Part 6 (1/2)
Outside of the closed circle of Sea Org executives, no one in Scientology knew of this hostile takeover. Most Scientologists simply saw David Miscavige as the anointed leader and the right man for the job. Among Hubbard's apostles, he was viewed as the truest of true believers: a purist who embraced even the most dogmatic of the Founder's scriptures, perhaps more stringently, some suggested, than Hubbard had himself.
But Miscavige was also a notably sheltered young man who grew up within the bubble-like world of the Sea Organization. He knew virtually nothing of the needs of everyday people, nor was he particularly curious. ”Miscavige is very, very cloistered,” said Jeff Hawkins. ”He never worked in a business. He never went to college. He never even ran a Scientology church or mission. The only example he had of a 'leader' was Hubbard, who, by the time Miscavige worked for him, was already on his way over the edge of sanity.”
In his prime, L. Ron Hubbard was a tall, robust, larger-than-life character: a Pied Piper who drew followers through the force of his own charisma. Miscavige was short, boyish-looking, and abrasive. Hubbard was a dreamer with great persuasive skill; Miscavige was a tactician who accomplished many of his goals through pure intimidation. ”To call David pugnacious would be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about him,” said one former a.s.sociate. ”You will never be as intimidated in your life as you are when you are confronted by David Miscavige.”
Hubbard seemed to crave approval; Miscavige kept his own counsel-he was not interested in Scientologists' love, but in their dedication and obedience. His role would not be the visionary but rather the steward who would consolidate Hubbard's movement, cleanse and repackage its image, sell it aggressively, and guide it into a new age. Ten years after his ascension, in a one-time-only interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Miscavige was asked about his rise to power. ”n.o.body gives you power,” he replied. ”I'll tell you what power is. Power in my estimation is if people will listen to you. That's it.”
At the time of L. Ron Hubbard's death, in 1986, the Church of Scientology, having weathered nearly a decade of scandal, was now the citadel of rules and codes its Founder had once imagined. In Los Angeles, Scientology's sprawling headquarters on Sunset Boulevard was a fortress, staffed by eager young Sea Org members in crisp naval-style uniforms and patrolled around the clock by security guards. Sophisticated locks, whose combinations ”continuously changed,” as one story in the LA Weekly noted, protected the church's offices and course rooms. But perhaps most striking, particularly for a movement promoting ”total freedom,” were the wanted posters that hung on the walls of the Los Angeles base, offering a $500 reward for information on different church ”enemies.”
Miscavige's revolution had intensified Scientology's us-versus-them atmosphere. It had also created defectors, including some of Scientology's highest-ranking executives, who charged, among other things, that over the past several decades the Church of Scientology had defrauded and in some cases brainwashed them, subjected them to abuse through its punitive ethics policies, and then, after they left the church, continued to hara.s.s them.
Though Miscavige and his allies denied these allegations, the defections proved to be a public relations disaster for the church. By the mid-1980s, juries across the United States were hearing cases brought against Scientology by its dissidents, occasionally returning judgments in the tens of millions of dollars. At the same time, a splinter network of Scientologists, known as the ”Free Zone,” was posing a challenge to the organized church by forming independent Scientology groups.
The most prominent leader of the Free Zone was David Mayo, once the highest-ranking technical officer in Scientology and the creator of some of the church's most sophisticated auditing techniques. A Scientologist since the late 1950s, Mayo had been trained by Hubbard personally and later supervised the Founder's auditing; he also audited Hubbard himself. In April 1982, Mayo received a letter from L. Ron Hubbard appointing him the guardian of Scientology's doctrine in the event of Hubbard's death. Shortly after, the Commodore's Messengers, who'd received copies of the letter, circ.u.mvented Hubbard's orders by accusing Mayo, with a group of sixteen other senior executives, of trying to take over the Commodore's Messenger Organization. Mayo was quickly removed from his post in the purges overseen by Miscavige.
