Back in the day, the story goes, four science fiction writers - Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and L Ron Hubbard - were hanging out late at night in 1940 in LA, drinking and putting the world to rights. They made a bet, who could dream up the best religion? Asimov explained in a TV interview in the 1980s that it was more of a dare than a true bet, and the goal was not a religion proper but ‘who can make the best religious story.’ The results were ‘Nightfall’ by Asimov, ‘Dune’ by Herbert, ‘Job’ by Heinlein and ‘Dianetics’ by Hubbard. If the first version of the story is true, Hubbard won the bet.
They say L Ron also said: ‘Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.’
Asimov is long dead but his niece, Nanette, is alive and well and lives in San Francisco where she works as a reporter on the city’s Chronicle newspaper. In 2004 she investigated the claims by Narconon – the anti-addiction programme promoted by the Church of Scientology – that it is an astonishingly successful drug therapy.
Narconon’s enthusiasts assert that drug addicts can be cured by long spells in the sauna and lots of Vitamin B or Niacin. Mr Hubbard had worked out that addicts could sweat out drugs like heroin from their fat. Tommy Davis told me that Narconon enjoyed an 80% success rate and Charles Hendry MP praised its success in the House of Commons in 2005: ‘I have seen for myself their project to take people away from drug addiction… Many of us have seen the good work that they do in those areas.’
Nanette Asimov’s investigation suggested this was mumbo-jumbo. She reported one year prior to the British MP’s endorsement and her series of stories was and is widely available on the internet for anyone to read. Nanette reported that addiction experts found Narconon ‘pseudoscience’ unsupported by scientific evidence; its drug education based on nonsense that drugs stay indefinitely in fat; its claim that drug residues produce a coloured ooze when exiting the body also nonsense; that sweating in a sauna helps you beat addiction, also nonsense.
On the trail of finding out more about Narconon, we flew from Florida to somewhere in the middle to somewhere on the West Coast. It took the rest of the day and much of the night. To someone who comes from a country where the sea is never further than 70 miles away, the United States of America is rather big. We had no sense that anyone was following us.
We woke in Oakland, on the other side of the bay from San Francisco. In Frisco, we popped along to the Scientology Org where I was not welcome. Later, we met Steve Heilig, a public health expert at the San Francisco Medical Society, who was asked by the San Francisco school board to review the Narconon drug education programme after Nanette’s reporting. He worked with four physicians and another public health authority, so that his conclusion was based on the work of a spread of experts.
And his finding on Narconon? Heilig described it as ‘out-dated, non-evidence-based and sometimes factually inaccurate.’
Scientology’s Narconon programme appears to be predicated on the belief that all drugs are fat-soluble, stay in the body long-term but can be flushed out by sweating. Science says that’s rubbish. Drugs like heroin are flushed out of the body in a few days, cannabis in a month or so. Long term, they’re not fat-soluble.
Heilig told me: ‘The approach favoured by Narconon was not supported by science. So given that falsehood, to use a blunt term, we recommended they be removed from San Francisco’s schools.’
I asked what struck him as being unusual about Narconon?
‘The idea that if you could approach it properly, sweat this out, that you would have different colours of ooze coming out of your skin which represented the drugs. That struck our experts as quote unquote “science fiction”’.
Not science fact?
‘Not science fact.’
The main purpose of our trip to San Francisco was to meet Bruce Hines, an ex-Scientologist who had ‘audited’ – that means heard the confessions of – stars such as Nicole Kidman, Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer, Tommy Davis’s mother and, briefly, Tom Cruise. It is a confession. At the end, the confessor proclaims: ‘By the power invested in me by the Church of Scientology, anything you have truthfully divulged is hereby forgiven by Scientologists.’
Bruce was once a true believer, a devoted acolyte of the religion and so trusted by the high command that he heard the confessions of its most precious parishioners. He had joined Scientology in 1972 when he was a 22-year-old physics student, and left in 2003, after three decades. From 1979 to 2003 he had been in the Sea Org.
Now that he is out, he is back studying physics, in particular cryogenic dark matter search or CDMS. Bruce explained to me by email what this means: ‘About 80% of the matter in the universe is made of something unknown. It can’t be detected by usual means, because it does not emit nor reflect light or any electromagnetic radiation. So it is called dark matter. It is different than what composes stars, planets, atoms, people, etc. This is not to be confused with “dark energy”, which is something else. It is definite that this dark matter exists, but to date no one knows for sure what it is made of. There are a few theories. I work as part of a collaboration that is testing one of these theories, the favored theory at the moment. I am with the University of Colorado, Denver. Some of the other institutions in the collaboration are MIT, Cal Tech, U of California Berkeley, Fermilab, NIST, Stanford, SLAC, U of Minnesota, U of Florida, Texas A&M, U of California Santa Barbara, U of British Columbia in Canada, Queen’s U in Canada, a university in Madrid, the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and a few others. It is very competitive. There are some other international collaborations composed of major institutions racing to make the same discovery, i.e. exactly what it this dark matter made of. It is currently one of the most major unanswered questions in the world of physics. Most agree that it could lead to Nobel Prizes, not that I could possibly be awarded one.’
As I said at the start, none of the people who had been Scientologists were dumb. Bruce was a big man, still handsome, plainly massively intelligent but gentle and thoughtful, understated and modest.
We drove around San Francisco for a bit, admiring the pointy building which looks like a bishop’s hat, and bumping into a George W. Bush cavalcade. We found a great background shot of San Francisco which framed the whole interview. The weather was ceaselessly sunny. It was weird listening to a man’s story of being held in a prison of the mind against the back-drop of one of the most free-thinking, free-wheeling cities on the planet.
Is it a cult?
‘It is a cult. I would have violently disagreed with that, even five years ago.’
Bruce referred to the 1961 book by the American psychiatrist, Robert Lifton: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, which I wrote about briefly in Chapter One. I’ve only got my head round Lifton’s work while writing this book. Now I sleep with it under my pillow.
Lifton was one of the very first people to think hard about brainwashing, and his understanding grew over time. Later on, Lifton set out three simple definers for a cult in his foreword to Margaret Singer’s book, Cults In Our Midst: that it has a charismatic leader who becomes a god; that it brainwashes; that it causes harm.
On Lifton’s first definer, I think a reasonable person would say that if a ‘religious’ body allowed its Leader to abuse or even hit members of the Holy Order, repeatedly, with impunity, that would be close to treating them as a god.
‘Most people, even Sea Organisation members and public Scientologists, have no idea what David Miscavige is like behind closed doors,’ said Bruce. ‘They have only seen him in these public gatherings, and there he’s quite personable.’
The real Miscavige is rather different than the fluent man in the tuxedo, said Bruce, accusing him of being a ‘very angry individual, he’s violent’.
