sent to work in LA. One night, he was assigned to escort Diane Colletto, the twenty-five-year-old editor of Scientology’s Auditor magazine, from the publications building to the Scientology complex in Hollywood where they both lived. It was late at night on August 19, 1978. Diane was a petite and mousy intellectual, with thick glasses. A diligent worker, she was often the last to leave the office. On this night, she was frightened.
Diane’s husband, John Colletto, a highly trained auditor, had recently been declared a Suppressive Person. John had gotten into an argument with church officials over a matter of policy. After being declared, he went to visit a Scientology chaplain, who could see that he was having a breakdown. He kept crying and grabbing his head in despair. At that point, he was forcibly detained in the RPF. He spent several weeks there, but managed to escape. Diane was ordered to disconnect from him. She told the chaplain that John had threatened her, saying that if he couldn’t have Scientology, then neither could she.
Rathbun—a big man, a former college basketball player—knew nothing of this as he rode back to the berthing with Diane in her Fiat. She was uncommunicative. She drove north on Rampart Boulevard, where the Pubs Org was located, to Sunset, and then left on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was mid-August, but there was a breeze from the ocean and the night air was unseasonably cool. As soon as Diane turned the corner from North Edgemont Street onto Fountain Avenue, in front of the Scientology complex, a pair of headlights on high beam blinded them, then a car rammed into them, pinning Diane’s vehicle against the curb.
Rathbun was in shock, but he managed to get out of the passenger side of the car. They had come to a stop in front of a small house with a picket fence. He saw the man in the other car get out and run toward Diane, who was still in the driver’s seat. Rathbun came around the front of the car, just in time to hear a popping noise and the sound of glass shattering. It was the first time in his life he had ever heard a gunshot. Jesse Prince, who was in RPF on the seventh floor, heard the sound and rushed to the windows. People were shouting, “John Colletto!” Everyone knew immediately what was happening.
Rathbun grabbed Colletto, and they spun around in the street. He got Colletto in a headlock, but Colletto pistol-whipped him and Rathbun momentarily lost consciousness. Both of them tumbled to the ground.
When Rathbun recovered, he saw Diane on all fours, crawling on the sidewalk, and Colletto running toward her with the gun. Rathbun says he got up and tackled John. They crashed through the picket fence and wrestled on the lawn. More shots were fired. At one point, according to Rathbun, the barrel of the revolver was pressed against the nape of his neck and Colletto pulled the trigger. The gun didn’t fire, but Rathbun went exterior, viewing the scene from twelve feet above his body.
Colletto broke free and caught up to his wife. He stuck the gun in her ear. Rathbun says he saw what was happening and did a “flying sidekick,” but at that fatal moment the gun fired.
Colletto was knocked to the ground by Rathbun’s blow and the gun skittered across the pavement. Rathbun picked it up and tried to fire it at Colletto, but the chambers were all empty. Colletto got in his car and screeched away.
Rathbun went back to Diane. Blood was gurgling and spewing from her mouth. He thought she was drowning in her own blood. Rathbun took off his shirt and put it under her head. As he heard the sirens screaming, she died in his arms.6
Three days later, John Colletto’s decomposing body was found. He had slashed his wrists and bled to death on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway.
Because of this incident, Rathbun was singled out for his fearlessness, or what Scientology terms his “high level of confront.” Soon after that, he was sent to La Quinta, Hubbard’s winter headquarters, where the old man was just then building up his moviemaking enterprise. Miscavige had appointed Rathbun head of what was known as the “All Clear” unit. The object was to resolve the dozens of lawsuits around the country that had named Hubbard as a defendant. He was also the target of grand juries in Tampa, New York, and Washington, DC. Hubbard wanted to be able to return to his moviemaking full-time, but he was afraid to show himself until he was assured that he wouldn’t be hauled into court. (He died before that happened.)
Like many Sea Org members on the secret base, Rathbun adopted an alias for security reasons, one that was similar to his real name but that separated him from his previous identity; it also made it more difficult for anyone to find him. Mark became Marty.
6 The police report confirms Rathbun’s story. “A suspect, tentatively I.D.’d as her husband, fired one shot through the driver’s side of the auto,” the report states. “He then forced her vehicle to stop, got out, and became involved in a fight with her male companion, during which time he was firing the weapon, a .22 caliber (short), 8-shot revolver.… The male companion was able to wrest the revolver from the suspect, at which point the husband fled.” The companion was identified as Mark Rathbun. The empty gun was found at the scene (Michael A. Shepherd, County of Los Angeles Case Report, Aug. 19, 1978). (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.188-90)
In the article, Haggis said of Scientology, “What excited me about the technology was that you could actually handle life, and your problems, and not have them handle you.” He added, “I also liked the motto, ‘Scientology makes the able more able.’ ” He credited the church for improving his relationship with his wife, Diane. “Instead of fighting (we did a lot of that before Scientology philosophy) we now talk things out, listen to each other and apply Scientology technology to our problems.”
Haggis told the magazine that he had recently gone through the Purification Rundown, a program intended to eliminate body toxins that form a “biochemical barrier to spiritual well-being.” For an average of three weeks, participants undergo a lengthy daily regimen, spending up to eight hours a day in a sauna, interspersed with exercise, and taking massive doses of vitamins, especially niacin. In large amounts, niacin can cause liver damage, but it will also stimulate the skin to flush and create a tingling sensation. The church says that this is evidence of drugs and other toxins being purged from the body. Although many in the medical profession have been hostile to the Purification Rundown, citing it as a fraud and a scam, Hubbard thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for it.
In the Celebrity interview, Haggis admitted that he had been skeptical of the procedure before going through it—“My idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettes”—but the Purification Rundown, he said, “was WONDERFUL. I really did feel more alert and more aware and more at ease—I wasn’t running in six directions to get something done, or bouncing off the walls when something went wrong.” He mentioned the drugs that he had taken when he was young. “Getting rid of all those residual toxins and medicines and drugs really had an effect,” he said. “After completing the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single chemical!” He had recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, when she was seriously ill, and had persuaded a young writer on his staff to take the course in order to wean herself from various medications. “She could tell Scientology worked by the example I set,” Haggis told the magazine. “That made me feel very good.”
The Purification Rundown is a fundamental feature of Scientology’s drug rehabilitation program, Narconon, which operates nearly two hundred residential centers around the world. Celebrity Scientologists conspicuously promote Narconon, citing the church’s claims that Narconon is “the most effective rehabilitation program there is.” Kirstie Alley, who served as the national spokesperson for Narconon for a number of years, describes herself as “the heart and soul of the project,” because it had helped break her dependency on cocaine. A year after 9/11, Tom Cruise set up a program for over a thousand rescue workers in New York to go through a similar procedure, which was paid for in part by using city money. Many participants reported positive results, saying that they had sweated a kind of black paste through their pores while in the sauna. The Borough of Manhattan gratefully declared March 13 (Hubbard’s birthday), 2004, as “Hubbard Detoxification Day.”
Kelly Preston has promoted Narconon in her native Hawaii. “Starting in the schools, we’ve delivered to over ten thousand different kids,” she said. Preston and Travolta’s sixteen-year-old son, Jett, who was autistic, died of a seizure in January 2009. His parents had taken him off of Depakote, an anti-seizure medication, saying it was ineffective. (The church claims that it does not oppose the use of such drugs when prescribed by a doctor; however, Hubbard himself denounced the use of anti-seizure medications.) Previously, Preston asserted on the Montel Williams Show that Jett suffered from Kawasaki syndrome, a rare disorder that she thought was brought on by his exposure to pesticides and household chemicals.
“With Jett, you started him on a program that I think is talked about in this book by L. Ron Hubbard,” Williams said, holding up Clear Body, Clear Mind, which outlines the principles of the Purification Rundown.
“Exactly,” Preston replied.1 She then talked about her own profound experience on the program. Novocaine from previous dental work began to surface. “I had my entire mouth get numb again for an hour and a half,” she said. Other drugs were purged as well, along with radiation exposure from the sun. “I had a bathing suit when I was seven years old—this is completely true. I had a bathing suit that I thought was so cool with holes in the side and a hole in the center,” she said. “And I got a sunburn in it. And twenty years later, I had this same sunburn come out in my skin, the entire sunburn.” Preston brought copies of Hubbard’s book for the entire studio audience. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.195-6)
LIKE PAUL HAGGIS, Tom Cruise had been raised Catholic, although he was more religiously inclined than Paul. His family moved frequently, and he spent part of his childhood in Canada, where he had the reputation of being a headstrong, troublesome, charismatic, and charming boy. His schoolwork suffered because of dyslexia, and he later said that when he graduated from high school he was “a functional illiterate.” However, he excelled in sports and drama. His family, like the Haggis family, threw themselves into theater, founding an amateur troupe of players in Ottawa. His antisocial, bullying father was a disruptive force in the family, and early one morning, when Cruise was twelve, his mother packed up her three daughters and her precocious son and fled back to America. “We felt like fugitives,” Cruise later recalled.
Spiritual questing and a tendency toward piety were already features of Cruise’s personality. He spent a year in seminary in Cincinnati, with a view toward joining the priesthood. But there was another, intensely ambitious side that was focused entirely on stardom. He went to Hollywood when he was eighteen, and managed to get a role in Endless Love, a movie starring Brooke Shields. He was a natural actor, but also persistent and choosy, quickly finding his way into memorable roles. The longing to express his spiritual side had never gone away, but it was difficult, in Hollywood, to know exactly how to fit that in. There was one church that was especially designed to resolve this dilemma.
Cruise’s first wife, the actress Mimi Rogers, introduced him to Scientology in 1986. He had just finished filming Top Gun, which had made him the world’s biggest movie star. He had little incentive to publicly declare himself a Scientologist after the widespread opprobrium directed at Scientology following the FBI raids on Operation Snow White and the exposure of the church’s esoteric beliefs. Rumors of his involvement began to mount, however. For several years he managed to keep his affiliation quiet, even from church management. Using his birth name, Thomas Mapother IV, he received auditing at a small Scientology mission called the Enhancement Center in Sherman Oaks, which Rogers had started with her former husband. Rogers’s close friend, and former roommate, Kirstie Alley, did her auditing there, along with singer—and later, congressman—Sonny Bono, who had also been brought into the church by Rogers. Cruise would later credit Scientology’s study methods for helping him overcome his dyslexia.
The triumph of adding Cruise to the Scientology stable was fraught with problems. Mimi Rogers was at the top of that list. Her parents had been involved with Dianetics since the early days of the movement. In 1957, when Mimi was a year old, they had moved to Washington, DC, to work for Hubbard, and her father, Philip Spickler, had briefly joined the Sea Org. But Mimi’s parents had become disaffected by the end of the seventies. They were considered “squirrels,” because they continued to practice Scientology outside the guidance of the church. It would be one thing to have Tom Cruise as a trophy for Scientology, but it would be a disaster if he became a walking advertisement for the squirrels.
