The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  ‘It is totalitarian,’ said Mike. ‘It’s insane. It’s psychosis, probably not seen in the entire history of the religion. It degenerated into people hitting one another, putting people in garbage cans, having people crawl around on their hands and knees until their knees were bleeding, torturing people with water.’

  Did that happen to you?

  ‘Absolutely. I crawled around on my hands and knees on this indoor, outdoor carpet until my knees were bleeding maybe a dozen times.’

  Why did he put up with it for so long? Mike set out explaining the greatest puzzle of all. Although he had left the Church of Scientology, he still believes in the faith of Scientology, is still a disciple of L Ron Hubbard.

  ‘There is a principle in Scientology,’ explained Mike, ‘called the greatest good for the greatest number: dynamics. One judges whether something is good or bad based on whether it enhances survival across those dynamics. For a Scientologist probably the single most important thing is expansion of the church, the expansion of the religion. Here, the person that is responsible or is the driving force behind that expansion has hit someone or slapped them.’

  So the heart of the problem was a conflict of loyalties: as a Scientologist he felt he had to endure abuse because otherwise the expansion of his religion would be imperilled, and that would imperil humankind.

  Mike described the first time David Miscavige hit him. It was sometime in the late 1990s when he was working at Gold Base in the Californian desert: ‘He called me up, he had an office that was up the hill. I ran up the hill because you had to get there in a hurry because you don’t want to keep the dear leader waiting. I ran around the corner and he literally, “Wham!” cold cocked me and then tackled me and pushed me into a tree and then had me in a headlock and was shoving me in the bushes and kind of pushing me around. You can’t really fight back because that would be the end of your career. That went on for, maybe, probably two minutes or something. He then calmed down and I had a cut on my mouth and [he] said: “OK, come inside” and I walked inside the little lounge and he handed me a glass of scotch and said, “drink that,” and pretended that nothing had happened.’

  Why?

  ‘For whatever his whim was at the moment. Looked at him the wrong way, answered the question the wrong way, said something that was in his mind inappropriate, had something that he thought was incorrect, had happened to be standing next to someone else that he was hitting so just kind of hit that guy and then, oh well I’ll give you one too just for good measure.’

  It sounds as though he was out of control?

  ‘He is. It’s insanity, and that’s why this is so bad. Look, someone getting hit, slapped across the face or whatever is not going to scar them for life. But the fact that the person who is the pinnacle of the Scientology religion is unable to control himself and has such what would be called in Scientology evil purposes towards others…it would be, like, the pope was a devil worshipper. It’s so diametrically opposed to what Scientology should be and what the example of a good Scientologist is. That’s what’s so troubling about it, not the fact of hitting someone but the fact that the person who is supposedly at the pinnacle of the religion is that nutty. That’s bad. David Miscavige is an anti-Scientologist.’

  The Church of Scientology and David Miscavige deny allegations of violence.

  I put it to Mike: they deny this.

  ‘Of course. Just like I did. It would be destructive in the minds of Scientologists because it would not be the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics because David Miscavige is driving forward the massive expansion of Scientology. So, therefore, anything that would undermine him or undermine his position or undermine his public persona would be destructive to this greater good, the greater good being – he is driving the expansion of Scientology. But that’s a lie.’

  Why did you put up with it? I asked again, unsure that I had properly understood what he was telling me.

  ‘Because I believed, like I said to you, I believe that the greater good and the expansion of Scientology was more important than my personal wellbeing.’

  And that included being beaten up by the Leader?

  ‘Yes.’

  The Church of Scientology…

  ‘I mean,’ Mike interrupted, ‘if he came and punched me now, we’d have a little difficulty…’

  I laughed out loud.

  I put it to Mike that if he was telling the truth, then Tommy was lying. He said he was, and that Tommy would continue lying until he was no longer in post, and that goes for all the senior Scientologists. They had, for example, sent statements to us and other journalists setting out that the allegations against David Miscavige were baseless, and that people alleging abuse were, in fact, the abusers. Mike had read these statements. His view was they were ‘frankly absurd. They look like and read like they were written by someone who just came out of a North Korean concentration camp.’

  In the light of Lifton’s work, that is a fascinating observation from a man who spent half a century inside the Church of Scientology.

  ‘They talk,’ Mike continued, ‘about the wonderful virtuous David Miscavige and that here is a man who walks on water and never does anything wrong, he saves sparrows who have fallen out of trees… He can do nothing wrong. I mean his breath doesn’t smell, nothing, everything about him is perfect, now that is obviously ridiculous. There is nobody walking on planet earth today that is quite as virtuous as he is made out to be.’

  Did Mike beat anyone up?

  ‘I did. On a couple of occasions. It was really something that I am not proud of and don’t feel good about. I don’t really have any excuse for it because something that I will never do again and if I ever see those people I will certainly apologise.’

  Mike described one attack: ‘I grabbed his shirt collar and held him up against the wall, making a point rather forcefully, maybe an inch away from his face.’

  He attacked the man because, he said, Miscavige had told Mike to give him an SRA, a Severe Reality Adjustment.

