Amy’s crime? Having consensual sex with a man she was in love with and who she planned to marry. What kind of religion is it that places a sixteen-year-old on a punishment regime for slap and tickle? Amy spent two years on the RPF. Her account reads like torture. Inside the RPF, degradation was never far away. If you transgressed you were punished by being placed on ‘rocks and shoals’: made to run up ‘laps’ up and down stairs. A big ‘lap’ was running up and down 11 flights of stairs to the top of the Foot Harrison Hotel and back.
The cruellest feature of her experience on the RPF for her and her fellow ‘convicts’ was lack of sleep, making accidents, she says, grimly frequent. Her RPF unit was working full-time building a house for LRH at Gold, lest he ever return. In truth, Mr Hubbard was living – or rather dying – in hiding a few dozen miles away in an out-of-the-way ranch.
‘Fatigue was constant,’ wrote Amy. ‘I recall in the middle of the night pushing a wheelbarrow up the hill and the next thing I knew I woke up in a ditch.’ In her book, she writes that a fellow RPF-er cut his finger off on the table-saw; another cut open his leg with an angle grinder because he fell asleep while using it; a woman fell 20 feet off a scaffold and shattered her pelvis.
After all their efforts, the LRH was subsequently entirely demolished and rebuilt.
On Christmas Day, 1984, Amy’s RPF was ordered to ‘white-glove’ clean the base galley for the crew. It being Christmas, the RPF were allowed to listen to the radio, a perk usually forbidden.
When LRH died in January 1986, the whole Sea Org was placed in a condition of mass mourning. Amy had no proper time to grieve her uncle, the NASA astronaut, Dick Scobee, one of seven killed in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, killed two days after the announcement of LRH’s death. For a true Scientologist, the passing away of a man she had never met trumped the death of her uncle, the Commander of the space shuttle.
As she ascended in the ranks of the Church, Amy came to know Miscavige well but not to admire him. One day Miscavige brought in a new executive, dressed in a black sweater with four gold Captain stripes on her epaulettes. The executive made a whimper when she saw Amy. Miscavige told her that the executive could sniff out crimes so she must have something ‘pretty slimy’ going on. The executive, she alleges, was Miscavige’s dog, Jelly.
Violent beatings, sexual humiliation and psychotic behaviour were par for the course, she writes.
As Miscavige consolidated his grip on power, life at Gold became grim, grimmer than before. The little sweeteners of life – listening to the radio, having plants or pictures of your family in the office – came to be forbidden, she writes. Family time, an hour a day for parents to spend with their kids, was cancelled; pregnancies in the Sea Org were forbidden, meaning that anyone without children in Sea Org had to accept childlessness or the damnation that came with exit. Amy got out when she was 42, childless.
Amy reflects on her mindset, on why she allowed herself to be abused in this dreadful way: ‘Unbelievably, I never blamed anyone for being put through these things. We were so indoctrinated or brainwashed into believing that we’re not our bodies, the mission is more important than self and that anything personal could easily be sacrificed for the cause.’
After she left Amy read Combating Cult Mind Control by ex-Moonie Steven Hassan. One particular passage impressed Amy: ‘Members are made to feel part of an elite corps of mankind. This feeling of being special, or participating in the most important acts of human history with a vanguard of committed believers, is strong emotional glue to keep people sacrificing and working hard.’
Amy reflects on her 27 years of what you could call ‘mind-glue’: ‘that makes a lot of sense to me as to why I could have possibly tolerated a fraction of what I did and still stick with the organisation.’
The Church and Miscavige deny Amy’s allegations of abuse and violence. On Amy, the Church suggests that she is sexually voracious and grossly incompetent. Freedom Magazine says: ‘Today, Scobee spends her days posting salacious drivel to cyber-terrorists on the lunatic fringe of the Internet. Although she has thus far escaped hate-crime scrutiny, she remains among the nastiest snipers and her snippets are filled with sexual tittle-tattle. So, yes, while Scobee may have never been a “celebrity queen,” she at least now qualifies as a gossip maven…’
A simple test of a civilised human being is how they describe those who have treated them badly. An ancient but lovely Berliner called Wolfgang Von Leyden taught me philosophy when I was a student at LSE. He was brilliant, kind and good. He had had to run from Germany in the thirties. He described the Nazis as ‘churlish and ill-bred’.
I thought Amy was smashing.
This list of ex-Scientologists who agree with Bruce Hines that Miscavige is angry and violent is not exhaustive. But I cannot include them all. My last witness on the issue of whether Scientology’s pope abuses his adepts gave her testimony in open court in Texas in February 2012. Former Scientologist Debbie Cook told a court in San Antonio that she witnessed ‘terror and tyranny’ during the 17 years as head of the church in Florida.
