Imagine two groups of people, one lot on the outside, one on the inside. The insiders believe they are defending their religion to the utmost from bigots; the outsiders believe the ‘religion’, if religion it be, is bad science fiction. The insiders believe the outsiders are brainwashed into thinking they are free when in fact they are slaves to a space alien Satan. The outsiders see a confidence trick inside a space alien cult masquerading as a religion; they believe the insiders live inside an invisible box, walled with mirrors, marked: religion. The outsiders believe the insiders are brainwashed, full stop.
That is the best short-hand description of the Church of Scientology I can come up with in one hundred and one words exactly. The alternative is to go see it for yourself. I did, but I would not recommend it.
Drive through the gates of Saint Hill Manor, a country estate a few miles from East Grinstead in Sussex, and you notice that something is immediately and obviously wrong. The English ruling class has a certain style for country houses. It’s not good form to show obscene wealth. So they let things slide a little, a gate off its hinges there, wild flowers running amok here, chipped and peeling paint, stray dogs, strayer children, the whole artifice generating a sense of artfully constructed neglect.
Saint Hill looks like a Hollywood set designer’s idea of an English country house. Fifty acres, hedged with rhododendron bushes, boasting a fake turret and a real lake, it’s so perfect in every detail it’s plastically unreal. In the heart of the English countryside it is that worst of things, un-English. Over-gardened, eerie, empty of people, Saint Hill exudes the atmosphere of a high-end psychiatric clinic, the kind of place where billionaires dump their mad aunts. Saint Hill is the British base of the Church of Scientology. Nothing here comes cheap. The Saint Hill Special Briefing Course will set you back £20,300.
No-one laughed. It was creepy.
They believe that humanity is trapped inside a prison of the mind and only the Church of Scientology can get us out, can end the insanity all around us. ‘We are the saviours of humankind.’ John Travolta, the older of the Church’s two great Hollywood apostles, once said: ‘There’s no doubt about it that the people that didn’t make it in Hollywood - and I mean survived - if they’d had Scientology or Dianetics they’d have been here today, whether it’s Elvis or Marilyn.’
In other words, Scientology can save your life.
Tom Cruise is the younger but the greater apostle, the living embodiment of Scientology. His divorce from Katie Holmes in the summer of 2012 notwithstanding, Cruise is no ordinary human being. He is, they say, the second most powerful Scientologist in the world and an Operating Thetan and that means, they say, Tom Cruise has special powers, of knowing and willing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time. He can levitate too.
If you just take those two stars together, Travolta and Cruise, hundreds of millions of people have seen them in films like ‘Saturday Night Fever’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Top Gun’ and the ‘Mission Impossible’ series. Some of those millions may have reflected that if Scientology has led Cruise and Travolta to fame and success, then it could be wonderful for them, too.
But the evidence that the Church has abused its servants is strong and compelling. The evidence that the Church abuses the trust of its star parishioners is also strong. There is no evidence to suggest that the Church of Scientology gives you powers over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time. Nor is there evidence that the story of the space alien Satan is anything more than inter-galactic mumbo-jumbo. Rather, the evidence points to the Church of Scientology being a brainwashing cult.
The Church of Scientology denies that it is a cult; it denies abuse; it denies spying; it denies betraying the secrets of the confessional; it denies brainwashing.
It was founded by the late Lafayette Ron Hubbard, known as ‘Mr Hubbard’ or LRH or L Ron, in 1954. There are people I know who still believe in Scientology, who still revere Mr Hubbard but no longer trust the Church as an institution, and they are good people and have a right to believe in whatever they want to believe in, and, uncomfortable as it is for me, I defend that right. But that right is not telescopic.
Scientologists inside and outside the Church hold that Mr Hubbard is the saviour of humanity. Others question that. Paul Thomas Anderson’s brave and good film, The Master, is loosely based on Hubbard. The film’s tortured main character, a true disciple, is warned: ‘You know he’s making it up as he goes along.’
The Master shows a fictional character like Mr Hubbard as a man of immense charismatic power. That portrayal helped me understand something: that, in the beginning, there was big magic that sucked people in. To others, L Ron was a ginger-haired pulp fiction writer who knocked off a story about a space alien Satan and re-baptized it as a religion. He launched his theory of Dianetics in ‘Astounding Science Fiction’ magazine in 1950. The name of the magazine is a clue.
Dianetics soon became a philosophy and a therapy programme, and that quickly morphed into Scientology, which shape-shifted into a ‘Church’. The movement appealed to something missing from people’s lives in 1950s America. But grave anxieties started to be raised. For example, the effect of Scientology’s mind exercises was to create a trance-like state, suitable for hypnosis. Could that be lead to a kind of brainwashing?
Scientologists were in thrall to L Ron’s ‘tech’ which enabled Scientologists to improve their communication skills. L Ron developed or borrowed a kind of 1950s ‘lie/truth detector’ technology he dubbed ‘auditing’ in which adherents would confess to an auditor, but with the added dimension of an ‘Electro-psychometer’ or ‘E-meter’ to test that they were telling the truth. The E-meter is a machine with leads running to two ‘tin cans’ which you grip with your hands. The sweat from your hands increases when you are anxious, and that anxiety shows up on a needle-and-dial dashboard which the auditor studies. Having a steady or gently floating needle is cool. If your needle jerks, then you’ve got issues and you may be lying - an ‘overt’ - or withholding the truth - a ‘withhold’. Confessions are recorded. In the early days the auditor took detailed notes; in the twenty-first century by state of the art pin-hole cameras. But could the recorded secrets of that confession, once given, be used against you – a kind of blackmail? No, says the Church. Yes, say ex-Scientologists.
What kind of man was Mr Hubbard? Charismatic, certainly. According to the Church he created, L Ron had an amazing life story: he’d been an acclaimed explorer, a nuclear physicist, a war hero and he’d been to deep space: ‘I was in the Van Allen Belt. This is factual. You’d be surprised how warm space is.’
