Inside Scientology Part 14

"Maybe we should go." Donna looked chagrined.

"No, let's see what they do." A few seconds later, the woman returned and everyone at her table got up and left. "Wow," Mike said. He looked around at the other well-dressed people eating on the patio. "I guess they know we're declared."

"But we haven't seen anything in writing," Donna protested. When Scientologists are formally excommunicated, a written declaration known as a "goldenrod" is issued, stating their crimes against the organization. It is printed on a piece of golden parchment and sent to both the member and his or her church, where it is often posted on the wall. The Hendersons had not received their goldenrod.

"Oh, we're definitely declared." Mike reminded his wife of another Scientologist friend they ran into at a local Dillard's department store. Upon seeing them, she'd turned and walked in the other direction. "If she walked away from us and wouldn't talk to us, then it's known among Scientologists in Clearwater that we're declared." Mike seemed regretful about this.

In their prior, flush life as OTs, Mike and Donna owned a Bellanca Viking airplane, which they sold to help recoup some of their financial losses. After dinner, Mike took me to the hangar where they had kept the plane. He'd repurposed it as a storeroom for a floor-to-ceiling a.s.sortment of boxes and stacking shelves filled with Scientology books, tapes, CDs, DVDs, E-meters, and other paraphernalia.

"This is probably one of the best collections ever put together," Mike said, handing me a leather-bound, gold-leaf-edged copy of Dianetics. He was selling it on eBay. "This is a special edition. You'd probably get a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty dollars for something like that." He picked up another book. "This is a transcript of a taped lecture that Hubbard gave on the Apollo in 1968." It forms the basis of Hubbard's book Mission into Time, in which Hubbard discussed his past life in ancient Greece. I opened the book, with its fraying dust jacket, and read the inscription: We hope the reading of this book is only the first step of a personal voyage of discovery into the new and vital world religion of Scientology.

Mike reached over to a shelf and took down an emerald green Planetary Dissemination Meter, a special-edition E-meter that came in a silk bag embroidered with gold thread. "My wife owns five of these. Each one cost ten grand. And that isn't even the most expensive one." He lifted an E-meter plated in twenty-four-karat gold. "This one is worth twenty thousand dollars." Mike estimated that he was one of just one hundred people who owned a gold E-meter. He'd used it to audit body thetans-millions of them, he figured. But the exorcism and indeed the entire OT experience, he admitted, hadn't really worked.

"I've had to come to grips with the fact that, yes, I've raised a family, and yes, I've had a successful business and all that, but a lot of my energy and my impetus as a person was channeled toward Scientology," he said sadly. "It's been a real letdown, letting go of that. But I just couldn't keep lying to myself any longer."

He looked around in the hangar, where virtually everything was for sale. "Maybe at some point in human evolution, people will be able to do some things we can't do now, but you're not going to have the ability to use every ounce of your intelligence, and develop psychic powers, and be able to leave your body at will. And that's what we thought when we got into Scientology. We thought we were going to be able to do all these things that the yogis taught, that the maharaja talked about. Immortality. Real freedom. I wanted the certainty that I would live and die and live again, and remember everything, and be okay, forever."

Instead, Mike Henderson had doubts and fears, just like every other mortal. "I don't know what's in store for me down the road, but I know I won't get there with Scientology," he said, with resignation. "And after thirty-four years, and six hundred thousand dollars, that is the saddest thing I can say about my life."

Epilogue.

What Is True for You

SIX THOUSAND SCIENTOLOGISTS and their guests turned out to christen the new Church of Scientology of Los Angeles on Sat.u.r.day, April 24, 2010. It was a crystal-clear afternoon, and for the believers who'd gathered at Scientology's West Coast headquarters on Sunset Boulevard-those people for whom the sixteen-foot, illuminated SCIENTOLOGY sign atop the landmark Cedars of Lebanon building is a testament to Scientology's claim of being the "fastest-growing religion of the twenty-first century"-here was the final manifestation of their hard work.

Amid the faceless commercial towers and stucco bungalows installed in this section of East Hollywood, Scientologists and a number of Los Angeles city officials, as well as the Los Angeles County sheriff, Lee Baca, a vocal supporter of Scientology's anti-drug program, gathered before an outdoor stage decorated, as all church functions are, with a huge portrait of L. Ron Hubbard. A dance troupe, attired in glittery top hats and tails, performed a routine. The band played "Hooray for Hollywood." Before the entrance to the new building-which, as everyone there knew, was actually the old building, with a multimillion-dollar facelift and a fresh coat of blue paint-bobbed an arc of blue and gold balloons. "Today marks a milestone step in our planetary crusade to bring on our help on a truly global scale," said David Miscavige, looking out from the podium. Dressed in a sharp navy suit, he commended the Los Angeles Scientologist community for its dedication in creating this new Ideal Org, the fourth such organization to open in 2010 and the most historic, for here, in 1954, is where the first church of Scientology was born.

