Inside Scientology

by Janet Reitman

  Day-to-day life there was grueling. Though she loved her husband, Claire frequently thought about what she'd given up by joining the Sea Org. Her stepsister was planning to go to college. Claire, who'd looked at Scientology as the only education she'd ever need, would never have that chance. She also knew that she'd probably never have children, because it would mean leaving the Sea Org. This rule had not been in place when Claire was a child at Saint Hill, but by the mid-1980s, rules had changed. So that the Sea Org could dispense with providing child care for the very young, parents who had children under the age of six were no longer allowed to join. Also, women were not allowed to have babies while serving in its ranks. In the 1980s, those who became pregnant had to leave the order and work at lower-ranking Scientology organizations while raising young children.

  By the early 1990s, however, a new, even stricter policy was coming into force to prevent such departures. Members of the Sea Org were pressured to terminate their pregnancies.* Having kids was seen as bad for business, and at Int, Claire learned from casual conversation, a good 60 to 80 percent of the married women on the base had had at least one abortion, even several, often claiming indigence to force the county to pay for the procedure. If a woman resisted (and few did), she would be separated from her husband, put on heavy manual labor, and vigorously "sec checked." If she still refused to get an abortion, she would be sent from the base in disgrace, alone.

  Claire had never thought much about having children, but that changed when she married Marc. "I would often have these fleeting thoughts of how much I would love to have a family with him—not that I could ever express them. And not that we ever discussed it either."

  Such conversations were strictly forbidden; after all, a discussion of that nature was considered tantamount to a discussion of wanting to leave. And leaving, Claire knew from the moment she arrived at Int, was not an option. Though it was against the rules to physically prevent a person from departing, tremendous security measures were set up to keep staffers on the base. Anyone suspected of "disaffection" would be immediately reported to a collective security force known as the Perimeter Council. This group maintained lists of "suspects" who were seen as security risks. Those individuals were forced to do manual labor and endure long hours of interrogation. Some were put on a twenty-four-hour security watch, during which staff members shadowed them as they went about their day. A security guard slept outside their door, sometimes with wrists tied to the doorknob, to prevent them from escaping in the middle of the night.

  Electric fences ringed the property, topped by razor barriers that were said to be for the staff's protection—a deterrent to intruders—but in fact they faced inward, to prevent the staff from escaping. If a person got too close to the exit, underground motion sensors would activate a series of alarms and searchlights. In addition, electronic monitors, concealed microphones, and hidden cameras were installed throughout the property, and even outside the base itself. Security guards were outfitted with night-vision goggles.

  If a person did manage to escape, a special "blow drill" was launched. Ethics and security officers combed through the files of the escapee to determine where he or she might go. Then teams of Scientologists would fan out to the local bus and train stations, the airport, and area hotels to "recover" the truant, using information gleaned from the ethics files to convince the person to return. Back on base, heavy labor and intense interrogation awaited the recovered staff member. The defeated look of those who had blown and been recovered was enough to discourage Claire from attempting the same course of action.

  In 1994, Claire's "worst nightmare," as she said, became reality. She was nineteen, and pregnant. "Birth control was expensive," she admitted. She'd done her best to prevent conception, but having had no sex education as a child, she said, "I guess I failed miserably."

  Devastated and terrified, she told Marc, and they agreed that she should go through with the abortion at the local Planned Parenthood clinic in Riverside, where Scientologists from the base went regularly. A base staff member drove her to the appointment. "Every ounce of me was screaming no, and yet I felt like a cornered cat ... there was absolutely nothing I could do about it," she said. "If I tried to keep it, they'd put me on manual labor, which might hurt the baby. Not to mention that I had no money, no insurance, and I knew that I would be cut off from Marc completely if I didn't go through with it. So I did it."