‘It is all lies. None of that is true,’ Russell Miller, his very unauthorised biographer, told me. ‘The whole religion is based on the word of a congenital liar and a brilliant confidence trickster.’ In his biography, Miller reports an ex-Scientologist, Gerry Armstrong, painting an unflattering picture of L Ron: ‘a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron Munchausen. In short, he was a con man.’
Hubbard was a friend of Aleister Crowley, the Occultist and Silly Twit who the papers called ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’. Hubbard said of Crowley: ‘my very good friend… signs himself “the Beast”, mark of the Beast 666…’
Some point to the distinctive sign of the Church – the cross and the star – and note its similarity to Crowley’s Tarot card design, with a cross in the foreground and a star shape behind.
In the early 1950s sceptical reporters in America started writing negative stories. They called it the Church of the Rondroids. Hubbard hit back, calling the ordinary, non-Scientologist world, inhabited by people like you and me, ‘wog’, defining the word as ‘common, everyday garden-variety humanoid … He “is” a body, doesn’t know he’s there, etc. He isn’t there as a spirit at all. He is not operating as a Thetan.’
By the late 1950s Mr Hubbard was suffering a blow-back as ex-members were admitted to mental hospitals. Psychiatrists, on behalf of patients who were disaffected Scientologists, started investigating, then castigating Scientology. Scientology investigated, then castigated, psychiatry. Others condemned Hubbard as an unusually inventive confidence trickster. Worse, the law enforcement authorities in America were beginning to give L Ron a rather beady eye. So he decided to up sticks and move to England. Mr Hubbard, by now a multi-millionaire, snapped up Saint Hill in 1959. The estate once belonged to the Maharajah of Jaipur, an aristocrat whose princely statelet back in India was gobbled up by democracy and whose princely fortune was left untended while he enjoyed his chukkas on the polo field. The Maharajah died, as he had lived, falling off a polo horse.
Hubbard once boasted that he ‘sort of won’ Saint Hill in a poker game. By the time he was interested in Saint Hill, the Maharajah was dead and it seems unlikely that his estate’s solicitors would have used it as a stake in poker.
In 1959 L Ron moved in, announcing to a reporter from the East Grinstead Courier that he was an expert on plant life. ‘The production of plant mutations,’ the Courier gushed, ‘is one of his most important projects at the moment. By battering seeds with X-rays, Dr Hubbard can either reduce a plant through its stages of evolution or advance it.’ A black and white photograph was taken of L Ron attaching electrodes to a tomato – the vegetable (botanically a fruit) that I replicated in the Industry of Death exhibition. This is one of my favourite photographs in the whole wide world.
The Church grew from a tiny base to number tens of thousands of adepts, but some of those people left and what they had to say was not good. It suffered international notoriety. In Australia, Mr Justice Anderson concluded in 1965: ‘Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill… [Scientology is] the world’s largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.’ Anderson’s report is the first to touch on the theme of the Church subjecting its adherents to ‘mental enslavement’, but not the last.
In the late sixties, the British health minister, Kenneth Robinson – a former Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy – blocked foreign Scientologists from coming to Britain: ‘The government is satisfied that Scientology is socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other and attributes squalid and disgraceful motives to all who oppose it; its authoritarian principles and practice are a potential menace to the personality and well being of those so deluded as to become followers; above all, its methods can be a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them… There is no power under existing law to prohibit the practice of Scientology; but the government has concluded that it is so objectionable that it would be right to take all steps within its power to curb its growth.’
The Church did not turn the other cheek. In 1967 it took on the local community around Saint Hill, suing East Grinstead Urban District Council, a teacher at a local convent school, the Chairman of the Urban District Council’s Health and Housing Committee, a farmer whose land adjoined Saint Hill Manor, and who had spoken disapprovingly of his neighbours, and thirty-eight people who had written critical things about Scientology in the papers. Most of the law suits were subsequently dropped but the Church sued the local Tory MP, Geoffrey Johnson-Smith. The libel trial lasted six weeks in 1970. The Church lost.
To counter-attack, Hubbard created a policy called ‘Fair Game’ where enemies of the Church could be ‘injured, tricked, sued, lied to or destroyed’. Russell Miller says he faced a terrifying campaign of harassment by the Church for his heretical biography.
What did Miller think of the Church’s claim that it is a religion? ‘It exhibits all the symptoms of a classic cult. It draws people in when they are vulnerable; it causes them to disconnect from their friends and family; it makes them believe that the truth is within the cult and the world is a dangerous place.’
L Ron’s Church suffered scandal after scandal in the sixties and seventies. On the run from the authorities, it went, like the owl and the pussycat, to sea. Miller tells the story hilariously in his book on Hubbard. After one stormy crossing too many the Church and its Founder ended up back in the United States. Perhaps the darkest days for the Church were in 1977 when the FBI discovered that the Church had been running two operations, one to frame the journalist Paulette Cooper by sending bomb threats to itself as if from her and the other to penetrate the US Government. The FBI arrested Mr Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue and other senior Scientologists, and LRH himself went on the run, vanishing off the face of the earth.
In 1984 the Church was accused of blackmailing its adherents to stay in, lest their intimate secrets be leaked out. Blackmail is a heavy word. But it was used by Judge Breckenridge sitting in the Los Angeles Superior Court, in his ruling against the Church and in favour of a group of ex-Scientologists, led by Gerry Armstrong, the chap who’d previously compared Mr Hubbard to Chaplin and Hitler. The Church had asked Armstrong, a dedicated Scientologist, to prepare documents for a planned biography of the Founder. Armstrong duly dug around the attic at Gilman Hot Springs, an old gamblers’ den on the edge of the Californian desert, handpicked by the Church as its secret base, now known as Gold or Int. In the attic Armstrong found a treasure trove of paperwork on Mr Hubbard but they proved to Armstrong’s satisfaction that Hubbard was a liar and a fantasist. He ran for it, taking the documents with him. The Church sued Armstrong and his fellows, and lost.
