Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  Brolin had known Haggis for many years. They had worked together in television, and Brolin had helped with Haggis’s charities. Brolin and his wife, actress Diane Lane, shared a house in Italy during the summers with Paul and Deborah. One evening, lubricated with grappa, Brolin began recounting a story of a friend who had “infiltrated” Scientology. He wondered why Paul and Deborah were listening stony-faced. When he finished the tale, Deborah finally said, “You know, we’re Scientologists.”

  “What?” Brolin exclaimed. “When the fuck did that happen?”

  “A long time ago,” Deborah said.

  “I am so sorry, I had no idea!” Brolin said.

  After that, Brolin went with Deborah to a couple of gatherings to hear about Scientology’s opposition to psychotropic drugs. Although Brolin had never talked about it, he had gone to the Celebrity Centre himself, “in a moment of real desperation,” and received spiritual counseling. He quickly decided Scientology wasn’t for him. But he still wondered what the religion did for celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta: “Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?”

  Brolin once witnessed Travolta giving a Scientology assist at a dinner party in Los Angeles. Marlon Brando arrived with a cut on his leg. He had been injured while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway pull his car out of a mudslide, and he was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology, which gave him enhanced abilities. Brando said, “Well, John, if you have powers, then absolutely.” Travolta touched Brando’s leg and they each closed their eyes. Brolin watched, thinking it was bizarre and surprisingly physical. After ten minutes, Brando opened his eyes and said, “That really helped. I actually feel different!”

  IN 2003, Cruise continued working with Rathbun on his upper levels. While he was at Gold Base, instead of staying in the cottage he had formerly shared with Nicole Kidman, Cruise moved into the guesthouse of L. Ron Hubbard’s residence, Bonnie View. One Sunday night, following a late-night meal in Hubbard’s baronial dining room, Cruise got food poisoning. The culprit was thought to be an appetizer of fried shrimp in an egg roll. The cook was summarily sent to Happy Valley.

  Rathbun accompanied Cruise to Flag Base in Clearwater where he could perform the exercises required to attain OT VII. Because Miscavige depended on Rathbun to handle so many of the church’s most sensitive problems, he had been lulled into feeling a kind of immunity from the leader’s violent temper. In September, he returned to Gold Base and gave a report to Miscavige about Cruise’s progress.

  Miscavige asked where Cruise would be doing his semiannual checkups. “At Flag,” Rathbun said. All OT VIIs do their checkups at Flag.

  “Who’s going to do it?”

  Rathbun named an auditor in Clearwater that he thought highly of.

  Miscavige turned to his wife and said, “Can you believe this SP?” He declared that unlike any other OT VII, Cruise would get his checkups at Gold Base.

  When Cruise duly arrived at Gold for his semiannual check, he was preparing for his role as a contract killer in Collateral. Miscavige took him out to the gun range and showed him how to shoot a .45-caliber pistol. Meanwhile, Rathbun administered the star’s six-month checkup.

  Because of his insubordination, Rathbun had to go through a program of penitence. One of the steps was to write up a list of his offenses against the church, which Miscavige had sketched out for him. “I am writing this public announcement to inform executives and staff that I have come to my senses and I am no longer committing present time overts and have ceased all attacks and suppressions on Scientology,” Rathbun admitted in September 2003, adopting the abject tone that characterizes many Scientology confessions. Speaking in full-blown Scientologese, he wrote, “The end result is unmocked org form, overworked and enturbulated executives and staff.” This meant that he had not thought out his intentions clearly, causing the church and the people who worked for it to be in disarray. He had a particular apology to make to David Miscavige: “Each and every time on major situations, COB has had to intervene to clean up wars I had exacerbated.… The cumulative amount of COB’s time I have cost in terms of dropping balls, creating situations internally and externally, is on the order of eight years.”

