Part 5 (1/2)
At the time of Hubbard's disappearance, in 1980, a key priority for the Church of Scientology was protecting their Founder from legal action. The Operation Snow White doc.u.ments had given the public its first glimpse into the secretive world of Scientology and the mindset of its followers. Now a New York grand jury was investigating the church's longtime hara.s.sment of the writer Paulette Cooper and the role L. Ron Hubbard may have played in it. The IRS, meanwhile, had begun a criminal investigation of Hubbard; the government suspected he was still in charge of the church and profiting from it handsomely, wherever he was.
In Los Angeles, David Miscavige, who'd impressed his superiors with his gung-ho att.i.tude and problem-solving skills, became part of a special team within the Commodore's Messenger Organization called the ”All Clear Unit.” Its mission was to meet with church attorneys to find ways to get around the myriad legal issues that had driven Hubbard into exile. One way to do that, they decided, was to design a new corporate architecture for the church, an undertaking that, with Hubbard's blessing, became known within Scientology as the ”Corporate Sort-out.” The overall idea, said Larry Brennan, then the senior executive in the Scientology legal department who oversaw the project, was to create a legally defensible structure that would give Hubbard and the Commodore's Messenger Organization full legal control over Scientology while at the same time ”insulat[ing] both Hubbard and the CMO from any legal liability for running the organizations of Scientology by lying about the level of control they really had.” This reorganization seemed like fraud, said Brennan, but the structure was so complex that deciphering the fraud was almost impossible.
The new structure would also establish a new hierarchy, giving unprecedented power to the Commodore's Messengers, who would soon maneuver their way into control of every facet of the organized church. ”The new corporate structure made top management think they could do just about anything without legal worry,” said Brennan. ”In other words, Miscavige could now do just about anything he wanted and there was no one to stop him, unless Hubbard did.”
Brennan, who'd served as the legal director of the Guardian's Office, became the overseer of Scientology's legal bureau once the Commodore's Messengers took control of the church. He met Miscavige in 1981. Now the self-appointed head of the All Clear Unit, Miscavige was twenty-one years old and, a highly aggressive and frequently belligerent young man, had come into his own. Though he could be supportive of those upon whose approval he depended, Miscavige was mistrustful of many others, with an ”almost pathological” certainty, according to one former colleague, that he, of all the Messengers, was right. To some he seemed like a reflection of L. Ron Hubbard on his very worst days, cursing and barking orders at other Sea Org members, including some staffers much older than he, or screaming at those who disagreed with him. He chewed tobacco and in meetings would frequently make a show of spitting the juice into a cup. Brennan was appalled. ”As I saw him, DM was like a highly impressionable spoiled child.”
DM idolized L. Ron Hubbard, the only boss he'd ever known; but unlike many seasoned Sea Org members who knew the Founder's propensity for changing his mind, Miscavige also took everything that Hubbard said literally. And what Hubbard was saying from his secret location was, by his second year in hiding, increasingly extreme. The Founder had returned to his original love, writing fiction, in seclusion, and was at work on the book that would become his opus: Battlefield Earth.* But he was also convinced that Suppressives had infiltrated the movement, particularly the Guardian's Office, and in missives signed only with an asterisk (in an effort to distance himself from Scientology management, Hubbard had adopted the asterisk as his ”signature” on church doc.u.ments) issued directives for his aides to spit on other staff members, strike those who seemed to oppose his wishes, or even send people to jail. While it would have been an act of sacrilege to disobey L. Ron Hubbard, ”some of us would still not do the most awful things Hubbard talked about as they violated our sense of right and wrong just too much,” said Brennan. ”DM, on the other hand, would blindly, and violently, follow such orders.”
Among the first of Hubbard's orders had been to clean up the Guardian's Office, which the Founder had determined was infested with ”criminals.” Miscavige and his All Clear Unit attacked this task with gusto, soon altogether dismantling the Guardian's Office- whose power had exceeded the Messengers' own. The first maneuver in this offensive was to remove the person Hubbard now saw as wholly responsible for the debacle: his wife, Mary Sue. Out on bail and appealing her conviction, she still held the lifetime position of Controller.