Judge Breckenridge wrote in his judgment: ‘The picture painted by these former dedicated Scientologists, all of whom were intimately involved with LRH, or Mary Jane Hubbard, or of the Scientology Organization, is on the one hand pathetic, and on the other, outrageous. Each of these persons literally gave years of his or her respective life in support of a man, LRH, and his ideas. Each has manifested a waste and loss or frustration which is incapable of description.’
Judge Breckenridge found: ‘Each [ex-Scientologist] has broken with the movement for a variety of reasons, but at the same time, each is still bound by the knowledge that the Church has in its possession his or her most inner thoughts and confessions, all recorded in “Pre-Clear (P.C.) folders” or other security files of the organization, and that the Church or its minions is fully capable of intimidation or other physical or psychological abuse if it suits their ends. The record is replete with evidence of such abuse.’
Judge Breckenridge continued: ‘The practice of culling supposedly confidential “P.C. folders or files” to obtain information for purposes of intimidation and or harassment is repugnant and outrageous.’
The judge cited a 1970 French police investigation into the Church, which concluded that ‘under the pretext of “freeing humans” (it) is nothing in reality but a vast enterprise to extract the maximum amount of money from its adepts by pseudo-scientific theories… pushed to extremes (a machine to detect lies, its own particular phraseology) to estrange adepts from their families and to exercise a kind of blackmail against persons who do not wish to continue.’
Nothing much had changed, said Judge Breckenridge: ‘From the evidence presented to this court in 1984, at the very least, similar conclusions can be drawn. In addition to violating and abusing its own members civil rights, the organization over the years with its “Fair Game” doctrine has harassed and abused those persons not in the Church whom it perceives as enemies. The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder LRH. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. At the same time it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating, and inspiring his adherents. He has been referred to during the trial as a “genius,” a “revered person,” a man who was “viewed by his followers in awe.” Obviously, he is and has been a very complex person, and that complexity is further reflected in his alter ego, the Church of Scientology.’
Hubbard died in 1986, a weird recluse. His autopsy said he was full of VISTARIL® or hydroxyzine hydrochloride, prescribed for disturbed or hysterical patients, and, of course, the very kind of psychiatric drugs the Church condemns.
But that was all a very long time ago. In the 21st century the Church is engaged in a pretty much successful global march to win respect and the right to call itself a religion. The church boasts of having 11 million square feet of property around the world, a somewhat idiosyncratic index of holiness.
In October 2006 the Church was set to open its spanking new £25 million centre in the City of London. Our Great British Weather, sadly, rained on their parade. Drizzle, drizzle, relentless drizzle. I came along to do a spot of filming from the street. As soon as we started, an official of the Church, Janet Laveau, asked us to stop filming. I told her we worked for BBC Panorama and the law allowed us to film in a London street. She said that they had blocked the street, it was a private function and she had a problem with Panorama. Janet was referring to the BBC Panorama documentary, ‘The Road to Total Freedom?’ filmed in 1987, 23 years before I joined the BBC. I repeated that that the BBC is allowed to film in London streets. We could not film inside the Church (or Org, in SciSpeak) but we could film on the street. I pointed out to her that had I been a car, she would have had a point because cars were not allowed on the road today. But I was not a car.
We filmed a top City of London copper, Chief Superintendant Kevin Hurley, splendidly reassuring in his uniform, walk up to the podium. The police chief praised the Church as a ‘force for good’ in London, ‘raising the spiritual wealth of society’.
It was time for the pope of Scientology to wow the faithful. David Miscavige bounded onto the stage to the rapture of the crowd, not perhaps as big as the organizers had planned. The Church of Scientology claims to have more than 10 million devotees worldwide, with 123,000 in the UK but the crowd did not look much bigger than a thousand people, if that. Quite a few seemed to be European, not British, as if they had been shipped in to bulk the numbers. But they all loved Miscavige. In the flesh, he has the manner of a high-end estate agent, smooth, polished, markedly short. The drizzle never stopped. The umbrellas twirled prettily.
‘Thank you very much,’ said Miscavige. ‘It’s a pleasure to join you on a day that genuinely qualifies as momentous…’
Miscavige is an Angel to some, a devil to others. A former Catholic high school drop-out, born in Philadelphia and raised in a suburb of that great city just across the state line in New Jersey, Miscavige suffered from asthma and allergies until his father, a trumpet player, took him along to a Scientologist and he was cured. The family embraced Scientology and moved to Saint Hill in England, where Miscavige, a precocious achiever, became an auditor at the age of 12. He joined the Sea Org – the Church’s priesthood – and became a favourite cameraman and messenger of Mr Hubbard. When the old prophet died in 1986, Miscavige rose to the top, proclaiming to grieving Scientologists that LRH had ‘discarded the body he had used in this lifetime.’
Intense, clever, Miscavige is known in the Church’s peculiar corporate-speak as Chairman of the Board or COB. He is given to grand claims: ‘If you’ve heard we’re the fastest growing religion on earth - it’s true.’
To the Church’s apostles, like Cruise and Travolta, Miscavige is a great servant of mankind. Some outsiders might consider that he has proved to be a deft and formidable operator, especially good at exploiting the weaknesses of those who criticise the Church. Ex-members of the Church, some of whom remain Scientologists and some of who no longer have anything to do with Scientology, say their experience of Miscavige was somewhat different, to put it mildly.
Whatever the truth about its leader, it is a fact that under Miscavige the Church of Scientology has been gaining acquiescence around the world.
In Germany, forever fearful of repeating the terrible mistakes of history, the Church of Scientology has faced serious, government-backed scrutiny for decades because of fears that it is a totalitarian organisation. The Church has fought back. In 1996 a number of famous Americans wrote an open letter to the then Chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Signatories included Bertram Fields (who just so happens to be Tom Cruise’s lawyer), Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman, Larry King, Mario Puzo, Tina Sinatra, Oliver Stone and the late Gore Vidal. They wrote: ‘In the Germany of the 1930s, Hitler made religious intolerance official government policy. In the 1930s, it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists… We implore you to bring an end to this shameful pattern of organized persecution. It is a disgrace to the German nation.’
