The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (38 page)

Clearly,
Trapped In The Closet
as far as the Church of Scientology is concerned was no laughing matter. There is no suggestion that either Tom Cruise or John Travolta knew of or condoned this spying operation on the satire show.

One of the very weirdest things among the host of weird things I have learned during the past few years is that ex-Scientologists have created among themselves quite the best intelligence network I have ever come across – and that includes MI6, the Russian FSB, the CIA, the Chinese State Security Bureau, the Belarus KGB, Saddam’s Mukhabarat, Mugabe’s C10, Ceausescu’s Securitate, Albania’s Segurimi and the Czech StB back in 1988 whom I dodged to see Vaclav Havel. They know so much about Hollywood, power, Clinton and Blair, sex, money. Their network stretches around the planet. But their speciality is, of course, the Church of Scientology.

In the autumn of 2012 I just happened to be in a pub in Soho downing a swift pint when I phoned a member of the ex-Sci network. The pub was noisy. A few feet away a gang of drunks were singing Abba’s
Knowing Me, Knowing You.
Bloody drunks. Through the din of the Scandinavian threnody to a defunct love affair I distinctly heard the words: ‘Tommy Davis has left…’

I was so astonished I left my pint in the pub and raced out to the street to hear the ex-Sci properly: ‘Tommy Davis has left the Sea Org. He’s quit California and started a new life selling real estate in Texas.’

You could have knocked me down with a copy of L Ron Hubbard’s
Battlefield Earth
. I zoned out and thought back to the first uber-weird moment – the midnight ambush – when both Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder were waiting for us at the hotel in Clearwater. Now both of them were out of the Church’s Holy Order. Astonishing.

The ex-Sci network might be good but it didn’t tell me everything because I still don’t know why Tommy left the Sea Org. I do know he’s told people that his allegiance has not changed, so he is still with the Church but no longer in the Sea Org, its high command. New people are talking officially on behalf of the Church and Tommy has gone off the radar. Whatever the cause of this, starting over in Texas is a long way from Gold.

Soon after that the ex-Sci network provided me with Tommy’s precise address. He once told me that he knew where I lived. Well, now I can return that favour.

Having heard and seen so much from so many different people since I first poked my nose into Scientology I think I now have some understanding of what it must have been like to be virtually born into the Church, as Tommy was. And as a human being, I can only feel sympathy for him.

Another thing: getting old is not good but one compensation is that if you live long enough you can watch what happens to your enemies. Sometimes they even become your friends. With that in mind, I flew from Colorado to Texas.

Tommy now lives 1,500 miles from Gold Base in a smart apartment block – Americans call it a condo – somewhere lovely in the Lone Star State. As I arrived at the front door a man in a Maserati convertible pulled up and an attention of valets fought to park it. I strode through the valets and marched towards the lift. The bad news is that I’d grown a beard and my clothes were still covered in dust from Trementina. The concierge thought I was a hobo and wouldn’t let me through the lobby so I left Tommy a note asking him to get in touch with me, if he ever wants to, along with a copy of my novel,
Elephant Moon
. It’s about elephants rescuing orphans on the run from the Japanese in Burma in 1942 and one of the heroes is an Indian officer who sides with the enemy – proof that I’m not a bigot.

At the time of writing, late November 2012, I have not heard from Tommy. I hope to meet him again. I imagine it would be like one of those reunions the chaps from the RAF and the Luftwaffe have, when they laugh and joke about that time during the Battle of Britain when they tried to kill each other. I wish Tommy well. The Church is under attack these days in a way that it was not back in 2007. But it still is extraordinarily rich and aggressive. Do not doubt its power. While we were making our second Panorama on the Church in 2010 we heard that the FBI was investigating the Church, too. They seemed to be asking the right people the right questions, and we kept our mouths shut about the FBI investigation. Nothing has happened. One ex-Scientologist who assisted the FBI told me: ‘They were good. They got it. The investigators we were talking to knew what they were doing. Then someone upstairs seemed to raise the stakes. They had to have video evidence of wrong-doing, an admission of guilt, or else nothing would happen.’

