Inside Scientology (47 page)

The Sea Org had, in fact, once targeted Kendra for recruitment. The same held true for virtually every one of her friends. Scientology children are raised to not only respect and defer to Sea Org officials, but to envision themselves in a Sea Org uniform. Since David Miscavige became the leader of the church, the Sea Org ranks had swelled with the children of church members. Recruiters patrol the orgs and also show up at schools like Delphi, looking for possible candidates. Once they've isolated a target, who can be as young as eight years old, they may make frequent visits to the child's home, sometimes, as Kendra witnessed, almost forcing their way in to talk to the kid. They present an image of the Sea Org as one part humanitarian mission and one part "cool, space-age army," in the words of one young Scientologist from Los Angeles, who recalled Sea Org promotional materials filled with military imagery like swords and shiny uniforms, as well as pictures of spaceships. It is a powerful pitch for kids raised in the insular bubble of the church.

If that angle doesn't work, there are other lures. Some kids are assured that they will still be able to become an archaeologist, or a ballet dancer, if they join the Sea Org. Others are encouraged to think about the independence they'll have, living away from parents. One of Kendra's friends, who swore for years that he would never join, changed his mind after he was presented with an offer he simply couldn't refuse. "You're not supposed to have sex unless you're married," said Kendra. "So they pulled him into a room with seven beautiful Sea Org girls and said, 'Join the Sea Org and you can get married.' After being harassed over and over again, he signed."

Kendra estimated that 25 percent of her Delphi class joined the Sea Org. Like her friend Erin, she resisted and ultimately did succeed in leaving Scientology, to her family's dismay. Natalie Walet also chose not to join the Sea Org, though she said she seriously considered it. "I was too young—I think I was thirteen when I was approached, and even though I was really mature, I was still a kid." Her parents also had a hand in her decision, she added. "They made me understand that if I signed up, it would be like the military; I wouldn't be able to come home whenever I wanted." So Natalie decided to finish her education. "I think everyone at some point gets spoken to about the Sea Org," she said. "It can be really tempting."

One Scientologist who was tempted, and succumbed, was Claire Headley. Claire was nine years old when she spoke to her first Sea Org recruiter, although it wasn't until she was thirteen that she began hearing from the org regularly. She was a seventh-grader living in Burbank with her parents, Gen and Hugh Whitt, both dedicated Scientologists who had moved to California from Scientology's British hub, Saint Hill, just a few years earlier. Lacking the finances to send their daughter to Delphi, where tuition was over $10,000 per year, they home-schooled Claire, a well-scrubbed-looking girl with a cascade of long red hair, adding an extra layer of isolation to an already sheltered childhood.

This made her a particularly easy target for Sea Org recruiters, who approached her at church with a warning about the dangers of the wog world. Then they asked her what she wanted to do with her life—Claire didn't know. So they appealed to her idealism by saying if she joined the Sea Org, she'd be "helping people." Who wouldn't want to help people? The recruiters called her on the phone: the planet was in desperate trouble, they told her; there were only five years left to clear the planet—she needed to do something about it
right now.

Unlike most of her friends at church, Claire was intimately familiar with the Sea Org: she'd grown up in the order, which her mother had joined when Claire was four years old. Divorced from Claire's biological father, Gen had taken her daughter to Saint Hill, where they spent the next four years. As Gen worked and pursued her own spiritual goals, Claire saw her mother for one hour a day, around dinnertime, and then for three hours on Saturdays.

Children of Sea Org members, notably those whose parents serve at large Scientology installations, were given their own organization, called the Cadet Org.
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They lived apart from their parents, in dormitory-style accommodations, with little adult supervision. At Saint Hill, the Cadet Org was housed in a dilapidated country mansion known as Stonelands. When Claire arrived, in 1979, there were about forty kids between the ages of four and sixteen, supervised by a single adult, a Scientologist in her sixties.

Few provisions were made for the education of the kids in the Sea Org (aside from putting them to work, Hubbard never figured how to accommodate actual children in his organizations). At Saint Hill, which had no school, some children joined the Commodore's Messenger Organization, which they could do at age eight. Claire, still too young, was bused to a local elementary school in East Grinstead, whose residents, like those in Clearwater, were notably unfriendly.

Yearning to make friends with the "normal kids"—Claire and her Cadet Org friends were, in her mind, the "weirdo kids"—she learned how to speak two languages: one for Scientology, the other for school. When she slipped up and started talking about things like overts or withholds, the other kids laughed. She'd been relieved when her mother met Hugh Whitt, an American Scientologist working at Saint Hill, and decided to marry him. Whitt had taken LSD in his youth and was prevented from joining the Sea Org because of it. As Sea Org members are not allowed to marry non–Sea Org members, Claire's mother had to petition Scientology to leave the Sea Org, and was granted permission.

"To me, it was like a dream come true: I was finally going to get to live in a house with my parents and be like a normal kid," Claire said. But the years she spent at Saint Hill stayed with Claire even after her family moved to Los Angeles, where Hugh ran the Scientology mission of Beverly Hills. She said, "The world outside of Scientology just seemed like this vast unknown: how could I possibly live in it?"

In 1989, when Claire was fourteen, she and her father went to Clearwater, where a friend of her father's named Richard Reiss, the base's highest-ranking auditor,
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told her that joining the Sea Org would be the "right thing to do." Momentarily inspired, Claire decided she would join. But she changed her mind once she got back to Los Angeles, particularly as her mother, according to Claire, "flipped out" when her fourteen-year-old daughter told her she'd signed a billion-year contract to serve Scientology for the rest of her life. Gen understood the rigors of Sea Org life. Claire was intelligent and attractive—there were plenty of things she could do, Gen believed, and still remain true to the church.

