In the summer of 2007 Allan Henderson – the father of Mike who, with his wife Donna, had told me about the reality of life inside the Sea Org back in Clearwater – lay mortally ill in hospital in California. Allan had six children and 24 grandchildren but only Mike and his daughter were at his bedside. The rest had disconnected from him because he had left the Church. The dying man had a simple message for his family: ‘I’d say stay together; family is family and if somebody is trying to talk you out of being a member of the family…you better question that group.’
Not one of the disconnected attended his funeral.
After Allan died, Mike Henderson told me about his father’s death and I sent him a note of condolence. Not long after, Mike got in touch. He had heard a rumour about a defector who had very quietly left the Church. When we heard the name of this supposed defector we were astonished.
I did some digging, and a mole – not, obviously, the Mole – told me that the defector was selling second hand cars in Virginia. As his final verdict on me had been that I was an ‘asshole’, it was decided that Mole should fly across the pond and see whether she could smoke him out. Mole was sceptical that he would be where my mole said he was, and thought the trip a complete waste of time. I sent her a photo of some flying geese, adding to her fears that this was the wild goose chase to end all wild geese chases. She was, satisfyingly, wrong.
And so in late 2009 I stood in a room on top of the Tate Modern with a superb view of the Thames – liquid history – flowing through London and St Paul’s beyond, waiting, waiting, waiting. It was like the scene in John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. But in this version, the defector defected, safe and sound. He walked across the Wibbly-Wobbly footbridge, the one that wobbled so much they had to rebuild it, bang on time.
Zombie Mike Rinder was a thing of the past. The spooky, hollow-eyed corpse-in-the-making sidekick had become a different human being: fitter, browner, heavier, happier, funnier. He’d spent 46 years inside the Church, taking my tally of ex-members’ service up to 184 years.
After ‘Scientology & Me’ had been broadcast in 2007, he had toured the TV studios, rubbishing me, boasting of how the Church had done ‘a John Sweeney to John Sweeney’. But he also felt that Miscavige had hated the programme and was angry that the Church had not been able to stop the Panorama. Mike feared that he would be the fall guy – banished to The Hole or given a ghastly foreign assignment in some faraway country, where he would rot, far away from his family. He knew all about disconnection, about what happened when a Scientologist left the Church. For some years he had run the machine, the Office of Special Affairs, that had made disconnections happen. He knew that if he left the Church he would be saying goodbye to his wife, his son and daughter, to his brother and mother, to all his friends, to everything he believed in. But he couldn’t bear it anymore.
So one day in the late spring of 2007, he left the Church’s office in Fitzroy Street in central London and set off towards Saint Hill near East Grinstead. But he never got there. Instead he turned off his phone, rented a room in a poky B&B near Victoria and walked out of the Church, the only life he’d known for damn near half a century.
He was amused when Mole found him in Virginia and although he played impassive and uninterested there was something on his conscience, a lie he wanted, he said, to deal with. So when he gave his first TV interview he gave it to Panorama, to get it off his chest.
Is it true that David Miscavige hit you, I asked the former head of the Office of Special Affairs?
‘Yes.’
And you denied it?
‘Yes. That was a lie.’
How many times did he hit you?
‘Fifty.’
It was an extraordinary moment. The Church of Scientology is weird, weird, weird, a real thing that defies the wildest imaginings, so far beyond fiction as to stun the mind. Once upon a time its spokesman Mike Rinder vowed to me that Miscavige was some kind of living angel. Once upon a time Mike Rinder had been at our hotel at midnight, supporting Tommy and demonising us. Now white was black, black white, the Leader of the Church the thumping Pope – a charge the Church and the Leader deny.
I questioned fifty. Mike explained he could not be exactly certain of how many times he had been beaten up by Scientology’s pope but described it as routine. Miscavige hit, punched, slapped, kicked and otherwise physically abused many members of the Church’s Holy Order, he said. The culture of violence spread outwards from the top of the Church, he said. The Church and Miscavige deny this.
Mike reflected on Tommy, the man who, according to Sci’gy-Leaks, could make me psychotic. He said he felt sorry for him, a decent guy, but perhaps his personal integrity is a little lacking if he were able to sit down in front of me and say that Miscavige never hit anybody.
