Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  Rathbun was in shock, but he managed to get out of the passenger side of the car. They had come to a stop in front of a small house with a picket fence. He saw the man in the other car get out and run toward Diane, who was still in the driver’s seat. Rathbun came around the front of the car, just in time to hear a popping noise and the sound of glass shattering. It was the first time in his life he had ever heard a gunshot. Jesse Prince, who was in RPF on the seventh floor, heard the sound and rushed to the windows. People were shouting, “John Colletto!” Everyone knew immediately what was happening.

  Rathbun grabbed Colletto, and they spun around in the street. He got Colletto in a headlock, but Colletto pistol-whipped him and Rathbun momentarily lost consciousness. Both of them tumbled to the ground.

  When Rathbun recovered, he saw Diane on all fours, crawling on the sidewalk, and Colletto running toward her with the gun. Rathbun says he got up and tackled John. They crashed through the picket fence and wrestled on the lawn. More shots were fired. At one point, according to Rathbun, the barrel of the revolver was pressed against the nape of his neck and Colletto pulled the trigger. The gun didn’t fire, but Rathbun went exterior, viewing the scene from twelve feet above his body.

  Colletto broke free and caught up to his wife. He stuck the gun in her ear. Rathbun says he saw what was happening and did a “flying sidekick,” but at that fatal moment the gun fired.

  Colletto was knocked to the ground by Rathbun’s blow and the gun skittered across the pavement. Rathbun picked it up and tried to fire it at Colletto, but the chambers were all empty. Colletto got in his car and screeched away.

  Rathbun went back to Diane. Blood was gurgling and spewing from her mouth. He thought she was drowning in her own blood. Rathbun took off his shirt and put it under her head. As he heard the sirens screaming, she died in his arms.6

  Three days later, John Colletto’s decomposing body was found. He had slashed his wrists and bled to death on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway.

  Because of this incident, Rathbun was singled out for his fearlessness, or what Scientology terms his “high level of confront.” Soon after that, he was sent to La Quinta, Hubbard’s winter headquarters, where the old man was just then building up his moviemaking enterprise. Miscavige had appointed Rathbun head of what was known as the “All Clear” unit. The object was to resolve the dozens of lawsuits around the country that had named Hubbard as a defendant. He was also the target of grand juries in Tampa, New York, and Washington, DC. Hubbard wanted to be able to return to his moviemaking full-time, but he was afraid to show himself until he was assured that he wouldn’t be hauled into court. (He died before that happened.)

  Like many Sea Org members on the secret base, Rathbun adopted an alias for security reasons, one that was similar to his real name but that separated him from his previous identity; it also made it more difficult for anyone to find him. Mark became Marty.

  AS THE NEW CHURCH LEADER, Pat Broeker quickly sought to exert his influence. He had a special uniform made up for himself, with solid gold epaulettes, and a “Loyal Officer” flag that was to be flown wherever he was in residence. He announced that he was going to issue a new “Grade Chart” on Sea Org Day in Clearwater. He justified the alteration of Hubbard’s sacred material with his own divinations because he claimed to be in telepathic communication with the founder. His Sea Org Day speech was stymied, however, when he was told that church authorities expected that a government raid would take place if he showed himself in public. That wasn’t true, but it wasn’t out of the question. For several years, the leaders of the church, including Hubbard, Miscavige, and Broeker, had been targets of an IRS criminal investigation. Church lawyers persuaded Broeker that while the investigation was still ongoing he should confine himself to another ranch near Creston that Hubbard had purchased. Broeker was content with that arrangement. He seemed more at home with the quarter horses that he so lovingly purchased with the church’s money than he did with the bureaucrats in the church hierarchy. He continued shopping for exemplary breeding stock even after Hubbard’s death, claiming he was carrying out the founder’s vision. He seemed to think he could run the church from the sidelines.

