Ruthless (15 page)

The result of the way David ran things was that people generally felt their jobs were in danger or that wholesale changes might be made in their area at any time. As you would conclude, every area of the base that David was involved in was frantically busy while producing almost nothing of value except under extreme duress.

David used one other tactic, not just on marketing people but on nearly everyone on the
base—sleep
deprivation. It became a source of tremendous pain (but also a twisted sense of pride if you could manage to stay awake during the ordeal) for someone to go without sleep for days on end after David had issued an
impossible-to
-achieve
deadline. That was the way he instigated the practice. He never expressly demanded that people go without sleep. He did, however, demand, time and again, that something “better be done by the time I come in in the morning,” which of course meant staying up all night to complete the task. Often, meetings during which David issued the demand ran well into the evening, sometimes hours beyond what was necessary to communicate the order.

Well, as any fool knows, going without sleep makes it harder to think, which results in poor decisions and mistakes. Naturally, David, well rested and fed when he arrived at work the following day, would spot the typos or poorly
thought-out
proposal, blow a gasket and send the submission back in flames; then the whole thing would begin again, resulting in even more mistakes. Meanwhile, people went without sleep. The situation became chronic for some staff members, and it was not unusual for people to exist for months on a few hours of sleep a night, rarely seeing their own beds and often sleeping at their desks or on the office carpet.

Sleep deprivation spread nearly
base-wide
around event time, when David's usual state of bad temper ramped up to new levels. His excuse was that he was surrounded by incompetents, and the only one he could count on to hold the line on quality was himself. Of course, demanding a standard of quality that is absolute or unobtainable is just another way to gum up the works and bring everything to a halt. I think David knew this and from time to time imposed these standards simply because he could. In his mind, everyone else who was working on the show was useless or, worse, out to sabotage the entire event. So, in addition to having to deal with the dead tiredness, lack of proper meals, no showers, no changes of clothes and a routine of coffee and cigarettes, people also were subjected to doses of invalidation and nullification dished out multiple times per day. It was nuts.

I was never thrown into the Hole, and neither was most of the Gold staff; nevertheless, the effects of the Hole seeped into the organization and made life even more distasteful, if that was possible. David engineered this by throwing some or all of the Gold executives into the Hole for a couple of weeks. When they were released, they were expected to take the lessons they had learned during their incarceration and apply them to the rest of Gold. And they did. There were frequent daily verbal and even physical fights among the general staff. Upbraiding people at musters and staff meetings became the standard mode of operation. What became known as “group seances” occurred at
Gold—personnel
responsible for areas that were “flapping” were forced to stand in front of the entire group and confess their sins, as was done in the Hole. The allusion to seances was sarcastic, since the purported purpose of these exercises was to create a magical change in the overall organization wherein Gold would suddenly become a cohesive, productive team overnight. I hope that I am communicating at least a whisper of the craziness of these times.

Nullification of junior staffers by senior staffers became the norm. At the weekly staff meetings or on random occasions, the staff was gathered and various people would be brought to the front and ordered to “tell the group what you are doing to sabotage COB's orders.” If the person came up with something to satisfy the growing bloodlust, people would shout out, “What else did you do?” “When?” “Why?” and badger the person. At times, these group confessions were not dissimilar to descriptions in
Lord of the Flies.

On Saturdays, the general schedule was a bit different than on weekdays. People were allowed out of their offices to work around the base, helping maintain the grounds or work on new construction projects. For most, it was the best day of the week. Being outdoors, getting some fresh air, learning to do something new was a joy compared to the rest of the week. People worked on renovations until dinner. In the evening there might be a base briefing from COB or the playing of one of Hubbard's lectures. All the units on the base attended; it was mandatory. RTC people were also there but not to enjoy the lecture. A half dozen of them would stand along each wall of the dining hall. Their job was to scan the audience and look for any staff members who might be falling asleep, looking disagreeable about anything being said, not paying attention, whatever. After the briefing or lecture, the guilty parties were hauled into the ethics section of their unit and worked over for “not being with the program.” We've all heard similar stories, but usually they are associated with Red China or East Germany, not an officially recognized church in the United States of America.

