Inside Scientology

by Janet Reitman

  Hubbard occasionally stopped by, "dressed in his denim jeans and jacket and peaked cap," as Chamberlin recalled, but he spent most of his time in the hills, where he'd rented a hacienda overlooking the sea, known as the Villa Estrella. It was from the patio of the villa that Hubbard recorded "Ron's Journal '67" in September 1967, announcing his breakthrough discovery of the Wall of Fire, something so physically taxing, he told his followers, he'd broken his back, his knee, and his arm over the course of his research. Chamberlin didn't notice that Hubbard had any broken bones, but he did recall that he had a "pharmaceutical store of drugs" at the Villa Estrella. "Most of the stuff was codeine-type pills," he said. "But this wasn't just for migraine, it was a whole wall of stuff."

  Chamberlin was one of a number of followers who believed Hubbard did most of his early OT research under the influence of drugs, as well as, perhaps, Jameson Irish whiskey, which Chamberlin recalled he'd drunk liberally at Saint Hill. In one oft-quoted 1967 letter to his wife, Hubbard admitted it: "I'm drinking lots of rum and popping pinks and greys."

  In Las Palmas, Hubbard eventually sobered up. "I don't think that Hubbard did any drugs after 1967," said Chamberlin. Indeed, those who joined Hubbard in the late 1960s say they never saw Hubbard intoxicated at all. "When I was with LRH, only twice in eight years on the ship did I see him take a drink of alcohol, and it was whiskey to warm up after a storm," said one of Hubbard's former aides, Karen Gregory.* "I never saw LRH take drugs. And I had access to all of his drawers, his closets. I never saw anything."

  By the end of 1967, Hubbard had recruited many more people to join the Sea Organization, as it was now called. They were a motley crew: of the fifty or so volunteers who'd sailed to Las Palmas on either the Enchanter or the Avon River, and the additional twenty Scientologists who left England several months later on the Royal Scotsman, almost no one could sail a ship. But that didn't seem to faze Hubbard. He convinced his devotees that they had sailed before—if not in this life, then in a previous one.

  One young Scientologist, Hana Eltringham, a South African nurse who'd joined the Sea Organization as a "great adventure," later recalled her terror at being put in command of the Avon River in 1968. To remedy this fear, Hubbard put the twenty-two-year-old Eltringham on the E-meter and ordered her to recall the last time she'd been captain of a ship. "My first thought was, this is ridiculous," she said. "Then I started to get vague impressions of a time in some past life when I was a captain of a ship and there was a storm at sea ... It was very real, not an imaginary thing at all." By the end of her session, she said, she felt calmer. "I went up on deck and felt the fear and terror in my stomach just disappear. I suddenly felt very able, very competent to tackle anything that came along."

  While learning the ropes, Hubbard's Sea Organization (like members of the Pubs Org, as Jeff Hawkins recalled) became test subjects for Hubbard's ethics conditions. The whole series of awards and punishments was instituted, including the wearing of heavy chains or rags to signify a degraded state. Crew members who were punished for a particularly low ethics condition found themselves condemned to a few days, or even weeks, in a dark chain locker in the bowels of the ship.

  By the latter part of 1968, the Sea Organization had arrived in Corfu, where Hubbard decided to give his ships heroic new names —the pedestrian-sounding Avon River, Enchanter, and Royal Scotman were rechristened the Athena, the Diana, and the Apollo, in honor of their Greek hosts. Of the three, the latter ship became Hubbard's flagship, also simply called "Flag." This ship became the setting for a particularly draconian punishment called overboarding, whereby errant Scientologists—be they Sea Org members or visitors who'd come to take a course aboard the Apollo and had somehow disappointed the Commodore (as Hubbard now was called)—were thrown into the Mediterranean. Hubbard or one of his immediate subordinates would initiate the ritual with a chant from the captain's deck: "We commit your sins and errors to the deep and trust you will rise a better thetan."

