The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (12 page)

Bruce Hines – auditor to the stars – reflected: ‘Lifton had done some research into prison camps in China and mind control. It resonated with me when I read that. Those are methods that kept me in that mindset for thirty years.’

Let’s take Lifton’s tests for brainwashing one at a time. Together, they provide some kind of intellectual framework for assessing whether or not the Church brainwashes – a charge Tommy Davis vehemently denied to me in the Industry of Death exhibition and one it continues to deny in the strongest possible terms.

Test Number One is ‘Milieu Control’. Lifton writes: ‘The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also – in his penetration of his inner life – over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell’s
1984
.’ The most basic consequence of this information control, says Lifton, ‘is the disruption of balance between self and outside world.’

Bruce told me: ‘When I was in, if I heard someone say something negative about Scientology, I would instantly not listen to what the person was saying. I would think that person is a suppressive. You get into that sort of a mindset. And when I was in the Sea Organisation it would have been unthinkable for me to have a cell phone, to have a personal computer, to even get certain magazines. The mail I would receive would be read before I would receive it. Any mail that I would send out would be read before it could go out. And if there was anything wrong it would get kicked back. There are many, many ways where I believe it is a mind control organisation. A big one is to shut out any counter ideas, any critical ideas. When I was in, I was actually in the frame of mind where I would not listen to some critical thing about it. I would immediately dismiss it. I wouldn’t even hear the words really.’

Test Number Two is ‘Mystical Manipulation’: adherents are, Lifton writes, ‘impelled by a special kind of mystique which not only justifies such manipulations, but makes them mandatory. Included in this mystique is a sense of “higher purpose”… By thus becoming the instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions – the Party, the Government, the Organisation. They are the agents “chosen” (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural force) to carry out the “mystical imperative”, the pursuit of which must supersede all considerations of decency or of immediate human welfare.’

Enter Lord Xenu. Can Scientology’s struggle against the space alien Satan be classed as a ‘mystical imperative’? What was Bruce’s take on the ‘Wall of Fire?’

‘It’s taught at the level of Operating Thetan III. OT3, it’s a big deal, you hear about from the day you first get interested and then when you do this level you’re going to have these great abilities. You’ll be way above an average human being, and you have to undergo very strict security clearance to even get access to these materials. They’re supposed to be very secret. The cosmology, the idea is that it goes back literally quadrillions of years. The current estimate on the Big Bang is fourteen billion, so this is orders of magnitude longer than you and I supposedly have existed. Relatively recently, seventy-five million years ago, there was this character named Xenu who was an emperor of a galactic federation and this is what… I read it and at the time I thought “oh cool!”’

What did Xenu do?

‘There were twenty-six stars that are in this part of the galaxy, and so he had people killed and brought to earth and placed in or on volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs, and then their souls are captured by an electronic ribbon he said, and then they are pulled down and given what is called an “implant” in Scientology, and this is basically pictures of forests to implant false ideas into the being.’

I didn’t quite follow this, but Bruce wasn’t finished.

‘And the main part about OT3 and one of the things that is so secret about it is that a lot of these implanted souls are now stuck to our bodies, and they’re here and there and there. Now supposedly I got rid of them on OT3. Although when you go onto the higher levels you find out that there are more of these body entheta they’re called. And because they’re implanted seventy-five million years ago, they influence the way you think and what you believe about things. A Scientologist who knew would say that you yourself, the fact that you’re doing a story on Scientology, you’re not really doing it out of your own freewill but you’re like a robot carrying these evil things from the past to try to keep Scientology from succeeding.’

So a fundamental belief to Scientology is that we’re actually contaminated by bits of space aliens?

‘Very definitely so. It’s patently false.’

Test Number Three, ‘The Demand for Purity’, sets out the goal of absolute purity, and reflects: ‘thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continual reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition… Once an individual person has experienced the totalist polarization of good and evil, he has great difficulty in regaining a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities of human morality.’

This test, ‘The Demand For Purity’, implies war against the impure. Was the Church in any way critical of Bruce? He is, says, Freedom Magazine, a liar and a religious bigot. ‘In 2001,’ while he was still inside, ‘Hines wrote a 13-page public announcement in which he detailed the Suppressive Acts he had committed… Lying was a constant unchanging pattern with Hines.’ Generating guilt and shame drip from virtually every line of Freedom Magazine.

To repeat, Bruce struck me as a painfully honest man.

Test Number Four is ‘The Cult of Confession’. This, Lifton writes, ‘is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is a demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed… In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.’ Lifton identifies three special meanings of the totalist confession: first, a ‘perpetual psychological purge of impurity’; second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender; third, it is a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organisation) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.’

In the Church of Scientology, does confession become a means of exploitation?

Bruce audited Nicole Kidman and Kirstie Alley and, briefly, Tom Cruise.

Auditing is Scientology’s version of confession, with the added element of the confessant holding two tin cans, or something like that, which connect to the E-meter, a kind of Bakelite box with a needle and dial. The E-meter works as a kind of crude lie or truth detector. The auditor asks questions. Quite different from the Catholic confession, the more the confessant confesses, the more the auditor probes the sins or crimes: what exactly did you think? Did you want to have sex with her? How did you have sex with her? It can be a probing and invasive investigation of sin, not just an admission. The question is – to what end? To help the person to lead a better life? Or to spy on them?