  Two years later, Claire found herself pregnant again. This time, she didn't have to think about what she should do. Obediently, she had an abortion and then returned to work, training for her new job as a member of the Church of Scientology's police force. Claire had been given a promotion. She was now working for David Miscavige's Religious Technology Center, by then the most prestigious organization in Scientology. To even be considered for this exclusive order, Claire had to pass a battery of security checks and be deemed superior intellectually, ethically, and also physically: "COB," as everyone knew, loved having pretty women around him.

  The RTC is Miscavige's honor guard—some might even say a Praetorian Guard—comprised of a few dozen staffers at the base as well as maybe a dozen or so RTC representatives at key Scientology outposts like Flag. Their job, in addition to controlling the rights to all of Scientology's intellectual property, is to patrol Scientology for wrongdoing of any kind. No one else in Scientology has such absolute authority.

  Accordingly, no one else in Scientology, or the Sea Organization, is treated with such deference. The majority of RTC officials are young women, not unlike L. Ron Hubbard's original Commodore's Messengers. While the "crew," or regular Sea Org staff, queue up for meals in the dining hall, stewards wait on RTC staffers. Housekeepers tidy their rooms. The clothes they wear—in the 1990s, a simple blue suit with a white cotton shirt; by the 2000s, a black suit and shirt—are made of high-quality material and are purchased by the church. Other staffers shop for clothes at Wal-Mart and pay for them with their meager earnings.

  For the first few years, Claire worked at the RTC as a "corrections" officer, assigned to "fix" whatever was wrong with management executives who were not performing up to standard. Most of her job consisted of interrogating executives on the E-meter, investigating them for abusing drugs or alcohol, viewing pornography, or making financial errors. She also pressed them for details about their sexual proclivities: masturbation, a sin in Scientology, was a frequent problem for some men on the Int Base, she said. Claire was twenty-two when she started this job. Other women were as young as fifteen. "I remember being so embarrassed by some of the things I had to ask, but I think that was the idea of having someone like me do the check," said Claire. "How much more humiliating could it be, if you're a forty-year-old man, to be asked by some young girl if you've been masturbating?"

  Working for the RTC meant working directly for David Miscavige, who, like L. Ron Hubbard, smoked constantly and worked tirelessly—well into his forties, the leader bragged about staying up until 4 A.M. He frequently called officials at all hours of the night, demanding that they work round-the-clock shifts as well. Those who couldn't handle the exhaustion were routinely attacked for not being "tough enough." Toughness was an ideal that L. Ron Hubbard had promoted as "a distinctive SO attribute," suggesting that a Sea Org member was capable of handling any challenge. Miscavige, however, made it the definitive criterion, indicating whether a person could cut it in the Sea Org.

  To harden his staff, Miscavige brought back Hubbard's practice of "overboarding," which had been largely abandoned in the 1970s. Sometimes the base's swimming pool stood in for the Mediterranean, and its diving board served as the gangplank; at other times, the muddy lake on the property was used and staffers were pushed off a bridge. Many of these events took place at night, in the desert chill, without regard for the season. Miscavige, recalled a number of former Base staff, seemed to enjoy the spectacle; he'd often watch officials submerge themselves and resurface, freezing, while he sipped tea or cocoa, wearing a fuzzy bathrobe.

&n
bsp; This behavior was of a piece with L. Ron Hubbard's in the late 1960s. The Commodore, as his former aides recalled, also was captivated by the drama of overboarding: dressed in his naval uniform, he would watch, and sometimes make a film, from the deck of the Apollo as his crew members were tossed into the sea with feet and wrists bound. But few at Int, save men like Jeff Hawkins, Mike Rinder, and Norman Starkey, the former captain of the Apollo, had any recollection of those days, nor in fact of L. Ron Hubbard at all—who, it should be noted, also surrounded himself with young people, believing them to be the only Scientologists whom he could trust.

  Miscavige preferred an entourage of young staffers for somewhat different reasons. The leader of Scientology, the head of a multinational religious corporation, had assumed power with virtually no prior executive experience. Within a very short time of his takeover, it became obvious to longtime Scientology officials that Miscavige, while an able warrior, lacked the maturity of a stable manager. What's more, he had very little administrative ability. A micromanager, but famously impatient, he involved himself in nearly ever detail of church business, from legal strategies to carpet samples. If a project didn't deliver immediate results, he'd scrap it and blame his staff's inadequacies.

