Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (35 page)

This was not like the August 1990 flood. That was a lot of water in a very short amount of time, maybe an hour or two. This storm went on for days. And while it was raining in San Jacinto, it was simply pouring down in Gilman Hot Springs. It was unnatural.

There was a lot of worry about the new tunnels and the new road. Would the storm undermine their integrity and cause them to collapse? Would the mountain slide down onto the new road? None of those things would happen. But what did happen would be worse.

Just like in the 1990 flood, the river that ran along the south side of the property ran high and threatened to break the levees which ran the entire distance of the property.

Teams of people were assigned to run dozers and backhoes to shore up the levee, no matter the cost. Several of us were “rovers”. We were given walkie-talkies and rode our motorcycles around the property line assessing the damage and reporting back to “Station One” the status of the water line and any levee breaks.

After three days of being up all night and day riding my motorcycle around in the freezing rain, I could not do it any longer. I was sick, very sick. I had to go to isolation. When I got there, it was packed with other staff, most of who had been on the same rover duty as me. I slept for two days and when I awoke, I heard one of the craziest things I had heard in ages.

After the San Jacinto River went past our property, it went under Sanderson Street. Well it had gone
over
Sanderson Street and taken it down river. It was no longer there. I did not believe it and rode my bike down the road to see for myself.

Sure enough. The road was GONE. The asphalt literally dead-ended and there was now a twenty-foot drop where the road used to be. For someone from anywhere else in the US, this might have been a periodic occurrence. Not here in Riverside County. We got a few inches of rain the entire year! For a major road to be washed away was a big deal.

One of the older security guards who had been at the base forever told me that this road had been damaged many years back by a similar flood in 1980. It was at that exact moment that I realized why the city had fast tracked the road. They knew that their road was going to get killed at some point and without fixing up the road that went through the property, the trip into town or the casinos would be threatened.

Sure enough, as soon as Sanderson was gone, the traffic through the base was not only back up to previous levels, but it was now
all
traffic—heavy trucks, semi-trucks, cars—everything had to go through the property.

To add insult to injury, the turn outs were somehow confusing and people were using them as passing lanes! So people would be driving down the two lane highway road, and when they got to the property, they would gun it to pass other cars as the road would widen to four lanes!

To say Dave Miscavige was pissed was an understatement. Where he thought he had gotten the best of the locals, it was the other way around. We had spent millions putting a new road in, and as a result ALL traffic into Hemet or San Jacinto or the Indian Casino was now going past our property.

As for Sanderson Street, it was official; they were not going to risk it being washed away again. This time they would build a huge overpass bridge instead of a road and redo the interchange between Lamb’s Canyon and Gilman Springs Road. It was planned to take 3 years at least!

This was a flap that would never end and many people would suffer now that it had gone as wrong as it did. Dave Miscavige would make sure that people suffered.

There were hundreds of pages of orders, meeting transcripts, plans, you name it, about how to handle the highway situation. Months and years would go by and the orders kept coming from Dave on what to do with the highway.

Every few weeks or months, we were briefed on the latest handling that was being done on the highway. None ever resulted in anything that would do what Dave Miscavige wanted. He wanted the road completely closed, no traffic. So anything that was done would never be what Dave wanted, so in the end, no matter what you did, it was going to be crapped on by Dave.

The people behind this flap were the PR Division of Golden Era. This consisted of Ken Hoden and Muriel Dufresne (pronounced Do-frane). They were the ones who were supposed to get the road closed or handled so that Dave did not have the problem of the highway on his lines.

In the year 2000, Dave had a new reason to complain about the highway: It was keeping him awake. Dave Miscavige lived in a building that was within 100 feet of the highway. He lived in the Lower Villa that was located directly east of the Star of California Clipper Ship. Apparently, the number of semi trucks using the highway was at an all time high and the peak time they drove by the base was around 6:00
 a.m.

Dave Miscavige had been trying for years to have the highway traffic shut down. Now it would keep him up all night. He decided to share the experience. One day an order came down stating that Ken Hoden, Muriel Dufresne, Steve Willet and Jim Mortland (the latter two were Estates area executives) were to get up at 5:30
 a.m.
and stand out by the highway just below Dave’s bedroom for a few hours. This was to go on until they handled the noise from the highway. Either by getting the speed limit changed, getting the road zoned as a county road, shutting it down, whatever it took, they were to sit out on the road EVERY SINGLE MORNING until it was resolved.

Months went by and, sure enough, there they were every morning standing out next to the highway.

Jim Mortland had it the worst. He was out there because he was the Estates Sec years prior. Well at the time he was working in the A/V systems area and would routinely be up very late at night working and would not even bother trying to go home since he would have to go out and stand on the highway in just a few hours anyway. He would catch a catnap at his desk for an hour or two and then get out on the highway.

All this so Dave Miscavige could enjoy the silence.

The May 9th event 2004 (anniversary of the original publication of
Dianetics
) was just completed and we all knew that we would be up all night every night for the next several weeks preparing for the June 6th events that commemorated the
Freewinds
Maiden Voyage anniversary.

Normally the June 6th event was the worst because it was actually a week of back-to-back nightly events. There were two-hour presentations each night for six nights in a row. On prior June 6th events we would have at least one 5-10 minute video for each night and then a ton of speeches on all sorts of subjects. Sometimes we would have multiple videos each night if COB wanted that and this year there was not much progress to report. Depending on what happened during the prior year we would have:

1. One night on the SBC’s or Social Betterment Corporations: Applied Scholastics, the Way to Happiness and Criminon.

2. A night on the destruction of psychiatry.

3. A night devoted to Preservation of the Tech.

4. A management night on International Scientology Expansion.

5. An awards night that acknowledged various public Scientologists for their application of Scientology technology in the field of business, i.e., whoever donated the greatest amount of money that year.

