The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (34 page)

How did Miscavige respond to critics? Time reporter Richard Behar ‘is a hater’, who set out to kidnap a Scientologist – a charge that Richard Behar denies. Former high-ranking Scientologist Vicki Aznaran told ABC: ‘They hire private detectives to harass people. They run covert operations. You name it, they have never quit doing it. It would like, they would have to quit being Scientology if they quit doing that.’ On Miscavige, Vicki alleged: ‘He said that we will use public people, we’ll send them out to the dissidents’ homes, have them, their homes broken into, have them beaten, have things stolen from them, slash their tyres, break their car windows, whatever. And this was being carried out at the time I left.’

Miscavige said of Aznaran: ‘This is a girl who was kicked out for trying to bring criminals into the Church, something she didn’t mention… She violated the mores and codes of the group. She was removed for it. I was a trustee of that corporation. She knows it. The words she said to me is, “I have no future in Scientology.” She wanted to bring bad boys into Scientology, her words.’

Mike went on to suggest to me another reason why the Leader hasn’t given a newspaper or TV interview for years: fear.

‘If something were to go wrong and he was made to look like a fool or couldn’t answer the allegations that were being put to him, then that would crumble some of his image in the mind of Scientologists.’

We went through the details of our weird encounters back in 2007. Mike explained that Miscavige had been aggressively contemptuous of Tommy’s ‘handling’ of us, that he was ‘pussy’, that he had failed to stop us from talking to the heretics, Mike Henderson and Donna, so Tommy decided to ambush us at our hotel, late, the expectation being that we would not have had our camera with us. It was pressure from Miscavige that drove the midnight ambush. We showed Mike a clip of the two cars following us when we were arrived at Los Angeles airport and me challenging the driver of the Blue Sidona: ‘are you from the Church of Scientology?’

Was I being paranoid?

‘No, you were being followed.’

Who gave the orders to follow us, I asked.

‘I did.’

There is no doubt in your mind that we were followed by the Church of Scientology?

‘No doubt whatsoever.’

Simple test. There is a gap, we were in Florida and then we went to LA. Where did we go in between?

‘You went to see Bruce Hines in San Francisco.’

How did you know that?

‘I was there.’

What do you mean you were there?

‘See… I was better at following you than the other people.’ They would have been the private detectives.

I never saw you.

‘I know. I followed you from San Francisco airport to the hotel that you stayed at, that one sitting on the corner. I was there.’

So you spied on us, the Church of Scientology spied on us?

‘Yes, absolutely.’

The Church of Scientology has always denied following and spying on the BBC.

‘And they probably would do so again.’

Will they be telling the truth?

‘No, that will be an absolute lie.’

Why spy on people?

Mike explained from the perspective of the Church, that they knew that the Panorama we were making was not going to be friendly, so that they wanted to know exactly who we were seeing and what we were finding out, so they could reply immediately that the things we were being told were not true. The only solution is to spy. The person driving this approach is David Miscavige, he said, and he admitted that as far as the media goes it is counter-effective. He touched on the colossal expense of private eyes. One in London costs around
£
300 a day or $50 an hour; lawyers, of course, cost far, far more, around $750 an hour.

The Church, for its part, said we weren’t spied on. David Miscavige said the suggestion that he and his office monitored any such operation communicating with Rinder and Davis is absolute and total nonsense. The Church categorically denied it too, but admitted private eyes were tasked to track and document us. An overt operation, they said, not spying.

Making the Scientology film was the strangest thing I have ever experienced in my entire life, I told Mike. And towards the end of the days we spent with you in the States in 2007 I felt as though I was beginning to lose my mind. And I can remember saying to Mole, on the day, that I lost my temper, ‘I don’t think I can do this any more.’ Tommy Davis in particular was attacking me, again and again and again. Is that deliberate?

‘Absolutely. Tommy Davis believed that he could score brownie points with Miscavige by driving you psychotic. If you had some of the fundamental technology and Scientology that you could apply, it wouldn’t have created that effect on you. He was doing something that’s called in slang Scientology “bull-baiting”. He was attempting to goad you into a reaction, do that routine and then have it appear in the press all over the world. It made you look bad and it was from our perspective something that made you lose credibility.’

