He said that with awe.
Donna chipped in with a theological point of some force: ‘What do my socks have to do with spiritual freedom?’
At Saint Hill and Fitzroy Street, everything we had seen was immaculate and subtly expensive. Living conditions for the Sea Org, behind the scenes, were, they said, somewhat different.
‘Termites, roaches, stinky old carpets,’ listed Donna. ‘Bare light bulbs, holes in the wall. Mike put in tiles, fixed the holes in the wall, put in a new toilet that worked. He got the old leaky dishwasher taken out, all that stuff. We did $2,000 worth of work on that room so it would be liveable.’
At Saint Hill and Fitzroy Street in London, the food was exquisite, I droned on, beautiful women giving us tea and coffee. Everything top notch.
‘For the staff, if you are a single person you will live in a room with four, five, six other people of the same sex, all stacked up.’
If you transgress, you are punished, she said. ‘They made an example of someone. He had to run up all the stairs of the Fort Harrison Hotel, ten floors. So here you have a person in their fifties who is not really in great shape and they are running them up and down ten flights of stairs. It is a wonder somebody doesn’t drop dead.’
Mike chipped in: ‘One night Tom Cruise spoke for five minutes at a graduation. He was there on a break from OT7’ – Operating Thetan Level 7. ‘He gave his wins’ – SciSpeak for self-enhancement – ‘and that was it. Donna was in the audience. But I never saw it because we were busy running tables and chairs up the freight elevator till one o’clock in the morning. When you are on staff you see the other side of the Scientology.’ His disillusion was deep.
Donna ended up on the Estates Project Force, a kind of paramilitary boot camp. And that is where she met Tommy Davis, she said. Suddenly, one day, the ethics officers and some of the higher ups came storming out of that room with Tommy. ‘They had him by the ear or by the hair and they dragged him out and held him up in front of the class. They started screaming about what a liar and terrible person he was. They were just trying to ridicule and shame him in front of everybody else. Then they slammed him back in the room. And we were left thinking: what was that about?’
Tommy Davis and the Church deny these allegations, vehemently. The Church makes the counter-accusation that Donna sought to extort money from it by making up absurd claims of abuse, and that her attempts at extortion failed. Donna and Mike deny these claims.
Back in England, I had asked the three Church spokesmen, Tommy Davis, Mike Rinder and Bob ‘Fireman Bob’ Keenan, about what some say is the Church’s secret belief, that they are engaged in a trillion year war against a space alien Satan who has brainwashed humanity into believing he does not exist. His name is Lord Xenu. Is Xenu real, I asked. They all guffawed, incredulous at my incredulity. Clearly, Xenu was nonsense. Or was it?
What did the defectors think about Xenu? Mike was uneasy, and said that he had signed a bond agreeing not to talk about it. I found his reluctance to discuss Xenu both proper, for him, and strangely disturbing. It suggested to me that there was something in it that he did not want to talk about. Donna had signed the same bond but she now believes that she did so in some strange hypnotic state: ‘It is just a game to get money. I don’t think there is any more truth in it than if I declare a raccoon god. And I don’t feel that anything I signed there can bind me to anything, because I was lied to, I was conned. I think Scientology creates a form of insanity. You are hypnotised, you are brainwashed.’
On Xenu, Donna came out, guns blazing: ‘It’s all made up, utter space garbage.’
Stop there. Three members of the Church’s Holy Order, Tommy Davis, Mike Rinder and Bob Keenan had all denied the existence of Xenu; Mike had declined to discuss Xenu; Donna said, effectively, that it was bad science fiction. Who to believe?
The 1987 Panorama ‘The Road to Total Freedom?’ (available on YouTube) says followers of the Church of Scientology go through a series of levels to become an Operating Thetan. When you get to Operating Thetan Level III – OT3 – you cross through ‘The Wall of Fire’ and learn the great mystery at the heart of Scientology, that it is secretly engaged in an endless war against a space alien Satan. The 1987 Panorama depicted an animated cartoon treatment of Scientology’s core cosmology. Hubbard, the BBC reported, wrote that seventy five million years ago Lord Xenu, the head of the Galactic Confederacy, brought life-forms called Thetans to planet Earth and blew them up in volcanoes with hydrogen bombs. Humanity’s wretchedness is due to our being infected with the souls of the dead Thetans.