  Violence flowed from the top: ‘You see what happens at the very pinnacle and then that becomes the code of conduct of those immediately beneath and then that eventually makes it way down the organisation, especially when you have an organisation that is so hierarchically structured as the Church of Scientology.’

  Bruce Hines had told me the same thing, that he had hit another Scientologist because he had been told to. They both may have been lying, of course, but they both showed remorse which I found convincing.

  What seems to anger Mike more than the physical or emotional abuse was the lack of honesty about the growth of the Church. He described how Miscavige had been making up the numbers, claiming millions of Scientologists as members when the real figures were pitifully lower: not ten million but something like 40,000.

  I have only once seen a packed Church of Scientology and that was the one Mike and Tommy took me into in LA. He told me that had been staged for Panorama, that they called people up to make the place look packed.

  Stepping away from the interview with Mike for a moment and to the only ever newspaper interview Miscavige has given, in 1998 to Tom Tobin of the St Petersburg Times, a reporter who has vigorously covered the Church against a howling wind of legal threats. Miscavige recalled meeting the founder in 1977. The newspaper’s story read:

  ‘Hubbard, then 66, wore a straw cowboy hat, slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and boots. He was leaving a dining room when the teenager from Clearwater introduced himself. “Oh I know who you are,” he remembers Hubbard saying. “Welcome aboard.” As most Scientologists do, Miscavige often refers to Hubbard by his initials, LRH. He says Hubbard called him by the nickname “Misc” (pronounced Misk).’ [No other ex-member of the Church has used the Misc nickname to me.] “I never thought LRH was looking at me as: Oh, Dave is 17 years old or 18 years old,” Miscavige said. “It was just Dave, person to person. Spiritual being to spiritual being, so to speak.”’

  So to speak. Miscavige u
sed his proximity well. By the age of 21, he succeeded in persuading Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, to step out of the way and when Hubbard died it was Miscavige who emerged as the new pope. There were no elections, or anything like that. ‘People keep saying,’ Miscavige told Tobin, ‘“How’d you get power?” Nobody gives you power. I’ll tell you what power is. Power in my estimation is if people will listen to you. That’s it.’

  I put it to Mike that Miscavige was close to Hubbard. Is that right?

  ‘Partly true. He controlled the communications to and from him. So therefore he was able to manipulate what information went to L Ron Hubbard and then what went back and he always manipulated it to make himself look very good, and others look not so good.’

  Stalin did that with Lenin, though I am not directly comparing Stalin with…

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  I pleaded that it was not a useful analogy. What was the difference between Miscavige then and now?

  ‘He has the same energy and intelligence. There is no question that he has always been very intelligent, smart, but that doesn’t make him good. The difference between now and then is that now he firmly believes that everybody else is dirt and he is God.’

  On reflection – and I hadn’t studied Lifton’s work at this stage – Mike’s analysis fits exactly with Lifton’s cult criteria of a charismatic leader who becomes the dispenser of immortality, a god.

  Why hasn’t Miscavige given a TV interview since 1992?

  ‘In part because he thinks it’s beneath him. In part, because he will only do it under extremely controlled circumstances. He doesn’t think it’s going to get any better than the interview that he did with Ted Koppel.’

  The 1992 ABC interview by Koppel with Miscavige is fascinating because in it the Leader – forceful, fluent, intense blue staring eyes, speaking in a gravelly New Jersey/Philadelphia twang – sets out arguments that Tommy, Mike and the Scientology celebrities had made to me in 2007, fifteen years later, sometimes almost word for word.

  For example, the film package prior to the interview showed ex-Scientologists complaining that they had been ripped off inside the Church and then spied on, threatened and followed once they had left. Miscavige replied, talking about the Church’s betterment programmes, defending auditing and demonising its critics: ‘every single detractor on there is part of a religious hate group called Cult Awareness Network… [This was an allegation Koppel denied on their behalf.] Now, I don’t know if you’ve heard of these people, but it’s the same as the KKK would be with the blacks. I think if you interviewed a neo-Nazi and asked them to talk about the Jews, you would get a similar result to what you have here.’

  That is the same trope Kirstie Alley hit me over the head with – not literally – in the Celebrity Centre, as if she was an actor and Miscavige had written her script some 15 years before.

  Later on, Miscavige riffs on psychiatry: ‘The Fascists, the Communists have used psychiatry to further their ends. That’s just a fact. You want to look at the studies that brought about the Holocaust of the Jews, that the Nazis justified killing the Jews, they were done at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Leipzig, Germany, and that justified the killing of six million people… But let me tell you what our real problem is. Number one, understand this. Psychiatry, psychology, that comes from the word psyche. Psyche means soul. These people have preempted the field of religion, not just Scientology, every other religion. They right now practice and preach the fact that man is an animal, and I guess that is where philosophically we’re at odds with them. But to understand what this war is, this is not something that we started. In fact, 22 days after Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health came out, the attacks from the American Psychiatric Association started.’

