More than individual salvation was at stake. Hubbard said that the Prison Planet had been civilized many times in the past, but it always arrived at the same end: utter annihilation. No matter how sophisticated mankind became, there was a trigger implanted in the imprisoned thetans that led them to blow themselves to pieces before they could escape their fate and go on to higher levels of existence. The goal of Scientology was to “clear the planet” and save humanity from its endless cycle of self-destruction.
Hubbard never really explained how he came by these revelations. “We won’t go into that,” he told the crew, saying only that he was fortunate to have somehow escaped the cataclysm so many eons ago. “You are the chosen,” he told them. “You are the Loyal Officers. We made the agreement way back when that we would all get together again. This time no one is going to stop us.”
Eltringham and two dozen Sea Org members had the honor of being the very first group to view the OT III materials. They went in one by one to read the documents. When she came to the part about the Loyal Officers, Eltringham immediately understood that this was what Hubbard had been talking about: she instinctively felt that she had been among them. At the same time, the account seemed incredible to her, bizarre and completely unfathomable.
Her task now was to take the materials into her cabin, along with an E-Meter, and audit herself to discover and expel body thetans. Once they were exposed and confronted, Hubbard promised, they would take flight, “lickety-split.” She began each day with a session, but she couldn’t locate any BTs. At the end of the week she turned in her folder and asked for help. She went through review auditing, but it was no use. She began to worry that she was unauditable, what Hubbard called a Dog Case or a Degraded Being—someone who had committed so many misdeeds as to be beyond help. It was all her fault.
Despite the fact that he was only fourteen, Quentin—LRH’s heir apparent—was among the first to be initiated into the OT III mysteries. Everyone on the ship knew what was happening, and people would hover near the cabin where the materials were held to see the expression on the faces of those who had been exposed to it. When Quentin emerged, he was pale, and he threw up violently. After that, he was never as sunny as he used to be.
TO MAKE SURE his orders were carried out, Hubbard created the Commodore’s Messengers Organization. In the beginning, the Messengers were four young teenage girls, including Yvonne Gillham’s two daughters, Terri and Janis, who were thirteen and eleven years old; Annie Tidman, twelve; and, briefly, Hubbard’s youngest daughter, Suzette, who was thirteen at the time. Soon, several more teenage girls joined them, and Suzette went to work on the decks. Two of the girls were always posted outside Hubbard’s office, waiting to take his handwritten directives to the mimeograph machine or deliver his orders in person. He instructed them to parrot his exact words and tone of voice when they were delivering one of his directives—to inform the captain what time to set sail, for instance, or to tell a member of the crew he was “a fucking asshole” if he had displeased him. Hubbard allowed them to create their own uniforms, so in warmer climates they attired themselves in white hot pants, halter tops, and platform shoes. When the Commodore moved around the ship, one or more Messengers trailed behind him, carrying his hat and an ashtray, lighting his cigarettes, and quickly moving a chair into place if he started to sit down. People lived in fear of Hubbard’s teenage minions. They had to call the Messenger “sir” even if she was a twelve-year-old girl. (That practice has continued in the Sea Org. All senior officials are referred to as “sir,” regardless of gender.) “They held the power of God in their little hands, their little lips,” Eltringham recalled.
The relationship between Hubbard and these girls was intimate but not overtly sexual. They prepared his bath when he retired and would sit outside his room until he awakened and called out, “Messenger!” They would help him out of bed, light his cigarette, run his shower, prepare his toiletries, and help him dress. Some of the children had parents on the ship, others were there alone, but in either case Hubbard was their primary caretaker—and vice versa. When the girls became old enough to start wearing makeup, Hubbard was the one who showed them how to apply it. He also helped them do their hair.
While he was on the ship, Hubbard was working out a code of Scientology ethics. He began with the idea that man is basically good. Even a criminal leaves clues to his crime, because he wishes for someone to stop his unethical behavior, Hubbard theorized. Similarly, a person who has accidentally hurt himself or gotten ill is “putting ethics in on himself” in order to lessen the damage he does to others or to his environment. These were testaments to the basic longing of all people to live decent, worthy lives.
