‘I want her to explain to you what brainwashing is,’ said Tommy.
‘Do you know what the definition of brain washing is?’ asked Jan.
No. I am not an expert on brain washing.
Jan gave me a book. I read out loud: ‘Brainwashing is the use of isolation deprivation, torture and indoctrination to break the human will. OK.’
‘Torture,’ said Jan.
We knocked around brainwashing for a long time. They said they first uncovered CIA brainwashing; I said hadn’t the Soviets and the Chinese Communists done it too? We got into the Catholic Church and paedophilia. I told them there is a huge problem with the Catholic Church because of the unmarried priesthood, and that is one of the problems I personally have with the Catholic Church because I do not believe in a non-married priesthood.
And then I said: so that aside, what people who used to be Scientologists say, is that I now realise having left the Church, that it is a sinister brainwashing cult.
Tommy stepped in close: ‘We can just bring this down a couple of notches for a second? You keep accusing my religion, my faith, OK, my faith and the faith of a lot of people in this room, and a faith of millions of people the world over, OK, of engaging in something which by definition involves torture, drugs, sleep deprivation…’
Not necessarily drugs, I said.
‘Of inflicting bodily harm. OK. And what is the methodology? It is a methodology which is widely considered by many people who are not even Scientologists to be one of the most heinous and barbaric things you could ever do to another human being: brainwashing.’
Tommy was calm, smooth, perfectly fluent: ‘And you throw that term around with every Scientologist that you meet and you do it under the cloak of your preface “some people claim”. You claim to be an investigative journalist, which means you investigate things, you get to the bottom of them, and you find out the truth, OK? When you were interviewing and I quote your friend, Shawn Lonsdale, a convicted sex pervert…’
Shawn was the lone videographer, who filmed them filming him filming them. When I had interviewed him in Clearwater a zillion years ago – it was, in fact, only four days before – Tommy had interrupted our interview by reading out his criminal record for having consenting sex with men in a public place.
Hold on a second, I said, I want to say he is not my friend. He is not my friend.
‘I have you on camera…’
OK, I said, I am English, I use irony. Some of the words I use you should not take a literal meaning. It may be a cultural difference between us. But when I would say…
‘Some words you use you should watch what you use, because you are the one who says them.’
OK, I said. But I just think that you have a cultural problem with my use of irony. I am English. Sometimes I say ‘my friend’ when I actually mean, I don’t like this person. But actually that is a subtlety. But when Lonsdale…
‘Well, we’ll put a little endnote on our documentary.’
I turned to Reinhardt’s camera, and addressed it directly: hold on a second, have we got that? When I called Shawn Lonsdale a friend, I could well have been using English irony, and I didn’t actually mean those words.
‘So when you say you’re not friends that actually means that you’re enemies so I’ll remember that now.’
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that I might have been falling into a trap that Tommy had made for me. Shawn was not my friend, and, as a BBC reporter, I did not want to appear overly close to him. But at the same time, as a human being, I felt, then and now, that Shawn was a singular and brave man and Tommy succeeded in thrusting this dichotomy at me so forcefully that I felt I had betrayed Shawn in some way, and I felt guilty about it. It is only on reading Lifton’s book on brainwashing, that I realise how successfully the Chinese Communists used guilt as a weapon to brainwash westerners. For example, an extraordinary brave Dutch priest, Fr Vechten, was racked with guilt generated by his captors long after his release. Tommy succeeded in making me feel guilty that I had betrayed Shawn. For the first time in my direct contact with the Church, I was in serious trouble. Keen to show proper distance from Shawn I now felt guilty that I had disowned him too much. Tommy smoked out my confusion, and went after it like a terrier.
‘When you interviewed him you didn’t once ask him, because he did also use that term brainwashing. And you say OK Shawn, what evidence do you have of that? Because I have investigated and the term brainwashing and the definition of brainwashing almost invariably involves sleep deprivation, lack of food, and things which by all definitions amount to torture. So what evidence, Shawn, do you have that people are tortured?’
I’m John, I pointed out, helpfully.
‘I am saying this is what you should have said to him. Ok what evidence, Shawn, do you have that people have been tortured?
Me: ‘No, hold a second Tommy…’
Tommy: ‘No, no, no I am not stopping you listen to me for a second. You are accusing members of my religion in engaging in brainwashing!’
His voice was raised, just shy of shouting at me.