Bruce explained that in 1995 he had audited the wife of a senior Scientologist, and Miscavige was not happy with the results. The woman was in LA, but the husband was posted 90 miles away at the International Headquarters of the Church, often known as Int or Gold Base, 500 acres tucked away in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Californian desert near a one-horse town called Hemet. Back in the day, in the late seventies, when Mr Hubbard was on the run from the FBI, Gold was top secret and for decades the Church sought to hide its existence from ‘public’ Scientologists. Today you can find it on Google Earth, snuggling the brown foothills of the San Jacinto mountains at Gilman Hot Springs, California. More than Clearwater or its complex in downtown LA, Gold is the headquarters of the Church, where David Miscavige is based. Bruce’s task was to convince the unhappy wife through auditing that her objections to this 90-mile separation were misplaced. Unsurprisingly, he failed.
‘I was in my office at Gold and I just heard out in the hallway, just outside my office, I heard him shouting, “where is that motherfucker?” and I go “uh-oh”. He barged into my office, and he’s always followed around by four, five, six people and they follow him in. And then he said, “there he is!” but he’s talking more loudly than I am and with much more anger. He walked up and he swung and he hit me on the side of the head.’
To say the head of a religion, or, to be more exact, an organisation that claims to be a religion, goes round hitting people is a heavy accusation. Critically, the sources have to be credible and there has to more than one and this isn’t the first time that someone has alleged that David Miscavige is violent. Back in 1987, Panorama reporter John Penycate interviewed Donald Larson, an ex-Scientologist who was described as being in the former ‘financial police’ of the Church. Larson told Panorama: ‘It was my job to scare people.’ What methods did you use? ‘Extortion, force, threats, duress.’ Larson described how, once Miscavige had taken over as leader of the Church, 15 Scientologists drove in three hired limos to the San Francisco Org to confront the head of the organization there. ‘This is nothing to do with religion any more,’ said Larson, ‘this is “where’s the money, Jack? I want the money. Where did you put the money?” The guy goes “I don’t have the money. I don’t know”. So David Miscavige comes up, grabs him by the tie and starts bashing him on the filing cabinets. Then his tie is ripped off and he’s thrown out onto the street.’
Ex-Scientologist Tom DeVocht used to be Miscavige’s drinking buddy. The two men used to chew the fat over a bottle of Macallan’s 12-year-old malt in the Chairman’s den at Gold from around 2000 to 2005 when Tom got out. Tom is a builder by trade, a thoughtful and decent man, good company, and, I felt, a man who would be a good friend. He was so close to Dave that he became a car-shopper for him, picking out an Acura TL, a fancy Japanese model. Women readers may not quite get this, but for a man to franchise out the buying of a car to another man is no small thing.
Miscavige hit him twice, Tom told me in 2010.
‘The first one, I was down at Gold, working on the renovations of compact disc manufacture and plant, and the next thing I knew all the international management, what they call “The Hall”, had come running down from a good quarter of a mile away. Dave had come in and he’d called me and I was standing in front of everybody and I really can’t recall exactly what he asked me. But I remember hesitating and thinking, what did he mean by that? The next thing I know, with an open hand, I got slapped, popped my ear pretty good. And pushed down to the ground and I think he might have hit me one more time in the chest.’
You are bigger than him?
‘I would say most are, but yes I am bigger than him.’
If somebody hit me…
‘…I was tempted to hit him back. This is where the cult aspect of it comes in. Here I have got the pope hitting me and I am thinking I have got 50-80 people behind him that I knew if I did anything to him, they would jump on me. I was outnumbered for sure. But that aside, you really do get into a mental state of…’ Tom struggled to find the right words, ‘…you have got to understand for years these people up there have been hit. I’ve seen Dave hit people, 75 to a 100 times. No joke.’
‘Second time,’ – also at Gold – ‘I was in the big castle, the studio. He was walking down the hall and I was there doing something, I forget. He walked by me and he just pushed me and banged my head into the concrete wall and he just kept walking.’
These are allegations that the Church of Scientology denies, I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Tom. And then he laughed.
These are allegations that the Church of Scientology denies.
Close up, Tom observed the slow accretion of power to Miscavige, how he switched from being on equal terms with other executives in the Church, when he addressed them by the first names and they called him Dave, to him insisting on them calling him ‘Sir’. In the end, Tom said, Miscavige became, ‘quite a monster, hitting people.’
Miscavige’s abuse of his Holy Order’s most senior figures was, at times, like a sadistic cocktail of the Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty, according to Tom’s description of it. Tom referred to a notorious game of ‘Musical Chairs’, the Scientology version, staged by Miscavige at Gold. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody blared out. Too many believers, not enough chairs. The twist is: if you lose your chair, you face eternal damnation. So you have to win that chair. Musical chairs as directed by the thumping pope. Tom said: ‘Everybody played the musical chairs game but with this mental anguish. And people were breaking down. It was unbelievable, a very eerie, strange thing.’
Like Bruce, Tom found the real Chairman to be unlike his official persona: ‘Up front Miscavige is a very nice guy when you first meet him. You think, “Wow!” This is a genuinely nice guy, he cares about me, he cares about other people, this is what you would expect from the head of the Church of Scientology. The closer I got with him, I found out he is actually quite the opposite. That is all a facade. He is an evil person.’
Evil is a heavy word, I said.
‘It is, and I am not using it lightly.’
The Church and David Miscavige deny allegations of abuse and violence in the strongest possible terms.
The Church’s official organ, Freedom Magazine, is not uncritical of Tom. It says that he is ‘a genuine pathological liar’; an incompetent who ‘enlisted a convicted felon to broker a Church property acquisition’, whose construction work for the Church led to ‘cost overruns, blown budgets and inordinate project delays’; it alleges that he stole several hundred dollars from the purse of his wife’s grandmother on their wedding day. It says that his ex-wife never saw any bruises on him: ‘DeVocht’s former wife, Jenny Linson: “I slept with Tom DeVocht for almost 20 years. I knew every inch of him. I never saw one scratch. I never saw one bruise. I never saw one black eye, nothing.”’
We come across Jenny Linson later in our narrative.
Freedom Magazine goes on to quote Tom denying that he had ever claimed that he had been bruised. The magazine adds: ‘DeVocht was so slow on the uptake he missed the logic train, i.e., that he claimed to have bruises or scars was not the point of his wife’s refutation; it was that someone who was actually beaten would have obviously exhibited bruises and scars. Or to phrase it in terms of his own skewed thinking: it doesn’t matter whether physical evidence “sort of” exists to prove what he’s saying because he never claimed there was physical evidence in the first place. But, of course, if there is no physical evidence, doesn’t that mean his allegations are “sort of” false, which in turn means DeVocht is “sort of” lying?’
Note the idiosyncratic, even peculiar, style of that rebuttal: pure denigration.
Claire Headley was born into the Church and signed the billion-year contract to join the Sea Org when she was still a teenager. She rose to work at the very top of the organisation at Gold base. Her recollection of Miscavige is not wholly favourable. Once, he ordered her, ‘go and berate those people and say: “Suck my big fat cock.”’