‘You can’t lie like that and live with it,’ said Mike. ‘It’s one of the reasons why I eventually walked out. You were the straw that broke my back. Because you stood there and said to me, “did David Miscavige ever strike you?” and I said, “no”.’
Over the years, Mike told me, he had faced a lot of questions from the media about Scientology. Many of them were ignorant or silly or uniformed, and easy for him as a believing Scientologist to knock down or dismiss. But my question floored him: it was direct and, he said, true, and what he told me in 2007 was a lie. Mike added that even though our Panorama did not air the violence allegations against Miscavige, he was still on the wrong end of the Leader’s anger, and he thought that was crazy, a kind of insanity. I asked him whether he thought Miscavige was sane. Mike replied that he was very intelligent, a very fast learner but no, not sane.
The Church and Miscavige deny that he is insane.
We discussed Miscavige’s idiosyncratic way with words. Back in 2007, Miscavige, Mike said, called him and Tommy: ‘Cock sucking ass hole. Cock sucking mother fucker. Useless piece of shit. He has the most vulgar vocabulary of anybody I have ever heard in my life. There used to be Blackberry messages, he would have his assistant Lou send them and they had little acronyms and you had to figure out what the acronyms meant. “YSCOHB”. And then the next one would be, “well did you figure it out yet?” Like five seconds after the one before. “Did you figure it out yet? Come on. Answer, answer, answer!” And what that stood for was: ‘You Suck Cock On Hollywood Boulevard.’
Mike thought this slightly unusual for a religious leader.
The reason why he had looked as though he had been in prison when we first met in 2007 was because he really had been in a prison – ‘The Hole’, two big trailers at Gold Base in the Californian desert where 100 of the Church’s most senior people who had angered Miscavige were locked up and tortured by each other. Immediately before we came on the Church’s radar, Mike had spent the previous nine months in ‘The Hole’. The conditions he described were barbaric. He is not alone: Debbie Cook in her evidence in open court in Texas in 2012 spoke of unbearable heat, of physical torture and mass humiliation.
‘It is totalitarian,’ said Mike. ‘It’s insane. It’s psychosis, probably not seen in the entire history of the religion. It degenerated into people hitting one another, putting people in garbage cans, having people crawl around on their hands and knees until their knees were bleeding, torturing people with water.’
Did that happen to you?
‘Absolutely. I crawled around on my hands and knees on this indoor, outdoor carpet until my knees were bleeding maybe a dozen times.’
Why did he put up with it for so long? Mike set out explaining the greatest puzzle of all. Although he had left the Church of Scientology, he still believes in the faith of Scientology, is still a disciple of L Ron Hubbard.
‘There is a principle in Scientology,’ explained Mike, ‘called the greatest good for the greatest number: dynamics. One judges whether something is good or bad based on whether it enhances survival across those dynamics. For a Scientologist probably the single most important thing is expansion of the church, the expansion of the religion. Here, the person that is responsible or is the driving force behind that expansion has hit someone or slapped them.’
So the heart of the problem was a conflict of loyalties: as a Scientologist he felt he had to endure abuse because otherwise the expansion of his religion would be imperilled, and that would imperil humankind.
Mike described the first time David Miscavige hit him. It was sometime in the late 1990s when he was working at Gold Base in the Californian desert: ‘He called me up, he had an office that was up the hill. I ran up the hill because you had to get there in a hurry because you don’t want to keep the dear leader waiting. I ran around the corner and he literally, “Wham!” cold cocked me and then tackled me and pushed me into a tree and then had me in a headlock and was shoving me in the bushes and kind of pushing me around. You can’t really fight back because that would be the end of your career. That went on for, maybe, probably two minutes or something. He then calmed down and I had a cut on my mouth and [he] said: “OK, come inside” and I walked inside the little lounge and he handed me a glass of scotch and said, “drink that,” and pretended that nothing had happened.’
Why?
‘For whatever his whim was at the moment. Looked at him the wrong way, answered the question the wrong way, said something that was in his mind inappropriate, had something that he thought was incorrect, had happened to be standing next to someone else that he was hitting so just kind of hit that guy and then, oh well I’ll give you one too just for good measure.’