All I know for certain is that an FBI investigation was running and nothing has happened. It turned out, my source said, that the Church had more money and more resolve than the FBI. The thing that may have killed the investigation was the FBI was afraid of taking on an official religion. If true, that does not sound good. Of course, all of the above may well be untrue and the FBI investigation may have failed for the simple truth that there was nothing to investigate.

In my time as a reporter money and power always seem to get on sweetly; power and the poor, the wretched, even, perhaps, the ‘disconnected’ less so. So will the authorities, those in government, crack down on the Church of Fear? I doubt it.

This is a personal account of my time inside the Church’s embrace and I have deliberately concentrated on my first-hand experiences of the Church, events I can report directly and confidently because they happened to me with our cameras running and even that seemingly simple task has not been easy. But outside that narrow focus the Church seems to have been very successful at emerging intact from what appear to be great scandals, in particular in the United States. The Church has reportedly got a billion dollar war chest. Its teams of lawyers are ready to fight tooth and nail.

Take the tragedy of Scientologist Lisa McPherson. She was declared ‘Clear’ then dead in an embarrassingly short time frame in 1995 on David Miscavige’s watch as Leader. Florida’s medical examiner reported that Lisa had been the victim of negligent homicide and the Church was indicted on two charges, abuse and/or neglect of a disabled adult and practising medicine without a license. The case collapsed after the state’s medical examiner changed the cause of death to accidental in 2000. Ex-Scientologists say that there was a cover-up operation aimed at hiding Miscavige’s role. The Church and Miscavige deny that emphatically. Law suits related to the McPherson tragedy are still trundling through the courts but the Church has survived Lisa’s death – evidence, the critics say, of the power of the Church to block scrutiny. The Church denies that.

Narconon – Scientology’s anti-drug therapy praised in the House of Commons by Charles Hendry MP and by the Church’s celebrities to me – is now in trouble after a series of young addicts have collapsed and died in the Church’s treatment centres in worrying circumstances. But again the Church’s legal teams are working hard to prove the Church has done nothing wrong. The Church, of course, says exactly that: these personal tragedies do not reflect on the good work that Narconon does in treating thousands of addicts. The ex-Scientologists say Narconon kills people. It is fair to say that addicts die in non-Scientology centres all the time.

The evidence suggests that the authorities will not do very much to encumber the Church of Scientology. But that does not mean that ordinary people are powerless. Richard Behar, the
Time
magazine journalist who wrote ‘The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power’, once told me that in the long law suit between
Time
and the Church – which
Time
won – the thing the Church most seemed to be afraid of was the prospect of their celebrities being embarrassed.

Katie Holmes’ divorce from Tom Cruise is a seismic event in the glitzy media world, but ordinary Scientologists may have noticed that while they have to disconnect from their family members declared ‘Suppressive Persons’, Tom Cruise has not disconnected from his daughter Suri after his divorce. ‘If you meet Tom Cruise,’ says Claire Headley, ‘ask him about disconnection.’ Here in this book, I repeat my request to interview Tom Cruise. He is an action hero and an Operating Thetan. He will have nothing to fear from me.

In the mean time, the Church’s culture of celebrity endorsement could, the ex-Scientologists say, be reversed against itself. If Tom Cruise and John Travolta face public shame about some of the Church’s extraordinary conduct, then things might change, they say. Marc Headley, for example, does not choose to watch the latest Tom Cruise thriller. He would rather see his mother see his sons. The same goes for all the former members of the Church who have left: Mike Rinder is disconnected from his family, Amy Scobee from hers… The list is long and cruel.

The critics say the next time Tom Cruise or John Travolta or Kirstie Alley pop up on the sofas of Jonathan Ross or Jeremy Clarkson or Oprah Winfrey they should ask three questions:

‘Why can disconnecting grannies from grandsons be good?’

