Inside Scientology Part 13

Work consisted of cleaning, maintenance, and various construction projects: fixing leaking roofs, sanding doors, repairing air-conditioning units, hauling garbage. Five hours a day consisted of mandatory study and routine auditing and security checking. Like most of the people he knew on the program, Stefan had been promised the RPF would take six months. Two years later, he was still there (though that was nothing compared to the ordeal of some worn-down souls who had endured a far longer stretch-six to eight years).

Tanja, meanwhile, remained at Int, where she faced daily pressure to divorce her husband. Steadfastly she refused, even after it was made clear to her that Stefan might never return to Int, which, after all, was a privileged post. An edict prevented Sea Org members from being married to staffers on other compounds, Tanja knew; to stay with Stefan she'd have to give up her job, and her life, at Int. From Sh.e.l.ly Miscavige on down the ranks, the RTC women reminded Tanja that she had the best job in Scientology, working for "the most ethical person on the planet," Miscavige. How could there even be a contest? Finally, after months of coercion, she agreed to initiate divorce proceedings.

Shortly afterward, in February 2002, Stefan completed the rehabilitation program laid out for him by his auditor. Aware that his wife had filed divorce papers, he submitted a request to begin the process of reacceptance into the Sea Organization. If he could just return to the base before the final papers were signed, he thought, he might still have a chance to save his marriage.

But the RPF refused to let him go. Another year pa.s.sed. Stefan remained imprisoned. Every day his auditor worked on him: why was he still so in love with his wife? "It was like this Machiavellian thing had been unleashed against me-I didn't know who was doing this to me, or why," he said. "All I knew was that somebody really wanted to make sure that I got divorced."

More months went by. His auditor told him that Tanja had signed divorce papers. Stefan began to understand that he would never leave the RPF unless he agreed to let go of Tanja completely. "And so I let go," he admitted to me.

Accordingly, he forced himself to stop talking about Tanja. He told himself to stop thinking about her. He agreed not to write or in any other way try to communicate with Tanja. He pledged himself to serve the Church of Scientology in whatever way it asked. Finally, in June 2003, Stefan "graduated" from the RPF, a broken man. He emerged from the Cedars of Lebanon building as cleansed as Winston Smith, in the book 1984. "I felt just like him," he said. "Everything's great, the organization is great, the propaganda is great, the technology is great, it's all wonderful. I'm divorced."

Less than twenty-four hours after Stefan got off the RPF, Tanja's mother, who worked at the PAC Base, approached him and gave him a cell phone. Soon Stefan received a call. "I still love you," Tanja whispered into the phone. She'd never signed divorce papers. They were still married.

For all the years that they had been separated, and in spite of all the pressure she'd endured, Tanja had never let go of Stefan. By the summer of 2003, she'd even begun wearing her wedding ring again. "It was my little statement," she said. "I didn't care what anyone said; the only thing that mattered was what was between him and me."

To understand just how dramatic this quiet act of defiance was, consider that during her thirteen years of working for Miscavige, Tanja had never voiced an opinion about anything that happened on the base, from her husband's banishment to Miscavige's increasingly brutal behavior, let alone express opposition to any of them.

Certain officials and inner-circle members like Tanja report that in addition to routine tongue-lashings, Miscavige from time to time physically attacked executives who angered him.* One frequent target was Mike Rinder, his unflappable Australian deputy and the head of the OSA, whose job was to manage lawsuits and do damage control. One time, Miscavige, furious over the negative press coverage of the Lisa McPherson case, called the OSA chief to his villa; then, grabbing Rinder around the neck, he swung him into a small tree. "[Then he] started kicking him," said Marty Rathbun, who'd been called to "witness" the attack.

On other occasions, the leader of Scientology is said to have publicly slapped, kicked, punched, or shoved executives who angered him, including Jeff Hawkins, who said he was attacked by Miscavige on five separate occasions, beginning in 2002. "It wasn't like he did it everywhere-it was usually in meetings or when he was inspecting an area," said Hawkins. Only those present saw what went on, "and they did not talk about it to other staff." The lowest-ranking workers on the base, for the most part, were exempt from the leader's abuse. The rest took what came to them silently. No one reported these beatings to the police.

"After twenty-eight years in Scientology, you blamed yourself for what was happening. I must be a real sc.u.mbag to pull that in," explained Tom De Vocht, who said he was attacked several times by Miscavige. He never fought back, nor did he expect anyone else to put up a challenge. "You're talking about the pope of Scientology beating on his staff, the man who controls your eternal salvation," he said. Besides, De Vocht added, many people, including him, had been conditioned to act exactly as Miscavige did.