It sounds as though he was out of control?
‘He is. It’s insanity, and that’s why this is so bad. Look, someone getting hit, slapped across the face or whatever is not going to scar them for life. But the fact that the person who is the pinnacle of the Scientology religion is unable to control himself and has such what would be called in Scientology evil purposes towards others…it would be, like, the pope was a devil worshipper. It’s so diametrically opposed to what Scientology should be and what the example of a good Scientologist is. That’s what’s so troubling about it, not the fact of hitting someone but the fact that the person who is supposedly at the pinnacle of the religion is that nutty. That’s bad. David Miscavige is an anti-Scientologist.’
The Church of Scientology and David Miscavige deny allegations of violence.
I put it to Mike: they deny this.
‘Of course. Just like I did. It would be destructive in the minds of Scientologists because it would not be the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics because David Miscavige is driving forward the massive expansion of Scientology. So, therefore, anything that would undermine him or undermine his position or undermine his public persona would be destructive to this greater good, the greater good being – he is driving the expansion of Scientology. But that’s a lie.’
Why did you put up with it? I asked again, unsure that I had properly understood what he was telling me.
‘Because I believed, like I said to you, I believe that the greater good and the expansion of Scientology was more important than my personal wellbeing.’
And that included being beaten up by the Leader?
‘Yes.’
The Church of Scientology…
‘I mean,’ Mike interrupted, ‘if he came and punched me now, we’d have a little difficulty…’
I laughed out loud.
I put it to Mike that if he was telling the truth, then Tommy was lying. He said he was, and that Tommy would continue lying until he was no longer in post, and that goes for all the senior Scientologists. They had, for example, sent statements to us and other journalists setting out that the allegations against David Miscavige were baseless, and that people alleging abuse were, in fact, the abusers. Mike had read these statements. His view was they were ‘frankly absurd. They look like and read like they were written by someone who just came out of a North Korean concentration camp.’
In the light of Lifton’s work, that is a fascinating observation from a man who spent half a century inside the Church of Scientology.
‘They talk,’ Mike continued, ‘about the wonderful virtuous David Miscavige and that here is a man who walks on water and never does anything wrong, he saves sparrows who have fallen out of trees… He can do nothing wrong. I mean his breath doesn’t smell, nothing, everything about him is perfect, now that is obviously ridiculous. There is nobody walking on planet earth today that is quite as virtuous as he is made out to be.’
Did Mike beat anyone up?
‘I did. On a couple of occasions. It was really something that I am not proud of and don’t feel good about. I don’t really have any excuse for it because something that I will never do again and if I ever see those people I will certainly apologise.’
Mike described one attack: ‘I grabbed his shirt collar and held him up against the wall, making a point rather forcefully, maybe an inch away from his face.’
He attacked the man because, he said, Miscavige had told Mike to give him an SRA, a Severe Reality Adjustment.
Violence flowed from the top: ‘You see what happens at the very pinnacle and then that becomes the code of conduct of those immediately beneath and then that eventually makes it way down the organisation, especially when you have an organisation that is so hierarchically structured as the Church of Scientology.’
Bruce Hines had told me the same thing, that he had hit another Scientologist because he had been told to. They both may have been lying, of course, but they both showed remorse which I found convincing.
What seems to anger Mike more than the physical or emotional abuse was the lack of honesty about the growth of the Church. He described how Miscavige had been making up the numbers, claiming millions of Scientologists as members when the real figures were pitifully lower: not ten million but something like 40,000.
I have only once seen a packed Church of Scientology and that was the one Mike and Tommy took me into in LA. He told me that had been staged for Panorama, that they called people up to make the place look packed.