When Miscavige learned of Cruise’s involvement in Scientology, he arranged to have the star brought to Gold Base, alone, at its secret desert location near Hemet, in August 1989. He assigned his top people to audit and supervise the young star during his first weekend stay. Cruise arrived wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, trying to keep a low profile, although everyone on the base knew he was there.
Cruise was preparing to make Days of Thunder that fall. He had just seen a twenty-one-year-old Australian actress, Nicole Kidman, in the thriller Dead Calm, and he was so enchanted that he cast her in a part she was far too young to play: a brain surgeon who brings Cruise’s character back to life after he crashes his race car. They had an immediate, intense connection, one that quickly became a subject of tabloid speculation.
According to Rathbun, Cruise and Miscavige now had a common interest: getting rid of Mimi. She demanded and received a church mediation of their relationship, which involves each partner being put on E-Meters and confessing their “crimes” in front of the other. But with Cruise ready to move on and Miscavige seemingly set against her, Rogers stood little chance. Marty Rathbun and a church attorney went to her home carrying divorce papers. “I told her this was the right thing to do for Tom, because he was going to do lots of good for Scientology,” Rathbun recalled. “That was the end of Mimi Rogers.”
Rogers later said that she and Cruise were already having difficulty in their marriage. He had been seriously thinking about becoming a monk, in which case marriage wouldn’t fit into his plans. “He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument,” she told Playboy. “Therefore, it became obvious that we had to split.”
AFTER TWO YEARS, Annie Broeker had worked her way out of Happy Valley. She was assigned to Gold Base, which serves as the headquarters for the Commodore’s Messengers Org; Golden Era Productions, which makes Scientology films and manufactures the audiovisual materials for the church, as well as E-Meters; and the Religious Technology Center, which enforces the orthodoxy of Scientology practices. Through his position as chairman of the RTC, Miscavige directed the church’s operations, spending much of his time living on the base. Rathbun and other top executives were also living and working on the five-hundred-acre base, which was still so hush-hush that few Scientologists knew of its existence. Rathbun believed that Miscavige wanted Annie close by, in case Pat Broeker ever stirred back to life.
An ex-marine named Andre Tabayoyon, who oversaw construction of the security at the Gold Base, later testified that church funds were used to purchase assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols; he also said that explosive devices were placed around the perimeter to be used in case of assault by law enforcement officials. Surrounded by a security fence with three-inch spikes, patrolled by armed guards, and monitored by cameras, motion detectors, infrared scanners, and a sniper’s nest at the top of a hill, the property houses about eight hundred Sea Org members, in conditions that the church describes as “like one would find in a convent or seminary, albeit much more comfortable.”
Annie resumed using her maiden name, Tidman. Although she was continuously under guard, she had fallen in love with another Sea Org member—Jim Logan, the same man who had recruited Paul Haggis into Scientology on the street corner in London, Ontario. Annie had met Logan in Happy Valley when both were on the RPF. Jim and Annie married in June 1990 and moved to Sea Org berthing near Gold Base. Logan was no longer the long-haired hippie he had been in those days; he was now middle-aged and balding, with a black moustache, but he still had those intense, playful eyes and a ready laugh. His outsized, boisterous personality didn’t always fit well in the highly regimented life he had signed up for. In the summer of 1992, Logan was served with a “non-enturbulation order,” which meant that he should stop stirring things up. In October, eight men came to escort him to a detention facility where troublesome staff members were confined. Logan was told that he had been declared a Suppressive Person and was going to be booted out of the Sea Org.
Annie had previously confided that she was “finished” with the Sea Org and would leave if Jim was ready. He didn’t want to go then; he still hoped to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the church, but Annie made application to formally route out of the Sea Org. In a few months, if all went well, they would have a quiet reunion in Nova Scotia, where they could have children and forget the past. Annie promised him, “They can’t make me divorce you.” But on October 8, 1992, Logan’s last day in the Sea Org, church officials told him that Annie had been ordered to disconnect from him. He was served with divorce papers, given a freeloader tab for more than $350,000, and then dropped off at the bus station with a ticket to Bangor, Maine.
Several times after that, Jim and Annie were able to speak secretly. She would manage to sneak a call to him late at night, or he would have his mother call her. When Annie couldn’t wait any longer to see him, Jim bought her an open ticket from Ontario, California—the nearest airport—to Bangor. It would be waiting for her to pick up whenever she wanted. A few weeks later, Jim got a call from Annie: she was on her way. It was about five in the morning in California. She was catching a flight that stopped in Denver, then went on to Boston, where she would change planes for Bangor. Jim set out from Nova Scotia for the nine-hour drive to the airport.
[page]Rathbun got the message that Annie had fled the base about an hour and a half after she left. He was panicked. Annie knew as well as anyone the inside story of the secret money transfers to Hubbard, the offshore accounts, the shredding of incriminating documents. She could torpedo the church’s application for tax-exempt status. She also knew the true circumstances of Hubbard’s last days. She might even reunite with Pat Broeker, and the two of them could pose a challenge to Miscavige. Rathbun saw Annie as a potential “doomsday machine.”
According to Gary Morehead, the hulking chief of security at Gold Base at the time, a “blow drill” went into effect immediately. Morehead had refined the process to a model of Sea Org efficiency. Each year, a minimum of a hundred people attempted to escape from Gold, but few got away cleanly. Morehead’s security team kept files on members, containing bank account and credit card numbers, family contacts, even hobbies and predilections. When one senior executive fled in 1992, for instance, Morehead knew he was a baseball fan. He caught him a week later in the parking lot of the San Francisco Giants stadium.
Morehead’s team was aided by the isolation of the base—Gold was in a narrow valley in the middle of the desert, seven miles from the village of Hemet. There was a single highway, easy to patrol; mountain ranges enclosed the base on either side, and the rocky slopes were copiously supplied with cactus and rattlesnakes. Many of the Sea Org members had neither the resources nor the skills to get very far. There was an ingrained distrust of the non-Scientology “wog” world and its system of justice, as well as a fatalistic view of the reach of the church, especially among Sea Org members who, like Annie, had grown up in Scientology. Those who had cell phones used them mainly as walkie-talkies for communication on the base; phone records were monitored and the phones would be taken away if they were used to make outside calls. Few of them had cars of their own, or even driver’s licenses, so the best they could do was to try to get to the bus station before they were discovered missing. By the time the bus made its next stop, however, there was usually a member of Morehead’s team waiting for them. If that failed, Morehead’s security squad would stake out the houses of the blown member’s family and friends, using scanners that could listen in on cordless phones and cell phones, and running the license plates of everyone who came and went. When the team finally confronted their prey, they would try to talk them into returning to the base voluntarily. If that failed, occasionally they would use force.3
Most of those who fled were torn by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, they were often frightened, humiliated, and angry. They desperately wanted a life outside the organization. Some, like Annie, wanted to have children, which she was forbidden to do as a Sea Org member. On the other hand, they believed that their eternal salvation was at stake. The youthful enthusiasm that had caused them to sign their billion-year contract of service may have been dampened, but there was usually some residual idealism that the security team could appeal to. Typically, in these confrontations, Morehead would bring along the escapee’s “opinion leader,” which could be his case supervisor, or another family member who was in Scientology—his wife or his mother, for instance. In many instances, the fleeing Sea Org member didn’t even argue; he just gave up, knowing that he would probably be taken directly to RPF, where he might spend months or years working his way back into good standing.
At any time, a fleeing member could guarantee his safety by simply calling the police, but that rarely if ever happened. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, whose jurisdiction includes Gold Base, says that there has never been an outcry of abuse, or an accusation of illegal detention from members of the church at the base. Although the Sea Org members lived inside a highly secure compound in a desert hideaway, surrounded by fences and high-tech sensors, most of them weren’t really being held against their will. On the contrary, it was their will that held them. But according to Morehead, no one who escaped ever returned voluntarily.
As soon as Morehead learned that Annie had blown, his team began combing through her personal effects, calling hotels and motels in the area, and looking for clues as to where she was headed. The easiest way of doing that was to have someone pretend to be Annie and try to book a flight, then be told, for instance, “Oh, we already have you on the eleven-ten flight to Boston.” If that didn’t work, another member would call the airlines, posing as a sick relative, and demand help in finding the missing “son” or “wife” or whatever; if the airline representative refused to give out that information, the member would continue asking to speak to a higher-up, until he got the information. In one case, it was the vice president of an airline who, thinking he was responding to a family medical emergency, gave up the pertinent details. Morehead also hired former FBI or CIA agents as private investigators. As soon as an escapee made the mistake of using a credit card, the team would know almost immediately where the charge was placed. Morehead was always surprised at how easily such supposedly confidential information could be obtained. His team quickly learned that Annie was on the flight to Boston.
Minutes later, Marty Rathbun lit out for the airport at a hundred miles an hour. He didn’t even have time to change clothes. He was wearing a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. His secretary booked a direct flight that would arrive at Boston only twenty minutes after Annie’s, and just twenty minutes before her connecting flight to Bangor.
It was winter and snowing in Boston when he landed, at ten at night, when most of the air traffic had ended. He ran through the nearly empty corridors of Logan Airport to the gate for the Bangor flight. There was a stairwell that led downstairs, and a door that opened to the tarmac. Rathbun rushed outside into the frigid air. The passengers were still on the ramp; Annie was only six feet away from him. “Annie!” he cried. She turned around. As soon as she saw who it was, her shoulders slumped, and she walked toward him.
Rathbun talked to Miscavige and said that he would get a couple of hotel rooms in Boston and bring Annie back in the morning, but Miscavige was unwilling to risk it. He told Rathbun that he had already arranged for John Travolta’s jet to pick them up a few hours later. Annie and Jim Logan were finally divorced on August 26, 1993. He never saw her again. (She died in 2011 of lung cancer, at the age of fifty-five.) (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.201-7)
Now that he was firmly in control of the church, Miscavige sought to restore the image of Scientology. The 1980s had been a devastating period for the church’s reputation, with Hubbard’s disappearance and eventual death, the high-profile lawsuits, and the avalanche of embarrassing publicity. Miscavige hired Hill & Knowlton, the oldest and largest public relations firm in the world, to oversee a national campaign. The legendarily slick worldwide chairman of Hill & Knowlton, Robert Keith Gray, specialized in rehabilitating disgraced dictators, arms dealers, and governments with appalling human-rights records. As representatives of the government of Kuwait, Hill & Knowlton had been partly responsible for selling the Persian Gulf War to the American people. One of the company’s tactics was to provide the testimony of a fifteen-year-old girl, “Nayirah,” to a human-rights committee in the US House of Representatives in October 1990. Nayirah described herself as an ordinary Kuwaiti who had volunteered in a hospital. She tearfully told the House members of watching Iraqi soldiers storm into the prenatal unit. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die,” she said. The incident could never be confirmed, and the girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and had never volunteered at the hospital. The propaganda operation was, at the time, the most expensive and sophisticated public relations campaign ever run in the United States by a foreign government.