But where many other executives in his position had abandoned Scientology, Mayo set up an independent auditing practice in Santa Barbara, called the Advanced Ability Center. Then he sent out a letter to the many Scientologists he knew, explaining the circ.u.mstances of his removal, and announced that he was open for business. Gale Irwin and DeDe Voegeding were among many Scientologists who flocked to the center in Santa Barbara. ”It was wonderful,” said Irwin. ”There was none of the BS but all of the goodness of what we'd known Scientology to be.”
Before long, Mayo's operation was grossing $20,000 to $30,000 per week, using the same techniques and materials that Hubbard had created for Scientology. This, to the church, const.i.tuted ”squirreling,” which made Mayo a target for Fair Game. As Jesse Prince, then a senior executive in RTC, recalled, ”DM became infuriated and ordered Mayo's new group to be destroyed using all means possible.” The RTC began a newsletter campaign, denouncing Mayo as a squirrel and accusing him of a broad range of crimes ranging from falsifying records and ”altering” Hubbard's teachings to ”s.e.xually perverted conduct.”
The RTC also organized groups of Scientologists who called themselves the Minutemen to hold noisy protests in front of Mayo's Advanced Ability Center. The church also hired private investigators to rent office s.p.a.ce above Mayo's center and electronically bug his offices. One of these investigators, Eugene Ingram, was a former sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department who'd been fired by the department in 1981. Enlisting the help of other ex-cops, Ingram began a campaign of hara.s.sment, informing local business owners that they were investigating Mayo for white-collar crime and linking him, falsely, to international drug smuggling. The church also filed a RICO suit against Mayo's group, arguing that they were conspiring with other Free Zone dissidents to use some advanced auditing materials that the church claimed had been stolen from a European Scientology organization. In 1985, the church succeeded in getting a federal injunction preventing Mayo from selling Scientology services; by 1986, the Advanced Ability Center, bankrupt after several years of hara.s.sment and litigation, shut down.
But by then, thousands of Scientologists in Europe and the United States had dropped out of the organized church, disillusioned by Miscavige's destruction of the mission network, which many people saw as Scientology's life blood. By 1986, though Scientology officially claimed two million adherents, Sea Org members put the numbers at far lower: perhaps 500,000. Anecdotal accounts during the early and mid-1980s reported an exodus of hundreds from individual Scientology missions across the United States and thousands, perhaps even as many as thirty-five thousand, by Alan Walter's estimate, leaving the Church of Scientology.
But the tens of thousands of Scientologists who didn't abandon the movement readily accepted their leaders' a.s.sertions that Scientology was the victim of religious persecution and that the defectors were ”heretics.” The church responded according to the Hubbard playbook-with an adamant defense of Scientology. This campaign, known as the ”Religious Freedom Crusade,” peaked in 1985 and 1986 and involved thousands of Scientologists around the world. Its high point was the so-called Battle of Portland, in which thousands of Scientologists-a huge gathering of Minutemen-descended upon Portland, Oregon, in May and June 1985 to protest a $39 million judgment awarded to Julie Christofferson t.i.tchbourne, a twenty-seven-year-old former Scientologist who had sued the church for fraud. When the judge in the Christofferson t.i.tchbourne case threw out the jury's decision on a technicality and declared a mistrial, the Scientologists in the courtroom that day erupted in whoops and applause.
The Christofferson t.i.tchbourne reversal was a pivotal moment for David Miscavige. He not only needed to defend Scientology and establish his leaders.h.i.+p, but he also knew the future depended on recasting Scientology as a mainstream church. Just as Hubbard had before him, Miscavige understood the power religion had in the culture and its effectiveness at bringing in cash. The 1980s were not unlike the 1950s in their conservatism and materialism, and churches that embraced those values flourished in this era. With the patronage of Ronald Reagan, and later George H. W. Bush, the Reverend Jerry Falwell became the most prominent religious leader in America, and his group, the Moral Majority, became a national political movement in which faith-fundamentalist Christian faith-was linked with upstanding social, economic, and religious values for the first time in decades.
