The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (13 page)

Tom said that Miscavige could bring up the dirt on 25 people instantly, like that – he clicked his fingers. He compared Miscavige’s conduct to the Catholic confession: ‘You go in as a Catholic and you say, look I have sinned, I have done this, that and the other thing. It is done, it is over for it. You don’t have to worry about it.’

Absolution, I said. And the priest doesn’t say anything to anyone, and that has been the rule since 1388.

‘Right.’

The Church of Scientology and David Miscavige deny any such allegations that the sanctity of the confessional has even been breached and say that Tom DeVocht is a genuine pathological liar.

Tom described consistent violations of that priest-penitent relationship at Gold Base, how if a Sea Org member slighted Miscavige by looking ‘at him wrong’ or ‘didn’t stand to attention when he walked into a room’ the person would be security-checked or ‘sec-checked’ in the jargon, and audited, aggressively, hour after hour. The auditor would get into trouble if he didn’t come up with the goods, said Tom.

‘So they had to sit there for hours and find out whatever the hell they could find out. If it was masturbation, if it was you thought about undressing somebody: I am giving you real life examples that I heard. You had sex with your wife when you were “down step”’ – that is if demotion in the hierarchy made sexual relations with your higher-placed wife out-of-bounds.’

After the sec-checking came the public humiliation, Tom said. At a mass staff meeting on Friday night, Miscavige ‘would go up there and say, “Peter, stand up. Yesterday Peter was masturbating in the bathroom.” This is in front of the entire staff anywhere from 500 to 800 people. So dig it: you have taken this religious philosophy and he is using it to crush people. By the time I got there in 2001 there were people I knew for almost 30 years. They were cowed, you couldn’t even talk to them. They were like different people.’

Amy Scobee in her book says that she witnessed the sanctity of the priest-penitent relationship abused: ‘I have seen this trust violated on several occasions throughout the years – especially with staff members, but also with celebrities.’ She describes how she was told that a man that she was uncomfortable around was appointed to be her boss, a decision she was personally unhappy with: ‘I couldn’t help but think that this was some sort of sick game Miscavige was playing.’

She was told she had no choice in the matter and was later given his confessional reports where he – in complete confidence – referred to his sexual infatuation with her. Then she was interrogated on the cans, asked repeatedly if she had had sex with the man who was infatuated with her. Her interrogator ‘had an ear-piece in, and she was getting instructions about what to ask by whoever… was looking in on this confessional from the other room.’ The confessional booths, she writes, are set up with LOOK-IN, LISTEN-IN and TALK-IN systems with video cameras positioned to be able to see the E-meter and the person confessing simultaneously on a split-screen monitor.

Amy said ‘no’ repeatedly to her interrogator, but was told that she would not be let out of the room until she confessed to having sex with the man or admitted to some other form of ‘sexual perversion’. The E-meter interrogation lasted several gruelling hours, she said. This was, she writes, ‘nothing short of sexual harassment.’

Her experience smacks of torture: prolonged physical and psychological abuse in order to extract information. In a BBC Radio Four documentary Torture in the 21
Century, the former Shadow Home Secretary Tory MP and ex-Territorial SAS trooper David Davis told me: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ The example he gave was of the CIA water-boarding a Libyan opponent of the Gaddafi regime and radical Islamicist, Sheikh al-Libi, a very large number of times, ‘essentially until he worked out what it was his torturers wanted him to say, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there was some sort of cooperation between Al Qaeda and the then Iraqi government. And that was a major part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq. So they got the information they wanted to hear.’ But it was not true.

To end her E-meter interrogation, Amy confessed to the sexual perversion that they wanted to hear. She writes, that she admitted ‘to a time that I put a finger in my rear end during sex with my husband.’ Miscavige made a joke of this incident around the base, describing ‘finger up the butt’ for the type of transgressions the staff were making, she writes: ‘Instead of coming clean on what we’ve done to “actively sabotage Scientology expansion”… This was not only embarrassing but a serious invasion of privacy and a violation of the priest-penitent relationship.’

After Amy left the Church and went public with her accusations, the Church went public against her, revealing details of her sex life. In its on-line magazine the Church labelled Amy ‘The Adulteress’ and accused her of ‘wanton sexual behaviour’ – something she denies. The Church also sent the St Petersburg Times the ‘dirt’, her intimate secrets that she had confessed in an auditing session or Sec-Check.

Amy told me: ‘The details of how I had sex with my husband before I got married is not something that should go to a newspaper. They made it the world’s business by issuing it on the internet and in a magazine that went to a hundred thousand or more people. It went to all my neighbours.’

The Church admits sending the newspaper material about Amy’s sex life. It claims the information was from an affidavit signed by her and therefore not confidential.

Amy disputes this, saying the Church handed over handwritten confessions which she believed were confidential.

Lifton identified three facets to the totalist confession: a perpetual psychological purge of impurity; self-surrender; 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.

Test Number Five: ‘The Secret Science’. Lifton says the totalist milieu ‘maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as the ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute “scientific” precision.’

Bruce Hines reflected on the lure of Scientology’s sacred “technology”: ‘There’s always a carrot. From the beginning in my own case and I think maybe others, when you first get involved, the big carrot is that you can reach the state they call “Operating Thetan”. This is a supposed state were you can leave your body at will and could do remote viewing and be totally certain of your own immortality, and not be afflicted by body troubles and things, some almost God-like state.

