Inside Scientology

by Janet Reitman

  Broeker's wife, Annie, stayed behind. Still loyal to Scientology, she was allowed to remain in the Sea Organization, but she was forced out of her position at the RTC by Miscavige and sentenced to a period of "rehabilitation" on the RPF, along with most of the couple's staff. The Broekers' possessions, including a new Ford Bronco, the horses, and a car that Hubbard had bought for Annie, were seized and sold by the Church of Scientology.

  With his last rival out of the way, Miscavige decided to remove himself as head of ASI, which was no longer the seat of power after Hubbard's death. The RTC, which held the rights to Scientology's trademarks and copyrights, was now the central policing and enforcement body of the church, and to gain control over it, Miscavige purged its top officials, including the Broeker loyalists Vicki Aznaran and Jesse Prince, both of whom had signed undated resignation letters when they began their jobs (something still required of all Scientology executives). Miscavige put himself at the helm of the RTC, creating a new title for himself: Chairman of the Board. Rathbun was appointed Inspector General of the RTC, one of the highest positions in the Church of Scientology.

  Only one task remained for Miscavige: to assert that Hubbard had never intended for the Broekers to lead Scientology in the first place. In 1988, he issued a proclamation declaring the "Sea Org and the Future" document a fake—though Miscavige notably did not cancel the rank of Admiral that Hubbard had bestowed upon himself in this document. "Of course, DM never provided anything [to prove that Hubbard hadn't written it] and no one was willing to ask and risk being sent to the RPF," wrote the church's onetime spokesman, Robert Vaughn Young, several years later. Miscavige claimed the Broekers had fabricated the document and had also altered other writings of Hubbard's creation, made during his exile. And since there were no handwritten notes or tape recordings of Hubbard's to contradict this account, most Scientologists, including the Sea Org members at Gilman Hot Springs, accepted Miscavige's allegation as truth. "DM had thoroughly discredited Pat by then, and the only information we had was what DM told us," said Dan Koon.

  "In the end, we were told that Pat was an estates manager for Hubbard and that's all he really was," said Tom De Vocht, another Sea Org member at the base. "Now that's odd because 'Big P,' which was Pat, was carbon-copied on every piece of written advice. But Dave said no, he was an estates manager. And Annie was the laundry person. And that was accepted because Pat and Annie were people no one knew. You saw them at the LRH death event and they were like gods, but then they were gone again. And Dave's in charge."

  "For the rest of my stay in [Scientology], Pat Broeker was never mentioned," wrote Young, a Broeker loyalist who was removed from his job as head of worldwide public relations for the church and sent to the RPF in 1989. Pat "became what in Orwell's 1984 is a non-person. He had been written out of history, with anyone who cared (such as me) being sent to the RPF or interrogated ... until they got the point, which meant ... that everyone else got the point."

  Two years after being sent to the RPF, in December 1989, Annie Broeker returned to Int Base. Upon her release, she and her friend Julie Holloway went Christmas shopping. She had almost no money, Holloway recalled, since the church had seized Broeker's valuables. But she was nonetheless determined to spend what little she had on a gift for David Miscavige. "She told me she wanted to buy something special for DM since he had helped her so much," Holloway said. "I couldn't believe it, after everything he'd done to her." Holloway, who left Scientology in 1990, had come to hate Miscavige. But Annie, who remains at Int to this day, never expressed anything but love for him, Holloway said. "She was totally broken."

  Outside of the closed circle of Sea Org executives, no one in Scientology knew of this hostile takeover. Most Scientologists simply saw David Miscavige as the anointed leader and the right man for the job. Among Hubbard's apostles, he was viewed as the truest of true believers: a purist who embraced even the most dogmatic of the Founder's scriptures, perhaps more stringently, some suggested, than Hubbard had himself.

  But Miscavige was also a notably sheltered young man who grew up within the bubble-like world of the Sea Organization. He knew virtually nothing of the needs of everyday people, nor was he particularly curious. "Miscavige is very, very cloistered," said Jeff Hawkins. "He never worked in a business. He never went to college. He never even ran a Scientology church or mission. The only example he had of a 'leader' was Hubbard, who, by the time Miscavige worked for him, was already on his way over the edge of sanity."

