Were they shadowing us? So far, no. Or so we thought. We flew from ‘Frisco to La-La Land, the city Raymond Chandler once described as having no more personality than a paper cup. Mole, Bill and I had been joined by our assistant producer, Patrick Barrie, a dry-witted, sceptical chap, the very opposite of paranoid.
This is Patrick’s memory of what happened at the hire car place at LAX: ‘There was a problem with the cars, as there was only one of them. During the wait to sort that out, one guy honed in on us and started asking questions about where we were staying on the pretext that he was looking for a good place and hadn’t booked anything yet. Suspicious. We were very quickly wary of him and everything else besides.’
I like this because it makes Patrick sound like a paranoid fruitcake, and he really isn’t.
Mole recalls: ‘We were standing around at the hire car place out in the open and some guy took a shine to Bill. He asked where we were staying. All very suspicious. Bill told the guy which hotel we were staying in and the address. That was the point anyway – to see if they were spying on us.’
It was approaching dusk in LA. I was driving one car with Bill riding shotgun, camera on his lap, Mole and Patrick following in the second car. We left the hire car park.
Patrick takes up the narrative: ‘Once we finally got the second car we knew to be on the lookout for vehicles tailing us. And lo and behold within a hundred yards of leaving the parking lot a vehicle parked on the right side of the road pulled out and was after us.’
You drive fast, slow, slow, fast. You turn left, then right, then left. If someone is following you, their evidently lunatic trail will soon become blindingly obvious.
Behind the wheel of the first BBC car, I spotted two vehicles tracking us, a Range Rover and a dark blue KIA Sidona people carrier. At one level I could not believe we were in a car chase in LA. But the evidence of my own eyes confirmed my suspicions. It was unbelievably exciting.
Bill’s camera captured me giving a blow-by-blow account of the madness: ‘The car in front – a Range Rover – seems to be following us. It’s now taken a detour down a road and it’s now going down an alleyway. Looks a bit creepy. I’m going to say goodbye to it. It’s going quite fast down there.’
I drew ahead, fast, turned down a side road, did a very fast U-turn – hell, it’s a hire car – and headed back towards the main road, parking up 20 yards from the junction. The essence of this game is patience. They want to trail you. You make them work at it – and then you can see them.
While waiting I knocked out a few pieces-to-camera, telly talk for the moment when Roger Smellie, The Man on The Telly, tells the viewer the bleeding obvious: ‘We’re being followed. I can’t think the General Synod of the Church of England or the British Association of Muslims or whatever they are or the British Board of Deputies of Jews or the Hindus or the Sikhs would do this. It’s crazy. Here’s my prediction. Either – two cars, a Sidona or a Range Rover – will track along this road shortly.’
Bill repeated: ‘Dark blue Sidona, black Range Rover.’
Nothing doing. No target car appeared. We were parked in a side road in Los Angeles, living out a million cop shows inside our minds. But in reality? Nothing. I tried to let myself down gently: ‘Of course I might be completely paranoid.’
Yet I couldn’t quite give up. We gave it another ten seconds. Another twenty.
‘But I think we’re being followed.’
A Blue Sidona drives past, slowly, clocks us, and accelerates away. Panorama gives chase.
‘They’re following us. The blue Sidona. I’m going to go and ask them a question.’
The Sidona is in front, changes lanes to go in front of a bus, turns right, races away. I stand on the accelerator.
‘It would be really good to get the number plate. I’m driving circumspectly as my father would say.’ That was for the fairies.
The Sidona turns right and comes to a dead stop at traffic lights. The number plate, ending: ‘U204’. I get out of our car, run forward and politely but firmly tap on the driver’s window of the Sidona.
‘Hi, hello, are you Scientologists at all?’