  Deeply paranoid—so much so that he ordered his water glass be covered with cellophane, for fear that someone might poison him—Miscavige trusted virtually no one and was openly contemptuous of anyone whose experience in Scientology predated his own. "I think he was panicked that someone who knew more than him might try to usurp power," said Jeff Hawkins, who saw in Miscavige a "manic desperation" that drove him to surround himself with naive young people who would never question his authority. Surely none of the pretty girls at the RTC would challenge the system.

  One of the most pliant girls was Tanja Castle, the daughter of prominent British Scientologists. A few years older than Claire, Tanja, a willowy blonde, was one of Miscavige's secretaries. There were more than one dozen such women in Miscavige's personal office, in addition to the ordinary RTC staff, and most were, like Tanja, beautiful, even-tempered, and under the age of twenty-five.

  Tanja was a favorite of the leader and his wife, Shelly. She went to the movies and out to dinner with the Miscaviges. At the conclusion of a particularly grueling work cycle, she and her colleagues might be rewarded with a day at the beach, a ski trip, or even a few days of vacation. There were trips to Europe and Caribbean cruises aboard Freewinds; Miscavige's entourage sometimes enjoyed scuba diving or jet skiing. "In terms of a Sea Org life, I had a great life," said Tanja. "I couldn't really complain, especially given how everyone else was treated."

  Tanja's husband, Stefan, for instance, never enjoyed the perks his wife received; this was also true for Marc Headley (Miscavige was notably uncharitable to the husbands of the women who worked for him). A wiry, handsome, and extremely headstrong young man, Stefan had married Tanja in June 1988, about a year after she arrived at Int. He was twenty at the time and a department head in the Commodore's Messenger Organization—nearly the same position Miscavige himself had once held at about that same age. Tanja and Stefan had begun what appeared to be a perfect Sea Org life, though like the Headleys, they wrestled with disappointment over not being able to have children. But they resigned themselves to that fate as faithful servants of the Church of Scientology. Raised by his Scientologist mother in Washington, D.C., Stefan had joined the Sea Org when he was twelve. He had every intention of spending his life at Int, as did his wife.

  But as the couple began advancing in their careers, things changed. Stefan became a producer of Scientology's technical films and live events; Tanja was promoted to the RTC. This made Tanja a "sir" to Stefan—just as Claire was a "sir" to Marc. It was weird, the girls thought, but they accepted it. Far less comfortable, however, was the unspoken rule that staffers in David Miscavige's organization should distance themselves from anyone not in the RTC, including a spouse. Of course many people ignored this—Claire was married to Marc, Tanja was married to Stefan, and many of their friends were married to men in other organizations. But there was always a subtle pressure to stop being married to that person.

  Tanja felt this pressure profoundly. For all of his initiative, Stefan would never ascend to the same echelon as his shy and retiring wife, who became a companion of "COB Assistant" Shelly Miscavige, a tough woman with very few friends. Shelly demanded that Tanja keep her company on Saturday nights. While the women ate popcorn and watched movies at the Miscaviges' condo on the base, Stefan spent the night alone.

  Before long, Stefan's resentment began to show. In 1998, while in England producing a live event, he knocked heads with Miscavige—over what, Stefan does not exactly recall. But Shelly Miscavige approached him immediately after the altercation. "What kind of beef do you have with Dave?" she asked.

  Stefan considered his answer: what beef did he have with DM? "You know what?" he said. "I hate that I don't see my wife. And when I do," he added, bluntly, "she's too exhausted to have sex."

  Shelly blanched. "Oh," she said. "Okay."