She is a beautiful woman, of poise and quality, the mother of two adored children, born in England, with a trace of her English accent still. Claire does not have a cock.
Did you do that?
‘I did.’
Forgive me, I said, but that sounds crazy.
‘It is.’
Her husband Marc joined in. Marc is a thick-set chap, a tekkie, self-assured, funny with a fast wit. You would not want to get on the wrong side of him, but he struck me as being a good man.
Marc tried to give me a flavour of how Scientology’s pope thinks of himself: Miscavige ‘went to some big celebrity dinner with Tom Cruise and John Travolta and a bunch of people and Bill Clinton was there and they shook hands or they talked or whatever, and when he got back to Gold someone said: “I heard you met President Bill Clinton”, and he said: “No, Bill Clinton met me.”’
Had Miscavige ever abused people in their presence?
Marc said: ‘I’ve seen him beat many people up.’ Claire said she had too. Marc had been beaten up by him once, too: ‘I was in a production facility and I had made an offhand comment and he was already upset and he grabbed me and started punching me and I fell up against a wall unit like a shelf, desk type of thing and my glasses were broken. I was going to strike him back and I was escorted out of the building immediately.’
Marc has written a book on his time in the Church, Blown For Good, which is a shocking read. The book describes Miscavige’s mass humiliation of the Sea Org staff: his version of Musical Chairs with people ripping chairs away from rivals and, on another occasion, when around a hundred of the Holy Order of the Church were made to clean out the sewage ponds at Gold by hand. Marc writes: ‘As you picked up the waste, it would crumble in your hands and make dust. Multiply that times a hundred people, walking, handling and moving all that waste and that made a pretty big cloud… A giant cloud of dust made up of excrement was what I was breathing in.’ The ordeal lasted two days. Eventually, Marc was allowed a shower. ‘That night when I got to wash up, I took a two-hour shower to try and get the stench off me. It did not work. I think it took a week for all of the crap to work its way out of my pores, nose, throat, and ears. Even my eyes would tear crap mud. It was the most disgusting, humiliating experience of my entire life.’
One wonders at the mental state of anyone who allows himself to scrub clean a sewage pond thick with excrement crumble by hand in the service of what some say is a religion. If Marc is right, one hundred people did that.
The Church and David Miscavige deny the allegations of abuse and violence and describe the Headleys as members of a ‘Posse of Lunatics’. The Church’s Freedom magazine says that Marc is ‘a fervid anti-Scientologist who never misses an opportunity to publicly denigrate the religion and its Founder.’ It says he was about to be caught red-handed after teaming up with a criminal in a crooked concern, so he fled. It says he was then excommunicated. His wife Claire soon followed suit, making her unannounced exit shortly thereafter. Later, it says, Marc became a member of a cyber-terrorist group.
I thought the Headleys were a lovely couple with two great kids.
Steve Hall, Scientology’s top scriptwriter until he left, described the following scene: ‘I was called up to “Building 50”. Everyone was made to sit in special chairs and told where to sit. It was about 15 or 20 people. Finally Miscavige came in and started walking up and down the aisles. Each chair was spaced out so he had plenty of room. No one knew what it was about, as per usual, but Miscavige was fuming, also as per usual. He glared at each person intently, then stopped in front of me. He shouted to the room that I was “out-ethics” but didn’t say why. This was also usual. But this time he made a special point of it. After staring at me he finally moved on, went down three more people then suddenly attacked Marc Yager [a senior figure in the Church] without warning, striking him repeatedly on both sides of the head. Yager tried to deflect some of the blows but was not very successful because Miscavige was standing over him while Yager was sitting. Yager fell out of his chair and was visibly shaken.
‘It was a bit like the scene from The Untouchables where Al Capone walked around with a baseball bat. But without the bat.
‘Later when Miscavige finally started talking, what he spoke about had nothing to do with Yager or me. I realized then that Miscavige, by suddenly starting to include me in his beatings, was actually grooving me in or grooming me up for the same treatment. It was obvious that I was the actual person he wanted to hit since he made the announcement, then hit someone else.
‘A few weeks later, I think it was November, 2003, Mike Rinder and I were working on another script. Miscavige ordered something to be fixed. Although my IQ is over 150, I never could understand the guy or what he wanted because he had the knack of both telling you to do and not do something in the same meeting. Plus he would also say to do other things, making comprehending what he wanted nearly impossible.’
Remember, poor Naz, Tom Cruise’s date who says she got dumped because she could not understand Miscavige’s speed-talk? She was, it seems, not alone.
‘So Miscavige ordered Mike Rinder to help me. Mike had known Miscavige longer and was able to decipher his gobbledy-gook orders a bit better perhaps. As per usual his orders were indecipherable. However, Mike thought he knew what to do. We made a minor fix of honestly just a few words. Miscavige came down to review the edit. For some peculiar reason, Miscavige ordered Mike and I to stand shoulder to shoulder while Miscavige stood just in front of us. Miscavige actually pressed us together so our shoulders were touching. Miscavige barked out orders to start the video then said “STOP!” He wheeled around and glared at me. As per usual I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was angry about. No one else knew either. His eyes held on me, then shifted to Mike for ten seconds. These stare-down sessions were part of how Miscavige rolls. He just stares at you and says nothing. Meanwhile, your mind is racing. Then he went back to staring at me. No-one in the room was even breathing. He looked back at Mike and suddenly launched at him. He was only about 12 inches away so he was at him lightning quick.
‘Miscavige grabbed Mike’s head with both hands and shoved him backwards so Mike lost his balance. Miscavige put his whole body into it, shoving from the legs up, and bashed Mike’s head into the wall three times, solid cherry cabinets built into the wall. Miscavige’s arms and whole body were shaking with the force and rage, as if he was trying to crush Mike’s head, and Mike’s head hit the wall HARD three times. Mike did not retaliate.
‘After that, Miscavige left. Yager asked Mike, “What was that for?” and Mike who still seemed somewhat dazed said, “I guess he didn’t like the edit.”’
The Church, David Miscavige and Marc Yager deny the violence allegations against David Miscavige.
The Church’s Freedom magazine suggests that Steve Hall was a fantasist, by claiming that in past lives he was variously Jesus, Buddha and the co-creator of the Universe. The Church mocks Steve’s claim to be a ‘scriptwriter’ for the ecclesiastic leader of the religion, Mr Miscavige, saying the claim is ‘patently false’: ‘By that definition, a person peeling potatoes in the army is “The President’s Potato Peeler.”’
I am looking forward to meeting Steve Hall and sharing a potato with him.
