Why did Bruce, a brilliant physicist, stay in for so long? A big reason for him was his perceived fear of eternal damnation, chiming with Lifton’s observation of fear of extinction or annihilation. ‘The Scientologists I have known really believe that. You get on what they call, they have nice sounding marketing names, like “The bridge to total freedom” or whatnot. And you get your feet on the bridge and you have to walk and keep your next step, and you have to pay as you go. Particularly once you know about it, if you abandon it, you are going to have a horrible future. And your hopes of becoming an eternally free being are dashed. And so that is one aspect. You have got to toe the line or you are going to lose your chance.
‘The other part is you are taught that anyone who is critical of Scientology, they say, that they have crimes for which they could be arrested. They [the critics] are part of this whole culture of evil and Scientology is the way out. When you try to suppress this force for good, because we are all implanted 75 million years ago, that we [the Scientologists] can’t allow such a thing to happen. So the whole of society is going to try to suppress Scientology, and so you have to be tough to get through. And so people who are critical of it are evil.’
Bruce’s intellectual and spiritual drift away from Scientology was gradual, but helped along by his incarceration in the RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force) for six years.
‘It was out in the high desert of southern California, about ninety miles or so east of Los Angeles, and it’s a very remote location. I understand they have now sold that property. You’re about five miles or so from the nearest town, if you were going to leave you would either walk into the wilderness or have to go across an Indian reservation. It’s in an environment where there are rattlesnakes, tarantulas, mountain lions, coyotes.’
Bruce did a stretch of three years on the RPF, was allowed to return to Gold Base, fell out with Miscavige again, or Miscavige fell out with him, he said, and then did a further three years. The second stretch was the most extreme, the RPF’s RPF, ‘as low as you can go in the Sea Organisation. I was not allowed to speak to other members. I had to work separately, had to eat separately. I would get the leftovers of the meals. I was with about four or five other guys. I had to sleep in a small shed, and this was in the summer in the desert, it was quite hot, on a concrete floor. I had very little space. There was a guard outside my door. And one time I said: “OK, I am leaving, I am out of here.” It was the middle of the night and I came out and immediately the guard was there and people appeared and they kind of cajoled me and talked to me and get me to kind of go back to bed.
‘And this went on for a couple of months. One time I was in a shed, just wooden sheds on concrete pads. And they closed the door and then they put a large baking pan against it, so that if I opened the door it would fall and make a noise to alert people that I was coming out.
‘And I had to do pretty intense manual labour during that time. And it was July or August in the California desert and it could get 105, 110 even 115 degrees. And then I would spend a couple of hours at night having to read writings of L Ron Hubbard, and write up my misdeeds, I had to write them down my misdeeds until I had a realisation that I was a bad person and I needed to change my ways and get back into progressing towards my redemption.’
Bruce described a deep deprivation, lack of space, lack of ideas, lack of contact with people. ‘So you feel very cut off. One or two people talk to you and tell you what to do and assign you jobs. There was a security guard, and he walked by and made sure I could go over to him. I said listen, “I want out of here, I want to leave.” And so he was trained to say, “oh ok…I understand Bruce.” The idea was that I continue over the days undergoing that sort of treatment that eventually my thinking would shift around, which it did.’
The physical abuse was extreme but it was trumped by Bruce’s fear of annihilation according to Scientology dogma and his hunger to conform with the hive. He submitted to the ideology, which defeated his concern for his physical well-being. His self-surrender was complete; his brain had been washed.
How would you describe that time in your life? What they did to you?
‘It wasn’t the whole six years but definitely for those couple of months I would say it was torture. I hated every second of it. What is amazing to me though is that eventually I did swing around to the true believers’ viewpoint again and for three years then worked to try to prove that I was OK. And eventually I was sent to New York City and I believe there was much less control there and so I had more contact with things outside. And I believe that helped me to free up from the mindset. Then I was able to walk out.’
The Big Apple ate away at the brainwashing?