In 2008, Tom Cruise starred as the great anti-Nazi German hero, Claus Von Stauffenberg in the film ‘Valkyrie’. That raised the question whether Scientology’s number one parishioner, Cruise, had made a brave film about a German hero. Or whether he had pulled off a great PR coup by taking on the role of a great enemy of totalitarian power, while being a member of what some say is a totalitarian cult – and in so doing subtly undermining one of the Church’s strongest critics.
In the United States, it is a similar story of official hostility to the Church weakening under attack, then morphing, first into acquiescence with the Church’s assertion that it should be classed as a religion, then actively promulgating that claim to other countries. The Church of Scientology had long been considered a business, not a religion, in the United States. In 1993 that changed when during the Clinton Presidency the Inland Revenue Service reversed its previous position and declared the Church a religion, saving it millions in taxes and giving it a shield against those who would dare criticize it. A week after the great breakthrough, 10,000 Scientologists went to an arena in LA. Chairman of the Board Miscavige took to the stage in black tie and spoke for two-and-a-half hours flanked by two flaming torches. He denounced the Church’s enemies, swayed by a hive-mind of psychiatrists, ‘pea-brained psych-indoctrinated mental midgets’ bent on creating a ‘slave society’, damned the IRS civil servants as ‘vampires’ and warned the Church’s foes: ‘We know who they are and we’ll get to them last.’ Miscavige’s trademark manner of address seems to include common themes of vilification and revenge.
Miscavige announced the headline news: ‘There will be no billion dollar tax bill which we can’t pay. There will be no more discrimination. There will be no more 2,500 cases against parishioners across the US. The pipeline of IRS false reports won’t keep flowing across the planet. There will be no more nothing – because on October first, 1993, at 8:37 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the IRS issued letters recognizing Scientology and every one of its organizations as fully tax exempt! The war is over!’
On this side of the Atlantic, many councils give the Church local tax breaks but as far as the Charity Commissioners are concerned, for the purposes of English charity law: ‘Scientology is not a religion.’
In Britain, Scientology’s war, as it were, is not over.
L Ron Hubbard was, whatever else you think of him, a shrewd man who knew that harnessing the power of celebrity to his cause was a smart thing to do. He jumped on the celebrity bandwagon faster than most. Miscavige has followed in his master’s footsteps. Ex-Scientologists say that the Church under Miscavige deliberately groomed and cocooned its celebrities, making life sweet for them in its own Celebrity Centres. In return, the Church’s celebrities have banged the drum for Scientology. Its film and TV star apostles include Cruise, Travolta, Kirstie Allie from ‘Cheers’, Anne Archer, Nancy Cartwright, the actress who voices Bart in TV’s ‘The Simpsons’, Elisabeth Moss, who played Peggy Olson in Mad Men, and, before they left the Church, Jason Beghe, star of GI Jane and TV dramas like CSI and Californication and Larry Anderson of Star Trek: Insurrection and Aliens Go Home. ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’, Will Smith, has never publically committed to Scientology, but Smith has said: ‘I just think a lot of the ideas in Scientology are brilliant and revolutionary and non-religious.’ In 2010 Smith gave $1.2 million to a school in California he founded which uses L Ron’s ‘Study Technology’.
In Britain, again the picture is not so rosy. The Church can point to just one MP who has told the House of Commons it is not a cult and a single man of the cloth, the Bishop of Norwich, who has questioned the ‘unexamined assumption’ that it is a cult. There are no celebrities who have embraced the Church of Scientology hook, line and sinker. The nearest the Church got to landing a British celeb was Peaches Geldof, who appeared to have a brief fling with the Church in 2009. She is now out.
TV stars like Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson and Jonathan Ross entertain Tom Cruise on their shows and do not seem to question him much or at all about Scientology. Perhaps this is not remarkable but in his autobiography Ross gives the Church the benefit of the doubt. Ross writes in his book, ‘Why Do I Say These Things’: ‘I don’t think Scientologists get a fair deal. I don’t know enough about the religion itself… But I do know that the handful of people I’ve met who’ve happened to be Scientologists have been some of the nicest and most courteous of any it has been my pleasure to spend time with.’ Ross cites John Travolta – ‘very happy and stable and together’, Will Smith – ‘if he is one’ – and Tom Cruise: ‘incredibly down to earth for a star of his stature. When he walks into a room, he pays attention to everyone, no matter what job they’re doing on a shoot – getting the coffee, doing the make-up, lugging the camera or sound equipment around – he doesn’t differentiate… when he leaves the room, everybody loves him’.
And yet ex-Scientologists say Cruise is a recruiting sergeant for a brainwashing cult. What is so strange about the world of the Church of Scientology is that evidence for Cruise being both a charming and thoughtful man and a cult’s recruiting sergeant co-exists. Throughout this book, you will come across examples of black-white conflicts, again and again. The Church and the middle ground do not flourish.
Wikileaks shows that American diplomats regularly took foreign governments to task for failing to respect the religious entitlement of the Church. Tom Cruise led Scientology meetings with the then French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, in Paris and reportedly at Downing Street, pushing home the message that Scientology was a religion like any other.
To that end, Miscavige embarked on a multi-million pound building spree, opening new Orgs or churches across the world. The new London org was yet another example. He was still at it, still speechifying: ‘A day when the moment we pull down that ribbon it goes down in history… In this city L Ron Hubbard… … defined the human spirit …an immortal being… technology… the root of our religion…’
He cut the ribbon and everyone cheered. The London drizzle drizzled on.
What is the secret of the Church of Scientology’s success? One answer is, critics say, brainwashing. It may have been a coincidence but when I lost my temper with the Church’s Tommy Davis, we had been arguing about brainwashing inside the brainwashing section of an exhibition that says that psychiatrists are brainwashing humanity. As I holler, Tommy says, over and over again: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
The Church of Scientology denies brainwashing.
