The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (15 page)

Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder greeted us like old synthetic rubber friends and showed us around a kind of tea room, decorated with riotously beautiful Z-listers who I wondered might have been specially drafted in for the occasion of our visit. We were escorted to a lift, a faux-Victorian effort. I half-expected that the floor of the lift might disappear to drop us into a pool full of killer sharks, as in a James Bond film, but I was disappointed. We were led to a large room, decorated with fake Louis Quinze furniture, and a phrase of the late Kenny Everett in his transvestite mode came to mind: ‘It’s all done in the best possible taste.’

As Bill set up, Tommy and I went over old ground: I was a bigot, he was, some say, brainwashed; I had a preset agenda; some said they were a cult. Then I asked him about the creepy people following us around.

‘We believe we were followed yesterday from L.A. airport,’ I said.

I have a certain truculent physical style when I am not best pleased, like a bull beginning to take notice. Tommy registered it.

‘Oh now you’ve taken it to a new level, wait a second. Let me try and get this right. I’m creepy because I show up at your hotel at 9.45 at night and call you on your cell phone and say that I’m there to see you. You hang up on me. Then…’

If this was a distraction technique, it worked pretty well.

‘Hold on a second, you turned up at midnight.’

‘No. It was at 9.45 at night when I arrived and then… I pull up to where you’re doing an interview in a public place, and you refer to a perfectly normal rental car that I’m driving as a “creepy car” and then you repeatedly tell me the most obnoxious things about my organisation, describing it in horrifically pejorative terms and by the way I reviewed the tape, not always using the preface of “some people claim”, there’s a number of times when you actually just said it yourself, that Scientology is a cult in these disgusting terms you use and now…’

‘Hold on a second…’ I said, trying to staunch the Niagara of words from Tommy.

‘…and when you….no, let me try and get this right, and now I’m having you
followed?
’ Tommy stressed the final word, his handsome face puckering into a rictus of incredulity.

‘Yeah.’

‘It seems to me that you’re the one who’s gone a bit creepy.’

‘It’s a question. All right, so who followed us yesterday?’

‘I have no idea!’

‘When we arrived at L.A.?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘OK.’

‘I mean you’ve done pieces all over the world with all kinds of somewhat notorious people. Is it possible that somebody else maybe was following you? I don’t know. I don’t even know what you’re talking about or how you could characterise it as being followed.’

I challenged him to deny that the six people we thought had followed us so far in LA had nothing to do with Scientology. (The six were the first man at the hire car place who was unusually interested in our whereabouts, two men each in the Sidona and the Range Rover and the black guy in the cowboy hat.)

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ said Tommy, all unblushing innocence.

‘There are no private eyes?’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

‘There are no Scientologists?’

‘I don’t know who you’re talking about, and I’m happy to look into it but standing right here I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘OK, all right,’ I said, with the maximum amount of ungraciousness.

‘It’s easy to be a bit paranoid.’

‘Nothing to do with you?’

‘Anyway…’

‘I understand.’

So did the Church of Scientology spy on the BBC?

Welcome to the strange world of Sci’gy-Leaks, an extraordinary cache of 25 pages of emails and BlackBerry messages which three years later fell into the wrong hands: mine. They appear to record in real-time a three-way conversation between Tommy Davis and Mike Rinder and the Leader’s Communicator, Lou Stuckenbrock, about handling BBC Panorama. Taken together, Sci’gy-Leaks paint an extraordinarily weird picture of the Church.

The Church of Scientology strongly deny that the Sci’gy-Leaks are genuine.

The previous day, the Saturday, we had spent with the husband and wife heretics, Donna Shannon and Mike Henderson, the evening concluding with Tommy and Mike waiting for us at our hotel at midnight. The first Sci’gy-Leaks message is from Tommy to Lou on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 and is headed ‘Hotel debrief’: ‘
Last night Mike
[Zombie Mike Rinder, the hollow-cheeked Australian Scientologist and Tommy’s deputy]
and I went to Sweeney’s hotel around 10pm and called him and told him I was at his hotel and wanted to see him immediately. He hung up on me. I checked their rooms and found out that they were not at the hotel. We had Jesse Radstrom’
– the black-clad cameraman - ‘
with us from Gold to shoot it. Sweeney, Mole and their camera man showed up around 12:30am.

