The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  On the Saturday before our Panorama, ‘Scientology & Me’, was due to air, the Church’s John Alex Wood put up a 41-second clip of me losing it in ‘The Industry of Death’ on YouTube. The calls from the Sunday newspapers piled in, and Panorama editor Sandy Smith and I fielded them. We told all of them I had been in the wrong to lose control and I used the phrase ‘exploding tomato’ to describe my hapless interviewing technique. If the newspapers thought that we were going to cover up my loss of temper, they were wrong. But we also said there were things in the programme about the Church that would give the viewer context and grounds for concern. We released an equally short clip of Tommy Davis going nose-to-nose with me at Plant City, when he lectured me about America’s freedom of religion and then trotted off when I started talking about freedom of speech. But, by and large, the story in everybody’s minds was me losing it, and that’s what the papers ran with.

  It was an interesting experience being rubbished 24/7 around the world for three days. My son Sam was at the gym, on a double treadmill machine, with a pal, both of them watching the BBC News Channel when the exploding tomato popped up. ‘Look at that nutter losing it,’ said Sam’s pal.

  ‘That’s my Dad,’ said Sam.

  On the Monday of transmission, Panorama’s editor, Sandy Smith, got a letter from Mike Rinder. Then it was marked ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL NOT FOR BROADCAST OR PUBLICATION’ but the Church have since published it on their website.

  Mike was reacting to an interview Sandy had given to the BBC’s Heaven and Earth religious affairs programme in which he had apologized for my loss of temper but defended our investigation in robust terms. Mike ripped off Sandy’s face, as it were: ‘Your blatant disregard for the truth with respect to the Panorama episode being produced on the Church of Scientology is appalling…

  You have repeated Mr. Sweeney’s avowed reason for losing his temper in the US: “he fell into a trap … he’d been watching a 90minute exhibition of supposedly proving that psychiatry is a Nazi science …I feel he was baited, he lost it.” This is false.’

  Mike hit all the Church’s G-spots: ‘psychotic break’, Carter-Ruck, ‘discredited sources’, and concluded: ‘Please retract your false and inflammatory statements that have been quoted in the media, with utter disregard for the documented facts.’

  It was drizzling that afternoon, wet, soggy, miserable weather. The fire bells starting ringing and 2,500 BBC employees trooped out into the rain as the building was cleared, and every single one of those 2,500 seemed to be looking at me, as if it was all my fault.

  Panorama’s ‘Scientology & Me’ peaked at 4.9million viewers, the highest figures for Panorama that year. This was almost certainly because of the Church’s attack video which seemed to have alerted every single news organisation on the planet to our journalism about them. After a fair bit of stuff for the lawyers – the 1984 verdicts of Judges Latey and Breckenridge – the Panorama settled down to the Tommy and John show, with him chasing, harassing and yelling at me across the United States. The show climaxed, as it were, with Mr Tomato.

  The best line of commentary in the show was the pay-off, written by Sandy: ‘So: Scientology? Those of its disciples who find it useful? Good luck to them. We don’t doubt their sincerity. But its leaders have their work cut out if they want to be hosting Songs of Praise anytime soon.’

  After the programme went out, there was that awful wait until the comments came in. I was saved by the sheer bloody-mindedness of the Great British Public who pay my wages. On the internet, on YouTube and via email, thousands commented that I was wrong to lose it, but I had been goaded into it. Two comments stand out. Over time I’ve polished these comments so they gleam like shiny conkers, but this is how I remember them. The first was from the Green Watch of the Lambeth River Fire Brigade who said, words to the effect: ‘we were with you the whole way, and we all shouted with you, and, in our view, you should have punched the xxxx.’ The very next email read: ‘Mr Sweeney, you’re my hero but then I am the Vice-President of the Royal College of Psychiatry.’

  A few days later bleary-eyed BBC staff arrived at work to be handed copies of a CD called ‘Panorama Exposed’, illustrated with a screaming fruitcake on the cover. I am that screaming fruitcake. This was the Church’s film about our film on them. They printed around 10,000 CDs and posted them at random to people in Britain – fancy goods salesmen, vicars, lollypop ladies – many of whom kindly got in touch with me, letting me know that they had received this oddity through their letterbox.

  ‘Panorama Exposed’ starts strongly with a typewriter effect tap-tapping out grave concerns about standards at the BBC; shows me denouncing BBC bosses as a bunch of morons; segues into the ‘Exploding Tomato’; cites Mike Rinder having a go at me at the hotel at midnight; shows us interviewing Shawn Lonsdale, sex pervert; and does a brilliantly edited cut-down of the celebrities being asked my ‘some say’ questions.

  They show me asking Kirstie Alley is it a sinister brain-washing cult?

  Kirstie Alley: ‘Would you ever sit with a Jew and tell them that their religion is a cult?’

