Ruthless (14 page)

Personal mail brought another invasion of a staff member's privacy. You would write a letter to a family member or friend, address the envelope and put a stamp on it but leave the envelope unsealed. You would place it in the mail station in your work area where each person in that building had a basket for incoming mail, memos, magazines, and the like. The mail runner would collect any outgoing letters and send them to the security department, where a member of the security force would read the letter. If the letter was deemed okay, the envelope was sealed and sent out to be mailed. If it wasn't
okay—if
the security person objected to something you had
written—the
letter came back to you to fix before it could go out. During World War II, the government checked mail to ensure sensitive operations were not being compromised. That was exactly the mentality at the Gold base, yet the only enemies on the horizon were in somebody's mind.

The irony is that Scientology loudly trumpets its support of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights; however, every staff member at the base was forced to sign away their rights to privacy. This really got to Becky because, working in marketing, she took part in creating church promotional magazines that contained the declaration in special issues every year. She once made a crack about the hypocrisy of the situation to her senior manager in marketing, and it created a brouhaha with a senior executive dressing her down in front of another group of executives and other staff, which, as it happened, included me.

That's how the craziness starts. People will respond to an authority figure. If someone has authority, people tend to listen to that person. Not just the Germans listening to Hitler but anybody listening to someone higher in the pecking order. So you agree to go to a muster four times a day, something you would never do if left to your own devices. You agree to have someone check your room to make sure it is clean. You agree to have your mail checked. You agree to have someone listen on an extension when you phone a family member. You agree to stay in an enclosed compound and not go to a store.

At the base, control was exerted over what a person could write and say, and this mania even extended to an attempt to control what a person had witnessed. Here is how that came about.

In the
mid-1980s
, Hubbard developed something he called the Truth Rundown in response to a comment a staff member had made on a survey. The gist of the comment was that Hubbard was difficult to work with on the set during the year he spent making technical training films. The person had been there for that whole year and experienced Hubbard's numerous blowups when things did not go according to his demands, and the writer expressed this in answering the survey.

Hubbard's response was to theorize that the man's observations were most likely a justification of or
cover-up
for harmful actions by the person himself. According to Hubbard, such criticisms of a
well-intentioned
person usually are found to be false or merely hearsay. The remedy was to take the individual into an auditing session and begin tracing
his
harmful actions and bring them to light. Now, here is where it gets creepy: the goal of this activity was to convince the person that what he thought he had seen (with his own eyes, mind you) was not what he actually had seen but merely his rationalization for his own
less-than
-stellar
behavior. In other words, the perfect outcome of the Truth Rundown would be for someone to disavow what he or she had witnessed. Hubbard also wrote that the person should offer to address the group and, in an act of contrition, apologize for spreading false and misleading information about
so-and
-so
and say, in essence, “It was just my own nasty secrets that made me say these things.” To me, this sounded a lot like the
Manchurian Candidate,
though I will add that I cannot recall the rundown's ever achieving the successful outcome that Hubbard envisioned. People observe what they observe, and what I observed were increasing restrictions on my freedoms of thought and expression.

I once tried out my theory of incremental concessions with a taxi driver. Peter Schless and I were taking a taxi to a gig site in Mexico, where we'd docked during a Maiden Voyage Anniversary cruise.

I asked the driver, “Have you ever heard of the pyramids of Chichen Itza?”

“Oh, yes, very famous. I know them well,” he replied.

“I wonder how they got there?” I said.

“I don't know,” he answered.

“You know, I heard that even with
modern-day
technology, you couldn't move stones that big,” I said. “Did you know that?”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“Yeah, that's what I heard,” I continued.

“Well, it's possible that that is true,” he agreed. I got him to agree to that one point.

After continuing to get a slight agreement here and a slight agreement there, we arrived at the gig site, and I asked the driver, “Okay, then, who built the pyramids at Chichen Itza?”

“People from outer space,” he replied.

I had proved to myself that my theory worked, and I had a witness. Peter laughed his ass off when we got out of the taxi.

That is a humorous example, but life in the Sea Org was not a joke. At one point in the early 2000s, I told Becky, “I cannot go on living like this.” She agreed.

As we were walking to lunch one day, I said to one of the guys in the music area, “I have no intention of living the rest of my life like this.”

He turned to me and said, “Ronnie, why don't you tell COB? Do you ever talk to him? Tell him how bad it is.”

A lot of good that would have done. David was the one who made it that way! In the Marines, when you are down in the trenches and everything is going to hell around you, you don't look sideways, you look up the chain of command. Because of that, I knew that David was responsible.