Indeed, this toxic environment metastasized to such a degree that Miscavige's underlings, unprovoked by the leader, would similarly descend upon one another, ganging up on whoever seemed weakest. Group confessions, referred to as "seances," had become regular occurrences at Int. At these events, executives who'd angered Miscavige in some way were made to sit at the front of a large room, such as the base dining hall, and one by one stand up and confess their "crimes." De Vocht witnessed numerous seances, including those where Miscavige himself would stand up and reveal someone's crimes, having combed through their auditing folders. "In front of seven hundred people, he'd say, 'It came up today that so-and-so was jerking off,' or 'Sam, here, in another life molested a child.' Well, people had very little sleep, they were eating rice and beans, they were half psychotic from working such long hours, and they'd go into a frenzy." Often the attacks were made in defense of the chairman of the board himself. "What have you done to Dave?!" the people would shout, and they'd jeer while the accused racked his brain to think of an appropriate response.*

Somehow, Tanja told herself, all of this must be for the greatest good. But doubt had begun to eat away at her. "Please try to get back here-you have to," she told Stefan one night on the phone. "I don't think I can handle it here alone."

But Stefan remained in Los Angeles, no closer to leaving the PAC Base than when he'd arrived four years earlier. Miscavige had refused to sign his release papers. The leader now decreed that those recently finished with the RPF were not to be seen as "rehabilitated" until they'd made up for the damage they'd caused the organization. How they were to do this was never explained. Meanwhile, Miscavige had grown suspicious of his secretary. One day in Los Angeles, the leader confronted Tanja. "Tell me the truth," he said. "Have you spoken to that sc.u.mbag husband of yours?"

Mustering all of her courage, Tanja admitted it: yes, she had. It was the last conversation she and Miscavige would have.

The following day, August 14, 2004, Tanja was sent back to the Int Base, where she was ordered to the Old Gilman House, a ramshackle, two-story building on the far edge of the property, which was used as a detention center for staff who'd expressed disaffection with the current management or a desire to "blow." There she would begin a program of "correction," a less structured, and more isolated, version of the RPF. She picked vegetables, lived in a trailer off the main house, and ate her meals, delivered by a security guard, alone. She was audited daily. None of her friends or former colleagues in Miscavige's office were allowed to have anything to do with her; indeed, her name would never be uttered among the regular staff at Int, as if she had literally been wiped from the collective memory there. From her once-lofty position as the favored communicator of the chairman of the board, Tanja had fallen to the level of, as she put it, "sc.u.m."

Three months pa.s.sed before Tanja was summoned to a private room to meet with the Sea Org executives Warren McShane and Mike Rinder. Stefan had left the Sea Org, they told her. He'd walked off the PAC Base in broad daylight a few weeks earlier, slipping past his minder during a shift change. Then, they said, he'd sought legal advice from Ford Greene, a well-known attorney of the San Francis...o...b..y Area who'd successfully litigated against Scientology in the Larry Wollersheim case. That Stefan had contacted this sworn enemy made him unredeemable in the eyes of the church.

Tanja will never forget how coolly Rinder delivered the news about Stefan's defection. He had her divorce papers folded under an envelope on the table in front of him. There was one set of doc.u.ments left to finalize her split with Stefan. "He thought for sure I was going to sign the papers and end it right there," she said. Instead, Tanja stood her ground. "Well, if he left, then I guess I'm going to leave too," she announced to the men. Rinder, she added, was "furious."

For the next week or so, Tanja endured "intense pressure" to change her mind. Rinder in particular couldn't fathom Tanja's stubbornness: her husband had committed some of the worst sins imaginable, and she wanted to be with him? She aimed to leave behind her family, her group, her religion, everything? According to Scientology's teachings, Stefan Castle was just one husband in a long string of husbands Tanja had already had, and would have, as a spiritual being over many lifetimes. "What is the big deal?" Rinder said.

Tanja was then subjected to another ten days of constant auditing. Then once again she met with Rinder, for what was called an "ethics interview." This time, he informed her, she wouldn't be allowed to leave the room until she confessed. When she insisted that she'd already told him everything, Rinder began to berate her. "He was just wide-eyed and red in the face, spitting and spraying me with his fury ... He painted this whole picture of what it would be like if I went out and found Stefan." Rinder, she said, gave the couple six months. "He kept saying, 'You have no money, no experience. You won't be able to talk to your family,' and he kind of played on my uncertainty. How could I know what I would be walking into if I were to leave?" Tanja had never had a credit card, didn't drive a car, didn't have a bank account. How could she possibly survive?

For years, Tanja had thought that one day she might be interrogated, and wondered how she would hold up. She'd a.s.sumed that she would be strong and make it through. But as Rinder's harangue continued, she felt herself weakening. She found it unbearable that Stefan, wholly unaware of her punishment and possibly believing she'd soon follow, had defected. Now he'd lost his spiritual salvation-his eternity. Even if he begged, he would never be able to return to the church. "These were things I couldn't bear the thought of," she said. After a while, "I was just dead. I wasn't crying, I wasn't showing any emotion, I was feeling kind of numb."