In a campaign spearheaded by Jeff Hawkins and his marketing group, Scientology now began to promote itself aggressively as a ”major religion” -just like ”Protestantism, Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism”-in glossy newspaper supplements. To forge bonds with mainstream Christian groups, the church urged members to attend local Sunday church services, mingle with the congregation, and introduce themselves to the minister and his wife. A key goal was to get local ministers to sign notarized affidavits affirming that Scientology was a ”bona fide religion,” according to one tip sheet published by the church. To b.u.t.ter them up, the doc.u.ment urged, Scientologists might tell the minister his sermon was ”brilliant” and ask if he'd be willing to speak at their church. ”He'll have a hard time refusing that one!” it noted.
To further reinforce Scientology's legitimacy, the Religious Freedom Crusade began to sponsor ec.u.menical conferences in Los Angeles, reaching out to religious leaders of other faiths by impressing upon them that any legal action brought against the Church of Scientology was a threat to all religions. By December 1985, such mainstream organizations as the National Council of Churches and the Coalition for Religious Freedom had voiced support for Scientology and its ”right to compete for converts without interference from the courts.”
But the cases against Scientology continued. In 1986, a jury in Los Angeles awarded $30 million to the former Scientologist Larry Wollersheim, who'd waged a six-year lawsuit against the church, which he charged had driven him to the point of suicide. In response to the verdict, the Religious Freedom Crusade descended on the Los Angeles County Courthouse much as it had the year before in Portland. This time it was the Reverend Ken Hoden, president of the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles, who spearheaded the campaign, at one point addressing a rally of over a thousand Scientologists; in his speech he compared them to the foot soldiers of the American Revolution. ”If you want your rights guaranteed, you have to fight for them,” he said. ”Larry Wollersheim will never get one thin dime from the Church of Scientology!” ”Not one thin dime for Wollersheim” became a refrain for the next twenty-two years, as the church fought consistently against awarding Wollersheim any damages.*
With Miscavige's full a.s.sumption of power in 1988, Scientology began to settle many of the lawsuits filed against it, often by offering litigants and their attorneys cash payouts to stop their a.s.sault on Scientology. Along with a coalition of other religious groups, the church also pushed a bill through the California state legislature protecting churches and members of the clergy from being a.s.sessed large punitive damages in lawsuits brought against them.
But Scientology faced one last formidable adversary: the Internal Revenue Service. Scientology's conflict with the IRS originated in 1967, when the agency, which had previously granted tax exemption to Scientology, revoked its tax-exempt status after finding that Scientology, and Hubbard in particular, seemed to be profiting from the operation. The Church of Scientology appealed this decision and refused to pay taxes-a stance it would maintain for the next twenty-six years.
This reaction prompted the IRS to embark on a deeper examination of Scientology as a ”dissident group.” Between 1969 and 1975, the Church of Scientology and its activities were monitored by three different agencies within the IRS. Scientology, in turn, monitored the IRS as part of Operation Snow White.
Even after Operation Snow White was uncovered, Scientology's war with the IRS only intensified. In September 1984, the U.S. Tax Court denied the church's appeal of the IRS's original 1967 ruling, concluding, as others had done before, that Scientology ”made a business out of selling religion.” The judge went into great detail about Scientology's many acts of obstruction, noting how Hubbard had once ordered his staff to mix up some two million pages of tax-related doc.u.ments to make it difficult for IRS agents to sort through them. The court noted that ”criminal manipulation of the IRS to maintain its tax exemption (and the exemption of affiliated churches) was a crucial and purposeful element of [Scientology's] financial planning.”
Meanwhile, the IRS's criminal investigation into Hubbard's finances had moved on to examine the activities of the RTC and Author Services, as well as their key officials. For several years, Miscavige would later maintain, he and several other officials were the target of investigation by the IRS's Criminal Investigations Division. The IRS didn't comment on the investigation, and the case was dropped with Hubbard's death in 1986. But Miscavige never forgot. To Scientology's new leader, as to its Founder, the IRS represented far more than a powerful government agency determined to ”suck the blood from the whole country,” as Miscavige once put it; it was the vanguard of a global campaign, launched by psychiatrists, to crush the church.
