The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (2 page)

Betty’s advice to anyone contemplating entering a Church of Scientology was clear: ‘For God’s sake, don’t walk through the door.’

In three decades and more as a reporter, this was one of the most unutterably moving interviews I have ever carried out.

On the train back to London, a woman sat opposite Patrick and I and engaged with us. I was suspicious. She said her iPod had run out of juice, and could she borrow my laptop, on which I was pounding away, to charge it. I politely said sorry, I could not. Paranoid, I suspected that she was an agent, working for the Church. Of course, I could have been entirely wrong.

We got the tube back to White City and were walking towards the office when Patrick’s phone rang. It was Betty, in tears. After almost two years of no contact, her daughter had walked through the door shortly after we had left. She’d told her mum: ‘Let’s be friends.’

The next day Betty phoned Patrick again. Her daughter had asked her to pull the interview with Panorama.

How on earth had they found out that we had interviewed Betty? One could make the deduction that they were spying on us – a charge the Church denies.

We pulled the interview and I have changed names and details. But the essential truth of the story remains. A broken-hearted mother, weeping about her lost daughter on camera to the BBC, and the same lost daughter walks through the door before we got back to the office. Of all the things that have happened to me personally while I have investigated the Church of Scientology, Betty’s story, and their success in stopping us from telling it, is the one that troubles me the most.

This book tells the story of Scientology from the perspective of people like Betty, from the other side of the gloss and the celebrities. It is the story of people who used to serve Cruise and Travolta but who now describe themselves as slaves and say the Church of Scientology is a force for evil. And it is the story of the battle between the two sides, the multi-billion dollar Church, its multi-millionaire stars on one side; the heretics on the other. It presents not the eagle’s eye view, not that seen by the celebrities, but the worm’s eye view, the story of ex-Scientologists who spent decades inside the belly of the Church, of critics demonized by it, at least one of whom ended up committing suicide, and my personal experience of the Church’s attempts to break me during five weeks of madness in the spring of 2007 up to the present day.

It is a Church, or more accurately, a thing of great wealth and power and if you anger it, it will try to destroy you, as I found out.

CHAPTER ONE

first contact

I
magine two groups of people, one lot on the outside, one on the inside. The insiders believe they are defending their religion to the utmost from bigots; the outsiders believe the ‘religion’, if religion it be, is bad science fiction. The insiders believe the outsiders are brainwashed into thinking they are free when in fact they are slaves to a space alien Satan. The outsiders see a confidence trick inside a space alien cult masquerading as a religion; they believe the insiders live inside an invisible box, walled with mirrors, marked: religion. The outsiders believe the insiders are brainwashed, full stop.

That is the best short-hand description of the Church of Scientology I can come up with in one hundred and one words exactly. The alternative is to go see it for yourself. I did, but I would not recommend it.

Drive through the gates of Saint Hill Manor, a country estate a few miles from East Grinstead in Sussex, and you notice that something is immediately and obviously wrong. The English ruling class has a certain style for country houses. It’s not good form to show obscene wealth. So they let things slide a little, a gate off its hinges there, wild flowers running amok here, chipped and peeling paint, stray dogs, strayer children, the whole artifice generating a sense of artfully constructed neglect.

Saint Hill looks like a Hollywood set designer’s idea of an English country house. Fifty acres, hedged with rhododendron bushes, boasting a fake turret and a real lake, it’s so perfect in every detail it’s plastically unreal. In the heart of the English countryside it is that worst of things, un-English. Over-gardened, eerie, empty of people, Saint Hill exudes the atmosphere of a high-end psychiatric clinic, the kind of place where billionaires dump their mad aunts. Saint Hill is the British base of the Church of Scientology. Nothing here comes cheap. The Saint Hill Special Briefing Course will set you back
£
20,300.

No-one laughed. It was creepy.

They believe that humanity is trapped inside a prison of the mind and only the Church of Scientology can get us out, can end the insanity all around us. ‘We are the saviours of humankind.’ John Travolta, the older of the Church’s two great Hollywood apostles, once said: ‘There’s no doubt about it that the people that didn’t make it in Hollywood - and I mean survived - if they’d had Scientology or Dianetics they’d have been here today, whether it’s Elvis or Marilyn.’