Amy Scobee was in for 27 years and rose to head the Celebrity Centre in LA, where she got to know Cruise, Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer – Tommy’s mum – Nancy Cartwright, Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, Juliette Lewis, Isaac Hayes and others. She is a lovely, bubbly woman, one of those people who wake up every morning as if they had already enjoyed a glass of champagne – not literally, of course. But Amy is fun to hang out with. She got out in 2005 and five years later told me that she had witnessed Miscavige beat people up seven, maybe eight times. On one occasion, she saw her pope attack a victim: ‘He’d jumped across the table, grabbed him around the neck, knocked him unto the floor, jumped on top of him, grabbed the epaulette, pulled it off, grabbed the tag, pulled it off. Buttons flying, change falling out.’
Amy’s book, Abuse at The Top, is a compelling read, setting out her evidence of grotesque physical, mental, sexual abuse of innocence. Her first contact with Scientology was at the age of 14. Once she turned 16, she signed the billion-year-contract, becoming a member of the Sea Org. Within months she was on the RPF, the Rehabilitation Project Force, which is a more extreme version of the Scientology boot camp in which Donna said she witnessed Tommy Davis having his hair pulled, an allegation Tommy and the Church deny.
Amy’s crime? Having consensual sex with a man she was in love with and who she planned to marry. What kind of religion is it that places a sixteen-year-old on a punishment regime for slap and tickle? Amy spent two years on the RPF. Her account reads like torture. Inside the RPF, degradation was never far away. If you transgressed you were punished by being placed on ‘rocks and shoals’: made to run up ‘laps’ up and down stairs. A big ‘lap’ was running up and down 11 flights of stairs to the top of the Foot Harrison Hotel and back.
The cruellest feature of her experience on the RPF for her and her fellow ‘convicts’ was lack of sleep, making accidents, she says, grimly frequent. Her RPF unit was working full-time building a house for LRH at Gold, lest he ever return. In truth, Mr Hubbard was living – or rather dying – in hiding a few dozen miles away in an out-of-the-way ranch.
‘Fatigue was constant,’ wrote Amy. ‘I recall in the middle of the night pushing a wheelbarrow up the hill and the next thing I knew I woke up in a ditch.’ In her book, she writes that a fellow RPF-er cut his finger off on the table-saw; another cut open his leg with an angle grinder because he fell asleep while using it; a woman fell 20 feet off a scaffold and shattered her pelvis.
After all their efforts, the LRH was subsequently entirely demolished and rebuilt.
On Christmas Day, 1984, Amy’s RPF was ordered to ‘white-glove’ clean the base galley for the crew. It being Christmas, the RPF were allowed to listen to the radio, a perk usually forbidden.
When LRH died in January 1986, the whole Sea Org was placed in a condition of mass mourning. Amy had no proper time to grieve her uncle, the NASA astronaut, Dick Scobee, one of seven killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, killed two days after the announcement of LRH’s death. For a true Scientologist, the passing away of a man she had never met trumped the death of her uncle, the Commander of the space shuttle.
As she ascended in the ranks of the Church, Amy came to know Miscavige well but not to admire him. One day Miscavige brought in a new executive, dressed in a black sweater with four gold Captain stripes on her epaulettes. The executive made a whimper when she saw Amy. Miscavige told her that the executive could sniff out crimes so she must have something ‘pretty slimy’ going on. The executive, she alleges, was Miscavige’s dog, Jelly.
Violent beatings, sexual humiliation and psychotic behaviour were par for the course, she writes.
As Miscavige consolidated his grip on power, life at Gold became grim, grimmer than before. The little sweeteners of life – listening to the radio, having plants or pictures of your family in the office – came to be forbidden, she writes. Family time, an hour a day for parents to spend with their kids, was cancelled; pregnancies in the Sea Org were forbidden, meaning that anyone without children in Sea Org had to accept childlessness or the damnation that came with exit. Amy got out when she was 42, childless.
Amy reflects on her mindset, on why she allowed herself to be abused in this dreadful way: ‘Unbelievably, I never blamed anyone for being put through these things. We were so indoctrinated or brainwashed into believing that we’re not our bodies, the mission is more important than self and that anything personal could easily be sacrificed for the cause.’
After she left Amy read Combating Cult Mind Control by ex-Moonie Steven Hassan. One particular passage impressed Amy: ‘Members are made to feel part of an elite corps of mankind. This feeling of being special, or participating in the most important acts of human history with a vanguard of committed believers, is strong emotional glue to keep people sacrificing and working hard.’
Amy reflects on her 27 years of what you could call ‘mind-glue’: ‘that makes a lot of sense to me as to why I could have possibly tolerated a fraction of what I did and still stick with the organisation.’
The Church and Miscavige deny Amy’s allegations of abuse and violence. On Amy, the Church suggests that she is sexually voracious and grossly incompetent. Freedom Magazine says: ‘Today, Scobee spends her days posting salacious drivel to cyber-terrorists on the lunatic fringe of the Internet. Although she has thus far escaped hate-crime scrutiny, she remains among the nastiest snipers and her snippets are filled with sexual tittle-tattle. So, yes, while Scobee may have never been a “celebrity queen,” she at least now qualifies as a gossip maven…’
A simple test of a civilised human being is how they describe those who have treated them badly. An ancient but lovely Berliner called Wolfgang Von Leyden taught me philosophy when I was a student at LSE. He was brilliant, kind and good. He had had to run from Germany in the thirties. He described the Nazis as ‘churlish and ill-bred’.
I thought Amy was smashing.
This list of ex-Scientologists who agree with Bruce Hines that Miscavige is angry and violent is not exhaustive. But I cannot include them all. My last witness on the issue of whether Scientology’s pope abuses his adepts gave her testimony in open court in Texas in February 2012. Former Scientologist Debbie Cook told a court in San Antonio that she witnessed ‘terror and tyranny’ during the 17 years as head of the church in Florida.
Cook told the court: ‘I witnessed Mr. Miscavige physically punching the face and wrestling to the ground another executive at Scientology International’ – Gold. A colleague called Ginge Nelson, she said, objected to the violence and he was later made to lick the bathroom floor clean for half an hour. ‘One time I was called into a conference room and asked some questions and he ordered his secretary to slap me. And she slapped me so hard I fell over into the chairs. One time Mr Miscavige ordered his Communicator to break my finger if I didn’t answer his question. It was bent back very hard. It was not broken.’
Her lawyer asked: ‘Getting ordered to have someone slap you down or throw water in your face or break your finger, what were the horrible crimes that you would commit that would cause these punishments to be inflicted?’
Debbie replied: ‘Just not answer a question fast enough or maybe your expression displeased him. Maybe you were smiling or you shouldn’t have been smiling.’
‘Did you ever witness any incidents of violence or torture or degradation in England?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Debbie. ‘I was at a meeting with Mr Miscavige and with several top international executives. And then he ordered a man named Bob Keenan’ – Fireman Bob – ‘to take those other executives and throw them into the lake. At the time it was October and it was very cold in England… They were made to go into the cold lake.’
Was Debbie physically abused by Miscavige, her lawyer asked?