  In his prime, L. Ron Hubbard was a tall, robust, larger-than-life character: a Pied Piper who drew followers through the force of his own charisma. Miscavige was short, boyish-looking, and abrasive. Hubbard was a dreamer with great persuasive skill; Miscavige was a tactician who accomplished many of his goals through pure intimidation. "To call David pugnacious would be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about him," said one former associate. "You will never be as intimidated in your life as you are when you are confronted by David Miscavige."

  Hubbard seemed to crave approval; Miscavige kept his own counsel—he was not interested in Scientologists' love, but in their dedication and obedience. His role would not be the visionary but rather the steward who would consolidate Hubbard's movement, cleanse and repackage its image, sell it aggressively, and guide it into a new age. Ten years after his ascension, in a one-time-only interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Miscavige was asked about his rise to power. "Nobody gives you power," he replied. "I'll tell you what power is. Power in my estimation is if people will listen to you. That's it."

  At the time of L. Ron Hubbard's death, in 1986, the Church of Scientology, having weathered nearly a decade of scandal, was now the citadel of rules and codes its Founder had once imagined. In Los Angeles, Scientology's sprawling headquarters on Sunset Boulevard was a fortress, staffed by eager young Sea Org members in crisp naval-style uniforms and patrolled around the clock by security guards. Sophisticated locks, whose combinations "continuously changed," as one story in the LA Weekly noted, protected the church's offices and course rooms. But perhaps most striking, particularly for a movement promoting "total freedom," were the wanted posters that hung on the walls of the Los Angeles base, offering a $500 reward for information on different church "enemies."

  Miscavige's revolution had intensified Scientology's us-versus-them atmosphere. It had also created defectors, including some of Scientology's highest-ranking executives, who charged, among other things, that over the past several decades the Church of Scientology had defrauded and in some cases brainwashed them, subjected them to abuse through its punitive ethics policies, and then, after they left the church, continued to harass them.

  Though Miscavige and his allies denied these allegations, the defections proved to be a public relations disaster for the church. By the mid-1980s, juries across the United States were hearing cases brought against Scientology by its dissidents, occasionally returning judgments in the tens of millions of dollars. At the same time, a splinter network of Scientologists, known as the "Free Zone," was posing a challenge to the organized church by forming independent Scientology groups.

  The most prominent leader of the Free Zone was David Mayo, once the highest-ranking technical officer in Scientology and the creator of some of the church's most sophisticated auditing techniques. A Scientologist since the late 1950s, Mayo had been trained by Hubbard personally and later supervised the Founder's auditing; he also audited Hubbard himself. In April 1982, Mayo received a letter from L. Ron Hubbard appointing him the guardian of Scientology's doctrine in the event of Hubbard's death. Shortly after, the Commodore's Messengers, who'd received copies of the letter, circumvented Hubbard's orders by accusing Mayo, with a group of sixteen other senior executives, of trying to take over the Commodore's Messenger Organization. Mayo was quickly removed from his post in the purges overseen by Miscavige.

  But where many other executives in his position had abandoned Scientology, Mayo set up an independent auditing practice in Santa Barba
ra, called the Advanced Ability Center. Then he sent out a letter to the many Scientologists he knew, explaining the circumstances of his removal, and announced that he was open for business. Gale Irwin and DeDe Voegeding were among many Scientologists who flocked to the center in Santa Barbara. "It was wonderful," said Irwin. "There was none of the BS but all of the goodness of what we'd known Scientology to be."

  Before long, Mayo's operation was grossing $20,000 to $30,000 per week, using the same techniques and materials that Hubbard had created for Scientology. This, to the church, constituted "squirreling," which made Mayo a target for Fair Game. As Jesse Prince, then a senior executive in RTC, recalled, "DM became infuriated and ordered Mayo's new group to be destroyed using all means possible." The RTC began a newsletter campaign, denouncing Mayo as a squirrel and accusing him of a broad range of crimes ranging from falsifying records and "altering" Hubbard's teachings to "sexually perverted conduct."