After more than twelve hours of interrogation, Tanja was given a piece of paper and a pen and told to write a "disconnection" letter to Stefan. She read the letter aloud while Rinder recorded the event with a video camera. Then Tanja was presented with divorce papers one last time. Through tears, she signed her name.

Chapter 17.

Exodus.

DAVID MISCAVIGE BURST into the conference room on the International Base one afternoon in the late fall of 2004, looking as if he was going to explode. "You guys are all s.h.i.theads," he barked. The leader ran through his usual litany of complaints: the overall organizational board was a mess; no one was doing their job; he was working himself to death just to counter the laziness and incompetence of those around him. All of the senior executives were SPs who might as well spend the rest of their lives cleaning septic tanks and breaking rocks. In fact, he might just make sure that some of them did that.

Suddenly, he asked, "Who knows what 'musical chairs' means?"

Several people raised their hand and stammered out Scientology's particular definition: "A constant transfer of workers from one job to another."

"No, f.u.c.k you," Miscavige said. "What else?"

"It's a game," someone finally said.

Miscavige, it turned out, had called them all to this meeting to play musical chairs, albeit with a twist. He explained that when the music stopped, whoever didn't get a chair would be offloaded from the base.

The officials went silent.

"You guys have f.u.c.ked with me for the last time," Miscavige said.

The leader ordered that a large boom box be brought into the conference room, and when it arrived, he popped in a CD of Queen'sGreatest Hits. Freddie Mercury's operatic tenor led off with "Bohemian Rhapsody": "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?" Slowly, people began walking around the circle of chairs. Marc Headley, now an executive, couldn't believe he was doing this. He took a quick survey of the players: among the nearly seventy officials were Miscavige's onetime deputy Greg Wilhere, and another top lieutenant, Mark Ingber; there was the OSA chief, Mike Rinder, and also Marty Rathbun and the CMO executive Tom De Vocht. The music stopped. An old-time member of the Sea Org who probably hadn't left the base in twenty years lost his chair. Then the game continued and a second person was gone.

What did Miscavige really mean by "offload"? Headley, who was eliminated after a few rounds, decided it could mean a number of things: Some people, the lucky ones, might be moved to another organization; those whom Miscavige considered more serious offenders might be sentenced to a remote Rehabilitation Project Force in, say, New Zealand. Others might be handed a few hundred dollars, put on a bus, and kicked out altogether. Most of the people on the base had no family outside Scientology. Where would they go? What would they do? Few had credit cards or bank accounts; even fewer owned vehicles. The base was all they knew.

Headley watched as friends who'd worked together for years battled it out for a chair. By the time the number had dwindled to twenty, people were throwing one another against the walls, ripping seats from one another's hands, wrestling one another to the floor.

Finally, just four players remained. Miscavige changed the music to Mozart's Requiem Ma.s.s. Greg Wilhere grabbed Mark Ingber and threw him aside-one down. Lisa Schroer, one of Marc Headley's colleagues, bested Wilhere in racing for a seat-now he was gone too. It was between Schroer and Wilhere's wife, Sue. The women walked around a single chair for what struck Headley as an eternity. The music stopped. Schroer won. The game was over.

"Do any of you animals have anything to say?" Miscavige asked. No one did. It was 3 A.M. The leader confined all seventy people to the conference room and ordered them to sleep under the tables. Food was delivered from time to time. A few days later, they were told that Miscavige had decided not to offload anyone after all.

For Marty Rathbun, who'd spent the game of musical chairs quietly looking out the window "trying to distract myself," as he said, Miscavige's threats were nothing new. After twenty years as the leader's deputy, Rathbun, like Tom De Vocht and several other senior officials of the Church of Scientology, had grown almost used to DM's bizarre behavior. Virtually every meeting with Miscavige involved an element of fear: the initial summons required that those called to it drop whatever they were doing and sprint to the a.s.signation place; there they would wait until the leader, who'd often be playing Nintendo in his private lounge, decided to show up.

He would arrive flanked by his wife and Lou Stuckenbrock, a retinue of aides, and, often, his beagles. He had five dogs, two of which, Jelly and Safi, wore tiny blue sweaters with commander's bars. Miscavige was known to make his staffers salute the dogs, who held ranks higher than those of many people on the base. The meeting room would have been thoroughly white-gloved and set with an ashtray, an air purifier, and an a.s.sortment of the leader's favorite snacks-Balance or Pure Protein energy bars were a notable pa.s.sion, as were raspberry sour candies and Penta ultra-purified water, which Miscavige ordered by the case.