Now there are countless churches. From London to Nashville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.-and also Quebec City, Brussels, Seattle, Pasadena, Mexico City, Madrid, Rome, and Johannesburg-Ideal Orgs have opened throughout the world over the past several years. By the end of 2011, according to the church's predictions, seventy new organizations will be opened or under construction from Atlanta to Battle Creek, Michigan, and from Caracas to Tel Aviv.

In Clearwater, the landmark Fort Harrison Hotel has been given a $40 million upgrade.* Just next door, connected to the Fort Harrison by a gla.s.s-enclosed sky bridge, is a facility referred to as the "Mecca" or "Super Power" building, which is still, more than a decade since ground was broken for it, under construction.

The Super Power building-named for a highly cla.s.sified, and expensive, new rundown intended to enhance Scientologists' perceptions-is an enormous white Mediterranean revivalstyle edifice occupying a full square block of downtown Clearwater. The largest building in all of Pinellas County (church officials call it Scientology's "Sistine Chapel"), it stood as an empty sh.e.l.l for six years, while it underwent a number of redesigns. When it is finally completed, at an estimated cost of $90 million, the seven-story, 380,000-square-foot building will have 889 rooms, 142 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, a 1,140-seat dining room, an indoor running track and sculpture garden, and 2 Scientology museums. The crowning touch will be a two-story illuminated Scientology cross that, perched atop a fifteen-story tower, will shine across the city of Clearwater like a beacon.

What this says about the church, according to its leaders, is that Scientology is a growing, vital movement-far from the dying organization its detractors contend it has become. "It certainly creates this incredible illusion of success and expansion," conceded its onetime finance officer Mat Pesch. "But it's like the housing market of 2005-'Things have never looked better.'"

But behind this facade, say people like Pesch, members are fleeing the organization in droves. How many? "This is as hard to estimate as it is to count how many people are 'in' Scientology, as it depends entirely on your definition of 'in,'" said one former senior church official. Perhaps forty thousand people have contributed to the IAS, Mike Rinder and other ex-officials noted. But indeed millions-perhaps even Scientology's current figure of eleven million-may be counted as Scientologists if, as the church does, you include in that number everyone who has ever read a Hubbard book or signed up for an introductory service. I myself, having once bought a book on Dianetics and completed an auditing session, am by that measure a "Scientologist."

The truth, as I noted at the beginning of this book, is not an easy thing to discern when it comes to the Church of Scientology. One thing is clear, however: for all of the charges leveled against the church by its current defectors, similar, if not worse, allegations were leveled against it in the past.

Yet throughout its history, Scientology has shown a remarkable ability to both survive scandal and deflect many hard questions. For the church to do that today will be daunting, given the breadth of negative information about it available on the Internet. But it may not be impossible.

Over the past decade, the church has been notably proactive with regard to what was until recently a largely untapped market: African Americans. This happened thanks in part to the late musician Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist and pa.s.sionate advocate of Hubbard's study technology, who started a number of small storefront tutoring programs to help inner-city youth. Early in 2000, Hayes met with Marty Rathbun, then the inspector general of the RTC, and proposed that the church consider a new financial strategy to make Scientology more affordable, and thus accessible, to the black community.

As Rathbun later wrote of the meeting, Hayes struck both an idealistic and pragmatic note. If Scientology's management was averse to making Scientology affordable to poor people on a simple humanitarian level, then perhaps it might consider how such an investment might pay off. "All that is hip and cool comes from the black ghetto," he told Rathbun. From a marketing perspective, Scientology was "shooting itself in the foot" by ignoring the black community. "Help Black America," Hayes said, "and you help yourself."

Miscavige seized upon this idea-less for idealistic reasons than for the prospect of Scientology becoming "hip," according to Rathbun-and three years later announced plans to open two new Ideal Orgs: one in Harlem and another in the Inglewood section of South Central Los Angeles.

For the next half dozen years, Scientology greatly stepped up efforts to reach out to the black community, notably through its ministers, courting such prominent leaders as the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, who is the former head of the ten-thousand-member St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. At Flag in June 2010, the church sponsored the three-day Clear African Americans awards banquet and convention, which included a seminar on how to disseminate to African Americans and a session called "Religious Influence in Black Life and How to Help Religious People Reach for LRH Tech." Guest speakers included Alfreddie Johnson Jr., a Baptist minister and the founder and executive director of the World Literacy Crusade, a Scientology-backed tutoring program based in Compton, California, and Tony Muhammad from the Nation of Islam.

