The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (25 page)

Russell was also accused of the assassination of a Cold War defector. ‘They found out that I was in East Berlin at a time when an American rock star called Dean Reed who was a Communist and had defected to the east, killed himself in 1986. I was there to interview him but that weekend he killed himself. And they discovered that my wife had been born in East Germany and put two and two together and made five and were convinced that I had murdered Dean Reed. They fielded a lot of private detectives, one of them was Eugene Ingram. They tracked down all the friends that I have in the United States and here in Britain. I found out where this guy was staying and called him and said: “What are you doing?” He said: “We are pretty sure you killed Dean Reed and we are going to prove it.”’

Had Russell killed Dean?

‘No, I hadn’t.’

Stasi files, released after the Wall came down, show that Reed committed suicide.

Russell was asked by the first ex-Scientologist he interviewed in LA: ‘“Are you being followed?” And I said no, I have never been followed in my whole life. So that alerted me and then I realised that I was being followed. They had a different car every day. The car would be at the end of the street. The car would pick me as I went off to do my job. It was distressing. You think, this is madness, this is paranoia gone crazy. What are these people doing? They obviously wanted to know what I was doing and who I was interviewing.’

He summed up his experience of the Church of Scientology: ‘These people are so brainwashed that they don’t understand what is happening to them. It is only when they get out of the organisation that they understand what is happening.’

In 1991 it was the turn of Richard Behar of
TIME
magazine to be the centre of the Church’s attention. He was followed so regularly that he started commuting by roller-blade, so that he could spin around, and roll along against the traffic on Fifth Avenue in New York to lose the vehicles tailing him.

Behar wrote: ‘Strange things seem to happen to people who write about Scientology. For the
TIME
story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me.’

One of them was ex-cop and private eye, Eugene Ingram.

‘A copy of my personal credit report, with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number, had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, “Educational Funding Services” of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology’s headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology’s attorneys “had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them.” He says now, “These are vicious people. These are vipers.” Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam.’

Behar hadn’t finished: ‘During the past five months, private investigators have been contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbours to a former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit rating, it’s excellent) and whether I’ve ever had trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven’t). One neighbour was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there.’

Behar still hadn’t finished: ‘An attorney subpoenaed me, while another falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about me, an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by the Church in affidavits to TIME’s lawyers as “proof” of my bias against Scientology.’

In 1997 it was the turn of Channel Four producers Jill Robinson and Simon Berthon, making a film for the
Secret Lives
series about L Ron Hubbard. Jill told the
Independent
and the
Daily Telegraph
how the Church of Scientology had reacted to their scrutiny. Jill went to the States on a research trip. Within days of her arrival, her production company started receiving messages from the Church’s headquarters saying they knew she was in LA. When she left her hotel room at 5am to go to Phoenix the man next door came out of his room at exactly the same time.

Jill’s brother worked in the US. When she dropped by his house, the phone went: it was the Church of Scientology, asking for Jill. When she went to a friend’s dinner party, a woman knocked at the door at 10.30 at night saying she needed water for her car radiator. Jill did not go to the door but she could hear the woman’s voice: she claims it was that of the guide who had led a group of visitors, including Jill, around the LA museum dedicated to Hubbard’s life. Her friend gave the woman the water but could see no sign of a car. Jill believes there wasn’t one at all. ‘It was their way of saying: “We’re here, we know you’re there,”’ she told the
Independent
.

When filming began, everywhere Channel Four went, the Church of Scientology, like Mary’s little lamb, was sure to go. They got hold of a copy of Jill’s shooting schedule. Cars tailed them. Weird phone calls bugged the crew in the middle of the night. In Denver, Jill and her crew took a wrong turning and ended up in an industrial wasteland; so did the tailing car. In San Francisco, her cameraman challenged the driver of a car watching them filming. He hid his face and sped off. In Florida, she and her crew went to a mall to do some shopping. They stopped a Volvo and asked the driver why he was following them. He said he was from New York and there were three of them on the job, getting paid to follow her around.

Back in England, while Jill was editing the film, her neighbour in Kent spotted a man loitering outside her house and called the police. He had not committed any offence and they let him go. His reason for being there was unconvincing. He did, however, tell police he was a Scientologist. Eugene Ingram came over to Kent to probe the horse riding stables where she kept her horse. That was not all. They even tracked down her parents and her hairdresser. ‘It’s a bit spooky,’ she told the
Telegraph
. ‘I just don’t see what it is they hope to achieve, except they seek to intimidate me.’

Jill’s exec, Simon Berthon, told the Telegraph that when friends began to complain that they had been visited by Ingram, the Church’s favourite private eye, he checked with 12 friends and relations whom he had recently telephoned from home. He said: ‘Out of 12 calls made, I have discovered that nine have been telephoned by a woman offering a free magazine if they take part in a TV viewing-habit survey and give their name and address.’ Three of those nine had subsequently been visited by Ingram. ‘This is well beyond coincidence,’ said Mr Berthon.

The Telegraph
reported that among them was a friend and neighbour, Charlotte Joll, whom he had telephoned recently to accept a children’s-party invitation for his daughter. Charlotte said: ‘Last Friday afternoon a man rang on the doorbell showing me his private investigator’s licence and then asked me if I knew someone he was trying to get in touch with. He showed me three photographs of a man I had never seen before and said this guy was wanted for some kind of offence to do with getting money fraudulently. I had no idea what it was about. Then he mentioned Simon Berthon’s name. Did I know him? I said “Yes, our children are friends.” I then remembered that our au pair had told me a couple of days earlier that she had been rung by someone purporting to do be doing research on our television viewing habits, offering her a year’s subscription to her favourite magazine and asking for our address.’