  Rathbun was shocked, not just by being declared an SP, but also by the changes at Gold Base in the year and a half he had been posted to Flag. All communications into and out of the base had been cut off. The leader had several of his top executives confined to the Watchdog Committee headquarters—a pair of double-wide trailers that had been married together. By the end of the year, the number who were living there under guard had grown to about forty or fifty people. It was now called the Hole. Except for one long conference table, there was no furniture—no chairs or beds, just an expanse of outdoor carpet—so the executives had to eat standing up and sleep on the floor, which was swarming with ants. In the morning, they were marched outside for group showers with a hose, then back to the Hole. Their meals were brought to them—a slop of reheated leftovers. When temperatures in the desert location mounted to more than a hundred degrees, Miscavige turned off the electricity, letting the executives roast inside the locked quarters.

  The leader ordered them to stay until they finally had rearranged the “Org Board”—the church’s organizational chart—to his satisfaction, which was never given. Photographs of Sea Org personnel were continually moved from one position to another on the chart, which meant that people were constantly being reassigned to different posts, whimsically, and no post was secure. About nine hundred positions needed to be filled at Int and Gold Bases, and the stack of personnel and ethics files was five feet high. This anarchic process had been going on more or less intensively for four years.

  At odd, unpredictable hours, often in the middle of the night, Miscavige would show up in the Hole, accompanied by his wife, Shelly, and his Communicator, Laurisse Stuckenbrock, each of whom carried a tape recorder to take down whatever Miscavige had to say. The detainees could hear the drumbeat of the shoes as Miscavige’s entourage marched toward the trailers. The leader demanded that the executives engage in what were termed “séances”—endless hours of confessions about their crimes and failures, in this and previous lives, as well as whatever dark thoughts—“counter-intentions”—they might be harboring against him. If someone was not forthcoming with such confessions, the group would harass that person until he produced a confession. Sometimes these were sexual fantasies. That would be written up in a report, which Miscavige would then read aloud to other church officials.

  The entire base became paralyzed with anxiety about being thrown into the Hole. People were trying desperately to police their thoughts, but it was difficult to keep secrets when staff members were constantly being security-checked with E-Meters. Even confidences whispered to a spouse were regularly betrayed. After one of COB’s lengthy rants, recordings of his statement would be sent to a steno pool, then transcripts were delivered to the executives in the Hole, who had to read them aloud to each other repeatedly.

  Mike Rinder was in the Hole for two years, even though he continued to be the church’s chief spokesperson. Bizarrely, he would sometimes be pulled out and ordered to conduct a press conference, or to put on a tuxedo and jet off to a Scientology gala; then he would be returned to confinement. He and other executives were made to race around the room on their hands and bare knees, day after day, tearing open scabs on their knees and leaving permanent scars. Miscavige once directed De Vocht to rough up Rinder, because “he’s just an SP.” De Vocht took Rinder outside and gave him a going-over. But De Vocht was also frightened of Miscavige. He took to sleeping with a broken broom handle. When another executive spoke up about the violence, he was beaten by two of Miscavige’s assistants and made to mop the bathroom floor with his tongue.

  Mike Rinder, former chief spokesperson for the church, i
n Florida, 2012

  The detainees developed a particular expression whenever Miscavige came in, which he took note of. He called them “Pie Faces.” To illustrate what he meant, Miscavige drew a circle with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. He had T-shirts made up with the pie face on it. Rinder was “the Father of Pie Faces.” People didn’t know how to react. They didn’t want to call attention to themselves, but they also didn’t want to be a Pie Face.

