In the first few months after the birth of Suri, Katie’s physical and emotional fatigue could have been attributed to postpartum depression, a condition that affects one in ten new mothers. Of course, Tom had publicly criticized Brooke Shields for taking medicine to cope with the black moods and despair associated with depression after the birth of her first child. Now that Katie was a Scientologist, it would have been utterly unthinkable for her to have gone down this medical path. Certainly the carefree girl of the Dawson’s Creek era was long gone; those who saw her up close and personal remarked that she seemed older than her years, sadder, and emotionally and physically worn out. Those who dared to make any connection between Katie’s new, subdued persona and the state of the newlyweds’ marriage very quickly faced the wrath of Tom—or rather his lawyers, who were vigilant in tackling tabloid stories suggesting that Katie was anything other than blissfully happy.
While baby Suri was an utter delight, it seemed to those who knew Katie that she was having doubts about the path she had embarked upon. With her acting career on the back burner, she appeared miserable, giving the impression that she was somehow now “trapped,” uncomfortably aware that she had married one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. However, when she told Harper’s Bazaar magazine that it would be an “honor” to work alongside Tom in a movie, it was a sign of how much she wanted the marriage to work both professionally and personally.
When she took on her first film role since the birth of Suri, Tom vowed to be by her side during the six-week shoot of Mad Money in Shreveport, Louisiana. While his intentions were good, in the end his own work commitments meant that he often flew her back and forth from their Beverly Hills home on a three-hour commute on board their private jet.
Whatever misgivings Katie may have had about the future of her union to Tom, the treatment of Nicole Kidman could only serve as a road map—and a warning. Katie knew that Nicole had been reduced to keeping in touch with her adopted children by Internet camera or e-mail. Tom effectively had custody, bringing up both youngsters in his faith. In the summer of 2007, for example, Isabella and Connor were sent to a Scientology summer camp in Portland, Oregon, rather than spend time with their mother. Nicole’s revelatory interview in Vanity Fair in September 2007, where she irritated Tom by revealing that she had had a miscarriage early in their marriage, was seen by observers as a warning shot to Tom to give her some parental latitude—otherwise, she would spill the beans on their ten-year marriage. Indeed, it seemed at one level that the interview was a coded conversation between Nicole and her former husband. Not only did she pose with her sister’s baby clutched to her chest—perhaps symbolizing the baby she longed for—but she hinted that one day she would fully explain the “complicated” background to the adoption of Isabella in Florida in 1993. At the time, the hand of Scientology was believed to be behind the adoption, although neither Tom nor Nicole ever commented on suggestions that the birth mother was an impoverished Sea Org member or, for that matter, the identity of the birth mother.
Whatever the private turbulence in her heart, Katie was discreet, her downbeat demeanor and aura of wistful sadness the only clues she gave to associates and others in her circle that perhaps motherhood and marriage were not quite how they had appeared in the brochure. In public, she was the perfect Hollywood wife, putting a brave face on her new life. “I have a husband and children I adore,” she said, looking relaxed and happy by Tom’s side. When David and Victoria Beckham finally arrived in Los Angeles in July 2007, Katie and Tom were waiting to welcome them with an exclusive A-list party at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The six-hundred-person guest list included cohosts Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, and Jim Carrey. Tom was going all-out to impress his British guests. While in Hollywood there is no such thing as a free lunch—or a free party, for that matter—at the time of writing, the Beckhams have yet to be beguiled by his faith.
It may just be a question of time. Few can resist the Cruise squeeze, the actor concentrating on those who influence specific ethnic or geographical communities. At the welcoming party, where David Miscavige was a brooding presence, were numerous celebrities who had at first balked at Tom’s blandishments, only to succumb later. He tried to recruit actress and singer Jennifer Lopez, whose father had been a Scientologist for twenty years, in an attempt to reach a wider Hispanic audience. As with Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith—who knocked Tom off the top spot to become Newsweek’s “Most Powerful Actor on the Planet” in 2007—and wife Jada Pinkett Smith became targets because of their popularity in the African-American community. Similarly, the woman who got away, Sofía Vergara, had an avid following in South America.