  Other than Hubbard’s imprimatur, Broeker had few assets on his side. He had the unfortunate combination of being garrulous without being articulate. Many of the executives he had been close to had been forced out of the church or had fled. Even people who didn’t like him, however, were fond of Annie. She was in many ways her husband’s opposite. She was measured where he was goofy and impetuous. Sweet and shy, with a fragile beauty that some compared to the actress Jessica Lange, Annie had been born into Scientology and was one of the few original Messengers who hadn’t been purged. In 1982, Hubbard had made her Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, the highest post in the church bureaucracy, in charge of protecting the sanctity of Scientology’s spiritual technology. It was a job she was ill suited for, by nature and also by circumstance, as she was not an auditor, and for years she had been living at the remote ranch as Hubbard’s caretaker, away from the administration of church affairs. In March 1987, Miscavige seized control of the RTC, making himself the Chairman of the Board. He downgraded the Inspector General’s post by dividing it into three parts. His new lieutenant and henchman, Marty Rathbun, became the IG for Ethics.

  Still, both Pat and Annie remained untouchable because of Hubbard’s final decree. And, most tantalizingly, only Pat seemed to know where the new OT levels—which he now claimed went all the way up to XV—were hidden. They were his insurance. Nothing could be more precious in the world of Scientology—to its members, who sought to gain Hubbard’s final revelations on the Bridge to Total Freedom, and to the organization, which profited from that journey.

  At Miscavige’s direction, Rathbun hired a team of private investigators to follow Broeker and dig into his private life. One of them was a former cop who met Broeker at a gun show, then began frequenting Broeker’s favorite tavern. He would chat him up whenever he came in. They got to be so friendly that at Christmas the ex-cop gave Broeker a cordless phone. Because such phones emit a weak radio signal, Rathbun’s minions were able to record Broeker’s calls. The detectives followed him everywhere, but there was no clue as to where the secret OT levels might be hidden.

  Miscavige still worried that Broeker was holding vital material back. A few months later, he and church attorneys went to the ranch to persuade the Broekers to hand over whatever confidential materials they might have to the church for safekeeping. While this was going on, a gang of a dozen powerful men assembled by Rathbun surrounded the ranch quarters and hid in the bushes.

  Inside the ranch house, Miscavige and the lawyers argued that Scientology would never get its tax exemption if the church did not have in its possession its most important documents. Miscavige also threatened Broeker with the prospect of criminal prosecution. Rathbun had discovered that there was $1.8 million of Hubbard’s funds that Broeker couldn’t account for. Broeker appeared to cave in. He let Rathbun load the file cabinets in the ranch house into a truck. Had Broeker not agreed, Rathbun was prepared to signal his goon squad to storm the place and seize everything. It took months to sort through the voluminous files, only to find that there was really nothing there—certainly, nothing that resembled new OT levels.

  In November 1987, the IRS notified the church that its criminal investigation had concluded. No charges were filed, but that also reduced the leverage Miscavige had over Broeker. A few months later, Miscavige decided that a final operation to retrieve the missing OT levels was in order. This time there would be no subterfuge, no subtle argument. Rathbun brought along a team of armed private investigators and off-duty LA cops as muscle, along with several other church executives. One of them found fifty thousand dollars stashed under the kitchen sink.

  Miscavige concentrated his attention on Annie. He took her to a separate room and interrogated her as a detective barred the door, preventing her husband from seeing her.
Eventually, Annie admitted that Pat kept a storage locker in nearby Paso Robles, and she coughed up the key. Rathbun’s team found more files, but not what they wanted. Rathbun eventually came to the conclusion that there were no further OT levels—no OT IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV—it was all a bluff on Broeker’s part, a lie that the church would have to live with, since the levels had been so publicly announced.7

  In April 1988, Miscavige formally canceled Hubbard’s final directive, Flag Order 3879, that had named the Broekers Loyal Officers. Miscavige declared that Pat Broeker had fabricated the order, although he produced no evidence to substantiate his charge. Broeker’s last claim to the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard was destroyed. He fled the country, followed by two private detectives, Paul Marrick and Greg Arnold, who claim that they tailed Broeker for the next twenty-four years, even to foreign countries. They say they were supervised personally by David Miscavige and paid from church funds. “He lived a very quiet, normal life, and everybody around him loves him,” Marrick later said of Broeker. “So that’s his whole story from our perspective.”

