It is a fairly revolutionary thing to say: to shame not only the defectors, but the loyalists; to admit that the overwhelmingly negative reports about Scientology are not all "lies," as Scientology has claimed; to muse on whether or not David Miscavige is guilty—and yet, to still love the church. "I don't look at COB and think he's my Jesus Christ and can never be wrong," said Natalie—though if one were to suggest that LRH did the things Miscavige is accused of doing, she added, "I'd think you're on drugs because I can't imagine a man who was as brilliant as he was, and who wrote what he did, being like that."
Hubbard, by all accounts, was to a degree "like that." But twenty-five years since his death, which is two years longer than Natalie has been alive, does it matter? Scientology, like all religions, accepts even grave imperfection as part of the human condition and, like all religions, seeks to transcend it. In Judaism, this is called justice. In Buddhism, it is called seeking nirvana. In Christianity, it is absolution from sin.
In Scientology, the route from flawed to faultless is called "going Clear." Natalie hasn't reached that point as yet; she hopes to. She also hopes the same for the church. "I am a Scientologist because when I read LRH, it helps me. So when I hear these terrible things, it makes me want to stand behind my organization that much more and change it. And I know so many young Scientologists who feel the same way. We are the going to be the new face of Scientology."
Some of these people, she noted, have gone into politics, or medicine. Natalie hopes to become a judge. There are some who've become management consultants. Others have joined the Sea Organization. "There are as many different kinds of Scientologist as there are different kinds of people," she said. "But you can only change things by changing the way people think or operate; by educating them." That, she believes, is something LRH would highly approve of. "I want to make sure Scientology is the best it can be, and that we're the organization we want it to be. It's my personal responsibility."
Notes
Secrecy and control are hallmarks of the Church of Scientology. Writing a book about such an organization thus poses myriad challenges to a journalist trying to construct a truthful narrative. Though the early history of Scientology has been documented, virtually no credible, unbiased books, scholarly or popular, have been written about the past twenty-five years of church history. Also, very few documents pertaining to this period have surfaced publicly because David Miscavige's orders and directives are almost always kept confidential, circulated only to officials at the International Base.
Sourcing for a book like this is particularly difficult, first, because the Church of Scientology harasses critics and defectors who speak about it, and second, because Scientology has a highly effective self-censorship mechanism, in that members must confess their transgressions prior to auditing. As journalists are, by L. Ron Hubbard's definition, "potential trouble sources," unauthorized contact with them is something to which a person would have to confess, and thus members who do speak to reporters almost always do so with the permission of the church.
For example, in 2005 I interviewed Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley in Clearwater, Florida; in both cases, Scientology's Office of Special Affairs provided them with equipment to record our conversation. In early 2006, I interviewed the actor Doug Dohring and several other young Scientologists in a conference room outfitted with recording devices at Scientology's Mother Church in Los Angeles. Every other Scientologist I have interviewed has been personally chaperoned by at least one and sometimes three church officials. The sole exception was Natalie Walet, who spoke to me freely, on the record, in person, on the telephone, and through e-mails dozens of times over the past few years. I applaud her courage and honesty.
Because of the Church of Scientology's history of harassing and discrediting its critics and defectors, the vast majority of people who leave the church do so quietly. This book began as a magazine assignment for Rolling Stone and could not have been completed without the help of a former Scientologist whom I have promised not to name but who has served as my Virgil since the earliest days of my reporting, painstakingly explaining not only Scientology's language, beliefs, practices, and moral codes, but also the mechanisms of control by which the church suppresses or discredits the words of its former members.
I felt it was imperative to this book's credibility that it be based largely on the accounts of "quiet defectors" such as my Virgil: people who had neither sued the church nor spoken publicly about their involvement with Scientology in any way. Finding the right individuals took months. Gaining their trust took just as long. And getting them to agree to go on the record was, in many cases, an almost Herculean task.
One cost of a book like this one is the time it takes to complete. Over the years I was reporting, a number of my sources, emboldened by the Internet, decided to become more public. These include Jeff Hawkins, Marc and Claire Headley, Nancy Many, Steve Hall, Kendra Wiseman, Mark Fisher, Amy Scobee, and several others who, since I first began talking to them, have posted their stories on the Internet and talked to other journalists; Many, Hawkins, Scobee, and Marc Headley have also self-published memoirs about their years in Scientology.
Though I would be remiss in not mentioning this, I must also stress that not a single one of these people had ever spoken publicly prior to my interviewing them, nor had any of them pursued legal action against the church or written a book. Except where specifically noted, all references to these people, their stories, and their quoted words come from my own interviews and conversations with them.