In May 1981, Miscavige visited Mary Sue in her Los Angeles office and told her that, as a convicted criminal, she could no longer be officially connected to the Church of Scientology. It would be ”for the good of the church,” as well as for the good of her husband, if she resigned, he said. Furious, Mary Sue refused and, in one often-told account, became so enraged that she threw an ashtray at Miscavige's head. But the twenty-one-year-old was intractable.
Numerous Scientology officials, particularly those loyal to David Miscavige, applauded his initiative. It was felt that Mary Sue Hubbard had blackened the name of the church; now it was only right that she be ostracized. But some members of the Sea Organization, particularly those who'd known the Hubbards aboard the Apollo, believed that Mary Sue had been treated too harshly. Among them was DeDe Reisdorf, by then married and known as DeDe Voegeding.
Voegeding was the Commanding Officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization. L. Ron Hubbard had appointed her to this post in the spring of 1981, and it was a daunting responsibility for the twenty-three-year-old. Her job involved not only parroting Hubbard's demands but also making executive decisions and giving orders to longtime Sea Org officials. It also required Voegeding to serve as the main communication line between the Church of Scientology at large and L. Ron Hubbard, via Pat Broeker.
Broeker had devised a strategy by which an aide needing to meet with him went to a remote pay phone to call him, let it ring twice, and then hang up, signaling for Broeker to call back. Then the aide drove to an appointed spot between Gilman Hot Springs and Los Angeles. Because these meetings generally took place at night, Voegeding wanted a male Messenger to accompany her. David Miscavige often volunteered.
Broeker was always happy to see Miscavige, who'd been his roommate for a period in La Quinta. ”I think Pat was dying for someone to talk to,” said Voegeding. ”He was holed up with LRH.” Unfortunately, Voegeding never had the time for small talk-running the church was more than a full-time job. But Miscavige and Broeker would spend an hour or two joking and smoking cigarettes. After a while, they'd developed such a rapport that they would walk off together to speak privately, leaving Voegeding waiting by the car.
Not long after Miscavige began accompanying her to these meetings, in August 1981, L. Ron Hubbard abruptly removed DeDe Voegeding from her post as head of the Commodore's Messenger Organization. The reason, she was told, was that Hubbard had found out that she'd ordered Scientology's prices reduced without his permission, a grave sin; even worse, she was accused of breaching security by hinting at Hubbard's true whereabouts to the British writer Omar Garrison, who'd been commissioned by the church to write a biography of the Founder.
Hubbard had signed the order for her removal. Nonetheless, Voegeding felt sure that the Founder had been fed false information. ”I had been with him enough times in hiding, so knew how it worked, and how it worked was that all communication to him was vetted,” she said. ”I'd never told anywhere where he was-I had no idea where he was. And the other things I was 'guilty' of were basic management decisions I would do again, like lowering prices to bring in more customers. I still feel that LRH would have agreed, if I'd been given the chance to explain. But there was no opportunity for an explanation.”
Within weeks, more Scientology officials had been removed, including Hubbard's longtime public relations adviser, Laurel Sullivan, who was accused of ”spying” on the Commodore's Messenger Organization for the Guardian's Office. Both Sullivan and Voegeding had been close to Mary Sue, whom Miscavige and Pat Broeker had mutually declared a ”criminal.”
Now, with the Controller out of the way and some of her key supporters sidelined, David Miscavige and his allies in the All Clear Unit embarked on a brutal purge of most the Guardian's Office, stripping hundreds of people of their positions with no warning. Also removed were many other Sea Org executives who'd had nothing to do with intelligence activities but who, like Sullivan and Voegeding, had simply been close to L. Ron Hubbard or his wife. Over the next year, Miscavige, on orders from Hubbard, accused hundreds of Scientology officials of crimes ranging from stealing church funds, to disobeying Hubbard's instructions, to being on the payroll of ”external influences” such as the CIA.
The ”crims,” as Miscavige and his a.s.sociates called these officials, were summoned to Gilman Hot Springs, where the Messengers, led by Miscavige, ordered them to scrub floors, eat table sc.r.a.ps out of buckets, and sleep on the floor, watched over by armed guards. They were also made to endure hours of interrogation, sometimes performed by up to six Messengers at once. These were known as ”gang bang” security checks.