Smiling and ever affable, pressing the flesh, Tom had a way with fellow celebrities and starry-eyed fans alike. He exuded the confidence and panache of a politician—or a Hollywood big shot—which is precisely what he now was. In early 2007, Tom, now heavier and often photographed wearing a suit and tie rather than his trademark T-shirt and jeans, gave the green light to his first movie as a United Artists producer, Lions for Lambs, a political drama directed by and starring screen legend Robert Redford. Billed as Tom’s comeback movie following his messy divorce from Paramount, the film was already causing controversy before its November 2007 release in the U.S., the movie’s tagline—“If you don’t stand for something, you might fall for anything”—infuriating conservatives, who accused it of being not just antiwar but anti-American. Interestingly, the world premiere took place in London—high on Tom’s Scientology target list—rather than in the United States.
Before Tom arrived in London’s Leicester Square for the premiere of Lions for Lambs on October 22, 2007, he insisted that the bags of all photographers be searched for water pistols. He did not want a repeat of the incident two years before, when a TV film crew squirted him with water as he worked the crowd. Although he spent nearly two hours meeting and greeting his fans, the movie received a lackluster reception from the critics. “The drama glows as brightly as a five-watt bulb,” wrote James Christopher in The Times, the newspaper that sponsored the film festival where the movie was showcased. The review described Tom, in his role as a Republican hawk, as “a desk-thumping, ultra-smooth flirt who beams at [Meryl Streep, playing a cynical journalist] with total insincerity.” Even though the film dealt with the controversial subject of the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Hollywood star smoothly sidestepped questions about the War on Terror. He did, however, reveal that he planned to take his friend David Beckham for a fast car or plane ride to cheer him up after his new soccer team, the L.A. Galaxy, failed to reach the playoffs in Beckham’s injury-prone first season.
If Tom’s first feature with United Artists signaled his studio’s intention to take on edgier issues, his next was an audacious fusion of faith and film, a symbol of his utter immersion in the promotion of Scientology. As Tom and his colleagues were sifting through potential scripts on the lot of United Artists, David Miscavige and his lieutenants were in Scientology’s war room at Hemet, planning the invasion of Germany. From time to time they were joined in their desert bunker by Tom, who these days is the organization’s second-in-command in all but name, involved in every aspect of planning and policy. Just as the denizens of the Kabbalah Centre do nothing without the approval of their great champion and paymaster, Madonna, so the marketing strategy of Scientology is molded around Tom Cruise.
Germany was a hugely desirable prize, a potential market of 82 million people. What’s more, it would be an immense public relations triumph to gain legitimacy in a country where Scientology is officially viewed as a commercial rather than a religious enterprise, a totalitarian organization that takes advantage of vulnerable individuals. In short, as far as Germany is concerned, Scientology poses a risk to democratic society. Over the years, various German states have taken measures to protect their citizens from infiltration by the group, whose activities are monitored closely by the Office for the Protection of the Constitu
tion.
In turn, Scientology has aggressively argued that Germany’s attitude is a denial of fundamental religious freedoms, their lobbying in Washington causing a rift between the U.S. and Germany on this human rights issue. In January 2007, Scientology established a major beachhead in its campaign when it opened a glossy 43,000-square-foot building in the heart of Berlin. Two months later, in a brilliant pincer move, Scientology effectively parked its tanks on Germany’s ideological lawn when Tom Cruise announced that he would produce and star in a movie about Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the German aristocrat whose failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the dying months of World War II earned him a place in the pantheon of German heroes.
Not only would a leading Scientologist be playing a symbol of the new German democracy, but the moviemakers wanted to film in the exact locations in Germany where the plot was hatched and dispatched. This was the Cruise/Miscavige axis at its most Machiavellian, planning to march their ideological storm troopers through the streets of Berlin, camouflaged in the garb of artistic integrity and religious freedom. The film could be seen as the stalking horse.