Stepping away from the interview with Mike for a moment and to the only ever newspaper interview Miscavige has given, in 1998 to Tom Tobin of the St Petersburg Times, a reporter who has vigorously covered the Church against a howling wind of legal threats. Miscavige recalled meeting the founder in 1977. The newspaper’s story read:
‘Hubbard, then 66, wore a straw cowboy hat, slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and boots. He was leaving a dining room when the teenager from Clearwater introduced himself. “Oh I know who you are,” he remembers Hubbard saying. “Welcome aboard.” As most Scientologists do, Miscavige often refers to Hubbard by his initials, LRH. He says Hubbard called him by the nickname “Misc” (pronounced Misk).’ [No other ex-member of the Church has used the Misc nickname to me.] “I never thought LRH was looking at me as: Oh, Dave is 17 years old or 18 years old,” Miscavige said. “It was just Dave, person to person. Spiritual being to spiritual being, so to speak.”’
So to speak. Miscavige used his proximity well. By the age of 21, he succeeded in persuading Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, to step out of the way and when Hubbard died it was Miscavige who emerged as the new pope. There were no elections, or anything like that. ‘People keep saying,’ Miscavige told Tobin, ‘“How’d you get power?” Nobody gives you power. I’ll tell you what power is. Power in my estimation is if people will listen to you. That’s it.’
I put it to Mike that Miscavige was close to Hubbard. Is that right?
‘Partly true. He controlled the communications to and from him. So therefore he was able to manipulate what information went to L Ron Hubbard and then what went back and he always manipulated it to make himself look very good, and others look not so good.’
Stalin did that with Lenin, though I am not directly comparing Stalin with…
‘Yes, you are.’
I pleaded that it was not a useful analogy. What was the difference between Miscavige then and now?
‘He has the same energy and intelligence. There is no question that he has always been very intelligent, smart, but that doesn’t make him good. The difference between now and then is that now he firmly believes that everybody else is dirt and he is God.’
On reflection – and I hadn’t studied Lifton’s work at this stage – Mike’s analysis fits exactly with Lifton’s cult criteria of a charismatic leader who becomes the dispenser of immortality, a god.
Why hasn’t Miscavige given a TV interview since 1992?
‘In part because he thinks it’s beneath him. In part, because he will only do it under extremely controlled circumstances. He doesn’t think it’s going to get any better than the interview that he did with Ted Koppel.’
The 1992 ABC interview by Koppel with Miscavige is fascinating because in it the Leader – forceful, fluent, intense blue staring eyes, speaking in a gravelly New Jersey/Philadelphia twang – sets out arguments that Tommy, Mike and the Scientology celebrities had made to me in 2007, fifteen years later, sometimes almost word for word.
For example, the film package prior to the interview showed ex-Scientologists complaining that they had been ripped off inside the Church and then spied on, threatened and followed once they had left. Miscavige replied, talking about the Church’s betterment programmes, defending auditing and demonising its critics: ‘every single detractor on there is part of a religious hate group called Cult Awareness Network… [This was an allegation Koppel denied on their behalf.] Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard of these people, but it’s the same as the KKK would be with the blacks. I think if you interviewed a neo-Nazi and asked them to talk about the Jews, you would get a similar result to what you have here.’
That is the same trope Kirstie Alley hit me over the head with – not literally – in the Celebrity Centre, as if she was an actor and Miscavige had written her script some 15 years before.
Later on, Miscavige riffs on psychiatry: ‘The Fascists, the Communists have used psychiatry to further their ends. That’s just a fact. You want to look at the studies that brought about the Holocaust of the Jews, that the Nazis justified killing the Jews, they were done at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Leipzig, Germany, and that justified the killing of six million people… But let me tell you what our real problem is. Number one, understand this. Psychiatry, psychology, that comes from the word psyche. Psyche means soul. These people have preempted the field of religion, not just Scientology, every other religion. They right now practice and preach the fact that man is an animal, and I guess that is where philosophically we’re at odds with them. But to understand what this war is, this is not something that we started. In fact, 22 days after Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health came out, the attacks from the American Psychiatric Association started.’
How did Miscavige respond to critics? Time reporter Richard Behar ‘is a hater’, who set out to kidnap a Scientologist – a charge that Richard Behar denies. Former high-ranking Scientologist Vicki Aznaran told ABC: ‘They hire private detectives to harass people. They run covert operations. You name it, they have never quit doing it. It would like, they would have to quit being Scientology if they quit doing that.’ On Miscavige, Vicki alleged: ‘He said that we will use public people, we’ll send them out to the dissidents’ homes, have them, their homes broken into, have them beaten, have things stolen from them, slash their tyres, break their car windows, whatever. And this was being carried out at the time I left.’
