Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  “It’s not true that he’s gotten for his birthday a motorcycle, fine suits, and leather jackets?” I asked.

  “I gave him a leather jacket once,” Davis conceded.

  “So it is true?” I asked. “A motorcycle, fine suits?”

  “I never heard that,” he responded. “And as far as fine suits, I’ve got some fine suits. The church bought those.” In fact, he was wearing a beautiful custom-made suit, with actual buttonholes on the cuffs. He explained that for IRS purposes it was considered a uniform. When Sea Org members mix with the public, he explained, they dress appropriately. “It’s called Uniform K.”

  Davis declined to let me speak to Miscavige; nor would he or the other members of the group agree to talk about their own experiences with the church leader.

  I asked about the leader’s missing wife, Shelly Miscavige. John Brousseau and Claire Headley believe that she was taken to Running Springs, near Big Bear, California, one of several sites where Hubbard’s works are stored in underground vaults. “She’ll be out of sight, out of mind until the day she dies,” Brousseau had predicted, “like Mary Sue Hubbard.”

  In the meeting, Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he wouldn’t disclose the location.

  Davis brought up Jack Parsons’s black magic society, which he asserted Hubbard had infiltrated. “He was sent in there by Robert Heinlein, who was running off-book intelligence operations for naval intelligence at the time.” Davis said that the church had been looking for additional documentation to support its claim. “A biography that just came out three weeks ago on Bob Heinlein actually confirmed it at a level that we’d never been able to before, because of something his biographer had found.”

  The book Davis was referring to is the first volume of an authorized Heinlein biography, by William H. Patterson, Jr. There is no mention there of Heinlein sending Hubbard to break up the Parsons ring. I wrote Patterson, asking if his research supported the church’s assertion. He responded that Scientologists had been the source of the claim in the first place, and that they provided him with a set of documents that supposedly backed it up. Patterson said that the material did not support the factual assertions the church was making. “I was unable to make any direct connection of the facts of Heinlein’s life at the time to that narrative or any of its supporting documents,” Patterson wrote. (The book reveals that Heinlein’s second wife, Leslyn, had an affair with Hubbard. Interestingly, given Hubbard’s condemnation of homosexuality, the wife charged that Heinlein had as well.)

  “Even those allegations from Sara Northrup,” Davis continued, mentioning the woman who had been Parsons’s girlfriend before running off with Hubbard. “He was never married to Sara Northrup. She filed for divorce in an effort to try and create a false record that she had been married to him.” He said that she had been under a cloud of suspicion, even when she lived with Parsons. “It always had been considered that she had been sent in there by the Russians,” he said. “I can never pronounce her name. Her actual true name is a Russian name.” Davis was referencing a charge that Hubbard once made when he was portraying his wife as a Communist spy named Sara Komkovadamanov. “That was one of the reasons L. Ron Hubbard never had a relationship with her,” Davis continued. “He never had a child with her. He wasn’t married to her. But he did save her life and pull her out of that whole black magic ring.” Davis described Sara as “a couple beers short of a six-pack, to use a phrase.” He included in the binders a letter from her, dated June 11, 1951, a few days before their divorce proceedings:

  I, Sara Northrup Hubbard, do hereby state that the things I have said about L. Ron Hubbard in the courts and the public prints have been grossly exaggerated or are entirely false.

  I have not at any time believed otherwise than that L. Ron Hubbard was a fine and brilliant man.

  She went on to say, “In the future I wish to lead a quiet and orderly existence with my little girl far away from the enturbulating influences which have ruined my marriage.” (Sara did live a quiet and orderly existence until her death, of breast cancer, in 1997. She explained why she made the tapes, in her last months of life. “I’m not interested in revenge,” she said. “I’m interested in the truth.”)

  The meeting with the Scientology delegation lasted all day. Sandwiches were brought in. Davis and I discussed an assertion that Marty Rathbun had made to me about the OT III creation story. While Hubbard was in exile, Rathbun said, he wrote a memo suggesting an experiment in which ascending Scientologists might skip the OT III level—a memo Rathbun says that Miscavige had ordered destroyed. “Of every allegation that’s in here,” Davis said, waving the binder containing fact-checking queries, “this one would perhaps be, hands down, the absolutely, without question, most libelous.” He explained that the cornerstone of the faith was the writings of the founder. “Mr. Hubbard’s material must be and is applied precisely as written,” Davis said. “It’s never altered. It’s never changed. And there probably is no more heretical or more horrific transgression that you could have in the Scientology religion than to alter the technology.”

  But hadn’t certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of Hubbard’s books been changed after his death?

  Davis agreed that was so, but he maintained that “the current editions are one-hundred-percent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.

  “The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?” I asked.

  “No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied. “The point is, it wasn’t Mr. Hubbard.”

  “Somebody put the material in those—”

  “I can only imagine,” Davis said, cutting me off.

  “Who would have done it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I don’t think it really matters,” Davis said. “The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyone’s sexual orientation.…”

  “Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked, trying to be clear.