Ex-Scientologists maintain that Xenu is part of Scientology’s Holy Writ. They say the exploding volcano that illustrates L Ron’s great work, Dianetics, is a cunning reference to this great secret. They say that if you ask a Scientologist about Xenu, they can’t tell you because the truth could kill you. Sceptics who think the Church is a con trick are, in fact, brainwashed by Xenu. They are Suppressive Persons, to be feared and attacked. The Xenu thing is, to some, an extraordinarily powerful narrative that has consumed the lives of thousands and thousands of people. To others, it’s bad science fiction.
Panorama in 1987 depicted Xenu as a bald cove, boasting a sinister goatee, heavy black eyebrows and a silvery jacket with shoulder pads so sharp they could poke your eye out. Xenu looks like a cross between Emperor Ming The Merciless in Flash Gordon and The Hood in Thunderbirds. It looks like, er, bad science fiction.
The Xenu story, critics say, is only secret because it is a clever way of squeezing money out of people. They only learn the great secret after spending years studying and paying for Scientology’s lessons, which do not come cheap. The critics say this makes Scientology less like a religion and more like a lobster pot – in that you are tempted by theological bait but that it is not fully revealed to you until you have entered so deep you are well and truly trapped in the pot. Ex-Scientologists insist that that the believing Scientologists were lying to me, out of their own peculiar sense of necessity.
Perhaps Tommy, Mike Rinder and Fireman Bob had no choice. If you believe in Scientology and confirm Xenu to the uninitiated, you place them in grave danger.
Enter a Church – Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or Coptic – and they will tell you that they believe that ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.’ Enter a mosque and they will tell you: ‘Follow the teachings of the Prophet.’ Enter a synagogue: ‘Marry a nice Jewish girl/boy and don’t eat bacon sandwiches.’ Enter a Church of Scientology Org and no-one will tell you about the space alien Satan they’re fighting. Xenu is a logic bomb inside the Church of Scientology’s claim to be treated just like any other religion. A ‘religion’ that hides its core belief from the world is not a religion because a true religion must be open about itself to all. That is the essence of the British test set by the Charity Commissioners in London, and one the Church of Scientology fails.
Mike Henderson refused to discuss Xenu, whereas Donna was happy to spill the beans. Mike’s position was, in some ways, the more telling: he still felt under an unbreakable mental bond to a thing he no longer belonged to; and that bond over-rode his natural courtesy to explain Scientology to us. The split over Xenu between Donna and Mike seemed natural and honest and indicated at least the possibility that if a believing Scientologist denied Xenu to us they were doing so in the service of humanity’s higher good, and that trumps any obligation to tell anyone from the ordinary world the truth.
Truth to tell, my mind at that moment was stumbling towards the distant glimmer of this observation. The most striking thing back then was the chasm between the two camps: Xenu was nonsense, said the Church officials; Xenu was real but garbage, said Donna the heretic and, the Church says, extortionist. None of this is easy to get your head round.
Let’s think about it in a slightly different way. Remember this: ‘They peel them with their metal knives, boil them for twenty of their minutes, then they smash them all to bits’. The words of the spindly-bodied, big-
headed, metallic-voiced cackling Smash Martians from the 1974 advert for instant mash potato in the UK. Imagine creating a religion out of the Smash Martians. As they are to earthlings, so adepts of the Church of Scientology are to simple, earthbound humanity. ‘They are clearly a most primitive people,’ as the Leader of the Smash Martians puts it. But imagine this: the Smash Martians are real, and the rest of us have been brainwashed into thinking they’re just a silly joke in an ad campaign. But really they are just a silly joke in an ad campaign and the people who believe in the Smash Martians are crazy. Try and hold both propositions in your head.