‘Who is Lord Xenu?’

‘What kind of Church hires private eyes?’

The answer is, of course, a Church of Fear.

John Sweeney, December, 2012.

THE END

NOTES

Introduction

‘John Sweeney is genuinely evil’ see: http://gettothechoppa
.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/john-sweeney-is-genuinely-evil/

‘Exploding tomato’ see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqR5NPhtLI and many other sites. Scientology & Me, the 2007 BBC Panorama documentary is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFRSt_viosc The Dalek impersonation is worth a watch, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLI1Al3S_pE

‘Hysterical rant’ from the
News of the World, May 13, 2007. Five years later Rupert Murdoch changed his tune, tweeting:
‘Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hierarchy.’

‘Secret police interrogator’: Charles Moore was writing in The Spectator, May 25, 2007.

‘Whose bunny was boiled’: watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecWhXP2jM28

‘Create the new reality’: watch Tom Cruise espouse Scientology here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0

Chapter One: First Contact

‘Psychotic, a bigot and a liar’: for the Church of Scientology’s considered view on the author:

http://www.freedommag.org/special-reports/bbc/panorama-exposed.html

http://www.freedommag.org/special-reports/bbc/panorama-desperate-lies.html

The first draft of this book was written before the Savile scandal engulfed the BBC in the autumn of 2012. What happened was wrong, and the failure of BBC Newsnight to broadcast the  stories of Savile abuse in 2011 compounded that wrong. But the BBC did air programmes strongly critical of BBC management, including a Panorama made by my colleagues and a BBC News Channel interview in which I openly criticized the then Director-General George Entwistle:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20024904

Entwistle faced difficult questions about his conduct from the BBC on air. Commentators have noted the contrast between the BBC’s openness to effective scrutiny and Entwistle’s subsequent resignation and the reactions of many newspaper groups to accusations of phone-hacking.

‘How warm space is’: http://www.xenu-directory.net/practices/ot.html

‘Con man’:
Bare Faced Messiah
, Russell Miller, London, 1987.

‘Mark of the Beast 666’:
L Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman
by Bent Corydon and L Ron Hubbard Junior, Lyle Stuart, New Jersey, 1987, p48.

‘Star shape behind’:
L Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman –
illustration opposite p195.

‘Wog’: Saint Hill Briefing Course-82 6611C29.

‘The production of plant mutations’:
Bare-Faced Messiah
, p305.

‘Mental therapy’: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/
Shelf/anderson/index.html

‘The other cheek’:
Believe What You Like, CH Rolph, Andre Deutsch, London, 1973
.  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/
Shelf/rolph/chr06.htm. Rolph, an former police officer, wrote about the Church and gave the warning about fatuous credulity at the start of this book.

‘Or destroyed’: HCO Policy letter of 18
October 1967, LRH directed: ‘Enemy- SP Order. Fair Game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.’

‘In 1984…’ http://www.gerryarmstrong.org/50grand/legal/
a1/breckenridge-decision.html

‘His autopsy…’ http://www.xenu.net/archive/hubbardcoroner/
hubbard_toxicology_report.jpg

‘Discarded the body…’ http://www.xenu.net/archive/hubbardcoroner
/hubbard_toxicology_report.jpg

‘Disgrace to the German nation’: http://www.xenu.net/archive/
hubbardcoroner/hubbard_toxicology_report.jpg

‘We’ll get them to them last’: http://www.sptimes.com/
TampaBay/102598/scientologypart4.html

‘Scientology is not a religion’:

http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Library/start/
cosfulldoc.pdf

‘Smart thing to do’: “Celebrities are very Special people and have a very distinct line of dissemination. They have comm [unication] lines that others do not have and many medias[sic] to get their dissemination through” L. Ron Hubbard, from Flag Order 3323, 9 May 1973 http://www.xenu.net/archive/celebrities/