Louis Farrakhan, the founder of the Nation of Islam, was a recipient of a Scientology Friends of Mankind award in 2006, cosponsored by the Church of Scientology and Ebony Awakenings, an African American nonprofit organization with ties to the church. Since then, Farrakhan has become notably enamored of Hubbard's philosophies, promoting Scientology's drug awareness and literacy programs and embracing its management technology. The Nation of Islam now has a national and regional "org board." It has also held Dianetics training seminars for its followers. In August 2010, the Nation held one such seminar in Rosemont, Illinois, at which Farrakhan announced that this training would soon be mandatory for every leader of the Nation's U.S. and international operations.*

Farrakhan did not, however, mention the key terms a.s.sociated with the brand-Scientology, Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard-an irony for a church that has spent so much money and human capital promoting itself and its name. But Miscavige, nothing if not pragmatic, would surely approve this tactic if it served to drive up Scientology's enrollment statistics, just as he has appeared to endorse the quiet ways that Scientology-sponsored front organizations are now disseminating Scientology's message into society.

Over the past decade or so, Scientologists have forged bonds with state and local lawmakers in cities across the United States, some of whom may not be fully aware of the Scientology connection. One example is the church's close ties to the National Foundation of Women Legislators, which counts more than eight hundred members in state and federal government. Since the late 1990s, Scientologists have held key positions in the organization, which they have used to reach out to lawmakers on issues pertaining to drugs and social reform, notably psychiatry.

In the spring of 2010, this link became notably clear after it was revealed that the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, a Tea Party candidate for the U.S. Senate and a member of the NFWL, had backed a bill to implement a Hubbard-inspired drug rehabilitation and reform program known as Second Chance in Nevada state prisons. The president of Second Chance, Joy Westrum, sat on the NFWL board and had reportedly been instrumental in linking Second Chance, which uses the Purification Rundown, with a drug awareness program known as Shoulder to Shoulder, which has nothing to do with Scientology but happens to be supported by the NFWL.

Angle, a Southern Baptist, was clearly enamored of Second Chance, appearing in a promotional video for the program. Angle also became an advocate of CCHR's agenda-though she did not publicly endorse CCHR-and in 2001 and 2003 tried to introduce legislation that would prohibit school nurses or psychologists (though not licensed physicians) to require that certain students take psychotropic drugs like Ritalin. These efforts failed, but in 2003, Angle did manage to convince the Nevada senator John Ensign to introduce a similar bill in Congress. (According to theLas Vegas Sun, Angle's website at one point contained a reference, later scrubbed, to her partnering with actresses Jenna Elfman and Kelly Preston, who joined her in lobbying Ensign.) "The Church of Scientology has been excellent at taking well-established social problems and capitalizing on them for its own good," noted the Canadian sociologist Stephen Kent, who has studied Scientology's tactics and practices for twenty years. The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, for example, provided Applied Scholastics-along with many other for-profit educational systems-with the opportunity to introduce Hubbard's study technology into the schools, and it was highly successful at implementing the program in one middle school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which was notorious for its poor performance record. Similarly, in Washington, D.C., Applied Scholastics International is now one of twenty-nine tutoring services listed in the t.i.tle I Supplemental Educational Services Guide provided to parents of children attending D.C.'s failing public schools.

The attacks of 9/11 also gave Scientologists a chance to introduce Hubbard's Purification Rundown to skeptical New Yorkers, and first responders continue to receive help from the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, which critics decry is Narconon by another name. WISE has a number of management consultancy groups that specialize in teaching small business owners L. Ron Hubbard's management technology-indeed, Mike Henderson's wife, Donna, was introduced to Scientology through a WISE-affiliated company that had promised to help her better manage her veterinary practice.

Where Scientology has not been wary of using its name has been in its humanitarian work. After the Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, for example, teams of Scientology missionaries, known as "volunteer ministers," flocked to Port-au-Prince, where they established a semi-permanent base, along with several other relief organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and Doctors Without Borders. Wearing the signature yellow T-shirts that identified them as members of the Church of Scientology's volunteer minister program, they brought food, water, medical supplies, and also plentiful Scientology literature. They served as surgical a.s.sistants and orderlies at the makeshift hospitals set up in the wake of the disaster, and also offered their own holistic healing techniques, known as "touch a.s.sists," to wounded children.