Once, she said, he ‘grabbed my shoulders and shook me while he was yelling at me.’
Her lawyer asked her how she ended up in The Hole, a bizarre dungeon of the mind she described at Gold.
‘In May 2007,’ – the month our Panorama aired – ‘I was at the International Base [Gold]. Mr Miscavige was not there, but I was supposed to be doing numerous things under his directions… I was on the phone to him every day, sometimes several times a day, and there were certain things that he was very unhappy… about, that weren’t done to his satisfaction… I was on the phone to him. I was in an office. Someone was pounding on the door. Because I was on the phone to him, I didn’t answer. I was trying to be on the phone and talk to him… The beating stopped and then someone pried the window open of the office that I was in and two big guys came in through the window. And Mr Miscavige said to me on the phone, “Are they there?” And I said, “Yes, they are.” And he said, “Goodbye.” And two men physically took me away to The Hole.’
The Hole, her evidence suggested, was a weird torture centre made out of two trailers on GOLD. Debbie told the court she was kept locked up in the trailers ‘infested with ants’ with other Scientologists for seven weeks as temperatures soared to 106 fahrenheit. Cook said: ‘I was put in a trash can, cold water poured over me, slapped, things like that.’
The Church vehemently denied her claims, calling them ‘outrageously false’.
It branded Cook a ‘heretic’ and withdrew its case to stop her using the court ‘as a forum’.
David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology flatly deny all allegations of abuse and violence.
The allegations of abuse and violence by the Leader of the Church, conducted in full view of senior members of the Church hierarchy with impunity, suggest evidence that the Leader is treated as a god. If so, the Church passes the first definer for a cult according to Robert Lifton, the world’s number one expert on mind control.
It is strange to think that Miscavige was Tom Cruise’s best man. The chasm between what Cruise and the Church say about the Chairman of the Board and what the ex-Scientologists say is deep.
Lifton’s next definer for a cult is brainwashing.
Back in 1961, Lifton in his book on brainwashing set out eight tests: ‘where totalism exists, a religion, a political movement, or even a scientific organization becomes little more than an exclusive cult.’ Lifton describes them as: ‘Milieu Control’, ‘Mystical Manipulation’, ‘The Demand for Purity’, ‘The Cult of Confession’, ‘The Sacred Science’, ‘Loading the Language’, ‘Doctrine over Person’ and ‘The Dispensing of Existence’.
Lifton sums up his eight tests: ‘The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform or “brainwashing”’.
Bruce Hines – auditor to the stars – reflected: ‘Lifton had done some research into prison camps in China and mind control. It resonated with me when I read that. Those are methods that kept me in that mindset for thirty years.’
Let’s take Lifton’s tests for brainwashing one at a time. Together, they provide some kind of intellectual framework for assessing whether or not the Church brainwashes – a charge Tommy Davis vehemently denied to me in the Industry of Death exhibition and one it continues to deny in the strongest possible terms.
Test Number One is ‘Milieu Control’. Lifton writes: ‘The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also – in his penetration of his inner life – over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984.’ The most basic consequence of this information control, says Lifton, ‘is the disruption of balance between self and outside world.’
Bruce told me: ‘When I was in, if I heard someone say something negative about Scientology, I would instantly not listen to what the person was saying. I would think that person is a suppressive. You get into that sort of a mindset. And when I was in the Sea Organisation it would have been unthinkable for me to have a cell phone, to have a personal computer, to even get certain magazines. The mail I would receive would be read before I would receive it. Any mail that I would send out would be read before it could go out. And if there was anything wrong it would get kicked back. There are many, many ways where I believe it is a mind control organisation. A big one is to shut out any counter ideas, any critical ideas. When I was in, I was actually in the frame of mind where I would not listen to some critical thing about it. I would immediately dismiss it. I wouldn’t even hear the words really.’
Test Number Two is ‘Mystical Manipulation’: adherents are, Lifton writes, ‘impelled by a special kind of mystique which not only justifies such manipulations, but makes them mandatory. Included in this mystique is a sense of “higher purpose”… By thus becoming the instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions – the Party, the Government, the Organisation. They are the agents “chosen” (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural force) to carry out the “mystical imperative”, the pursuit of which must supersede all considerations of decency or of immediate human welfare.’
Enter Lord Xenu. Can Scientology’s struggle against the space alien Satan be classed as a ‘mystical imperative’? What was Bruce’s take on the ‘Wall of Fire?’
‘It’s taught at the level of Operating Thetan III. OT3, it’s a big deal, you hear about from the day you first get interested and then when you do this level you’re going to have these great abilities. You’ll be way above an average human being, and you have to undergo very strict security clearance to even get access to these materials. They’re supposed to be very secret. The cosmology, the idea is that it goes back literally quadrillions of years. The current estimate on the Big Bang is fourteen billion, so this is orders of magnitude longer than you and I supposedly have existed. Relatively recently, seventy-five million years ago, there was this character named Xenu who was an emperor of a galactic federation and this is what… I read it and at the time I thought “oh cool!”’
What did Xenu do?
‘There were twenty-six stars that are in this part of the galaxy, and so he had people killed and brought to earth and placed in or on volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs, and then their souls are captured by an electronic ribbon he said, and then they are pulled down and given what is called an “implant” in Scientology, and this is basically pictures of forests to implant false ideas into the being.’
I didn’t quite follow this, but Bruce wasn’t finished.
‘And the main part about OT3 and one of the things that is so secret about it is that a lot of these implanted souls are now stuck to our bodies, and they’re here and there and there. Now supposedly I got rid of them on OT3. Although when you go onto the higher levels you find out that there are more of these body entheta they’re called. And because they’re implanted seventy-five million years ago, they influence the way you think and what you believe about things. A Scientologist who knew would say that you yourself, the fact that you’re doing a story on Scientology, you’re not really doing it out of your own freewill but you’re like a robot carrying these evil things from the past to try to keep Scientology from succeeding.’
So a fundamental belief to Scientology is that we’re actually contaminated by bits of space aliens?
‘Very definitely so. It’s patently false.’
Test Number Three, ‘The Demand for Purity’, sets out the goal of absolute purity, and reflects: ‘thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continual reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition… Once an individual person has experienced the totalist polarization of good and evil, he has great difficulty in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality.’
This test, ‘The Demand For Purity’, implies war against the impure. Was the Church in any way critical of Bruce? He is, says, Freedom Magazine, a liar and a religious bigot. ‘In 2001,’ while he was still inside, ‘Hines wrote a 13-page public announcement in which he detailed the Suppressive Acts he had committed… Lying was a constant unchanging pattern with Hines.’ Generating guilt and shame drip from virtually every line of Freedom Magazine.
To repeat, Bruce struck me as a painfully honest man.