Gray had also worked closely with the Reagan campaign. He regaled the Scientologists with his ability to take a “mindless actor” and turn him into the “Teflon President.” Hill & Knowlton went to work for the church, putting out phony news stories, often in the form of video news releases made to look like actual reports rather than advertisements. The church began supporting high-profile causes, such as Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games, thereby associating itself with other well-known corporate sponsors, such as Sony and Pepsi. There were full-page ads in newsmagazines touting the church’s philosophy, and cable television ads promoting Scientology books and Dianetics seminars.
Then, in May 1991, came one of the greatest public relations catastrophes in the church’s history. Time magazine published a scathing cover story titled “Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” by investigative reporter Richard Behar. The exposé revealed that just one of the religion’s many entities, the Church of Spiritual Technology, had taken in half a billion dollars in 1987 alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the parent organization were buried in secret accounts in Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and Cyprus. Many of the personalities linked with the church were savaged in the article. Hubbard himself was described as “part storyteller, part flimflam man.” The Feshbach brothers were the “terrors of the stock exchanges,” who spread false information about companies in order to drive down their valuations. Behar quoted a former church executive as saying that John Travolta stayed in the church only because he was worried that details of his sex life would be made public if he left. The article asserted that Miscavige made frequent jokes about Travolta’s “allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior.” When Behar queried Travolta’s attorney for the star’s comment, he was told that such questions were “bizarre.” “Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist,” Behar wrote.
“Those who criticize the church—journalists, doctors, lawyers, and even judges—often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up, or threatened by death,” Behar noted. He accused the Justice Department of failing to back the IRS and the FBI in bringing a racketeering suit against the church because it was unwilling to spend the money required to take the organization on. He quoted Cynthia Kisser, head of the Cult Awareness Network in Chicago: “Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen.”
After the Time article appeared, Miscavige was invited to appear on ABC’s Nightline, a highly prestigious news show, to defend the image of the church. He had never been interviewed in his life. He rehearsed for months, as much as four hours per day, with Rathbun and Rinder. He would prod them to ask him questions, then complain that they didn’t sound like Ted Koppel, the show’s courtly but incisive host. Miscavige would ask himself the questions in what he thought was Koppel’s voice, then respond with a hypothetical answer. He sorted through what seemed to his aides an endless number of wardrobe choices before settling on a blue suit with a purple tie and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. Finally, on Valentine’s Day, 1992, he went to New York, where the show would be broadcast live.
The interview was preceded by a fifteen-minute report by Forrest Sawyer about Scientology’s claims and controversies. “The church says it now has centers in over seventy countries, with more on the way,” Sawyer said. Heber Jentzsch, the president of the Church of Scientology International, was featured, claiming a membership of eight million people. Sawyer also interviewed defectors, who talked about their families being ripped apart, or being bilked of tens of thousands of dollars. Richard Behar, the Time reporter, recounted how Scientology’s private investigators had obtained his phone records. Vicki Aznaran, a former high official in the church, who was then suing the church, told Sawyer that Miscavige ordered attacks on those he considered troublemakers—“have them, their homes, broken into, have them beaten, have things stolen from them, slash their tires, break their car windows, whatever.”
Koppel allowed Miscavige to respond to the Sawyer report. “Every single detractor on there is a part of a religious hate group called Cult Awareness Network and their sister group called American Family Foundation,” Miscavige said. “It’s the same as the KKK would be with blacks.” He seemed completely at ease.
“You realize there’s a little bit of a problem getting people to talk critically about Scientology because, quite frankly, they’re scared,” Koppel observed.
“Oh, no, no, no, no.”
“I’m telling you, people are scared,” Koppel insisted. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.217-9)
The church began to plot its counterattack. The Cult Awareness Network, besieged by more than fifty lawsuits brought by Scientologists, went bankrupt in 1996. An individual Scientologist purchased its name and assets at auction. Soon after that, the reorganized Cult Awareness Network sent out a brochure lauding the Church of Scientology for its efforts to “increase happiness and improve conditions for oneself and others.” The church also began a $3 million campaign against Time, placing full-page ads every day in USA Today for twelve weeks, charging that the magazine had “supported” Adolf Hitler, for instance, by naming him the 1938 “Man of the Year” because of his dominance in European affairs. A lengthy supplement was placed in USA Today titled “The Story That Time Couldn’t Tell: Who Really Controls the News at Time—and Why,” in which the church claimed that Time was actually under the sway of the pharmaceutical industry—specifically, Eli Lilly and Company, the maker of Prozac. The church had charged that Prozac caused people to commit mass murder and suicide. The Time article was the drug company’s revenge, the church alleged.3
Rathbun directed the ferocious legal assault on Time and oversaw the team of private detectives probing into Behar’s private life. The church, employing what was reported to be an annual litigation budget of $20 million and a team of more than a hundred lawyers to handle the suits already in the courts, filed a $416 million libel action against Time Warner, the parent company of the magazine, and Behar. Because the church is regarded under American law as a “public figure,” Scientology’s lawyers had to prove not only that the magazine’s allegations were wrong but also that Behar acted with “actual malice”—a legal term meaning that he knowingly published information he knew to be false, or that he recklessly disregarded the facts, because he intended to damage the church. Although there was no convincing evidence proving that the facts were wrong or that the reporter was biased, the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which sustained the district court’s initial ruling against the church. In the process, it cost Time more money in defense costs than any other case in its history.
Rathbun’s strategy followed Hubbard’s dictate that the purpose of a lawsuit is “to harass and discourage rather than win.” Hubbard also wrote: “If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace.… Don’t ever defend. Always attack.” He added: “NEVER agree to an investigation of Scientology. ONLY agree to an investigation of the attackers.” He advised Scientologists: “Start feeding lurid, blood, sex, crime, actual evidence on the attackers to the press.… Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.… There has never yet been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out.” These were maxims that Rathbun took as his guidelines.
The Time article capsized Miscavige’s attempts to break free of the negative associations so many people had with Scientology. But there was an even larger battle under way, one in which the church’s very existence was at stake: its fight with the IRS to regain its tax-exempt status as a bona fide religion, which it had lost in 1967.
The government’s stance was that the Church of Scientology was in fact a commercial enterprise, with “virtually incomprehensible financial procedures” and a “scripturally based hostility to taxation.” The IRS had ruled that the church was largely operated to benefit its founder. Miscavige inherited some of that liability when he took over after Hubbard’s death. A tax exemption would not only put the imprimatur of the American government on the church as a certified religion, rather than a corrupt, profit-making concern, but it would also provide a substantial amount of immunity from civil suits and the persistent federal criminal investigations. A decision against the tax exemption, on the other hand, would destroy the entire enterprise, because Hubbard had decided in 1973 that the church should not pay its back taxes. Twenty years later, the church was $1 billion in arrears, with only $125 million in reserves. The founder had placed Scientology’s head on the executioner’s block.
The war between the church and the IRS had already gone on for more than two decades, with both sides waging a campaign of intimidation and espionage. Miscavige accused the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS of engaging in surveillance of church leaders, wiretaps, and illegal opening of the church’s mail. Now the church upped the ante by besieging the IRS with 200 lawsuits on the part of the church and more than 2,300 suits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country, overwhelming government lawyers, running up fantastic expenses, and causing an immense amount of havoc inside the IRS. Miscavige boasted that the entire legal budget of the federal agency was exhausted: “They didn’t even have money to attend the annual American Bar Association conference of lawyers—which they were supposed to speak at!” The church ran ads against the agency, using the images of beloved celebrities (who were not Scientologists) such as John Wayne and Willie Nelson, who had been audited by the IRS. “All of America Loved Lucy,” one ad said, over an iconic photo of Lucille Ball, “except the IRS.” A ten-thousand-dollar reward was offered to potential whistle-blowers to expose IRS abuses. Private investigators dug into the private lives of IRS officials, going so far as to attend seminars and pose as IRS workers, to see who had a drinking problem or might be cheating on a spouse. Stories based on these investigations were promoted by a phony news bureau the church established, and also published in the church’s Freedom magazine, which Scientologists passed out for free on the steps of the IRS headquarters in Washington. The hatred on both sides for the other was intense. It seemed bizarre that a rather small organization could overmatch the US government, but the harassment campaign was having an effect. Some government workers were getting anonymous calls in the middle of the night, or finding that their pets had disappeared. Whether or not these events were part of the Scientology onslaught, they added to the paranoia many in the agency were feeling.
Both the church and the IRS faced the challenge of addressing the question of what, exactly, constituted a religion in the eyes of the American government. On the church’s side was a body of scholars who had arisen in defense of what were called “new religious movements,” such as the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and of course the Church of Scientology. The term was employed to replace the word “cult,” because these academics found no reliable way of distinguishing a cult from a religion. They believe that new religious movements are persecuted and ridiculed simply because they are recent and seem exotic. Often, such experts are paid to testify in court on behalf of these organizations. In the courtroom setting, the casual distinctions that many people often make about cults and brainwashing have proven to be difficult to sustain, as the experts pose telling comparisons with the history of mainstream religions, whose practices and rituals have long since been folded into a broad cultural acceptance.
The Church of Scientology had decided to enlist such experts following the FBI raids in 1977, which exposed Operation Snow White and created a major crisis in the church. There was a deliberate campaign to provide religious cloaking for the church’s activities. A Scientology cross was created. Scientology ministers now appeared wearing Roman collars. And religious scholars were courted; they were given tours and allowed to interview carefully coached church members.
[page]Frank K. Flinn, a former Franciscan friar and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, has testified repeatedly on behalf of Scientology—notably, in 1984, when the Church of Scientology, along with Mary Sue Hubbard, sued Gerald Armstrong, the former archivist for the church. Flinn defined religion as a system of beliefs of a spiritual nature. There must be norms for behavior—positive commands and negative prohibitions or taboos—as well as rites and ceremonies, such as initiations, sacraments, prayers, and services for weddings and funerals. By these means, the believers are united into an identifiable community that seeks to live in harmony with what they perceive as the ultimate meaning of life. Flinn argued that Scientology amply fulfilled these requirements, even if it differed in its expression of them from traditional denominations.
