The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  The pecking order was established from that very first day: Tommy Davis was the boss, Mike a corpse-in-the-making. You could tell from their suits. Tommy looked magnificent; Mike looked Zombie-esque, as though he’d just come out of prison. That did not turn out so far from the truth.

  Tommy is a prince of Scientology, his mother an Academy Award nominee, his father a real-estate tycoonette: family fame and money made him a member of its Hollywood Brahmin caste. He is a close friend of Tom Cruise. Three years before we met, Tommy had been on hand to improve Tom’s chances with Iranian beauty Naz Boniadi, whom he dated before dropping her and going out with Katie Holmes, according to Vanity Fair. The magazine alleges that Tom Cruise used the Church, with Miscavige’s blessing, to scout for and groom a suitable mate for him, an allegation that the Church and Cruise hotly deny.

  Vanity Fair’s version is that Tommy and his then wife, Nadine van Hootegen, and his now current wife, Jessica Feshbach, all went ice-skating and had sushi with Cruise and Naz on their first date. Perhaps co-incidentally, Naz had been previously asked what was her dream date? Ice-skating and sushi. Everything went well between Cruise and Naz until she met David Miscavige and his wife, Shelley, the magazine alleged. Naz, born in Iran but raised in London, couldn’t properly understand the fast-spoken Philadelphia rasp of the Chairman of the Board, Miscavige, says Vanity Fair. This is a common failing. Ex-member of the Church Steve Hall, a scriptwriter and a man with a laconic wit, said that disentangling Miscavige’s mixed messages and super-fast delivery was a nightmare. Pity Naz. The magazine said that after Naz was perceived to have failed to respect Miscavige, Cruise had her dumped. All of this the Church, Miscavige and Cruise deny.

  Tommy and Jessica Feshbach had both gone to the great wedding in Italy when Cruise got hitched with Katie Holmes. Jessica was widely described as Scientology’s minder for Katie, introduced as Katie’s ‘best friend’ when the media interviewed Katie about Batman Begins, in which Katie starred as an assistant DA in Gotham City and a childhood friend of Batman. Jessica’s father, Joe, was a multi-millionaire investor and a major donor to the Church. Back in 1993, the Feshbach family business took over a chocolate company in California, introduced Scientology’s technology and a number of staff left, complaining that they were being force-fed not chocolate but Dianetics.

  Plugged into the very top of Scientology although Tommy Davis may have been, the power relationship between Posh Tommy and Zombie Mike seemed, on reflection, to be the wrong way round. That’s because Mike, whose family joined the Church when he was six years old, was a professional PR man for Scientology who had been defending the Church to the media for years, and whose preferred technique was to block, not to engage. Tommy was new to this game, and happy to fight, and that makes good telly but bad PR.

  Very early on at Saint Hill, the mind-games started. Tommy told us it was a shame that we hadn’t told them about the BBC team filming me driving in through the gate, because they would have helped us. That was generous and kind and slightly creepy because we had done a few driving set-up shots on the road outside of the estate. How did they know we had been filming? This was the first time with the Church that I felt as though I was treading on a step that wasn’t there. It would not be the last. Bob chatted to Mole about her being based in Northern Ireland. They knew quite a lot about us. Funny that. We didn’t know it but they were filming us on their CCTV, footage that would be subsequently shown in their splendid film on us, called ‘Panorama Exposed’. Watch it. I am the baddie.

  Inside, Saint Hill was like a show mansion. Or a film set. Everything looked right. Nothing felt right. Plush, carpeted, scrupulously clean, eerily quiet, empty, creepy-creepy-crawlie. They showed off the novelty feature of the house, a ghastly mural in garish colours by John Spencer Churchill, nephew of Sir Winston Churchill, of a load of monkeys, 145 in all, featuring a score of species. A capuchin monkey painting under a tree portrays his Uncle Winston. I cracked a joke about Stan and Hilda Ogden’s ‘muriel’ in ITV’s Coronation Street, a cross-cultural reference they were never going to get in a billion years. Mole looked at me witheringly so I shut up.