The end result of these tactics was that David instilled such fear in people that if he gave an order and someone misinterpreted it and did something wrong, that person was certain they would be crushed. People became stimulus response robots. Fear pervaded the base, and, no doubt, there are people still there, as well as those who have left, who are scarred by the abuse.

I have mentioned the way David compensated for his small size at school by picking fights, but I am positive that there was another, much more important, influence that shaped the way he behaved as leader of the church. And this influence was L. Ron Hubbard himself.

Back in Mount Carmel, a lot of guys joined one of the branches of the military after high school. One weekend after boot camp, I was back home, hanging out, and there was a guy who had joined the Air Force and also was on leave. We were just sitting around talking, and I, as well as some others, noticed that this guy was now talking with a southern accent. Somewhere in the Air Force he had picked up a southern accent! People from Mount Carmel do not talk like that. We said nothing but figured that he was not being himself. It was like he was wearing the personality of someone else, probably a superior. Scientology calls this being in another person's valence.
Valence
is just a fancy word for identity.

I never met or worked with L. Ron Hubbard, but I have known a number of people who
did—quite
a few, in fact, including some of the original messengers who were with him on the
Apollo.
All have told me that he could be absolutely horrible to work with at times. Just a frothing, screaming madman when he was in a foul mood and things were not going well around him. David worked with him enough to witness these outbursts many, many times. Unlike everybody else who also saw these tantrums, David apparently used these as mentoring experiences. He, of course, adopted them with the energy and dedication that he did everything else in Scientology. He has taken LRH's valence, I am convinced of it.

But Hubbard also had a sunny side. He could be compassionate and caring, and his general demeanor was pretty cheerful. In fact, I am told that he was more often sunny than thundering. David must never have paid attention to that part of Hubbard's personality, because in my many last years of associating with David, the sun rarely, if ever, shone.

Sixteen

Assessing My Son

Power tends to corrupt,

and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Great men are almost always bad men.

—Lord Acton, British historian and member of Parliament

That, in a nutshell, describes what happened to David
Miscavige after he joined the Sea Org in 1976. The dynamics there were vastly different from what he grew up with at home. The Sea Org has a rigid hierarchy, and the higher one moves on the ladder, the more power one accumulates. David entered this environment right after leaving home, where he had me and his mother, as well as his siblings, kids at school and his teachers, who could exercise some restraint on him if he got out of line. In the Sea Org, the game was much like Chutes and Ladders, where you could climb high quickly but slide down just as quickly. He had entered a more dynamic situation and relished it. If you were energetic and
gung-ho
, you could climb the ladder rapidly.

By virtue of his status as a Commodore's Messenger, he had already been granted a considerable amount of leverage over most other Sea Org members, even those who had been in Scientology for decades. That first assignment of his, which I mentioned earlier, conferred great disciplinary powers on him when he was sent on a mission, and he used those powers liberally but not in a good way. A friend told me that David once watched her work on a cleaning detail. He stood there with arms folded for a few minutes and then disappeared. A short time later, her superior came around and began yelling at her for not working fast enough. On two other occasions, David returned, observed her work and complained to her superior; she got two more lectures about not working hard enough.

Later on, David became the person in charge of running all the missions, a promotion that increased his power. By virtue of that job, he could affect any organization in the entire Scientology network.

I've already described how David, at the expense of executives senior to him in the Commodore's Messenger Organization, made himself indispensable to L. Ron Hubbard while in his position as Special Pjt Ops. Part of this involved a corporate restructuring of the entire church that established three distinct entities that were, in theory, meant to serve as checks and balances on one another and thus stabilize Scientology for the future. The three organizations were the Church of Spiritual Technology (CST), which was the final repository for all of Hubbard's Scientology materials; the Religious Technology Center (RTC), which owns the trademarks and advanced materials of Scientology; and the Church of Scientology International (CSI), which manages the church and all related entities. Boards of trustees with lifetime appointments were established. When the church settled its
long-running
battle for tax exemption with the IRS in 1993, the documents filed with the IRS included the board appointments, so there is a record of the names. A good friend of mine, Terri Gamboa, was appointed a trustee of CST while she was in the Sea Org, but she never knew it until years after she had left the organization and saw the incorporation papers that are now public record. David, it seems, never told her of her appointment.