Like Catholicism, Flinn explained, Scientology is a hierarchical religion. He compared L. Ron Hubbard to the founders of Catholic religious orders, including his own, started by Saint Francis of Assisi, whose followers adopted a vow of poverty. Financial disparities within a church are not unusual. Within the hierarchy of Catholicism, for instance, bishops often enjoy a mansion, limousines, servants, and housekeepers; the papacy itself maintains thousands of people on its staff, including the Swiss Guards who protect the pope, and an entire order of nuns dedicated to being housekeepers for the papal apartments.
The Catholic Church also maintains houses of rehabilitation (like the RPF) for errant priests hoping to reform themselves. Flinn saw the RPF as being entirely voluntary and even tame compared to what he experienced as a friar in the Franciscan Order. He willingly submitted to the religious practice of flagellation on Fridays, whipping his legs and back in emulation of the suffering of Jesus before his crucifixion. Flinn also spent several hours a day doing manual labor. As a member of a mendicant order, he owned no material possessions at all, not even the robe he wore. Low wages and humble work were essential to his spiritual commitment.
There is a place for a Supreme Being in Scientology—in Hubbard’s Eight Dynamics, it’s at the top—but the God idea plays a diminished role compared to many religions. On the other hand, some religions worship objects—stones or icons or mandalas—rather than a deity. Scientologists don’t pray; but then, neither do Buddhists. The idea of salvation, so central to Christianity, is not so different from Hubbard’s assertion that the fundamental law of the universe is the urge to survive. Flinn compared the Scientology distinction between preclear and Clear to Buddhist notions of entanglement and enlightenment, or Christian doctrines of sin and grace. The Scientology creed that humans are “thetans” simply means we are beings with immortal souls, which no Christian would argue with.
One of Flinn’s most interesting and contested points had to do with hagiography, by which he meant attributing extraordinary powers—such as clairvoyance, visions of God or angels, or the ability to perform miracles—to the charismatic founders of a religion. He pointed to the virgin birth of Jesus, the ability of the Buddha to “transmigrate” his soul into the heavens, or Moses bringing manna to the people of Israel. Such legends are useful in that they bolster the faith of a community, Flinn said. The glaring discrepancies in Hubbard’s biography should be seen in the light of the fact that any religion tends to make its founder into something more than human.
Flinn was asked to testify about a policy Hubbard had written in 1965 titled “Fair Game Law,” in which he laid down the rules for dealing with Suppressive Persons. That category includes non-Scientologists who are hostile to the church, apostates, and defectors, as well as their spouses, family members, and close friends. “A truly Suppressive Person or Group has no rights of any kind,” Hubbard wrote. Such enemies, he said, may be “tricked, lied to or destroyed.” In 1965, he wrote another policy letter ambiguously stating, “The practice of declaring people FAIR GAME will cease. FAIR GAME may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations. [The new ruling] does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP.” The supposed revocation of Fair Game took place before Operation Snow White, the harassment of Paulette Cooper and other journalists, the persecution of defectors, and many other actions undertaken by church insiders that were done in the spirit, if not the name, of the original policy.
“Almost all religious movements in their very early phase tend to be harsh,” Flinn reminded the court. He contended that they tend to evolve and become more lenient over time. As for disconnection, he declared that it was “functionally equivalent to other types of religious exclusions,” such as shunning of nonbelievers among Mennonites and the Amish. In the Book of Leviticus, for instance, which is part of the Torah and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, idolaters and those who have strayed from the faith were to be stoned to death. That practice has disappeared; instead, Orthodox Jews will sit Shiva for the nonbeliever, treating him as if he is already dead. “So this kind of phenomenon is not peculiar to Scientology,” Flinn concluded. The implication underlying Flinn’s testimony was that Scientology is a new religion that is reinventing old religious norms; whatever abuses it may be committing are errors of youthful exuberance, and in any case they are pale imitators of the practices once employed by the mainstream religions that judges and jurors were likely to be members of. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.224-9)
On October 8, more than a thousand Scientologists stood and cheered in the Los Angeles Sports Arena as Miscavige announced, “The war is over!” The IRS had settled with the church. Although the terms were secret, they were later leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Instead of the $1 billion bill for back taxes and penalties that the church owed, Scientology agreed to pay just $12.5 million to resolve outstanding disputes; the church also agreed to stop the cascade of lawsuits against the agency. In return, the IRS dropped its investigations. “The magnitude of this is greater than you can imagine,” Miscavige said that night at the Sports Arena. He held up a thick folder of the letters of exemption for every one of the church’s 150 American entities. The victory over the IRS was total, he explained. It gave Scientology financial advantages that were unusual, perhaps unique, among religions in the United States. For instance, schools using Hubbard educational methods received tax exemption. Eighty percent of individual auditing on the part of members was now a tax-deductible expense. Two Scientology publishing houses that were solely dedicated to turning out Hubbard’s books, including his commercial fiction, also gained the tax exemption. The church even gained the power to extend its tax exemption to any of its future branches—“They will no longer need to apply to the IRS,” Miscavige marveled. From now on, the church could make its own decisions about which of its activities were exempt.
“And what about all those battles and wars still being fought overseas?” Miscavige continued. “Well, there’s good news on that front, too.” In the past, he observed, foreign governments would say, “You are an American religion. If the IRS doesn’t recognize you, why should we?” As a part of the settlement, Miscavige revealed, the agency agreed to send notices to every country in the world, explaining what Scientology was. “It is very complete and very accurate,” Miscavige said of the government brochure. “How do I know? We wrote it!”
Miscavige summed up the mood in the Sports Arena: “The future is ours.”
A MONTH AFTER the church’s historic triumph over the IRS in 1993, Rathbun blew. He had come to see Miscavige in a different light during the two years they labored over the tax case. The last six months of the tax case had been particularly arduous. During that period, he slept only about four hours a night. The former athlete was a physical wreck. “I’m only doing this for LRH,” he told himself, as he and Miscavige ate dinners together night after night in Washington and trudged back to the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “I’m not going to be this guy’s bitch for the rest of my life.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.232-3)
On December 5, McPherson slipped into a coma. When church members decided to take her to the hospital that night, they bypassed the Morton Plant Hospital, just down the street, where McPherson had originally been seen, and drove her forty-five minutes away, passing four other hospitals, to the Columbia New Port Richey Hospital, where there was a doctor affiliated with the church. The woman they finally wheeled into the emergency room was skeletally thin and covered with scratches, bruises, and dark brown lesions. She was also dead. She had suffered a pulmonary embolism on the way to the hospital. In the eyes of the world press, Scientology had murdered Lisa McPherson. She was one of nine Scientologists who had died under mysterious circumstances at the Clearwater facility.
The night after McPherson died, Rathbun got word from church officials to wait for a call at a pay phone at a nearby Holiday Inn. “Why aren’t you all over this mess?” Miscavige demanded, when Rathbun answered the call. “The police are poking around. Do something.”
Rathbun discovered that church officials in Clearwater had already lied in two sworn statements to the police, claiming that McPherson hadn’t been subjected to an Introspection Rundown. The church’s official response, under Rathbun’s direction, was to continue to lie, stating that McPherson had been at the church’s Fort Harrison Hotel only for “rest and relaxation” and there was nothing unusual about her stay. In the meantime, Rathbun went through the logs that McPherson’s attendants had kept. As many as twenty people had been rotating in and out of McPherson’s room; some of them were scratched and bruised from trying to subdue her; that was hardly the isolation and absolute silence and calm that the Introspection Rundown called for. Rathbun noted that, among other entries in the logs, one of the caretakers admitted that the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor. In the presence of a Scientology lawyer, Rathbun handed several of the most incriminating logs to a church executive, and said, “Lose ’em.”
The McPherson case loomed over the church for five years, with an ongoing police investigation, protests in front of Scientology facilities, lawsuits on the part of the family, and endless unwanted press. Embarrassing details emerged, including the fact that McPherson had spent $176,700 on Scientology services in her last five years, but she had died with only $11 in her savings account. Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the church’s spokesman, were responsible for managing the situation, but Miscavige supervised every detail. The level of tension was nearly unbearable.
Rinder had the particularly unrewarding task of defending the church to the public. He was articulate and seemingly unflappable, and he had a talent for disarming hostile interviewers. He had been a Scientologist since he was five years old, in South Australia, when the religion was banned. He had sailed with Hubbard aboard the Apollo. Few had a deeper experience of the religion than he and no one was more publicly identified with it. But even Rinder could not quell the furor that arose from the McPherson affair. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.236)
The 1990s saw the rise of apocalyptic movements in many different countries. As the millennium drew near, the theme of science fiction and UFOs became especially pronounced and deadly. In October 1994, police in Switzerland, investigating a fire in a farmhouse, discovered a hidden room with eighteen corpses wearing ceremonial garments, arranged like spokes in a wheel. Other bodies were found elsewhere on the farm. Their heads were covered with plastic bags; some had been shot or beaten. The next day, three chalets burned in another Swiss village. Investigators found more than two dozen bodies in the ruins. They had been poisoned. Some of the dead had been lured to the scene and murdered, but most were followers of Joseph Di Mambro, a French jeweler, who had created a new religion, the Order of the Solar Temple. Di Mambro’s chief lieutenant, a charismatic Belgian obstetrician named Luc Journet, preached that after death the members would be picked up by a spaceship and reunited on the star Sirius. Like Hubbard, Journet had been influenced by Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis. A year after these macabre incidents, the burned corpses of sixteen other members of the group were found in Grenoble, France; then, in 1997, five more members of the order burned themselves to death in Quebec, making a total of seventy-four deaths. In contrast to the Branch Davidians or the followers of Jim Jones, who were predominantly lower class, the members of the Solar Temple were affluent, well-educated members of the communities they lived in, with families and regular jobs, and yet they had given themselves over to a mystical science-fiction fantasy that turned them into killers, suicides, or helpless victims.
In March 1995, adherents of a Japanese movement called Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”) attacked five subway trains in Tokyo with sarin gas. Twelve commuters died; thousands more might have if the gas had been more highly refined. It was later discovered that this was just one of at least fourteen attacks the group staged in order to set off a chain of events intended to result in an apocalyptic world war. The leader of the group, Shoko Asahara, a blind yoga instructor, combined the tenets of Buddhism with notions drawn from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which depicts a secretive group of scientists who are preparing to take over the world. Many of Asahara’s followers were indeed scientists and engineers from top Japanese universities who were enchanted by this scheme. They purchased military hardware in the former Soviet Union and sought to acquire nuclear warheads. When that failed, they bought a sheep farm in Western Australia that happened to be atop a rich vein of uranium. They cultivated chemical and biological weapons, such as anthrax, Ebola virus, cyanide, and VX gas. They had used such agents in previous attacks, but failed to create the kind of mass slaughter they hoped would bring on civil war and nuclear Armageddon. Still, Aum exposed the narrow boundary between religious cultism and terror, which would soon become more obvious with the rise of al-Qaeda. A spokesperson for the Church of Scientology in New Zealand explained that the source of Aum Shinrikyo’s crimes was the practice of psychiatry in Japan.
