Fair Game

by Steve Cannane

  For Eric Kleitsch, one of the Sea Org members tasked with cleaning the car park in preparation for James Packer’s visits to the Advanced Org in Sydney, Scientology still gives him nightmares. Spending 12 consecutive years on the Sea Org’s punishment camp the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF) has left him physically broken.

  According to Kleitsch, when he first arrived on the RPF he was forced to run barefoot on bitumen roads as a form of punishment. ‘I destroyed my heels and the arches of my feet,’ says Kleitsch, ‘and basically I tore the ligaments out of my feet.’79 The former Scientologist says he was forced to run on the road up to two hours a day for around a year. ‘It was painful,’ Kleitsch says. ‘Your feet would wind up at the end of the day bleeding.’80

  Kleitsch had arrived on the RPF with no money or no decent shoes. ‘The only shoes I could afford to buy for $5 from the army surplus store were army overshoes with no heels or soles,’ he says. The impact of his bare feet hitting bitumen is still being felt over 20 years later. ‘I can’t even wear shoes,’ he says. ‘I have to go barefoot or wear Crocs.’81

  The punishments against Kleitsch grew increasingly bizarre and barbaric the longer he was on the RPF. He says at one point he was forced to live underneath a squash court on the premises of Scientology’s headquarters in Dundas. ‘It was beneath the building,’ he says. ‘It was mouldy, cold and damp. I was basically there from 6 am till midnight, and then if I was good I was allowed to sleep in the concrete passage hidden away from the rest of the RPF.’82

  While he was on the RPF, Kleitsch was completely separated from his Scientologist wife, Liz. ‘We could only communicate by writing letters and the letters were vetted,’ Liz Kleitsch told me.83 On one of Liz’s birthdays, Eric stumbled across her. ‘I happened to see her in the passage and gave her a quick peck on the cheek,’ he says. ‘It would only have taken a second, and then Liz’s boss saw us and I was sent to the RPF’s RPF for that.’84

  In the end Eric Kleitsch’s salvation came courtesy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ‘I was reading about serfs in medieval England,’ Kleitsch told me, ‘and then realised I was a bloody slave.’85 From that point on Kleitsch was antagonistic to his superiors, who eventually had enough of his insubordinate behaviour and gave him what was called an ‘offload order’. He was no longer welcome in the Sea Org. After 12 long years on the RPF he was finally free.

  Eric Kleitsch got out of the Sea Org in 2007. He had entered Scientology in 1970 as an idealistic young student with long hair and bell-bottomed trousers. He had been attracted by Scientology’s underground status as a banned organisation, and by its promises that it was working to make the world a better place. Thirty-seven years later, Eric left Scientology a broken man. He’d escaped what he came to believe was a form of slavery. He was free, but he had no money to show for his hard labour, only physical ailments such as his butchered feet.

  After interviewing him in his Melbourne flat I took Eric down the road to a nearby pub and bought him a few beers. It was the least I could do after he had relived so many traumatic memories with me. As I caught a tram back from his home, Eric texted me:

  Thanks for everything Steve. That was the first time I’ve been to a pub in 43 years.86

  Scientology may have helped James Packer but it’s hard to see how it helped Eric Kleitsch.

  CHAPTER 20

  MIKE RINDER LEAVES THE BUILDING

  ‘OPEN THE LETTER BOX!’ The command comes so fast and with such authority, I do what I’m told. I am in Palm Harbor, Florida, arm dangling out the window of a black Acura RL, on the verge of doing my first mailbox raid. The driver barking the orders is Mike Rinder, the former head of the Church of Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs. We are parked on his neighbour’s lawn looking for evidence.

  This doesn’t feel right to me. I know it’s illegal to open someone’s mail, but is it okay to drive up on a kerb, with two wheels turning on the lawn and open their letterbox? I have to make a decision on the fly and I begin to rationalise. Rinder doesn’t want to check the contents of his neighbour’s mail; he just wants to read the name on the front of the envelope. I flip the mailbox open.