I was as good as gold for five, six days before I went tomato.

‘You held up pretty good. It was a deliberate effort to get you to lose your cool.’

And when I lost it, how did you feel?

‘Pretty cool.’

But the new, un-Zombie Mike was ashamed of what they had done in 2007 and felt that it was an abuse of their powers as Scientologists, a betrayal of what Scientology stood for. Mike explained that the greater problem for the Church was that Tommy had boasted of his immediate access to the Leader, because in Miscavige’s mind that countered his ability to plausibly deny his agents – a disastrous mistake. Faced with the Leader’s anger, Tommy vanished to Las Vegas, leading Mike to run the show. That was the explanation for his absence in London: Tommy had gone AWOL. Mike was too modest to say so, but he was, in the end, the more professional PR man.

The allegations of being beaten by Miscavige, the spying, the lying, The Hole - all of this, I asked Mike, I’ve got to ask you: were you lying to me then in 2007 or are you lying to me now: ‘I was lying to you then.’

I know this word cult is a very difficult word for you and you don’t accept it as far as Scientology as a principle is concerned.

‘Correct.’

But is the Church of Scientology under David Miscavige a cult?

‘It’s degenerated into the cult of David Miscavige. He has become someone who is infallible, who is all-knowing, all-seeing, expects absolute obeisance and people now look to him like he is beyond any criticism or beyond any reproach and will blindly follow the things that he says to do.’

The Church, of course, was not best pleased with Mike Rinder giving an interview to Scientology’s devil, which we broadcast in the autumn of 2010. Its on-line Freedom Magazine has even created a special graphic, a cartoon of Mike looking at himself in a mirror and suddenly morphing into a fanged, green-skinned cobra, complete with chilling sound effects. The Mike-into-cobra cartoon is compelling evidence that the organising intelligence behind the Church of Scientology is very troubled. It strikes one as being nasty, pathological and pathetic. If this man really is so incompetent and lacklustre as the Church suggests, then why bother attack him so viciously? And how does the Church square blackening its enemies in this way while advancing its claim to be respected as a religion? It’s schizoid.

Weirdly, the Church’s Freedom Magazine and I ask the same question: ‘Was Mike Rinder lying then, or is he lying now?’ It then adds its own gloss: ‘Regarding the anti-Scientology drivel he now funnels to the tabloid media? You be the judge after reading the following verbatim quotes from Rinder when he served the Church as spokesperson… “Look, there is a string of these people…that goes back 25 years. Most of them you will never see again. They have their moment of glory where they make their wild allegations. They get coverage in the media. And then, they disappear. Their claims are proven to be untrue, and they’re gone.”

Mike Rinder to BBC Panorama in 2007…

‘In a 2007 letter to the BBC, Rinder again set the record straight: “[W]e repeatedly requested the name of any source alleging ‘bullying’ and ‘beating.’ The only individual you name is (B.H.) [Bruce Hines]. You must find it at least a little strange that [he] has appeared in various media in the United States, France and the UK over the last two years and has never made this allegation before. In each case he has told stories that the media at the time wanted to hear. You are just the latest, and obviously this is what you wanted to hear from him, so he manufactured a tale.”’

This is weird on weird to the power of ten. The Church’s Freedom Magazine is seeking to disgrace its former spokesman and make his word appear unreliable by quoting his remarks to me and a letter to the BBC. The obvious retort is, having defected from what he now says is a cult, Mike has changed his mind. Painting Mike as a cobra or reminding the world of what he told me in 2007 does not address the substance of the grave complaints made by Mike and other senior ex-members of the Church, that they were beaten, abused and humiliated by David Miscavige when they were inside the Church. These are allegations which the Church and Miscagive deny.

The next day Mike introduced me to Marty Rathbun, the former Inspector-General of the Church and once David Miscavige’s right hand man. After 27 years inside, he left in 2004. Marty used to be Scientology’s confessor to, amongst others, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, and John Travolta, and he had offered to give me an opportunity on the E-meter. I sat opposite him and picked up the cans while he twiddled with a dial on the E-meter.

