The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  Anyone who drives along this dirt road for 30 miles knows that burrowing a great hole into the mountain in this part of the world would have been astonishingly expensive. They would have needed to import labour, immense earth-moving machines, tunnel drills, steam rollers – or whatever the modern equivalent is – for the airstrip, and a small city of concrete and steel.

  It feels terrifyingly remote. The word is that one security man was driven so melancholic by the solitude of the base that he killed himself. I would fear to be a believing Scientologist and end up in this place. Contact with the rest of humanity would be close to zero.

  The light is beginning to die, the shadows creeping up the side of the gulch. I have come 4,500 miles to see this thing, and it is looking like the worst wild goose chase ever. We turn one last corner and suddenly Marc and I are staring at something out of Lost. We have become attuned to the primitive landscape, pretty much untouched by man, and suddenly we are staring at 21century technology: a massive steel gate, secured by an alphabet lock and guarded by two security cameras which watch our every move like Hal the psycho computer in 2001:A Space Odyssey. I press an intercom button. A lonely voice – German, Scandinavian accent? – says: ‘Hello?’ I tell the disembodied voice that I’m John Sweeney and I ask nicely for a tour. The intercom spouts white noise. As we drive back to civilization we wonder what kind of religion is it that builds a space alien cathedral underground in the middle of nowhere?

  Only later does it strike me that a Church is not the right word for an organization that places gold in a vault under the ground. In English, we call that a bank. Had it been ‘The Bank of Scientology’ I could have stayed in bed all these years.

  We stop the night at a Best Western in Las Vegas, New Mexico. That night at one o’clock in the morning Marc gets four mystery phone calls to his room. Each time the caller hangs up as soon as Marc answers. Both rooms were registered in my name. They got the wrong room. But still impressive, in a way, because I hadn’t booked in advance and I paid cash.

  The next morning we drive back to Marc’s new home in Colorado. On the road, we talk about the Church he spent his whole life from the age of six in. His book, ‘Blown For Good: Inside the Dark Curtain of Scientology’ has become the bible for Scientologists thinking of leaving the Church. They often call him up and he chats through his arguments for getting out.

  As we drove across the endless wastes of New Mexico, Marc explained what he tells them: ‘I don’t criticise Hubbard, I don’t say it’s all bad. I start with money and math. The E-meter costs $40 to make. I know that number because I used to make them. There is a picture of me making an E-meter. The Church sells an E-meter at $4,000. That’s a profit of $3,960 on each one, and everyone needs two in case one breaks down. In 2004, we in Sea Org started making the new generation of E-meters, the Mark 8 Ultra. They still haven’t been rolled out yet. Since that time, the iPhone has come out. You can put all of Hubbard’s work on the iPhone or similar. You can make an app which would do the same thing as the E-meter. If you really care about spreading the word of Scientology to the whole planet, why not go digital? You could have it all for free on an iPhone which costs you $400?’

  At 11:30am we stop off for a bite to eat. We sit on our own in a barn of a restaurant. As we get up to leave we notice a man sitting in the next booth, oddly close given the emptiness of the restaurant. He asks which team do we root for? I reply: ‘Tranmere Rovers’, my dad’s team, those bonny boys from Birkenhead. He looks nonplussed. I ask him who does he support? He says: ‘Manchester.’ Which one? I ask, puzzled that anyone would presume that there is only one team in Manchester. With a visible effort of memory he says: ‘Manchester United.’

  The miles roll by. The Man U fan follows us is his car. We drive off the freeway and stop. We are close to the state line and if you are a New Mexico PI you cannot follow someone in Colorado without risking being nicked for stalking unless you have a separate PI license for that state too. We don’t see him again. As usual, he could just have been a friendly American fascinated by British soccer who just happened to have never heard of the current Premier League Champions Manchester City.