Then Miscavige would open the meeting with an accusation or, more often, a comment about someone's s.e.xual peccadilloes, which he seemed to relish discussing at great length. If anyone else in the room was to snicker or even blink, the leader would threaten him or her with expulsion. "You'll be flipping burgers at McDonald's," he frequently said, before launching into the main thrust of his meeting, which was usually, according to Jeff Hawkins, "a dissertation about how everything was wrong and how terrible and suppressive everybody was."

The once-vast org board, which at Int had originally listed hundreds of posts, was now irrelevant. Its purpose, to ensure that a particular organization worked like a well-oiled machine to achieve the goals of Scientology, was moot at Int. Distrusting many of his a.s.sociates, Miscavige had sidelined them to be punished or rehabilitated, so that important efforts were understaffed. He forced his remaining executives, an ever-dwindling number, to endlessly revise the organizational charts; because he was perpetually displeased with their strategies, the task had dragged on for four years-since 2000. He micromanaged each facet of the work done at Int, demanding that every marketing plan, event proposal, and film script be submitted to him instantly. Then he sat on the doc.u.ments for days or weeks, or even months, only to reject each one, with a scathing putdown of the person who'd submitted it. In this atmosphere, little productive activity could occur.

The leader's impatience and disgust with Int Base personnel eventually escalated into a full-blown purge. During group confessions, often daylong affairs, hundreds of people were evicted from the base and sent to the RPF; dozens more waited at the former Happy Valley, now called the Int Ranch, to be offloaded, Scientology's equivalent of a dishonorable discharge.* Virtually all of the Church of Scientology's senior managers and technical officials were denounced as SPs and locked in the large, doublewide trailer that housed the conference room where the game of musical chairs had taken place. The trailer had been designated "SP Hall," or simply "The Hole." The condemned would remain there for months-some for years-sleeping under their desks, showering in a garage, unable to get even a change of clothes unless it was to do work Miscavige had specifically ordered, such as squiring around visiting VIPs or appearing at church events (for example, the OSA chief, Mike Rinder, and Guillaume Lesevre, head of the Church of Scientology International, would be released, outfitted in tuxedos, and sent to promote Scientology to the membership, then reinstalled in The Hole upon their return).

Even the grand new RTC building Miscavige built on the base in 1999, a fifty-five-thousand-foot structure of imported sandstone, now stood empty. The only people who worked there were Miscavige and his personal staff, which by the time of the infamous musical chairs had reportedly dwindled to just half a dozen people; the rest had been demoted or declared SPs.*

Such purges had, of course, happened before. In the early 1950s Hubbard had denounced and expelled those in the Dianetics movement who opposed him; by 1959, the Founder would declare his own son an SP. But Hubbard, while a tyrant in his worst moments, also had the capacity to forgive. "Once he got over his tirades and tantrums, he'd follow it up with some justice measure"-often by granting sweeping "amnesties" to those he'd committed to the RPF, said the former Scientologist Glenn Samuels, who was purged from Scientology in 1982.

But Miscavige didn't seem to believe in absolution, nor, as many saw it, in justice. By the mid-2000s, the leader's way of denouncing staffers as Suppressive Persons had become staggeringly random. No longer was a defection, a leaked doc.u.ment, or some other treasonous act a prerequisite for being deemed an SP, though only serious offenses like those would seem to merit such severe condemnation. It meant, after all, expulsion from the church and the loss of salvation-a severe penalty. But now anyone who expressed even the smallest criticism of church policy or leadership was in danger of being cast out.

For people like Marty Rathbun, the promise of eternal freedom, Scientology's core doctrine, kept them hanging on during Miscavige's oppressive regime. But ultimately, even Rathbun decided he'd had enough. One afternoon in December 2004, having witnessed Miscavige physically attack Tom De Vocht during a meeting, Rathbun felt himself hit an invisible wall. If he didn't remove himself from the situation, he realized, he might kill Miscavige out of pure hate. Later that evening, Rathbun retrieved his Yamaha 650 motorcycle from the bushes where it was parked, wheeled it downhill, and waited for the back gate to open. When it did, just as a car drove through, "I gunned it and headed out down the road." That was the last he'd ever see of the base.

Within a few weeks, De Vocht was gone as well, in much the same manner. By that spring, so was Jeff Hawkins. Not one of these executives, nor those who followed, including Mike Rinder, who departed Scientology in 2007, made a move to suggest that Miscavige should be the one to leave, though both Rathbun and De Vocht later said they thought about it. "We had a tacit agreement that something needed to be done about this guy ... but you couldn't go there, because if you got caught going there, you'd be declared [an SP] forever," said Rathbun, who would never relinquish his belief in L. Ron Hubbard's technology, despite losing faith in the management of his church.