  The situation I find myself in is partly my fault. I arrived that morning at Tampa International Airport bearing gifts. I had some top-notch inside information that suggested that one of Rinder’s neighbours was a paid-up Scientology spy. Rinder, as the former head of Scientology’s intelligence wing, knew the best way to find out what her real name was. When I opened up the letterbox, however, there was nothing inside.

  From the time he left Scientology in 2007, Mike Rinder has been under constant surveillance. Spies cruise past his house on a regular basis, his rubbish is rifled through by private investigators, on one occasion seven Scientologists including his daughter, his former wife and his brother confronted him outside a doctor’s surgery as Miscavige’s executives yelled at him: ‘You are a fucking SP!’ ‘Stop doing what you are doing!’ ‘You are going to die!’ ‘You are trying to destroy Scientology.’1

  Just after I visited Rinder at his home in Palm Harbor he discovered a secret camera had been installed in a birdhouse on his neighbour’s property. It was pointed towards his home, presumably so it could monitor who had been visiting him. Rinder climbed up a ladder, peered into the birdhouse and disconnected the hidden camera. He filmed the whole episode and posted it online.

  While Rinder and his young family were being exposed to around-the-clock surveillance, I had managed to gather some intelligence on the intelligence gatherers. I was able to glean some inside information on a key part of the Church of Scientology’s external spy network that shone a light on the lengths they would go to to pry into the personal life of Mike Rinder and his family.

  One of the first things I obtained was a dossier compiled by one of the private investigation firms hired by Scientology’s lawyers. Included in the file were photos to help their expansive team of investigators identify prominent former Scientologists such as Mike Rinder and his partner Christie Collbran, Haydn and Lucy James and Tom DeVocht. There were photos of their cars and licence plate numbers to help in any stakeout. The files even included photos of their children and grandchildren.

  I also obtained key details about how the operation worked. Back when Rinder lived at his previous home, 15 minutes away in Tarpon Springs, a house was rented a few doors down and used as a spy base. The tenant monitored Rinder’s home and reported back on who was coming and going. Private investigators were hired on different shifts to monitor Rinder around the clock. If there was a car parked near his house the licence plates would be photographed and run through an identity check. Another house in West Clearwater was used as a meeting place before each investigator’s shift. They would park their cars at the property and pick up a rental car so Rinder could not trace them.

  Mike Rinder was not just being watched at home. If he went to the grocery store, the local school, or the airport he was followed. At times he was tailed by as many as six private investigators with a further one or two monitoring activities from the house. Journalists who met with Mike were also followed. It was a campaign of intimidation designed to stop him speaking out about abuse inside the Church of Scientology. Rinder was not the only person they were trying to silence. The private investigators hired as part of the operation were forced to sign contracts that stipulated they would be fined tens of thousands of dollars if they disclosed details about the operation.

  Not only did I get my hands on this key dossier, I also received a map and the location of the house that was used as the spy base. Another key piece of information came my way – that two cameras had been installed under the awning of the rental property, one by the front door, one down the side of the house. The two cameras had long lenses and were able to take photographs of who was coming and going from Mike’s home. Photographs of local reporters Joe Childs and Thomas Tobin, who had published a number of ground-breaking exposés on Scientology in the St. Petersburg Times, were taken outside th
e house and used as ‘evidence’ that they were somehow biased against Scientology.

  When Mike picked me up from Tampa airport I told him about the inside information I had acquired. After having breakfast at a local diner we headed to Tarpon Springs. We pulled in to the driveway of a cream-coloured bungalow in Anclote Drive and walked up to the front door. The cameras were no longer there because Rinder had moved out of the neighbourhood. But under the awnings, in the two locations I had been told to look for, were bolt holes that had been drilled either side of where the cameras were once fixed. We had been able to confirm what Mike and his partner Christie had long suspected – that a Scientology spy had moved in to their neighbourhood and befriended them as part of a covert surveillance operation.

