Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (15 page)

M&M or Maintenance Man House:
This house was originally the place where the maintenance man for the resort lived. It is now used for staff berthing.

The Lake:
The lake is a huge man-made lake just west of Building 36. It even had fish in it. It was more of an eyesore than majestic, with dead animals and several feet of sludgy muck beneath the few feet of water. There is a small island at one end of it with a stone veneer bridge that allows access to the island and has a huge cottonwood tree on it.

Golf Course:
This is the public golf course located to the east of the main Golden Era property.

Sublet Road:
This is the public road that is adjacent to the main property and runs along the golf course. Several houses are located along this road. Some were purchased and used as staff housing units while others had local residents living in them who had nothing to do with the base.

For my orientation, I would go to each and every building on the property and answer a question about each. This exercise took me two days.

For the most part, it was business as usual in most buildings. People were generally uniformed in the Sea Org garb and people were at desks and computers working away. There were, however, a few exceptions. Most of these exceptions occurred in Gold.

When I went into Studio Two, the mixing facility at the top of the property, a man was sitting at the main mix board console. He was in boxer shorts and a T-shirt. He was sitting in a large leather chair and had his feet up on the mix board. He was wearing socks but no shoes and seemed rather unresponsive to my entrance into the room.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hey,” he answered back. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“My name is Marc Headley and I am doing my Orientation Course.” I answered back, almost laughing.

“Well, Marc, I’m Jesse Prince and this is Studio Two. Now - get out! I am trying to work here!” he said, half joking and half serious.

I walked out of the studio and laughed. Of all the areas I had been to, this was the only one where someone was out of uniform and kicking back during post hours.

Beside a few random characters on my route, my orientation was pretty uneventful. I walked around to a bunch of buildings and headed back to finish the course.

My next course was a technical course, the Audio Basics Course. No Scientology stuff I thought – wow. This would be the first thing I would study that was not filled with LRH issues from 20 years ago. I opened the course pack. The first issue was Keeping Scientology Working #1. Okay, well that issue was in the front of every course in Scientology. I came to the first nontechnical issue; it was written by Hubbard in the 1980s and was all about nano webers and magnetic flux and how these all make audiotape possible. There was no escaping it. Hubbard had something to say about everything and no matter what, I would have to study it if I was to get through these courses.

It took me only a few days to plow through this last course. As soon as I was done, I went on my first post.

I was told where to go and that I would meet a girl named Clarisse. I arrived in Building 36 in what they called the Gauss line. Clarisse was a short girl in her 30s and wore a long sad puppy dog look most of the time. She gave me the tour of the whole cassette production facility. The Gauss line was the high-speed cassette manufacturing facility at Golden Era Productions. They had two giant master machines, both of which would load master production reels that would play back on a huge loop. The signals from the master machines were transferred to 16 high speed copying “slave” machines that had huge reels of cassette tape on them called “pancakes.” Both the master and playback machines ran the tape through at 32X normal speed. In 30 minutes you could make 30 cassettes on each machine. With 16 machines, depending on the length of the lecture being copied, you could crank out 400-500 tapes every hour including setting up and reloading the machines with new tape.

The huge reels were then checked by a special Studer brand tape machine that was designed to play them.

The pancakes were loaded into cassette shells that were then labeled, stuffed into binders, shrink-wrapped, boxed up and shipped out. As we entered the packaging area, there were stacks and stacks of cassettes everywhere. There must have been a few hundred thousand tapes, easily. They were in red plastic bins piled high throughout the entire room. None were in binders, just loose cassettes piled into big plastic bins.

After Clarisse showed me the production facility, I could not help but notice that the place looked like a ghost town. Everywhere else I had been on the property there were people working and desks with baskets filled with papers and trash cans with trash in them. This place had nothing. No papers on any desks, no people working in it, no duffle bags under the desks with the occasional pair of shoes sitting around, nothing. It was as sterile as could be.

Clarisse, or “CB” as she stated she preferred to be called, said that she was the only person posted here and that I would be taking the job as the Tapes Packaging In Charge. More people would be coming to take over the other ten posts that were empty.

Okay. Weird but okay.

When I got to dinner, I told Tom that I was being posted in Tapes Manufacturing. He said he knew that. He told me that all the people coming up to Gold from the mission down in LA would be posted there.

“That is why there was a mission to get a bunch of people up here from LA,” Tom said, “to man up tapes with NEW personnel.”

“Where did all of the people that worked there before go?” I asked.

“Either declared or sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force,” Tom said matter of factly while eating his last bite of dinner.

“What?” I asked him as we got up and headed towards the bussing station, “How?”

“Well, they made about 300,000 overt product cassette tapes,” Tom said, “And a lot more that probably went out to public that we never found.”

“Holy crap!” I freaked. “How many people are we talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine. CB is still over there though, right?” We finished bussing our dishes and headed out for a smoke.

“Yeah, she was the one who gave me the tour of the place,” I answered, thinking about all of this.

“Yeah, well she used to be a Lieutenant junior grade. She was the only one that did not get RPFed or declared. She was lowered in rank to a Chief Petty Officer and has hundreds of hours of amends to do or she will get sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force anyway,” Tom explained.

“Why didn’t she go to the RPF or get declared like everybody else?” I asked.

“Well, she is David Miscavige’s sister in-law,” Tom finished.

After muster I went back to tapes.

“So, what should I do?” I asked CB as I walked in.

“Well, we need to set up for all hands tonight,” CB said as we walked into the finishing area. “All of these bins of tapes have to have the labels removed.” She waved her hands at all the red bins I had seen earlier during my tour.