Tom’s presence on German soil provoked debate among all sections of society about the rights and wrongs of Scientology. Which was precisely the master plan. “The subject of Stauffenberg was chosen deliberately,” claims a former Scientologist who was privy to the organization’s plans for European expansion. “It was a brilliant way to rub it into their faces. The Scientology high command was laughing their asses off. It created controversy in Germany, set politicians against politicians, which was just what they wanted.”
Controversy was not long in coming, as members of the Stauffenberg family, the German church, and politicians robustly attacked the film. The hero’s eldest son, Berthold Graf von Stauffenberg, a retired general, declared, “Scientology is a totalitarian ideology. The fact that an avowed Scientologist like Mr. Cruise is supposed to play the victim of a totalitarian regime is purely sick.” Tom was compared to infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by the German Protestant Church, whose spokesman, Thomas Gandow, divined the underlying purpose behind the movie: “This film will have the same propaganda advantages for Scientology as the 1936 Olympics had for the Nazis.”
When it was discovered that United Artists planned to film in Germany, politicians clamored to man the barricades. Defense Ministry spokesman Harald Kammerbauer said, “United Artists will not be allowed to film at German military sites if Count Stauffenberg is played by Tom Cruise, who has publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult. In general, the Bundeswehr [German military] has a special interest in the serious and authentic portrayal of the events of July 20, 1944, and Stauffenberg’s person.”
Tom’s battalions valiantly threw themselves into the fray, Shrek star Rupert Everett publicly saying that Scientology was no more ridiculous than other religions. Whether the openly gay actor was aware of Hubbard’s policy stating that homosexuals should be “disposed of quietly and without sorrow” is not known. Paula Wagner fired her own broadside, arguing that Tom’s personal beliefs “had no bearing on the movie’s plot, themes, or content.” This was no more than the truth, as screenwriter Chris McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer, the creative duo behind the slickly intelligent crime drama The Usual Suspects, had no idea that their von Stauffenberg project was possibly being used as a Trojan horse to promote the cause of Scientology.
The man at the center of this war of words was statesmanlike and disarmingly low key. After paying a three-hour Sunday-morning visit to the new European headquarters of Scientology during a June reconnaissance of the film’s Berlin locations, Tom coolly opened a second front, diplomatically and unusually inviting selected journalists for a cocktail party to meet other members of the cast, which included Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Terence Stamp, and to watch the filming of a scene on set. He spoke humbly about the Catholic aristocrat who was executed the day after the bomb he was carrying in a briefcase injured but did not kill the Führer. “He was someone who realized that he had to take the steps that ultimately cost him his life. He recognized what was at stake. It’s compelling when people stand up for things.”
His last sentence was a sentiment that could serve as a metaphor for the world’s fascination with the actor. Certainly the scene in which, as Stauffenberg, Tom watched his children play just before embarking on his dreaded mission reminded the watching media why he had been at the top of his trade for more than two decades. “Without the aid of dialogue, his face obscured by an eye patch, Tom still manages to convey grief and turmoil,” observed entertainment writer Ruben Nepales. “Watching the scene reminded us why we’ve always believed that Tom is an underrated actor. The controversies have often succeeded in eclipsing the fact that the guy is one of the finest actors of his generation.”
Within a matter of weeks, the strategy paid off. The German defense ministry waved the white flag and agreed to his demands to film at military locations. After their abject surrender, another government ministry paid “reparations,” giving the film $6.5 million in subsidies because the movie dealt with issues of national history. So, on July 17, 2007, without a shot being fired, fighter planes emblazoned with swastikas, the banned symbol of the Nazi regime, flew low over the village of Loepten outside Berlin as filming began. Only a few Germans realized that they were being invaded.