‘Yeah. New York City is a very vibrant place, there is lot’s of creativity, lots of energy. And I just sort of like… “Wow, there is a whole world out there, there is a lot happening.” After 30 years inside…’
Would you say you were brainwashed?
‘I would call it brainwashing, particularly the Rehabilitation Project course.’
That would be a straight eight out of Lifton’s eight tests for brainwashing.
Lifton’s three broad definers for a cult were: a leader-cum-god; brainwashing; and harm. Do the adepts of the Church of Scientology suffer harm? One thinks of the series of allegations about cleaning out the sewage ponds and the RPF; about the many allegations of violence by the Leader, David Miscavige; about his use of abusive language; about the spying on the confessionals; about the humiliation of people by bringing up their sad sexual indignities in front of their peers. That could add up to harm.
All of the above are denied.
Back in March 2007, I had no idea of the number of people high up in the Church of Scientology who would subsequently say they were beaten or abused by its Chairman of the Board, David Miscavige. At that time very few said anything at all, out in the open. But since then the growing use of the internet for lone dots of light to communicate with each other has changed the ability of the Church to constrict information. Back then I had also not read Lifton’s superb book. But I made a judgment about Bruce and it was based on this: he’d volunteered to me that he’d once been ordered to scream his head off at another Scientologist and he had obeyed – and, now, looking back on it, he felt ashamed and that what he had done was cruel. That contrition suggested to me Bruce was telling the truth.
CHAPTER SIX
‘This is the word of the Church
of Scientology’
Were they shadowing us? So far, no. Or so we thought. We flew from ‘Frisco to La-La Land, the city Raymond Chandler once described as having no more personality than a paper cup. Mole, Bill and I had been joined by our assistant producer, Patrick Barrie, a dry-witted, sceptical chap, the very opposite of paranoid.
This is Patrick’s memory of what happened at the hire car place at LAX: ‘There was a problem with the cars, as there was only one of them. During the wait to sort that out, one guy honed in on us and started asking questions about where we were staying on the pretext that he was looking for a good place and hadn’t booked anything yet. Suspicious. We were very quickly wary of him and everything else besides.’
I like this because it makes Patrick sound like a paranoid fruitcake, and he really isn’t.
Mole recalls: ‘We were standing around at the hire car place out in the open and some guy took a shine to Bill. He asked where we were staying. All very suspicious. Bill told the guy which hotel we were staying in and the address. That was the point anyway – to see if they were spying on us.’
It was approaching dusk in LA. I was driving one car with Bill riding shotgun, camera on his lap, Mole and Patrick following in the second car. We left the hire car park.
Patrick takes up the narrative: ‘Once we finally got the second car we knew to be on the lookout for vehicles tailing us. And lo and behold within a hundred yards of leaving the parking lot a vehicle parked on the right side of the road pulled out and was after us.’
You d
rive fast, slow, slow, fast. You turn left, then right, then left. If someone is following you, their evidently lunatic trail will soon become blindingly obvious.
Behind the wheel of the first BBC car, I spotted two vehicles tracking us, a Range Rover and a dark blue KIA Sidona people carrier. At one level I could not believe we were in a car chase in LA. But the evidence of my own eyes confirmed my suspicions. It was unbelievably exciting.
Bill’s camera captured me giving a blow-by-blow account of the madness: ‘The car in front – a Range Rover – seems to be following us. It’s now taken a detour down a road and it’s now going down an alleyway. Looks a bit creepy. I’m going to say goodbye to it. It’s going quite fast down there.’
I drew ahead, fast, turned down a side road, did a very fast U-turn – hell, it’s a hire car – and headed back towards the main road, parking up 20 yards from the junction. The essence of this game is patience. They want to trail you. You make them work at it – and then you can see them.