I wish I had not done what I did next, but I could not help it. Had my father’s death had anything to do with it? I don’t think so. The previous evening’s session with Rick Ross may have had a paradoxical effect, of reinforcing and reawakening the fundamental reasonableness and common sense of objections to the Church and its teachings. I feared I was going to lose my mind, my sanity, my grip on reality. I feared they were out to brainwash me. If I didn’t fight it, then soon I would be saying that psychiatry was responsible for the Holocaust, that I had not been followed by sinister strangers in a Kia Sidona, that the man with the cowboy hat was just passing by the reception desk, that Tommy and Mike were not at our hotel at midnight, that I had made it all up. For the past hour – it felt like an eternity – my brain had been assailed by some of the darkest and cruellest images I have ever seen, and I have seen bad things. But these images were constructed and pressed home by fanatics, members of an organization which people who used to belong to it say is literally maddening; an entity so crazy that half of them didn’t know about the space alien Satan that threatens us all, and half of them did. Worst, for me, was the sense that I didn’t know enough about the history of psychiatry to be able to say clearly and with authority that they were not telling the truth. But about Shawn Lonsdale I knew what Tommy was implying was not true. I had asked Shawn a tough question at the very beginning of the interview. I had asked him: ‘You are a social outcast, a menace, a fruitcake, a nutter. Why would Scientology make those kinds of suggestions about you?’
That was a solid fact, and I could stand by it full square. They were not going to brainwash me. I saw red, my face turned into an exploding tomato. Our two faces were inches apart, back-lit in the curious sulphuric red light of the exhibition, set against the background of a huge blow-up picture of the Twin Towers burning. I had had enough of the Church of Scientology; more than enough; and I fought back, jet-engine loud, screaming my head off as loud as I could holler.
Me: ‘NO TOMMY YOU STOP!’
Tommy: ‘BRAINWASHING! BRAINWASHING IS A CRIME!’
Me: ‘YOU LISTEN TO ME!’
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
Me: ‘YOU WERE NOT THERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVIEW. YOU WERE NOT THERE.’
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
Me: ‘YOU DID NOT HEAR OR RECORD ALL OF THE INTERVIEW.’
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime.’
Tommy’s repeated mantra adds to the utter weirdness of the scene: it’s as if he had been trained to repeat a phrase over and over again, so that it gives the other party no break or opportunity to return to calmness. What I was driving at was that Tommy couldn’t say for a fact that I was cosy with Shawn because he wasn’t there at the beginning of the interview. Tommy only invaded it half way through – and our tape could prove that. Frankly, it was a very minor point to lose one’s temper over, as is
often the case when you chuck your toys out of the pram.
Me: ‘Do you understand? Did you understand?’ Suddenly, weirdly, my voice drops in volume.
Tommy: ‘Brainwashing is a crime against humanity.’
Me: ‘YOU ARE QUOTING THE SECOND HALF OF THE INTERVIEW.’
I am back to yelling again: quite why I stopped shouting and then started again is inexplicable. Perhaps I should see a psychiatrist.
Tommy: ‘You are accusing my organisation of engaging in a crime.’
Me: ‘NOT THE FIRST HALF. YOU CANNOT ASSERT WHAT YOU’RE SAYING. Now will you listen to me?’
I shot a quick look at Mole, who flicked her eyes at me, once. Oh, dear, what had I done?
I apologised then and I apologise now.
CHAPTER TEN
The Tethered Goat
It was Mole’s fault. Sweeney’s iron law of TV: if things go well, the reporter picks up the awards. If they go badly, it’s the producer’s fault. For the record, it was, of course, my fault I lost my temper. Mole could do nothing to stop me once I’d gone tomato. But what happened was a wholly unplanned, unintended consequence of Mole’s cunning plan.
Back in 1971, journalist Paulette Cooper had written The Scandal of Scientology. This led to ‘Operation Freak-Out’ whose goal, according to Church documents, was to get Cooper ‘incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.’ The Church of Scientology sent bomb threats to itself, but faked them as if they had come from Cooper. She was indicted in 1973 for threatening to bomb the Church. Cooper endured 19 lawsuits by the Church but was finally exonerated in 1977 after FBI raids on the Church offices in Los Angeles and Washington uncovered documents proving the Church was behind the bomb plot. No Scientologists were ever tried over this scandal. Cooper’s blood parents were both killed at Auschwitz and she was adopted by American parents at the age of six – so the Church ended up trying to jail a child victim of the Nazis, an irony which its Nazi-obsessed museum neglects to mention.
In 1987, the Church did its best to stop the BBC Panorama team making the documentary, The Road to Total Freedom? Reporter John Penycate and producer Peter Malloy were spied on, filmed, lied to and faced preposterous legal threats.
Around the same time, L Ron’s biographer, Russell Miller, faced Scientology’s inquisition. He told me: ‘When we were researching the book in Los Angeles we were followed by a bright red sports car with huge wing mirrors so they obviously wanted me to know that I was followed. I was told my phone was tapped and the mail was intercepted. I was accused of various crimes. They said I was responsible for the murder of a private detective in south London, and I was an arsonist and I had set fire to a helicopter factory somewhere in the north.’
Are you a murderer and arsonist, I asked Russell?
‘No,’ he said.
What did they accuse you of?