Every bit of information in this book has been checked and cross-checked with multiple sources, and where I have found discrepancies, I have erred on the side of caution and toned down certain accounts whose veracity I do not feel I can comfortably prove. While this book relies almost wholly on named sources, there were a few people who, fearing retribution against themselves and their family members still in Scientology, requested I give them pseudonyms or total anonymity. Those few cases are clearly identified. I am particularly grateful to the Church of Scientology officials who spent time with me during my first year of research. This book benefitted greatly from their tremendous help.
Piecing together the complex history of Scientology is extremely difficult, and I could not have done it without the tremendous expertise and research of others, whose work I will try to acknowledge here. The early history of Scientology has been documented in two highly critical books: Russell Miller's Barefaced Messiah, which remains the best and most comprehensive biography of L. Ron Hubbard, and Jon Atack's A Piece of Blue Sky, which offers a remarkably thorough insider account of the founding and development of the Scientology movement through the 1980s. Though biased, these books are nonetheless essential reading for anyone interested in Scientology, and taken together they supply excellent insight into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard and the creation of his church.
Helen O'Brien's Dianetics in Limbo is regarded as the seminal book on the early Dianetics movement, as is Dr. Joseph Winter's A Doctor's Report on Dianetics. Paulette Cooper's The Scandal of Scientology was one of the first journalistic examinations of Scientology and is particularly helpful in describing the movement in the 1960s, as are George Malko's The Now Religion and Stephen Kent's From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam Era. For a sociological analysis of Scientology, Roy Wallis's The Road to Total Freedom is invaluable for its objectivity, though it covers Scientology only through the 1970s; more recently, J. Gordon Melton's The Church of Scientology, Stephen Kent's From Slogans to Mantras and his numerous studies of Scientology's Rehabilitation Project Force, and James Lewis's collection of scholarly essays, Scientology, provide the best, and right now some of the only, academic writing on the movement. I also found tremendous insight and much-needed interpretation of the Church of Scientology's practices and protocols in Cyril Vosper's The Mind Benders and Margery Wakefield's Understanding Scientology, first published in 1991 by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens,
and later as an e-book (www.religio.de/books/wakefield/us.html).
David Halberstam's The Fifties and Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War helped me understand the sociopolitical environment in which Scientology was born, as did Hugh Urban's excellent paper "Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America." I was hugely grateful to those who worked with L. Ron Hubbard who suggested I read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich to glean an understanding of the business psychology mindset of the 1950s and how that may have played into Hubbard's thinking. Scientology has been called by more than one critic the McDonald's of religion—I found this to be true, not only in terms of its real estate strategy but also in its overall franchising concept. To gain a better understanding of franchising, I found John F. Love's McDonald's: Behind the Arches to be a fascinating corporate study.
Phillip Jenkins's Mystics and Messiahs and Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay are excellent references on the development of cults and new religious movements, as well as the personality traits of gurus. I would have been lost without Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which provided both inspiration and in many ways an ideal model for how to tell the story of a little-understood religious movement. George Pendle's Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons was invaluable in providing research into the life of John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons and the culture of physics in southern California. For historical and sociological perspectives on the birth and development of Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century, my first and best resource was the journalist Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island of the Land; I also appreciated Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Kevin Starr's The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s, which devotes a chapter to Pasadena and Caltech.
Some of the very best coverage of the Church of Scientology has appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, theNew York Times, and theLos Angeles Times—Pulitzer Prize winners all, for their reporting on the church in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, the investigative reporter Richard Behar did some of the bravest and most groundbreaking reporting on the movement, first for Fortune, and then for Time magazine. The reporting of journalists at the Boston Herald and theWall Street Journal provided great help in my research into the Church of Scientology's social betterment organizations and its IRS tax battle and secret agreement; the Lisa McPherson case might have never come to light were it not for the reporting of Cheryl Waldrip from theTampa Tribune, who broke the story of Lisa's death in 1996. I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Robert Farley at the St. Petersburg Times for his continued assistance and research, and to his colleagues, Tom Tobin and Joe Childs, whose 2009 and 2010 reporting on abuse at the International Base confirmed many of the stories I had been told by former staffers and officials for several years prior. The thoroughness of the Times's recent coverage, particularly the paper's video interviews with Marty Rathbun, which were posted on the paper's website, were invaluable to me in piecing together the very complex story of Scientology's current leadership.
Though Rathbun, for reasons known only to him, chose not to be interviewed for this book, he provided a wealth of information on the church's recent history and the mindset and behavior of David Miscavige on his blog, Moving On Up a Little Higher (markrathbun.wordpress.com). Similarly, the former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder, whom I interviewed at length early in my reporting, has also helped fill in those blanks through his frequent posts and, while still a church official, was hugely helpful in shining a light on some of the more positive aspects of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, and the movement's early history.
Finally, L. Ron Hubbard's own books, policy letters, and other directives informed almost every page of this book and were made available to me through a variety of former Scientologists, through the Church of Scientology itself, and through the assistance of numerous researchers, notably Professors Stephen A. Kent at the University of Alberta and J. Gordon Melton and the J. Gordon Melton Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Library's Special Collections; I also appreciate the work of the researcher Chris Owen and, most crucially, Gerry Armstrong, whose tremendous contribution to the historical record of Scientology I have detailed in the notes for chapter 2.
