On 8 October 1993, Miscavige announced before a crowd of over 1000 Scientologists, ‘The war is over!’ The IRS had settled. It agreed to grant exemption for all of the church’s 150 entities, including the publishing house that produced Hubbard’s books. The irony is that while the Church of Scientology was trying to argue in the courts and to the IRS that it was not a commercial enterprise, it was trying to remove a potential critic, who just happened to be the head of its former for-profit company, by paying them good money to leave the country for an isolated property in Australia.
Neither Marty Rathbun nor Mike Rinder know how much the operation cost. Terri Gamboa estimates it could have cost millions of dollars once you take into consideration salaries and expenses, the cost of renting the farm, buying horses, paying Ian Markham-Smith and his business partner to run the operation and keeping the private investigator Dave Lubow on a retainer. Terri says no expense was spared. ‘They flew us to Hong Kong at least twice,’ she says. ‘They would take us to the fanciest places, they wined and dined us, they once paid $1400 for a five-course dinner for just four people, and it was all church money. No expense was spared when Miscavige’s power was at stake.’114
I FIRST MET TERRI Gamboa (née Gillham) in June 2015. Twenty-five years after she left the Sea Org she was still wary about being followed while talking to a journalist. Our meeting place was a secret. I was told to ring her when I was ready to be picked up. When I called, the instructions were direct. She would pick me up on the third floor of the car park of the low-rent Las Vegas casino I was staying at. ‘Make sure you’re not tailed,’ she told me. When I got in the car she took me to a Cheesecake Factory outlet in a nearby shopping plaza. We talked for hours about her amazing life inside Scientology.
It was the first time Terri had agreed to be interviewed by a journalist since she fled the Sea Org. In 1991, legendary news anchor Ted Koppel had tracked her down and asked if she wanted to go on Nightline and debate David Miscavige. It would have made for explosive television, but Terri declined the offer. ‘I had just escaped from a very dangerous prison and was in no frame of mind to do that.’115 Twenty-five years later Terri was ready to talk.
In a subsequent conversation Terri made an extraordinary revelation. Up until the week before we met she was weighing up whether she would be part of a Scientology takeover bid. Former Sea Org members were urging her to go back in, use her status as a lifetime trustee and try and kick Miscavige out. ‘I had this vision that I would go in, clean it all up and make it into the good we all thought it was supposed to be,’ she told me. ‘We thought we could change it for the good and make it a great movement that really helped people, not the insidious controlling and overpowering entity that it has become.’116
There were people around the edges of Scientology, disenfranchised believers in Hubbard, who felt Miscavige had perverted his ideas, and wanted to see Terri lead a takeover. Terri thought long and hard about the ramifications. Even if she were successful in knocking off Miscavige, who was a master at both seizing and keeping power, she would inherit a nightmare scenario. Any reformation of Scientology would require a reconciliation process that would involve admitting to previous abuses and providing compensation.
Terri believes that process, while necessary, would paralyse the Church of Scientology. ‘It would be a domino effect,’ she says. ‘As soon as Miscavige was gone many would want to have a refund. We would give everybody a refund that wanted one and deserved one, but once you start doing that it would be a nightmare. With the mess that Miscavige has created and the number of people he has ripped off there might be nothing left. It could bankrupt the church and take years to clean up this mess and figure it all out.’117
In 1990, Terri had left the Sea Org because of the culture of abuse that she saw up close on the inside. Now, she wanted to speak up about what she could see from the outside – the damage and destruction that the policy of disconnection had caused by tearing families apart and preventing those suffering from abuse on the inside from escaping for fear of never seeing their family members again.
Instead of getting involved in a takeover bid, Terri pursued another plan. She tried to contact Miscavige to see if a peaceful resolution could be brought about through cancelling the policy of disconnection. Terri wanted to propose a general amnesty where all former Sea Org members who had left and been declared ‘suppressive’ would be allowed to see family members on the inside. She made several attempts at trying to organise a meeting with Miscavige and spoke with his lawyer Monique Yingling.
