Inside Scientology (22 page)

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 participate 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 assigned to do menial labor while awaiting judgment before a Scientology tribunal called a Committee of Evidence, which was often assembled 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.

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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.
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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 assumed." 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 friendship 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 protégés, 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 fashion 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 entity, 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 bashing 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 entities: 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 communiqués, 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; asserting his belief that his father was dead or was possibly being held prisoner against his will, he sued for control of Hubbard's assets.

In response, the Founder submitted a lengthy signed affidavit, asserting 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 Thoreau secluded himself by Walden Pond, so I have chosen to do so in my own fashion."
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