John Travolta flew his private plane to the island, bringing with him a team of doctors, more volunteer ministers, and a reported six tons of ready-to-eat military rations and medical supplies. The project won Travolta, and Scientology, tremendous media coverage. And, as with every church initiative, Scientologists were encouraged to donate to the cause. "We need to get as much Scientology technology into the hands of the Haitian people," noted one fundraising letter promising members that a $3,000 gift or more would win the donor a "very special commendation" in their ethics file.

The appeal likened the tragedy in Haiti to the attacks of September 11, 2001, which Miscavige had described as a "wake-up call" to Scientologists to proselytize.

Since leaving Scientology, Marty Rathbun has become the chief thorn in David Miscavige's side. On his blog, and in several key interviews with the St. Petersburg Times, CNN, and other media, he has railed against Miscavige's policies and accused him of human rights abuses. But Rathbun is still a Scientologist, as are a number of former Int staffers mentioned in this book, among them Dan Koon, Steve Hall, and Mike Rinder. They are part of a new "Independent Scientology" movement: people who've remained true to the original theories and teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, though not to the current management of the church.

Such splintering is not unusual for religions-Protestantism, after all, was originally a splinter movement-and indeed, dissension has been a hallmark of Scientology since its earliest days, when Dianeticists like Helen O'Brien split with Hubbard over the very creation of a religious movement called Scientology. In the 1980s, the so-called Free Zone movement attracted a few thousand members but was ultimately hounded out of existence-ironically, by Rathbun and the church's legal department. Now Rathbun's own movement (which is largely, but not entirely, comprised of former Sea Org members) is facing similar attacks leveled by the Church of Scientology, which claims, among other things, that Rathbun, not Miscavige, was responsible for the culture of violence that developed on the base.

After leaving the Sea Org, Rathbun moved to south Texas, where he spent several years staying a.s.siduously under the radar. Many former Scientologists, including Marc and Claire Headley, believed he was dead. Then, in 2008, he emerged, posting on an ex-Scientologist message board that he was open for business as an auditor. Since then, hundreds of former church loyalists have reportedly availed themselves of his services at his Corpus Christi home.

But Rathbun's "church," if it could be called that, is still largely a virtual church, located on his website, where the former RTC inspector general sermonizes on everything from David Miscavige's abusiveness to the inspiration he draws from the rapper Nas, who, on his alb.u.m Hip Hop Is Dead criticized the music industry-and America-for, as Rathbun saw it, "degraded values."* Rathbun similarly judged Miscavige's church to be degraded. Indeed, he has likened himself, in vague terms, to Martin Luther, challenging a corrupt and megalomaniacal pope.

Such tactics have their price, and since the summer of 2009, when Rathbun gave several lengthy interviews to theSt. Petersburg Times, he has been hounded by private investigators. "My wife and I can't even have a quiet meal at the local Chuck Wagon without some[one] plopping down beside us, straining his ear," Rathbun wrote on his blog in September 2010. His home, he said, is under constant surveillance, and investigators have dug into his personal life. One of them, Rathbun claimed, has suggested to authorities that Rathbun was somehow involved in the 1981 murder of his brother, Bruce, a charge he unequivocally denied. "I joined Scientology for the sole purpose of helping my troubled brother," Rathbun has said.

Marc and Claire Headley too have been followed by church-funded P.I.'s, although for different reasons. The Headleys, who disavowed Scientology, sued the Church of Scientology in 2009 for violations of labor law, human trafficking, and forced abortions. On August 5, 2010, the suits were dismissed by the U.S. district judge Dale Fischer, who ruled that as the ministerial arm of the church, the Sea Organization was protected by the First Amendment. "Inquiry into these allegations would entangle the court in the religious doctrine of Scientology and the doctrinally motivated practices of the Sea Org," Judge Fischer wrote.

In response to the ruling, the Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis said succinctly, "Scientology wins."

The Church of Scientology in the twenty-first century may be very different from the therapy group L. Ron Hubbard founded in 1954, but its core tenets have not changed. Scientologists continue to see tax collectors and government officials as "criminal elements," largely because of Hubbard's belief that these groups take money from the public and deliver nothing in return. They view journalists with distrust and disdain as "merchants of chaos" and believe that psychiatrists, in cahoots with drug companies like Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKlein, are part of a broad, government-endorsed, global conspiracy to subjugate the human race. Scientology continues to use the legal system as a weapon, just as Hubbard intended; its lawsuits aim to "hara.s.s and discourage" as well as, in myriad cases, "ruin" its opponents utterly: since the Operation Snow White investigation of the late 1970s, the U.S. government has been loath to investigate the Church of Scientology despite numerous charges of wrongdoing, ranging from human rights abuse to financial corruption. According to several reports, the FBI is currently investigating Scientology over the abuse allegations made by numerous Sea Org staff; the agency is also reportedly investigating David Miscavige for "inurement," or allegations that he has personally enriched himself with church funds.