The driver and passenger put their hands up to mask their faces and turn away from Bill’s camera. In London, in Krasnoyarsk in the middle of Siberia, in Bucket, Arkansas, you tap on the car window of an innocent party, and they wind the window down and say, ‘can I help?’ or ‘what the bloody hell are you doing, mate?’ You do that to the wrong people in parts of LA, I’ve heard, they shoot you. That the driver of the KIA put his hands up to hide his face was powerful evidence that we had chased the right people.
‘My name’s John Sweeney from the BBC. Are you from the Church of Scientology? I believe that you might be following us. Hi, John Sweeney from the BBC. Just wondering about your curious driving behaviour?’
The lights change, leaving us standing in the middle of a busy street in LA, having asked some blokes in a car their religious orientation, half-wondering whether we have gone entirely bonkers.
Some of the private investigators who work for the Church have a slightly foxed past. The most famous was a bent cop before he started working for the Church. Sgt. Eugene M. Ingram was dismissed from the LAPD in April, 1981 for misconduct, allegedly running a house of prostitution and also providing a suspected cocaine dealer with confidential police information and firearms in advance of a police raid. No criminal case ensued. Ingram had claimed to be wounded by a sniper in Elysian Park near the Police Academy in 1980 but an internal police investigation discovered that Ingram had inflicted the injury himself.
We had the chase on tape. The worry was – what would happen if our tapes, in TV jargon, the rushes, went missing?
Mole takes up the story: ‘We got to the hotel on Sunset Boulelvard and in the lobby we saw Louis Theroux.’ Theroux, the British TV presenter and journalist, was in La-La Land to make a film about plastic surgeons. In real life, as on the telly, Louis sports a look of befuddled bemusement. But so did we all, and not without reason.
‘In the background,’ Mole continues, ‘was a black guy with a cowboy hat on. It did cross my mind that he was a Scientology spy but I rejected it because he looked a bit dazed and so conspicuous with his cowboy hat on.’
Patrick recalls: ‘When I came back into the hotel reception you were telling the whole story to Louis Theroux, who by chance was there. I was nervous as there was a black guy with a Stetson and possibly another person loitering in reception. They gave the impression of being both interested, but were also trying not to look interested. I remember wanting to try and find a way to cut in and end the conversation, because both of these guys didn’t seem to have any reason for standing around in the lobby. By this stage there was a strange atmosphere, a mix of excitement after the car chase and a creeping paranoia about the goings on. That night we went for a meal across the road and had steaks and drank a lot. There was a rodeo ride in the restaurant which I think you wanted to go on, but you were talked out of it.’
I remember being frustrated as I was not allowed to go on the cowboy ride ‘em thingy – my age at the time: 48. We went to another bar for one last drink where we drank green cocktails that gave us, well me, anyway, peculiar nightmares and viridescent poo. Patrick spent the night in a massive hotel room with the rushes – our tapes – safe under his pillow.
‘The next morning,’ Patrick recalls, ‘because of my suspicions about the Stetson guy I came down for breakfast early and sat on my own. He was sitting in the far corner and was on the phone quite a lot. I distinctly remember hearing him something like “one of them is here now” in a not sufficiently quiet voice. I left breakfast and either told you and/or Mole and Bill that the Stetson man was there. I think that he left the breakfast room and then came back for a second time when you three were having breakfast and that Bill tried to get some shots of him.’
The paranoia grew and grew like a giant spider with hob-nailed boots on acid and tequila.
Curious and curiouser: I got an email from Tommy, notwithstanding all the commotion at Plant City and on the roof of the car park back in Clearwater, inviting us to the Celebrity Centre in LA to interview a number of high profile Scientologists the following morning. They hated me. They loved me.
Cowboy Hat turned up at breakfast. Louis Theroux looked on quizzically – is that the only look he can do? – while Mole distracted the Hat and Bill shot him, hiding the small video camera behind a bowl of cornflakes. Later, I announced in my foghorn voice that I was going to pop down to the hotel garage to check on our car. Sure enough, there the Hat was, smooching around, hitching his trousers. On the surface, it was comic but, at a deeper level, existentially creepy, a malign, moronic presence watching over you. It helped generate not just mental discomfort but something darker and more animal: fear.
The Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre is a perfect copy of a French chateau in the middle of Hollywood, all turrets and perpendicular Froggie-slated roofs and beautifully kept gardens and as real and true-to-life as Noddy’s friend Big Ears sitting on a red and white-spotted mushroom with a French beret on his bonce and a string of onions around his neck. Welcome to Ooh-La-La-Land.
Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder greeted us like old synthetic rubber friends and showed us around a kind of tea room, decorated with riotously beautiful Z-listers who I wondered might have been specially drafted in for the occasion of our visit. We were escorted to a lift, a faux-Victorian effort. I half-expected that the floor of the lift might disappear to drop us into a pool full of killer sharks, as in a James Bond film, but I was disappointed. We were led to a large room, decorated with fake Louis Quinze furniture, and a phrase of the late Kenny Everett in his transvestite mode came to mind: ‘It’s all done in the best possible taste.’
As Bill set up, Tommy and I went over old ground: I was a bigot, he was, some say, brainwashed; I had a preset agenda; some said they were a cult. Then I asked him about the creepy people following us around.
‘We believe we were followed yesterday from L.A. airport,’ I said.
I have a certain truculent physical style when I am not best pleased, like a bull beginning to take notice. Tommy registered it.
‘Oh now you’ve taken it to a new level, wait a second. Let me try and get this right. I’m creepy because I show up at your hotel at 9.45 at night and call you on your cell phone and say that I’m there to see you. You hang up on me. Then…’
If this was a distraction technique, it worked pretty well.
‘Hold on a second, you turned up at midnight.’
‘No. It was at 9.45 at night when I arrived and then… I pull up to where you’re doing an interview in a public place, and you refer to a perfectly normal rental car that I’m driving as a “creepy car” and then you repeatedly tell me the most obnoxious things about my organisation, describing it in horrifically pejorative terms and by the way I reviewed the tape, not always using the preface of “some people claim”, there’s a number of times when you actually just said it yourself, that Scientology is a cult in these disgusting terms you use and now…’
‘Hold on a second…’ I said, trying to staunch the Niagara of words from Tommy.
‘…and when you….no, let me try and get this right, and now I’m having you followed?’ Tommy stressed the final word, his handsome face puckering into a rictus of incredulity.
‘Yeah.’
‘It seems to me that you’re the one who’s gone a bit creepy.’
‘It’s a question. All right, so who followed us yesterday?’
‘I have no idea!’
‘When we arrived at L.A.?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘OK.’
‘I mean you’ve done pieces all over the world with all kinds of somewhat notorious people. Is it possible that somebody else maybe was following you? I don’t know. I don’t even know what you’re talking about or how you could characterise it as being followed.’
I challenged him to deny that the six people we thought had followed us so far in LA had nothing to do with Scientology. (The six were the first man at the hire car place who was unusually interested in our whereabouts, two men each in the Sidona and the Range Rover and the black guy in the cowboy hat.)
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ said Tommy, all unblushing innocence.
‘There are no private eyes?’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’
‘There are no Scientologists?’
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about, and I’m happy to look into it but standing right here I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘OK, all right,’ I said, with the maximum amount of ungraciousness.
‘It’s easy to be a bit paranoid.’
‘Nothing to do with you?’
‘Anyway…’
‘I understand.’
So did the Church of Scientology spy on the BBC?
Welcome to the strange world of Sci’gy-Leaks, an extraordinary cache of 25 pages of emails and BlackBerry messages which three years later fell into the wrong hands: mine. They appear to record in real-time a three-way conversation between Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder and the Leader’s Communicator, Lou Stuckenbrock, about handling BBC Panorama. Taken together, Sci’gy-Leaks paint an extraordinarily weird picture of the Church.