What is ‘brainwashing?’ is the title of the opening chapter of Robert Jay Lifton’s classic study of mind control, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. I was introduced to Lifton’s work by Bruce Hines, at one time an auditor – Scientology’s word for confessor – who used to minister to Nicole Kidman, Kirstie Allie and Tom Cruise. Bruce is now out, neither a member of the Church, nor a Scientologist.
Lifton, an American military psychiatrist, interviewed Allied ex-prisoners who had been captured during the Korean War and held in North Korea and then Chinese and European victims of Chairman’s Mao totalitarian state. He explains that the term ‘brainwashing’ was first used by the American journalist, Edward Hunter, as a translation of the colloquialism hsi nao, (literally, ‘wash brain’) which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use after the Communist takeover. In his book, which everyone seriously interested in understanding the Church of Scientology should read, Lifton quotes the Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan: ‘When religion becomes organised, man ceases to be free. It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity.’
Later, Lifton set out three defining characteristics of a cult: firstly, ‘all cults have a charismatic leader, who himself or herself increasingly becomes the object of worship, and in many cases, the dispenser of immortality. Spiritual ideas of a general kind give way to this deification of the leader.’ Secondly, in cults there is some kind of ‘thought reform’, popularly known as brainwashing. Thirdly, ‘there is a pattern of manipulation and exploitation from above, by leaders and ruling coteries, and idealism from below, on the part of supplicants and recruits.’ To sum up Lifton’s definers for a cult: one, the Leader is God; two, brainwashing; three, harm.
In his book Lifton sets out eight tests for brainwashing. The third test is ‘The Demand for Purity’: the ‘world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil… All “taints” and “poisons” which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated.’ A follower of a thought control cult can off-load his inner guilt by hitting out at the outside world: ‘one of his best ways to relieve himself of some of his burden of guilt is to denounce, continuously and hostilely, these same outside influences.’
Let’s apply Lifton’s test number three to the Church of Scientology. Does it by any chance denounce the impure? Are there any subtle signs of that? The Church’s Freedom Magazine produced an attack video which described ex-Scientologists I had interviewed and me as follows:
‘Disgraced. Liar. Perjurer. Callous. Insulting. Bullying. Notorious. Shameful. Laughing stock. Poor work ethic. Can’t hold a job. Failure. Known drunk. Disaffected. Angry. Vengeful. Malcontents. Disgraced. Incompetent. Serial sexual misconduct. Sells soul. Abhorrent. Deranged Abuser of women. Wrecks of men. Posse of vindictive liars.’
Thank you. One of the Church’s official spokesman, Mike Rinder, called me ‘an utter lunatic’ and ‘an asshole’ in 2007. Five years on, he still stands by both judgments, although there is a twist to that tale, more of which later. Tommy Davis, the other, more senior spokesman, called me ‘psychotic’, a ‘tabloid bottom-feeder’ and repeatedly, a ‘bigot’.
One Scientology blog calls for my permanent end: ‘Growing up on a diet of things like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, one gets a chance to see a fair number of good guys & bad guys. In the movies, the bad guys are commonly depicted as being so low, so loathsome, that by the end of the movie even the most sweet and innocent housewife is picturing in her mind the most violent, grisly and permanent way for the bad guy to meet his end, because there’s no question at all that the bad guy is just plain bad for everyone, and has just got to go. But in real life, you seldom come across such a bad guy that can be as utterly loathsome, so low, so cowardly and yet so holistically evil that they can be agreed upon as a total villain. Well, I think our wait is over. Enter BBC Panorama’s John Sweeney.’
The title of the blog? ‘John Sweeney is genuinely evil.’
Brainwashing is a heavy word. It’s also a serious charge to make against a multi-billion dollar entity like the Church. In 1984 British High Court judge Mr Justice Latey said: ‘Scientology is both immoral and socially obnoxious …It is corrupt, sinister and dangerous. It is corrupt because it is based on lies and deceit and has its real objective money and power for Mr. Hubbard… It is sinister because it indulges in infamous practices both to its adherents who do not toe the line unquestionably and to those who criticize it or oppose it. It is dangerous because it is out to capture people and to indoctrinate and brainwash them so they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult, withdrawn from ordinary thought, living, and relationships with others.’
Language, grammar orders the mind. Subvert language and you subvert sanity. George Orwell, that great enemy of totalitarianism, knew and feared the power of that subversion when he witnessed it done by Stalin’s men in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. That’s the substance of his invented language, NewSpeak, in 1984. The charge against the Church is that it confounds meaning and minds while presenting an artificial front to the world, a charge it denies.
The Chinese Communist torturers, and before them, Stalin’s men, and before them, the Spanish Inquisition had brutal force to fall on if the wretches in their hands did not mentally submit. What is so strange is that we are considering people in fundamentally free societies who, it is said, have submitted to mental enslavement. They could just walk away. This is a conundrum raised in the TV series ‘Homeland’, just as it was in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate – how can the brainwashing be so strong that it keeps its spell even when you are free to leave?
One month after the opening of the London Org, November 2006, Tom Cruise married his third wife, Katie Holmes, in one of the most beautiful castles in the whole of Italy. The happy couple were conjoined according to the Scientology wedding rite scripted by L Ron, calling on all those present to note, ‘girls need clothes and food and tender happiness and frills, a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat.’ The Book of Common Prayer it is not.
Miscavige, the Leader of the Church, was Tom Cruise’s best man. The word is that he came along on the honeymoon too, a story the Church denies.
In the spring of 2007 we engaged with the Church. So that’s how I ended up in Saint Hill. Mole and I approached the front door. Mole is the BBC producer some believe best able to keep me on the professional straight and narrow. Mole (first name: Sarah) is so quietly spoken you can barely hear a word she says and she looks completely harmless. Don’t be fooled: she combines the attributes of Mother Theresa and J.V. Stalin.