  JS: No.

  JS: [fast inter-cut] Some people… some say… some people say… some people say… that it’s a sinister brain-washing cult.

  Juliette Lewis: I know and some people say women are really stupid and shouldn’t have the vote.

  JS: Some people would say you’re a member of a brainwashing cult, in some way brain-washed, brain-washed, brain-washed…

  Anne Archer: Do I look brain-washed to you?

  JS: (Silence)

  Anne Archer: How dare you!

  What is odd is that Scientology’s celebrities had been objecting that I had invaded their privacy; then the Church broadcast their encounters with me. Intercut with the interviews were contributions from pundits warning about the BBC and tabloid journalism.

  One pundit stands out. The Right Reverend Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, who was once a serious contender to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, told the Scientology crew: ‘The thing that worries me the most is the way in which unexamined assumptions get taken as read – so Church of England congregations are in free fall, the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t do much about sex abuse, Opus Dei, Scientology, the Moonies are all mind-numbing and brainwashing cults – those are the sort of things that are taken for granted, as if these are proven.’

  The bishop may question whether the Church of Scientology and the Moonies are brainwashing cults. But in my experience few people choose to call them that lightly. That view of the Church of Scientology is not ‘unexamined’ but expensively protected by, for example, Carter-Ruck.

  As I’ve said before, I’m sorry I lost my temper with the Church. But it did have one wholly unintended and very welcome consequence.

  Cut to two years later…

  …nine rockets crashed in, just after sunrise. They killed one soldier and badly wounded the Havildar, or Sergeant-Major. The Taliban would have wired up their solar-powered detonators, triggered by the sun’s rays, the night before so they were long gone by the time the Pakistani Army found the firing site high on a bluff of land overlooking the army base, set up in an abandoned girl’s school – no education for girls in the Swat Valley these days, and not much in the whole of the North West Frontier Province. The Taliban had seen me, the only European in this part of the Valley, the previous evening filming the ruin of a mosque one of their suicide bombers had blown up. The bomber had wanted to blow up an army post but a sentry started shooting at the bomber’s Land Cruiser and he swerved towards the mosque and hit his trigger, wrecking it, bringing down the minaret and killing six children queuing for water at the mosque’s tap. The rockets were the Taliban’s response.

  What went through the mind of the suicide bomber in the last moments of his life? Did he really believe that he was part of a force for good? Or did he see that he was about to crash into the holy building? Did he see the kids lined up with their plastic water containers by the water pipe? On
the internet you can find dozens of Taliban snuff movies, showing ‘brave, idealistic’ Pakistani or Afghan young men garlanded with explosives before they drive their truck bomb into the pre-selected target and BOOM! The Taliban is, some say, a nationalistic resistance movement against foreign invaders. Others feel that it is a death cult and those ‘brave, idealistic’ men have been brainwashed into killing themselves and others.

  The chopper came to take me out of the Taliban’s way, sharpish. The rush of wind through the open doors burnt my eyes but the view from two, three, four thousand feet was spectacular, the ridges of the North West Frontier Province rising and dipping as our ancient Pakistani Army Huey chugged over the terrain. In the back seat, just behind me, the half-dead Havildar lay on a stretcher with a medic hard at work, pumping his heart. Beneath him, the coffin containing the corpse of the dead soldier.

  Back in Islamabad, I did my best to grow my beard. We got stuck in a traffic jam and were crawling around a roundabout when my Pakistani fixer said the police had caught a suicide bomber at this very place, waiting for a European. When, I asked? ‘Yesterday,’ he said.

  I wanted to get some GVs – General Views – TV twaddle for the wallpaper shots of a country you can stick anywhere in a film over which you can make some boring blah-blah point. We found a mosque, climbed up the minaret and the cameraman shot bucket-loads of GVs. Down below, five, six, seven SUVs had rolled up. We were being stared at by men in dark glasses and sharp suits. We climbed down, icicles in our bowels. We were descending towards the ISI, the Pakistani secret police. Not the Taliban, but not nice either. The ISI torture and kill. We must have filmed something they did not want us to film from the minaret.

  The main dude spoke exquisite Oxford English, wore a rather fine suit and had pitted skin.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is John Sweeney and I work for BBC Panorama.’

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘Yes. Here is my passport and here is my press card.’

  He inspected them, and handed them to a goon who got in a big SUV and drove off, kicking up a storm of dust. As soon as the dust died down Pitted Skin turned back to me and said: ‘Who are you and can you prove it?’

  ‘My name is John Sweeney and I work for Panorama and I have seven million hits on YouTube. Look me up.’

  He came back and handed over my passport and press card and we were allowed to go on our way. So, for making me instantly identifiable in this and all other galaxies, I would like to thank the Church of Scientology.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Defector

  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 violenc
e 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.