  In Scientology, there is a phrase that explains mob psychology: Contagion of Aberration, meaning that groups of people can stimulate each other to do things that are insane. According to former church executives, one day Miscavige arrived at the Hole and demanded that Marc Yager, the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, and Guillaume Lesevre, the Executive Director of the Church of Scientology International, confess that they were homosexual lovers. He threatened that Tom Cruise would come to “punch you guys out” if the other Sea Org members in the Hole failed to get a confession from the two men. The captive executives took this threat seriously. When Miscavige left, a group of women executives who had been appointed as leaders of the detainees urged some of the bigger men in the Hole to “give some people some black eyes before Tom has to.” Several men dutifully beat up Lesevre and Yager. Then one of the women reported to Miscavige that the men had confessed that they were gay lovers. When Debbie Cook, the former Captain of Flag Service Org and one of the most respected executives in the church, said that wasn’t true, she was declared a traitor. She was made to stand in a garbage can for twelve hours, as the other detainees demanded that she confess her own “homosexual tendencies.” The women in the room repeatedly slapped her and poured water over her head. A sign was hung around her neck, saying LESBO.

  Rathbun was seen as being COB’s chief enforcer. During meetings in the Hole or elsewhere on the base, he would stand to one side and glare at his colleagues while he says Miscavige berated and abused them. Although he was physically intimidating, Rathbun was suffering from a number of physical ailments, including a bad back, gallstones, calcium deposits in his neck, and painful varicose veins, which he believed came from having to stand at attention for hours on end. He, too, was prone to bursts of sudden violence. “Once on a phone call I saw him get so mad that he put his fist right through a computer screen,” his former wife recalled. Miscavige would send him down to observe what was going on in the Hole and come back with reports. In January 2004, when Rinder was accused of withholding a confession from the group, Rathbun took him outside and beat him up. Rathbun says Miscavige wasn’t satisfied. He called Rathbun into his massive office in the Religious Technology Center, a cold and imposing room with steel walls and eighteen-foot ceilings, and accused him of letting Rinder “get away with murder.” Then, according to Rathbun, out of nowhere, Miscavige grabbed him by the throat and slammed his head against the steel wall.5 Rathbun blacked out for a moment. He wasn’t hurt, but the terms had changed.

  A few days later, Rathbun found himself in the Hole, along with the entire International Management team and other executives. Miscavige said they were going to stay there until they got the Org Board done.

  Scientologists are trained to believe that whatever happens to them is somehow their fault, so much of the discussion in the Hole centered on what they had done to deserve this fate. The possibility that the leader of the church might be irrational or even insane was so taboo that no one could even think it, much less voice it aloud. Most of the people in the Hole had a strong allegiance to the group—Scientology and the Sea Org—and they didn’t want to let their comrades down. Many had been in the Sea Org their entire adult lives and portions of their childhood. Mike Rinder joined the Sea Org when he was eighteen. Amy Scobee was sixteen. Tom De Vocht was thirteen. They had already surrendered the possibility of ordinary family life. Sex outside of marriage was taboo, so many members married in their teens; but since 1986, children have been forbidden to Sea Org members. Former church executives say that abortions were common and forcefully encouraged. Claire Headley married Marc when she was seventeen; by the time she was twenty-one she had been pushed to have two abortions. She estimates that sixty to eighty percent of the women on Gold Base have had abortions. “It’s a constant practice,” she said.6

  Worried about pillow talk, Miscavige instituted a policy of imposed divorces in 2004; people in the Religious Technology Center, the Commodore’s Messenger Organization, and Golden Era Productions could not be married to members in other divisions. For many of those people in the Hole, everyone they knew or cared about was in the church. The cost of leaving—emotionally and spiritually, as well as financially—was forbidding. And they knew if they tried to run away, they’d likely be found and punished.

  Those who attempted to leave the Sea Org through the formal process of “routing out” would be presented with a freeloader tab for all the coursework and counseling they had received over the years. Claire and Marc Headley, for instance, were billed more than $150,000 when they left and told they would have to pay if they ever wanted to see their family again. Those who accept this offer can spend years paying off their debt. Those who don’t stand to lose any connection to their friends and family who remain in Scientology.