Cook told the court: ‘I witnessed Mr. Miscavige physically punching the face and wrestling to the ground another executive at Scientology International’ – Gold. A colleague called Ginge Nelson, she said, objected to the violence and he was later made to lick the bathroom floor clean for half an hour. ‘One time I was called into a conference room and asked some questions and he ordered his secretary to slap me. And she slapped me so hard I fell over into the chairs. One time Mr Miscavige ordered his Communicator to break my finger if I didn’t answer his question. It was bent back very hard. It was not broken.’
Her lawyer asked: ‘Getting ordered to have someone slap you down or throw water in your face or break your finger, what were the horrible crimes that you would commit that would cause these punishments to be inflicted?’
Debbie replied: ‘Just not answer a question fast enough or maybe your expression displeased him. Maybe you were smiling or you shouldn’t have been smiling.’
‘Did you ever witness any incidents of violence or torture or degradation in England?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Debbie. ‘I was at a meeting with Mr Miscavige and with several top international executives. And then he ordered a man named Bob Keenan’ – Fireman Bob – ‘to take those other executives and throw them into the lake. At the time it was October and it was very cold in England… They were made to go into the cold lake.’
Was Debbie physically abused by Miscavige, her lawyer asked?
Once, she said, he ‘grabbed my shoulders and shook me while he was yelling at me.’
Her lawyer asked her how she ended up in The Hole, a bizarre dungeon of the mind she described at Gold.
‘In May 2007,’ – the month our Panorama aired – ‘I was at the International Base [Gold]. Mr Miscavige was not there, but I was supposed to be doing numerous things under his directions… I was on the phone to him every day, sometimes several times a day, and there were certain things that he was very unhappy… about, that weren’t done to his satisfaction… I was on the phone to him. I was in an office. Someone was pounding on the door. Because I was on the phone to him, I didn’t answer. I was trying to be on the phone and talk to him… The beating stopped and then someone pried the window open of the office that I was in and two big guys came in through the window. And Mr Miscavige said to me on the phone, “Are they there?” And I said, “Yes, they are.” And he said, “Goodbye.” And two men physically took me away to The Hole.’
The Hole, her evidence suggested, was a weird torture centre made out of two trailers on GOLD. Debbie told the court she was kept locked up in the trailers ‘infested with ants’ with other Scientologists for seven weeks as temperatures soared to 106 fahrenheit. Cook said: ‘I was put in a trash can, cold water poured over me, slapped, things like that.’
The Church vehemently denied her claims, calling them ‘outrageously false’.
It branded Cook a ‘heretic’ and
withdrew its case to stop her using the court ‘as a forum’.
David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology flatly deny all allegations of abuse and violence.
The allegations of abuse and violence by the Leader of the Church, conducted in full view of senior members of the Church hierarchy with impunity, suggest evidence that the Leader is treated as a god. If so, the Church passes the first definer for a cult according to Robert Lifton, the world’s number one expert on mind control.
It is strange to think that Miscavige was Tom Cruise’s best man. The chasm between what Cruise and the Church say about the Chairman of the Board and what the ex-Scientologists say is deep.
Lifton’s next definer for a cult is brainwashing.
Back in 1961, Lifton in his book on brainwashing set out eight tests: ‘where totalism exists, a religion, a political movement, or even a scientific organization becomes little more than an exclusive cult.’ Lifton describes them as: ‘Milieu Control’, ‘Mystical Manipulation’, ‘The Demand for Purity’, ‘The Cult of Confession’, ‘The Sacred Science’, ‘Loading the Language’, ‘Doctrine over Person’ and ‘The Dispensing of Existence’.
Lifton sums up his eight tests: ‘The more clearly an environment expresses these eight psychological themes, the greater its resemblance to ideological totalism; and the more it utilizes such totalist devices to change people, the greater its resemblance to thought reform or “brainwashing”’.
Bruce Hines – auditor to the stars – reflected: ‘Lifton had done some research into prison camps in China and mind control. It resonated with me when I read that. Those are methods that kept me in that mindset for thirty years.’
Let’s take Lifton’s tests for brainwashing one at a time. Together, they provide some kind of intellectual framework for assessing whether or not the Church brainwashes – a charge Tommy Davis vehemently denied to me in the Industry of Death exhibition and one it continues to deny in the strongest possible terms.
Test Number One is ‘Milieu Control’. Lifton writes: ‘The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also – in his penetration of his inner life – over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984.’ The most basic consequence of this information control, says Lifton, ‘is the disruption of balance between self and outside world.’
Bruce told me: ‘When I was in, if I heard someone say something negative about Scientology, I would instantly not listen to what the person was saying. I would think that person is a suppressive. You get into that sort of a mindset. And when I was in the Sea Organisation it would have been unthinkable for me to have a cell phone, to have a personal computer, to even get certain magazines. The mail I would receive would be read before I would receive it. Any mail that I would send out would be read before it could go out. And if there was anything wrong it would get kicked back. There are many, many ways where I believe it is a mind control organisation. A big one is to shut out any counter ideas, any critical ideas. When I was in, I was actually in the frame of mind where I would not listen to some critical thing about it. I would immediately dismiss it. I wouldn’t even hear the words really.’