Hundreds, perhaps even a few thousand Scientologists, live in the East Grinstead area. This patch of Sussex, some of the most lazily beautiful countryside in England, is served by two Conservative MPs, Nicholas Soames (grandson of Winston Churchill) and Charles Hendry – the political heir to Geoffrey Johnson-Smith, who was unsuccessfully sued by the Church in 1970. Soames once threatened to sue the Church after it used images of his grandfather in their publicity material.
Hendry, a government minister from 2010 until the summer of 2012, is a different kettle of fish. In 2004 Hendry went to the premiere of Cruise’s film Collateral. Tom Cruise chatted to the MP and his wife and phoned up Hendry’s step-daughter to wish her happy birthday. The MP told the East Grinstead Courier: ‘“Clare thought it was the coolest thing ever.” Mr Hendry said he and Mr Cruise spoke about Saint Hill, an L Ron Hubbard detox centre the actor set up in New York for victims of the September 11 terrorist attack and a bit about the film. “It was a very special evening and a real treat to be invited. I thought Tom was absolutely amazing for spending so much time speaking to people who had waited for him for hours and the film was full of suspense.” Graeme Wilson, public affairs director at the Church of Scientology, said: “The premiere of Collateral was quite an experience and it was a real pleasure to be able to invite many of our friends from the East Grinstead area. It is a really excellent movie.”’
In 2005 the House of Commons debated an amendment to a controversial bill protecting religions from hate speech which some, including the comedian Rowan Atkinson, feared threatened free speech. The amendment proposed that the following groups should not be covered by the law: Satanists, Nazis, cannibals, believers in female circumcision and Scientologists. Up popped Charles Hendry: ‘I hope my honourable Friend will understand that although Scientology may be very controversial, people who are Scientologists find it profoundly offensive to be included in that list. As he may be aware, Scientologists in this country are based in East Grinstead, which is just outside my constituency, and many hundreds of my constituents are Scientologists. They will be mystified by their inclusion in such a list, particularly as many other groups, such as those who practise voodoo, are not included. This debate has already caused Scientologists offence. On Second Reading, my right honourable Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) said that “it is…a dangerous organisation that preys on people with mental illness”. That is a characterisation that many people in my constituency would find peculiar and to which they would not relate. I am not familiar with the details of Scientology as a religion or as a set of beliefs, and having heard the Minister’s comments earlier, it would be hard to decide on which side of that boundary it would fall. Those who practise Scientology would say that it is a religion, but many others would contest that. Undoubtedly, as human beings they do a great deal of good.’ Hendry praised the Church’s drug treatment programme. He went on to say: ‘Certainly, as an organisation, Scientology has gone through serious hoops in terms of ensuring that it has the right to broadcast on television by satisfying the Independent Television Commission [ITC] that it is not a cult. It is a not-for-profit organisation, and that is well recognised.’
The bill became law but the clause Atkinson objected to was dropped.
In 2012 I raised Hendry’s ‘not a cult’ stance in the Independent newspaper and Hendry wrote a letter to protest: ‘Mr Sweeney quotes me as saying of Scientology that, “It is not a cult”. The actual words I used in Parliament were that Scientology has been able to broadcast on television by “satisfying the Independent Television Commission that it is not a cult”. To say he was quoting selectively was an understatement.’
The ITC no longer exists but a spokesman for the British agency that regulates advertising, the Advertising Standards Authority, told me: ‘To be clear there are no rules in the Broadcast Advertising Code relating to cults. So neither the ITC nor the ASA today would have a role in judging whether an organisation was – or was not – a cult.’
Hendry was the only MP to stand up for Scientology and his enthusiasm for the Church contrasts strikingly with Soames and his late predecessor, Johnson-Smith. Hendry’s constituents who fear the Church may perhaps be assured that it is a not-for-profit organisation.
Mole and I got to Saint Hill’s grand door and were met by a lawyer and three Scientologists – an interesting ratio I had not come across before in a House of God. They all wore suits and gave off a whiff of corporate power, as if they were from a multinational commodity broker or a mining company. The lawyer was Bill Walsh, a near-silent American who said that he was not a Scientologist but a Human Rights Counsel – that’s fancy talk for a lawyer. The Englishman was an ex-London fireman called Bob Keenan. He, too, didn’t say that much. Bob and Bill were flower-pot men, nodding their heads but contributing little theatre.
The two others were to be our ‘handlers’, we later realised: an Australian-American called Mike Rinder, a spooky, sallow-faced and hollow-cheeked man, and Tommy Davis, son of film actress Anne Archer. Tommy was younger than Mike but by some unspoken corporate osmosis more senior. Teeth gleamed, dark hair flopped, the nose aquiline, the smile cherubic. Nattily attired in what looked to me to be a $2,000 suit, crisp white shirt and dark tie, Tommy not only physically resembled Tom Cruise, he acted like him, intense, passionate, smiley, weird. In the idiom of American TV cops shows like Starsky and Hutch or Hawaii Five-0 that used to wallpaper my childhood, Tommy was the smart, rich guy who almost certainly was the baddie; Mike had all the hallmarks of the bloke who gets gruesomely murdered in the first five minutes.
The pecking order was established from that very first day: Tommy Davis was the boss, Mike a corpse-in-the-making. You could tell from their suits. Tommy looked magnificent; Mike looked Zombie-esque, as though he’d just come out of prison. That did not turn out so far from the truth.
Tommy is a prince of Scientology, his mother an Academy Award nominee, his father a real-estate tycoonette: family fame and money made him a member of its Hollywood Brahmin caste. He is a close friend of Tom Cruise. Three years before we met, Tommy had been on hand to improve Tom’s chances with Iranian beauty Naz Boniadi, whom he dated before dropping her and going out with Katie Holmes, according to Vanity Fair. The magazine alleges that Tom Cruise used the Church, with Miscavige’s blessing, to scout for and groom a suitable mate for him, an allegation that the Church and Cruise hotly deny.