”A tax-exempt organization is not subject to the myriad complexities of the Internal Revenue Code which can be used to hara.s.s and destroy organizations the IRS does not like,” Miscavige told his flock. ”But most importantly, because all bona-fide religions and churches in the United States do have tax exemption ... if the IRS refused to grant such to Scientology that fact alone could be used to [discredit] the church internationally.” Without tax exemption, he argued, Scientology would never be seen as a religion. Nothing, in Miscavige's mind, could damage Scientology more.
In 1988, Marty Rathbun received his next a.s.signment from Miscavige: launch a campaign to win tax exemption from the IRS. The plan, according to Rathbun, was to follow L. Ron Hubbard's edicts in the most strategic way possible in order to overwhelm the agency and wear it down. To prosecute this war, Rathbun would rely upon the Office of Special Affairs, which he had helped establish five years earlier. Since then, OSA had carried out numerous a.s.signments, ranging from litigating against Scientology enemies to far stealthier black operations, just as the Guardian's Office had always done.
Staffed by some of Miscavige's closest a.s.sociates, OSA also employed numerous former Guardian's Office officials who, having survived the purges of the early 1980s, had been offered a second chance. ”The measuring stick in the Church of Scientology has never been whether you were partic.i.p.ating in illegal activities#x2014;it's whether you were caught,” Jesse Prince, who took part in several intelligence operations in his capacity as an RTC executive, told me. ”Those who weren't caught and punished were still used.”
Like the old Guardian's Office, OSA handled public-facing activities: legal affairs, public relations, and Scientology's various social betterment programs. It also handled its most secret undertakings and continued to use Scientologists as informants and operatives, as well as employing a cadre of private investigators. It had been OSA that had ruined David Mayo and destroyed his independent Scientology network, using private investigators like Eugene Ingram, who served OSA for many years. The Office of Special Affairs had also created Scientology's Crusade for Religious Freedom as a public relations strategy.
But whereas the Guardian's Office had been an impregnable ent.i.ty so covert as to not even appear by name on the church's organizational chart, OSA was listed in Scientology's incorporation papers. ”Where OSA differs from the Guardian's Office,” explained one former Scientologist who was an operative for both intelligence bureaus, ”is that OSA wants to seem above board and approachable. That makes Scientology seem more approachable, which, they hope, will help the church operate as a religion freely, without hara.s.sment.” In service to this goal, OSA made more of an effort to create a legal wall between the church and any covert activities, relying much more on private investigators, and paying a legion of outside attorneys.*
They kept busy. Throughout the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Church of Scientology filed some two hundred lawsuits against the IRS, while more than twenty-three hundred individual Scientologists sued the agency over its refusal to allow them to claim their Scientology contributions as tax deductible. These ”cookie-cutter suits,” as Rathbun described them, soon became cases that cost Scientology tens of millions of dollars in legal fees-with presumably similar cost to the IRS.
At the same time, the church, long an expert on using the Freedom of Information Act, filed hundreds of requests for internal IRS doc.u.ments. Some of their findings were published in Freedom, a magazine created by the Office of Special Affairs to shed light on various government agencies and their abuses. In Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., OSA deployed Scientology operatives to flock Capitol Hill, attend congressional hearings, and network with Hill staffers. One former OSA official explained that for more than a year, she'd fed congressional aides information on the IRS's handling of groups as divergent as the Amish and owners of small businesses, to shed light on its often prejudicial auditing and investigative practices. ”They all knew we were from the church. It was a public relations thing,” she said. ”We were trying to get people to come forward and show that there were attacks on other members of the public, not just on Scientology.”