The Church of Scientology strongly deny that the Sci’gy-Leaks are genuine.
The previous day, the Saturday, we had spent with the husband and wife heretics, Donna Shannon and Mike Henderson, the evening concluding with Tommy and Mike waiting for us at our hotel at midnight. The first Sci’gy-Leaks message is from Tommy to Lou on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 and is headed ‘Hotel debrief’: ‘Last night Mike [Zombie Mike Rinder, the hollow-cheeked Australian Scientologist and Tommy’s deputy] and I went to Sweeney’s hotel around 10pm and called him and told him I was at his hotel and wanted to see him immediately. He hung up on me. I checked their rooms and found out that they were not at the hotel. We had Jesse Radstrom’ – the black-clad cameraman - ‘with us from Gold to shoot it. Sweeney, Mole and their camera man showed up around 12:30am.
‘He [Sweeney] said that he had never told me what hotel he was staying in and that means that we are spying on the BBC and that he thinks that is very weird. I said that is ridiculous and that this is a small town and Englishman with TV cameras stand out like mad and we saw them interviewing the Shannons and walking around flag with them so that is utterly nuts.
‘I then started tearing into him (not swearing as the cameras were rolling) and the hotel manager asked us to step outside. We continued out there.
‘I told him that I was shocked at the unprofessional and juvenile way in which he was conducting himself and this program… I then said that he had come all the way here to Clearwater and was offered a tour of our facilities, the largest most significant Church facilities in the world and yet declined an offer to see or tour those facilities and instead was spending his entire day with Donna Shannon and Mike Henderson, two ex-Scientologists with a clear axe to grind.
‘During the confrontation in front of Sweeney’s hotel Sweeney said to me that Donna had told him that she did hard labor together with me when she was in the Sea Org and that she witnessed me get my hair pulled, my ears pulled and my face ripped off. This did not faze me at all and I calmly told him that I have no idea what she is talking about and that it is a complete and total lie and I could easily produce multiple witnesses to attest to that fact. He seemed somewhat shocked at hearing this.’
I do remember being taken aback – shocked seems to be over-egging the pud somewhat – at the force of Tommy’s denial that his hair and ears had been pulled and his immediate upgrading of the stakes, that he could provide multiple witnesses for his version of events against Donna’s. The striking thing is that this is a fine detail I would not have recalled had I not seen Sci’gy-Leaks.
‘I kept at him about how disingenuous and disgusting this all was…’
Tommy referred back to our meetings in England and the dispute over whether they had set three conditions or not: ‘I told him that is not what I said and that he is again twisting what occurred in the meeting and that I would be happy to provide him with a transcript of what occurred as he may recall we recorded all of it. This seemed to shut him up.’
Neither Tommy nor the Church of Scientology ever did provide a transcript of the meetings in England. I remain un-shut up.
‘At this point a CW [Clearwater] Police car showed up having been called by the hotel manager (she overreacted to our dueling cameras and heated discussion).’
The hotel manager was doing her job.
‘The cop asked who we were. Sweeney said he was from the BBC and we never got a chance to say who we were… The officer came back out and said that the hotel would prefer that we disperse and not continue. I thanked him and said that is not a problem and that we work and live around here and certainly don’t want to disturb anyone. I turned to Sweeney and said “we are done” and walked away. He called after me repeating out loud the demands that he has mocked up we made of him “that we won’t refer to you as a cult”, “that we won’t interview critics” and that was all.
‘We continued surveilling them and saw that they did not leave for Vegas this morning.’
On the face of it, Tommy’s repeated denials of the Church of Scientology spying on the BBC were not true. He was lying.
‘However it was so down to the wire with so limited flights that we did not want to take the chance of them flying out later in the day and getting to Vegas ahead of us. For this reason Mike [Rinder] and Kevin Caetano went ahead to Vegas and will be landing there in the next few hours. Kirsten and I are still here in CW and are actually now at Plant City where the new Test Center in opening. Sweeney is here.’