  Marc continues: ‘The goal, Miscavige says, is getting the whole planet clear. OK. I figured out that if you take zip code 90027 around L Ron Hubbard Way in Los Angeles,’ – centred on the building I call the Concrete Angel – ‘you have 50,000 people. After Clearwater, it has probably the highest concentration of Scientologists per square mile in the world. The organisation within Scientology that makes people clear is called the American Saint Hill Organisation or ASHO. ASHO has a newsletter and it printed that it had two Clears in one month. That got me thinking.’

  Clears, to repeat, are on the first big step on the road to total freedom – a journey that costs around $50,000. Beyond that and much more expensive are the Operating Thetan Levels I, II, III – the Wall of Fire where you learn about Xenu – on to OT VIII when you become a kind of God.

  ‘So let’s be generous,’ Marc says. ‘They make two Clears in one month. In one year, that’s say 24 Clears. In ten years, that’s 240 Clears. In one hundred years, that 24,000 Clears. So in a century, the Church will only get to make half the zip code of one of the greatest concentrations of Scientologists on the planet Clear. Under Hubbard, if you made Clear in a previous existence that stayed with you, so “Last Life-Time Clears” could carry on at that level into a new life. Miscavige killed that policy, so once you get to 100 years and everyone is dead, you have to reset the whole thing to zero. All those 24,000 are no longer Clears in the next life. So the stated goal of the Church of Scientology, to Clear the planet? It is not going to happen – on their own numbers.’

  Marc and Jason Beghe, the Hollywood actor, travelled together to Germany to attend a conference on Scientology organised by Ursula Caberta, yet another woman the Church greatly dislikes. Caberta is in the vein of shotgun-toting cult-buster Margaret Singer. Caberta opened the conference, Marc said, by noting that Church officials had not been allowed to attend and they had protested about this denial of their rights. Caberta said: ‘If you hold a conference about drug addiction, you don’t invite the drug dealers.’

  The Church says that Caberta is the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’, ‘Hamburg’s modern-day Grand Inquisitor’ and has printed a picture of her against the backdrop of a bleak building it identifies as the Gestapo HQ from the 1930s.

  Marc told me: ‘Ursula says that the best way of working against Scientology is using Scientology.’ He said that she has more of L Ron Hubbard’s works than he ever saw in the Church and that when people asked for her help with refunds she would state Hubbard’s policy advice at Church officials, reading out chapter and verse.

  Marc took Ursula’s advice and applied it to the Church’s Holy Scriptures. Several times ordinary ‘public’ Scientologists have been asked to re-purchase Hubbard’s works because technical errors had led, the Church said, to his wisdom not being correctly put down. ‘If that is so,’ said Marc, ‘then all the writings locked inside the earth in Trementina Base back in the 1980s are wrong. What a waste of money.’

  It is arguments like this, Marc says, that make ordinary Scientologists wonder what they have been paying for.

  While her two young sons played making a fort out of a blanket, Marc’s wife Claire reflected with me on the absolute worst moment for her since she got out. Until this moment she had let Marc do the fighting. Having suffered two abortions because of the Sea Org’s then policy against its adepts having children, she was determined to be a good mother and leave talking to reporters about stuff to Marc. That changed when a social worker from Child Services knocked on the door of their home. He had received an anonymous complaint alleging child abuse. It didn’t take long for the social worker to work out what I saw: that their boys are greatly loved and smashing kids. She was and is incredibly angry that someone sought to make trouble for her as a mother.

  Claire and Marc were both brought up inside Scientology. They did
n’t see much of their parents, didn’t have many toys or holidays, left school very young and learnt L Ron’s works rather than the ‘false data’ of what you learn at university. They strive to give their little boys the very best. But neither boy has a grandmother worthy of the name: both women are in the Church and have disconnected from the Headleys and that means disconnecting from their grandchildren too. To make up for that, they have Cindy, an ex-Scientologist who lives close by, whose own daughter is in the Church and disconnected from her. Cindy spoils the lads rotten, just like a real grandmother would.

  This book opened with the story of Betty being disconnected from her daughter. The good news is that her daughter has left the Church, and they are back together on good terms. But how did the Church find out that Betty had given us an interview in the first place?