The reaction of Claire's mother illustrates a common dilemma for Scientologist parents, who are supposed to feel honored that their child has been selected for the Sea Org in the same way a Catholic parent is supposed to swell with pride if their child joins the priesthood. But many parents are not eager to give their son or daughter to the church, which requires signing away all legal rights to the child's welfare. "You get a lot of parents who are just beside themselves," says Sandra Mercer, whose youngest son was approached as a ten-year-old, and without either of his parents present, signed a contract—with crayon, she said—though he was not formally approached to activate his contract until he was thirteen. Mercer refused to allow her son to join until he finished high school (by which point, she added, he'd lost interest), and since she was a prominent Scientologist in Clearwater, church officials didn't push. "But I was an exception," she noted. "If you're just a rank-and-file member, you can't complain or say no."

The scrutiny that unwilling parents receive—they may be condemned for being "counter-intentioned" to Scientology, an act of treason, if they prevent their child from joining the Sea Org—forces many into silence and even leads some to encourage their kids to make the commitment. Gen Whitt managed to delay Claire's enrollment for two years with a pledge that her daughter would help out at the Beverly Hills mission. But in 1991, when Claire was sixteen, Gen finally gave her consent. Richard Reiss reminded the Whitts that were they to refuse to let Claire go, they might be put before a church ethics board. Reiss himself might face a Scientology tribunal for his failure to recruit her unless Claire agreed to enlist.

And so began Claire's immersion into the tightly wound, paramilitary world of the Sea Organization, where she would spend the next fourteen years of her life.

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portray the Sea Organization as similar to the U.S. Marines. "The toughest, most dedicated team this planet has ever known," says one recruiting brochure. "Against such a powerful team the opposition hasn't got a chance." Though these are L. Ron Hubbard's words, the vision they invoke has been fully realized only in the era of David Miscavige. Today it is impossible to understand the Church of Scientology without understanding the Sea Org, which over the past forty years has evolved from Hubbard's private navy to Scientology's managerial elite, to its current incarnation: an executive body but also a low-paid workforce that can run the church's engines without impacting its overall revenue.

Induction into the Sea Org begins with a boot camp known as the Estates Project Force, or EPF. In Los Angeles, the EPF is located at the Pacific Area Command Base (PAC Base) on Sunset Boulevard. Here, Claire Headley learned to march, salute, and perform manual labor. Physical work is a key training technique for new Sea Org recruits. Among the chores given people on the EPF are scrubbing pots, washing garbage receptacles, and cleaning roach- or rat-infested ducts. Claire described the work as "nasty" but ultimately noble in purpose. "The idea," she told me, "is that you do this for a few weeks and you can do any task given to you and do it right."

After graduation, inductees are assigned a post at one of Scientology's organizations. Many kids hope to work at Celebrity Centre, where staffers are outfitted in custom-made uniforms and have a chance to mingle with movie stars. Claire was even more ambitious: she wanted to work at Int, the most exclusive Scientology facility on land. Like all public Scientologists, she'd known of the base as "Gold," the home of Scientology's film studio, Golden Era Productions, which sounded glamorous. She heard rumors that Tom Cruise was a regular there. And she'd been shown pictures of the five-hundred-acre property and its large swimming pool and golf course. There were grassy meadows, winding paths, and a small lake where swans and ducks roamed freely. With its neat white buildings with blue tiled roofs, she thought it looked like Disneyland—and in fact, this comparison with Disneyland was often used to promote the place to potential teenage recruits.

Only the most qualified and privileged Sea Org members were posted to Gold; often they were the children of Scientology's elite. Among them were L. Ron Hubbard's granddaughter Roanne and the sons and daughters of some of Scientology's top attorneys and money managers. Claire was told she'd need to score at least 125 on an IQ test, which she did, and that she would also have to score high on a variety of leadership and personality tests. The rules were very strict: no one with family members in government or media could work at the International Base; no one with friends or family who'd left Scientology on bad terms could be assigned there either. A wholesome, virginal girl with a "clean" drug history, Claire sailed through the process, and two months after joining the Sea Org, she got her wish and was assigned a clerical position at Gold.

At first glance, Gold did look a lot like Disneyland. Driving in through the main gate, Claire saw a beige estate house, known as the Castle, which looked like an actual castle. This housed Scientology's film wing. Nearby was a stone carriage house called the Tavern, which was where visiting VIPs often ate their meals. It was decorated in the style of King Arthur's court, complete with a sizable round table and even a stone with a sword embedded in it, like Excalibur. Across the road, rising up from the hills, was the
Star of California
clipper ship, which was done up in "Pirates of the Caribbean" style, with mermaid figurines and plastic crabs.

But there were also many other buildings, most of them utilitarian looking, scattered around the property, and Claire had to memorize the names and locations of all of them, and their abbreviations. Her new home, she learned right away, was far more than the film and production studio most Scientologists thought it was. This was a ruse, or "shore story," the church told the public in order to maintain the security of the base. Int was Scientology's nerve center, where every policy, legal strategy, advertising campaign, and event was planned and launched.

Virtually everything about the Int Base was different than Claire had imagined. It was run and organized like a covert military installation. The base's location was a secret—Claire had to pledge never to divulge it to her friends or family, under the threat of treason. Leaving the compound with any documents or paperwork was forbidden. Similarly, she was not allowed to speak of her job nor of any goings-on at the base to anyone, not even to a Sea Org friend. She was banned from riding in local taxis or taking any form of public transportation; instead, she traveled on special Scientology buses or in a private vehicle driven by a staff member who'd completed a special driving course designed by L. Ron Hubbard. Every Sea Org member who wants to drive is required to attend this "car school," even if the person already has a driver's license and a car.