Though there has been a profound lack of unbiased scholarship on Scientology, there is plentiful critical information about the church for those who seek it. Dozens if not hundreds of websites, with new ones popping up all the time, are devoted to debunking various aspects of Scientology and critiquing L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige. These sites, most of which have been created by former Scientologists or free-speech activists, with names such as Scientology-cult, Scientology Lies, and Operation Clambake, do not pretend to be neutral. Nonetheless, many could be characterized as an independent, if biased, research library: a repository for troves of Scientologist documents, newspaper articles, letters, affidavits, and other materials that might otherwise take a researcher months to acquire. Because scans of those documents have been freely posted on these sites, I have turned to many of them as a secondary source of information, keeping in mind their anti-Scientology bias. In every case, I have been extremely careful which documents to use; whenever possible, I acquired the originals or original photocopies of all historical materials.
All quotes are sourced in these notes except in the case of a subject who was interviewed by me and was speaking to me. Unless specified, it should be assumed that all quotes by a single source within a single paragraph come from the same page or document noted.
Scientology's policy letters and bulletins are voluminous, so when citing them in the notes, I have used the church's standard abbreviations. Hubbard Communication Office Bulletins and Policy Letters are referred to by the acronym HCO.
Introduction
The description of the New York Church of Scientology, and the people who work there, comes from my own observation and notes from several visits I made to the organization in July 2005 while on assignment for Rolling Stone. In order to get a sense of what a newcomer might experience upon simply walking into a Scientology organization, I concealed my identity as a journalist (though not my name or any other important details of my life) and was thus availed of the typical "orientation package" offered to newcomers: lectures, films, and introductory auditing. As this would amount to an "undercover" bit of research, I could not take notes while in the New York church. However, I wrote copious notes just after leaving it each day, recalling every part of my conversations and other important information gleaned from my interaction with Scientologist greeters and registrars. Many of these observations first appeared in an article I wrote forRolling Stone, "Inside Scientology," in February 2006.
The statistics on Scientologists' previous religious affiliations found in this chapter come from Scientology's primer What Is Scientology? and from the church's website, www.scientology.org.
page
[>] In Germany, where the church: Kate Connolly, "German Ministers Try to Ban Scientology," The Guardian, December 8, 2007.
in May 2008, for example: Anil Dawar, "Teenager Faces Prosecution for Calling Scientology 'Cult,'" The Guardian, May 20, 2008.
one outspoken member: Anne Wright, "Senator Nick Xenophon Brands Scientology a 'Criminal Organization,'" Herald Sun, November 18, 2009. Xenophon, an independent senator from South Australia, began receiving letters from former Scientologists after questioning the organization's tax-exempt status during a 2009 television interview. Those letters, he said, detailed "a worldwide pattern of abuse and criminality." Since then he has become one of the most vocal critics of Scientology, repeatedly calling for inquiries into the church's activities and the repeal of its tax exemption. In September 2010, at his urging, Australia's Senate initiated an investigation into Scientology and other nonprofit organizations; it then created a committee to ensure that such groups deserve their charity status. (Its work is ongoing at the time of writing.)
[>] "I d
on't think that's going": "Scientology: Former Scientologist," The Current, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, October 30, 2009.
[>] Roughly a quarter of them: Church of Scientology, What Is Scientology?, p. 463.
[>] "If it isn't written": Hubbard, "The Hidden Data Line," HCO Policy Letter, April 16, 1965.
"growing faster now than": Church of Scientology, "Frequently Asked Questions," www.scientologynews.org/faq/frequently-asked-questions-introduction.html.
1. The Founder
The true story of L. Ron Hubbard was unknown to Scientologists, and to the public at large, until the early 1980s, when a onetime Hubbard acolyte and church archivist named Gerald Armstrong left Scientology after eleven years in the church's inner sanctum, taking with him a trove of private letters, journals, files, and other materials that, as he said, "documented that Hubbard had lied about virtually every part of his life, including his education, degrees, family, explorations, military service, war wounds, scientific research, the efficacy of his 'sciences'—Dianetics and Scientology—along with the actions and intentions of the organizations he created to sell and advance these 'sciences.'"
This material, deposited with several attorneys for safekeeping, became the basis of a 1984 lawsuit, Church of Scientology of California v. Gerald Armstrong, brought by Scientology against its former archivist for theft and breach of trust. (The church did not dispute the authenticity of the documents themselves.) During the course of the trial many pages of previously unknown biographical data about L. Ron Hubbard, including his infamous affirmations, were read into the record, ultimately helping to form a counternarrative to the official life of Hubbard that the church promulgates.
Inside Scientology Page 42