‘What I am going to do is I am going to pinch you. And I want you to just check and see what the needle does when I pinch you, just note it ok.’

He pinched me.

‘Ow!’

‘Now what I want you to do, keep watching the needle, is recall the moment of that pinch. Now right….John.’

I recalled the moment of pain from the pinch, and the needle jagged to attention. I laughed nervously as my scepticism queued up for the bus home.

‘That’s a bit creepy,’ I said, ‘because my mind remembered the pinch and then that registered.’

The E-meter, Scientologists both within and without the Church believe, helps you uncover repressed thoughts. It didn’t take Marty long to find a naughty thought of mine.

‘Are you nervous or concerned about something?’ asked Marty.

‘I am fighting this. Also I am thinking of something that I am not going to tell anyone about…’

‘I can tell that….’ said Marty, laughing. ‘You don’t have to. OK.’

‘Yes. I am not going to.’

‘And I am not going to try to make you so, although I know when you’re thinking it.’

‘Right. This is a naughty thought. Does it tell you it is a naughty thought?’

‘It tells me that you don’t want to share it, that’s all.’

‘You can tell whether I am agitated about a line of thinking, a line of questioning.’

‘You got it, you got it.’

The E-meter scared me. My lesson in what lay behind Mr Hubbard’s tech was not over. We watched a clip of Tommy having a go at me back in 2007, relentlessly piling on the pressure: ‘Bigot… bigot… bigot,’ said Tommy, ‘I, Tommy Davis, say you, John Sweeney, is a bigot.’

Marty explained what was happening, if you had been trained in Scientology: ‘People have emotional buttons, things that set them off and they study you for that.’

‘Bigot,’ snapped Mike.

I’m not a bigot, I said. To call me a bigot annoys me because I am not a bigot.

‘I understand that but that’s…’ said Mike.

But hold on a second, I struggled to interrupt.

‘If I keep cutting you off like this,’ said Mike, ‘I will actually drive you nuts if every time you start to say something I cut you off…’

I tried to cut in, in vain.

‘That’s another…’ said Mike.

I babbled…

‘… if every time you start to say something I cut you off…’ said Mike.

Eerumpfg, I said.

‘…It’s another way of getting you so that you become emotionally upset…’

‘Yeah, it builds up like a dam,’ said Marty. ‘All these things you want to originate, keep getting cut off and it builds up like a dam and then finally explodes.’

‘And its one of these things…’ said Mike.

It’s very annoying, I said, I want to say something interesting.

‘No,’ said Mike, ‘you’re not allowed to say anything right now…’

‘Bigots are not allowed to talk,’ said Marty.

I collapsed in half-annoyed giggles, pleading that they stop. But again, this made me just a little bit afraid. The two Scientologists could tie me up on knots verbally and I get paid for talking the hind leg off a donkey.

Mike and Marty told me about black or reverse Scientology, about how its power to do good had been corrupted and turned to the dark side. ‘In Miscavige’s Church,’ said Marty, ‘you see Scientology and dynamics, good principles, being twisted around, used in a negative fashion. The whole thing is to help the guy communicate, to help the person freely communicate, to help the person you know examine his own life and to communicate about it. Reverse the process, you’re going to feel worse.’

Having met Russell Miller and read his heretical biography of L Ron Hubbard, and the books of other ex-Scientologists who felt they were victims of the Church under its founder, I am not convinced that there was a ‘White Scientology’ to be corrupted. But there is a clear difference in the openness with which Mike and Marty explain their faith, and their belief in L Ron Hubbard, and the flat refusal to do the same by David Miscavige.

And that extends to Xenu. When I asked Marty about the space alien stuff, he talked about Buddha reaching enlightenment underneath a tree and Jesus exorcising demons: ‘If you look at early Christianity, they fully believed in the existence of spirits amongst us. So this whole thing about the stuff you’re talking about, I call it a creation myth.’

Is Xenu true, I asked Mike?

‘That’s not what Scientology is about. It is a creation myth, no different than the creation myth of God creating the world in one day…’

It was six days, I interrupted, and then the seventh…