A fiercely doctrinaire religion, Scientology has always required that its adherents follow L. Ron Hubbard's edicts to the letter. Dissent or opposition to any of Hubbard's views or technologies has never been tolerated. Throughout the church's history, those who challenged Hubbard's authority, including several early members of his Sea Organization, were immediately cast out. Debating church tenets in any context that would foster the free exchange of ideas and, ultimately, adaptation has never been looked upon favorably. While members are expected to take responsibility for one another-which would include reporting abusive Sea Org members, as Natalie Walet's mother once did-comporting oneself in any way that could be seen as contrary to church goals, including expressing curiosity about other philosophies, or about people or aspects of life that might be independent of the church's immediate purview, is considered subversive: punishable, in its most egregious cases, by excommunication.

Scientology, in other words, is and has always been a fundamentalist faith. And like other fundamentalist groups, it will have its factions and its apostates. Whether it will endure in spite of that rests on whether its basic mission-to "clear" the planet and thus create a Scientology world-remains vital to its flock, and to their children.

After Kendra Wiseman left Scientology in 2000, she spent a few years in Los Angeles, searching for meaning. Her pa.s.sing interest in Wicca was over; now she explored Kabbalah, Buddhist meditation, yoga, and Pilates. She worked for Food Not Bombs, took part in anarchist conventions, protested the impending war in Iraq, and tried to become obsessed with various rock-and-roll bands. Nothing filled the void left by her abandonment of the church. "One of the most addictive things about Scientology is the constant feeling that you are part of the Universal Struggle," she later wrote in an essay, "Growing Up a Scientologist." This feeling is not unique to her; it is an integral feature of the movement's success. "Youpersonally are giving the universe real hope ... simply by existing, by the mere fact that you are Moving Up the Bridge." A science fiction fan, Kendra compared L. Ron Hubbard to Yoda and everyone else she knew to Luke Skywalker. "Imagine feeling that big, that important, that powerful every day of your life," she said. "I challenge anyone to look into their heart of hearts and tell me that if they ever found a cause that they considered worthy, as we considered that cause worthy, that they wouldn't join it."

Now, Kendra realized, leaving Scientology was about much more than simply deciding not go to church or use language developed by L. Ron Hubbard. It was about learning to live in a world that hadn't in some way been designed by L. Ron Hubbard. In 2004, having dropped out of Delphi and gotten a GED, Kendra went to college. She chose a school as far away as she could imagine: in Beijing, a city where Scientology, like most religions, is outlawed.

From there, she began posting to anti-Scientology websites. The church soon became aware of this, and in the spring of 2006, Kendra's name was entered onto what she called a church "blacklist" of Scientology critics. As a result, her parents disconnected from her. "They have abandoned me here," she wrote me from China. "But it's okay," she added. "I'm doing fine."

She'd become a writer and a web designer. Warily, she continued to post her thoughts on anti-Scientology message boards. Then, in January 2008, Kendra and many other former Scientologists were given a tremendous boost by a loose affiliation of Internet hackers, free-speech advocates, and critics who, calling themselves "Anonymous," began attacking Scientology websites and holding large anti-Scientology rallies in cities around the world. Emboldened by the safety in numbers on the Internet and at the rallies, Kendra and two friends, Jenna Miscavige Hill, a niece of David Miscavige, and Astra Woodcraft, the daughter of one of Lisa McPherson's former caretakers, launched Ex-Scientology Kids, a website offering "non-judgmental support for those who are still in Scientology" as well as "discussion and debate for those who've already left." Their motto: "I was born. I grew up. I escaped."

But Kendra hadn't spoken to her parents in more than two years. "I write them letters sometimes," she told me in an e-mail. "I haven't heard from them in so long, writing the letters is like writing in a diary, or talking to myself." She had recently gotten engaged and was planning her wedding, which she knew her family wouldn't attend. "I don't hate them. I don't resent them. I don't want to see them punished, or forced to not be Scientologists, or anything like that. I just want to talk to them again." If she could say one thing to her family, "I'd tell them I love them. I wish they'd given me a chance to show that I've grown up, and that I'm happy."

A few months later, these sentiments, which Kendra posted on Ex-Scientology Kids, abruptly disappeared from the site. By the end of 2008, Kendra's name had also disappeared from that website, save one small reference, which identified her as a founder. Scientology had not forced this to happen; Kendra herself had decided to do it.