Although he may have won this battle, the war was by no means over. As Tom continued filming in Berlin’s Babelsberg Studios—once favored by Goebbels for making Nazi propaganda—Scientology suffered assault after assault. First, a fourteen-year-old girl and her stepbrother, children of a high-ranking German Scientologist, made headline news after fleeing their home in Berlin to escape the organization. They sought refuge in Hamburg, which has safe houses for those leaving cults. Then Ursula Caberta, who had spent fifteen years investigating Scientology as the commissioner of the Scientology Taskforce for the Hamburg Interior Authority, released The Black Book of Scientology, a scathing critique of the organization that became an instant best-seller. In Belgium, after a ten-year investigation that concluded that the group should be labeled a criminal organization, prosecutor Jean-Claude Van Espen recommended that Scientology should stand trial for fraud and extortion. The organization vowed to fight the charges.
It was the enemy within, however, that was potentially the most damaging. As Tom, in his character as Stauffenberg, loaded his briefcase with explosives, a Scientology renegade was about to detonate his own device. Behind bullet-proof glass in a building in Stuttgart protected by armed guards, a man who claimed to be a former Scientology minister, Christian Markert, spent three days telling secret agents about his experiences inside the organization. Fearing that he would not be safe in America, where many former Scientologists believe—sometimes with good reason—that the local police work hand in glove with Scientology organizations, Markert, a German citizen who had been living in Buffalo, New York, fled to Germany for safe haven. It was an ironic inversion of the dark days when Jews escaped Nazi Germany and took refuge in America.
The story Markert told the German intelligence agents was familiar yet chilling. A difficult relationship with his parents, a checkered career, including arrest warrants for fraud in France and Ireland, and a search for meaning in his life after the death of his mother had led him to Scientology a decade before. To verify his identity, Markert, now thirty-six, had a letter from the Scientology legal department in Buffalo attesting that he was a good and long-standing member of the organization. He said he worked for Scientology in Ireland and California before his stint in Buffalo.
Not only did Markert run the bookstore, but for a time he claimed he was the director of the Office of Special Affairs in charge of intelligence, in particular harassing former Scientologists who had criticized the organization. As proof, he handed over sensitive OSA documents that conformed to similar directives and orders held in the extensive archive in the Scientology commission in Hamburg. He to
ld the German police that he had coordinated the systematic harassment of families and individuals. Those who stayed silent were left alone; those who attacked their former faith were dubbed “Suppressive Persons” and faced “the full wrath of the organization.” The method, as per training, was always the same. First, he would gather the so-called confidential “ethics” files that contained confessions about sex, drugs, and rocky roads, looking to find and exploit an individual’s “ruin.”
According to Markert, one family, a husband, wife, and daughter, was harassed every day for a year, receiving thousands of unsolicited visits, telephone calls, and threatening letters. Markert told the secret agents that as a result of the pressure, the wife, then judged a Suppressive Person, had made two unsuccessful suicide attempts. The third succeeded. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” he said. “As a Scientologist you don’t view death as much of a big thing, you just talk about dropping the body.” Markert and his staff did not see themselves as engineering her death. After all, the actions were consistent with instructions outlined years before by L. Ron Hubbard when he declared that an enemy of Scientology could be “tricked, sued, or lied to or destroyed.” Even the interviewing agents, who knew about Scientology’s tactics, were shocked by his allegations of calculated cruelty at the dark heart of an organization that calls itself a religion. “It was the first story he told me when I met him,” recalls Ursula Caberta, the commissioner for the Scientology Taskforce in Hamburg.
Markert was a walking blueprint for Scientology’s future policy, a strategy that placed Tom Cruise at the heart of their expansion into Britain and Europe. He claimed that these plans were unveiled at a meeting with David Miscavige in Hemet in April 2007, where Markert was offered the chance to help build the organization in Europe. Scientology was desperately short of linguists, for example using non-German-speaking staff from England in Berlin. During his first—and last—visit to the base, Markert reported feeling as if he were entering a high-security prison. There was a pervading sense of paranoia about the place. Before meeting David Miscavige, Markert had to undergo rigorous security checks, as if he were meeting the President of the United States.
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