  Out came the snaps. Tommy and Mike showed us lots of family album-style snaps of empty Scientology churches or Orgs. In Scientology, there is no mass worship. It consists of one-to-one therapy sessions, which is one reason why some question its claim to be classed as a religion. Once you’ve seen one shot of an empty Org in Nebraska, you’ve seen too many. Mole is naturally polite; I am not. Under the cosh from her to play nicely I said little and was on my best behaviour. Albums over, a film, again, high-value sequences of empty Scientology Orgs, then its Narconon programme.

  Narconon is a programme for drugs addicts, devised by Mr Hubbard, based on the notion that if you spend long enough in the sauna and take lots of Vitamin B tablets the harmful drugs will ooze out of your pores with your sweat. This is rubbish. There is no independent scientific validation for Narconon, though some, including the former minister Charles Hendry MP, praise the Church’s programme.

  The Narconon base in Arrowhead, near New Bucket, Arkansas – or somewhere like that – was illustrated on video with lots of swooshing camera dives of knitting pattern magazine mannequin-style extras playing drug addicts walking crossways across the main field of view. They look good and they have big hair, so the film seems like a bad 80s American detective series, but one with not enough or, in fact, no dead bodies. My notebook gives a flavour of it: ‘psychiatry: bringing down the hammer on a criminal agenda… largest disaster relief organisation on earth… the tech…’

  The notes in my notebook continue: ‘this is welcome to reshaping the destiny of earth… Bingo… psychiatry… taking them down… Psych… 6616 Sunset Boulevard…’

  The video showed Mike Rinder introduce Chairman Miscavige. On the tape, Rinder seemed to be a cardinal of the Church, not the zombie underling in front of us. The leader bounced onto a vast stage, applauded to the echo by an audience of Hollywoodesque luvvies, all booted and suited in black tie, as if were some kind of eschatological Oscars.

  The film continued: ‘psychiatry an industry of death… the horror of psychiatry… 100 million aware of psych horrors…368 psychs doing time… 2006: Phase One: Global Demolition… Global Obliteration… hand grenade.’

  Hand grenade?

  It made little sense but I got it that they didn’t like psychiatry. After an hour of it, I wanted to run away. I said I needed a loo break. Tommy said that the film lasted another two hours. What? It was a surreal exercise in non-communication. We said goodbye and arranged to meet them the next day in London in Fitzroy Street where L Ron first stayed in London. Mole recalls that very sweetly they gave us as a goodwill gesture a picnic of cheese and pickle sandwiches.

  At Fitzroy Street they showed us L Ron’s room, a wacky shrine of a kind, complete with a peaked white naval hat to remind us of his service in the US Navy, in which heretic Russell Miller says he shelled Mexico by mistake. We were given a lunch of sandwiches wrapped in cellophane, served by a distractingly beautiful woman who vanished in seconds. It was clearly some kind of trick and it worked on me brilliantly. On Mole, it did not.

  The five of us sat down over a fantastic platter – spring rolls, cheese things, smoked salmon enrobed in delicious what-nottery – Tommy, Mike, Fireman Bob, Mole and I. Tommy did most of the talking. I noticed that Mike’s Australian accent was watered down or conflicted by a smattering of English idioms and an icing of Americana. He was, in short, one crazy mixed up Aussie.

  I asked Tommy: ‘Can there be such a thing as a good psychiatrist?’

  Tommy: ‘No.’

  Mole tried to play diplomat. She recalls saying that we wanted to find out more about Scientology for the documentary, and maybe they could show me some Scientology techniques or go through the process of what it would be like to become a Scientologist. ‘Until this point,’ Mole says, ‘Tommy had been charming. But he suddenly switched and accused me of being disingenuous. He said he knew tha
t I’d been filming with anti-Scientology protesters a few months ago opposite the Church’s Tottenham Court Road assessment centre and so I clearly had a negative agenda. I was very surprised because, yes, I had filmed the protestors the previous autumn but I hadn’t identified myself to the Church. I realised that they must have taken pictures of me and either matched me up to the person who was sitting in front of them or they had done some kind of other investigative work to find out my name and that I worked for the BBC.’