  The same day that Miscavige canceled Hubbard’s order, Annie showed up in a remote re-education camp, in the Soboba Indian Reservation in Southern California, that Scientologists called Happy Valley. It had once belonged to an order of nuns, who left a sign on the gate that said VALLEY OF THE SINGING HEART. An armed guard stood watch. Dogs were trained to track down anyone who tried to leave.

  Miscavige was now in complete control.

  * * *

  1 Miscavige has been circumspect about what missions he actually performed in his capacity as Action Chief. He once testified: “What is a mission? Okay. Well, you have a situation and a situation is defined as a departure, major departure from the ideal scene, and at the bottom of that there’s some Y. Y is defined as an explanation that opens a door to a handling. And if you have actually pulled the strings on the situation all the way down, you will now have a Y, which means that the situation can be resolved. A mission would take a situation, knowing what the Y is, and therefore knowing what exact handling steps are thus possible as a result of the door being opened because the Y was found by evaluation, and they would … operate on what is known as a set of mission orders, and the set of mission orders is an exact series of steps, sometimes consecutive, sometimes not, sometimes they can be done concurrently within each other.… These mission orders have an exact purpose to be accomplished, exact major targets, exact primary targets, exact vital targets, exact operating targets; they have listed the means of mission communication, and they have also listed the target date for completion.” He did not clarify the situation further. (David Miscavige testimony, Bent Corydon v. Church of Scientology, July 1990.)

  2 The church categorically denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.

  3 In 1989, an appellate court reduced the judgment to $2.5 million, which the church finally paid in 2002, plus interest, which brought the sum to $8.6 million.

  4 The church claims that Hubbard’s income was generated by his book sales.

  5 Rathbun was never able to apply those advanced techniques on his brother. In 1981, two boys walking their dogs near a vacant lot in Garden Grove, California, discovered Bruce Rathbun’s body buried under a pile of debris. The cause of death was never determined and the case was never resolved (www.ci.garden-grove.ca.us/?q=police/Unsolved/1981/Rathbun).

  6 The police report confirms Rathbun’s story. “A suspect, tentatively I.D.’d as her husband, fired one shot through the driver’s side of the auto,” the report states. “He then forced her vehicle to stop, got out, and became involved in a fight with her male companion, during which time he was firing the weapon, a .22 caliber (short), 8-shot revolver.… The male companion was able to wrest the revolver from the suspect, at which point the husband fled.” The companion was identified as Mark Rathbun. The empty gun was found at the scene (Michael A. Shepherd, County of Los Angeles Case Report, Aug. 19, 1978).

  7 None of the promised levels has ever been released.

  6

  In Service to the Stars

  In 1986, the same year that L. Ron Hubbard died, Paul Haggis appeared on the cover of the church’s Celebrity magazine, marking his entry into the pantheon of the Scientology elite. The photo shows Haggis sitting in a director’s chair, holding a coffee cup. He’s clean-shaven, with glasses, wearing a herringbone jacket with a pocket square in the breast pocket and pleated linen slacks, looking like a nerdy Hollywood executive with a lot of money to spend on clothes. The article took note of his rising influence in Hollywood. He had broken free of the cartoon ghetto after selling a script to The Love Boat, then ascended through the ranks of network television, writing movies of the week and children’s shows before settling into sitcoms. He worked on Diff’rent Strokes, Who’s the Boss? and One Day at a Time. He was now the executive producer of The Facts of Life, a top-rated Saturday night staple. Celebrity noted, “He is one of the few writers in Hollywood who has major credits in all genres: comedy, suspense, human drama, animation.”