  “Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said. “And by the way,” he added, referring to Quentin Hubbard, “his son’s not gay.”

  During his presentation, Davis showed an impressively produced video that portrayed Scientology’s worldwide efforts for literary programs and drug education, the translation of Hubbard’s work into dozens of languages, and the deluxe production facilities at Gold Base. “The real question is who would produce the kind of material we produce and do the kinds of things we do, set up the kind of organizational structure that we set up?” Davis asked. “Or what kind of man, like L. Ron Hubbard, would spend an entire lifetime researching, putting together the kind of material, suffer all the trials and tribulations and go through all the things he went through in his life … or even with the things that we, as individuals, have to go through, as part of the new religion? Work seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, fourteen-, fifteen-, eighteen-hour days sometimes, out of sheer total complete dedication to our faith. And do it all, for what? As some sort of sham? Just to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?” He concluded, “It’s ridiculous. Nobody works that hard to cheat people. Nobody gets that little sleep to screw over their fellow man.”

  We came to the section in the queries dealing with Hubbard’s war record. His voice filling with emotion, Davis said that if it was true that Hubbard had not been injured, then “the injuries that he handled by the use of Dianetics procedures were never handled, because they were injuries that never existed; therefore, Dianetics is based on a lie; therefore, Scientology is based on a lie.” He concluded: “The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.”

  I believe everyone on The
New Yorker side of the table was taken aback by this daring equation, one that seemed not only fair but testable. As proof of his claim that Hubbard had been injured, Davis provided a letter from the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, dated December 1, 1945. It states that Hubbard had been hospitalized that year for a duodenal ulcer, but was pronounced “fit for duty.” Davis had highlighted a passage in the letter: “Eyesight very poor, beginning with conjunctivitis actinic in 1942. Lame in right hip from service connected injury. Infection in bone. Not misconduct, all service connected.” Davis added later that according to Robert Heinlein, Hubbard’s ankles had suffered a “drumhead-type injury”; this can result, Davis explained, “when a ship is torpedoed or bombed.”

  Despite subsequent requests to produce additional records, this was the only document Davis provided to prove that the founder of Scientology was not lying about his war injuries. And yet, Hubbard’s medical records show that only five days after receiving the doctor’s note, Hubbard applied for a pension based on his conjunctivitis, an ulcer, a sprained knee, malaria, and arthritis in his right hip and shoulder. His vision was little changed from what it had been before the war. This was the same period during which Hubbard claimed to have been blinded and made a hopeless cripple.

  Davis acknowledged that some of Hubbard’s medical records did not corroborate the founder’s version of events. The church itself, Davis confided, had been troubled by the contradiction between Hubbard’s story and the official medical records. But he said there were other records that did confirm Hubbard’s version of events, based on various documents the church had assembled. I asked where the documents had come from. “From St. Louis,” Davis explained, “from the archives of navy and military service. And also, the church got it from various avenues of research. Just meeting people, getting records from people.”

  The man who examined the records and reconciled the dilemma, he said, was “Mr. X.” Davis explained, “Anyone who saw JFK remembers a scene on the Mall where Kevin Costner’s character goes and meets a man named Mr. X, who’s played by Donald Sutherland.” In the film, Mr. X is an embittered intelligence agent who explains that the Kennedy assassination was actually a coup staged by the military-industrial complex. In real life, Davis said, Mr. X was Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, who had worked in the Office of Special Operations at the Pentagon. (Oliver Stone, who directed JFK, says that Mr. X was a composite character, based in part on Prouty.) In the 1980s, Prouty worked as a consultant for Scientology and was a frequent contributor to Freedom magazine. “We finally got so frustrated with this point of conflicting medical records that we took all of Mr. Hubbard’s records to Fletcher Prouty,” Davis continued. Prouty told the church representatives that because Hubbard had an “intelligence background,” his records were subjected to a process known as “sheep-dipping.” Davis explained that this was military parlance for “what gets done to a set of records for an intelligence officer. And, essentially, they create two sets.” (Prouty died in 2001.)

  The sun was setting and the Dunkin’ Donuts sign glowed brighter. As the meeting was finally coming to an end, Davis made a plea for understanding. “We’re an organization that’s new and tough and different and has been through a hell of a lot, and has had its ups and downs,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is nobody will take the time and do the story right.”

  Davis had staked much of his argument on the veracity of Hubbard’s military records. The fact-checkers had already filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all such material with the National Archives in St. Louis, where military records are kept. Such requests can drag on well past deadline, and we were running short on time. An editorial assistant, Yvette Siegert, flew to St. Louis to speed things along.

  Meantime, Davis sent me a copy of a document that he said clearly confirmed Hubbard’s heroism: a “Notice of Separation from the US Naval Service,” dated December 6, 1945. The document specifies medals won by Hubbard, including a Purple Heart with a Palm, implying that he was wounded in action twice. But John E. Bircher, the spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, wrote me that the Navy uses gold and silver stars, “NOT a palm,” to indicate multiple wounds. Davis included a photograph of the actual medals Hubbard supposedly won, but two of them weren’t even created until after Hubbard left active service.