  The anti-Scientology protesters back in 2006 were small in number but big in volume. They would encamp immediately opposite the Church’s long-time Tottenham Court Road recruiting centre and their leader, a classic English eccentric in a rather splendid straw trilby, would intone through a microphone in a fine sing-song baritone: ‘Don’t give money to Scientology. It’s a scam, it’s a con, it’s a cult.’

  Mole tried to negotiate access with Tommy, Mike and co. I wrote down their terms in my notebook: ‘1) Not a cult.’ In our proposed film we were not to mention the word ‘cult’. ‘2) No crazies. 3) No anonymous – unnamed – sources.’

  Again and again they pressed the point that the Church of Scientology was a religion like other religions, and that it should be respected. This line of argument had clearly been played out before, successfully to the United States IRS back in the 1990s, to President Sarkozy in France, reportedly to Tony Blair in Number Ten. It’s a powerful argument but not one that is beyond scrutiny.

  There is a cultural dimension to the question of what is and what is not a religion. The United States of America was founded by Puritans fleeing religious persecution at the hands of the King of England and the established Church of England in the seventeenth century. For the founding fathers, religious freedom was a right which they hard-wired into the American constitution. It is as if there is in the United States an eleventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt not criticise another man’s religion.’ The danger is that in America they are so afraid of religious un-freedom that they fear to discriminate between a religion and a confidence trick.

  Henri IV of France, born a Protestant who converted to Catholicism because, as he put it, ‘Paris is worth a Mass’, summed up my take on God: ‘Those who follow their conscience are of my religion, and I am of the religion of those who are brave and good.’ Later, Henri was assassinated by a bigot.

  In the twenty first century, everyone has a right to believe in nothing or whatever they want to believe in and that includes the right to believe in Scientology. It may be useful to make a distinction between faith and religion. A faith is a universal belief system which individuals can respect; a religion is a universal belief system which society, by and large, respects. If people believe in Mr Hubbard’s teachings, good luck to them. Some people I know do, and, uncomfortable as it is, I defend their right to believe in him. But not everything that claims it is a religion has an automatic right to be treated as a religion by society. It could be a multi-billion corporation like Coca Cola or a racket like the mafia or a brainwashing cult. The Church of Scientology is, some say, all three.

  The Church’s conditions – no use of the word cult, no anonymous interviews, no interviews with people the Church defines as ‘haters’ – were a line in the sand. We could not make a film about the Church of Scientology without addressing that core issue, that it is not a fact that it is a religion but a claim – and a claim that is open to scrutiny. Others dispute it. It is a fact that many of its ex-members call it a cult. We could not possibly make a film on the Church without examining whether or not it is a cult.

  The Church through those awfully nice legal people at Carter-Ruck denied setting the conditions. Mole and I are clear: they set three conditions. She’s smart; I was sober.

  We politely declined their terms and left. We did not tell them but we were going to carry on. We were determined to make our film, come what may. The question is would the Church let us get on with it? Or would they try and intervene, to try and exercise control?

  L Ron’s unauthorised biographer, Russell Miller, warned me: ‘First, you are going to be followed. Unquestionably you will be followed wherever you go. They will dig into your background, they will try and dig up some dirt about you and find out any scandals about you and they will certainly make them public and they will keep as close as possible tabs on you as they are able to do so.’

  Mole had a cunning plan. She and cameraman Bill Browne flew to Florida a day ahead of me.

  My father, Leonard Sweeney, had died the week before, a loss I strove to keep from the Church of Scientology. He was a good man, a poor working class boy from Birkenhead – on the increasingly fashionable west bank of the Mersey, across from Liverpool – who left school at the age of fourteen, joined Cammell Laird’s shipyard as an apprentice and at the age of 19 became a ship’s engineer during the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war he left the sea to raise our family, support Tranmere Rovers from a distance and tell stories. Modest about his war, after a pint and a half he could be persuaded to talk about what it felt like being hunted by Nazi U-boats. He did an impression of the sound of a Royal Navy anti-U boat depth charge going off when you’re stuck far below sea level in the engine room: BOOOOM! In the pub, it was a show-stopper.