The second message of the day comes from Mike Rinder: ‘To: Lou, Dear Sir…’
All of the messages from the Leader’s Office come from Lou, the Communicator, but in an extremely masculine tone that suggests they are the direct word of the Leader. The Communicator is always addressed as ‘Sir’ but this is standard policy, set down by Hubbard, in Scientology, that all higher ranks are addressed as ‘Sir’ even if they are female.
Mike continues: ‘I am now on Blackberry and saw the cc you sent. They are going to SFO [San Francisco] not LV [Las Vegas]. TD [Tommy Davis] is enroute now to SFO and I am going at 10pm and will know where they go. I am getting the debriefs put together and overall planning done in coordination with Bob and OSAI [Office of Special Affairs International]. Ml Mike.’
The boss and/or his Communicator, Lou, is not a happy bunny: ‘Why is Tommy going to SFO? Areb’t they going to say you are following them. Are you this fing nuts (beyond just sp)? Please clarify. Please tell me he’s not on their plane!’
Fing nuts is short for fucking nuts – as the messages spool out abuse from the top becomes common. At no time do Tommy and Mike return the abuse. SP means Suppressive Person, a baddie.
Why does the Church’s leader have his own personal Communicator, Lou Stuckenbrock? Why can’t he communicate himself? In 1977 the FBI raided the Church of Scientology and the investigation got very close to Mr Hubbard. His wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, ended up going to jail, so ex-members of the Church say that the role of the Communicator is a deliberately constructed cut-out. Sci’gy-Leaks read as if Miscavige says something, his word is recorded and transcribed and put into the third person, so there is always a measure of deniability. This use of a private office cut-out so that politicians, for example, can have plausible deniability is common practice in Westminster and Washington DC.
It’s conceivable that the Sci’gy-Leaks cache could be fake, an elaborate fraud. They are written, pitch-perfect, in Scientology-ese, which only someone immersed in the Church for decades could write. There are, of course, ex-members of the Church who could do that. What seems to me much more difficult to fake is the seemingly real-time reaction to events and actions that we took part in. Reality is imperfect, so it strikes me as evidence pointing to Sci’gy-Leaks being genuine that the BlackBerry machines are on different time settings and time zones, that the spelling is often grotesquely askew, and that real life panics and cock-ups do occur which strike me as beyond the imagination of even the cleverest fraudster. Still, both possibilities should be born in mind by the reader: that Sci’gy-Leaks are genuine; that they are fake.
The Church deny that they are genuine.
Twelve minutes later, Mike replies to the Communicator: ‘Dear Sir He is definitely not on the same flight. He is going via Chicago to Oakland as the only available flight. There is no plan to do anything with them but to be available there in case (there may be internet chat on who they see) or they may try to go to one of the orgs there as we showed them SFO, SNC and Gatos. If not, then it is easy to get down to LA. ML Mike.’
The next message is a terse thank you. That Monday we arrive in San Francisco. The Communicator demands of Mike at half past midnight: ‘Well. Anything?’
Mike replies: ‘Dear Sir Nothing yet. My plane just landed in SFO. They arrive at 0130. TD arrives at 0900. Wont know anything other than where theyre staying until morning. Ml mike.’
Tailing people is a sleep-killer. It was past midnight and Mike was at the airport, waiting for us.
A few minutes later the Communicator snaps back: ‘What are you going to do? Act like you “guessed” they were there? Or, if you understand TD acronyms, BT?’
TD stands for ‘Technical Dictionary’, Hubbard’s very own version of SciSpeak; BT means, according to the Xenu-directory.com glossary: ‘Body Thetan. Usually plural. Evil spirits which need to be exorcized, as in: “OT5 consists entirely of running out BTs; what a bore.”’ These are well known terms inside Scientology. The tone of this message is bullying.