“All of them?”

“Yeah, all of them,” she said. “We’ve been doing this with the entire crew for a few months already. Each night for at least an hour, all of Gold comes down here and peels these paper labels off the tapes by hand. Then any sticky residue gets wiped off and the tapes get brought up to the 3rd floor warehouse.”

“Why not just throw them out?” I asked, dreading spending the rest of my adult life peeling labels off cassettes.

“Because each tape is worth about $1.50. We can’t throw that away. That is about a half a million dollars in materials,” CB said, almost so softly that I could barely hear her.

I totally understood CB now. She was the only one in this whole place that did not get busted and she knew it was only because she was related to the boss’s wife. She would have been mincemeat any other day of the week if it were not for that fact.

It also explained the constant long face she wore. She was miserable. She had been in the Sea Org her entire life and was actually working for L. Ron Hubbard when he died in 1986. She had risen up the ranks and was an officer and here she was after 20 years, just a staffer back at the bottom again.

I asked CB if there were any write-ups or directions on how to get the labels off.

“No, everything was burned,” CB replied.

“Huh?”

“Anything that was here from the previous crew was burned, any items that could be burned were burned, log books, daily Battle Plans, directions and procedures, training materials, any correspondence, anything. All of the desks were emptied out into a fire and burnt. There is not one scrap of anything left from the previous people. It is as if they never existed,” CB said.

“Okay,” I replied, not knowing what I could possibly say in response to that. That was plain nuts. They burnt everything, as if the evilness was somehow going to be transferred onto the next batch of people through the paper.

Weeks went by and we de-labeled cassette tapes each night with the entire crew. It seemed like it would take forever. We’d maybe get a few thousand done each night with a few hundred people helping us. Then one day it happened. A guy named Luigi came into the packaging area and told me to come into the room where all the duplication equipment was.

“Hold this for me,” Luigi said as he soldered some part to a circuit board he handed me.

You would think that with a name like Luigi, he would have been a big Italian guy. Luigi was as far from that as you could imagine. He was a small thin Asian with jet-black hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. He spoke perfect English and had just a tinge of “Los Angeles attitude” in his accent.

Bruce, the technician I had met earlier in Ray Reiser’s office, was in the room as well. Bruce looked as though he could fall asleep any second. Both he and Luigi had been in and out of the duplication room for weeks. They were trying to fix the machines that made the cassette tapes. This is the exact part of the line that made all of the bad cassettes.

“This is the Gauss line,” said Luigi while continuing to solder. “All these machines are made by a company called Gauss.”

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

“Well, they are not making the tapes sound as good as we would like,” Luigi answered.

“Why can’t you just make the company that made them fix the problem?” I asked, thinking this is just a warranty issue.

“Because the problem is not that the machines do not work, they do not work as well as Chairman of the Board would like them to,” Bruce chimed in. “We have to make the machines better on our own with modifications.”

CB came in and said she needed my help in the next room and I went back to moving bins around in the finishing area.

“How long will it take those guys to fix the machines?” I asked CB.

“It has been months already, I don’t know,” she replied. “COB has been down here a ton of times asking them as well. They always tell him something that they have pulled out of their asses and then get assigned a condition of Doubt for false reporting.”

The next day I was told that I would not be posted in the final packaging area but would instead be posted as the quality control for the Gauss line. This was huge. The guy that did this before was the one that caused the whole flap that got everybody busted. Wow, I did not know about this. This seemed like a big deal and could end up being a catastrophe.

I had to study a bunch of manuals for the technical equipment I would be operating. In the Sea Org, if you operate any piece of equipment that you are not checked out on, you get assigned a lower condition. You have to read the manual from beginning to end and get someone else to quiz you on the operation of the equipment. The first of the operation manuals I had to study was several hundred pages long. It was a Hewlett Packard 8562A Spectrum Analyzer.

It took me a few weeks just to get through that one manual. The manual itself was written by an engineer for an engineer and I had no business even attempting to read this thing. I eventually got through the manual. After I had learned how to operate the machine and was fully versed in its capabilities, I tried to get a check out. Turns out that no one at Gold had ever read the manual for this machine and those that started had never finished.

“It’s not even ours,” Luigi said to me. “Church of Spiritual Technology sent it over when we needed something that was well beyond the analyzers we had around here. That analyzer costs around $85,000. These things are used at NASA to test space shuttle crap.”

“So I am the only one who has read the manual for this thing?” I exclaimed, after three weeks of having my head buried in five different technical dictionaries and reading about wavelengths and demodulators and radar frequencies!

After that first manual, the rest I had to read took me one day to get though and get checked out. They were a powered speaker, Studer tape deck, OKI data printer and a test generator/analyzer by the Gauss M2 company.

After reading the manuals, I was told to go down and help Luigi and Bruce get the machines fixed.

There was no science to what Bruce and Luigi were doing. Luigi would try something, and then test to see if it worked. When it didn’t, they would try something else. We would get all of the machines tuned up and spend all night getting them perfect. After, we slept on the floor for two or three hours right next to the machines, the next morning we would run tests on the machines and they would all be out of whack again. This had been going on for weeks and no matter what we did, the machines were not predictable and would change overnight.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of trying everything possible, it boiled down to several points:

1. The Production Masters – The production line that made the masters had faults on it that were introducing low quality directly into the masters being used to make the cassettes.

2. The master playback machines in the duplication facility – The actual machines that played back the production master to the slave machines had faults with it that needed to be modified.