  How did Miscavige respond to critics? Time reporter Richard Behar ‘is a hater’, who set out to kidnap a Scientologist – a charge that Richard Behar denies. Former high-ranking Scientologist Vicki Aznaran told ABC: ‘They hire private detectives to harass people. They run covert operations. You name it, they have never quit doing it. It would like, they would have to quit being Scientology if they quit doing that.’ On Miscavige, Vicki alleged: ‘He said that we will use public people, we’ll send them out to the dissidents’ homes, have them, their homes broken into, have them beaten, have things stolen from them, slash their tyres, break their car windows, whatever. And this was being carried out at the time I left.’

  Miscavige said of Aznaran: ‘This is a girl who was kicked out for trying to bring criminals into the Church, something she didn’t mention… She violated the mores and codes of the group. She was removed for it. I was a trustee of that corporation. She knows it. The words she said to me is, “I have no future in Scientology.” She wanted to bring bad boys into Scientology, her words.’

  Mike went on to suggest to me another reason why the Leader hasn’t given a newspaper or TV interview for years: fear.

  ‘If something were to go wrong and he was made to look like a fool or couldn’t answer the allegations that were being put to him, then that would crumble some of his image in the mind of Scientologists.’

  We went through the details of our weird encounters back in 2007. Mike explained that Miscavige had been aggressively contemptuous of Tommy’s ‘handling’ of us, that he was ‘pussy’, that he had failed to stop us from talking to the heretics, Mike Henderson and Donna, so Tommy decided to ambush us at our hotel, late, the expectation being that we would not have had our camera with us. It was pressure from Miscavige that drove the midnight ambush. We showed Mike a clip of the two cars following us when we were arrived at Los Angeles airport and me challenging the driver of the Blue Sidona: ‘are you from the Church of Scientology?’

  Was I being paranoid?

  ‘No, you were being followed.’

  Who gave the orders to follow us, I asked.

  ‘I did.’

  There is no doubt in your mind that we were followed by the Church of Scientology?

  ‘No doubt whatsoever.’

  Simple test. There is a gap, we were in Florida and then we went to LA. Where did we go in between?

  ‘You went to see Bruce Hines in San Francisco.’

  How did you know that?

  ‘I was there.’

  What do you mean you were there?

  ‘See… I was better at following you than the other people.’ They would have been the private detectives.

  I never saw you.

  ‘I know. I followed you from San Francisco airport to the hotel that you stayed at, that one sitting on the corner. I was there.’

  So you spied on us, the Church of Scientology spied on us?

  ‘Yes, absolutely.’

  The Church of Scientology has always denied following and spying on the BBC.

  ‘And they probably would do so again.’

  Will they be telling the truth?

  ‘No, that will be an absolute lie.’

  Why spy on people?

  Mike explained from the perspective of the Church, that they knew that the Panorama we were making was not going to be friendly, so that they wanted to know exactly who we were seeing and what we were finding out, so they could reply immediately that the things we were being told were not true. The only solution is to spy. The person driving this approach is David Miscavige, he said, and he admitted that as far as the media goes it is counter-effective. He touched on the colossal expense of private eyes. One in London costs around £300 a day or $50 an hour; lawyers, of course, cost far, far more, around $750 an hour.

  The Church, for its part, said we weren’t spied on. David Miscavige said the suggestion that he and his office monitored any such operation communicating with Rinder and Davis is absolute and total nonsense. The Church categorically denied it too, but admitted private eyes were tasked to track and document us. An overt operation, they said, not spying.

  Making the Scientology film was the strangest thing I have ever experienced in my entire life, I told Mike. And towards t
he end of the days we spent with you in the States in 2007 I felt as though I was beginning to lose my mind. And I can remember saying to Mole, on the day, that I lost my temper, ‘I don’t think I can do this any more.’ Tommy Davis in particular was attacking me, again and again and again. Is that deliberate?

  ‘Absolutely. Tommy Davis believed that he could score brownie points with Miscavige by driving you psychotic. If you had some of the fundamental technology and Scientology that you could apply, it wouldn’t have created that effect on you. He was doing something that’s called in slang Scientology “bull-baiting”. He was attempting to goad you into a reaction, do that routine and then have it appear in the press all over the world. It made you look bad and it was from our perspective something that made you lose credibility.’

  I was as good as gold for five, six days before I went tomato.

  ‘You held up pretty good. It was a deliberate effort to get you to lose your cool.’

  And when I lost it, how did you feel?

  ‘Pretty cool.’

  But the new, un-Zombie Mike was ashamed of what they had done in 2007 and felt that it was an abuse of their powers as Scientologists, a betrayal of what Scientology stood for. Mike explained that the greater problem for the Church was that Tommy had boasted of his immediate access to the Leader, because in Miscavige’s mind that countered his ability to plausibly deny his agents – a disastrous mistake. Faced with the Leader’s anger, Tommy vanished to Las Vegas, leading Mike to run the show. That was the explanation for his absence in London: Tommy had gone AWOL. Mike was too modest to say so, but he was, in the end, the more professional PR man.

  The allegations of being beaten by Miscavige, the spying, the lying, The Hole - all of this, I asked Mike, I’ve got to ask you: were you lying to me then in 2007 or are you lying to me now: ‘I was lying to you then.’

  I know this word cult is a very difficult word for you and you don’t accept it as far as Scientology as a principle is concerned.