In other words, Scientology can save your life.

Tom Cruise is the younger but the greater apostle, the living embodiment of Scientology. His divorce from Katie Holmes in the summer of 2012 notwithstanding, Cruise is no ordinary human being. He is, they say, the second most powerful Scientologist in the world and an Operating Thetan and that means, they say, Tom Cruise has special powers, of knowing and willing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time. He can levitate too.

If you just take those two stars together, Travolta and Cruise, hundreds of millions of people have seen them in films like ‘
Saturday Night Fever’, ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘Top Gun’
and the
‘Mission Impossible
’ series. Some of those millions may have reflected that if Scientology has led Cruise and Travolta to fame and success, then it could be wonderful for them, too.

But the evidence that the Church has abused its servants is strong and compelling. The evidence that the Church abuses the trust of its star parishioners is also strong. There is no evidence to suggest that the Church of Scientology gives you powers over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time. Nor is there evidence that the story of the space alien Satan is anything more than inter-galactic mumbo-jumbo. Rather, the evidence points to the Church of Scientology being a brainwashing cult.

The Church of Scientology denies that it is a cult; it denies abuse; it denies spying; it denies betraying the secrets of the confessional; it denies brainwashing.

It was founded by the late Lafayette Ron Hubbard, known as ‘Mr Hubbard’ or LRH or L Ron, in 1954. There are people I know who still believe in Scientology, who still revere Mr Hubbard but no longer trust the Church as an institution, and they are good people and have a right to believe in whatever they want to believe in, and, uncomfortable as it is for me, I defend that right. But that right is not telescopic.

Scientologists inside and outside the Church hold that Mr Hubbard is the saviour of humanity. Others question that. Paul Thomas Anderson’s brave and good film,
The Master
, is loosely based on Hubbard. The film’s tortured main character, a true disciple, is warned: ‘You know he’s making it up as he goes along.’

The Master
shows a fictional character like Mr Hubbard as a man of immense charismatic power. That portrayal helped me understand something: that, in the beginning, there was big magic that sucked people in. To others, L Ron was a ginger-haired pulp fiction writer who knocked off a story about a space alien Satan and re-baptized it as a religion. He launched his theory of Dianetics in ‘
Astounding Science Fiction
’ magazine in 1950. The name of the magazine is a clue.

Dianetics soon became a philosophy and a therapy programme, and that quickly morphed into Scientology, which shape-shifted into a ‘Church’. The movement appealed to something missing from people’s lives in 1950s America. But grave anxieties started to be raised. For example, the effect of Scientology’s mind exercises was to create a trance-like state, suitable for hypnosis. Could that be lead to a kind of brainwashing?

Scientologists were in thrall to L Ron’s ‘tech’ which enabled Scientologists to improve their communication skills. L Ron developed or borrowed a kind of 1950s ‘lie/truth detector’ technology he dubbed ‘auditing’ in which adherents would confess to an auditor, but with the added dimension of an ‘Electro-psychometer’ or ‘E-meter’ to test that they were telling the truth. The E-meter is a machine with leads running to two ‘tin cans’ which you grip with your hands. The sweat from your hands increases when you are anxious, and that anxiety shows up on a needle-and-dial dashboard which the auditor studies. Having a steady or gently floating needle is cool. If your needle jerks, then you’ve got issues and you may be lying - an ‘overt’ - or withholding the truth - a ‘withhold’. Confessions are recorded. In the early days the auditor took detailed notes; in the twenty-first century by state of the art pin-hole cameras. But could the recorded secrets of that confession, once given, be used against you – a kind of blackmail? No, says the Church. Yes, say ex-Scientologists.

What kind of man was Mr Hubbard? Charismatic, certainly. According to the Church he created, L Ron had an amazing life story: he’d been an acclaimed explorer, a nuclear physicist, a war hero and he’d been to deep space: ‘I was in the Van Allen Belt. This is factual. You’d be surprised how warm space is.’