‘He
[Sweeney]
said that he had never told me what hotel he was staying in and that means that we are spying on the BBC and that he thinks that is very weird. I said that is ridiculous and that this is a small town and Englishman with TV cameras stand out like mad and we saw them interviewing the Shannons and walking around flag with them so that is utterly nuts.

‘I then started tearing into him (not swearing as the cameras were rolling) and the hotel manager asked us to step outside. We continued out there.

‘I told him that I was shocked at the unprofessional and juvenile way in which he was conducting himself and this program… I then said that he had come all the way here to Clearwater and was offered a tour of our facilities, the largest most significant Church facilities in the world and yet declined an offer to see or tour those facilities and instead was spending his entire day with Donna Shannon and Mike Henderson, two ex-Scientologists with a clear axe to grind.

‘During the confrontation in front of Sweeney’s hotel Sweeney said to me that Donna had told him that she did hard labor together with me when she was in the Sea Org and that she witnessed me get my hair pulled, my ears pulled and my face ripped off. This did not faze me at all and I calmly told him that I have no idea what she is talking about and that it is a complete and total lie and I could easily produce multiple witnesses to attest to that fact. He seemed somewhat shocked at hearing this.’

I do remember being taken aback – shocked seems to be over-egging the pud somewhat – at the force of Tommy’s denial that his hair and ears had been pulled and his immediate upgrading of the stakes, that he could provide multiple witnesses for his version of events against Donna’s. The striking thing is that this is a fine detail I would not have recalled had I not seen Sci’gy-Leaks.

‘I kept at him about how disingenuous and disgusting this all was…’

Tommy referred back to our meetings in England and the dispute over whether they had set three conditions or not: ‘
I told him that is not what I said and that he is again twisting what occurred in the meeting and that I would be happy to provide him with a transcript of what occurred as he may recall we recorded all of it. This seemed to shut him up.
’

Neither Tommy nor the Church of Scientology ever did provide a transcript of the meetings in England. I remain un-shut up.

‘
At this point a CW
[Clearwater]
Police car showed up having been called by the hotel manager (she overreacted to our dueling cameras and heated discussion)
.’

The hotel manager was doing her job.

‘The cop asked who we were. Sweeney said he was from the BBC and we never got a chance to say who we were… The officer came back out and said that the hotel would prefer that we disperse and not continue. I thanked him and said that is not a problem and that we work and live around here and certainly don’t want to disturb anyone. I turned to Sweeney and said “we are done” and walked away. He called after me repeating out loud the demands that he has mocked up we made of him “that we won’t refer to you as a cult”, “that we won’t interview critics” and that was all.

‘We continued surveilling them and saw that they did not leave for Vegas this morning.’

On the face of it, Tommy’s repeated denials of the Church of Scientology spying on the BBC were not true. He was lying.

‘However it was so down to the wire with so limited flights that we did not want to take the chance of them flying out later in the day and getting to Vegas ahead of us. For this reason Mike
[Rinder]
and Kevin Caetano went ahead to Vegas and will be landing there in the next few hours. Kirsten and I are still here in CW and are actually now at Plant City where the new Test Center in opening. Sweeney is here.’

The second message of the day comes from Mike Rinder: ‘
To: Lou, Dear Sir…
’

All of the messages from the Leader’s Office come from Lou, the Communicator, but in an extremely masculine tone that suggests they are the direct word of the Leader. The Communicator is always addressed as ‘Sir’ but this is standard policy, set down by Hubbard, in Scientology, that all higher ranks are addressed as ‘Sir’ even if they are female.

Mike continues: ‘
I am now on Blackberry and saw the cc you sent. They are going to SFO
[San Francisco]
not LV [
Las Vegas].
TD
[Tommy Davis]
is enroute now to SFO and I am going at 10pm and will know where they go. I am getting the debriefs put together and overall planning done in coordination with Bob and OSAI
[Office of Special Affairs International].
Ml Mike
.’