  In the article, Haggis said of Scientology, “What excited me about the technology was that you could actually handle life, and your problems, and not have them handle you.” He added, “I also liked the motto, ‘Scientology makes the able more able.’ ” He credited the church for improving his relationship with his wife, Diane. “Instead of fighting (we did a lot of that before Scientology philosophy) we now talk things out, listen to each other and apply Scientology technology to our problems.”

  Haggis told the magazine that he had recently gone through the Purification Rundown, a program intended to eliminate body toxins that form a “biochemical barrier to spiritual well-being.” For an average of three weeks, participants undergo a lengthy daily regimen, spending up to eight hours a day in a sauna, interspersed with exercise, and taking massive doses of vitamins, especially niacin. In large amounts, niacin can cause liver damage, but it will also stimulate the skin to flush and create a tingling sensation. The church says that this is evidence of drugs and other toxins being purged from the body. Although many in the medical profession have been hostile to the Purification Rundown, citing it as a fraud and a scam, Hubbard thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for it.

  In the Celebrity interview, Haggis admitted that he had been skeptical of the procedure before going through it—“My idea of doing good for my body was smoking low-tar cigarettes”—but the Purification Rundown, he said, “was WONDERFUL. I really did feel more alert and more aware and more at ease—I wasn’t running in six directions to get something done, or bouncing off the walls when something went wrong.” He mentioned the drugs that he had taken when he was young. “Getting rid of all those residual toxins and medicines and drugs really had an effect,” he said. “After completing the rundown I drank a diet cola and suddenly could really taste it: every single chemical!” He had recommended the Rundown to others, including his mother, when she was seriously ill, and had persuaded a young writer on his staff to take the course in order to wean herself from various medications. “She could tell Scientology worked by the example I set,” Haggis told the magazine. “That made me feel very good.”

  The Purification Rundown is a fundamental feature of Scientology’s drug rehabilitation program, Narconon, which operates nearly two hundred residential centers around the world. Celebrity Scientologists conspicuously promote Narconon, citing the church’s claims that Narconon is “the most effective rehabilitation program there is.” Kirstie Alley, who served as the national spokesperson for Narconon for a number of years, describes herself as “the heart and soul of the project,” because it had helped break her dependency on cocaine. A year after 9/11, Tom Cruise set up a program for over a thousand rescue workers in New York to go through a similar procedure, which was paid for in part by using city money. Many participants reported positive results, saying that they had sweated a kind of black paste through their pores while in the sauna. The Borough of Manhattan gratefully declared March 13 (Hubbard�
��s birthday), 2004, as “Hubbard Detoxification Day.”

  Kelly Preston has promoted Narconon in her native Hawaii. “Starting in the schools, we’ve delivered to over ten thousand different kids,” she said. Preston and Travolta’s sixteen-year-old son, Jett, who was autistic, died of a seizure in January 2009. His parents had taken him off of Depakote, an anti-seizure medication, saying it was ineffective. (The church claims that it does not oppose the use of such drugs when prescribed by a doctor; however, Hubbard himself denounced the use of anti-seizure medications.) Previously, Preston asserted on the Montel Williams Show that Jett suffered from Kawasaki syndrome, a rare disorder that she thought was brought on by his exposure to pesticides and household chemicals.

  “With Jett, you started him on a program that I think is talked about in this book by L. Ron Hubbard,” Williams said, holding up Clear Body, Clear Mind, which outlines the principles of the Purification Rundown.

  “Exactly,” Preston replied.1 She then talked about her own profound experience on the program. Novocaine from previous dental work began to surface. “I had my entire mouth get numb again for an hour and a half,” she said. Other drugs were purged as well, along with radiation exposure from the sun. “I had a bathing suit when I was seven years old—this is completely true. I had a bathing suit that I thought was so cool with holes in the side and a hole in the center,” she said. “And I got a sunburn in it. And twenty years later, I had this same sunburn come out in my skin, the entire sunburn.” Preston brought copies of Hubbard’s book for the entire studio audience.