Hawkins knew that opposing Miscavige would be futile. He'd been in the Church of Scientology for thirty-eight years, had seen the movement's leadership evolve from idealistic to authoritarian to, as he saw it, Orwellian in mindset. Through it all, he'd fought to maintain his own integrity in what became a permanently hostile and intimidating environment. Finally, Hawkins accepted as pointless his hopes that things might change. What was happening at the base, said the onetime marketing chief, "was an irreversible trend. And when I realized that, I said, 'I'm out of here.'"

Throughout the Sea Org rank and file, many other members were making the same decision.

On January 10, 2005, Stefan and Tanja Castle were legally divorced. Five months later, Tanja left the trailer by the Old Gilman House that had become her home and returned to Int proper, where she was given a bed in a dormitory and a new job: helping to build sets for Golden Era Productions. The internal struggle she'd gone through for nine months, poring over LRH's teachings to see if she could find some justification for what had happened to her, was over. Stefan was an SP. Nothing else mattered. "Once the group has agreed that something is a certain way, one person can't change it on her own," she said.

It had been five years since Stefan had been separated from his wife, and less than one year since he had fled from the PAC Base, a far easier place to leave, he knew, than Int. He had tried everything he could think of to communicate with Tanja, even filing a missing person's report with the Hemet police department; nothing had worked. The detectives couldn't prove that Tanja was being held against her will. His lawyer informed him that there was no legal way to force Tanja to speak to him, unless it could be proved that she was being held captive. Desperate, Stefan contacted the church a few weeks after he fled, offering to come back to Scientology if they would let him be with Tanja. Maybe there was a place where they could go. Australia, he offered. Even the RPF, provided they could do it together.

But Scientology didn't want him back. Instead, Stefan received a call from the Office of Special Affairs, summoning him to Scientology's large Mother Church building on Hollywood Boulevard. When he arrived, Elliot Abelson, the Church of Scientology's general counsel, handed Stefan a thirty-page doc.u.ment stating that he would never sue or denounce the church to the press, and asked him to sign. Then Abelson wrote a check for $25,000. "This will help you get started," he said.

The money petrified Stefan. Scientology often made cash settlements with its defectors, particularly those the church worried might speak to the press or testify against it in court. Several of these former officials, after reportedly receiving payments, had in fact retracted the negative statements they'd previously made. But no one, to Stefan's knowledge, had ever been offered as much as $25,000 to simply keep quiet, unless the person posed a particular threat.

What the f.u.c.k is going on? he wondered. Then he realized what it was: his wife had been Miscavige's secretary. What does she know? Stefan didn't have a clue. Tanja had never shared RTC secrets with him.

But clearly the church feared that she had. Stefan tried to bargain with Abelson: what if he and Tanja stayed in the movement and simply minded their own business? Abelson said it was too late. "Take it." He pushed the check toward Stefan. "We'd like to rest at ease that you aren't going to talk to anyone."

"I didn't think I had a choice," Stefan said. So he signed the agreement and took the check, but didn't cash it. The following day, his lawyer, Ford Greene, sent a strongly worded letter to the church, accusing its leaders of coercion and demanding that they rescind the agreement. The church, remembering the tenacity with which Greene had successfully litigated against them on behalf of Wollersheim and several other Scientologists, agreed. Then all went quiet.

Stefan tried to move on with his life. He found a job working in production design and soon started his own company. He began to read the critical material about Scientology on the Internet. He reached out to former Sea Org members he met online, many of whom, he discovered, had been hauled into OSA headquarters, confronted by lawyers, and offered sizable monetary inducements to keep their mouths shut, just as he had.

Toward the end of 2005, Stefan reconnected with Marc and Claire Headley, who'd escaped from the Int Base shortly after the musical chairs incident. Marc had gone first, in the early hours of January 5, 2005, on his motorcycle, ultimately making his way to Kansas City, Missouri, where his father, who had long ago left Scientology, now resided.

Claire followed a few weeks later, having finagled a trip into town to refill a contact lens prescription. From there, she'd called a taxi and hightailed it to the nearest bus station.

Sitting with the Headleys in the back garden of their snug, bungalow-style house in Burbank, Stefan knew he had to rescue Tanja. He'd continued to dream about her, which was reaffirming. There was still a connection. She was the only woman he'd ever loved. If she had moved on, he believed he would have sensed it.

And Tanja felt this too. "All this time I'd been wondering, 'Is Stefan surviving, is he doing okay, what's happened to him?'" she said. "There was always a side of me that was out there with him. I never stopped thinking about it."

In her former life as an obedient RTC staffer, Claire Headley had helped convince Tanja to file for divorce. Now she was plagued with guilt. "I felt like the s.h.i.ttiest person," she said. "I thought to myself, anything I could do to somehow make things right I had to do."