David ultimately became chairman of the board of RTC, though for several years he was occupied with another job. One reason for the corporate reorganization was to create legal separation between Hubbard and church operations. The solution was creation of an organization ostensibly designed to promote his literary affairs. This new unit was called Author Services, Inc. (ASI), and David was its head. He oversaw every aspect of ASI, including Hubbard's income and finances. Hubbard, though in seclusion, was still viewed as the head of all Scientology. All authority rested with him, and thus a system of checks and balances was unnecessary.

ASI's finance department invested Hubbard's money from time to time. A couple of employees made bad investments, and each lost $1 million of Hubbard's money. Both were removed. Dave and Pat Broeker then decided that they would take over the investments. Pat, as I mentioned before, was an old friend of David's from their days at the base in La Quinta. Pat and his wife, Annie, were Hubbard's closest aides during the last years of his life. Terri Gamboa, who also worked at ASI, says the two friends became heavily involved in speculation in oil wells using Hubbard's money.

A bit more about Terri: her mother, Yvonne Gillham, was considered royalty in Scientology; she was a dynamic, charismatic woman who headed Scientology's Celebrity Centre for years. Terri was one of Hubbard's messengers aboard the
Apollo
and as such held important executive positions in later years. When ASI was formed, Terri became its executive director, so she was in a position to know everything that went on, including the details of the investments that David and Pat Broeker were making. Terri claims that, through their financial wizardry, the two lost a ton of Hubbard's money in oil wells that turned up dry. Terri says the way David broke the news to the ASI staff was not “Pat and I lost the money.” It was “We [meaning the whole organization, ASI] lost the money and now you [again meaning ASI] need to make it back.”

She says that David became intent on recouping the losses before Hubbard found out. The plan he came up with included selling expensive special editions of Hubbard's books and art prints of book covers. Terri says that the staff of ASI was pushed hard to sell these items, and soon they were making $500,000 or more per week from these items alone.

David's brutal side began to appear more and more often. Once, he ordered every person at ASI to spit on a staff member who had fallen out of favor with David. According to that former staff member, the episode occurred while he was being interrogated on the
E-meter
with all ASI staffers watching while David shouted questions at him. To their credit, everyone but David and one other person refused to spit on the man; David and his accomplice chewed tobacco before their despicable display. The church has long denied that David engages in punishment of this kind.

For many years, David and Pat Broeker were close friends, confidants and confederates. After Hubbard's death, Pat and Annie were essentially the leaders of Scientology. Hubbard was said to have given them Sea Org ranks in a published issue before his death that basically cemented their authority over everyone else in the Sea Org. The authorship of that issue is open to dispute, however, and David had a different idea about who should control Scientology. A power struggle ensued between the erstwhile friends. A year later, David won.

Pat held one important pawn in the struggle: Scientology's most advanced technical materials in the form of Hubbard's own auditing folders, as well as notes that contained the instructions for higher levels of spiritual attainment that had yet to be released or even codified. That work was meant to fall to senior technical people after Hubbard's demise. Broeker had these materials securely locked away in a location where Dave could not get at them. This gave Pat leverage. According to Mark Fisher, David's former assistant who oversaw corporate liaisons between David and the different entities he was involved with, the only other person who knew the location of the unreleased technical materials was Annie, Broeker's wife, and Dave went to work on her. Eventually, he pried from Annie where the materials were hidden. Former Scientology executive Marty Rathbun told the
Tampa Bay Times
that he and David executed a plan to get the materials from Pat and Annie. According to Rathbun, David arranged a meeting with lawyers in Washington, D.C., that both he and Pat had to attend. Meanwhile, Rathbun positioned about 20 men outside the Broekers' ranch in Barstow, California. During a layover in Chicago, David called Rathbun and gave the signal to grab the materials. Rathbun says he then fed the caretaker at the Broekers' ranch a line that the FBI was going to raid the place in two hours. The story worked. Rathbun's men were let in and they carted the materials away, storing them safely at the Int base near Hemet. The church has consistently denied the accounts of former executives as the lies of disgruntled apostates.

His one and only chip now gone, Broeker, too, was soon gone. At that point, sometime in 1987, David gained uncontested power over Scientology. Now no one in all of Scientology had the authority or courage to tell him no. The fact of his struggle with the Broekers is the only proof I need that Hubbard never selected David to succeed him.