The boss and/or his Communicator, Lou, is not a happy bunny:
‘Why is Tommy going to SFO? Areb’t they going to say you are following them. Are you this fing nuts (beyond just sp)? Please clarify. Please tell me he’s not on their plane!’

Fing nuts
is short for fucking nuts – as the messages spool out abuse from the top becomes common. At no time do Tommy and Mike return the abuse. SP means Suppressive Person, a baddie.

Why does the Church’s leader have his own personal Communicator, Lou Stuckenbrock? Why can’t he communicate himself? In 1977 the FBI raided the Church of Scientology and the investigation got very close to Mr Hubbard. His wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, ended up going to jail, so ex-members of the Church say that the role of the Communicator is a deliberately constructed cut-out. Sci’gy-Leaks read as if Miscavige says something, his word is recorded and transcribed and put into the third person, so there is always a measure of deniability. This use of a private office cut-out so that politicians, for example, can have plausible deniability is common practice in Westminster and Washington DC.

It’s conceivable that the Sci’gy-Leaks cache could be fake, an elaborate fraud. They are written, pitch-perfect, in Scientology-ese, which only someone immersed in the Church for decades could write. There are, of course, ex-members of the Church who could do that. What seems to me much more difficult to fake is the seemingly real-time reaction to events and actions that we took part in. Reality is imperfect, so it strikes me as evidence pointing to Sci’gy-Leaks being genuine that the BlackBerry machines are on different time settings and time zones, that the spelling is often grotesquely askew, and that real life panics and cock-ups do occur which strike me as beyond the imagination of even the cleverest fraudster. Still, both possibilities should be born in mind by the reader: that Sci’gy-Leaks are genuine; that they are fake.

The Church deny that they are genuine.

Twelve minutes later, Mike replies to the Communicator:
‘Dear Sir He is definitely not on the same flight. He is going via Chicago to Oakland as the only available flight. There is no plan to do anything with them but to be available there in case (there may be internet chat on who they see) or they may try to go to one of the orgs there as we showed them SFO, SNC and Gatos. If not, then it is easy to get down to LA. ML Mike.’

The next message is a terse thank you. That Monday we arrive in San Francisco. The Communicator demands of Mike at half past midnight: ‘
Well. Anything?
’

Mike replies: ‘
Dear Sir Nothing yet. My plane just landed in SFO. They arrive at 0130. TD arrives at 0900. Wont know anything other than where theyre staying until morning. Ml mike
.’

Tailing people is a sleep-killer. It was past midnight and Mike was at the airport, waiting for us.

A few minutes later the Communicator snaps back: ‘
What are you going to do? Act like you “guessed” they were there? Or, if you understand TD acronyms, BT?
’

TD stands for ‘Technical Dictionary’, Hubbard’s very own version of
SciSpeak
; BT means, according to the Xenu-directory.com glossary: ‘Body Thetan. Usually plural. Evil spirits which need to be exorcized, as in: “OT5 consists entirely of running out BTs; what a bore.”’ These are well known terms inside Scientology. The tone of this message is bullying.

At one am, Mike replies: ‘
Dear Sir. I am not planning to BT. Someone is speaking to them to find out their plans and whoever they plan on talking to is likely to say something on the internet thst wld become public knowledge. And of course if they show up at an org this will be known. No plan to contact them untll we have overt data. Will have moe data when they arrive. Ml mike
’

The phrase ‘overt data’ is a give-away: we were the subject of a covert investigation. The Communicator pings back at 0117am:
‘Thank you. You realize this hasd gone totally out of control and you and Tommy have created the usual out of control sit - right down to Tommy wanting to ignore everything the boss said and just say “what’s happening” (the ballroom).
[The ballroom? I have no idea that this means.]
‘The boss view is that he spent 20 years doing this so others could get tech and orgs show on the rails and they did zero. And you thought the battles were the game, giving it all to him. He’s not going to do it anymore as nobody will go free and there will be no orgs. Your contribution to LrHs birthday (a5 tommys) was to enturbulate. Period. He had a month to work on videos and refused it. He is you.’