Vanity Fair’s version is that Tommy and his then wife, Nadine van Hootegen, and his now current wife, Jessica Feshbach, all went ice-skating and had sushi with Cruise and Naz on their first date. Perhaps co-incidentally, Naz had been previously asked what was her dream date? Ice-skating and sushi. Everything went well between Cruise and Naz until she met David Miscavige and his wife, Shelley, the magazine alleged. Naz, born in Iran but raised in London, couldn’t properly understand the fast-spoken Philadelphia rasp of the Chairman of the Board, Miscavige, says Vanity Fair. This is a common failing. Ex-member of the Church Steve Hall, a scriptwriter and a man with a laconic wit, said that disentangling Miscavige’s mixed messages and super-fast delivery was a nightmare. Pity Naz. The magazine said that after Naz was perceived to have failed to respect Miscavige, Cruise had her dumped. All of this the Church, Miscavige and Cruise deny.
Tommy and Jessica Feshbach had both gone to the great wedding in Italy when Cruise got hitched with Katie Holmes. Jessica was widely described as Scientology’s minder for Katie, introduced as Katie’s ‘best friend’ when the media interviewed Katie about Batman Begins, in which Katie starred as an assistant DA in Gotham City and a childhood friend of Batman. Jessica’s father, Joe, was a multi-millionaire investor and a major donor to the Church. Back in 1993, the Feshbach family business took over a chocolate company in California, introduced Scientology’s technology and a number of staff left, complaining that they were being force-fed not chocolate but Dianetics.
Plugged into the very top of Scientology although Tommy Davis may have been, the power relationship between Posh Tommy and Zombie Mike seemed, on reflection, to be the wrong way round. That’s because Mike, whose family joined the Church when he was six years old, was a professional PR man for Scientology who had been defending the Church to the media for years, and whose preferred technique was to block, not to engage. Tommy was new to this game, and happy to fight, and that makes good telly but bad PR.
Very early on at Saint Hill, the mind-games started. Tommy told us it was a shame that we hadn’t told them about the BBC team filming me driving in through the gate, because they would have helped us. That was generous and kind and slightly creepy because we had done a few driving set-up shots on the road outside of the estate. How did they know we had been filming? This was the first time with the Church that I felt as though I was treading on a step that wasn’t there. It would not be the last. Bob chatted to Mole about her being based in Northern Ireland. They knew quite a lot about us. Funny that. We didn’t know it but they were filming us on their CCTV, footage that would be subsequently shown in their splendid film on us, called ‘Panorama Exposed’. Watch it. I am the baddie.
Inside, Saint Hill was like a show mansion. Or a film set. Everything looked right. Nothing felt right. Plush, carpeted, scrupulously clean, eerily quiet, empty, creepy-creepy-crawlie. They showed off the novelty feature of the house, a ghastly mural in garish colours by John Spencer Churchill, nephew of Sir Winston Churchill, of a load of monkeys, 145 in all, featuring a score of species. A capuchin monkey painting under a tree portrays his Uncle Winston. I cracked a joke about Stan and Hilda Ogden’s ‘muriel’ in ITV’s Coronation Street, a cross-cultural reference they were never going to get in a billion years. Mole looked at me witheringly so I shut up.
Out came the snaps. Tommy and Mike showed us lots of family album-style snaps of empty Scientology churches or Orgs. In Scientology, there is no mass worship. It consists of one-to-one therapy sessions, which is one reason why some question its claim to be classed as a religion. Once you’ve seen one shot of an empty Org in Nebraska, you’ve seen too many. Mole is naturally polite; I am not. Under the cosh from her to play nicely I said little and was on my best behaviour. Albums over, a film, again, high-value sequences of empty Scientology Orgs, then its Narconon programme.
Narconon is a programme for drugs addicts, devised by Mr Hubbard, based on the notion that if you spend long enough in the sauna and take lots of Vitamin B tablets the harmful drugs will ooze out of your pores with your sweat. This is rubbish. There is no independent scientific validation for Narconon, though some, including the former minister Charles Hendry MP, praise the Church’s programme.
The Narconon base in Arrowhead, near New Bucket, Arkansas – or somewhere like that – was illustrated on video with lots of swooshing camera dives of knitting pattern magazine mannequin-style extras playing drug addicts walking crossways across the main field of view. They look good and they have big hair, so the film seems like a bad 80s American detective series, but one with not enough or, in fact, no dead bodies. My notebook gives a flavour of it: ‘psychiatry: bringing down the hammer on a criminal agenda… largest disaster relief organisation on earth… the tech…’
The notes in my notebook continue: ‘this is welcome to reshaping the destiny of earth… Bingo… psychiatry… taking them down… Psych… 6616 Sunset Boulevard…’
The video showed Mike Rinder introduce Chairman Miscavige. On the tape, Rinder seemed to be a cardinal of the Church, not the zombie underling in front of us. The leader bounced onto a vast stage, applauded to the echo by an audience of Hollywoodesque luvvies, all booted and suited in black tie, as if were some kind of eschatological Oscars.
The film continued: ‘psychiatry an industry of death… the horror of psychiatry… 100 million aware of psych horrors…368 psychs doing time… 2006: Phase One: Global Demolition… Global Obliteration… hand grenade.’
Hand grenade?
It made little sense but I got it that they didn’t like psychiatry. After an hour of it, I wanted to run away. I said I needed a loo break. Tommy said that the film lasted another two hours. What? It was a surreal exercise in non-communication. We said goodbye and arranged to meet them the next day in London in Fitzroy Street where L Ron first stayed in London. Mole recalls that very sweetly they gave us as a goodwill gesture a picnic of cheese and pickle sandwiches.
At Fitzroy Street they showed us L Ron’s room, a wacky shrine of a kind, complete with a peaked white naval hat to remind us of his service in the US Navy, in which heretic Russell Miller says he shelled Mexico by mistake. We were given a lunch of sandwiches wrapped in cellophane, served by a distractingly beautiful woman who vanished in seconds. It was clearly some kind of trick and it worked on me brilliantly. On Mole, it did not.