Yet his recognition of his responsibility for creating the terrible conditions at the base was exactly zero. I offer this example: one day I was talking with Marc Yager, one of the top church executives for many years and thus one of David's favorite punching bags. At one point, Marc mentioned to me that he had remarked to David, “Some people in Gold have not had a liberty in 12 years.” According to Mark, David's response was utter surprise. “That's insane,” he said, thereby pretending that he had no hand in it while being the sole creator of the arbitrary rules that led to the conditions where people could go for that long without a day off.

David had closely aligned himself with L. Ron Hubbard. When LRH died, some people thought that Hubbard had appointed David as his successor, which I am certain is not true. Here is why I think so: Throughout his life, Hubbard wrote down nearly everything in longhand, including the vast majority of the thousands of church policies and technical bulletins he wrote. He even wrote whole books in longhand. He recorded thousands of public lectures and thousands more briefings of executives. He kept a small cassette recorder next to his bed in case an idea came to him in the middle of the night. Yet he said not a word about arguably the most important decision of his
life—who
should carry on his life's work. My opinion is that Hubbard left no plan for succession. Here was a man who wrote everything down. He couldn't have scrawled a note on his deathbed that said, “I hereby appoint David Miscavige as my successor”?

During his time in the Sea Org, however, David had wormed his way into a position that made him the gatekeeper for communications to and from Hubbard. That gave David immense authority. Because he had that authority, people would listen to him, which is another definition of power, something David told me as well as others. “Power is when people will listen to you,” as he put it. Knowing this, he used that authority to make people do things they would not normally do. In the Sea Org, people assume that any orders come from COB, so they follow them. It is that simple.

I saw him ruthlessly take people apart with a withering glare and
high-decibel
,
profanity-laced
accusations. You did not want to cross him. His modus operandi was domination through nullification. You might walk into another area of the
org—say
,
editing—and
there he would be, ripping somebody apart. A different area on another day, same thing. You were glad it was not happening to you. A corporate management style popular up until the 1980s was the tough boss who yells at employees. It has long since gone out of favor, but it is the palest approximation of the way David has run the church since he took over.

Every staff member was, more often than not, in a rattled condition all of the time. The facility at Gold had a large CD production plant, built at great expense just as CDs were being replaced by digital downloads. Quite often we were called to
all-hands
work details to stuff lecture CDs into their cases so they could be
shrink-wrapped
and sent out. The thousands and thousands of CDs coming off the line were far more than the staff posted in the area could deal with, so the rest of the org would be called in for half an hour after lunch, for example. One day Becky and I were standing next to each other while we stuffed CDs when David arrived for an inspection and noticed us. A person in his entourage came over and told Becky she had to move because it was not “personal time.” Anything to make your life more miserable.

Much of what I have written in this chapter is bad enough, but the worst thing is this: I am actually telling the truth.

It gets even worse, however, but before I dive into that I have a piece of advice:

Do not ever sign away any right you have as an individual.

Don't ever sign anything that will allow someone to read your mail or listen to your phone calls or restrict your freedom of movement. If you do, you have allowed the erosion of freedoms that I consider your birthright; you will have started to fashion the key that fits the lock of the mental prison you will find yourself in, and you do not own that key. That's how it starts, so do not do it. If you find yourself in a relationship with another person, group or institution that begins to try to take away some of your rights, and the situation is too big for you to deal with
head-on
, find a side door and get out. Once you are in a safer position, you can take action to disempower that person or group.

Fifteen

The Hole

For years, life bumped along relatively unpleasantly as I have described, until the beginning of 2004 when David instituted something that later became infamous as “the Hole.” Stories abound on the Internet about the abuses that occurred in the Hole, but no one, to my knowledge, has come forward with the rationale, if you can call it that, for its formation.

Around 1979, L. Ron Hubbard determined that lack of proper marketing was the reason for the disappointing expansion of Scientology. He began a study of marketing texts and wrote numerous policy letters about marketing as it relates to Scientology. He ordered the establishment of a sizable marketing unit. He also decreed that if the management of Scientology ever dismantled marketing, the managerial arm itself was to be shut down and reconstructed.

David used that order as a pretense to shut down management and confine executives to their offices, which at the time consisted of a pair of
double-wide
renovated trailers that had conference rooms, offices and cubicles where management executives worked. At one point, iron bars were placed over windows, and a guard stood outside the only exit 24 hours a day. International management executives along with executives from Gold, as well as other staff members David believed were a drag on his time and attention, were thrown into this purgatory. According to multiple accounts, people were not permitted to leave. While they were not particularly cramped for space, the conditions in the Hole were miserable. People who were there have told me that they slept on the floor under desks or in offices in sleeping bags. Once a day they were marched down to the estates' maintenance building for a shower. They ate leftovers from the galley. Debbie Cook, a former Scientology executive, testified in a lawsuit that David had the
air-conditioning
turned off as punishment during a
two-week
stretch in the summer of 2007 when temperatures reached over 100 degrees. After Cook's testimony, the church issued a statement saying that Cook was “clearly bitter and falsely vilifying the religion she once was a part of.''