‘It is all lies. None of that is true,’ Russell Miller, his very unauthorised biographer, told me. ‘The whole religion is based on the word of a congenital liar and a brilliant confidence trickster.’ In his biography, Miller reports an ex-Scientologist, Gerry Armstrong, painting an unflattering picture of L Ron: ‘a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron Munchausen. In short, he was a con man.’

Hubbard was a friend of Aleister Crowley, the Occultist and Silly Twit who the papers called ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’. Hubbard said of Crowley: ‘my very good friend… signs himself “the Beast”, mark of the Beast 666…’

Some point to the distinctive sign of the Church – the cross and the star – and note its similarity to Crowley’s Tarot card design, with a cross in the foreground and a star shape behind.

In the early 1950s sceptical reporters in America started writing negative stories. They called it the Church of the Rondroids. Hubbard hit back, calling the ordinary, non-Scientologist world, inhabited by people like you and me, ‘wog’, defining the word as ‘common, everyday garden-variety humanoid … He “is” a body, doesn’t know he’s there, etc. He isn’t there as a spirit at all. He is not operating as a Thetan.’

By the late 1950s Mr Hubbard was suffering a blow-back as ex-members were admitted to mental hospitals. Psychiatrists, on behalf of patients who were disaffected Scientologists, started investigating, then castigating Scientology. Scientology investigated, then castigated, psychiatry. Others condemned Hubbard as an unusually inventive confidence trickster. Worse, the law enforcement authorities in America were beginning to give L Ron a rather beady eye. So he decided to up sticks and move to England. Mr Hubbard, by now a multi-millionaire, snapped up Saint Hill in 1959. The estate once belonged to the Maharajah of Jaipur, an aristocrat whose princely statelet back in India was gobbled up by democracy and whose princely fortune was left untended while he enjoyed his chukkas on the polo field. The Maharajah died, as he had lived, falling off a polo horse.

Hubbard once boasted that he ‘sort of won’ Saint Hill in a poker game. By the time he was interested in Saint Hill, the Maharajah was dead and it seems unlikely that his estate’s solicitors would have used it as a stake in poker.

In 1959 L Ron moved in, announcing to a reporter from the
East Grinstead Courier
that he was an expert on plant life. ‘The production of plant mutations,’
the Courier
gushed, ‘is one of his most important projects at the moment. By battering seeds with X-rays, Dr Hubbard can either reduce a plant through its stages of evolution or advance it.’ A black and white photograph was taken of L Ron attaching electrodes to a tomato – the vegetable (botanically a fruit) that I replicated in the Industry of Death exhibition. This is one of my favourite photographs in the whole wide world.

The Church grew from a tiny base to number tens of thousands of adepts, but some of those people left and what they had to say was not good. It suffered international notoriety. In Australia, Mr Justice Anderson concluded in 1965: ‘Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill… [Scientology is] the world’s largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.’ Anderson’s report is the first to touch on the theme of the Church subjecting its adherents to ‘mental enslavement’, but not the last.

In the late sixties, the British health minister, Kenneth Robinson – a former Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy – blocked foreign Scientologists from coming to Britain: ‘The government is satisfied that Scientology is socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other and attributes squalid and disgraceful motives to all who oppose it; its authoritarian principles and practice are a potential menace to the personality and well being of those so deluded as to become followers; above all, its methods can be a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them… There is no power under existing law to prohibit the practice of Scientology; but the government has concluded that it is so objectionable that it would be right to take all steps within its power to curb its growth.’

The Church did not turn the other cheek. In 1967 it took on the local community around Saint Hill, suing East Grinstead Urban District Council, a teacher at a local convent school, the Chairman of the Urban District Council’s Health and Housing Committee, a farmer whose land adjoined Saint Hill Manor, and who had spoken disapprovingly of his neighbours, and thirty-eight people who had written critical things about Scientology in the papers. Most of the law suits were subsequently dropped but the Church sued the local Tory MP, Geoffrey Johnson-Smith. The libel trial lasted six weeks in 1970. The Church lost.