The five of us sat down over a fantastic platter – spring rolls, cheese things, smoked salmon enrobed in delicious what-nottery – Tommy, Mike, Fireman Bob, Mole and I. Tommy did most of the talking. I noticed that Mike’s Australian accent was watered down or conflicted by a smattering of English idioms and an icing of Americana. He was, in short, one crazy mixed up Aussie.
I asked Tommy: ‘Can there be such a thing as a good psychiatrist?’
Tommy: ‘No.’
Mole tried to play diplomat. She recalls saying that we wanted to find out more about Scientology for the documentary, and maybe they could show me some Scientology techniques or go through the process of what it would be like to become a Scientologist. ‘Until this point,’ Mole says, ‘Tommy had been charming. But he suddenly switched and accused me of being disingenuous. He said he knew that I’d been filming with anti-Scientology protesters a few months ago opposite the Church’s Tottenham Court Road assessment centre and so I clearly had a negative agenda. I was very surprised because, yes, I had filmed the protestors the previous autumn but I hadn’t identified myself to the Church. I realised that they must have taken pictures of me and either matched me up to the person who was sitting in front of them or they had done some kind of other investigative work to find out my name and that I worked for the BBC.’
The anti-Scientology protesters back in 2006 were small in number but big in volume. They would encamp immediately opposite the Church’s long-time Tottenham Court Road recruiting centre and their leader, a classic English eccentric in a rather splendid straw trilby, would intone through a microphone in a fine sing-song baritone: ‘Don’t give money to Scientology. It’s a scam, it’s a con, it’s a cult.’
Mole tried to negotiate access with Tommy, Mike and co. I wrote down their terms in my notebook: ‘1) Not a cult.’ In our proposed film we were not to mention the word ‘cult’. ‘2) No crazies. 3) No anonymous – unnamed – sources.’
Again and again they pressed the point that the Church of Scientology was a religion like other religions, and that it should be respected. This line of argument had clearly been played out before, successfully to the United States IRS back in the 1990s, to President Sarkozy in France, reportedly to Tony Blair in Number Ten. It’s a powerful argument but not one that is beyond scrutiny.
There is a cultural dimension to the question of what is and what is not a religion. The United States of America was founded by Puritans fleeing religious persecution at the hands of the King of England and the established Church of England in the seventeenth century. For the founding fathers, religious freedom was a right which they hard-wired into the American constitution. It is as if there is in the United States an eleventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt not criticise another man’s religion.’ The danger is that in America they are so afraid of religious un-freedom that they fear to discriminate between a religion and a confidence trick.
Henri IV of France, born a Protestant who converted to Catholicism because, as he put it, ‘Paris is worth a Mass’, summed up my take on God: ‘Those who follow their conscience are of my religion, and I am of the religion of those who are brave and good.’ Later, Henri was assassinated by a bigot.
In the twenty first century, everyone has a right to believe in nothing or whatever they want to believe in and that includes the right to believe in Scientology. It may be useful to make a distinction between faith and religion. A faith is a universal belief system which individuals can respect; a religion is a universal belief system which society, by and large, respects. If people believe in Mr Hubbard’s teachings, good luck to them. Some people I know do, and, uncomfortable as it is, I defend their right to believe in him. But not everything that claims it is a religion has an automatic right to be treated as a religion by society. It could be a multi-billion corporation like Coca Cola or a racket like the mafia or a brainwashing cult. The Church of Scientology is, some say, all three.
The Church’s conditions – no use of the word cult, no anonymous interviews, no interviews with people the Church defines as ‘haters’ – were a line in the sand. We could not make a film about the Church of Scientology without addressing that core issue, that it is not a fact that it is a religion but a claim – and a claim that is open to scrutiny. Others dispute it. It is a fact that many of its ex-members call it a cult. We could not possibly make a film on the Church without examining whether or not it is a cult.
The Church through those awfully nice legal people at Carter-Ruck denied setting the conditions. Mole and I are clear: they set three conditions. She’s smart; I was sober.
We politely declined their terms and left. We did not tell them but we were going to carry on. We were determined to make our film, come what may. The question is would the Church let us get on with it? Or would they try and intervene, to try and exercise control?
L Ron’s unauthorised biographer, Russell Miller, warned me: ‘First, you are going to be followed. Unquestionably you will be followed wherever you go. They will dig into your background, they will try and dig up some dirt about you and find out any scandals about you and they will certainly make them public and they will keep as close as possible tabs on you as they are able to do so.’
Mole had a cunning plan. She and cameraman Bill Browne flew to Florida a day ahead of me.
My father, Leonard Sweeney, had died the week before, a loss I strove to keep from the Church of Scientology. He was a good man, a poor working class boy from Birkenhead – on the increasingly fashionable west bank of the Mersey, across from Liverpool – who left school at the age of fourteen, joined Cammell Laird’s shipyard as an apprentice and at the age of 19 became a ship’s engineer during the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war he left the sea to raise our family, support Tranmere Rovers from a distance and tell stories. Modest about his war, after a pint and a half he could be persuaded to talk about what it felt like being hunted by Nazi U-boats. He did an impression of the sound of a Royal Navy anti-U boat depth charge going off when you’re stuck far below sea level in the engine room: BOOOOM! In the pub, it was a show-stopper.
He was a lovely chap but old age was catching up with him. Sitting in ‘the captain’s chair’ at home with mum, he had a massive heart attack and died in hospital. Far better to go out like that with a BOOOOM! than a long lingering death covered in tubes. In death, as in life, he was a gentleman.
I drove down to Hampshire for the funeral. Lots of people turned up, many from Lymington Bowling Club, where he’d been some kind of Supreme Being. I gave the address, reading out the score of a football game that will never happen: ‘Manchester United nil, Tranmere Rovers seven.’ We gave him a good send-off. I felt guilty that I did not cry.
The next day I flew to the United States and battle commenced.