  "There were degrees of being thrown overboard," says Chamberlin. "There was straight overboard, overboard with a blindfold, or with hands tied; overboard with a blindfold and with hands tied, and then blindfolded with both hands and feet tied." He was once thrown overboard, blindfolded, he says, for ordering secondhand tires without approval.

  By the time Jeff Hawkins arrived on the Apollo in 1971, overboarding was no longer used*—or at least Jeff never saw it. The Sea Organization was now Scientology's senior management organization, and Hubbard's flagship, the only vessel of the original fleet to still be sailing Mediterranean waters,† was its headquarters.

  Hubbard tended to remain out of view. He spent most of his time locked away in the Research Room, his private cabin above the main deck. No one was quite sure what he did in there, though it was assumed that he spent at least part of his time exploring new realms, such as the OT levels, by auditing himself. Once, Jeff almost ran headlong into the Commodore, who was standing at the foot of the stairs, talking with his aides. "H-h-hello, sir!" he stammered. The other Sea Org officers looked at Jeff as if he were a fish that had flopped onto the deck. But Hubbard smiled at him. "Well, hello there!" he boomed, and laughed.

  That was the last time Jeff saw Hubbard on the Apollo. His days were taken up with the Executive Briefing Course, as the training was called. Much of it involved listening to taped lectures delivered by Hubbard, as well as studying, and in some cases memorizing, all of Hubbard's so-called policy letters, a voluminous collection of memos that outlined his concept of "management technology," a set of business principles Hubbard had come up with to streamline the administration of his organizations. His concept, Jeff learned, was the ne plus ultra of organizational theory, much better than anything one might learn at Harvard Business School. Every facet of Scientology—from sales figures and financial data, to membership, to the number of students being processed in auditing, to the employees themselves—was evaluated statistically. There was one guiding principle of this analysis: an organization or an individual should remain "upstat," or successful, at all times.

  While the Apollo sailed up and down the Moroccan coast, Jeff sat in a hold of the ship that had been outfitted as a classroom, absorbing Hubbard's theories about promotion. As with all other topics, the Old Man had very specific ideas. "Don't explain. Penetrate," he wrote. Don't waste time describing Scientology to the public. Let the promotional literature do that for you. Even when asked point-blank what Scientology is, never tell anyone. Just encourage them to find out for themselves.

  But, Hubbard insisted, do it aggressively. He advocated the hard sell, a technique he'd picked up from studying the methods of car salesmen. An important tactic was to avoid giving potential customers an option: telling rather than asking them to buy. This method worked, said Hubbard, the old hypnotist, because most people lived "more or less in a hypnotic daze," due to their aberrant state, and thus tended to respond to direct commands. Early Scientology ads embodied this idea, featuring slogans cast in the imperative: "Buy This Book!" or "Get Auditing!"

  Jeff wondered about this technique—wouldn't it be better to explain to people what Scientology was all about, rather than simply telling them to do something? But Hubbard was adamant. "We have learned the hard way that an individual from the public must never be asked to DECIDE or CHOOSE," he stated in one policy. Just tell them that Scientology could handle their problems, and then tell them to read a book or take a course. Then the Founder himself could explain Scientology to them.

  Jeff spent close to six months on the Apollo in 1971, one of forty Scientologists selected for the Executive Briefing Course. At twenty-six, he was regarded as an up-and-comer in the movement, as he had recently taken over the largest division in the Publications Organization, the Production Division, where all of the books, recorded lectures, E-meters, and films were produced. He was successful, and aboard the Apollo he was treated like a VIP. He was impressed with the ship and with the highly enthusiastic men and women who ran it with military precision. Mi
dway through his course, Jeff was invited to join them. "So what are your plans for the next billion years?" a Sea Org recruiter asked him.

  Jeff looked at the woman. He had recently been doing a new, super-secret series of auditing procedures called the "L-Rundowns," which were meant to correct transgressions from billions of years past. Something about the process was exhilarating. Once you got the idea that you had lived countless lifetimes, had been all kinds of creatures—from space pirates to emperors to soldiers—your current life seemed fairly provincial, a mere blip on the screen. "Well, I guess I don't have any plans," he said.