As it turned out, her parents had attended her wedding after all. Afterward, the family agreed to come to a sort of detente. Kendra would stop publicly voicing her opposition to church policies, which would make it easier for her parents to keep her in their lives. Both parties would maintain their own views, but they simply wouldn't talk about them. "I guess it's like don't ask, don't tell," Kendra told me. "We basically agreed that the only way it would work out was if we totally kept Scientology out of each other's lives."

If the Church of Scientology-not Scientology as a philosophy, but the church as an inst.i.tution-is to survive, it will have to find a way to reconcile itself, and its policies, with people like Kendra Wiseman. Reform is not an idea that sat well with L. Ron Hubbard, who preached that Scientology was the only way out of the maze of the human condition, and, moreover, that its message and practices could be delivered only through Scientology organizations or individuals controlled by them and licensed to provide "100 percent standard tech." But reform may nonetheless be what is needed. "LRH's real mission was to teach people to look for themselves: into themselves, into others, into the world around them," said Dan Koon, who is one of a number of former Scientologists who believe that Hubbard's original philosophy differed vastly from the policies and ideology imposed by his organization. Because of this, Koon estimated that there may now be more people practicing Scientology outside the organized church than inside.

Those people have had to make a choice: should they speak out and be declared heretics or keep silent and maintain their ties with family and friends? It is a bitter and, for many, an impossible choice, and because of it, the Church of Scientology, controlled as it is by authoritarian and image-conscious leaders who appear to have invested far more in the look than the substance of the faith, may not, as its detractors predict, survive as it exists today.

I have no doubt, however, that for as long as people yearn for the answers to eternal questions, as well as to their own immediate problems, some vestiges of L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy will remain, provided the movement's second and third generations lead the way.

Natalie Walet, for instance, has stayed true to Scientology, and to the organized church. She is also applying to law schools. On her list: Stanford, Georgetown, Columbia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan. While she waits, she is living in Tampa, working as a waitress, and taking Scientology courses at Flag. "I go there every week," she says. "I love it there."

Which is not to say that Natalie is unaware of Scientology's problems. Like many young Scientologists, she has broken church rules and gone on the Internet to read the OT levels and peruse critical websites. Over the past years, she has read all the stories published in the St. Petersburg Times detailing the accounts of human rights violations at the Int Base. "I don't doubt that some of those things happened," she said. "I'm well aware of what it's like inside the Sea Org, and there is definitely truth to every bit of bad PR you hear."

On the other hand, she wondered, why did officials let this happen? "All the people who've come out and told the press these things were in a position to do something about it-to change things. Instead, they stood there and watched. Why? It's so beyond what the church-any church-should stand for."

She rejected the defectors' claims that the environment was too corrosive-too "cult-like," in the words of men like Jeff Hawkins and Tom De Vocht-for them to do anything more than take the abuse, and run. "If you know there's a problem, it's your responsibility to fix it-that's what LRH says," she noted. "When you look at the doctrine, it's not all that free-thinking, but the auditing is all about freedom of thought. If orders are coming down that you know are wrong, it's your responsibility as a Scientologist to handle them. So it really floors me that people saw DM doing this, if he did this, and didn't do anything. Shame on them for not fixing it."

It is a fairly revolutionary thing to say: to shame not only the defectors, but the loyalists; to admit that the overwhelmingly negative reports about Scientology are not all "lies," as Scientology has claimed; to muse on whether or not David Miscavige is guilty-and yet, to still love the church. "I don't look at COB and think he's my Jesus Christ and can never be wrong," said Natalie-though if one were to suggest that LRH did the things Miscavige is accused of doing, she added, "I'd think you're on drugs because I can't imagine a man who was as brilliant as he was, and who wrote what he did, being like that."

Hubbard, by all accounts, was to a degree "like that." But twenty-five years since his death, which is two years longer than Natalie has been alive, does it matter? Scientology, like all religions, accepts even grave imperfection as part of the human condition and, like all religions, seeks to transcend it. In Judaism, this is called justice. In Buddhism, it is called seeking nirvana. In Christianity, it is absolution from sin.

In Scientology, the route from flawed to faultless is called "going Clear." Natalie hasn't reached that point as yet; she hopes to. She also hopes the same for the church. "I am a Scientologist because when I read LRH, it helps me. So when I hear these terrible things, it makes me want to stand behind my organization that much more and change it. And I know so many young Scientologists who feel the same way. We are the going to be the new face of Scientology."