The Church has told the BBC that auditing sessions are routinely recorded for training purposes. What happens with that information is hotly disputed.

Ecclesiastically, when Bruce audited Cruise, he was the confessor and Cruise the lowly parishioner. But it didn’t work out like that, he said. Bruce described a fateful session which ended badly for him. ‘You’re supposed to have what’s called a floating needle, that’s a certain motion that the needle is supposed to do, that’s considered a good thing. And so I’m doing this exam on him and he’s there and he has a big smile and he said something very brief like “that was a good session” or something, but I didn’t see this floating needle immediately and so I was sort of waiting to see if one would happen. And then I saw a floating needle and then I told him that, “Your needle’s floating, Tom”, but then later I was told he complained that I was too slow and so I wasn’t allowed to do these exams on him anymore. In a regular organisation that wouldn’t happen, but with the kid-glove treatment that Tom Cruise was getting, they would get someone who wouldn’t imply in anyway that maybe he wasn’t doing just great.’

He got kid-glove treatment?

‘Aw, unbelievable, no other Scientologist got treatment like Tom Cruise.’

Other ex-members of the Sea Org suggest that Cruise’s confessions were exploited by the Leader, Miscavige, his own best man.

Cruise’s major confessor was Marty Rathbun, at one time an Inspector-General of the Church, and now out of the organisation, but still a believing Scientologist. His blog is the go-to running commentary for those Scientologists who hope for a Reformation of the Church. He is a tough man, no fool. Marty told me: ‘There is a specific room for all the A-listers, John Travolta, Tom Cruise. And I audited Tom Cruise there. There is a shelf in there that has a false glass mirror panel and behind it there is a video camera.’

The Church’s Freedom Magazine suggests that Marty is a mentally unstable and violent psychopath.

Audio-visual technician Marc Headley told me: ‘When I was working for the Church of Scientology I installed over 100 rooms that had two cameras and a microphone in them where people would get auditing.’

The camera was not obvious but hidden, said Marc, ‘inside of a smoke detector or inside of a picture frame. We’re talking about pinhole cameras.’

The Church says it does film auditing, but that this is not a secret and has been announced publicly. Cameras are fitted within walls to stop them being intrusive and unsightly. The Church also says that auditing secrets are sacrosanct, protected by priest-penitent confidentiality and never revealed.

Claire Headley told me she watched a video of Cruise being audited: ‘Marty, sitting in the chair. The E-meter and on the opposite side of the table Tom Cruise, holding the cans and the whole thing. I mean I saw those videos.’

And did they include personal things?

‘Absolutely.’

Things that Cruise would not want people to know?

‘Absolutely.’

The Church says recording is not a breach of confidentiality. Other Scientologists are authorised to listen in; selected staff are given access for the purposes of training and monitoring. The Church and David Miscavige deny that the sanctity of the confessional has ever been breached.

The idea that your most intimate, darkest sexual imaginings, the things that make you blush even thinking about them, could end up in the hands of the Church of Scientology frightened Tom DeVocht.

During auditing was it necessary to reveal intimate sexual details?

‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t in an auditing session say, “oh, I had an affair”. You had to say what exactly did you do, how long did you do it.’

This is pornographic?

‘Very much so.’

I took her clothes off, she did this….

‘Yes,’ said Tom.

‘Exact details,’ said Alison. ‘I was Sec-Checked.’ That’s
SciSpeak
for Security-Checking. The devil lies in the detail. The Church makes a distinction between the sanctity of the priest-penitent confession and the Sec-Check, to defend the Church against attack. For the Sea Org member, holding the cans, being probed about his or her intimate secrets, the process would feel the same and the Church’s distinction may seem one without a difference.

‘They will ask you,’ said Alison, ‘what you have done and whatever comes up, maybe it is a sexual question, maybe it is to do with what you did at work, that they want to know exactly what you did. When you did it? How you did it?’

Tom cut in, saying the sexual end of it was far more important than if, as a staff member, you falsified your statistics. Miscavige appeared to enjoy, he said, bringing up staffers’ sexual indignities in the hall at Gold Base in front of other Scientologists: ‘First of all, what the hell has that got to do with him? Secondly, that poor guy is sitting there. And then you have got to think from a religious, from a Scientologist’s point of view, it is a confession for god’s sake.’

Not for publication?

‘That’s exactly right. But Dave would take a pleasure in just crushing… You can see the guy sitting there just sweating and going, oh my God, I can’t believe this is being brought up.’

Tom recalled that Miscavige taunted one particular victim who had admitted taking pictures of himself with a camera phone, and that he called for the pictures to be downloaded and posted up on display. That never happened but by then everyone knew the poor man’s secret. 

The Chairman’s old drinking partner also said that there was a warehouse full of the Pre-Clear folders, containing written reports and videos: ‘You know he has got that information. It’s a very scary but a very real thing.’

Miscavige’s abuse of confessional secrets, Tom says, was common. He described a scene at Gold that he had witnessed. ‘There was a break period where people were coming in, people coming out. And he goes, “watch this”. And he calls at random, some people I knew, some people I didn’t. He would call “Alison” over’ – Tom gestured to his partner, giving her name to cover a real person – ‘he would say, “Tom, this is Alison. Alison was thinking about committing suicide, she was thinking about killing me, she was masturbating, thinking about the captain of the organisation.” I am thinking, OK, bye Alison. “Peter, here, was falsifying his statistics and had his finger up his ass on three different occasions.”’