  One of the funny things about the Church is that it has a lot of secrets but it is not good at keeping them. One source has told me that I was followed in Britain by a London firm of private eyes. I phoned the firm. No reply. I sent an email asking to talk them. No reply. Next I visited their offices which turned out to be a fancy accommodation address. This gives the company the allure and status of an expensive address and a smart receptionist but in reality its staff do not work there full-time, if at all. It is not a shell company because it does exist, just not in the bit of space the business address suggests. And so it being an accommodation address, they were not in. I wrote them a series of follow-up emails, saying that I had heard on good authority that they had been working, effectively, for the Church. Did they spy on me for the Church? Thus far, I have received no reply which is odd because in my experience, if you contact anyone or anything suggesting they are close to the Church of Scientology you get a reply.

  For example, I was told by a source that the credit rating firm Experian had sold six sets of its people-tracking software kit, ‘Name Tracer Pro’, to the Church of Scientology for £60,000 in 2008. This software would enable the Church to track down anybody they fancy – me, you, someone on the run from Sea Org – with the very latest commercially available information kit. Experian spokesman Bruno Rost admitted that this was true, saying: ‘We can confirm that The Church of Scientology is no longer a client and in 2009 ceased using this product. The product uses publicly available information and its use is governed by the Data Protection Act.’

  So that’s all right then.

  The silence, thus far, from the firm of private eyes who I’m told spied on me is intriguing and leads to more questions, such as: has the Church used private eyes to spy on people who have embarrassed its celebrities?

  Take South Park. In the episode called Trapped In the Closet the cartoon team present their take on L Ron’s Second Coming. The Church’s seer returns to earth as Stan. Immediately Tom Cruise turns up and asks the reincarnation of Mr Hubbard what he thinks of his acting. When Stan pooh-poohs his talent, Tom Cruise is upset and hides in Stan’s closet, leading to the immortal line: ‘Dad, Tom Cruise won’t come out of the closet.’ John Travolta pops in and he follows Tom into Stan’s closet and won’t come out. Xenu is portrayed as an evil space alien frog. The show concludes with Stan saying, ‘to really be a church, they can’t charge money to help,’ and then coming clean: he’s not L Ron Hubbard but, Stan says, ‘Scientology is just a big fat global scam.’

  It’s hilarious satire: bitingly funny. Marc Headley and I watched it together and howled with laughter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of the credits are either John or Jane Smith.

  After Comedy Central aired Trapped In The Closet in 2005 it was booked for a rebroadcast the following spring, but the show mysteriously fell off the air amidst gossip that Cruise had used his power in Hollywood to stop the repeat. South Parks’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, issued a statement to Variety on March 17th, 2006: ‘So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!’

  The statement was signed ‘Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu.’

  Did the Church take that comic defiance lying down? A document from the Office of Special Affairs, the Church’s version of the CIA, for the very next month suggests otherwise. It reads as follows:

  ‘CONFIDENTIAL WDC OSA

  24-4-06

  CC: CO OSA INT D/CO EXTERNAL OSA INT

  RE: INVEST REPORTS

  Dear Sir…

  SOUTH PARK

  The PI was out today at the South Park Studio near Marina del Rey. The inside of their offices has different work cubicles in an open space. The staff mainly appear to be in their 20s and 30s. They do not go out for lunch, it is brought in by a catering company called Prestige Services Inc, which does catering for the entertainment industry. There are two parking spots marked “SP” in one section which is covered. The two vehicles there are most likely owned by [Trey] Parker and [Matt] Stone. One is a gray [model and plate details I have deleted] and a blue [model and plate details I have deleted].

  The LA office of Comedy Central where Doug Herzog works is in one of the towers in Century City. The special collection there is not possible.

  Research is being done on writers and others who have been or who are currently connected with the show to find lines that can be used.’

  The OSA document goes on to list people connected with South Park to be targeted for further investigation and concludes: ‘The next action will be for the investigator to work out a resource to get the above people interviewed.’