Good and evil actions can be judged only by understanding what Hubbard termed the Eight Dynamics. The First Dynamic is the Self and its urge toward existence. The Second Dynamic is Sex, which includes the sexual act as well as the family unit. The Third Dynamic is the Group—any school, or class, organization, city, or nation. The Fourth Dynamic is Mankind. The Fifth Dynamic is the urge toward existence of all living creatures, including vegetables and grass—“anything directly and intimately motivated by life.” The Sixth Dynamic is the matter, energy, space, and time that compose the reality we live in. The Seventh Dynamic is the Spiritual, which must be obtained before expanding into the Eighth Dynamic, which is called Infinity or God. The Scientology mantra for judging ethical behavior is “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics”—a formula that can excuse quite a number of crimes.
Every individual or group moves through stages, which Hubbard calls Ethics Conditions, that incline toward either survival or collapse. They range from the highest state, Power, to the lowest, Confusion. The way to determine what condition one is in at any given moment is through statistics, compiled each Thursday at two p.m. For a Scientology church, the relevant statistic might be how much money it is bringing in. The “org” that brings in less money week after week is in a condition of Non-Existence, which, plotted on a graph, is represented as a steeply plummeting line. A level or slightly declining line indicates a condition of Emergency. Slightly up is Normal; sharply up is Affluence. Every Scientology organization, and every member of its staff, henceforth would be judged by the implacable weekly statistics. Hubbard warned his charges, “You have to establish an ethics presence hard. Otherwise, you’re just gonna be wrapped around a telegraph pole.”
The years at sea were critical ones for the future of Scientology. Even as Hubbard was inventing the doctrine, each of his decisions and actions would become enshrined in Scientology lore as something to be emulated—his cigarette smoking, for instance, which is still a feature of the church’s culture at the upper levels, as are his 1950s habits of speech, his casual misogyny, his aversion to perfume and scented deodorants, and his love of cars and motorcycles and Rolex watches. More significant is the legacy of his belittling behavior toward subordinates and his paranoia about the government. Such traits stamped the religion as an extremely secretive and sometimes hostile organization that saw enemies on every corner.
Because Hubbard viewed the world that way, he awakened suspicion that there must be something very dangerous about Scientology. One by one, ports began turning away the fleet. It had begun with Gibraltar in 1967, when the ship was refused assistance during a heavy storm in the strait. England banned foreign Scientologists from entering the country for study in July 1968 and declared Hubbard an undesirable alien. Hubbard took out his frustration on his crew. He assigned Yvonne Gillham a condition of Non-Existence and reduced her to a “swamper,” which he defined as “one who cleans up.” Her hands became raw and gnarled. “She was like Cinderella,” a friend recalled, “always scrubbing.”
While the ships were docked in Valencia, a storm arose. Hubbard happened to be aboard the Avon River when he noticed that the Royal Scotman had torn free from one of its mooring lines. He screamed that someone should hoist the anchor and start the engines, but before the crew reacted, t
he big ship crashed against the dock, damaging its prop. Although the ship was not badly damaged, Hubbard assigned the crew and the Royal Scotman itself to a condition of Liability, which is below Non-Existence on his ethics scale. Hubbard stayed aboard the Avon River and steamed off to Marseilles until the Royal Scotman was returned to favor. Mary Sue was made the captain and ordered to retrain the crew and spruce up the ship to an acceptable state. No one could bathe or change clothes for months. The crew wore dirty gray rags on their left arms, which signaled their degraded status. Even Mary Sue’s snappish Corgi, Vixie, had a rag around its collar, and the ship itself wore a bracelet of gray tarpaulins around its funnel. An Ethics Officer walked the decks actually swinging a mace.
Despite the squalid conditions, Mary Sue ran the ship with a minimum of hysteria, earning her the respect and loyalty of many aboard. Without Hubbard, the mood lightened. Mary Sue used to have parties in her cabin with Candy Swanson, the children’s tutor, and two men they were sweet on. They danced to Jimi Hendrix records. But when Hubbard returned, the party was over.