At one am, Mike replies: ‘Dear Sir. I am not planning to BT. Someone is speaking to them to find out their plans and whoever they plan on talking to is likely to say something on the internet thst wld become public knowledge. And of course if they show up at an org this will be known. No plan to contact them untll we have overt data. Will have moe data when they arrive. Ml mike’
The phrase ‘overt data’ is a give-away: we were the subject of a covert investigation. The Communicator pings back at 0117am: ‘Thank you. You realize this hasd gone totally out of control and you and Tommy have created the usual out of control sit - right down to Tommy wanting to ignore everything the boss said and just say “what’s happening” (the ballroom). [The ballroom? I have no idea that this means.] ‘The boss view is that he spent 20 years doing this so others could get tech and orgs show on the rails and they did zero. And you thought the battles were the game, giving it all to him. He’s not going to do it anymore as nobody will go free and there will be no orgs. Your contribution to LrHs birthday (a5 tommys) was to enturbulate. Period. He had a month to work on videos and refused it. He is you.’
He is you? What on earth does the Communicator mean?
Five and a bit hours later – no-one seems to get much sleep in the Church – Mike replies: ‘Dear Sir - I totally realize this and intend to deal with this so it doesnt create further enturbulation. I know we did nothing on March 13 [we met Mike and Tommy on that day] and that this is the continuing treason. The people arrived sfo and drove to Berkeley and are in on on hotel.’
This is a spying operation on a grand scale, conducted across 2,000 miles of the continental United States. Mike’s admission of a continuing treason seems to be comically over-the-top and self-denigrating. But he knew roughly what we were planning to do in the morning: ‘to interview two people tomorrow but we dont know their names yet though suspect one is the woman who stirred uo the SFO Chronicle earlier about NN [Narconon] in thhe schools as she lives nearby and was on on student of Margaret Singer. We have the DAs on her and Singer.’
‘DA’ means ‘Dead Agent’, to spread malicious lies and rumours about an anti-Scientologist person or organization in an attempt to discredit them. LRH’s policy on “dead agenting” appeared in a 1974 bulletin: ‘The technique of proving utterances false is called “DEAD AGENTING”. It’s in the first book of Chinese espionage. When the enemy agent gives false data, those who believed him but now find it false kill him - or at least cease to believe him. So the PR slang for it is ‘Dead Agenting.’”
Singer is a reference to Margaret Singer, a feisty academic who took on all manner of cults including the Moonies, Falun Gong, Hare Krishna and Heaven’s Gate and wrote Cults In Our Midst. She suffered hate-mail, had live rats released into her house and travelled under an assumed name. She never backed down. Her view on cults was straightforward and unapologetic: cults ‘prey on the most lonely, vulnerable people they can find, cage you with your own mind through guilt and fear, cut you off from everyone…they don’t need armed guards to keep you. Liars, tricksters, it’s been the same ever since Eve got the apple, and I doubt it will ever change. They’re all basically, really the same, con men.’
At the age of 80, she frightened off a stalker – not from the Church of Scientology – who had been leaving menacing notes in her mailbox: ‘I’ve got a 12-gauge shotgun up here, sonny, and you’d better get off my porch, or you’ll be sorry!’ she hollered out the window. ‘And tell your handlers not to send you back!’ By the time we landed in San Francisco, Singer had been dead for two years. Only the Church of Scientology would seek to ‘Dead Agent’ the dead.
Mike continued: ‘We will ensure the orgs are briefed on them possibly trying to come in. TD arrives at 11am and will then have the full plan in coordination with Bob [Fireman Bob, who, it seems, can do no wrong] who is moving forward in UK. Ml’
The Communicator replied nine hours after his previous message, presumably after a good night’s sleep: ‘Thanks. Still means nothing and I don’t know why TD would take until 11 to get across country and why you are in sfo except if they try to ambush org (but org could have been briefed and told to chuck them) if they showed up. But that’s my dub in as you and TD just are dangerous environ and REFUSE to give specifics (like maybe there is a reason you are there?)’