For Terri the policy of disconnection is the biggest issue that Scientology must deal with. ‘Families need to be able to reunite and those who want Scientology can have it and those who don’t should be left alone. There’s something wrong when you have to abuse people, lock them up, manipulate and control them in order to make them believe in a faith, and they can’t speak out or they will be declared a “Suppressive Person” and forced to disconnect from their family and friends. This is America, the land of the free, it’s shocking that this goes on in this country and they get away with it.’118
Miscavige would not respond to Terri’s approaches. ‘Of course cancelling disconnection would only damage his power,’ says Terri, ‘as disconnection is his sole protection from those inside finding out about the truth on the outside. Once disconnection was gone it would tear down his wall of protection and security. It is his only insurance policy for maintaining complete power and control over the church and every person in there.’119
Terri is concerned that by speaking out after all this time she is making herself a target. After all, the Church of Scientology had a private investigator infiltrate her business in the years when she remained silent. ‘He will now come after me and will have OSA publish all kinds of bad statements about me to try and discredit me,’ she says. ‘This is their routine, they will try to harm my business, my income, my livelihood and my wellbeing. I am saying it now so that if anything happens to me you can follow the trail and you will find them behind it.’120
While Terri considered being involved in an attempt to reclaim Scientology from Miscavige, she decided she was not the person to lead it. For starters her husband, Fernando, did not want her to do it. ‘He feels it’s too late for reform and that the church is doomed,’ she says.121 Further to that, Terri questioned whether she had the desire to go through with it. ‘I’m 60 years old,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to take on something like that at my age. I have worked hard all my life. I was a slave as a kid. I’ve worked my butt off my whole life. I want to start relaxing a bit and I would never be able to do that if I took this on, and for what? Who’s going to appreciate it? You’d be in the crossfire – there’s so much animosity and hatred on both sides.’122
We will never know if Terri Gamboa, as a lifetime trustee, would have had the legal authority, or the internal support, to dethrone David Miscavige. That moment has now passed. One thing is for sure, if Miscavige did not have the legal authority to remain in control, he would have used every dirty trick imaginable to hang on to power. Terri is comfortable she made the right decision in 2015 to stay out, just as she made the right decision in 1990 to get out.
CHAPTER 17
JULIAN ASSANGE’S NOISY INVESTIGATION
OVER A DECADE BEFORE Mike Huckabee wanted him executed, and Sarah Palin thought he should be ‘pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders’,1 Julian Assange had a different bunch of enraged Americans on his case. At the time, Assange did not need any more trouble. He had just avoided a jail sentence after pleading guilty to 25 hacking charges, and was in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle over his son. Then he found himself under investigation from the Church of Scientology.
On a spring day in Melbourne in 1997, Assange was at home in the two-bedroom brick house he shared with his young son, Daniel, when the phone rang. On the line was Roger Middleton, a private investigator working for the Scientologists. The former Australian Federa
l Police agent had got hold of Assange’s unlisted number and started pumping the 26-year-old for information. Middleton was conducting what Hubbard referred to as a Noisy Investigation.
Assange had been ignoring legal threats from Scientology lawyers in California and needed to be taught a lesson. ‘The way Scientology works,’ Assange told me, ‘is it does sub-surface investigations where the targets do not know they are being investigated, and it does investigations where the targets do know and the investigations are deliberately noisy. Their purpose is not to gain intelligence, their purpose is to create fear – to create a specific deterrence and a general deterrence – this was a noisy investigation – the private investigator said he was working for Scientology.’2
As was the case with WikiLeaks over a decade later, Assange was in trouble for publishing secrets. At the time, he was running Suburbia.net, a non-profit Internet Service Provider (ISP) staffed by volunteers. ‘We were the free speech ISP in Australia,’ he says.3
Suburbia was hosting an anti-Scientology website run by university student David Gerard. The site had published secret Scientology literature including excerpts from confidential course materials for Operating Thetan Level VII (OT VII). The Church of Scientology guarded these secrets closely. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to go up ‘the Bridge’. If some computer geek in Melbourne published parts of the course online, it removed some of the mystique surrounding Scientology’s upper levels and undermined their ability to make money from them.4
Helena Kobrin, a Scientology lawyer in California, who specialised in the cease and desist letter, sent a series of legal threats to Assange. Kobrin accused Suburbia of violating copyright law in Australia and the US. The Scientology lawyer warned Assange: ‘We are currently involved in litigation over the same and similar materials in several lawsuits.’5 Kobrin claimed her client had already been awarded damages and that in one case in San Jose, in which Netcom was the defendant, ‘the court ruled an access provider which is informed that infringement is occurring through its system and does nothing to stop it can be liable for contributory infringement’.6
At the time, Netcom boasted that it was the largest ISP in the world. If the Church of Scientology was willing to take them to court, what hope was there for a small non-profit run by volunteers in Melbourne?
As US officials would come to learn in later years, Assange was not easily intimidated. The hacking charges he had pleaded guilty to related to an operation that had embarrassed the US military. Assange and two colleagues, who formed a collective known as the International Subversives, had hacked into what the author of Underground, Suelette Dreyfus, described as ‘the Who’s Who of the American military-industrial complex’,7 including the Pentagon, NASA and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia.
Julian Assange was not about to be steamrolled by the Church of Scientology. Not only did he possess the crazy/brave attitude required to hack into the Pentagon, he and his peers had strong beliefs in the importance of fighting for freedom of speech in cyberspace. ‘As people involved in building an Internet to bring knowledge to the people – to bring ideas from one part of the world to another,’ Assange told me, ‘we saw this interference by Scientology as an attack on all the things we had been building and dreaming for. These were not just isolated attacks. Scientology was setting adverse precedents in some of its legal suits which went on to be used by other corporations trying to silence speech on the Internet.’8
Assange ignored the legal threats and refused to pass on information about the website’s founder, David Gerard, to Scientology’s private investigator. ‘The guy’s got balls of titanium,’ says Gerard.9 The two met online in 1995 when the Victoria University of Technology (VUT) caved to pressure from the Church of Scientology and locked Gerard’s student computer account after he made critical posts online about Scientology. Assange provided Gerard with an alternative account and a platform to set up an anti-Scientology website.