While waiting I knocked out a few pieces-to-camera, telly talk for the moment when Roger Smellie, The Man on The Telly, tells the viewer the bleeding obvious: ‘We’re being followed. I can’t think the General Synod of the Church of England or the British Association of Muslims or whatever they are or the British Board of Deputies of Jews or the Hindus or the Sikhs would do this. It’s crazy. Here’s my prediction. Either – two cars, a Sidona or a Range Rover – will track along this road shortly.’
Bill repeated: ‘Dark blue Sidona, black Range Rover.’
Nothing doing. No target car appeared. We were parked in a side road in Los Angeles, living out a million cop shows inside our minds. But in reality? Nothing. I tried to let myself down gently: ‘Of course I might be completely paranoid.’
Yet I couldn’t quite give up. We gave it another ten seconds. Another twenty.
‘But I think we’re being followed.’
A Blue Sidona drives past, slowly, clocks us, and accelerates away. Panorama gives chase.
‘They’re following us. The blue Sidona. I’m going to go and ask them a question.’
The Sidona is in front, changes lanes to go in front of a bus, turns right, races away. I stand on the accelerator.
‘It would be really good to get the number plate. I’m driving circumspectly as my father would say.’ That was for the fairies.
The Sidona turns right and comes to a dead stop at traffic lights. The number plate, ending: ‘U204’. I get out of our car, run forward and politely but firmly tap on the driver’s window of the Sidona.
‘Hi, hello, are you Scientologists at all?’
The driver and passenger put their hands up to mask their faces and turn away from Bill’s camera. In London, in Krasnoyarsk in the middle of Siberia, in Bucket, Arkansas, you tap on the car window of an innocent party, and they wind the window down and say, ‘can I help?’ or ‘what the bloody hell are you doing, mate?’ You do that to the wrong people in parts of LA, I’ve heard, they shoot you. That the driver of the KIA put his hands up to hide his face was powerful evidence that we had chased the right people.
‘My name’s John Sweeney from the BBC. Are you from the Church of Scientology? I believe that you might be following us. Hi, John Sweeney from the BBC. Just wondering about your curious driving behaviour?’
The lights change, leaving us standing in the middle of a busy street in LA, having asked some blokes in a car their religious orientation, half-wondering whether we have gone entirely bonkers.
Some of the private investigators who work for the Church have a slightly foxed past. The most famous was a bent cop before he started working for the Church. Sgt. Eugene M. Ingram was dismissed from the LAPD in April, 1981 for misconduct, allegedly running a house of prostitution and also providing a suspected cocaine dealer with confidential police information and firearms in advance of a police raid. No criminal case ensued. Ingram had claimed to be wounded by a sniper in Elysian Park near the Police Academy in 1980 but an internal police investigation discovered that Ingram had inflicted the injury himself.
We had the chase on tape. The worry was – what would happen if our tapes, in TV jargon, the rushes, went missing?
Mole takes up the story: ‘We got to the hotel on Sunset Boulelvard and in the lobby we saw Louis Theroux.’ Theroux, the British TV presenter and journalist, was in La-La Land to make a film about plastic surgeons. In real life, as on the telly, Louis sports a look of befuddled bemusement. But so did we all, and not without reason.
‘In the background,’ Mole continues, ‘was a black guy with a cowboy hat on. It did cross my mind that he was a Scientology spy but I rejected it because he looked a bit dazed and so conspicuous with his cowboy hat on.’
Patrick recalls: ‘When I came back into the hotel reception you were telling the whole story to Louis Theroux, who by chance was there. I was nervous as there was a black guy with a Stetson and possibly another person loitering in reception. They gave the impression of being both interested, but were also trying not to look interested. I remember wanting to try and find a way to cut in and end the conversation, because both of these guys didn’t seem to have any reason for standing around in the lobby. By this stage there was a strange atmosphere, a mix of excitement after the car chase and a creeping paranoia about the goings on. That night we went for a meal across the road and had steaks and drank a lot. There was a rodeo ride in the restaurant which I think you wanted to go on, but you were talked out of it.’