  This criticism would be Stefan's undoing. He was subjected to the False Purpose Rundown, put on the E-meter, and asked about his crimes. Why did he hate COB? What had he done to hurt him? Stefan maintained he'd done nothing. But Shelly was suspicious. As Tanja later explained, "Shelly was extremely serious about protecting Dave. She was like his bodyguard, doing whatever she had to in order to stop anyone or anything getting to him. She honestly believed that there were numerous people out to intentionally harm or destroy him—suppressives were all around." Those working closest to Miscavige, such as Stefan when he was managing the events, "were under constant surveillance," she added.

  Miscavige himself had always had mixed feelings about Stefan, as he did about most of his employees. It was only a matter of time before he would find fault in Stefan's performance. In early 1999, Stefan booked a venue for the church's Millennium New Year's Eve event, in Los Angeles, only to be told later that it wasn't available. Miscavige was furious about this logistical mishap. Major events like this one had become his chief fundraising tool; a perfectionist, he was often dissatisfied with some aspect of their planning or production. After this problem occurred, both Tanja and Stefan recalled, he began to look more closely at Stefan's management of the budgets, apparently convinced that Stefan had hidden crimes.

  To uncover them, Stefan's co-workers were audited in hopes they'd inform on him, he said, and he himself underwent an even more stringent form of interrogation, known as the Truth Rundown. Like the False Purpose Rundown, the Truth Rundown is a security-checking process specifically targeted at "black propaganda." Under duress during this interrogation, Stefan admitted to harboring deep resentments about the leader's lavish lifestyle, particularly given how parsimonious Miscavige could be in concerning truly pressing needs within the church. The leader seemed to think nothing of purchasing first-class plane tickets to attend Scientology events in England, for example, but he would fly into a rage if a few extra workers were flown over, in coach class, to help on the project. He would approve demanding plans for lavish new buildings, then become tremendously angry about the money being spent to construct them, almost always insisting that staffers were being wasteful. "It made no sense," Stefan said.* "But once those criticisms were known, my life was over. And because my wife worked for DM, my life with her was over as well."

  In June 1999, Miscavige, now believing himself fully aware of Stefan's "black propaganda," sentenced him to an indefinite period of reeducation on the Rehabilitation Project Force, which was located in a remote camp at the edge of the base known as Happy Valley. On its website, the church describes the RPF as a voluntary rehabilitation program offering a "second chance" to Sea Org members who have become unproductive or have strayed from the church's codes. It is not, in the strictest term, a "prison," if only because Scientologists agree to do the RPF of their own free will. There is tremendous psychological pressure to consider oneself fortunate to receive this cha
nce of redemption.

  "The way the RPF works is you agree to leave your day-to-day life and go through the program to explore all the areas of your life and what types of transgressions you've been committing," Stefan said. Upon arrival on the RPF, each person is given a partner, or "twin," with whom to spend virtually the whole time there, whether auditing each other, working side by side on a gardening or construction project, or watching to make sure the partner does not try to escape. Meals are scant, often just rice and beans, and communication is controlled: just as in Hubbard's day, people on the RPF are not allowed to speak to anyone who is not also on the RPF, which means that wives and other family members are not allowed to visit or call. The only communications allowed to and from RPFers are handwritten letters, which are screened.

  Stefan was entering his ninth month on the RPF when the church closed Happy Valley* and moved its fifteen-odd RPF inmates to the fortress-like Cedars of Lebanon building in Los Angeles, where they merged with more than a hundred other disgraced Sea Org staffers, including a number of high-ranking executives such as Brian Anderson, the former commanding officer of Flag's Office of Special Affairs, who had been sent west for rehabilitation after the Lisa McPherson debacle.

  Work consisted of cleaning, maintenance, and various construction projects: fixing leaking roofs, sanding doors, repairing air-conditioning units, hauling garbage. Five hours a day consisted of mandatory study and routine auditing and security checking. Like most of the people he knew on the program, Stefan had been promised the RPF would take six months. Two years later, he was still there (though that was nothing compared to the ordeal of some worn-down souls who had endured a far longer stretch—six to eight years).