Mike replied: ‘Dear Sir. There were no other available flights and they had a 6hr wait In chicago. The original reason for going to sfo was to be there if we needed to confront them if needed. We did not know what their plans were. We now know they are planning to do two interviews today and catch a flight to la tomorrow morning.’
How they knew our schedule, we do not know. We would have been wary about communicating our plans with anyone outside the team, and I trust everyone in the team, absolutely.
‘They have been meeting with bruce hines this morning.’
More evidence, if it were needed, that they were spying on us.
‘We are leaving people here to track their activities. The org DSAs have been briefed as well and are ready to handle them if they show up. we are going to la to prepare for them and get our complaint to the bbc prepared and coordinated with walsh’ [Bill Walsh, the American lawyer we met at Saint Hill] and uk counsel as they are way out of line. We have a 2:45 flight. Ml Mike’
The Communicator replied: ‘Tks. I hope they have all the dope on Hines. What’s so bad is none of these people know anything happening anywhere in PT in the church.’
PT stands for Present Time, the here and now. The Xenu directory gives a useful example: ‘SPs are stuck in an incident in the past; they need to be brought up to PT.’
Mike replied: ‘Dear Sir, we have the da [Dead Agent file] on hines and will get this to sweeney as he took him in front of sfo org to shoot shots of him so hines involvement is now overtly [as opposed to covertly] known. Clearly they are only interested in people who have allegations to make and no actual data and this is part of his gross bias.’
Mike continued: ‘We are in LA and now going through the transcripts of the statements made by js [John Sweeney] when he was confronted by tommy at the plant city opening and when he was interviewing shawn Lonsdale. I have never seen so many overtly bigoted and biased statements made by a reporter… We are going to lay out exactly how to further mess up his plans on wednesday as he expects us to refuse to show him anything. But we can force him to shoot our facilities. We can also line up interviews that he will likely refuse (on principal he is saying that anything we give him is just our propaganda) and we will use that against him. If he does interview them them they will da [Dead Agent] his lines.’
And lo, exactly that came to pass: they bombarded us with interviewees. It seemed wrong to us to say no, so we interviewed all of the people they put in front of our cameras but the cumulative effect was boring telly and mind-shattering.
‘We are putting this together at osai’ – the Church’s version of CIA HQ, Langley - ‘and will send a complete report at the end of the nite as I know you hve only been getting bits and pieces on blackberry. This is ok ML Mike’
The Communicator asks for the number where the two men are working. Then Tommy joins the conversation, messaging Lou: ‘Dear Sir, I apologize for the generality.’
Generality means waffle.
‘We are back in LA now and at OSA Int and going through everything - the transcripts from the UK, the BBC broadcasting guidelines, the legal data we have inn the invest results.’
Tommy’s mention of the ‘invest results’ suggests that there was an investigation into our team, perhaps by private eyes, on top of the tracking carried out by Mike and Tommy. Perhaps that investigation is the source of Tommy’s remark at Plant City, which he swallowed in the next sentence, that ‘I know where you live’.
They were working on a plan: ‘to handle sweeney terminatedly. Ml, Tommy.’
The ‘terminatedly’ still makes my flesh creep.
The evidence from Sci’gy-Leaks seems compelling, describing in detail, in real-time, an elaborate spying operation by the Church of Scientology against the BBC, tracking us across the United States, from our hotel in Clearwater to identifying an important ex-Scientologist source we interviewed in San Francisco to LA. When Tommy Davis said he had no idea what I was talking about he was not, on the face of it, being honest.
On Wednesday, March 21st, we spent the day as Tommy’s guest interviewing the stars at the Church’s Celebrity Centre. An anxious message came from the Communicator in the evening: ‘We are in LA now, are there any areas we should avoid? And is this guy’s body now many new (torn worn to wall) assholes?’
This is, some say, the word of the Church of Scientology.