  The recruiter held out a contract. "How would you like to join the Sea Org and clear the planet?"

  Jeff signed. And so did every other student on board who, one by one, had been pulled aside and asked the same question. In 1967, when Jeff joined the movement, there were twenty-one official churches of Scientology around the world. Four years later, that number had more than doubled, and smaller Scientology outposts, known as "missions," were springing up as well. Now Jeff and his colleagues were challenged to grow Scientology even further: to "boom" the movement planetwide.

  Jeff was an artist, not a businessman. But he asked himself, Why can't I be an executive? The original Sea Org members, he was reminded, had been kids in their twenties, like him, with absolutely no technical experience. And yet they had learned to sail ships. It had been their duty to navigate the sea; now it was up to Jeff Hawkins and his colleagues to steer Scientology on land and make sure it kept growing, no matter what obstacles they faced. As Hubbard said, "The supreme test of a thetan is his ability to make things go right."

  This cannot-fail posture instilled an intensely competitive attitude within Scientology. Ultimately, it helped feed the impression that Scientologists were highly materialistic. In one 1972 policy letter to his finance officers, Hubbard summed up his philosophy: "MAKE MONEY. MAKE MORE MONEY. MAKE OTHERS PRODUCE AS TO MAKE MONEY."

  Despite this edict, Hubbard himself was not particularly concerned with money for himself. "He did not have extravagant needs or habits. His lifestyle was really quite modest," recalled his former steward, Ken Urqhart, who worked for Hubbard until 1974. "Neither he nor Mary Sue had huge wardrobes. Neither had noticeably expensive clothes"—although Hubbard did become attached, in the early 1970s, to "exotic naval uniforms," Urqhart added. Aside from his impressive camera collection and his beloved Jaguar sports car, said Urqhart, he didn't make a show of material possessions—quite in contrast to other gurus of the day, such as Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who owned ninety-three Rolls-Royces.

  But profits were clearly important to Hubbard. He was, at the end of the day, a businessman, and he viewed success based on his product and how well it sold.* To motivate his workers, Hubbard instituted corporate incentive policies. The sales statistics of all the organizations were handed in each Thursday at 2 P.M. and sent up the chain of command, along with a portion of weekly proceeds. Successful orgs that raised their income statistic were rewarded with more money, and their staff were given perks such as days off or dinners out. Those orgs whose statistics fell, on the other hand, received less funding; their staff members were punished with a harsh review and "lower conditions" enforced by the ethics division. Individual Scientologists and organizations that brought in new clients or encouraged existing members to sign up for more advanced courses and auditing might also receive direct cash payments.

  Most of the money made by Scientology organizations was plowed back into the organizations themselves. But some was siphoned off to pay the Founder, who by the 1970s held Swiss bank accounts as well as secret accounts in Luxembourg and Lichtenstein.† Money was transferred into these accounts from a Liberian shell corporation, the Religious Research Foundation, which had been set up specifically to build the Founder's coffers. In an interview with the New York Times, a former Sea Org executive named Laurel Sullivan claimed that she and other Scientologists "created fraudulent and retroactive billings" to make it appear that Hubbard had earned this money legally. "It was fraud," Sullivan said, "an out-and-out ripping off of funds that were supposed to go to the church."

  The pressure to keep raising more money was intense. Particularly in America, church staff struggled to stay productive, devising ingenious measures to do so. Throughout the orgs, a take-no-prisoners approach resulted in a huge boom in both membership and income. This had been accomplished by keeping staff up all night, and in some cases, locking members into rooms until they wrote a check for their next service. Those who couldn't afford it at the time were encouraged to "postulate," or imagine, that they'd have the money in the near future, and then write what were called "postulate checks." According to this idea, the member would have the money to cover the check by the time it was deposited. In practice this didn't work—checks bounced all the time. But such voodoo accounting did at least temporarily raise the orgs' sales statistics.