Here is how Homer Schomer, once a chief financial officer for the Church of Scientology, described one of several gang-bang security checks he was given in the early 1980s: ”It lasted from about ten o'clock in the evening to eight o'clock in the morning ... During this time I was just bombarded with these questions asking who I was working for. Was I working for the CIA? Was I a plant? Was I working for the FBI? Where was all the money I stole? Where were all the jewels I stole?”
Those officials who didn't answer the Messengers' questions were slapped, shoved, punched, and sometimes locked in a room for hours. Often, the person being grilled would answer, the reply would be belittled, and the abuse would continue. ”It was horrible what went on,” recalled Larry Brennan, who was asked to partic.i.p.ate in a gang-bang ”sec check” and refused. ”They wanted me to scream at some poor guy they said owed money to Hubbard. I said no and walked out. I always refused to do the abuses, but I saw it happen. They knew that if they screamed in your face loud enough and intimidated you enough, you would come out with some crime. I'd never heard of anything like that [in Scientology] before.”
Many Scientology executives, broken by this treatment, admitted to a wide range of criminal acts, if only to make the interrogation stop. A good number were then a.s.signed to do menial labor while awaiting judgment before a Scientology tribunal called a Committee of Evidence, which was often a.s.sembled by Miscavige. A Commodore's Messenger named Mark Fisher, then the head of Miscavige's household unit and his administrative chief, was chosen as a juror on several of these tribunals, in which the E-meter, now serving as a true ”lie detector,” proved to be a remarkably efficient, if biased, judge. Almost everyone who went in front of one of these tribunals, said Fisher, was found guilty and denounced as a traitor.
”It was completely surreal and just appalling,” said Fisher, a heavy-set, good-tempered man. Just a single negative thought-about L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige, or anything else that might be viewed as critical of Scientology-would be discovered by the E-meter and ”boom, you were denounced and out of there.” (Fisher, who'd joined the Sea Org in Clearwater the same year as Miscavige, was loyal to the Sea Org mission and remained in Scientology, working for Miscavige, for nine more years.) In the end, the officials departed Gilman, having had what Miscavige described as a ”severe reality adjustment,” affirming their obedience, and agreeing to become church janitors or groundskeepers, or, far more frequently, to simply leave the Church of Scientology altogether. Upon doing so, many signed confidentiality agreements pledging they would never sue or speak publicly about what had happened to them.
Gale Reisdorf, who had also married and was going by her married name, Gale Irwin, had been given her sister's job as Commanding Officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization.* Long before the major purging had even begun, Irwin had become concerned about David Miscavige. He seemed to take pleasure in others' misery, an irony, given that Miscavige was often miserable himself, still suffering from chronic asthma. Irwin would recall one instance in the summer of 1980 when Miscavige had a severe asthma attack and was rushed to the emergency room. He survived the attack and upon returning from the hospital said he'd had an amazing revelation. ”Power,” he said, ”is a.s.sumed.” Irwin had no idea what he meant.
But toward the end of 1981, Irwin began to think more about that statement as she considered how far Miscavige had risen in such a short time. He had taken over the All Clear Unit, sidelined Mary Sue and several others, and witnessed the removal of her sister as his boss-or had he simply commandeered her removal himself? Irwin wasn't sure. In the same letter from Hubbard that demoted DeDe and promoted Gale, Miscavige had also been given a new job: Special Project Ops, a post that stood outside the standard chain of command, making Miscavige answerable to no one other than Broeker and Hubbard.
Irwin had no idea if Hubbard had created this post for Miscavige or if he and Broeker had come up with it themselves. But Miscavige's friends.h.i.+p with Broeker bothered her. Miscavige, not Irwin, seemed to have the main line of communication to L. Ron Hubbard. And Irwin realized that this might be her fault: she had once or twice allowed Miscavige to meet with Broeker alone when she'd been too busy to accompany him.
As the messages coming from L. Ron Hubbard became increasingly paranoid, Irwin and others started to wonder exactly what Hubbard was being told. Scientology was now under scrutiny by both the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. This would have elevated the Founder's already profound suspiciousness to astronomical levels. In response, Hubbard began sending increasingly strident missives railing against a wide number of phantom enemies-”external influences”-whom he blamed for keeping him in exile. ”You could feel his fear coming at you left, right, and center,” said Julie Holloway. ”He was mad about everything. No matter what we sent him, we'd get nothing good back, it was all this 'external influences' stuff.” At one point, Hubbard's paranoia appeared to be at such a high point that Pat Broeker went so far as to buy armored cars for the Founder. ”I mean, why?” said Holloway. ”I thought that was ridiculous-who was going to be shooting at him?”