I remember being frustrated as I was not allowed to go on the cowboy ride ‘em thingy – my age at the time: 48. We went to another bar for one last drink where we drank green cocktails that gave us, well me, anyway, peculiar nightmares and viridescent poo. Patrick spent the night in a massive hotel room with the rushes – our tapes – safe under his pillow.
‘The next morning,’ Patrick recalls, ‘because of my suspicions about the Stetson guy I came down for breakfast early and sat on my own. He was sitting in the far corner and was on the phone quite a lot. I distinctly remember hearing him something like “one of them is here now” in a not sufficiently quiet voice. I left breakfast and either told you and/or Mole and Bill that the Stetson man was there. I think that he left the breakfast room and then came back for a second time when you three were having breakfast and that Bill tried to get some shots of him.’
The paranoia grew and grew like a giant spider with hob-nailed boots on acid and tequila.
Curious and curiouser: I got an email from Tommy, notwithstanding all the commotion at Plant City and on the roof of the car park back in Clearwater, inviting us to the Celebrity Centre in LA to interview a number of high profile Scientologists the following morning. They hated me. They loved me.
Cowboy Hat turned up at breakfast. Louis Theroux looked on quizzically – is that the only look he can do? – while Mole distracted the Hat and Bill shot him, hiding the small video camera behind a bowl of cornflakes. Later, I announced in my foghorn voice that I was going to pop down to the hotel garage to check on our car. Sure enough, there the Hat was, smooching around, hitching his trousers. On the surface, it was comic but, at a deeper level, existentially creepy, a malign, moronic presence watching over you. It helped generate not just mental discomfort but something darker and more animal: fear.
The Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre is a perfect copy of a French chateau in the middle of Hollywood, all turrets and perpendicular Froggie-slated roofs and beautifully kept gardens and as real and true-to-life as Noddy’s friend Big Ears sitting on a red and white-spotted mushroom with a French beret on his bonce and a string of onions around his neck. Welcome to Ooh-La-La-Land.
Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder greeted us like old synthetic rubber friends and showed us around a kind of tea room, decorated with riotously beautiful Z-listers who I wondered might have been specially drafted in for the occasion of our visit. We were escorted to a lift, a faux-Victorian effort. I half-expected that the floor of the lift might disappear to drop us into a pool
full of killer sharks, as in a James Bond film, but I was disappointed. We were led to a large room, decorated with fake Louis Quinze furniture, and a phrase of the late Kenny Everett in his transvestite mode came to mind: ‘It’s all done in the best possible taste.’
As Bill set up, Tommy and I went over old ground: I was a bigot, he was, some say, brainwashed; I had a preset agenda; some said they were a cult. Then I asked him about the creepy people following us around.
‘We believe we were followed yesterday from L.A. airport,’ I said.
I have a certain truculent physical style when I am not best pleased, like a bull beginning to take notice. Tommy registered it.
‘Oh now you’ve taken it to a new level, wait a second. Let me try and get this right. I’m creepy because I show up at your hotel at 9.45 at night and call you on your cell phone and say that I’m there to see you. You hang up on me. Then…’
If this was a distraction technique, it worked pretty well.
‘Hold on a second, you turned up at midnight.’
‘No. It was at 9.45 at night when I arrived and then… I pull up to where you’re doing an interview in a public place, and you refer to a perfectly normal rental car that I’m driving as a “creepy car” and then you repeatedly tell me the most obnoxious things about my organisation, describing it in horrifically pejorative terms and by the way I reviewed the tape, not always using the preface of “some people claim”, there’s a number of times when you actually just said it yourself, that Scientology is a cult in these disgusting terms you use and now…’
‘Hold on a second…’ I said, trying to staunch the Niagara of words from Tommy.
‘…and when you….no, let me try and get this right, and now I’m having you followed?’ Tommy stressed the final word, his handsome face puckering into a rictus of incredulity.
The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology Page 11