‘I got a call from the police saying “what was I doing on this particular day?” and I said “why do you want to know?” and they said “we have had information that you were involved in the killing of a private detective in a car park pub in south London”. I said, obviously, I wasn’t. It became so frequent that I had a special number I could call every time I was accused of something. I said to the police, OK, don’t worry about this, the Scientologists are doing this, so call this number in a police station and that took the heat off me.’
Russell was also accused of the assassination of a Cold War defector. ‘They found out that I was in East Berlin at a time when an American rock star called Dean Reed who was a Communist and had defected to the east, killed himself in 1986. I was there to interview him but that weekend he killed himself. And they discovered that my wife had been born in East Germany and put two and two together and made five and were convinced that I had murdered Dean Reed. They fielded a lot of private detectives, one of them was Eugene Ingram. They tracked down all the friends that I have in the United States and here in Britain. I found out where this guy was staying and called him and said: “What are you doing?” He said: “We are pretty sure you killed Dean Reed and we are going to prove it.”’
Had Russell killed Dean?
‘No, I hadn’t.’
Stasi files, released after the Wall came down, show that Reed committed suicide.
Russell was asked by the first ex-Scientologist he interviewed in LA: ‘“Are you being followed?” And I said no, I have never been followed in my whole life. So that alerted me and then I realised that I was being followed. They had a different car every day. The car would be at the end of the street. The car would pick me as I went off to do my job. It was distressing. You think, this is madness, this is paranoia gone crazy. What are these people doing? They obviously wanted to know what I was doing and who I was interviewing.’
He summed up his experience of the Church of Scientology: ‘These people are so brainwashed that they don’t understand what is happening to them. It is only when they get out of the organisation that they understand what is happening.’
In 1991 it was the turn of Richard Behar of TIME magazine to be the centre of the Church’s attention. He was followed so regularly that he started commuting by roller-blade, so that he could spin around, and roll along against the traffic on Fifth Avenue in New York to lose the vehicles tailing him.
Behar wrote: ‘Strange things seem to happen to people who write about Scientology. For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me.’
One of them was ex-cop and private eye, Eugene Ingram.
‘A copy of my personal credit report, with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number, had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, “Educational Funding Services” of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology’s headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology’s attorneys “had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them.” He says now, “These are vicious people. These are vipers.” Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam.’
Behar hadn’t finished: ‘During the past five months, private investigators have been contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbours to a former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit rating, it’s excellent) and whether I’ve ever had trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven’t). One neighbour was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there.’
Behar still hadn’t finished: ‘An attorney subpoenaed me, while another falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about me, an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by the Church in affidavits to TIME’s lawyers as “proof” of my bias against Scientology.’
In 1997 it was the turn of Channel Four producers Jill Robinson and Simon Berthon, making a film for the Secret Lives series about L Ron Hubbard. Jill told the Independent and the Daily Telegraph how the Church of Scientology had reacted to their scrutiny. Jill went to the States on a research trip. Within days of her arrival, her production company started receiving messages from the Church’s headquarters saying they knew she was in LA. When she left her hotel room at 5am to go to Phoenix the man next door came out of his room at exactly t
he same time.
Jill’s brother worked in the US. When she dropped by his house, the phone went: it was the Church of Scientology, asking for Jill. When she went to a friend’s dinner party, a woman knocked at the door at 10.30 at night saying she needed water for her car radiator. Jill did not go to the door but she could hear the woman’s voice: she claims it was that of the guide who had led a group of visitors, including Jill, around the LA museum dedicated to Hubbard’s life. Her friend gave the woman the water but could see no sign of a car. Jill believes there wasn’t one at all. ‘It was their way of saying: “We’re here, we know you’re there,”’ she told the Independent.
When filming began, everywhere Channel Four went, the Church of Scientology, like Mary’s little lamb, was sure to go. They got hold of a copy of Jill’s shooting schedule. Cars tailed them. Weird phone calls bugged the crew in the middle of the night. In Denver, Jill and her crew took a wrong turning and ended up in an industrial wasteland; so did the tailing car. In San Francisco, her cameraman challenged the driver of a car watching them filming. He hid his face and sped off. In Florida, she and her crew went to a mall to do some shopping. They stopped a Volvo and asked the driver why he was following them. He said he was from New York and there were three of them on the job, getting paid to follow her around.
Back in England, while Jill was editing the film, her neighbour in Kent spotted a man loitering outside her house and called the police. He had not committed any offence and they let him go. His reason for being there was unconvincing. He did, however, tell police he was a Scientologist. Eugene Ingram came over to Kent to probe the horse riding stables where she kept her horse. That was not all. They even tracked down her parents and her hairdresser. ‘It’s a bit spooky,’ she told the Telegraph. ‘I just don’t see what it is they hope to achieve, except they seek to intimidate me.’
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology Page 19