Just as the debate in Germany was coming to a climax, in March 1997, thirty-nine members of a group calling itself Heaven’s Gate committed suicide in a San Diego mansion. They apparently had hoped to time their deaths in order to ascend to a spacecraft that they believed was following Comet Hale-Bopp. Marshall Applewhite, their leader, a former choirmaster, represented himself as a reincarnated Jesus who was receiving guidance from the television show Star Trek.
Although Scientology has persecuted its critics and defectors, it has never engaged in mass murder or suicides; however, the public anxiety surrounding these sensational events added to the rancor and fear that welled up in Germany. Could Scientology also turn violent? There were elements mixed into these various groups that resembled some features of Scientology—magical beliefs and science fiction being the most obvious. Past lives were a common theme. Like Aum Shinrikyo, Scientology has ties to Buddhist notions of enlightenment and Hindu beliefs in karma and reincarnation. Structurally, Aum Shinrikyo was the most similar to Scientology, having both a public membership and a cloistered clergy, like the Sea Org, called renunciates, who carried out directives that the larger organization knew little or nothing about. When the attacks on the subway took place, Aum’s membership in Japan was estimated to be about 10,000, with an additional 30,000 in Russia, and some scattered pockets worldwide, with resources close to $1 billion—figures that compare with some estimates of Scientology today. What separated these groups from Scientology was their orientation toward apocalypse and their yearning for the end-time. That has never been a feature of Scientology. Clearly, however, the lure of totalistic religious movements defies easy categorization. Such groups can arise anywhere and spread like viruses, and it is impossible to know which ones will turn lethal, or why.
Both the German government and the Scientologists viewed their struggle through the prism of Germany’s Nazi past. Ursula Caberta, the head of the Hamburg anti-Scientology task force, compared Hubbard’s Introduction to Scientology Ethics to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Hitler was thinking that the Aryans were going to rule the world, the untermenschen. The philosophy of L. Ron Hubbard is the same.” In response to such statements, in January 1997 a group of Hollywood celebrities, agents, lawyers, and movie executives published a full-page open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the International Herald Tribune. “Hitler made religious intolerance official government policy,” the letter stated. “In the 1930s it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists.” The letter compared the boycotts of Cruise, Travolta, and Corea to Nazi book-burnings. The letter was written and paid for by Bertram Fields, then the most powerful lawyer in Hollywood, whose clients included Travolta and Cruise. None of the thirty-four signatories of the document were Scientologists, but many were Jews. Most of them—such as Oliver Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and Goldie Hawn—had worked with the two stars or were friends or clients of Fields.
Entertainment Tonight sent the actress Anne Archer, a well-known Scientologist, to Germany on a “fact-finding mission.” She later testified before the US Congress, as did other Scientology celebrities—Travolta, Corea, and Isaac Hayes—about the suppression of religious freedom in Germany. “Individuals and businesses throughout Germany are routinely required to sign a declaration, referred to as a ‘sect filter,’ swearing that they are not Scientologists,” Travolta told Congress. “Failure to sign means that companies will not hire them, trade unions will not admit them, they will not be permitted to join social groups, banks will not open accounts for them, and they are even excluded from sports clubs, solely because of their religion.”
In April, John Travolta met with President Bill Clinton at a conference on volunteerism in Philadelphia. It was a freighted moment for the president, since Travolta was portraying a character based on him in the forthcoming movie Primary Colors. “He said he wanted to help me out with the situation in Germany,” Travolta later said. “He had a roommate years ago who was a Scientologist and had really liked him, and respected his views on it. He said he felt we were given an unfair hand in that country, and that he wanted to fix it.” Clinton set up a meeting for Travolta and Cruise with Sandy Berger, his national security advisor, who was given the additional assignment of being the administration’s “Scientology point person.”
None of this had any effect on Travolta’s character in the film, as the movie had already been shot, nor on Germany’s policy toward the church, which refused to recognize Scientology as a religion or allow members to join political parties. However, the US State Department began pressuring the German government on behalf of Scientology. The Germans were puzzled that their American counterparts seemed not to know or care about the church’s RPF camps, which the Germans called penal colonies, and the reported practices of confinement, forced confessions, and punishing physical labor, which they said amounted to brainwashing. There was a belief within the German cabinet that the church’s real goal was to infiltrate the government and create a Scientology superstate. “This is not a church or a religious organization,” the labor minister, Norbert Blum, told Maclean’s magazine. “Scientology is a machine for manipulating human beings.” (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.240-3)
Cruise’s renewed dedication to Scientology permanently changed the relationship between the church and the Hollywood celebrity community. Cruise poured millions of dollars into the church—$3 million in 2004 alone. He was not simply a figurehead; he was an activist with an international following. He could take the church into places it had never been before. Whenever Cruise traveled abroad to promote his movies, he used the opportunity to lobby foreign leaders and American ambassadors to promote Scientology. Davis usually accompanied him on these diplomatic and lobbying missions. Cruise repeatedly consulted with former President Clinton, lobbying him to get Prime Minister Tony Blair’s help in getting the Church of Scientology declared a tax-deductible charitable organization in the United Kingdom. Rathbun was present for one telephone call in which Clinton advised Cruise he would be better served by contacting Blair’s wife, Cherie, rather than the prime minister, because she was a lawyer and “would understand the details.” Later, Cruise went to London, where he met with a couple of Blair’s representatives, although nothing came of those efforts. In 2003, he met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to express the church’s concerns over its treatment in Germany. Cruise had access to practically anyone in the world.
That same year, Cruise and Davis lobbied Rod Paige, the secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, to endorse Hubbard’s study tech educational methods. Paige had been impressed. For months, Cruise kept in contact with Paige’s office, urging that Scientology techniques be folded into the president’s No Child Left Behind program. One day Cruise flew his little red-and-white-striped Pitts Special biplane, designed for aerobatics, to Hemet, along with his Scientologist chief of staff, Michael Doven. Miscavige and Rathbun picked them up and drove them to Gold Base. Rathbun was in the backseat and recalls Cruise boasting to COB about his talks with the secretary.
“Bush may be an idiot,” Miscavige observed, “but I wouldn’t mind his being our Constantine.”
Cruise agreed. “If f*cking Arnold can be governor, I could be president.”
Miscavige responded, “Well, absolutely, Tom.”2 (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.249-50)
THE INTENSITY OF the pressure on Sea Org members to raise money for the church—while working for next to nothing—can be understood in part through the account of Daniel Montalvo. His parents joined the Sea Org when he was five, and the very next year he signed his own billion-year contract. He says that he began working full-time in the organization when he was eleven and recalls that, along with other Sea Org members, including children, his days stretched from eight in the morning until eleven thirty at night. Part of his work was shoveling up asbestos that had been removed during the renovation of the Fort Harrison Hotel. He says no protective gear was provided, not even a mask. He rarely saw his parents. While he was at Flag Base in 2005, when he was fourteen, he guarded the door while Tom Cruise was in session. The sight of children working at a Sea Org facility would not have been unusual. They were separated from their parents and out of school. According to Florida child labor laws, minors who are fourteen and fifteen years old are prohibited from working during school hours, and may work only up to fifteen hours a week. Daniel said that he was allowed schooling only one day a week, on Saturday.
When Daniel was fifteen, he was assigned to work on the renovation of Scientology’s publications building in Los Angeles, operating scissors lifts and other heavy equipment. According to California child labor laws, fifteen-year-old children are allowed to work only three hours per day outside of school, except on weekends—no more than eighteen hours per week total. Sixteen is the minimum age for children to work in any manufacturing establishment using power-driven hoisting apparatus, such as the scissors lift. Daniel graduated to work at the church’s auditing complex nearby, called the American Saint Hill Organization; then from six in the evening until three in the morning he volunteered at Bridge Publications. He was paid thirty-six dollars a week.
Daniel’s work at Bridge Publications was sufficiently impressive that he was posted full-time in the manufacturing division there the following year. The church had issued a new edition of Hubbard’s books and lectures called The Basics, which was being aggressively marketed to Scientologists. One of Daniel’s jobs was to cut the “thumb notches” that mark the glossary and the appendix in these handsomely made books, like the notches one would find in an unabridged dictionary. A machine with a guillotine steel blade slices through the pages to produce the half-moon indentation. California law specifically forbids the operation of the machine by anyone under the age of eighteen. Daniel noted about twenty other minors working at the plant, all of them sleep deprived and working around heavy equipment. One night Daniel chopped off his right index finger on the notching machine. A security officer picked up his finger and put it in a plastic bag with ice, then took Daniel to the children’s hospital in Hollywood. He was instructed to tell the admitting nurse that he had injured himself in a skateboarding accident. The doctors were unable to reattach his finger.
After that, Daniel was sent to the sales division of Bridge Publications. Sales had been declining since The Basics had first been published in 2007. The Basics included eighteen books and a number of Hubbard lectures on CD; the complete package cost $6,500. Sea Orgs all over the world had call centers set up to sell them. In Los Angeles, there were hourly quotas to be met, and those who failed suffered various punishments, such as having water dumped on their head or being made to do push-ups or run up and down the stairs. There were security guards on every floor. A salesperson had to get a slip verifying that he had made his quota before he was permitted to go to bed.
Often it was simply impossible to make the quota legitimately, so people ran unauthorized credit cards. Members of the Sea Org sales force would break into the church’s financial records and pull up the credit card information of public members. Members who had money on account at the church for future courses would see it drained to pay for books they didn’t order. Parishioners who balked at making contributions or buying unwanted materials were told they were in violation of church ethics, and their progress in Scientology was blocked or threatened.
Members who pledge more than they can afford can find themselves in a compromised situation. One Scientologist who was a bank teller says he was told to comply with a robbery in order to pay off his debt to the church; the robbers took four thousand dollars. In 2009, Nancy Cartwright’s fiancé, Stephen E. Brackett, a contractor, had taken a substantial construction advance to renovate a restaurant. The company that insured the project later sued Cartwright, claiming that she and Brackett had diverted the money to the Church of Scientology. Brackett, an OT V, had been featured in a church ad for the Super Power Building, identified as a “key contributor.” “Mankind needs your help,” Brackett was quoted as saying in the ad. He later took his life by jumping off a bridge on Pacific Coast Highway near Big Sur.4
The biggest financial scandal involving church members was a Ponzi scheme operated by Reed Slatkin; he was one of the co-founders, with Paul Haggis’s friend Sky Dayton, of EarthLink. Slatkin’s massive fraud involved more than half a billion dollars in investments; much of the initial “profit” was returned to Scientology investors, such as Daniel and Myrna Jacobs, who earned nearly $3 million on a $760,500 “investment.” According to Marty Rathbun, Slatkin’s Scientology investors included Anne Archer and Fox News commentator Greta Van Susteren. Later investors were not so lucky. Slatkin was convicted of defrauding $240 million; it is still not known how much of that money went directly to the church, although the court found that about $50 million was funneled to the church indirectly by investors with massive gains. In 2006, groups affiliated with the Church of Scientology, including the Celebrity Centre, agreed to pay back $3.5 million.