  The rental property at Anclote Drive had been the home of Heather McAdoo, a single mother with a four-year old son. Her child was the perfect age to befriend Christie’s boy, who was just a year older. Christie and Heather had bumped into each other in the street a few times in January 2012. One day Heather knocked on Christie’s door and told her she didn’t know anybody in the neighbourhood. Heather invited Christie to a Pampered Chef party, a multi-level marketing sales gathering for kitchen products, not unlike a Tupperware party. Christie couldn’t make it, but, like a good multi-level marketing woman, Heather did not let go.

  Christie’s new neighbour now had her mobile phone number and bombarded her with texts. In her messages she came across as lonely and in need of a friend. She was constantly offering to help Christie and to organise play dates with her son. Pregnant with her second child, Christie held a baby shower and invited Heather along. For a single mum with no visible means of support, Heather went overboard on the presents, bringing along three gifts.

  When Heather found out Christie and Mike were looking to move to Palm Harbor, she offered to help them look for a new house. It didn’t end there. She offered to go shopping with Christie at Home Goods, invited her to board game nights at her place and asked if her son wanted to register to play T-Ball with her boy.

  Soon after they moved, Heather moved too, securing a place a few blocks away. Christie was by now completely creeped out. It didn’t make sense that a single mother with one child would move in to a three-bedroom house in a neighbourhood known for its manicured lawns and backyard pools. Christie decided to stop seeing Heather, but felt tinges of guilt. What if she wasn’t a spy? Had Scientology and its culture of surveillance polluted their minds and made them excessively paranoid?

  By telling Mike about the cameras in the rental property at Tarpon Springs I had been able to confirm that Christie’s hunch was right. It also showed the depths to which the Church of Scientology would sink to place the likes of Mike Rinder and Christie Collbran under surveillance. They would be happy to pay for an operation that saw a single mother use her four-year-old child as bait to create a fake friendship and infiltrate the lives of a family who had left Scientology.

  Armed with this new evidence, Christie confronted Heather about working for the Church of Scientology. She suggested she do some research about the organisation, texting a link to an article where videographer Bert Leahy had blown the whistle on Scientology’s squirrel buster campaign, an operation designed to harass former Scientologist Marty Rathbun outside his home in Texas. McAdoo responded by text, ‘Sorry for whatever happened to your family, but I really don’t know what you are talking about.’ (Heather McAdoo denies she was a spy, but did admit to me her then boyfriend was a private investigator.)2 Within two weeks Heather had moved out of her Palm Harbor home. Mike and Christie never heard from her again.

  It’s an extraordinary tale, but for those with an intimate knowledge of Scientology operations, it comes as no real surprise. This is the way it has been for Mike Rinder since he left Scientology in 2007. Just after I visited him he not only discovered the camera in his neighbour’s fake birdhouse, he also captured vision of a short tubby man in brown pants and a pony-tail stealing his garbage and placing it in his maroon Camaro.3

  These rubbish raids have been going on for years and were a standard Scientology tactic. A local waste management worker had confessed to Rinder that he was part of the operation. ‘The garbage man in Tarpon came and knocked on our door one day and said, “Look I feel really bad but they are paying me money to give them your garbage,”’ says Rinder.4

  Later on it was proven in court that Rinder had been subjected to even more dirty tricks. In 2015, Eric Saldarriaga, a private investigator from Queens, was sent to jail for hacking into emails. One of the people he had targeted was Mike Rinder. It can’t be confirmed whether the private investigator was operating on behalf of the Church of Scientology. The judge said he had no power to compel Saldarriaga to reveal who he was working for.5 But Tony Ortega, the New York journalist who writes about Scientology on a daily basis, was also targeted in the same hacking operation and the New York Times reported that, ‘The client is said to be someone who has done investigations on behalf of Scientology.’6

  Back when I first met Rinder in Florida I asked him how he felt about being targeted by Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs (OSA), given he was once the head of OSA, and was issuing the orders for various surveillance operations. He responded:

  I guess it’s poetic justice in some ways and in others it sort of motivates me to keep doing what I’m doing to put an end to it. It’s really just like water off a duck’s back to me. I really don’t care. I’ll turn around and figure out how to fuck with them more than they are ever able to fuck with me. It just doesn’t have any effect on me, but it bothers me that they do it to other people.7

  Scientology still hadn’t learned from its mistakes. It was continuing to rile its critics in ways that made them even more determined to continue speaking out. Just like Paulette Cooper, Julian Assange and the netizens in Anonymous, Mike Rinder was not about to be intimidated into silence.