To further this effort, OSA created, and financed, a gra.s.sroots lobbying organization known as the National Coalition of IRS Whistleblowers to support IRS employees who wanted to expose corruption. The coalition was planned through Freedom magazine and hired as its president a former IRS agent named Paul DesFosses. Stacy Young, then the managing editor of Freedom, later told the New York Times that ”the whole idea was to create a coalition that was at arm's length from Scientology so that it had more credibility.”
By the summer of 1989, these efforts were beginning to pay off. The National Coalition of IRS Whistleblowers helped spark congressional hearings on IRS abuses, based on leaked doc.u.ments and other records that showed, among other things, that several Los Angeles IRS agents had s.h.i.+elded a California apparel manufacturer from a tax investigation after the agents bought property from the manufacturer. The New York Times, in an op-ed published on July 24, 1989, predicted that the proceedings might be the ”most startling Congressional hearings since Watergate.”
The hearings did expose significant abuse within the agency. The Church of Scientology, emboldened, began to press for further IRS reform. On April 16, 1990, David Miscavige wrote an editorial in USA Today calling for the abolition of the IRS and the creation of a new ”value added” tax on goods and services. In October 1990, bands of whistle-blowing Scientologists with the National Coalition of IRS Whistleblowers protested in front of the IRS offices in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., offering a $10,000 reward to any agent willing to expose IRS abuses.
The church also spent roughly $6 million on a series of full-page advertis.e.m.e.nts that ran in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. One advertis.e.m.e.nt, with the heading ”Don't You Kill My Daddy!” addressed an incident in which ”a band of armed IRS agents” supposedly tried to choke an Idaho man who hadn't paid his taxes. Several of the ads also featured photographs of individual agents, including the IRS chief, Fred Goldberg Jr.
Scientology did not confine its war to the IRS as an organization. Following the well-worn path that L. Ron Hubbard had laid out, the church hired private investigators to dig into the lives of IRS employees. One of these investigators, Michael L. Shomers, later told the New York Times that in 1990 and 1991, he was retained by the Church of Scientology to perform a variety of services, including ”looking for [the] vulnerabilities” of various IRS agents. Posing as an IRS employee, Shomers said he attended IRS conferences, where he took notes on those agents who seemed to have a drinking problem or were being unfaithful to a spouse. He then provided the church with the names, and in some cases the phone numbers, of agents he thought it might be easy to blackmail.*
In August 1991, the church filed a $120 million federal lawsuit against seventeen individual IRS officials, accusing them of various illegal acts, including infiltrating the church using paid informants, conspiring to plant phony doc.u.ments in Scientology's files, and in one case, attempting to rewrite the IRS definition of church to enable the agency to deny the Church of Scientology its exemption.
The agency, overwhelmed, began to feel the c.u.mulative effect of the church's pressure campaign. ”It was blatant hara.s.sment,” opined one formerly high-ranking IRS official. He'd been hara.s.sed by Scientologists, he noted, since the 1970s. ”They have a nasty habit of finding your unlisted telephone number and calling you at two A.M., just to let you know they're there.” One a.s.sistant commissioner repeatedly found his garden hose mysteriously turned on in the middle of the night. Other agents reported that their dogs and cats had disappeared.
In the fall of 1991, Miscavige proposed meeting with the IRS commissioner Fred Goldberg, personally, to work out a deal. He floated the idea, said Rathbun, during a meeting with the church's lawyers based in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The attorneys balked. But Miscavige insisted, and Goldberg agreed to see them later that week.
As Rathbun later recalled, Miscavige opened the meeting with a twenty-minute speech that included a pa.s.sionate defense of Scientology as a legitimate religion. He acknowledged the Church of Scientology's history of hara.s.sment and lawsuits, but claimed that the church had never had much choice. ”We're just trying to defend ourselves,” he said.
Then he made a peace offering. ”Look, we can just turn this off,” he told Goldberg, in reference to the lawsuits-provided that the Church of Scientology could get ”what we feel we are actually ent.i.tled to,” which was full exemption. Goldberg had been with the IRS since 1982, and was, by all accounts, eager to make the messy Scientology battles go away. During a break Goldberg came up to Rathbun and asked if Miscavige was serious. ”We can really turn it off?”