IN JULY 2004 Miscavige hosted Tom Cruise’s forty-second birthday party aboard the Scientology cruise ship Freewinds. The Golden Era Musicians, including Miscavige’s father on trumpet, played songs from Cruise’s movies as film clips flickered on the giant overhead screens installed especially for the occasion. Cruise himself danced and sang “Old Time Rock and Roll,” reprising a famous scene in Risky Business, the movie that firmly established him as a star.
Occasionally, the Freewinds is used to confine those Sea Org members that the church considers most at risk for flight. Among the crew on the ship during Cruise’s birthday party was Valeska Paris, a twenty-six-year-old Swiss woman. Paris had grown up in Scientology and joined the Sea Org when she was fourteen. Three years later, her stepfather, a self-made millionaire, committed suicide, leaving a diary in which he blamed the church for fleecing his fortune. When Valeska’s mother denounced the church on French television, Valeska was isolated at the Clearwater base in order to keep her away from her mother. The next year, at the age of eighteen, she was sent to the Freewinds. She was told she would be on the ship for two weeks. She was held there against her will for twelve years. Shortly before Cruise arrived, Paris developed a cold sore, which caused Miscavige to consign her to a condition of Treason, so she wasn’t allowed to go to the birthday party, but she later did wind up serving Cruise and his girlfriend at the time, the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.279-82)
Nazanin Boniadi was obviously being groomed for leadership. Why else would she be reading about BolÃvar and Sáenz? But what lesson was she supposed to draw? She was puzzled by the demands the church was placing on her, which had little to do with human rights. Along with the security checks and the coursework, Naz was told to have her braces taken off and was given very expensive beauty treatments. Wilhere informed her that the “director” of the special project had decided that her hair had too much red in it, so a stylist to the stars came to the Celebrity Centre to darken and highlight her hair. Then came the shopping spree. Wilhere took Naz to Rodeo Drive and spent twenty thousand dollars for her new wardrobe.
Finally, Naz and Wilhere flew to New York, first class. She guessed that the mission would finally be revealed to her. They stopped at the New York Org, ostensibly on routine business, but there they happened to run into Tom Cruise. Tommy Davis was with him. Although it all seemed like a happy coincidence, Naz was a little flustered. Not only was Cruise the biggest star in the world, he had also just been accorded the highest honor in Scientology. She said to him, “Very well done, sir.” (Later she was corrected for saying that, because you don’t commend your senior.)
Cruise was charming. He said that he and Davis were headed over to the Empire State Building and then to Nobu for some sushi—why didn’t they join them? Afterward, they all went skating at Rockefeller Center, which was closed to the public while they were on the rink. It was beginning to seem a little too perfect. She spent that first night with Cruise in the Trump Tower, where he had taken an entire floor for his entourage. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.288)
Scientologists have been seeking ways of criminalizing psychiatric remedies. In the same period that Cruise was chastising Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, Kirstie Alley and Kelly Preston were testifying before state lawmakers in Florida, who passed a bill, written in part by Scientologists, that would hold schoolteachers criminally liable for suggesting to parents that their children might be suffering from a mental health condition, such as attention deficit disorder. Governor Jeb Bush vetoed the bill. Governor Jon Huntsman did the same in Utah. Similar bills have been pushed by the CCHR in other states. In her Florida testimony, Kirstie Alley held up photographs of children who had committed suicide after taking psychotropic drugs. “None of these children were psychotic before they took these drugs,” she asserted, sobbing so hard she could barely speak. “None of these children were suicidal before they took these drugs.”
Some drug makers have covered up studies that indicate an increased danger of suicidal or violent thoughts caused by psychotropic medicines. Eli Lilly, for instance, suppressed data showing that patients who were taking the popular drug Prozac—the only antidepressant certified as safe for children—were twelve times more likely to attempt suicide than patients taking similar medications. Antidepressants have been implicated in a number of schoolyard shootings, such as the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where two students killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher. One of the killers was taking Luvox at the time. Adderall—one of the drugs cited by Cruise—is an amphetamine often prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; it sometimes causes increased aggression in children and adolescents. Ritalin, the most common drug prescribed for ADHD, is similar to cocaine in its potential for addiction. According to The Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, a person using Ritalin, Adderall, or other cocaine-like drugs “can experience nervousness, restlessness, agitation, suspiciousness, paranoia, hallucinations and delusions, impaired cognitive functions, delirium, violence, suicide, and homicide.”
But people who are taking antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood-stabilizing drugs are already at a higher risk for suicide or violent behavior. One of the dangers of prescribing an antidepressant is that it may give the patient the stimulus he or she needs to act on suicidal impulses that are already present. Sudden withdrawal from antidepressants can prompt suicidal thoughts as well. Several studies have found that the risk of suicide was just as great for those who don’t receive antidepressants as for those who do; over time, however, patients taking antidepressants are less likely to kill themselves. Such medications now come with warnings about increased suicidal behavior. And yet, one study noted the steady decline of overall suicide rates in the United States since fluoxetine (Prozac) was introduced in the American market. The authors estimated that the drug was responsible for saving 33,600 lives between 1988 and 2002.
There are numerous examples of Scientologists who have considered or actually committed suicide, or engaged in violence, who might have been helped if they had taken psychotropic medicines. In Buffalo, New York, on March 13, 2003 (L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday), twenty-eight-year-old Jeremy Perkins stabbed his mother seventy-seven times. He was a schizophrenic with a history of violence and hallucinations, who had rejected psychiatric treatment because he was a Scientologist. Hana Eltringham, who had been Hubbard’s chief deputy, believes that Scientology itself caused her own shattered mental state. For years after attaining OT III, Eltringham had frequent thoughts of suicide. The unremitting migraines and voices in her head made her despair. Several times, she came close to jumping off the top floor of the church’s headquarters in Clearwater, but restrained herself because she was worried that it would bring disgrace upon the church and Hubbard’s teachings. It was only when she left the church and began taking Prozac that her headaches and her suicidal thoughts went away. “It has changed my life,” she claimed. Her friend Mary Florence Barnett, Shelly Miscavige’s mother, had similar symptoms—constant headaches and suicidal thoughts. She confided to Eltringham that she wanted to kill herself in order to stop the suppressive body thetans from taking over her mind. Barnett eventually went outside the official church to receive Scientology counseling, a heretical practice known in Scientology as squirreling. (The church denies that Barnett became involved with dissident Scientologists, but if she had, that would have placed David and Shelly Miscavige in a compromised position with the church. They would have been Potential Trouble Sources if they failed to disconnect from her.) On September 8, 1985, Barnett’s body was found. She had been shot three times in the chest and once through the temple with a rifle. Both of her wrists were slashed. She left two suicide notes. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled her death a suicide.
In 2007, Kyle Brennan, twenty years old, who was not a Scientologist, went to stay with his father, a member of the church, in Clearwater. Brennan was taking Lexapro, an antidepressant heavily promoted by its manufacturer, Forest Laboratories. He was also under the care of a psychiatrist. According to court records, Brennan’s father, Thomas, was ordered to “handle” his son. Thomas Brennan’s auditor was Denise Miscavige Gentile, David Miscavige’s twin sister. She spoke on the phone to Kyle’s mother, who was not a Scientologist, and urged her to enroll her son in Narconon, the church’s drug-treatment program. His mother refused, pointing out that the program costs approximately $25,000; moreover, Kyle was not a drug addict. She sued, charging that church officials had ordered Thomas Brennan to lock his son’s Lexapro in the trunk of his car. Days after that, Kyle shot himself to death with a .357 Magnum that his father kept in his bedside table. (The suit was dismissed for lack of evidence.) (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.295-7)
AT THE TIME Haggis was doing his investigation, the FBI was also looking into Scientology. In December 2009, Tricia Whitehill, a special agent from the Los Angeles office, flew to Florida to interview former members of the church at the bureau’s office in downtown Clearwater, which happens to be directly across the street from Scientology’s spiritual headquarters. Tom De Vocht, who spoke to Whitehill then, got the impression that the investigation had been going on for quite a while. He says that Whitehill confided that she hadn’t told the local agents what the investigation was about, in case the office had been infiltrated. Amy Scobee also spoke to Whitehill for two full days, mainly about the abuse she had witnessed.
Whitehill and Valerie Venegas, the lead agent on the case, also interviewed former Sea Org members in California. One was Gary Morehead, who had developed the blow drill. He explained how his security team would use emotional and psychological pressure to bring escapees back; but failing that, physical force has been used.8
Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human trafficking. The laws regarding trafficking were built largely around forced prostitution, but they also pertain to slave labor. Under federal law, slavery is defined, in part, by the use of coercion, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological abuse. The California Penal Code lists several indicators that someone may be a victim of human trafficking: signs of trauma or fatigue; being afraid or unable to talk because of censorship or security measures that prevent communication with others; working in one place without the freedom to move about; owing a debt to one’s employer; and not having control over identification documents. Those conditions resemble the accounts of many former Sea Org members who lived at Gold Base. If proven, those allegations would still be difficult to prosecute given the religious status of Scientology.
Marc Headley escaped from Gold Base in 2005; he says this was after being beaten by Miscavige.9 His defection was especially painful for the church, because Marc says he was the first person Tom Cruise audited. In Scientology, the auditor bears a significant responsibility for the progress of his subject. “If you audit somebody and that person leaves the organization, there’s only one person whose fault that is—the auditor,” Headley explained. Later that year, Marc’s wife, Claire, also escaped. In 2009, they sued the church, claiming that the working conditions at Gold Base violated labor and human-trafficking laws. The church responded that the Headleys were ministers who had voluntarily submitted to the rigors of their calling, and that the First Amendment protected Scientology’s religious practices. The court agreed with this argument and dismissed the Headleys’ complaints, awarding the church forty thousand dollars in litigation costs.
In April 2010, John Brousseau also fled. He, too, represented a dangerous liability to the church. He had been a Sea Org member for decades; he had worked personally for Hubbard; and he knew Miscavige intimately. But what was of most concern to the church was the fact that he had worked on or overseen numerous special projects for Tom Cruise. None of these unique and costly gifts come anywhere close to the millions of dollars that the star has donated to the church over the years, but they do call into question the private benefit afforded a single individual by a tax-exempt religious organization.