Miscavige said of Aznaran: ‘This is a girl who was kicked out for trying to bring criminals into the Church, something she didn’t mention… She violated the mores and codes of the group. She was removed for it. I was a trustee of that corporation. She knows it. The words she said to me is, “I have no future in Scientology.” She wanted to bring bad boys into Scientology, her words.’
Mike went on to suggest to me another reason why the Leader hasn’t given a newspaper or TV interview for years: fear.
‘If something were to go wrong and he was made to look like a fool or couldn’t answer the allegations that were being put to him, then that would crumble some of his image in the mind of Scientologists.’
We went through the details of our weird encounters back in 2007. Mike explained that Miscavige had been aggressively contemptuous of Tommy’s ‘handling’ of us, that he was ‘pussy’, that he had failed to stop us from talking to the heretics, Mike Henderson and Donna, so Tommy decided to ambush us at our hotel, late, the expectation being that we would not have had our camera with us. It was pressure from Miscavige that drove the midnight ambush. We showed Mike a clip of the two cars following us when we were arrived at Los Angeles airport and me challenging the driver of the Blue Sidona: ‘are you from the Church of Scientology?’
Was I being paranoid?
‘No, you were being followed.’
Who gave the orders to follow us, I asked.
‘I did.’
There is no doubt in your mind that we were followed by the Church of Scientology?
‘No doubt whatsoever.’
Simple test. There is a gap, we were in Florida and then we went to LA. Where did we go in between?
‘You went to see Bruce Hines in San Francisco.’
How did you know that?
‘I was there.’
What do you mean you were there?
‘See… I was better at following you than the other people.’ They would have been the private detectives.
I never saw you.
‘I know. I followed you from San Francisco airport to the hotel that you stayed at, that one sitting on the corner. I was there.’
So you spied on us, the Church of Scientology spied on us?
‘Yes, absolutely.’
The Church of Scientology has always denied following and spying on the BBC.
‘And they probably would do so again.’
Will they be telling the truth?
‘No, that will be an absolute lie.’
Why spy on people?
Mike explained from the perspective of the Church, that they knew that the Panorama we were making was not going to be friendly, so that they wanted to know exactly who we were seeing and what we were finding out, so they could reply immediately that the things we were being told were not true. The only solution is to spy. The person driving this approach is David Miscavige, he said, and he admitted that as far as the media goes it is counter-effective. He touched on the colossal expense of private eyes. One in London costs around £300 a day or $50 an hour; lawyers, of course, cost far, far more, around $750 an hour.
The Church, for its part, said we weren’t spied on. David Miscavige said the suggestion that he and his office monitored any such operation communicating with Rinder and Davis is absolute and total nonsense. The Church categorically denied it too, but admitted private eyes were tasked to track and document us. An overt operation, they said, not spying.
Making the Scientology film was the strangest thing I have ever experienced in my entire life, I told Mike. And towards the end of the days we spent with you in the States in 2007 I felt as though I was beginning to lose my mind. And I can remember saying to Mole, on the day, that I lost my temper, ‘I don’t think I can do this any more.’ Tommy Davis in particular was attacking me, again and again and again. Is that deliberate?
‘Absolutely. Tommy Davis believed that he could score brownie points with Miscavige by driving you psychotic. If you had some of the fundamental technology and Scientology that you could apply, it wouldn’t have created that effect on you. He was doing something that’s called in slang Scientology “bull-baiting”. He was attempting to goad you into a reaction, do that routine and then have it appear in the press all over the world. It made you look bad and it was from our perspective something that made you lose credibility.’
I was as good as gold for five, six days before I went tomato.
‘You held up pretty good. It was a deliberate effort to get you to lose your cool.’
And when I lost it, how did you feel?
‘Pretty cool.’