We moved on from the Church’s somewhat tricky cosmology to how people are treated inside the Sea Org. Donna set out the gap between the high theology of the ‘religion’ and the human reality. Sea Org members are encouraged to travel on buses from the accommodation to FLAG. The buses are ‘grossly overcrowded, just horrible, there is no room to sit. Now these are Sea Org members, Operating Thetans, these higher beings. When the bus comes, it suddenly turns into a madhouse, like a bunch of stray dogs they just go crazy clawing to get on the bus.’ If you don’t fight, you will miss the bus and get into trouble for being late, she said.
Mike said, ‘You have the smiley face experts who handle the celebrities. Tommy Davis is part of that crew, to make sure that Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, get the best treatment. They hold elevators for them, they never have to wait for anything. They get the top level of smiley face Scientology treatment. And the only time I ever saw that as a public Scientologist, was the more money I had available, or the higher the credit limit was on my credit cards, the more smiley face I got. And then I figured it out that the smiley face is dependent on your status as a celebrity, or how much money you are worth.’
Mike spent 34 years inside the Church. Why stay so long? ‘It becomes like a carrot attached to a donkey by a stick, out in front. You just keep chasing the carrot. And every time you take another two or three steps it costs you another hundred thousand dollars.’
They both felt that it was a pay-as-you-go religion. Donna spent a decade inside the Church, spending $1million. Mike spent $500,000.
But worse, far worse, than the money is the effect on family life.
Mike said: ‘I have 35 family members in Scientology: my mother, my brother, my four sisters, my 22 nieces and nephews, and my son. And the only ones that are outside the church are myself, my daughter, and my father. And everyone is estranged that is not in the Church. My father’s kids won’t speak to him with me being the exception. And I didn’t speak to him for four years. And after I left the Church I re-established ties with him and it is difficult to describe how a man of 76 years whose proudest accomplishment in life is his six children, and they won’t speak to him.’
Mike, a great haystack of a man, was crying his eyes out. It was unbearably moving.
I told Donna and Mike that the Church’s spokesmen had offered us access on condition that we did not use the word cult.
Donna said: ‘If you actually understand what a cult is, look it up in the dictionary, all of the things fit. It is funny to me that when you first get into Scientology you are trained on how to handle people that tell you it is a cult. They say they have nothing hidden. Everything is hidden. The Xenu story is hidden. The staff conditions are hidden, the real agenda of Scientology is hidden. They are not there clearing the planet, they are out there getting money. It is a con game. They are a cult.’
After the main interviews, Bill Browne, our cameraman, took some set-up shots of Donna and Mike. I powered up my phone and BBC Radio Five came on, asking me for a reaction to the news that Sally Clark had died. Sally was the English mother of two baby boys who suffered cot deaths. Cruelly, she was charged, tried and convicted of murdering them, in part on the evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow who told the jury that the chances of this happening naturally were ‘73 million to one’.
One of my first radio documentaries for BBC Radio Five in 2001 was called ‘73 million to one’ in which that number, and much of the rest of Sir Roy’s expertise, was demolished, and we set out the evidence that Sally had been the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Two years later she was freed by the Court of Appeal, but the trauma of false accusation and prison had broken Sally’s heart. I gave Radio Five an interview, switched off the phone, and in the middle of a country park in Florida I burst into tears, grieving for a good woman destroyed by bigotry. And then it was back to the day job.
Mike and Donna took us on a tour of Scientology Town, past the Power building, a half-built monstrosity, still being completed after years and years of refurbishment, past the Fort Harrison hotel where the Operating Thetans do their courses. We got out of the car and filmed them walking around Clearwater pointing out all the sites. We expected to be filmed or challenged. But downtown Clearwater was eerily quiet, as if the whole Scientology population had been ordered to keep off the streets lest Bill film them off-guard.
We took Donna and Mike to dinner to thank them for their time. I knocked back a bit of wine while Mole scowled at me. Surely, I was allowed some time off? It was late when we said our goodbyes to Donna and Mike. We got back to our hotel in Clearwater at midnight, to find the Church of Scientology waiting for us in the lobby.
CHAPTER THREE
Ill-met at midnight
Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder were sitting in the hotel’s comfy chairs along with a Scientology cameraman, clad in black. Damn the wine. I should have drunk lemonade.