Test Number Two is ‘Mystical Manipulation’: adherents are, Lifton writes, ‘impelled by a special kind of mystique which not only justifies such manipulations, but makes them mandatory. Included in this mystique is a sense of “higher purpose”… By thus becoming the instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions – the Party, the Government, the Organisation. They are the agents “chosen” (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural force) to carry out the “mystical imperative”, the pursuit of which must supersede all considerations of decency or of immediate human welfare.’
Enter Lord Xenu. Can Scientology’s struggle against the space alien Satan be classed as a ‘mystical imperative’? What was Bruce’s take on the ‘Wall of Fire?’
‘It’s taught at the level of Operating Thetan III. OT3, it’s a big deal, you hear about from the day you first get interested and then when you do this level you’re going to have these great abilities. You’ll be way above an average human being, and you have to undergo very strict security clearance to even get access to these materials. They’re supposed to be very secret. The cosmology, the idea is that it goes back literally quadrillions of years. The current estimate on the Big Bang is fourteen billion, so this is orders of magnitude longer than you and I supposedly have existed. Relatively recently, seventy-five million years ago, there was this character named Xenu who was an emperor of a galactic federation and this is what… I read it and at the time I thought “oh cool!”’
What did Xenu do?
‘There were twenty-six stars that are in this part of the galaxy, and so he had people killed and brought to earth and placed in or on volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs, and then their souls are captured by an electronic ribbon he said, and then they are pulled down and given what is called an “implant” in Scientology, and this is basically pictures of forests to implant false ideas into the being.’
I didn’t quite follow this, but Bruce wasn’t finished.
‘And the main part about OT3 and one of the things that is so secret about it is that a lot of these implanted souls are now stuck to our bodies, and they’re here and there and there. Now supposedly I got rid of them on OT3. Although when you go onto the higher levels you find out that there are more of these body entheta they’re called. And because they’re implanted seventy-five million years ago, they influence the way you think and what you believe about things. A Scientologist who knew would say that you yourself, the fact that you’re doing a story on Scientology, you’re not really doing it out of your own freewill but you’re like a robot carrying these evil things from the past to try to keep Scientology from succeeding.’
So a fundamental belief to Scientology is that we’re actually contaminated by bits of space aliens?
‘Very definitely so. It’s patently false.’
Test Number Three, ‘The Demand for Purity’, sets out the goal of absolute purity, and reflects: ‘thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continual reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition… Once an individual person has experienced the totalist polarization of good and evil, he has great difficulty in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality.’
This test, ‘The Demand For Purity’, implies war against the impure. Was the Church in any way critical of Bruce? He is, says, Freedom Magazine, a liar and a religious bigot. ‘In 2001,’ while he was still inside, ‘Hines wrote a 13-page public announcement in which he detailed the Suppressive Acts he had committed… Lying was a constant unchanging pattern with Hines.’ Generating guilt and shame drip from virtually every line of Freedom Magazine.
To repeat, Bruce struck me as a painfully honest man.
Test Number Four is ‘The Cult of Confession’. This, Lifton writes, ‘is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is a demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed… In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.’ Lifton identifies three special meanings of the total
ist confession: first, a ‘perpetual psychological purge of impurity’; second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender; third, it is a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organisation) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.’
In the Church of Scientology, does confession become a means of exploitation?
Bruce audited Nicole Kidman and Kirstie Alley and, briefly, Tom Cruise.
Auditing is Scientology’s version of confession, with the added element of the confessant holding two tin cans, or something like that, which connect to the E-meter, a kind of Bakelite box with a needle and dial. The E-meter works as a kind of crude lie or truth detector. The auditor asks questions. Quite different from the Catholic confession, the more the confessant confesses, the more the auditor probes the sins or crimes: what exactly did you think? Did you want to have sex with her? How did you have sex with her? It can be a probing and invasive investigation of sin, not just an admission. The question is – to what end? To help the person to lead a better life? Or to spy on them?
The Church has told the BBC that auditing sessions are routinely recorded for training purposes. What happens with that information is hotly disputed.
Ecclesiastically, when Bruce audited Cruise, he was the confessor and Cruise the lowly parishioner. But it didn’t work out like that, he said. Bruce described a fateful session which ended badly for him. ‘You’re supposed to have what’s called a floating needle, that’s a certain motion that the needle is supposed to do, that’s considered a good thing. And so I’m doing this exam on him and he’s there and he has a big smile and he said something very brief like “that was a good session” or something, but I didn’t see this floating needle immediately and so I was sort of waiting to see if one would happen. And then I saw a floating needle and then I told him that, “Your needle’s floating, Tom”, but then later I was told he complained that I was too slow and so I wasn’t allowed to do these exams on him anymore. In a regular organisation that wouldn’t happen, but with the kid-glove treatment that Tom Cruise was getting, they would get someone who wouldn’t imply in anyway that maybe he wasn’t doing just great.’
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology Page 9