  He was a lovely chap but old age was catching up with him. Sitting in ‘the captain’s chair’ at home with mum, he had a massive heart attack and died in hospital. Far better to go out like that with a BOOOOM! than a long lingering death covered in tubes. In death, as in life, he was a gentleman.

  I drove down to Hampshire for the funeral. Lots of people turned up, many from Lymington Bowling Club, where he’d been some kind of Supreme Being. I gave the address, reading out the score of a football game that will never happen: ‘Manchester United nil, Tranmere Rovers seven.’ We gave him a good send-off. I felt guilty that I did not cry.

  The next day I flew to the United States and battle commenced.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘What do my socks have to do with spiritual freedom?’

  There is something unearthly about the quality of the light in Clearwater, halfway down Florida’s thigh facing the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps it is the light which lured L Ron to appoint Clearwater as Scientology’s Mecca in the 1970s, when he tired of wandering the oceans of the world. It is to this small, sleepy coastal resort that Scientologists the world over come to study. Here, there are more members of the Church per head of population than anywhere else on the planet.

  A word about the weather. Throughout our time in the United States in the spring of 2007 the weather was unremittingly glorious: clear, bright sunny days, not too hot. It never rained. This lack of drizzle weakens moral fibre.

  It was the late Mr Hubbard’s birthday party, and Miscavige was speaking at a major event in a hall which seats 2,200 people. We went along and tried to get in, but were rebuffed, and left, but not before their CCTV cameras filmed us not getting in and then leaving. For the record – and perhaps I am being overly defensive because of what happened later in California – I was polite and correct throughout.

  At Clearwater the next day we met our first two defectors from the Church who were willing to go on camera and talk openly about their experiences inside, Donna Shannon and Mike Henderson. Mole arranged that we film the couple in a country park, populated by raccoons, who took a mild interest in our conversation. By and large, the ex-members of the Church I’ve met are nice people: bright, funny, self-deprecating, keen to help. They are not dumb. What is extraordinary is what they endured in the name of something they believed in.

  Mike is a gentle giant, six foot nine inches tall, a pilot and a sweet man. When we met, he still believed in some of Scientology’s teachings but had fallen out with the Church as an institution. Donna was an ‘out-out’, a vet and also a pilot with her own small plane and someone with real oompf about her: a feisty lady. She had been an ordinary or as they call it ‘public’ Scientologist but was so enamoured with the Church she was persuaded to sell her vet’s
practice and moved with husband Mike to Clearwater. There, they entered the Church’s Holy Order, the Sea Org – Scientology’s version of monks and nuns, who give up worldly pleasures to better serve the organisation. Donna and Mike were based at FLAG, the name of the Church’s massive HQ in Clearwater, endeavouring to make the world ‘clear’. As a parishioner or ‘public’ Scientologist, Donna had worked in the outside world, coming in to the Church to study and pay her way up the varying levels to clear and beyond. As a member of staff at FLAG, she became, she said, their slave.

  ‘In the Sea Org, on staff,’ said Donna, ‘you are controlled by derision, ridicule, being screamed at the top of someone’s lungs right in your face. They train people how to scream at somebody and how to intimidate somebody and how to make them feel like dirt. It is called ripping your face off. You get right up in somebody’s face, nose to nose, and spittle flying out of your mouth, scream in their face.’

  Can you scream back, I asked, foolishly? Remember this conversation took place a whole week before I did exactly that. The answer was no.

  Mike Henderson gave me an illustration of life in the Sea Org: ‘One of the first weekends we were there, room inspection. And the Sea Org ethics officer comes in and inspects. And if you drawers aren’t in order, if your socks and your underwear aren’t stacked neatly, it is a flunk. And the first time this happened Donna just said right to the guy’s face “you have got to be fucking kidding me”. And I couldn’t believe she said that to him, but that’s Donna.’