The answer came to her in a dream. She had sent Tanja a letter in a Victoria's Secret box. Lingerie items, which RTC women ordered online, were the only packages that were never opened by security staff at the base-a rule that was pa.s.sed after some security guards had gotten in trouble for opening several Victoria's Secret packages. Excitedly, Claire shook Marc awake. "I know how we can free Tanja."

The following day, Stefan ordered Tanja some items from the Victoria's Secret catalog. Then he sat down and composed a letter. "I love you and know you still have love for me too," he wrote. "Regardless of everything, I have no regrets of having left the Sea Org. I am free. I have my dignity."

Stefan then tucked the letter into a pair of jeans and put a cell phone in the box as well. He taped the package securely and, for good measure, "kicked it around to make it look like it was coming from Ohio. And then I sent it by UPS." Then he waited.

A few days later, Tanja received the package. Knowing she hadn't ordered anything, she took it as a message. "It was surreal," she said. "But there was a calmness about me." She opened the package and read her husband's letter. "Call me!"

Tanya wavered. She wanted to be with Stefan, of course. But after all she'd been through, how could she leave? She considered all the ways in which people had escaped from the base: They'd driven off in a car or motorcycle-Tanja didn't have either. They jumped the fence-exhausted from working long hours and eating rice and beans, Tanja was too weak. Simply walking down the highway would be easiest, but that hardly ever worked: only three people she'd ever heard about had successfully blown using that technique.

She wrote Stefan a letter telling him she didn't see how it would be possible. But she couldn't stop thinking about her husband. "I knew once I had sent the letter I had crossed a line," she said. One night, summoning every ounce of her courage, she called him.

Overjoyed, Stefan urged Tanja to communicate with him by voice mail and text message, methods he knew would be hard to trace. Through these furtive exchanges, Tanja learned about her husband's new life. He was making over $100,000 per year as a production designer. He had a house in the San Fernando Valley and a car. Were she to join him, they could have children, he promised her. Finally, after several weeks, Stefan convinced his wife to risk escape.

On August 5, 2006, Tanja took a ladder and walked toward the wall near the Castle, the only spot on the base not surrounded by an electric fence. It was just after midnight. Outside the wall, Stefan sat in his dark blue Mustang, waiting. His friend John, in a separate vehicle, drove down the road to an area where it was possible to pull onto the base. This, they knew, would alert the security guard, who would immediately go to investigate, at which point Tanja would jump over the wall. Even if she happened to trip the wire at the top, setting off an alarm, she would still have at least two minutes to run.

Stefan had painstakingly organized the plan. He and John stayed on the phone as John parked on the base. A few minutes later, a roving security guard walked toward his car. John hung up-the agreed-upon signal. Then Stefan called Tanja. "Go baby, go!" he said. "Now!"

"I'm going!" Tanja said, and taking a deep breath, jumped over the wall into the darkness. She saw her husband's waiting car and ran toward it. Then, with no one behind them, they sped off down Highway 79, out of the dust-choked San Jacinto Valley, and toward Los Angeles, and freedom, unleashed from the bonds of Int, David Miscavige, the Sea Organization, and the Church of Scientology.

The Scientologists who have left the church since the mid-2000s, a group from all strata of the organization, form part of what some have called the Second Great Exodus. There is a significant difference between this generation and those who were part of the exodus of the 1980s, largely thanks to the Internet, which has enabled former members, both Sea Org and public, to find one another and unite over their shared experience. "You don't tend to blame yourself when you see that others went through the same thing," commented Jeff Hawkins, who has become an outspoken critic of Scientology's current management. "It's made for a strong, well-informed, and coordinated group of ex-members, which the church has never had to face before."

Hawkins has helped this group develop, writing about his personal experiences in a memoir and blog, called Counterfeit Dreams, and creating a second website, Leaving Scientology, intended to help current, as well as former, Scientologists see beyond the church's hyperbolic speeches and marketing strategies. He advised his readers to look at their local org. "How many people are in the org? Are there more people in the org than there were ten years ago? Twenty years ago? Or are there less? What about events? Are there many more people now at events than there were ten years ago? You would think that if Scientology had been experiencing 'unprecedented expansion' for the last 10 years"-as the church often claims-"they would need bigger and bigger event venues. But the LA Events are still at the Shrine, as they were 20 years ago. And they have trouble filling that. So where is this expansion?"

One answer is Scientology's real estate portfolio. Since the early 2000s, Scientology has been running what former church executives say is a very profitable building and renovation scheme called the Ideal Org program. Indeed, according to numerous reports from within and outside of the church, real estate may now be Scientology's principle cash cow.