  The RTC also organized groups of Scientologists who called themselves the Minutemen to hold noisy protests in front of Mayo's Advanced Ability Center. The church also hired private investigators to rent office space above Mayo's center and electronically bug his offices. One of these investigators, Eugene Ingram, was a former sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department who'd been fired by the department in 1981. Enlisting the help of other ex-cops, Ingram began a campaign of harassment, informing local business owners that they were investigating Mayo for white-collar crime and linking him, falsely, to international drug smuggling. The church also filed a RICO suit against Mayo's group, arguing that they were conspiring with other Free Zone dissidents to use some advanced auditing materials that the church claimed had been stolen from a European Scientology organization. In 1985, the church succeeded in getting a federal injunction preventing Mayo from selling Scientology services; by 1986, the Advanced Ability Center, bankrupt after several years of harassment and litigation, shut down.

  But by then, thousands of Scientologists in Europe and the United States had dropped out of the organized church, disillusioned by Miscavige's destruction of the mission network, which many people saw as Scientology's life blood. By 1986, though Scientology officially claimed two million adherents, Sea Org members put the numbers at far lower: perhaps 500,000. Anecdotal accounts during the early and mid-1980s reported an exodus of hundreds from individual Scientology missions across the United States and thousands, perhaps even as many as thirty-five thousand, by Alan Walter's estimate, leaving the Church of Scientology.

  But the tens of thousands of Scientologists who didn't abandon the movement readily accepted their leaders' assertions that Scientology was the victim of religious persecution and that the defectors were "heretics." The church responded according to the Hubbard playbook—with an adamant defense of Scientology. This campaign, known as the "Religious Freedom Crusade," peaked in 1985 and 1986 and involved thousands of Scientologists around the world. Its high point was the so-called Battle of Portland, in which thousands of Scientologists—a huge gathering of Minutemen—descended upon Portland, Oregon, in May and June 1985 to protest a $39 million judgment awarded to Julie Christofferson Titchbourne, a twenty-seven-year-old former Scientologist who had sued the church for fraud. When the judge in the Christofferson Titchbourne case threw out the jury's decision on a technicality and declared a mistrial, the Scientologists in the courtroom that day erupted in whoops and applause.

  The Christofferson Titchbourne reversal was a pivotal moment for David Miscavige. He not only needed to defend Scientology and establish his leadership, but he also knew the future depended on recasting Scientology as a mainstream church. Just as Hubbard had before him, Miscavige understood the power religion had in the culture and its effectiveness at bringing in cash. The 1980s were not unlike the 1950s in their conservatism and materialism, and churches that embraced those values flourished in this era. With the patronage of Ronald Reagan, and later George H. W. Bush, the Reverend Jerry Falwell became the most prominent religious leader in America, and his group, the Moral Majority, became a national political movement in which faith—fundamentalist Christian faith—was linked with upstanding social, economic, and religious values for the first time in decades.

  In a campaign spearheaded by Jeff Hawkins and his marketing group, Scientology now began to promote itself aggressively as a "major religion" —just like "Protestantism, Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism"—in glossy newspaper supplements. To forge bonds with mainstream Christian groups, the church urged members to attend local Sunday church services, mingle with the congregation, and introduce themselves to the minister and his wife. A key goal was to get local ministers to sign notarized affidavits affirming that Scientology was a "bona fide religion," according to one tip sheet published by the church. To butter them up, the document urged, Scientologists might tell the minister his sermon was "brilliant" and ask if he'd be willing to speak at their church. "He'll have a hard time refusing that one!" it noted.

  To further reinforce Scientology's legitimacy, the Religious Freedom Crusade began to sponsor ecumenical conferences in Los Angeles, reaching out to religious leaders of other faiths by impressing upon them that any legal action brought against the Church of Scientology was a threat to all religions. By December 1985, such mainstream organizations as the National Council of Churches and the Coalition for Religious Freedom had voiced support for Scientology and its "right to compete for converts without interference from the courts."