  There was a fire in the St. Louis archives in 1973, which destroyed a number of documents, but Yvette returned with more than nine hundred pages of what the archivists insisted were Hubbard’s complete military records. Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard’s being wounded in battle or breaking his feet. X-rays taken of Hubbard’s right shoulder and hip showed calcium deposits, but there was no evidence of any bone or joint disease in his ankles.

  There is a Notice of Separation in the official records, but it is not the one Davis sent me. The differences in the two documents are telling. The St. Louis document indicates that Hubbard earned four medals for service, but they reflect no distinction or valor. The church document indicates, falsely, that Hubbard completed four years of college, obtaining a degree in civil engineering. The official document correctly notes two years of college and no degree.

  The official Notice of Separation was signed by Lieutenant (jg) J. C. Rhodes, who also signed Hubbard’s detachment paperwork. On the church document, the commanding officer who signed off on Hubbard’s separation was “Howard D. Thompson, Lt. Cmdr.” The file contains a letter, from 2000, to another researcher, who had written for more information about Thompson. An analyst with the National Archives responded that the records of commissioned naval officers at that time had been reviewed and “there was no Howard D. Thompson listed.”

  The church, after being informed of these discrepancies, asserted, “Our expert on military records has advised us that, in his considered opinion, there is nothing in the Thompson notice that would lead him to question its validity.” Eric Voelz and William Seibert, two longtime archivists at the St. Louis facility, examined the church’s document and pronounced it a forgery.10

  Eric Voelz additionally told The New Yorker, “The United States has never handed out Purple Hearts with a palm.” He said that ditto marks, which are found on the document provided by the church, do not typically appear on forms of this kind. The font was also suspect, since it was not consistent with the size or style of the times. Voelz had never heard of the “Marine Medal,” and he took issue with the “Br. & Dtch. Vict. Meds.” found on the church document, saying that medals awarded by foreign countries are not listed on a Notice of Separation, and that they were unlikely to have been awarded to an American in any case.

  A few months after this meeting, Davis and Feshbach stopped representing Scientology, even though they continued to be listed as the top spokespeople on the church website. Rumor from former members is that Davis blew but was recovered and once again subjected to sec-checking. Then Feshbach became seriously ill. According to the church, they are on a leave of absence from the Sea Org for medical reasons. They are now living in Texas. When I last spoke to Davis, he said, “I think you should know my allegiances haven’t changed—at all.” He added: “I don’t have to answer your questions anymore.”

  * * *

  1 In my meeting with Isham, he had asserted that Scientology is not a “faith-based religion.” Leaving aside the question of what religion is without faith, I pointed out that in Scientology’s upper levels, there was a cosmology that would have to be accepted on faith. Isham responded that he wasn’t going to discuss the details of OT III, nor had I asked him to. “You understand the only reason it’s confidential is because in the wrong hands it can hurt people,” he told me, evidently referring to Hubbard’s warning that those who are not spiritually prepared to receive the information would die, of pneumonia.

  2 The church denies that this ever happened. Davis admits that the briefcase was lost but claims that there were no sex-related videos inside.

  3 Davis says he and his wife divorced because of irreconcila
ble differences, and that “it had nothing to do with the organization.”

  4 Davis says that he does not recall meeting Shannon, has never scrubbed a Dumpster, and has no need to borrow money.

  5 Davis denies that he blew or was in Las Vegas. Noriyuki Matsumaru, who was a finance officer in the Religious Technology Center at the time, told me he was in charge of handling Davis’s punishment when he returned.

  6 Armstrong told me that he was actually wearing running shorts in the photo, which were obscured by the globe. His settlement with the church prohibited him from talking about Scientology, a prohibition he has ignored, and the church has won two breach-of-contract suits against him, including a $500,000 judgment in 2004, which Armstrong didn’t pay. He gave away most of his money and continues to speak openly about the church.

  7 Rinder denies committing violence against his wife. A sheriff’s report supports this.

  8 At this point Paul Haggis had not been declared Suppressive. He later was.

  9 The list of those who told me they had been physically assaulted by David Miscavige: Mike Rinder, Gale Irwin, Marty Rathbun, Jefferson Hawkins, Tom De Vocht, Mark Fisher, Bruce Hines, Bill Dendiu, Guy White, Marc Headley, and Stefan Castle. Those who said they had witnessed such abuse: John Axel, Marty Rathbun, Janela Webster, Tom De Vocht, Marc Headley, Eric Knutson, Amy Scobee, Dan Koon, Steve Hall, Claire Headley, Mariette Lindstein, John Peeler, Andre Tabayoyan, Vicki Aznaran, Jesse Prince, Mark Fisher, Bill Dendiu, Mike Rinder, David Lingerfelter, Denise (Larry) Brennan, Debbie Cook, and Lana Mitchell. One witness refused to have his name printed. Other witnesses have been reported in the press.