Some of these people, she noted, have gone into politics, or medicine. Natalie hopes to become a judge. There are some who've become management consultants. Others have joined the Sea Organization. "There are as many different kinds of Scientologist as there are different kinds of people," she said. "But you can only change things by changing the way people think or operate; by educating them." That, she believes, is something LRH would highly approve of. "I want to make sure Scientology is the best it can be, and that we're the organization we want it to be. It's my personal responsibility."

Notes.

Secrecy and control are hallmarks of the Church of Scientology. Writing a book about such an organization thus poses myriad challenges to a journalist trying to construct a truthful narrative. Though the early history of Scientology has been doc.u.mented, virtually no credible, unbiased books, scholarly or popular, have been written about the past twenty-five years of church history. Also, very few doc.u.ments pertaining to this period have surfaced publicly because David Miscavige's orders and directives are almost always kept confidential, circulated only to officials at the International Base.

Sourcing for a book like this is particularly difficult, first, because the Church of Scientology hara.s.ses critics and defectors who speak about it, and second, because Scientology has a highly effective self-censorship mechanism, in that members must confess their transgressions prior to auditing. As journalists are, by L. Ron Hubbard's definition, "potential trouble sources," unauthorized contact with them is something to which a person would have to confess, and thus members who do speak to reporters almost always do so with the permission of the church.

For example, in 2005 I interviewed Kelly Preston and Kirstie Alley in Clearwater, Florida; in both cases, Scientology's Office of Special Affairs provided them with equipment to record our conversation. In early 2006, I interviewed the actor Doug Dohring and several other young Scientologists in a conference room outfitted with recording devices at Scientology's Mother Church in Los Angeles. Every other Scientologist I have interviewed has been personally chaperoned by at least one and sometimes three church officials. The sole exception was Natalie Walet, who spoke to me freely, on the record, in person, on the telephone, and through e-mails dozens of times over the past few years. I applaud her courage and honesty.

Because of the Church of Scientology's history of hara.s.sing and discrediting its critics and defectors, the vast majority of people who leave the church do so quietly. This book began as a magazine a.s.signment for Rolling Stone and could not have been completed without the help of a former Scientologist whom I have promised not to name but who has served as my Virgil since the earliest days of my reporting, painstakingly explaining not only Scientology's language, beliefs, practices, and moral codes, but also the mechanisms of control by which the church suppresses or discredits the words of its former members.

I felt it was imperative to this book's credibility that it be based largely on the accounts of "quiet defectors" such as my Virgil: people who had neither sued the church nor spoken publicly about their involvement with Scientology in any way. Finding the right individuals took months. Gaining their trust took just as long. And getting them to agree to go on the record was, in many cases, an almost Herculean task.

One cost of a book like this one is the time it takes to complete. Over the years I was reporting, a number of my sources, emboldened by the Internet, decided to become more public. These include Jeff Hawkins, Marc and Claire Headley, Nancy Many, Steve Hall, Kendra Wiseman, Mark Fisher, Amy Scobee, and several others who, since I first began talking to them, have posted their stories on the Internet and talked to other journalists; Many, Hawkins, Scobee, and Marc Headley have also self-published memoirs about their years in Scientology.

Though I would be remiss in not mentioning this, I must also stress that not a single one of these people had ever spoken publicly prior to my interviewing them, nor had any of them pursued legal action against the church or written a book. Except where specifically noted, all references to these people, their stories, and their quoted words come from my own interviews and conversations with them.

Every bit of information in this book has been checked and cross-checked with multiple sources, and where I have found discrepancies, I have erred on the side of caution and toned down certain accounts whose veracity I do not feel I can comfortably prove. While this book relies almost wholly on named sources, there were a few people who, fearing retribution against themselves and their family members still in Scientology, requested I give them pseudonyms or total anonymity. Those few cases are clearly identified. I am particularly grateful to the Church of Scientology officials who spent time with me during my first year of research. This book benefitted greatly from their tremendous help.

Piecing together the complex history of Scientology is extremely difficult, and I could not have done it without the tremendous expertise and research of others, whose work I will try to acknowledge here. The early history of Scientology has been doc.u.mented in two highly critical books: Russell Miller's Barefaced Messiah, which remains the best and most comprehensive biography of L. Ron Hubbard, and Jon Atack's A Piece of Blue Sky, which offers a remarkably thorough insider account of the founding and development of the Scientology movement through the 1980s. Though biased, these books are nonetheless essential reading for anyone interested in Scientology, and taken together they supply excellent insight into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard and the creation of his church.