  Many had long since turned their back on friends and family who were not in the church, and the prospect of facing them again brought up feelings of shame. The thought of leaving loved ones still in the church was even more fraught. All of these conflicting emotions were informed by the Scientology theory that life goes on and on, and that the mission of the church is to clear the planet, so in the scheme of things the misery one might be suffering now is temporary and negligible. There is a larger goal. One is always working for “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics,” as Scientology ethics prescribed. And so the executives of the church who had given their lives to the Sea Org directed their confusion and their anger inward, or toward their helpless colleagues.

  Rinder was an inevitable target. He was seen as being arrogant and above it all. Few people other than Rathbun really understood Rinder’s job; unlike the others, the two men were often off the base, dealing with lawyers, the government, and the press. No doubt there was resentment at work as well. The next time the Sea Org executives turned on Rinder, Rathbun exploded. He caught his friend in a headlock and slammed him to the ground, then sat astride him, pounding his head into the floor and shouting at him, nose to nose. Rinder managed to whisper, “Marty, I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

  Suddenly, Rathbun froze. Words had been spoken that broke the spell. But it was only a moment.

  One evening about eight o’clock, Miscavige arrived, with his wife and his Communicator, Shelly and Laurisse, flanking him as usual with tape recorders in their hands. He ordered that the conference table be taken away and chairs be brought in for everyone in the Hole—about seventy people at the time, including many of the most senior people in the Sea Org. He asked if anyone knew what “musical chairs” meant. In Scientology, it refers to frequent changes of post. About five hundred people had been moved off their jobs in the last five years, creating anarchy in the management structure. But that wasn’t the point he was trying to make. Finally, someone suggested that it was also a game. Miscavige had him explain the rules: Chairs are arranged in a circle and then, as the players march around them, one chair is removed. When the music stops, everybody grabs a seat. The one left standing is eliminated. Then the music starts again. Miscavige explained that in this game the last person to grab a chair would be the only one allowed to stay on the base; everyone else was to be “offloaded”—kicked out of the Sea Org—or sent away to the least desirable Scientology bases around the world. Those whose spouses were not in the Hole would be forced to divorce.

  While Queen’s Greatest Hits played on a boom box, the church executives marched around and around, then fought for a seat when the music stopped. As the number of chairs diminished, the game got more physical. The executives
shoved and punched each other; clothes were torn; a chair was ripped apart. All this time, the biting lyrics of “Bohemian Rhapsody” floated over the saccharine melody:

  Is this the real life?

  Is this just a fantasy?

  Caught in a landslide

  No escape from reality.

  Rathbun, with his bad back, was eliminated fairly quickly. Rinder, De Vocht, Marc Headley—one by one, they found themselves standing alone, behind low cubicle walls, watching the surviving contestants desperately fighting to remain in the Hole rather than be sent off to God knows where. There was a clock over the door marking the hours that passed as the music played on and on then suddenly stopped and the riot began again. As people fell out of the game, COB had airline tickets for distant locations printed up for them at the base’s travel office. There were U-Haul trucks waiting outside to haul away their belongings. “Is it real to you now?” Miscavige teased. They were told that buses would be ready to leave at six in the morning. Many were in tears. “I don’t see anybody weeping for me,” Miscavige said. The utter powerlessness of everyone else in the room was made nakedly clear to them. The game continued until 4 a.m., when a woman named Lisa Schroer grabbed the final chair.

  The next morning the whole event was forgotten. No one went anywhere.

  In several legal declarations he has made over the years, Miscavige has protested, “I am the ecclesiastical leader of the religion, not the Church.” The distinction is important when the church is dragged into lawsuits or threatened with criminal liability; Miscavige can point to a chart that assigns organizational responsibility to other departments, whereas the sole responsibility of the Religious Technology Center, which he heads, is to protect Scientology doctrine and literature. And yet, Miscavige freely consigned those other department heads to the Hole or sent them to RPF. During the period that the organizational chart was being constantly rearranged, the only reliable posting on the base was his, that of COB RTC; everyone else was constantly being uprooted and repotted in other temporary assignments. There is really only one person in charge of the Church of Scientology.