But the new, un-Zombie Mike was ashamed of what they had done in 2007 and felt that it was an abuse of their powers as Scientologists, a betrayal of what Scientology stood for. Mike explained that the greater problem for the Church was that Tommy had boasted of his immediate access to the Leader, because in Miscavige’s mind that countered his ability to plausibly deny his agents – a disastrous mistake. Faced with the Leader’s anger, Tommy vanished to Las Vegas, leading Mike to run the show. That was the explanation for his absence in London: Tommy had gone AWOL. Mike was too modest to say so, but he was, in the end, the more professional PR man.
The allegations of being beaten by Miscavige, the spying, the lying, The Hole - all of this, I asked Mike, I’ve got to ask you: were you lying to me then in 2007 or are you lying to me now: ‘I was lying to you then.’
I know this word cult is a very difficult word for you and you don’t accept it as far as Scientology as a principle is concerned.
‘Correct.’
But is the Church of Scientology under David Miscavige a cult?
‘It’s degenerated into the cult of David Miscavige. He has become someone who is infallible, who is all-knowing, all-seeing, expects absolute obeisance and people now look to him like he is beyond any criticism or beyond any reproach and will blindly follow the things that he says to do.’
The Church, of course, was not best pleased with Mike Rinder giving an interview to Scientology’s devil, which we broadcast in the autumn of 2010. Its on-line Freedom Magazine has even created a special graphic, a cartoon of Mike looking at himself in a mirror and suddenly morphing into a fanged, green-skinned cobra, complete with chilling sound effects. The Mike-into-cobra cartoon is compelling evidence that the organising intelligence behind the Church of Scientology is very troubled. It strikes one as being nasty, pathological and pathetic. If this man really is so incompetent and lacklustre as the Church suggests, then why bother attack him so viciously? And how does the Church square blackening its enemies in this way while advancing its claim to be respected as a religion? It’s schizoid.
Weirdly, the Church’s Freedom Magazine and I ask the same question: ‘Was Mike Rinder lying then, or is he lying now?’ It then adds its own gloss: ‘Regarding the anti-Scientology drivel he now funnels to the tabloid media? You be the judge after reading the following verbatim quotes from Rinder when he served the Church as spokesperson… “Look, there is a string of these people…that goes back 25 years. Most of them you will never see again. They have their moment of glory where they make their wild allegations. They get coverage in the media. And then, they disappear. Their claims are proven to be untrue, and they’re gone.”
Mike Rinder to BBC Panorama in 2007…
‘In a 2007 letter to the BBC, Rinder again set the record straight: “[W]e repeatedly requested the name of any source alleging ‘bullying’ and ‘beating.’ The only individual you name is (B.H.) [Bruce Hines]. You must find it at least a little strange that [he] has appeared in various media in the United States, France and the UK over the last two years and has never made this allegation before. In each case he has told stories that the media at the time wanted to hear. You are just the latest, and obviously this is what you wanted to hear from him, so he manufactured a tale.”’
This is weird on weird to the power of ten. The Church’s Freedom Magazine is seeking to disgrace its former spokesman and make his word appear unreliable by quoting his remarks to me and a letter to the BBC. The obvious retort is, having defected from what he now says is a cult, Mike has changed his mind. Painting Mike as a cobra or reminding the world of what he told me in 2007 does not address the substance of the grave complaints made by Mike and other senior ex-members of the Church, that they were beaten, abused and humiliated by David Miscavige when they were inside the Church. These are allegations which the Church and Miscagive deny.
The next day Mike introduced me to Marty Rathbun, the former Inspector-General of the Church and once David Miscavige’s right hand man. After 27 years inside, he left in 2004. Marty used to be Scientology’s confessor to, amongst others, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, and John Travolta, and he had offered to give me an opportunity on the E-meter. I sat opposite him and picked up the cans while he twiddled with a dial on the E-meter.
‘What I am going to do is I am going to pinch you. And I want you to just check and see what the needle does when I pinch you, just note it ok.’
He pinched me.
‘Ow!’
‘Now what I want you to do, keep watching the needle, is recall the moment of that pinch. Now right….John.’
I recalled the moment of pain from the pinch, and the needle jagged to attention. I laughed nervously as my scepticism queued up for the bus home.
‘That’s a bit creepy,’ I said, ‘because my mind remembered the pinch and then that registered.’