From the outside, the Scientology lawyers might have considered the pair soft targets – a couple of impoverished 20-somethings with no corporate or legal backing. But Assange and Gerard had other things going for them. They were smart, had spare time and shared a love of troublemaking. ‘He is an inveterate shit-stirrer,’ says Gerard.10 The pair were fuelled by a surplus of outrage. Having no money bought them even more freedom. They acted like men who had nothing to lose.
An editor with the student newspaper No Name, and a member of the VUT Student Representative Council, David Gerard became interested in Scientology through his love of William S. Burroughs. The beat writer had a complicated relationship with Scientology. In 1968, he went ‘clear’ while on a course at Saint Hill, writing that ‘Scientology can do more in ten hours than psychoanalysis can do in ten years’.11 Yet Burroughs also railed against Scientology’s founder, criticising Hubbard’s ‘fascist utterances’12 and Scientology’s ‘control system … with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties’.13 Gerard had a curious mind and wanted to find out more. In the early days of the Internet, Usenet newsgroups sprung up. A precursor to online forums, they were basically discussion groups formed around a common interest. A conversation would start around a certain topic and members could then respond. Newsgroups formed around a diverse range of subcultures such as hackers, astrophysicists, muscle car enthusiasts and fans of The Simpsons.
One of the most popular newsgroups in the 1990s was alt. religion.scientology. Started in 1991 by Scott Goehring, another renegade 20-something, partly as a joke and partly as he described it ‘because I felt Usenet needed a place to disseminate the truth about this half-assed religion’.14 To initiate the group Goehring used a forged message, signing in as [email protected], a made-up email address based around a misspelling of the name of Scientology’s leader.
Back in Melbourne, David Gerard started engaging with others on alt.religion.scientology. His curiosity about William S. Burroughs led him headlong into the first big freedom of speech battle in cyberspace, in what became known as Scientology v the Internet. The Church of Scientology had just triumphed in its long-running conflict with the taxman, but it was about to become engaged in a guerrilla war with an enemy it would find impossible to defeat.
In the first two years of its operation, posters to alt.religion. scientology could generally be split into three categories. Critics, supporters and members of the Freezone – Independent Scientologists who embraced Hubbard’s technology but rejected the way the Church of Scientology was being run.15 The newsgroup hosted arguments about the E-Meter, the purification rundown and other aspects of Hubbard’s technology. It was a fairly niche operation. But that small newsgroup began to reach a much larger audience once the Church of Scientology tried to control it.
In 1994, Elaine Siegel from the Office of Special Affairs released an internal Scientology memo titled, ‘Briefing to all Scientologists on the Internet.’16 The letter began:
Dear Scientologist,
As you know, there has been quite a bit of false and derogatory information going out over the Internet by a few detractors, squirrels etc … We have a plan of action that we are taking, to simply outcreate the entheta [upsetting information] on these newsgroups.17
Elaine Siegel’s plan was to encourage Scientologists to bombard alt.religion.scientology with positive messages. ‘If you imagine 40–50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days, we’ll just run the SP’s [Suppressive Persons] right off the system. It will be quite simple, actually.’18
It was not as simple as Siegel made out. The letter soon leaked onto alt.religion.scientology and spread like wildfire. As Wendy Grossman, the author of Net.Wars wrote: ‘Its widespread circulation heated the debate to yet another degree, bringing a new constituency into the newsgroup: people who wanted to defend the Net against what they saw as a threat to their freedom. Many of them knew nothing about Scientology except for that letter, and they were incensed.’19
Just before Christmas 1994, messages posted t
o alt.religion. scientology started being removed by a cancelbot – a program that sends messages to Usenet groups to remove certain postings. In most cases, the posts targeted involved discussions about Scientology’s ‘Advanced Technology’ secrets.20 These tactics further enraged the free speech advocates, but the Scientologists were only just getting started.
In January 1995, Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin tried to get alt.religion.scientology shut down. Kobrin posted a ‘remove group’ message on Usenet that read:
We request that you remove the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup from your site. The reasons for requesting its removal are: (1) It was started with a forged message; (2) not discussed on alt.config; (3) it has the name ‘scientology’ in its title which is a trademark and is misleading, as a.r.s [alt. religion.scientology] is mainly used for flamers to attack the Scientology religion; (4) it has been and continues to be heavily abused with copyright and trade secret violations and serves no purpose other than condoning these illegal practices.21
The system administrators knocked back the lawyer’s plea to shut down the newsgroup. Instead of restricting debate, Kobrin’s intervention made alt.religion.scientology a haven for online activism, attracting sceptics and free speech advocates who piled in to the debate. The newsgroup became bigger and nastier. It morphed into what Wendy Grossman described as ‘one of the most contentious, roisterous, fiery, and vicious newsgroups ever’.22 The Church of Scientology was never going to take it lying down. Heeding the words of its founder, it attacked all of its critics. The war being waged in cyberspace had become toxic and it was about to move offline.
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