  To make sure the various organizations ran smoothly, Hubbard insisted that every member of the staff memorize a complex "org board," or management chart, listing every single post within a Scientology organization, from the executive division to the maintenance crew. In the 1970s, Scientologists recited the organizational chart at meetings. "All the staff would stand in front of that organizational board, and as a group they would chant every part of it," said Nancy Many, who worked at the Boston Org and held various senior executive posts at the international management level of Scientology. "There was a time when I could just rattle off that entire organizational board by heart."

  Hubbard dubbed this method "Chinese School." In his writings, he described it as a joyous singsong affair that could be applied to anything one needed to learn—a foreign language, a mathematical or scientific theorem, or Hubbard's elaborate, eighty-point tone scale. It was also a form of social conditioning. "Chinese School was an effective means of robotically learning almost anything," said Many. "You knew who was responsible for what, and what everyone was supposed to do, and it was ingrained—you didn't even think about it. From a standard of efficiency, it was felt that the more each individual member of the organization understood about the functions in other departments and divisions, the stronger the group would be. That was the good part of Chinese School," she said. "The bad part, of course, is you got your mind to meld with LRH."

  The Sea Org, of which Jeff Hawkins was now a member, enforced Scientology's codes, but only Scientology staff members were subjected to them. The paying public had no sense of the repressive environment at the orgs. They were being sold total freedom, even if the path to get there kept changing. Each year, new rundowns, or auditing procedures, were created to enhance members' understanding of themselves and their eternal nature. Tremendous emphasis was put on past lives—indeed, "Get 'em past life!" was one of L. Ron Hubbard's frequent proclamations, according to some former aides. If a Scientologist didn't have a past life experience, the argument went, something was wrong with his or her auditing.

  In a similar vein, the original goal of Scientology and Dianetics—becoming Clear—was now only the beginning. Signs had been appearing at Scientology organizations around the world, declaring a new initiative: "Go OT." Operating Thetan was Scientology's new product line—there were eight OT levels, each one promising a higher level of personal power and spiritual enlightenment—and over time it came to define Scientology overall. Hubbard's OT discoveries were the most carefully guarded secret in Scientology, and this was particularly true with regard to its most exclusive product: OT 3.

  Jeff Hawkins was primed for years for OT 3 by other Sea Org friends who'd done the level and hinted at something so fantastic, "it would blow my mind beyond anything I'd ever imagined." He waited more than five years to learn the secret. OT 3 wasn't something one simply purchased and then followed unreservedly, like other auditing processes. Scientologists had to be invited to pass through the Wall of Fire. Beforehand, they were put through a security check to verify that they were ready to receive this know
ledge. They then signed a waiver promising never to reveal the secrets of OT 3, nor to hold the Church of Scientology responsible for any trauma or damage they might endure during this stage of auditing. Finally, they were given a manila folder, which they placed in a locked briefcase; they were instructed to read it in a private, guarded room. Inside was a single-page document, written in Hubbard's longhand script, which laid out what seemed, to some, to be Hubbard's book of Genesis.

  It began like this: "The head of the Galactic Confederation (76 planets around larger stars visible from here—founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera) solved overpopulation (250 billion or so per planet—178 billion average) by mass implanting." This leader, a tyrant named Xenu, set out to capture the trillions who opposed him and deposited them in volcanoes on the prison planet of Teegeeack, otherwise known as Earth. He then eradicated them and all life on the planet with hydrogen bombs, leaving only the thetans, or souls, of the captives—which were then brainwashed, or "implanted," to rid them of their original identities. Millions of years later, when life began again on Teegeeack, the traumatized thetans attached themselves to human bodies.

  This was the crux of OT 3: that one's problems were not caused merely by the reactive mind, but by aberrant "body thetans," each one reliving the trauma of Xenu's ancient genocide. That trauma had set the course of human history, resulting in the social and political ills—war, famine, genocide, poverty, drugs, nuclear weapons, acts of terror—that had played out on the planet for generations. To truly clear oneself, a Scientologist had to audit each one of these body thetans through specific processes Hubbard had designed: unclustering them, clearing their engrams, and ultimately freeing them of their implants. This, Hubbard believed, would be each individual's salvation, and ultimately, it would be the salvation of mankind.