David left Los Angeles and moved back to the Int base. His first order of business was to clean house at the Religious Technology Center, purging the executives and staff there whom he believed had sided with Pat during the power struggle. In actual fact, they had simply been following Pat's directions while David was in Los Angeles running Author Services.

To revisit Lord Acton, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I am not so arrogant as to presume that if I ever found myself in a position of holding absolute power that it wouldn't affect me in ways I cannot imagine, so I can only speculate about what may have contributed to David's corruption. And, for certain, he has become corrupt. When I compare the happy,
fun-loving
boy I raised to the man he has become, the images of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde spring immediately to mind.

In his position of absolute authority in Scientology, David became surrounded more and more by brownnosers and
yes-men
and -women. He never went anywhere without an entourage, so if a
low-level
executive thought that what David was proposing was nuts, objecting would have been political suicide. I suppose that after everyone agrees with your every pronouncement long enough, you begin to believe that you can do no wrong, and this certainly happened with Dave.

The more elevated he became in the eyes of his associates, however, the more he tended to express exasperation with them. The traits I mentioned earlier became more and more evident: the sharp rebukes became daily occurrences and the
tongue-lashings
more brutal. As time went on, David began to express his dislike for the base and its people. It got to the point that, during the week, when staff members dressed in uniforms, David and his closest associates dressed in civilian clothes. On weekends, when staffers dressed in civvies, David dressed in full Sea Org uniform. The less he associated with people on the base the better, he felt, and this distinction in dress made the point symbolically.

None of these changes happened overnight. For years, he ate his meals in the dining room with the rest of the crew. He flew in coach or business class, not the private jets he takes today. His uniforms, while better tailored, essentially matched everyone else's. His office was of the same size and had the same furnishings as those of other RTC executives. The room that he and his wife lived in was nicer than other rooms, but he paid for the special features out of his own pocket.

One thing that anybody who has known him will affirm: David has the capacity to work very hard. It was nothing for him to work through the night if that was what the task at hand required, at least in the years before he assumed full control of the church. Basically, he could outwork anybody, and, to be honest, he was probably smarter than anybody around him. That is a great combination if it is driven by good intentions.

I recall one Saturday morning in the
mid-1980s
when he came up to Gold from Author Services in Los Angeles. He had been up all night working on reports that would be sent to Hubbard, and someone who was returning to the base drove David's van while he slept on the carpeted floor in the back. When the van arrived at the base, he was still sound asleep, and I carried him from the van to his room, just as I had done when he was a little kid.

Beyond the usual
day-to
-day
concerns and headaches of the base demanding his work and attention, there was another factor pulling at
David—the
seductive lure of celebrity, most particularly in the person of Tom Cruise. This began around 1990, when Cruise was preparing to shoot
Days of Thunder.
Dave went to Daytona, Florida, where Tom was doing research for his role. When David returned to the base, he pulled his top executives into a conference room and showed them a video of Tom and him jumping out of an airplane and skydiving in tandem. The time they spent together obviously left David deeply impressed with the PR potential that Cruise could lend to Scientology. And to Dave.

The first time Tom came to the base, which also was their first meeting, David was on pins and needles, wanting to be sure that everything would be suitably impressive. At that time it was very
hush-hush
that Tom was even involved with Scientology. All the records of his auditing sessions were kept in folders labeled with his given name, Thomas Mapother. Tom had been audited in Los Angeles by auditors who were not in the Sea Org, and he was then married to Mimi Rogers, the daughter of Phil Spickler, a longtime and noted Scientologist. Spickler had run afoul of the organization some years before and had been excommunicated, so to speak. David desperately wanted to get matters under tighter
control—that
is, under
his
control—and
one of his top lieutenants, Greg Wilhere, had finally arranged to bring Tom to the base for a stay and some auditing.

David orchestrated every detail for maximum impact on his guest. A special dinner was prepared by Hubbard's former chef to be served at the base swimming pool/recreational area, which had been given a complete makeover some years before (for just such occasions). Now the area looked like a clipper ship, complete with
50-foot
masts with sails, a teak deck and even a lifeboat. Nothing had been overlooked. Schedules in Los Angeles did not cooperate, however, and Tom was late arriving. The appointed hour came and went, as did the next two hours. David paced around anxiously, demanding, “Are they here yet?”