Before long, long-serving Messengers like Holloway came to see that Hubbard had stopped trusting the aides who'd served him faithfully for years. Instead, he seemed to trust David Miscavige and his group, who portrayed themselves as Hubbard's representatives, anointed to not only carry out his wishes but also rescue Scientology from all but certain doom.
Alarmed by this unregulated hubris, David Mayo, L. Ron Hubbard's personal auditor, pulled Miscavige aside in December 1981 and ordered him to get a security check. Miscavige balked. Outraged by his insubordination, Gale Irwin confronted Miscavige. His response, she recalled, was to physically tackle her, sending her flying through an open door.
Now genuinely afraid of Miscavige, Irwin slipped off the base at Gilman Hot Springs to call Pat Broeker, using his special callback system. Waiting at a gas-station pay phone for Broeker to return her call, Irwin suddenly saw Miscavige roll up with a number of his aides in a black van. As she'd later recall, he got out, walked to the back of the van, took out a tire iron, and as she watched, proceeded to smash the pay phone so it wouldn't work. Then he grabbed a terrified Irwin, ordered her into the van, and accused her of mutiny. Upon her arrival back at Gilman Hot Springs, she was stripped of her position as the head of the Commodore's Messenger Organization by Miscavige, and soon replaced with one of his own proteges, a nineteen-year-old Messenger named Marc Yeager.
Soon after, Irwin was sent to Scientology's base in Clearwater, Florida, along with her brother and sister and their spouses, where the entire family was made to do heavy physical labor. But that wasn't punishment enough. She and her sister, DeDe, were then sent to the sprawling new Scientology compound on Sunset Boulevard. There, they were put in a shower room and told they would live there, under twenty-four-hour guard. This was not the RPF. ”We were beneath the RPF,” Irwin said.
Fed up, Irwin said she wanted to leave the Sea Org. In response, she underwent the gang-bang interrogation, asked whether she was working for the CIA or plotting to overthrow Scientology. ”Every once in a while, DM and one of his crew would call us over to their offices and they would scream at us,” she recalled. After weeks of this treatment, Irwin felt as if she'd gone insane.
Finally, in the spring of 1982, Gale and DeDe were awakened in the middle of the night and informed that they'd been declared Suppressive Persons. After more than ten years at the highest levels of Scientology, they left that night, disgraced. Within the next few years, virtually all of the original Commodore's Messengers who had sailed with L. Ron Hubbard aboard the Apollo were treated in much the same fas.h.i.+on by Miscavige and his allies and ultimately left the church.
This revolution within Scientology was at first not felt beyond the confines of Gilman Hot Springs and the international management. Many ordinary Scientologists, particularly those affiliated with its missions, were unaware of what was going on at the top. Like the McDonald's corporation, whose methods church executives reportedly had studied, Scientology was rigorously expansion-oriented and during its first twenty years had opened missions around the globe. These franchises were of limited scope, offering lower-level Scientology services, but they were run by some of the most experienced Scientology executives; Alan Walter, for example, opened Scientology missions in New York City, Boston, St. Louis, Dallas, New Orleans, Kansas City, and Beverly Hills, among other cities. Most were extremely profitable, and by the late 1970s, the Scientology ”mission network” was booming: some individual franchises grossed up to $100,000 a week.
Organized churches of Scientology, which offered a much wider range of spiritual counseling and training, made less money despite, or perhaps because of, being more tightly controlled by the larger church. As a result, many Scientology organizations struggled to pay both their bills and their staff, while Scientology franchise holders, who were allowed to keep most of their profits, could make a six-figure salary by selling some of the same Scientology services in a smaller and frequently more relaxed environment.
On October 17, 1982, roughly four hundred Scientology mission holders from across the United States were called to a meeting with church management on the fourth floor of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel. Inside a large conference room, twenty-two-year-old David Miscavige, his deputy Norman Starkey, and members of a militant unit of the Sea Organization known as the International Finance Police declared a new world order. The independence of the missions was abolished: from now on, the larger Church of Scientology would run the franchises like a diocese, with missions reduced to little more than local parishes.