Test Number Four is ‘The Cult of Confession’. This, Lifton writes, ‘is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is a demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed… In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.’ Lifton identifies three special meanings of the totalist confession: first, a ‘perpetual psychological purge of impurity’; second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender; third, it is a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organisation) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.’
In the Church of Scientology, does confession become a means of exploitation?
Bruce audited Nicole Kidman and Kirstie Alley and, briefly, Tom Cruise.
Auditing is Scientology’s version of confession, with the added element of the confessant holding two tin cans, or something like that, which connect to the E-meter, a kind of Bakelite box with a needle and dial. The E-meter works as a kind of crude lie or truth detector. The auditor asks questions. Quite different from the Catholic confession, the more the confessant confesses, the more the auditor probes the sins or crimes: what exactly did you think? Did you want to have sex with her? How did you have sex with her? It can be a probing and invasive investigation of sin, not just an admission. The question is – to what end? To help the person to lead a better life? Or to spy on them?
The Church has told the BBC that auditing sessions are routinely recorded for training purposes. What happens with that information is hotly disputed.
Ecclesiastically, when Bruce audited Cruise, he was the confessor and Cruise the lowly parishioner. But it didn’t work out like that, he said. Bruce described a fateful session which ended badly for him. ‘You’re supposed to have what’s called a floating needle, that’s a certain motion that the needle is supposed to do, that’s considered a good thing. And so I’m doing this exam on him and he’s there and he has a big smile and he said something very brief like “that was a good session” or something, but I didn’t see this floating needle immediately and so I was sort of waiting to see if one would happen. And then I saw a floating needle and then I told him that, “Your needle’s floating, Tom”, but then later I was told he complained that I was too slow and so I wasn’t allowed to do these exams on him anymore. In a regular organisation that wouldn’t happen, but with the kid-glove treatment that Tom Cruise was getting, they would get someone who wouldn’t imply in anyway that maybe he wasn’t doing just great.’
He got kid-glove treatment?
‘Aw, unbelievable, no other Scientologist got treatment like Tom Cruise.’
Other ex-members of the Sea Org suggest that Cruise’s confessions were exploited by the Leader, Miscavige, his own best man.
Cruise’s major confessor was Marty Rathbun, at one time an Inspector-General of the Church, and now out of the organisation, but still a believing Scientologist. His blog is the go-to running commentary for those Scientologists who hope for a Reformation of the Church. He is a tough man, no fool. Marty told me: ‘There is a specific room for all the A-listers, John Travolta, Tom Cruise. And I audited Tom Cruise there. There is a shelf in there that has a false glass mirror panel and behind it there is a video camera.’
The Church’s Freedom Magazine suggests that Marty is a mentally unstable and violent psychopath.
Audio-visual technician Marc Headley told me: ‘When I was working for the Church of Scientology I installed over 100 rooms that had two cameras and a microphone in them where people would get auditing.’
The camera was not obvious but hidden, said Marc, ‘inside of a smoke detector or inside of a picture frame. We’re talking about pinhole cameras.’
The Church says it does film auditing, but that this is not a secret and has been announced publicly. Cameras are fitted within walls to stop them being intrusive and unsightly. The Church also says that auditing secrets are sacrosanct, protected by priest-penitent confidentiality and never revealed.
Claire Headley told me she watched a video of Cruise being audited: ‘Marty, sitting in the chair. The E-meter and on the opposite side of the table Tom Cruise, holding the cans and the whole thing. I mean I saw those videos.’
And did they include personal things?
‘Absolutely.’
Things that Cruise would not want people to know?
‘Absolutely.’
The Church says recording is not a breach of confidentiality. Other Scientologists are authorised to listen in; selected staff are given access for the purposes of training and monitoring. The Church and David Miscavige deny that the sanctity of the confessional has ever been breached.
The idea that your most intimate, darkest sexual imaginings, the things that make you blush even thinking about them, could end up in the hands of the Church of Scientology frightened Tom DeVocht.
During auditing was it necessary to reveal intimate sexual details?
‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t in an auditing session say, “oh, I had an affair”. You had to say what exactly did you do, how long did you do it.’
This is pornographic?
‘Very much so.’
I took her clothes off, she did this….
‘Yes,’ said Tom.
‘Exact details,’ said Alison. ‘I was Sec-Checked.’ That’s SciSpeak for Security-Checking. The devil lies in the detail. The Church makes a distinction between the sanctity of the priest-penitent confession and the Sec-Check, to defend the Church against attack. For the Sea Org member, holding the cans, being probed about his or her intimate secrets, the process would feel the same and the Church’s distinction may seem one without a difference.
‘They will ask you,’ said Alison, ‘what you have done and whatever comes up, maybe it is a sexual question, maybe it is to do with what you did at work, that they want to know exactly what you did. When you did it? How you did it?’
Tom cut in, saying the sexual end of it was far more important than if, as a staff member, you falsified your statistics. Miscavige appeared to enjoy, he said, bringing up staffers’ sexual indignities in the hall at Gold Base in front of other Scientologists: ‘First of all, what the hell has that got to do with him? Secondly, that poor guy is sitting there. And then you have got to think from a religious, from a Scientologist’s point of view, it is a confession for god’s sake.’
Not for publication?
‘That’s exactly right. But Dave would take a pleasure in just crushing… You can see the guy sitting there just sweating and going, oh my God, I can’t believe this is being brought up.’
Tom recalled that Miscavige taunted one particular victim who had admitted taking pictures of himself with a camera phone, and that he called for the pictures to be downloaded and posted up on display. That never happened but by then everyone knew the poor man’s secret.
The Chairman’s old drinking partner also said that there was a warehouse full of the Pre-Clear folders, containing written reports and videos: ‘You know he has got that information. It’s a very scary but a very real thing.’
Miscavige’s abuse of confessional secrets, Tom says, was common. He described a scene at Gold that he had witnessed. ‘There was a break period where people were coming in, people coming out. And he goes, “watch this”. And he calls at random, some people I knew, some people I didn’t. He would call “Alison” over’ – Tom gestured to his partner, giving her name to cover a real person – ‘he would say, “Tom, this is Alison. Alison was thinking about committing suicide, she was thinking about killing me, she was masturbating, thinking about the captain of the organisation.” I am thinking, OK, bye Alison. “Peter, here, was falsifying his statistics and had his finger up his ass on three different occasions.”’
Tom said that Miscavige could bring up the dirt on 25 people instantly, like that – he clicked his fingers. He compared Miscavige’s conduct to the Catholic confession: ‘You go in as a Catholic and you say, look I have sinned, I have done this, that and the other thing. It is done, it is over for it. You don’t have to worry about it.’
Absolution, I said. And the priest doesn’t say anything to anyone, and that has been the rule since 1388.
‘Right.’
The Church of Scientology and David Miscavige deny any such allegations that the sanctity of the confessional has even been breached and say that Tom DeVocht is a genuine pathological liar.