A comparable model for the Ideal Org program would be one used by another franchise-based operation, McDonald's, which is also one of the most successful real estate corporations in the country. McDonald's earns most of its income not from the sale of Big Macs, but from the money its franchise owners pay in rent on their properties. Scientology too has used this formula, a.s.signing a special division of church management, the International Landlord Office, to purchase choice buildings around the world, often through third-party corporations, and paying for them in cash, with IAS money raised from Scientology's parishioners.

In some cases, these buildings have reportedly been leased to the local orgs, which are expected to raise the money for rent, and for renovations, from their congregation. This buys the Church of Scientology, as a business enterprise, significant autonomy. No longer is the church dependent on services-sales of auditing and course packages-for income; the onus is now on the local organizations to succeed, and if they don't, the Church of Scientology, whose investment in the Ideal Org was minimal, is none the poorer.

The New York Org, which I visited in 2005, was one of the original Ideal Orgs. As the Church of Scientology already owned the West 46th Street property, it did not need to purchase a new building, but the church nonetheless spent $18 million on renovating the structure, installing skylights, building a full-service spa for its Purification Rundown program, redoing the ornate lobby, and adding other plush features. Tom De Vocht, who'd run similar building projects in Florida, was tasked with overseeing the renovations, which, he said, were far from complete as the grand opening ceremony, slated for September 25, 2004, approached. To address the problem, some four hundred Sea Org members descended upon midtown Manhattan the day before the ribbon cutting, to finish the cosmetic renovations.

After the ceremony, said De Vocht, many of the refurbishings had to be redone, having failed to meet certain building codes, which drove the local organization only further into debt. "It was a disaster. The org already owed $1.8 million to contractors who were banging on the door every day, saying, 'Where the h.e.l.l's my money?' They had not paid the building off as yet, and so they were regging the public like crazy. But hey, on the face of things, it looked like a beautiful new organization." (In Scientology parlance, regging means "soliciting money from members.") The theory behind the Ideal Org program is "If you build it, they will come." By most accounts, however, it hasn't worked out that way. Montreal, for example, has always had a small congregation and roughly fifteen people on staff. Yet the Church of Scientology recently decided to open an Ideal Org there. Members were convinced to donate $4 million to purchase the building and then another $4 million to renovate it. While the membership was pressured for the money, sometimes holding all-night fundraising sessions, the new building sat empty, and the original organization struggled with debt, because the parishioners had spent all their money on the building and thus could no longer afford to pay for services.

But it is likely that this problem did not affect the Church of Scientology as a corporate ent.i.ty. "As a money-making scheme, the Ideal Org plan is pretty good," said Mat Pesch, a former Sea Org official who was an executive in the International Landlord Office. Though he lacks current financial data, which remain confidential (Pesch left Scientology in 2005), he said, "What I would expect to find based on the indicators and data that I have is that cash and real estate are growing by leaps and bounds. On the other hand, the staff and public and structure of the church, other than real estate, are breaking down ... even the best PR will not be able to cover it up or slow it down."

In the summer of 2010, Mike Rinder conducted an online survey of former Scientologists to find out what had motivated them to leave the church. Of the hundreds of respondents, most cited the unremitting pressure, sometimes called "crush regging," to donate to various Scientology causes, like the Ideal Org program. Rinder dubbed it the "vulture culture."

Mike and Donna Henderson, onetime Scientologists from Clearwater, were victims of this culture. OT 7 and OT 8 respectively, they were nearly bankrupted by their involvement with the church. Today they are two of a growing number of ex-Scientologists who predict that in these dark economic times, Scientology's "unvarnished demand for money," as Mike puts it, may lead to its demise.

Mike joined the Church of Scientology in 1971, as a nineteen-year-old in Los Angeles. By 1973, he'd signed a billion-year contract with the Sea Organization and was sailing with L. Ron Hubbard aboard the Apollo. When Hubbard moved onsh.o.r.e, Mike, eager to strike out on his own, went through the appropriate steps to leave the Sea Org. He moved back to L.A. and became a public Scientologist, ultimate reaching the very top of the Bridge to Total Freedom, as did Donna, his second wife, whom he married in 2003.

Along the way, Mike contributed to a wide range of causes and programs, ranging from the Golden Age of Tech to the release of a sophisticated new E-meter. To further Scientology's "planetary dissemination," he and Donna bought extra copies of Dianetics and other books by Hubbard to send to libraries all over the world. They helped fund a project to translate the Founder's writing and lectures into languages spoken by relatively few people, such as Lithuanian. To preserve Hubbard's technology for eternity, the couple gave money to the Church of Spiritual Technology, a special ent.i.ty that has spent the past twenty years preparing and storing all of the Founder's handwritten notes, policy letters, and science fiction in secret, underground vaults spread across three remote locations in California, as well as one near Trementina, New Mexico. The Hendersons also regularly took cruises, costing $10,000 to $20,000, aboard Freedwinds, and they gave generously to groups such as Narconon, Applied Scholastics, and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights; they were listed in church publications as patrons of the International a.s.sociation of Scientologists, signifying they had contributed at least $50,000 to the church's legal war chest.