The audience members were stunned. The franchises could still offer basic Scientology counseling and courses, Miscavige and his cohorts announced, but they would be required to send a much higher quota of their clientele to the nearest Scientology org, thus dramatically limiting both the missions' power and earning potential. To make sure the mission holders followed the rules, they were required to sign an agreement giving total control to a new and powerful church ent.i.ty, the Religious Technology Center, or RTC. Those who didn't sign would lose their missions entirely and be subjected to heavy fines, or even, the new regime threatened, time in jail.
Those franchise owners who objected to the new mandate were declared ”mutinous” and immediately shuffled into private rooms where, behind locked doors, they were interrogated on the E-meter to uncover their crimes. Others were ordered to Gilman Hot Springs for security checking and, in some cases, were subjected to a new punishment known as the ”Running Program,” in which the victims were forced to run around a pole in the high desert for up to nine or ten hours a day. Still others, like Alan Walter, were declared a Suppressive Person on the spot and expelled. The mission holders who survived were expected to turn over whatever money was demanded of them to the International Finance Police. Those who refused were swiftly excommunicated.
One of the main enforcers of this policy was Don Larson, who served for a time as head of the International Finance Police. As the official hatchet man, Larson estimated he personally sent three hundred Scientologists to the RPF. He also collected money. ”If you could force someone to be scared enough of the church, they would cough up the money that you wanted,” Larson told the BBC in 1987. ”It was my job to scare people.” Once, he recalled, he and fourteen other Sea Org executives, including David Miscavige, drove to a San Francisco mission to confront its commanding officer. It was a ”beat-'em-up kind of meeting ... this has nothing to do with religion anymore, right? This is, 'Where's the money, Jack-I want the money! Where did you put the money?'” When the man insisted he didn't have any money, in Larson's words, ”David Miscavige comes up, grabs him by the tie, and starts bas.h.i.+ng him into the filing cabinet.”
Larson, who was purged from Scientology in 1983 after a little more than a year as enforcer, described Miscavige as ”a very, very macho 1950s tough guy.” He liked to shoot with bow and arrow, practiced karate, and collected guns ; an avid trap and skeet shooter, he was said to own at least a dozen rifles and perhaps a dozen pistols. He surrounded himself with young men like himself, many who had grown up in Scientology, as he had. Their motto, recalled Larson, was ”We're tough, we're ruthless”-Miscavige most of all.
Miscavige's coup was now nearly complete. He had dubbed himself Captain of the Sea Organization and created two powerful new ent.i.ties: the aforementioned RTC, which controlled and licensed L. Ron Hubbard's works, and Author Services, Inc. (ASI), which handled the proceeds. ASI had been created as L. Ron Hubbard's personal literary agency, managing the sales of his books and the income he made from his non-Scientology-related works. But in fact, ASI was the clearinghouse through which Hubbard issued his orders to lower organizations and the secret funnel through which he received his money from all areas of the church-up to $1 million per week, according to the former finance officer Homer Schomer, who was an executive at ASI between April and November 1982. David Miscavige ran ASI. It was a singularly powerful position, putting him in direct control of not only Hubbard's communiques, but also the Church of Scientology's finances.
Scientologists were told that all of these changes, including the appointment of David Miscavige to the helm of Author Services, had not only been approved but in fact ordered by L. Ron Hubbard. Most believed this unquestioningly; a few, however, had doubts. Hubbard's long-estranged son, Nibs, for one, was suspicious of Miscavige, and though he had been detached from Scientology since 1959, he was worried about the consolidated control the Messengers now seemed to have over the movement. In November 1982, Nibs went to Superior Court in Riverside, California; a.s.serting his belief that his father was dead or was possibly being held prisoner against his will, he sued for control of Hubbard's a.s.sets.