Tom described consistent violations of that priest-penitent relationship at Gold Base, how if a Sea Org member slighted Miscavige by looking ‘at him wrong’ or ‘didn’t stand to attention when he walked into a room’ the person would be security-checked or ‘sec-checked’ in the jargon, and audited, aggressively, hour after hour. The auditor would get into trouble if he didn’t come up with the goods, said Tom.
‘So they had to sit there for hours and find out whatever the hell they could find out. If it was masturbation, if it was you thought about undressing somebody: I am giving you real life examples that I heard. You had sex with your wife when you were “down step”’ – that is if demotion in the hierarchy made sexual relations with your higher-placed wife out-of-bounds.’
After the sec-checking came the public humiliation, Tom said. At a mass staff meeting on Friday night, Miscavige ‘would go up there and say, “Peter, stand up. Yesterday Peter was masturbating in the bathroom.” This is in front of the entire staff anywhere from 500 to 800 people. So dig it: you have taken this religious philosophy and he is using it to crush people. By the time I got there in 2001 there were people I knew for almost 30 years. They were cowed, you couldn’t even talk to them. They were like different people.’
Amy Scobee in her book says that she witnessed the sanctity of the priest-penitent relationship abused: ‘I have seen this trust violated on several occasions throughout the years – especially with staff members, but also with celebrities.’ She describes how she was told that a man that she was uncomfortable around was appointed to be her boss, a decision she was personally unhappy with: ‘I couldn’t help but think that this was some sort of sick game Miscavige was playing.’
She was told she had no choice in the matter and was later given his confessional reports where he – in complete confidence – referred to his sexual infatuation with her. Then she was interrogated on the cans, asked repeatedly if she had had sex with the man who was infatuated with her. Her interrogator ‘had an ear-piece in, and she was getting instructions about what to ask by whoever… was looking in on this confessional from the other room.’ The confessional booths, she writes, are set up with LOOK-IN, LISTEN-IN and TALK-IN systems with video cameras positioned to be able to see the E-meter and the person confessing simultaneously on a split-screen monitor.
Amy said ‘no’ repeatedly to her interrogator, but was told that she would not be let out of the room until she confessed to having sex with the man or admitted to some other form of ‘sexual perversion’. The E-meter interrogation lasted several gruelling hours, she said. This was, she writes, ‘nothing short of sexual harassment.’
Her experience smacks of torture: prolonged physical and psychological abuse in order to extract information. In a BBC Radio Four documentary Torture in the 21st Century, the former Shadow Home Secretary Tory MP and ex-Territorial SAS trooper David Davis told me: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ The example he gave was of the CIA water-boarding a Libyan opponent of the Gaddafi regime and radical Islamicist, Sheikh al-Libi, a very large number of times, ‘essentially until he worked out what it was his torturers wanted him to say, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there was some sort of cooperation between Al Qaeda and the then Iraqi government. And that was a major part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq. So they got the information they wanted to hear.’ But it was not true.
To end her E-meter interrogation, Amy confessed to the sexual perversion that they wanted to hear. She writes, that she admitted ‘to a time that I put a finger in my rear end during sex with my husband.’ Miscavige made a joke of this incident around the base, describing ‘finger up the butt’ for the type of transgressions the staff were making, she writes: ‘Instead of coming clean on what we’ve done to “actively sabotage Scientology expansion”… This was not only embarrassing but a serious invasion of privacy and a violation of the priest-penitent relationship.’
After Amy left the Church and went public with her accusations, the Church went public against her, revealing details of her sex life. In its on-line magazine the Church labelled Amy ‘The Adulteress’ and accused her of ‘wanton sexual behaviour’ – something she denies. The Church also sent the St Petersburg Times the ‘dirt’, her intimate secrets that she had confessed in an auditing session or Sec-Check.
Amy told me: ‘The details of how I had sex with my husband before I got married is not something that should go to a newspaper. They made it the world’s business by issuing it on the internet and in a magazine that went to a hundred thousand or more people. It went to all my neighbours.’
The Church admits sending the newspaper material about Amy’s sex life. It claims the information was from an affidavit signed by her and therefore not confidential.
Amy disputes this, saying the Church handed over handwritten confessions which she believed were confidential.
Lifton identified three facets to the totalist confession: a perpetual psychological purge of impurity; self-surrender; making public or at least known to the Organisation everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.
Test Number Five: ‘The Secret Science’. Lifton says the totalist milieu ‘maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as the ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute “scientific” precision.’
Bruce Hines reflected on the lure of Scientology’s sacred “technology”: ‘There’s always a carrot. From the beginning in my own case and I think maybe others, when you first get involved, the big carrot is that you can reach the state they call “Operating Thetan”. This is a supposed state were you can leave your body at will and could do remote viewing and be totally certain of your own immortality, and not be afflicted by body troubles and things, some almost God-like state.
That carrot is always there.’
Are you an Operating Thetan?
‘Well I was on OT7’ – Operating Thetan Level 7, the second highest level inside Scientology.
So theoretically you’re immortal?
‘Yeah.’
Well, you used to be immortal and…?
Bruce started laughing.
The mood changed when he talked about his sister, a devout Scientologist. She completed OT8, the highest possible level, then suffered breast cancer. It was slow-moving and easily operable, but Scientology teaches its devotees that if you do the tech, you have cause – power, supremacy – over ill-health.
Bruce, fair-minded as ever, pointed out many Scientologists do take normal medical treatment. Was she treated medically?
‘No, and she definitely should have been. She had breast cancer and it was a slow growing kind, and with…’
And easily operable?
‘Yeah. The auditing would take care of it, but it just got worse and worse and then it was too late.’
She died, aged 55, in 1999.
‘It had a profound effect on me,’ said Bruce, ‘although I wouldn’t admit it at the time, because according to their ideology as you get up to those higher levels you should be more or less impervious to such things. In my sister’s case, she was such a true believer, you’re led to believe that as an Operating Thetan you are at cause over things that can go wrong with the body. She did believe that.’
Brainwashing Test Number Six: ‘Loading the Language’: ‘The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.’ These clichés become, says Lifton, ‘ultimate terms’, either ‘god terms’ representing ‘ultimate good’ or ‘devil terms’ representing ‘ultimate evil’. ‘Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centred on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull.’ For an individual, Lifton says, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. ‘He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.’
Apply ‘loading the language’ to the following terms: ‘auditing’, ‘covert hostility’, ‘disconnection’, ‘E-meter’, ‘ethics officer’, ‘floating needle’, ‘Int’, “Operating Thetan’, ‘RPF’, ‘security check’, ‘Sea Organisation’, ‘upset’, ‘withhold’ and ‘Xenu’.
Brainwashing Test Number Seven: ‘Doctrine over person’: ‘this sterile language,’ says Lifton, ‘reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience – between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguings of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which a totalist environment seems, at least to the outsider, to possess.’ The consequence is that ‘the human is thus subjugated to the ahuman… The underlying assumption is that the doctrine – including its mythological elements – is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience.’