A YOUNG MAN with a gift for languages named Belkacem Ferradj joined the Sea Org when the ship docked briefly in Algiers in 1968. Hubbard, surrounded by his Messengers, had made an immediate impression on Ferradj. He was dressed like an admiral, and he spoke with a broad American accent. A golden glow seemed to emanate from his large head. Mary Sue struck Ferradj as “gorgeous,” with long, curly hair and piercing eyes, but he thought she was “the most secretive person in the world.” When the ship sailed in July, Ferradj was aboard, having signed his billion-year contract with the Sea Org.
Ferradj became close to Hubbard’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Diana. She had developed into a glamorous young woman, with flowing red hair and pale skin showered with freckles. She played the grand piano in the family dining room on the ship. Some saw her as imperious, a princess, but Ferradj, who was four years older than Diana, was smitten. When Hubbard found out about the relationship, he summoned Ferradj to the poop deck. Ferradj said Hubbard greeted him with a blow to the jaw. “I hit the bulkhead of the ship and slumped to the deck,” he recalled. “I don’t know if it was because I was an Arab or what. I left in disgrace.”
When Otto Roos, a Sea Org executive from Holland, failed to lash a steel cable to a bollard on the dock during a terrible storm in Tunisia, Hubbard ordered him thrown from the ship’s bridge into the sea, a height of about four stories. Hana Eltringham wrote a concerned report to Hubbard that night, explaining that the storm had been so furious that Roos simply couldn’t hang on when trying to secure the ship. The report was returned to her with the comment “Never question LRH.”5
Roos survived his punishment, only to set a dismal precedent. After that, overboardings became routine, but mostly from the lower poop deck. Nearly every morning, when the crew was mustered, there would be a list of those sentenced to go over the side, even in rough seas. They would be fished out and hauled back onboard through the old cattle doors that led to the hold. The overboardings contributed to the decision of the Greek government to expel the Scientology crew from Corfu in March 1969. That didn’t stop the practice. None except Hubbard family members were spared. John McMaster, the second “first Clear,” was tossed over the side six times, breaking his shoulder on the last occasion. He left the church not long afterward. Eltringham had to stand with Hubbard and his aides on the deck when the punishments were meted out. If the crewman seemed insufficiently cowed by the prospect, Hubbard would have his hands and feet bound. Whitfield remembered one American woman, Julia Lewis Salmen, sixty years old, a longtime Scientology executive, who was bound and blindfolded before being thrown overboard. “She screamed all the way down,” Eltringham said. “When the sound stopped, Hubbard ordered a deck hand to jump in after her. Had he not, I think Julia may have drowned.”
Hubbard chose a different punishment for another of the older members of the crew, Charlie Reisdorf. He and two other Sea Org crew were made to race each other around the rough, splintery decks while pushing peanuts with their noses. “They all had raw, bleeding noses, leaving a trail of blood behind them,” a senior auditor recalled. The entire crew was ordered to watch the spectacle. “Reisdorf was in his late fifties, probably. His two daughters were Messengers; they were eleven or twelve at the time, and his wife was there also. It was hard to say which was worse to watch: this old guy with a bleeding nose or his wife and kids sobbing and crying and being forced to watch this. Hubbard was standing there, calling the shots, yelling, ‘Faster, faster!’ ”
Hubbard increasingly turned his wrath on children, who were becoming a nuisance on the ship. He thought that they were best raised away from their parents, who were “counter-intention” to their children. As a result, he became their only—stern as well as neglectful—parent. Children who committed minor infractions, such as laughing inappropriately or failing to remember a Scientology term, would be made to climb to the crow’s nest, at the top of the mast, four stories high, and spend the night, or sent to the hold and made to chip rust. A rambunctious four-year-old boy named Derek Greene, an adopted black child, had taken a Rolex watch belonging to a wealthy member of the Sea Org and dropped it overboard. Hubbard ordered him confined in the chain locker, a closed container where the massive anchor chain is stored. It was dark, damp, and cold. There was a danger that the child could be mutilated if the anchor was accidentally lowered or slipped. Although he was fed, he was not given blankets or allowed to go to the bathroom. He stayed sitting on the chain for two days and nights. The crew could hear the boy crying. His mother pleaded with Hubbard to let him out, but Hubbard reminded her of the Scientology axiom that children are actually adults in small bodies, and equally responsible for their behavior. Other young children were sentenced to the locker for infractions—such as chewing up a telex—for as long as three weeks. Hubbard ruled that they were Suppressive Persons. One little girl, a deaf mute, was placed in the locker for a week because Hubbard thought it might cure her deafness.