The daily activities of people in the Hole consisted of either writing down or verbally confessing their sins. Ostensibly, they were following Hubbard's protocol to get back into good graces within the group and Scientology in general. That procedure contained a series of steps one had to follow after having been declared a “suppressive person,” in other words, someone dedicated to the destruction of Scientology. That this would even be considered possible among the group of people who were inarguably the most dedicated Scientologists in the world tells you immediately how screwball the whole affair was. Despite the accounts of former members who experienced it firsthand, the church, in the person of a lawyer who was not under oath, put out a statement denying that the Hole ever existed.

According to those who were in the Hole, the routine of people sitting in a room and writing page after page of their transgressions day after day later devolved into each of these people standing before the other restricted personnel and confessing their misdeeds or evil intentions. As described by Mike Rinder, a former top executive in the church, and other former Sea Org members, these group confessions were often brutal affairs. One person was directed to stand in front of the group (all told there must have been about 100 people in the Hole at various times) and confess the ways in which he or she had been ineffective on the job, hampered the expansion of Scientology and, worst of all, sabotage all the work David was doing to salvage Scientology (from who or what was never made clear). People formerly confined to the Hole say that if they failed to confess or their confessions were deemed disingenuous, the person was screamed at and often slapped, pushed and punched by other persons held there. Per published accounts, this went on for weeks, which turned into months, and some executives spent five to seven years locked up there. The church denies that David has fostered a management culture that encourages physical abuse and says that when he learned that executives were physically abusing staff members, he put a stop to it and demoted the perpetrators.

One day I came out of the music rehearsal building, which was just a stone's throw from where all this insanity was going on. Outside the trailers was a large
U-Haul
truck, just sitting there. Hmm, I speculated, they must be getting rid of some old furniture or maybe buying new stuff. Maybe some stuff has to be moved from the other side of the property. I had no idea what that truck was doing there, but two days later it was gone, and I only recently found out why it was there. It was another cruel ruse cooked up by David to further nullify the people in the Hole. People at Gold had no idea what was going on inside the building at the
time—and
if anybody did know, they weren't talking.

Here is what multiple people who were involved told me and the press: One evening, David came down to the Hole from his office carrying a boom box. He announced to the captives that he was going to show them what their inactivity, incompetence and evil intentions were doing to the rest of humanity. He said they were going to play a game of musical chairs, and the song he had selected to play was Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the lyrics to which include this famous line, just to drive the point home: “Nothing really matters to me.”

He further explained that anyone put out of the game would be banished from the base. They would be reposted to a small and failing church somewhere in a far corner of the globe. They would be separated from their spouse or other family members. Again, at the time, the people at Gold had no idea this had occurred, but I have been told it was traumatic for many. The
U-Haul
sitting outside was to be used to gather people's belongings. He had plane tickets booked to the far corners of the Scientology world: Australia, Africa, New Zealand. He made the threat very, very real. I have spoken to people who were forced to participate, and the stories are not pleasant. They say no one dared to call David on the charade he was enacting, and people played the game for blood. Clothes were torn, people were thrown around, chairs were broken. The most insane thing about it was that people were actually fighting to stay! In the end nobody was sent away. The next day people were left wondering when they would be moved off the base, but after a day or two they began to realize the whole thing had been nothing more than a threat and a demonstration of the cruelty of which David was capable. The church told the
Tampa Bay Times
that the accounts of the musical chairs game by Mike Rinder and other former executives are overblown. The church claims that David was just trying to make a point about how personnel transfers are like “musical chairs” and can harm a group's progress.

My wife, Becky, once heard David tell a church employee being considered for promotion that Hubbard had instructed David to disband and
re-form
management if marketing ceased to be an important priority. As I said, David's justification for starting the Hole was that marketing had shrunk beyond an irreducible minimum. Yet the flaw in his reasoning is illustrated by his not having followed the second part of Hubbard's order: to reconstruct management. To this day, so far as I know, no international management structure has been
re-formed
with executives authorized to run assigned areas. In fact, the overall structure of base organizations was thrown into confusion at about the time the Hole was created, with different units merged then separated, and then merged again; organizations were moved to one building, then back to their earlier location. Mass confusion was the order of the day, a day that lasted for years and, for all I know, might still be going on.