  IN THE LATE 1970s and early 1980s, Mike Rinder, along with Marty Rathbun and David Miscavige, were part of the young guard who took over Scientology. After surviving the chaos of the Portuguese Rock concert of 1974 and two years on board the Apollo, Rinder moved to Clearwater, Florida, in December 1975 when Hubbard set up Scientology’s land base there.

  During the move, Rinder was working in external communications. He handled telexes, and picked up the mail and freight that was flown in from Los Angeles as the Scientologists got established in Clearwater.

  When the Guardian’s Office was dissolved following the disaster of Operation Snow White and the jailing of Mary Sue Hubbard, the Office of Special Affairs replaced it. Mike Rinder was one of the young operatives tasked with reforming Scientology’s intelligence and legal affairs wing.

  At the time, the Church of Scientology and Hubbard were under siege from lawsuits. The new Office of Special Affairs wanted to end the litigation and prevent further lawsuits. Rinder and his colleagues decided to clean out the bad people and the bad practices of the old Guardian’s Office. He says the disclosure of Operation Freakout documents from the FBI raids made Scientology vulnerable to lawsuits:

  It gave a really good foundation for people to come in with civil suits and say look at these people, they are like the lunatic fringe and it doesn’t matter how outrageous they make their claims, it couldn’t be more outrageous than what they admitted they did. So it was important to get rid of anybody that had been involved in any of those things.8

  The old Guardian’s Office acted autonomously from the Church of Scientology. It operated in secret and was accountable only to itself. Mike Rinder says when the Office of Special Affairs (OSA) was set up things changed. The church hierarchy made sure it closely monitored OSA’s activities and there was a basic rule for any new operation:

  It was do not do anything illegal. Don’t engage in illegal activities. Don’t do anything without lawyer signoff and authorisation. Don’t go trying to frame people for stupid shit – hit and runs and that kind of nutty stuff – honestly at that point I was aghast. I was
stunned I couldn’t believe that anybody would do that stuff, it was beyond comprehension to me.9

  The new dictates didn’t mean the Church of Scientology stopped putting people under surveillance. That could still be justified by the church hierarchy. ‘Spying isn’t illegal,’ Rinder told journalist Tony Ortega. ‘It’s not done by churches, I understand that, but it’s done by corporations all the time. It’s not very savory, but it’s not illegal.’10

  Shortly after being involved in the cleanout of the Guardian’s Office, Rinder became the head of the new Office of Special Affairs. It was a position he would hold for close to 20 years. Eventually he would combine that role with the position of Scientology’s international spokesman. With David Miscavige avoiding TV interviews following his experience with Ted Koppel on Nightline, Rinder stepped up to the plate.

  It was a hell of a tough gig. As Scientology started to face more scrutiny, Mike had to deal with more and more difficult questions. He was grilled about Scientology’s handling of Lisa McPherson, a young woman who’d had a mental breakdown and died on Scientology’s watch. He had to deflect questions about Xenu and Hubbard’s infamous myth involving spacecraft, aliens and volcanoes, which had leaked out during a court case. In 2007, he had to deal with one of the toughest questions of all. During an interview with the BBC’s John Sweeney, he was forced to deny allegations that David Miscavige had assaulted him. It was this interview that became the catalyst for Rinder leaving Scientology forever.

  The BBC Panorama program ‘Scientology and Me’ became famous for the footage of reporter John Sweeney losing his rag with Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis. After being taken through the brainwashing section of the Los Angeles Scientology museum, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, Sweeney screamed manically at Davis, ‘You were not there at the beginning of the interview! You were not there! You did not hear or record all the interview!’ Sweeney was referring to an interview he had done with a Scientology critic.