Rathbun looked at the commissioner. ”Like a faucet.”
For the next two years, Rathbun and Miscavige made weekly trips to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to meet with a five-man working group of IRS officials that had been put together by Commissioner Goldberg, outside normal channels. The group was highly irregular; it bypa.s.sed the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, which would have normally handled the review of the Church of Scientology's status. When asked about this, Rathbun suggested that Goldberg had tried to eliminate the ”Scientology haters” from the review process, which required creating his own side group to review the claims.
Every week, Rathbun and Miscavige returned to Los Angeles with questions from the tax authorities; their aides would work diligently to prepare answers for the officials' next trip. ”There was a huge number of people putting together all of this information: binders and pictures, charts,” recalled Tanja Castle, who was one of David Miscavige's secretaries at the time. ”The whole religion of Scientology was basically explained to the IRS: the Grade Chart, the ethics conditions ... [Dave and Marty] were trying to show these guys how Scientology is a religion, how it actually did conform to the basic tenets of a religion, how it wasn't for profit-we gave them all the finance records from all the treasuries, all the way down to the lowest org. The entirety of Scientology had to get their financial records straight”-a difficult task, as most of the organizations kept few if any records.
Indeed, said one church finance officer, the church's finances were such a mess, it had to reconstruct its books wholesale. ”There really were no books,” she said. ”Had anyone from the IRS come in and looked at our finances, they would have never given us any kind of exemption. Some of these orgs hadn't recorded their income, yet their members were claiming on their tax forms that they'd donated tens of thousands of dollars to Scientology, and no one could prove it. They had no records that actually gave you any idea of what a church had, or what it spent-and I'm talking about all the organizations all over the country.”
To fix this problem, David Miscavige had created an ”audit task force” in 1987 to do forensic accounting. In Los Angeles, Scientology's Pacific Area Command Base became the site of a frenzied audit involving 120 Scientologists who worked nearly round the clock to make sense of the church's finances. In New York, a task force of around 50 people set up shop on a floor of the New York Org in midtown Manhattan and did the same thing. Over the next several years, as the church's lawsuits and investigations of the IRS ballooned, these Scientologists pieced together the books of every Scientology organization, mission, and church-affiliated ent.i.ty in the United States.
Finally, in the fall of 1993 the two sides reach a settlement, the details of which would not be fully known until the end of 1997. In a highly unusual move, the IRS had declared the agreement secret, not subject to release through the Freedom of Information Act or its own code of regulations.* It was a sharp departure from how other religious organizations had been treated. As the New York Times later noted, both the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries and an affiliate of the Reverend Jerry Falwell's had been ”required by the I.R.S. to disclose that they had paid back taxes in settling disputes in recent years.”
The excuse given within the agency was that the Scientology fight had been tying up IRS resources for too long. But it was puzzling, the official noted, because the IRS staff involved in the agreement had also been fairly confident they'd ultimately win the war.
For twenty-five years, the IRS had steadfastly insisted that Scientology was a business, and it had prevailed in all of the substantive suits brought by the church. As late as June 1992, the U.S. Claims Court had upheld the IRS's denial of tax-exempt status to the Church of Scientology. The ruling strongly supported the agency's position that the church was a commercial organization, and again the judge reproved it for deliberately deceptive practices-this time in designing its financial structure. ”The decision [to settle] came as an enormous shock to all of us,” the official said.
In an editorial, the St. Petersburg Times wrote that the IRS had ”surrendered” to the Scientologists. ”Instead of tough tax law enforcement, taxpayers are seeing a Scientology sellout.” Privately, many people within the IRS agreed. Several agents who'd been a.s.signed to process the church's formal application after the agreement was reached later confessed that they had been instructed to ignore substantive issues while processing the application. ”If you ask me, Goldberg couldn't put up with the hara.s.sment like the rest of us did,” said the former high-ranking IRS official, whose tenure with the agency dated back to the 1970s and Operation Snow White.