Brousseau knew the lengths to which the church would go in order to find him and bring him back. He drove to Carson City, Nevada, and bought a netbook computer at a Walmart, along with an air card, then set up an encrypted e-mail account. He sent a note to Rathbun, saying, “I just left and I’m freaked out, and I’ve got nowhere to go.” Rathbun invited him to South Texas. Expecting that the church would have hired private detectives to stake out key intersections on the interstate highways, Brousseau stuck to county roads. It took him three days to make it to Texas. He was driving a black Ford Excursion, much like the one that he had fashioned into a limousine for Cruise.
Brousseau and Rathbun met at a Chili’s restaurant near Corpus Christi. They decided to hide Brousseau’s truck at a friend’s house. Rathbun then checked Brousseau into a Best Western motel under a different name. Despite the precautions, two days later, at five thirty in the morning, when Brousseau went out on the balcony to smoke, he heard a door open nearby and footsteps walking toward him. It was Tommy Davis and three other church members.
“Hey, J.B.,” Davis said. “You got yourself in some shit.”
Brousseau turned and walked away.
“Where are you going?” Davis demanded.
Brousseau said he was going to get some coffee. Davis and the Scientology delegation followed behind him. The Circle K across the street wasn’t open yet, so Brousseau went into the motel lobby. He told the receptionist, “Call the police. These guys are stalking me.”
She laughed in disbelief.
“We’ve got a room here, too,” Davis said.
Brousseau said he needed to go to the bathroom. As soon as he got back to his room he bolted the door and called Rathbun. “Marty, they came for me,” he said.
After calling 911, Rathbun jumped in his truck to go to the motel, but four cars filled with Scientologists blocked his way. He says they were led by Michael Doven, Cruise’s former personal assistant.
Brousseau waited in his room until the police officers arrived. Davis and the others left empty-handed.10
Brousseau talked to Whitehill and Venegas at the FBI. He was under the impression that the federal agents were considering a raid on Gold Base. Brousseau says he was shown high-resolution photos of the base taken from a drone aircraft. He says he was told that they had even gathered the tail numbers on Tom Cruise’s aircraft, in case Miscavige tried to escape. Brousseau and others claim to have discouraged the idea, saying that such a raid would turn Miscavige into a martyr; and, in any case, no one would testify against him. Rinder told the agents it would be a waste of time, because everyone would tell them their lives are all “seashells and butterflies.” The investigation was reportedly dropped.11
[page]AFTER SENDING COPIES of his resignation letter to his closest friends in Scientology, Haggis wasn’t surprised when he came home from work a few days later to find nine or ten of them standing in his front yard. “I can’t imagine why you’re here,” he joked, but he invited them to sit on the back porch and talk. Anne Archer and her husband, Terry Jastrow, an Emmy-winning producer for ABC Sports, were there. Mark Isham, a composer who worked with Haggis for years, came with his wife, Donna. Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink and Boingo Wireless, joined them, along with several other friends and a representative of the church that Haggis didn’t know. His friends could have served as an advertisement for Scientology—they were wealthy high achievers with solid marriages who exuded a sense of spiritual well-being.
Scientologists are trained to believe in their persuasive powers and the need to keep a positive frame of mind. But the mood on Haggis’s porch was downbeat and his friends’ questions were full of reproach.
“Do you have any idea that this might damage a lot of wonderful Scientologists?” Jastrow asked. “It’s such a betrayal of our group.”
Haggis responded that he didn’t mean to be critical of Scientology. “I love Scientology,” he said. Everyone knew about Haggis’s financial support of the church and the occasions when he had spoken out in its defense. He reminded his friends that he had been with them at the Portland Crusade, when he had been drafted to write speeches.
Archer had a particular reason to feel aggrieved: Haggis’s letter had called her son a liar. She could understand the pain and anger Haggis felt over the treatment of his own gay daughters, but she didn’t think that was relevant. In her opinion, homosexuality is not the church’s issue. She had personally introduced gay friends to Scientology.
Isham was especially frustrated. He felt that they weren’t breaking through to Haggis. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. They had a common artistic sensibility that made it easy to work together. Isham had won an Emmy for the theme music he composed for Haggis’s 1996 television series, EZ Streets. He had scored Crash and Haggis’s last movie, The Valley of Elah. Soon he was supposed to start work on The Next Three Days. Now both their friendship and their professional relationship were at risk.
Isham had been analyzing the discussion from a Scientological perspective. In his view, Haggis’s emotional state on the Tone Scale at that moment was a 1.1, Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—he hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. Isham made what he calls an intellectual decision to be angry.
“Paul, I’m pissed off,” he told Haggis. “There are better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, there’s a complaint line.” Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit. All of his friends believed that if he wanted to change Scientology, he should do it from within. They wanted him to recant and return to the fold or else withdraw his letter and walk away without making a fuss. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.324-7)
Anne and Terry soon found their way into Scientology, but Tommy was initially raised in his mother’s original faith, Christian Science. His father, William Davis, is a wealthy financier and real-estate developer who was once reported to be among the largest owners of agricultural property in California. He was also a well-known fund-raiser for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and personally contributed an estimated $350,000 a year to Republican causes. Although Tommy grew up in an environment of money and celebrity, he impressed people with his modesty. He longed to do something to help humanity. Scientology seemed to offer a direction. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.335)
As an example, Davis singled out Gerald Armstrong, the former Scientology archivist, who received an $800,000 settlement in a fraud suit against the church in 1986. Davis charged that Armstrong had forged many of the documents that he later disseminated in order to discredit the church’s founder, although he produced no evidence to substantiate that allegation. He passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong “sitting naked” with a giant globe in his lap. “This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money,” Davis said. “He’s not a very sane person.”6
Davis also displayed photographs of what he said were bruises sustained by Mike Rinder’s former wife in 2010, after Rinder physically assaulted her in a Florida parking lot.7 Davis then showed a mug shot of Marty Rathbun in a jailhouse jumpsuit, after being detained in New Orleans in July 2010 for public drunkenness. “Getting arrested for being drunk on the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse?” Davis cracked. “That’s like getting arrested for being a leper in a leper colony.” Other defectors, such as Claire and Marc Headley, were “the most despicable people in the world.” Jefferson Hawkins was “an inveterate liar.”
If these people were so reprehensible, I asked, how had they all arrived at such elevated positions in the church?
“They weren’t like that when they were in those positions,” Davis replied.
The defectors we were discussing had not only risen to positions of responsibility within the church; they had also ascended Scientology’s ladder of spiritual accomplishment. I suggested that Scientology didn’t seem to be effective if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, drunks, and embezzlers.
“This is a religion,” Davis responded movingly. “It aspires to greatness, hope, humanity, spiritual freedom. To be greater than we are. To rise above our craven, humanoid instincts.” Scientology doesn’t pretend to be perfect, he said, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. “I haven’t done things like that,” Davis said. “I haven’t suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, lied—contrary to what Paul Haggis says.” He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: “If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology … then why the hell did he stick around for thirty-five years?” He continued: “Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose?” Davis shook his head in disgust. “I think he’s the most hypocritical person in the world.” He said he felt that he’d done all he could in dealing with Haggis over the issue of Proposition 8. He added that the individual who had made the mistake of listing the San Diego church as a supporter of the initiative—he didn’t divulge his name—had been “disciplined” for it. I asked what that meant. “He was sat down by a staff member of the local organization,” Davis explained. “He got sorted out.”
Davis thought I was making too much out of the issue of Suppressive Persons in the piece. “Do you know how many people, grand total, there are in the world who have been declared Suppressive?” he asked rhetorically. “A couple of thousand over the years. At most.” He said that in fact many had been restored to good standing. “Yet again, you’re falling into the trap of defining our religion by the people who’ve left.”
Hubbard had said that only two and a half percent of the human population were suppressive, but one of the problems I faced in writing about Scientology, especially its early days, is that the preponderance of people who had been close to Hubbard had either quietly left the church or been declared Suppressive. Some, like Pat Broeker, had gone underground. Many others, like David Mayo, had signed non-disclosure agreements. Those who remained in the church were off-limits to me.8
We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged by many former members against Miscavige. “The only people who will corroborate are their fellow apostates,” Davis said. “They’re a pack of sanctimonious liars.” He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting their accusations. He noted that in the tales about Miscavige, the violence always seemed to come out of nowhere. “One would think that if such a thing occurred, which it most certainly did not, there’d have to be a reason,” Davis said.
I had wondered about these outbursts as well. When Rinder and Rathbun were in the church, they claimed that allegations of abuse were baseless. Then, after Rinder defected, he said that Miscavige had beaten him fifty times. Rathbun had told the St. Petersburg Times in 1998 that in the twenty years he had worked closely with Miscavige, he had never seen him hit anyone. “That’s not his temperament,” he had said. “He’s got enough personal horsepower that he doesn’t need to resort to things like that.” Later, he acknowledged to the Times, “That’s the biggest lie I ever told you.” He has also confessed that in 1997 he ordered incriminating documents destroyed in the case of Lisa McPherson, the Scientologist who died of an embolism while under church care. If these men were capable of lying to protect the church, might they not also be capable of lying to destroy it?
However, eleven former Sea Org members told me that Miscavige had assaulted them; twenty-two have told me or testified in court that they have witnessed one or more assaults on other church staff members by their leader.9 Marc Headley, one of those who say Miscavige beat them on several occasions, said he knows thirty others who were attacked by the church leader. Rinder says he witnessed fourteen other executives who were assaulted, some on multiple occasions, such as the elderly church president, Heber Jentzsch, who has been in the Hole since 2006. Some people were slapped, others punched or kicked or choked. Lana Mitchell, who worked in Miscavige’s office, saw him hit his brother, Ronnie, in the stomach, during a meeting. Mariette Lindstein, who also worked in Miscavige’s office, witnessed as many as twenty attacks. “You get very hardened,” she admitted. She saw Miscavige banging the heads of two of his senior executives, Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre, together repeatedly, until blood came from Lesevre’s ear. Tom De Vocht says he witnessed Miscavige striking other members of the staff about a hundred times. Others who never saw such violence spoke of their constant fear of the leader’s wrath.
The attacks often came out of the blue, “like the snap of a finger,” as John Peeler described it. Bruce Hines, who was a senior auditor in 1994, told me that before he was struck, “I heard his voice in the hallway, deep and distinctive, ‘Where is that motherf*cker?’ He looked in my office. ‘There he is!’ Without another word he came up and hit me with an open hand. I didn’t fall down. It was at that point I was put in RPF. I was incarcerated six years.”