‘Hi Mike, Hi Tommy,’ I said, as if it was perfectly natural to bump into two Scientologists in your hotel lobby at midnight, and proffered my hand.
‘I’m not going to shake your hand,’ said Tommy, rising from his chair. He was wearing a suit, dark tie and white shirt. ‘I find it considerably obnoxious what you’ve done. The time that I took – spent two days with you straight. Offer you cooperation and who do you spend your time with?’
His tone was that of an outraged Victorian husband furious that his young wife had dallied at the regimental ball of the 19th Foot and returned at midnight with a tendril of hair uncoiled and her bonnet askew.
The Scientology cameraman was fully kitted out with camera top light and microphone on a lead, so he could catch every word of Tommy berating me for my atrocious conduct. It was the perfect video ambush – or it would have been had not Mole brought along a small video camera to dinner, just in case. They were video-ambushing us. We were video-ambushing them back. The Scientology cameraman switched on his light. I engaged with him: ‘Hi I’m John Sweeney from the BBC.’ He said nothing but we later found out his name was Jesse Radstrom.
‘And you spend the day with Mike Henderson and Donna Shannon? What are these people?’ said Tommy, full of wounded pride. ‘The people who you spent the day with?’ I stepped away from Tommy. He stepped towards me. Mike Rinder edged closer to me, the cameraman boxing me in.
‘Ok, from my perspective?’ Suddenly, I was sober as Mr Justice Latey. ‘Are you sure you’re getting good sound? Shall I hold that?’ I grasped the microphone wielded by the black-clad cameraman and opened fire. ‘You’ – Tommy - ‘and you’ – Mike - ‘and the Church of Scientology have been spying on the BBC. You have been spying on our hotel. We didn’t tell you where we were staying so you’ve been spying on us. And I find that, if I may say so, a little bit creepy. Here’s your microphone’ – and I handed it back, not to the cameraman, but to Tommy.
‘Thanks,’ said Tommy, perhaps – I might be wrong – a little forlornly.
I hadn’t finished. ‘And secondly, what’s wrong with talking to people who are critical in an open society, who are critical of an institution?’
‘Nothing,’ said Tommy.
‘Have they no right to speak?’
‘There is nothing wrong with that. But that’s not what I’m taking about.’
The hotel receptionist was not used to this kind of theatre of absurd in her lobby at midnight. She said: ‘Excuse me, you two need to go outside or I wil
l call the police.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but you can do that anyway.’
I walked out into the fresh air, and Tommy, Mike and the Man in Black followed me out. I still hadn’t finished: ‘So the question is: have you been spying on us?’
‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘The locals in town were talking,’ said Tommy. ‘A camera crew – an English guy.’
The population of Clearwater is 100,000. It being a BBC Current Affairs budget, we were staying in an adequate hotel with fine views of a freeway on stilts, a good few miles out of town.
‘Oh and they said they’re staying at this hotel?’
‘Yeah. Absolutely. But that’s immaterial,’ said Tommy.
‘It’s not immaterial. Because it means that you’re invading our space. We’re not going to come round to where you sleep and say hello. And come in the middle of the night. Don’t you think that’s a bit weird? A little bit strange?’
‘You know what? I’m not even going to talk about it. We spent two days with you. We offered you so much and what happened in return?’
If you work in television, two days not filming is two days wasted. I batted back his offer of ‘so much’, calling it nothing.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Tommy, incredulous at my stony lack of gratitude. He was back to doing his outraged Victorian husband routine. I had lost my bonnet for good. This palaver went on for what seemed like a very long time. I put it to Tommy that Donna had told me she had seen people grab him by the hair. He denied it. He accused Donna of demanding money from the Church, of being an extortionist. Then it was back to attacking me: ‘What is baffling to us is that we tell you we’re open and willing to communicate…’
And then the Clearwater Police Department cruiser turned up. The police officer got out of the car and sized the situation up: two men in suits and a cameraman in black filming one man and a woman and a cameraman filming them. Or the other way around. The police officer asked: ‘The hotel wanted to know what you are filming?’
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology Page 5