Another of Mr Berthon’s friends who was asked to take part in a telephone survey was Dorothy Byrne, the then editor of ITV’s The Big Story. She said that

Ingram had telephoned her at her office, saying that he was a private detective investigating extortion, and asking for information about Simon and Jill.

Dorothy said: ‘I told him that Simon was one of the most highly regarded people in television. I also told him that in Britain we don’t really appreciate private detectives hanging around outside people’s houses. Then on Friday I received a phone call from a woman saying that she was doing a survey of TV viewing habits.’

In all, Jill Robinson, Simon Berthon, the associate producer, the cameraman, the sound recordist, the picture editor, the assistant cameraman and the composer of the music had visits from Ingram and his colleagues.

The Independent
got in touch with Mike Rinder, who told the paper that documentary evidence about Hubbard had been provided to Channel 4. It was not true, Mike maintained, that the Church had refused to co-operate - quite the contrary. The programme-makers had ignored the Church’s offers of access.

Mike Rinder said that behind Jill’s sources ‘were repeated threats against the church and demands for payments of tens of millions of dollars’. Channel 4, alleged Mike, had missed the real Hubbard story - of his ‘solutions to the social ills of drugs, illiteracy and crime’ and the ‘more than 40 million who have been touched by his non-religious moral code; and the many millions who hold his work to be the cornerstone of their lives.’

Mole had studied what had happened to our journalist colleagues who had gone down the same path ahead of us. She predicted that the Church of Scientology would attack me and attack me and attack me. Before we flew out to the United States Mole had said: ‘You’re going to be like the tethered goat in
Jurassic Park
, bleating as the Tyrannosaurus Rex comes to get you. All you have to do is bleat. You can bleat, can’t you?’ I told her I could.

Everything had gone to plan. Every time Tommy and Mike turned up, at the hotel at midnight, at Plant City, at the top of the car park in Clearwater with Shawn Lonsdale, every time we were followed, every time the private eye in the cowboy hat turned up – it was all part of Mole’s brilliant tethered goat plan. The Church of Scientology had fallen into her trap, again and again and again. Our only goal was to film every attack. The one thing she did not predict was the behaviour of the tethered goat. I did not bleat. Or perhaps I did, but after too much of them, I ended up lowering my head and charging. Not, then, a Tethered Goat. An Un-Tethered Rhino, more like.

So what happened in the Mind Control section was, I think, that two traps went off at exactly the same time. I fell into Tommy’s trap. But he – and they – fell into Mole’s, again.

Incredibly, weirdly, madly everything continued as though nothing had happened. After losing it, I felt nervous and jumpy, and you can clearly see me on the rushes, appearing strained, anxious, worried. In the grammar of television I had made a career-killing mistake. I was almost certainly finished at the BBC; our whole documentary could be killed by BBC management, hugely embarrassed by their fruitcake reporter who could not interview anyone without screaming at them. What the Church’s agents described in Sci’gy-Leaks as my usual ‘arrogance’ was gone. I was, of course, in the wrong. I do believe that. People in the public eye should hold their temper. I had lasted, what, six or seven days (I couldn’t be sure) with them. It felt like six or seven years. I wanted to run away, to talk through my catastrophic loss of control with Mole and Bill. But Tommy and Mike wouldn’t let me.

Weirdly – and I am sorry for the repetition of the adverb, but no other will suffice – Tommy and Mike helped me get my composure back because they carried on attacking me, calling me a bigoted reporter. I carried on telling them that some say they belonged to a brainwashing cult. It was as if I had never done my rhino impersonation at all.

Of course, they knew that we were making a long-form documentary, and it would take us at least a month to cut, edit and legal our film. And therefore it made good tactical sense for them to keep their powder dry. But still, it was beyond strange.

So, after the shout, it was back to the same old battle. Tommy said: ‘So you, John Sweeney, are a bigot, and you are biased and you are incapable of objective reporting, and you have no leg to stand on.’

I have two legs to stand on, I replied. The BBC will fairly and accurately report your view.

An ocean of argy-bargy later, I put to Tommy the stories on the internet that David Miscavige spits at people.

Tommy replied: ‘That is disgusting. It couldn’t even be further from the truth. David Miscavige is a personal friend of mine, I have known him for over 16 years, my entire adult life. He is the kindest, most humane, most caring, most generous, hardest working person I have ever met or had the privilege to know.’

Has he ever thumped anyone?

‘Absolutely not,’ said Tommy, before committing a very rare slip of the tongue: ‘And you continue with these gross allegations I will go after you for slibel…for libel and slander.’

For slibel?

‘I am just combining the two. It is a good one we will put it in the dictionary. Anyway the point is it is libellous and it is slanderous for you to level such accusations that the leader of the Church of Scientology is anything other than a genuine honest and straightforward person. And you know what every accusation that you are levelling has been investigated at enormous length whether it is courts of law or the Internal Revenue Service for the purpose of determining the charitable status and religious nature of Scientology and every single one of them was found to be utterly and completely false.’

We carried on bashing each other for a bit. I asked to interview Miscavige, again.

Tommy replied: ‘He won’t give an interview to you John Sweeney. Do you know why? Because I wouldn’t ever in a million years put him anywhere near your presence. You are bigoted, unobjective, biased, disgustingly despicable bottom feeding tabloid issues, slanderous libellous presence.’