Davis admitted that the musical chairs episode occurred, even though the church denies the existence of the Hole, where it took place. He explained that Miscavige had been away from Gold Base for some time, and when he returned, he found that many jobs had been reassigned without his permission. The game was intended to demonstrate how disruptive such wholesale changes could be on an organization. “All the rest of it is a bunch of embellishment and noise and hoo-haw,” Davis told me. “Chairs being ripped apart, and people being threatened that they’re going to be sent to far-flung places in the world, plane tickets being purchased, and they’re going to force their spouses—and on and on and on. I mean, it’s just nuts!”
The Scientology delegation objected to the negative tenor of The New Yorker queries about the church’s leader, including such small details as whether or not he had a tanning bed. “I mean, this is The New Yorker. It sounds like the National Enquirer,” Davis complained. He wouldn’t say what Miscavige’s salary was (the church is not required to publicly disclose that information), but he derided the idea that the church leader enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle. Miscavige, he contended, doesn’t live on the ostentatious scale of many other religious leaders. “There’s no big rings. There’s no fancy silk robes,” he said. “There’s no mansion. There’s no none of that. None, none, none. Zero, zilcho, not.” As for the extravagant birthday presents given to the church leader, Davis said that it was tradition for Sea Org members to give each other gifts for their birthdays. It was “just obnoxious” for me to single out Miscavige.
“It’s not true that he’s gotten for his birthday a motorcycle, fine suits, and leather jackets?” I asked.
“I gave him a leather jacket once,” Davis conceded.
“So it is true?” I asked. “A motorcycle, fine suits?”
“I never heard that,” he responded. “And as far as fine suits, I’ve got some fine suits. The church bought those.” In fact, he was wearing a beautiful custom-made suit, with actual buttonholes on the cuffs. He explained that for IRS purposes it was considered a uniform. When Sea Org members mix with the public, he explained, they dress appropriately. “It’s called Uniform K.”
Davis declined to let me speak to Miscavige; nor would he or the other members of the group agree to talk about their own experiences with the church leader.
I asked about the leader’s missing wife, Shelly Miscavige. John Brousseau and Claire Headley believe that she was taken to Running Springs, near Big Bear, California, one of several sites where Hubbard’s works are stored in underground vaults. “She’ll be out of sight, out of mind until the day she dies,” Brousseau had predicted, “like Mary Sue Hubbard.”
In the meeting, Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he wouldn’t disclose the location.
Davis brought up Jack Parsons’s black magic society, which he asserted Hubbard had infiltrated. “He was sent in there by Robert Heinlein, who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time.” Davis said that the church had been looking for additional documentation to support its claim. “A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we’d never been able to before, because of something his biographer had found.”
The book Davis was referring to is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention there of Heinlein sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring. I wrote Patterson, asking if his research supported the church’s assertion. He responded that Scientologists had been the source of the claim in the first place, and that they provided him with a set of documents that supposedly backed it up. Patterson said that the material did not support the factual assertions the church was making. “I was unable to make any direct connection of the facts of Heinlein’s life at the time to that narrative or any of its supporting documents,” Patterson wrote. (The book reveals that Heinlein’s second wife, Leslyn, had an affair with Hubbard. Interestingly, given Hubbard’s condemnation of homosexuality, the wife charged that Heinlein had as well.)
“Even those allegations from Sara Northrup,” Davis continued, mentioning the woman who had been Parsons’s girlfriend before running off with Hubbard. “He was never married to Sara Northrup. She filed for divorce in an effort to try and create a false record that she had been married to him.” He said that she had been under a cloud of suspicion, even when she lived with Parsons. “It always had been considered that she had been sent in there by the Russians,” he said. “I can never pronounce her name. Her actual true name is a Russian name.” Davis was referencing a charge that Hubbard once made when he was portraying his wife as a Communist spy named Sara Komkovadamanov. “That was one of the reasons L. Ron Hubbard never had a relationship with her,” Davis continued. “He never had a child with her. He wasn’t married to her. But he did save her life and pull her out of that whole black magic ring.” Davis described Sara as “a couple beers short of a six-pack, to use a phrase.” He included in the binders a letter from her, dated June 11, 1951, a few days before their divorce proceedings:
I, Sara Northrup Hubbard, do hereby state that the things I have said about L. Ron Hubbard in the courts and the public prints have been grossly exaggerated or are entirely false.
I have not at any time believed otherwise than that L. Ron Hubbard was a fine and brilliant man.
She went on to say, “In the future I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence with my little girl far away from the enturbulating influences which have ruined my marriage.” (Sara did live a quiet and orderly existence until her death, of breast cancer, in 1997. She explained why she made the tapes, in her last months of life. “I’m not interested in revenge,” she said. “I’m interested in the truth.”)
The meeting with the Scientology delegation lasted all day. Sandwiches were brought in. Davis and I discussed an assertion that Marty Rathbun had made to me about the OT III creation story. While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun said, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists might skip the OT III level—a memo Rathbun says that Miscavige had ordered destroyed. “Of every allegation that’s in here,” Davis said, waving the binder containing fact-checking queries, “this one would perhaps be, hands down, the absolutely, without question, most libelous.” He explained that the cornerstone of the faith was the writings of the founder. “Mr. Hubbard’s material must be and is applied precisely as written,” Davis said. “It’s never altered. It’s never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology.”
But hadn’t certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard’s books been changed after his death?
Davis agreed that was so, but he maintained that “the current editions are one-hundred-percent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.
“The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?” I asked.
“No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied. “The point is, it wasn’t Mr. Hubbard.”
“Somebody put the material in those—”
“I can only imagine,” Davis said, cutting me off.
“Who would have done it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t think it really matters,” Davis said. “The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyone’s sexual orientation.…”
“Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked, trying to be clear.
“Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said. “And by the way,” he added, referring to Quentin Hubbard, “his son’s not gay.”
During his presentation, Davis showed an impressively produced video that portrayed Scientology’s worldwide efforts for literary programs and drug education, the translation of Hubbard’s work into dozens of languages, and the deluxe production facilities at Gold Base. “The real question is who would produce the kind of material we produce and do the kinds of things we do, set up the kind of organizational structure that we set up?” Davis asked. “Or what kind of man, like L. Ron Hubbard, would spend an entire lifetime researching, putting together the kind of material, suffer all the trials and tribulations and go through all the things he went through in his life … or even with the things that we, as individuals, have to go through, as part of the new religion? Work seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, fourteen-, fifteen-, eighteen-hour days sometimes, out of sheer total complete dedication to our faith. And do it all, for what? As some sort of sham? Just to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?” He concluded, “It’s ridiculous. Nobody works that hard to cheat people. Nobody gets that little sleep to screw over their fellow man.”
[page]We came to the section in the queries dealing with Hubbard’s war record. His voice filling with emotion, Davis said that if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie.” He concluded: “The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.”
I believe everyone on The New Yorker side of the table was taken aback by this daring equation, one that seemed not only fair but testable. As proof of his claim that Hubbard had been injured, Davis provided a letter from the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. It states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was pronounced “fit for duty.” Davis had highlighted a passage in the letter: “Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected.” Davis added later that according to Robert Heinlein, Hubbard’s ankles had suffered a “drumhead-type injury”; this can result, Davis explained, “when a ship is torpedoed or bombed.”
Despite subsequent requests to produce additional records, this was the only document Davis provided to prove that the founder of Scientology was not lying about his war injuries. And yet, Hubbard’s medical records show that only five days after receiving the doctor’s note, Hubbard applied for a pension based on his conjunctivitis, an ulcer, a sprained knee, malaria, and arthritis in his right hip and shoulder. His vision was little changed from what it had been before the war. This was the same period during which Hubbard claimed to have been blinded and made a hopeless cripple.
Davis acknowledged that some of Hubbard’s medical records did not corroborate the founder’s version of events. The church itself, Davis confided, had been troubled by the contradiction between Hubbard’s story and the official medical records. But he said there were other records that did confirm Hubbard’s version of events, based on various documents the church had assembled. I asked where the documents had come from. “From St. Louis,” Davis explained, “from the archives of navy and military service. And also, the church got it from various avenues of research. Just meeting people, getting records from people.”
The man who examined the records and reconciled the dilemma, he said, was “Mr. X.” Davis explained, “Anyone who saw JFK remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costner’s character goes and meets a man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald Sutherland.” In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations at the Pentagon. (Oliver Stone, who directed JFK, says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the 1980s, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology and was a frequent contributor to Freedom magazine. “We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis continued. Prouty told the church representatives that because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer. And, essentially, they create two sets.” (Prouty died in 2001.)
The sun was setting and the Dunkin’ Donuts sign glowed brighter. As the meeting was finally coming to an end, Davis made a plea for understanding. “We’re an organization that’s new and tough and different and has been through a hell of a lot, and has had its ups and downs,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is nobody will take the time and do the story right.”
Davis had staked much of his argument on the veracity of Hubbard’s military records. The fact-checkers had already filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all such material with the National Archives in St. Louis, where military records are kept. Such requests can drag on well past deadline, and we were running short on time. An editorial assistant, Yvette Siegert, flew to St. Louis to speed things along.
Meantime, Davis sent me a copy of a document that he said clearly confirmed Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the US Naval Service,” dated December 6, 1945. The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of the actual medals Hubbard supposedly won, but two of them weren’t even created until after Hubbard left active service.
There was a fire in the St. Louis archives in 1973, which destroyed a number of documents, but Yvette returned with more than nine hundred pages of what the archivists insisted were Hubbard’s complete military records. Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard’s being wounded in battle or breaking his feet. X-rays taken of Hubbard’s right shoulder and hip showed calcium deposits, but there was no evidence of any bone or joint disease in his ankles. (Lawrence Wright "Going Clear" 2013 p.342-51)
The ‘Truth’ Rundown October 3, 2013 by Mark C. Rathbun
The Truth Rundown High-ranking defectors tell of violence in Scientology's top ranks. This three-part series also reveals new information about the Lisa McPherson death case and details the degrading rituals that keep church staffers in line. June 2009
THE PROOF AT LAST: FBI Files Reveal Scientology ‘Human Trafficking’ Investigation 05/03/2017
DOX: The full FBI file from its 2009-2010 human trafficking investigation of Scientology 08/21/2017
The Apostate Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. by Lawrence Wright 2/14/2011
A Few Things You Should Know About Scientology... 02/11/2011 The New Yorker has published a devastating expose on the Church of Scientology, written by staff writer Lawrence Wright.
Los Angeles Times at cs.cmu.edu: Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times show that members of the Church of Scientology believe that mankind's ills were caused by an evil ruler named Xemu who lived 75 million years ago. 11/09/1985
Los Angeles Times: Defining the Theology 06/24/1990
A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack
My Nine Lives in Scientology by Monica Pignotti (1989)
Life and death of Quentin Hubbard (22)
Quentin Hubbard
A Correction of the Falsehoods in Lawrence Wright's Book on Scientology
Leah Remini • Aftermath: After Money
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