  But the cases against Scientology continued. In 1986, a jury in Los Angeles awarded $30 million to the former Scientologist Larry Wollersheim, who'd waged a six-year lawsuit against the church, which he charged had driven him to the point of suicide. In response to the verdict, the Religious Freedom Crusade descended on the Los Angeles County Courthouse much as it had the year before in Portland. This time it was the Reverend Ken Hoden, president of the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles, who spearheaded the campaign, at one point addressing a rally of over a thousand Scientologists; in his speech he compared them to the foot soldiers of the American Revolution. "If you want your rights guaranteed, you have to fight for them," he said. "Larry Wollersheim will never get one thin dime from the Church of Scientology!" "Not one thin dime for Wollersheim" became a refrain for the next twenty-two years, as the church fought consistently against awarding Wollersheim any damages.*

  With Miscavige's full assumption of power in 1988, Scientology began to settle many of the lawsuits filed against it, often by offering litigants and their attorneys cash payouts to stop their assault on Scientology. Along with a coalition of other religious groups, the church also pushed a bill through the California state legislature protecting churches and members of the clergy from being assessed large punitive damages in lawsuits brought against them.

  But Scientology faced one last formidable adversary: the Internal Revenue Service. Scientology's conflict with the IRS originated in 1967, when the agency, which had previously granted tax exemption to Scientology, revoked its tax-exempt status after finding that Scientology, and Hubbard in particular, seemed to be profiting from the operation. The Church of Scientology appealed this decision and refused to pay taxes—a stance it would maintain for the next twenty-six years.

  This reaction prompted the IRS to embark on a deeper examination of Scientology as a "dissident group." Between 1969 and 1975, the Church of Scientology and its activities were monitored by three different agencies within the IRS. Scientology, in turn, monitored the IRS as part of Operation Snow White.

  Even after Operation Snow White was uncovered, Scientology's war with the IRS only intensified. In September 1984, the U.S. Tax Court denied the church's appeal of the IRS's original 1967 ruling, concluding, as others had done before, that Scientology "made a business out of selling religion." The judge went into great detail about Scientology's many acts of obstruction, noting how Hubbard had once ordered his staff to mix up some two million pages of tax-related documents to make it difficult for IRS agents to sort through them. The c
ourt noted that "criminal manipulation of the IRS to maintain its tax exemption (and the exemption of affiliated churches) was a crucial and purposeful element of [Scientology's] financial planning."

  Meanwhile, the IRS's criminal investigation into Hubbard's finances had moved on to examine the activities of the RTC and Author Services, as well as their key officials. For several years, Miscavige would later maintain, he and several other officials were the target of investigation by the IRS's Criminal Investigations Division. The IRS didn't comment on the investigation, and the case was dropped with Hubbard's death in 1986. But Miscavige never forgot. To Scientology's new leader, as to its Founder, the IRS represented far more than a powerful government agency determined to "suck the blood from the whole country," as Miscavige once put it; it was the vanguard of a global campaign, launched by psychiatrists, to crush the church.

  "A tax-exempt organization is not subject to the myriad complexities of the Internal Revenue Code which can be used to harass and destroy organizations the IRS does not like," Miscavige told his flock. "But most importantly, because all bona-fide religions and churches in the United States do have tax exemption ... if the IRS refused to grant such to Scientology that fact alone could be used to [discredit] the church internationally." Without tax exemption, he argued, Scientology would never be seen as a religion. Nothing, in Miscavige's mind, could damage Scientology more.

  In 1988, Marty Rathbun received his next assignment from Miscavige: launch a campaign to win tax exemption from the IRS. The plan, according to Rathbun, was to follow L. Ron Hubbard's edicts in the most strategic way possible in order to overwhelm the agency and wear it down. To prosecute this war, Rathbun would rely upon the Office of Special Affairs, which he had helped establish five years earlier. Since then, OSA had carried out numerous assignments, ranging from litigating against Scientology enemies to far stealthier black operations, just as the Guardian's Office had always done.