That carrot is always there.’

Are you an Operating Thetan?

‘Well I was on OT7’ – Operating Thetan Level 7, the second highest level inside Scientology.

So theoretically you’re immortal?

‘Yeah.’

Well, you used to be immortal and…?

Bruce started laughing.

The mood changed when he talked about his sister, a devout Scientologist. She completed OT8, the highest possible level, then suffered breast cancer. It was slow-moving and easily operable, but Scientology teaches its devotees that if you do the tech, you have cause – power, supremacy – over ill-health.

Bruce, fair-minded as ever, pointed out many Scientologists do take normal medical treatment. Was she treated medically?

‘No, and she definitely should have been. She had breast cancer and it was a slow growing kind, and with…’

And easily operable?

‘Yeah. The auditing would take care of it, but it just got worse and worse and then it was too late.’

She died, aged 55, in 1999.

‘It had a profound effect on me,’ said Bruce, ‘although I wouldn’t admit it at the time, because according to their ideology as you get up to those higher levels you should be more or less impervious to such things. In my sister’s case, she was such a true believer, you’re led to believe that as an Operating Thetan you are at cause over things that can go wrong with the body. She did believe that.’

Brainwashing Test Number Six: ‘Loading the Language’: ‘The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.’ These clichés become, says Lifton, ‘ultimate terms’, either ‘god terms’ representing ‘ultimate good’ or ‘devil terms’ representing ‘ultimate evil’. ‘Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centred on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull.’ For an individual, Lifton says, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. ‘He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.’

Apply ‘loading the language’ to the following terms: ‘auditing’, ‘covert hostility’, ‘disconnection’, ‘E-meter’, ‘ethics officer’, ‘floating needle’, ‘Int’, “Operating Thetan’, ‘RPF’, ‘security check’, ‘Sea Organisation’, ‘upset’, ‘withhold’ and ‘Xenu’.

Brainwashing Test Number Seven: ‘Doctrine over person’: ‘this sterile language,’ says Lifton, ‘reflects another characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience – between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguings of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which a totalist environment seems, at least to the outsider, to possess.’ The consequence is that ‘the human is thus subjugated to the ahuman… The underlying assumption is that the doctrine – including its mythological elements – is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience.’

I asked Bruce about the effect of his commitment to Scientology on his family?

‘I was in Scientology for about six years and then I decided to join the Sea Organisation, which is this sort of monastic type organization. You live in a paramilitary structure, you live communally, you eat communally and so you sort of move off and you give up any sort of normal life. It would be like joining a monastery if you were a Catholic. And at that point, although I told myself well it’s all for the greater good, I rarely saw my family, my parents, my brother my sister, and I would maybe make a phone call every couple of years, and maybe write a letter. It’s difficult to find time to write a letter because there’s quite a lot of demands on your time. And it’s something I really regret now, from their view, although they were very understanding, they would never say anything to criticise me. I went off and joined a cult and just left them.’

You’ve still got family in there?

‘Yes I have.’

You talk to them?

‘No, they will not talk to me, because I, since I left, and I have been officially declared in the eyes of Scientology as a Suppressive Person, and that means that my basic motivation is to stop Scientology because I want the world to go down, that’s what they believe…’

Bruce continued: ‘…so I have two nieces who live in Clearwater who won’t talk to me and formally sent me a letter saying that they love me and always will, but with the path that I’ve chosen they just cannot continue to have any communication or relationship with me.’

Disconnection. But that’s a family smasher, I said.

‘Well, yes.’

Brainwashing Test Number Eight is ‘The Dispensing of Existence’. Lifton says: ‘The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right… For the individual, the polar emotional conflict is the ultimate existential one of “being versus nothingness”… The totalist environment – even when it does not resort to physical abuse – thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation.’

Why did Bruce, a brilliant physicist, stay in for so long? A big reason for him was his perceived fear of eternal damnation, chiming with Lifton’s observation of fear of extinction or annihilation. ‘The Scientologists I have known really believe that. You get on what they call, they have nice sounding marketing names, like “The bridge to total freedom” or whatnot. And you get your feet on the bridge and you have to walk and keep your next step, and you have to pay as you go. Particularly once you know about it, if you abandon it, you are going to have a horrible future. And your hopes of becoming an eternally free being are dashed. And so that is one aspect. You have got to toe the line or you are going to lose your chance.

‘The other part is you are taught that anyone who is critical of Scientology, they say, that they have crimes for which they could be arrested. They [the critics] are part of this whole culture of evil and Scientology is the way out. When you try to suppress this force for good, because we are all implanted 75 million years ago, that we [the Scientologists] can’t allow such a thing to happen. So the whole of society is going to try to suppress Scientology, and so you have to be tough to get through. And so people who are critical of it are evil.’

Bruce’s intellectual and spiritual drift away from Scientology was gradual, but helped along by his incarceration in the RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force) for six years.

‘It was out in the high desert of southern California, about ninety miles or so east of Los Angeles, and it’s a very remote location. I understand they have now sold that property. You’re about five miles or so from the nearest town, if you were going to leave you would either walk into the wilderness or have to go across an Indian reservation. It’s in an environment where there are rattlesnakes, tarantulas, mountain lions, coyotes.’