Joining the IAS was not optional. Every Scientologist must be a member, though when people first become interested in Scientology they are offered a free six-month membership. After that, members are prohibited from taking further Scientology services until they buy either a yearly or a lifetime membership. A yearly membership costs $300 and a lifetime membership costs $3,000. "The thing is, you are pretty much expected to become a lifetime member, and they hit you up for money all the time," Mike said during an interview in Clearwater in 2010. "Every few months, or weeks, there's some kind of event that they get you to go to, and then ask you for this and that. And eventually, you wind up being an IAS sponsor, which is $5,000, and then you get up to where you've paid $40,000 or $50,000, and now you're a patron."

During his thirty-four years as a member of the Church of Scientology, Mike, who once ran a profitable contracting business, estimated he "donated" roughly $600,000. Donna, a veterinarian, was a member for just ten years but spent well over $1 million in that time. The Hendersons also claimed over $100,000 in tax deductions in the decade or so after donations to the Church of Scientology became tax-exempt, though as with most parishioners, the money they saved was plowed back into the church.

"The money that keeps this church going comes from professionals like my wife," Mike explained. "People think it's the celebrities"-the actress Nancy Cartwright, the voice of The Simpsons' Bart Simpson, for example, donated $10 million to the IAS in 2007 -"but a big, big part of Scientology has nothing to do with celebrities; it has to do with dentists, vets, chiropractors, podiatrists, accountants, professional people who have six-figure incomes and who can afford to drop everything, come to Flag twice a year, and spend some serious money because it won't make a dent in their life."

Ultimately, however, even Scientology's wealthiest benefactors have found themselves running out of money, as the Hendersons did in 2005. By then Mike, whose business had suffered a downturn, had committed so much money to the Church of Scientology that he was reduced to borrowing from his elderly divorced mother to recompense Flag for past debts. Donna was in such bad financial straits that she sold her thriving veterinary practice to help pay off some of what she owed. Left with no work and little choice, but still loyal to Scientology, the couple made what to them seemed the logical decision at the time: they joined the Sea Organization to defray costs.

But rather than indoctrinate them more deeply, Donna Henderson, a plainspoken woman, said the Sea Org experience served to "wake us up." Public members, and notably those who've paid enough to become Operating Thetans, are a.s.siduously kept in the dark about how the Sea Org, and the overall church hierarchy, actually functions. "You truly have no idea that things are as bad as they are within the organization," said Donna. "But once you're in, it's like the curtain just drops, and all of a sudden there's absolutely no pretense. You're not there to save the planet, you're not there to help anybody-you're there to get money from people. And you don't have money anymore, so you're a slave."

Four months after joining the Sea Org, in July 2005, the Hendersons packed their belongings in a Ryder truck and drove away. They refused to submit to the coercive exit interview process, known as "routing out," by which disgruntled staffers are often (albeit after days or weeks of pressure) convinced to stay. They thus became SPs. Shortly afterward, Mike's sisters, brother, nieces, nephews, his children, and his ex-wife-roughly thirty-five people in all*-disconnected from him. So did many of his business a.s.sociates, and almost all of the couple's friends.

Today the Hendersons live alongside the water in a quiet middle-cla.s.s neighborhood of St. Petersburg, just south of Clearwater. Slowly, they have rebuilt their lives: Mike has worked odd jobs and currently sells furniture; Donna opened a new veterinary practice. They have become vocal critics of the church and its administration, and their fear of hara.s.sment is palpable. Their ranch-style home is a fortress not unlike a Scientology org, Mike said with a laugh. "We have a twenty-four-hour alarm system, plus fire protection, gla.s.s-break protection, forced-entry and burglar protection, and security lights around the house, with motion detectors."

In many other ways, leaving Scientology has not been easy. During my visit to Clearwater, Mike and Donna took me to dinner at a waterfront restaurant just off the Memorial Causeway between Clearwater and Clearwater Beach, a resort community that is home to many Scientologists. Mike is a tall man, six foot six, with a loping gait that makes him hard to miss, even amid dozens of people. Shortly after we sat down, a couple and their teenage children were seated at the table next to us. Glancing over, they became visibly uncomfortable. The woman took out her cell phone and walked a few feet away. Her daughter began craning her neck, looking for the hostess.

"They're Scientologists," Donna whispered.

"Just wait," Mike said.