In response, the Founder submitted a lengthy signed affidavit, a.s.serting that Nibs's suit had been ”brought maliciously, in bad faith,” and, he indicated, for personal reasons having nothing to do with protecting Hubbard's estate. ”I am not a missing person,” he said. ”I am in seclusion of my own choosing. As Th.o.r.eau secluded himself by Walden Pond, so I have chosen to do so in my own fas.h.i.+on.”*
Hubbard made a special point of stating his ”unequivocal confidence in David Miscavige,” whom Nibs had accused of ”stealing” from Hubbard, and from Scientology, by mismanaging the Founder's money. ”Any activities which he may have engaged in at any time concerning my personal or business affairs have been done with my knowledge and authorization and for my benefit,” Hubbard said. He refuted the charge that Miscavige was organizing the theft of his a.s.sets as ”completely false,” noting that Miscavige was a ”long time devoted Scientologist.” And Scientologists, he explained, ”are my most trusted a.s.sociates and would never do anything to harm me, much less ... steal from me.”
In June 1983, a California Superior Court judge, convinced by Hubbard's declaration, dismissed Nibs's case.
Now Miscavige had no rival other than Pat Broeker, who was still the sole conduit to Hubbard and, it was widely believed, Miscavige's co-conspirator. The two men met regularly and secretly at a truck stop off the 10 Freeway, near Barstow. From there, they drove in unmarked rented cars to a safe house in the nearby town of Newberry Springs, where they exchanged boxes: Broeker giving Miscavige Hubbard's communiques, Miscavige giving Broeker reports from various organizations and officials and also cash. ”Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash would show up for LRH in that banking box,” said Mark Fisher, who then served as corporate liaison between Miscavige, ASI, and the rest of Scientology.
Virtually everything that went on in Scientology was filtered through Broeker and Miscavige, who returned to Gilman Hot Springs with increasingly angry missives from Hubbard, who continued to be convinced that Scientology was falling prey to external influences. Sea Org officials hardly knew what they were guilty of, but there was no defense, said Fisher, because while legally the corporations of Scientology were supposed to be separate, in reality they all depended entirely on Miscavige's goodwill. ”Only people who worked in the Commodore's Messenger Organization or on other parts of the base were aware of this-it was not something known to the average Scientologist. But all of the executives understood that if they didn't do what Miscavige ordered, he could report them to Hubbard and they'd be removed.”
Before presenting anything meant for Hubbard, Miscavige screened all of the written communiques and reports. ”If he didn't like anything in them, he kicked them back [to whoever wrote them]”-or just threw them out, said Fisher. ”Whoever controlled that communication line had the power, and Miscavige controlled it entirely. Hubbard just got this box, and whatever was in there is what he believed.”
In January 1984, Hubbard delivered an unusual taped message to his flock t.i.tled ”Today and Tomorrow: The Proof.” As Jon Atack noted in A Piece of Blue Sky, it was not the typical Hubbard talk in that it was scripted, with frequent interruptions where the Founder ”was asked questions, given answers, even corrected on some slight underestimation of a statistic.” At the crux were a bitter indictment of what he saw as the corruption of the former management of Scientology and an elevation of individuals he called ”a small hardcore group of founding members, devoted on-Policy, in-Tech Scientologists who suddenly understood what was happening ... and just as it looked like the churches were finished and about to fall into hostile hands, they suddenly isolated the infiltrators and threw them out.”
It was an undisputable homage to Miscavige and his posse. But whether Hubbard was ever fully aware of the extent of Miscavige's changes was, and remains, unclear. In five years, the young Messenger and his allies had demoted or otherwise dispensed with nearly every person who'd served Hubbard aboard the Apollo, eased out long-serving executives, and dismantled the independent franchises, a network the Founder had established and relied upon as a feeder for his movement. The overhaul did away with most of the inst.i.tutional memory, technical expertise, and earning power of the church.
On January 27, 1986, Captain David Miscavige, light brown hair cut short, his blue Sea Org uniform pressed and starched, epaulets sitting smartly on his shoulders, stood before a crowd of eighteen hundred fellow Scientologists at the Hollywood Palladium, in Los Angeles. ”Fellow Sea Org members, Org staff, and Scientology public, I am here before you today to announce that Ron has moved forward to his next level of research,” he said. A hush fell over the audience. ”It is a level reaching beyond the imagination,” Miscavige continued, ”and in a state exterior to the body. Thus at 2000 hours, on Friday, the 24th of January, 1986, L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months, and eleven days.”