What's more, the person who dismantled marketing was David himself. My wife and close friends who worked in marketing tell me that with unrealistic time expectations, capricious rejections, changing his mind about broad strategies that were not communicated clearly but only tossed off in passing—“Oh, and by the way that plan X has to change”—as well as through micromanaging every aspect of most marketing work, people had no real option other than to leave the area, either by escaping (called “blowing”) or being relieved of one's duties (being “busted”). So marketing dwindled. Per the organizational structure, there should have been at least half a dozen layers of management between the marketing staff and David, yet requests for marketing decisions went directly to him, and anyone in between was reduced to a rubber stamp, catching hell if they failed to submit paperwork to David on time. David always wanted things
now!
In that sense he is not unlike the
three-year
-old
who sees something and wants it immediately, except that David has the unlimited and unquestioned authority to demand it.

Becky worked in the marketing area for years and told me what life was like there. Some of the things David did with marketing give insight into the way he has mismanaged Scientology all over the world. Over time, the number of people in marketing had dwindled. Many of the departures were, you guessed it, the direct result of one of David's meddlesome,
spur-of
-
the
-moment
orders. Then, six months later, he would find out how few people were left in marketing (often because of the insanely executed increase in personnel in another area), and he would pronounce himself shocked at the state of the area. He would go on a campaign to immediately bolster the marketing staff, and that, of course, necessitated taking personnel from another area, with the result that those areas now were becoming understaffed. This kind of “du jour” management style, capriciously focusing on one area this week and another area next week, kept the organization in a general state of turmoil, as you can imagine. The only stable thing about the organization at the base was its instability.

David had a way of doing the same thing with individual staffers. Someone who was doing well on the job would come into favor with David. The staff member would be held up as an example of someone who was effective, productive and, most important, getting things done that COB wanted done. The object of this adulation naturally began to feel pretty good, especially in light of the general attitude toward most staff members, either that they were nobodies or people who were, in David's words, actively sabotaging what he was trying to accomplish. Since COB had made himself the unquestioned authority for all of Scientology, word that someone had received praise or acknowledgment from him spread quickly through the ranks, and that person quickly became known as being in David's good graces. What usually followed was a promotion to a position with greater responsibility because David was always on the lookout for people he thought might be able to help him manage some area of Scientology so he would not be saddled with “doing everything myself,” his most common refrain. Oftentimes, his latest “golden child” came from an organization that was lower than Gold in the Scientology hierarchy and was brought to the international headquarters at Gold. David would, of course, have briefed the anointed one on what he, David, thought of the organizations and units on the base and instilled his attitudes in his new favorite; these attitudes were invariably negative about everything at the base, so the new executive would be disaffected from the outset.

It became fairly predictable that within six months, or a year at most, the golden child would fall out of favor and be removed from the job or even relegated to the Hole with the rest of management. This scenario was repeated often enough that the more hardened base staff would see a new executive as part of David's entourage and say under their breath, “Enjoy the honeymoon while it lasts, sucker.”

The result of such treatment was that the people around David spent their lives
roller-skating
on bongo
boards—they
were constantly off balance. David had ways of keeping people off kilter. He might go into a meeting about, say, a marketing submission, and in attendance would be not only people from marketing but also executives in charge of marketing and even the senior executives for that area. Now, these other executives also had other areas of responsibility in addition to marketing. David might walk into the meeting and fire off pointed questions at one of the attending execs about something that was “flapping” (an unexpected emergency that is not being handled) in another part of that person's job. He might tear into the executive about the flap for a minute or two before getting down to the actual business of the meeting. The person who received the dressing down would leave the meeting completely rattled, but others who had been present also felt destabilized because they knew well that they could have been singled out. As a highly energetic micromanager, David knew just about everything of importance that was happening on the base, often more than the executive whose area it was, and you could see he took a measure of satisfaction in informing others of something flapping in a certain area.

He wore mirrored sunglasses, the kind that hide the eyes, which made it difficult to read whether some remark he made was a joke or serious. He took obvious pleasure in keeping others guessing about what he meant by a statement he had made. He could say something in jest to someone who did not know how to take it and that person would then be hit with a sharp “Why aren't you laughing?” It worked both ways. Someone might say something humorous, and you could not tell how he took it because you could not see his eyes. The worst thing of all was when you thought he was joking and laughed when he was serious. Then you were done for. “What the hell is so goddamned funny?!” Gulp.

Another technique he used was to brief the base and use the occasion to denigrate a particular person or several people, depending on his mood, in front of the assembled staff. One leading executive, once a close friend of David's, became the subject of an entire briefing in which the executive's supposed attempts to “undercut and even overthrow Dave” (or so one witness told us) were laid out in detail for all to hear. The net result, of course, was to turn everybody on the base against the poor man. He was subsequently banished to live in a literal swamp on the base property for a year. He had to build his own
lean-to
out of bamboo and tarps and was restricted to a
fenced-in
area of maybe an acre.