The E-meter, Scientologists both within and without the Church believe, helps you uncover repressed thoughts. It didn’t take Marty long to find a naughty thought of mine.
‘Are you nervous or concerned about something?’ asked Marty.
‘I am fighting this. Also I am thinking of something that I am not going to tell anyone about…’
‘I can tell that….’ said Marty, laughing. ‘You don’t have to. OK.’
‘Yes. I am not going to.’
‘And I am not going to try to make you so, although I know when you’re thinking it.’
‘Right. This is a naughty thought. Does it tell you it is a naughty thought?’
‘It tells me that you don’t want to share it, that’s all.’
‘You can tell whether I am agitated about a line of thinking, a line of questioning.’
‘You got it, you got it.’
The E-meter scared me. My lesson in what lay behind Mr Hubbard’s tech was not over. We watched a clip of Tommy having a go at me back in 2007, relentlessly piling on the pressure: ‘Bigot… bigot… bigot,’ said Tommy, ‘I, Tommy Davis, say you, John Sweeney, is a bigot.’
Marty explained what was happening, if you had been trained in Scientology: ‘People have emotional buttons, things that set them off and they study you for that.’
‘Bigot,’ snapped Mike.
I’m not a bigot, I said. To call me a bigot annoys me because I am not a bigot.
‘I understand that but that’s…’ said Mike.
But hold on a second, I struggled to interrupt.
‘If I keep cutting you off like this,’ said Mike, ‘I will actually drive you nuts if every time you start to say something I cut you off…’
I tried to cut in, in vain.
‘That’s another…’ said Mike.
I babbled…
‘… if every time you start to say something I cut you off…’ said Mike.
Eerumpfg, I said.
‘…It’s another way of getting you so that you become emotionally upset…’
‘Yeah, it builds up like a dam,’ said Marty. ‘All these things you want to originate, keep getting cut off and it builds up like a dam and then finally explodes.’
‘And its one of these things…’ said Mike.
It’s very annoying, I said, I want to say something interesting.
‘No,’ said Mike, ‘you’re not allowed to say anything right now…’
‘Bigots are not allowed to talk,’ said Marty.
I collapsed in half-annoyed giggles, pleading that they stop. But again, this made me just a little bit afraid. The two Scientologists could tie me up on knots verbally and I get paid for talking the hind leg off a donkey.
Mike and Marty told me about black or reverse Scientology, about how its power to do good had been corrupted and turned to the dark side. ‘In Miscavige’s Church,’ said Marty, ‘you see Scientology and dynamics, good principles, being twisted around, used in a negative fashion. The whole thing is to help the guy communicate, to help the person freely communicate, to help the person you know examine his own life and to communicate about it. Reverse the process, you’re going to feel worse.’
Having met Russell Miller and read his heretical biography of L Ron Hubbard, and the books of other ex-Scientologists who felt they were victims of the Church under its founder, I am not convinced that there was a ‘White Scientology’ to be corrupted. But there is a clear difference in the openness with which Mike and Marty explain their faith, and their belief in L Ron Hubbard, and the flat refusal to do the same by David Miscavige.
And that extends to Xenu. When I asked Marty about the space alien stuff, he talked about Buddha reaching enlightenment underneath a tree and Jesus exorcising demons: ‘If you look at early Christianity, they fully believed in the existence of spirits amongst us. So this whole thing about the stuff you’re talking about, I call it a creation myth.’
Is Xenu true, I asked Mike?
‘That’s not what Scientology is about. It is a creation myth, no different than the creation myth of God creating the world in one day…’
It was six days, I interrupted, and then the seventh…
‘Six days, you know, whatever…’
These were not perfect answers, but both men answered my question about Xenu civilly, without incredulity or scorn. The problem is when you claim respect and tax relief for secret belief, for something holy or unholy you keep dark from the world.
Later, Mike and Marty and I went on a tour of the Church’s London properties. They were disgusted that they all looked empty, that the footfall was so sparse. For Mike and Marty, who truly believe in Scientology, this was the worst thing of all – worse than the abuse, The Hole, the obscene language – that the man in charge of the Church they used to love was driving people away from it.
We were spied on, filmed overtly and covertly: the usual.