I asked Bruce about the effect of his commitment to Scientology on his family?
‘I was in Scientology for about six years and then I decided to join the Sea Organisation, which is this sort of monastic type organization. You live in a paramilitary structure, you live communally, you eat communally and so you sort of move off and you give up any sort of normal life. It would be like joining a monastery if you were a Catholic. And at that point, although I told myself well it’s all for the greater good, I rarely saw my family, my parents, my brother my sister, and I would maybe make a phone call every couple of years, and maybe write a letter. It’s difficult to find time to write a letter because there’s quite a lot of demands on your time. And it’s something I really regret now, from their view, although they were very understanding, they would never say anything to criticise me. I went off and joined a cult and just left them.’
You’ve still got family in there?
‘Yes I have.’
You talk to them?
‘No, they will not talk to me, because I, since I left, and I have been officially declared in the eyes of Scientology as a Suppressive Person, and that means that my basic motivation is to stop Scientology because I want the world to go down, that’s what they believe…’
Bruce continued: ‘…so I have two nieces who live in Clearwater who won’t talk to me and formally sent me a letter saying that they love me and always will, but with the path that I’ve chosen they just cannot continue to have any communication or relationship with me.’
Disconnection. But that’s a family smasher, I said.
‘Well, yes.’
Brainwashing Test Number Eight is ‘The Dispensing of Existence’. Lifton says: ‘The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right… For the individual, the polar emotional conflict is the ultimate existential one of “being versus nothingness”… The totalist environment – even when it does not resort to physical abuse – thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation.’
Why did Bruce, a brilliant physicist, stay in for so long? A big reason for him was his perceived fear of eternal damnation, chiming with Lifton’s observation of fear of extinction or annihilation. ‘The Scientologists I have known really believe that. You get on what they call, they have nice sounding marketing names, like “The bridge to total freedom” or whatnot. And you get your feet on the bridge and you have to walk and keep your next step, and you have to pay as you go. Particularly once you know about it, if you abandon it, you are going to have a horrible future. And your hopes of becoming an eternally free being are dashed. And so that is one aspect. You have got to toe the line or you are going to lose your chance.
‘The other part is you are taught that anyone who is critical of Scientology, they say, that they have crimes for which they could be arrested. They [the critics] are part of this whole culture of evil and Scientology is the way out. When you try to suppress this force for good, because we are all implanted 75 million years ago, that we [the Scientologists] can’t allow such a thing to happen. So the whole of society is going to try to suppress Scientology, and so you have to be tough to get through. And so people who are critical of it are evil.’
Bruce’s intellectual and spiritual drift away from Scientology was gradual, but helped along by his incarceration in the RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force) for six years.
‘It was out in the high desert of southern California, about ninety miles or so east of Los Angeles, and it’s a very remote location. I understand they have now sold that property. You’re about five miles or so from the nearest town, if you were going to leave you would either walk into the wilderness or have to go across an Indian reservation. It’s in an environment where there are rattlesnakes, tarantulas, mountain lions, coyotes.’
Bruce did a stretch of three years on the RPF, was allowed to return to Gold Base, fell out with Miscavige again, or Miscavige fell out with him, he said, and then did a further three years. The second stretch was the most extreme, the RPF’s RPF, ‘as low as you can go in the Sea Organisation. I was not allowed to speak to other members. I had to work separately, had to eat separately. I would get the leftovers of the meals. I was with about four or five other guys. I had to sleep in a small shed, and this was in the summer in the desert, it was quite hot, on a concrete floor. I had very little space. There was a guard outside my door. And one time I said: “OK, I am leaving, I am out of here.” It was the middle of the night and I came out and immediately the guard was there and people appeared and they kind of cajoled me and talked to me and get me to kind of go back to bed.
‘And this went on for a couple of months. One time I was in a shed, just wooden sheds on concrete pads. And they closed the door and then they put a large baking pan against it, so that if I opened the door it would fall and make a noise to alert people that I was coming out.
‘And I had to do pretty intense manual labour during that time. And it was July or August in the California desert and it could get 105, 110 even 115 degrees. And then I would spend a couple of hours at night having to read writings of L Ron Hubbard, and write up my misdeeds, I had to write them down my misdeeds until I had a realisation that I was a bad person and I needed to change my ways and get back into progressing towards my redemption.’
Bruce described a deep deprivation, lack of space, lack of ideas, lack of contact with people. ‘So you feel very cut off. One or two people talk to you and tell you what to do and assign you jobs. There was a security guard, and he walked by and made sure I could go over to him. I said listen, “I want out of here, I want to leave.” And so he was trained to say, “oh ok…I understand Bruce.” The idea was that I continue over the days undergoing that sort of treatment that eventually my thinking would shift around, which it did.’
The physical abuse was extreme but it was trumped by Bruce’s fear of annihilation according to Scientology dogma and his hunger to conform with the hive. He submitted to the ideology, which defeated his concern for his physical well-being. His self-surrender was complete; his brain had been washed.
How would you describe that time in your life? What they did to you?
‘It wasn’t the whole six years but definitely for those couple of months I would say it was torture. I hated every second of it. What is amazing to me though is that eventually I did swing around to the true believers’ viewpoint again and for three years then worked to try to prove that I was OK. And eventually I was sent to New York City and I believe there was much less control there and so I had more contact with things outside. And I believe that helped me to free up from the mindset. Then I was able to walk out.’
The Big Apple ate away at the brainwashing?
‘Yeah. New York City is a very vibrant place, there is lot’s of creativity, lots of energy. And I just sort of like… “Wow, there is a whole world out there, there is a lot happening.” After 30 years inside…’
Would you say you were brainwashed?
‘I would call it brainwashing, particularly the Rehabilitation Project course.’
That would be a straight eight out of Lifton’s eight tests for brainwashing.
Lifton’s three broad definers for a cult were: a leader-cum-god; brainwashing; and harm. Do the adepts of the Church of Scientology suffer harm? One thinks of the series of allegations about cleaning out the sewage ponds and the RPF; about the many allegations of violence by the Leader, David Miscavige; about his use of abusive language; about the spying on the confessionals; about the humiliation of people by bringing up their sad sexual indignities in front of their peers. That could add up to harm.
All of the above are denied.
Back in March 2007, I had no idea of the number of people high up in the Church of Scientology who would subsequently say they were beaten or abused by its Chairman of the Board, David Miscavige. At that time very few said anything at all, out in the open. But since then the growing use of the internet for lone dots of light to communicate with each other has changed the ability of the Church to constrict information. Back then I had also not read Lifton’s superb book. But I made a judgment about Bruce and it was based on this: he’d volunteered to me that he’d once been ordered to scream his head off at another Scientologist and he had obeyed – and, now, looking back on it, he felt ashamed and that what he had done was cruel. That contrition suggested to me Bruce was telling the truth.