6. An IAS event night showing what their funded programs had achieved throughout the previous year.

For those of us at Golden Era Productions, we would have to gather up all the past activities of the year and obtain photos or video footage of anything that could be made into something that could be talked about for each of the nightly events. This is the same as would be done for any other event that occurred throughout the year, except that for the June 6th event, we had to have tons of pictures and tons of data because the people who attended these events aboard the
Freewinds
were financing all Scientology enterprises. They had to be impressed in order to give more money.

Each day at Gold we would have meetings to go over what would be included in each night’s event. These meetings were usually useless since everything that was planned would eventually be thrown out the window as soon as Dave saw the plan. Nevertheless we would spend every day gathering up the photos from around the world, writing speeches, shooting videos and putting together each night’s event.

The staff working on putting an event together normally numbered around 300. People from the following areas contributed to events:

1. COB

2. COB’s Office

3. RTC Execs

4. ED INT

5. CO CMO INT

6. LRH PPRO

7. ED ASI

8. CO IASA

9. CMO INT PR staff

10. IMPR Speechwriters

11. IMPR Scriptwriters

12. Cine Research Dept

13. Cine Scriptwriting Dept

14. Cine Props Dept

15. Cine Logistics Dept

16. Cine Make-up Dept

17. Cine Costumes Dept

18. Cine Sets Dept

19. Cine Camera Dept

20. Cine Lighting Dept

21. Cine Grips Dept

22. Cine Post Production Dept

23. Cine Video Shoot Crews Dept

24. Cine SFX Dept

25. Audio Mixing Dept

26. Audio Music Dept

27. A/V Manufacturing Dept

28. Shipping Dept

So these 300 people all knew that they would be getting 4-5 hours sleep, if that, for the next four weeks while these events were being prepared. Couple that with the fact that the first two weeks of work would most likely be wasted and that the last two weeks would be twice as stressful with even less sleep.

For all of the events put on for the fifteen years I was at Gold there were three main components that made up the event:

1. New releases

2. Speeches

3. Videos

If we were lucky, all three would somehow correlate to each other. So if we were talking about Applied Scholastics, we might have a video that showed a new school being opened and then maybe a new course having to do with Applied Scholastics. That would be the ideal arrangement.

Now when you have hundreds of people all working in different directions on different things and most of them not getting much done, it is unusual for the ideal event combination to occur very often. In most cases, the new releases drove the event. If a release was guaranteed to be done by the event, it was worked into the planning. The speeches and videos were drawn up based on the releases.

This worked fine if there were things that were being completed on a regular basis. Dave was the only one who could approve anything that got done at the Int Base, so not much got done. And when things did get done they might not actually have anything to do with the event that was coming up. For instance, if a new revised Dianetics “How to” video was completed in December, it would sit around and not be released at the New Years or March 13th events but would be “saved” for the May 9th event. Herein lies the problem with the Int Base—nothing was ever done on schedule and because of this, we got to stay up all night and day pulling stuff out of dark holes before an event to come up with something to talk about or show, when we really had nothing.

Then you had Dave Miscavige who had laid out a master plan of things to occur over several years and each new release was tied to an event. In 1990, a list was issued that contained 10 years worth of events. By 2000, all of the “new” products were to have been released and then all events thereafter would be devoted to focusing on the unchecked expansion that would be occurring worldwide.

By 2000, a small fraction of those items had been released, and by 2004, all of the items that had been released had to be redone or re-released due to being incorrect or needing upgrade in some way later on.

Things did not always go as planned at the Int Base; in fact, they never did.

But back to the event for the
Freewinds
. Most of the event crew stayed up for two whole weeks leading up to the events.

For most of the videos, Dave would sit in the editing bay and critique each cut and each sequence, in each and every video. Then he would head over to Music where he would listen to the music scores and have those revised or redone. Peter Schless could crank out a five-minute video score in a day or two. So doing ten videos in a month was no big deal. But when you have to do ten videos twice over in a month, it adds up. And in between the scores for each video, the music would still have to be recorded and mixed and laid back to the off line edit. And you have to be part of all of the attendant meetings about the videos and then also all of the meetings with COB on how the videos suck and have to be redone. All of this does not leave a lot of minutes left in the day to eat, sleep or be merry.

Now, event speeches would normally be written by the executives who would be delivering the speeches. This was a very short list of possibilities that would routinely be jumbled around right up until the actual night of the event. And depending on which event it was, and what was happening at the base, the people speaking could be doing so from a number of posts or titles. But the usual suspects were:

1. COB – Dave Miscavige

2. Mike Rinder

3. Marc Yager

4. Guillaume Lesevre

5. Danny Sherman

Most of these guys would have to write their own speech for the event and submit it to Dave Miscavige for approval. There were a few Catch 22s put in place by Dave though. No one could submit his own speech unless the others had been written and coordinated with. Something that Marc Yager wanted to talk about could not be in any of the other speeches and each person had to come up with enough stuff to talk about in his own speech so that it could stand on its own.

There was the added bonus that someone in the Management PR Office would have to propose a speech for Dave Miscavige and that his speech had to be much better than all the other speeches so as to put him on a pedestal far above the other speakers.

Last but not least, the speeches could not talk about the stuff that was in the videos, but could only have a short introduction to the video that went with the speech.