  Clearly, Trapped In The Closet as far as the Church of Scientology is concerned was no laughing matter. There is no suggestion that either Tom Cruise or John Travolta knew of or condoned this spying operation on the satire show.

  One of the very weirdest things among the host of weird things I have learned during the past few years is that ex-Scientologists have created among themselves quite the best intelligence network I have ever come across – and that includes MI6, the Russian FSB, the CIA, the Chinese State Security Bureau, the Belarus KGB, Saddam’s Mukhabarat, Mugabe’s C10, Ceausescu’s Securitate, Albania’s Segurimi and the Czech StB back in 1988 whom I dodged to see Vaclav Havel. They know so much about Hollywood, power, Clinton and Blair, sex, money. Their network stretches around the planet. But their speciality is, of course, the Church of Scientology.

  In the autumn of 2012 I just happened to be in a pub in Soho downing a swift pint when I phoned a member of the ex-Sci network. The pub was noisy. A few feet away a gang of drunks were singing Abba’s Knowing Me, Knowing You. Bloody drunks. Through the din of the Scandinavian threnody to a defunct love affair I distinctly heard the words: ‘Tommy Davis has left…’

  I was so astonished I left my pint in the pub and raced out to the street to hear the ex-Sci properly: ‘Tommy Davis has left the Sea Org. He’s quit California and started a new life selling real estate in Texas.’

  You could have knocked me down with a copy of L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. I zoned out and thought back to the first uber-weird moment – the midnight ambush – when both Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder were waiting for us at the hotel in Clearwater. Now both of them were out of the Church’s Holy Order. Astonishing.

  The ex-Sci network might be good but it didn’t tell me everything because I still don’t know why Tommy left the Sea Org. I do know he’s told people that his allegiance has not changed, so he is still with the Church but no longer in the Sea Org, its high command. New people are talking officially on behalf of the Church and Tommy has gone off the radar. Whatever the cause of this, starting over in Texas is a long way from Gold.

  Soon after that the ex-Sci network provided me with Tommy’s precise address. He once told me that he knew where I lived. Well, now I can return that favour.

  Having heard and seen so much from so many different people sin
ce I first poked my nose into Scientology I think I now have some understanding of what it must have been like to be virtually born into the Church, as Tommy was. And as a human being, I can only feel sympathy for him.

  Another thing: getting old is not good but one compensation is that if you live long enough you can watch what happens to your enemies. Sometimes they even become your friends. With that in mind, I flew from Colorado to Texas.

  Tommy now lives 1,500 miles from Gold Base in a smart apartment block – Americans call it a condo – somewhere lovely in the Lone Star State. As I arrived at the front door a man in a Maserati convertible pulled up and an attention of valets fought to park it. I strode through the valets and marched towards the lift. The bad news is that I’d grown a beard and my clothes were still covered in dust from Trementina. The concierge thought I was a hobo and wouldn’t let me through the lobby so I left Tommy a note asking him to get in touch with me, if he ever wants to, along with a copy of my novel, Elephant Moon. It’s about elephants rescuing orphans on the run from the Japanese in Burma in 1942 and one of the heroes is an Indian officer who sides with the enemy – proof that I’m not a bigot.

  At the time of writing, late November 2012, I have not heard from Tommy. I hope to meet him again. I imagine it would be like one of those reunions the chaps from the RAF and the Luftwaffe have, when they laugh and joke about that time during the Battle of Britain when they tried to kill each other. I wish Tommy well. The Church is under attack these days in a way that it was not back in 2007. But it still is extraordinarily rich and aggressive. Do not doubt its power. While we were making our second Panorama on the Church in 2010 we heard that the FBI was investigating the Church, too. They seemed to be asking the right people the right questions, and we kept our mouths shut about the FBI investigation. Nothing has happened. One ex-Scientologist who assisted the FBI told me: ‘They were good. They got it. The investigators we were talking to knew what they were doing. Then someone upstairs seemed to raise the stakes. They had to have video evidence of wrong-doing, an admission of guilt, or else nothing would happen.’