Hubbard explained to Hana Eltringham that the punishments were meant to raise the level of “confront” in order to deal with the evil in the universe. One member of Eltringham’s crew on the Avon River, Terry Dickinson, a jocular Australian electrician, made the mistake of failing to order a part for the ship-to-shore radio. Hubbard sent a handwritten note to Eltringham ordering her to keep Dickinson awake until the part arrived and the radio was properly installed. If the crewman fell asleep, he would be expelled. Eltringham guiltily carried out the order, but she knew the hapless Dickinson couldn’t make it on his own, so she stayed awake with him for five days and nights, pouring coffee down his throat, walking him up and down the beach, and consoling him as he wept and said he couldn’t take it anymore. Eltringham believed she was saving Dickinson’s soul, as well as her own, but he left shortly after that incident, “a broken man.” Later, Hubbard wrote a note explaining that Dickinson “did not have the confront to see this through.”
“You would say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you speak out?’ ” Eltringham later remarked. “You see, I was a true believer. I believed that Hubbard knew what he was doing. I, unfortunately, believed that he knew what it was going to take to help everyone in the world and that, even though I didn’t understand, it was my duty to follow and support what he was doing. None of us spoke out. None of us did anything.”
IN THE SHIP’S LOG of December 8, 1968, Hubbard mentions an organization he calls SMERSH, a name taken from James Bond novels. Hubbard describes it as a “hidden government…that aspired to world domination!” Psychiatry is the dominating force behind this sinister institution. “Recently a check showed that we had never seen or heard of an ‘insane’ person who had not been in their hands,” Hubbard writes. “And the question arises, is there any insanity at all? That is not manufactured by them?” He said that SMERSH had made one big mistake, however; it attacked Scientology. He vowed revenge.
Hubbard had been wooing a young Florida woma
n, Elizabeth Gablehouse, to join the Sea Org. She had come from a prominent family in Tallahassee, Florida, and had studied in Europe. She spoke French, German, and Spanish. She had admirable social skills; moreover, she was a redhead, always a stamp of pre-eminence in Hubbard’s book. Finally, Kit agreed to join the Royal Scotman in 1969, just as the ship was being expelled from Corfu. She was soon appointed to the “Missionaires Elite Unit.” Hubbard already had an assignment in mind for her.
Hubbard set a course for Cagliari, on the Italian island of Sardinia. On the way, he personally tutored her in his plan to take over the World Federation for Mental Health, which was headquartered in Geneva. Hubbard had learned that the organization had never bothered to actually incorporate itself in Switzerland. His grand idea was to set up an office in Bern, the capital, posing as an American delegation of the WFMH bent on reforming the organization from within. The true scheme was to establish a presence in the country long enough to incorporate as the WFMH; and then, posing as the actual mental health organization, go to the United Nations with a plan for enforced euthanization of the “useless or unfixable” elements of society. Hubbard predicted that the outcry that would surely follow would turn the world against the WFMH. It would be a powerful strike against his most formidable enemy, SMERSH.
All the way to Sardinia Hubbard drilled Kit in the history of the health organization, its former presidents, and the policies it supported, such as electroshock therapy. Kit didn’t need to be persuaded about the dangers of that practice; her own mother had been subjected to electroshock in the 1940s, without her consent, as treatment for postpartum depression. After that, her mother suffered from amnesia and a fear of change and losing control.
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