Helen O'Brien's Dianetics in Limbo is regarded as the seminal book on the early Dianetics movement, as is Dr. Joseph Winter's A Doctor's Report on Dianetics. Paulette Cooper's The Scandal of Scientology was one of the first journalistic examinations of Scientology and is particularly helpful in describing the movement in the 1960s, as are George Malko's The Now Religion and Stephen Kent's From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam Era. For a sociological a.n.a.lysis of Scientology, Roy Wallis's The Road to Total Freedom is invaluable for its objectivity, though it covers Scientology only through the 1970s; more recently, J. Gordon Melton's The Church of Scientology, Stephen Kent's From Slogans to Mantras and his numerous studies of Scientology's Rehabilitation Project Force, and James Lewis's collection of scholarly essays, Scientology, provide the best, and right now some of the only, academic writing on the movement. I also found tremendous insight and much-needed interpretation of the Church of Scientology's practices and protocols in Cyril Vosper's The Mind Benders and Margery Wakefield's Understanding Scientology, first published in 1991 by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, and later as an e-book (www.religio.de/books/wakefield/us.html).

David Halberstam's The Fifties and Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War helped me understand the sociopolitical environment in which Scientology was born, as did Hugh Urban's excellent paper "Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America." I was hugely grateful to those who worked with L. Ron Hubbard who suggested I read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich to glean an understanding of the business psychology mindset of the 1950s and how that may have played into Hubbard's thinking. Scientology has been called by more than one critic the McDonald's of religion-I found this to be true, not only in terms of its real estate strategy but also in its overall franchising concept. To gain a better understanding of franchising, I found John F. Love's McDonald's: Behind the Arches to be a fascinating corporate study.

Phillip Jenkins's Mystics and Messiahs and Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay are excellent references on the development of cults and new religious movements, as well as the personality traits of gurus. I would have been lost without Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which provided both inspiration and in many ways an ideal model for how to tell the story of a little-understood religious movement. George Pendle's Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons was invaluable in providing research into the life of John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons and the culture of physics in southern California. For historical and sociological perspectives on the birth and development of Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century, my first and best resource was the journalist Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island of the Land; I also appreciated Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Kevin Starr's The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s, which devotes a chapter to Pasadena and Caltech.

Some of the very best coverage of the Church of Scientology has appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, theNew York Times, and theLos Angeles Times-Pulitzer Prize winners all, for their reporting on the church in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, the investigative reporter Richard Behar did some of the bravest and most groundbreaking reporting on the movement, first for Fortune, and then for Time magazine. The reporting of journalists at the Boston Herald and theWall Street Journal provided great help in my research into the Church of Scientology's social betterment organizations and its IRS tax battle and secret agreement; the Lisa McPherson case might have never come to light were it not for the reporting of Cheryl Waldrip from theTampa Tribune, who broke the story of Lisa's death in 1996. I also owe a tremendous debt of grat.i.tude to Robert Farley at the St. Petersburg Times for his continued a.s.sistance and research, and to his colleagues, Tom Tobin and Joe Childs, whose 2009 and 2010 reporting on abuse at the International Base confirmed many of the stories I had been told by former staffers and officials for several years prior. The thoroughness of the Times's recent coverage, particularly the paper's video interviews with Marty Rathbun, which were posted on the paper's website, were invaluable to me in piecing together the very complex story of Scientology's current leadership.

Though Rathbun, for reasons known only to him, chose not to be interviewed for this book, he provided a wealth of information on the church's recent history and the mindset and behavior of David Miscavige on his blog, Moving On Up a Little Higher (markrathbun.wordpress.com). Similarly, the former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder, whom I interviewed at length early in my reporting, has also helped fill in those blanks through his frequent posts and, while still a church official, was hugely helpful in shining a light on some of the more positive aspects of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, and the movement's early history.

Finally, L. Ron Hubbard's own books, policy letters, and other directives informed almost every page of this book and were made available to me through a variety of former Scientologists, through the Church of Scientology itself, and through the a.s.sistance of numerous researchers, notably Professors Stephen A. Kent at the University of Alberta and J. Gordon Melton and the J. Gordon Melton Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Library's Special Collections; I also appreciate the work of the researcher Chris Owen and, most crucially, Gerry Armstrong, whose tremendous contribution to the historical record of Scientology I have detailed in the notes for chapter 2.

Though there has been a profound lack of unbiased scholarship on Scientology, there is plentiful critical information about the church for those who seek it. Dozens if not hundreds of websites, with new ones popping up all the time, are devoted to debunking various aspects of Scientology and critiquing L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige. These sites, most of which have been created by former Scientologists or free-speech activists, with names such as Scientology-cult, Scientology Lies, and Operation Clambake, do not pretend to be neutral. Nonetheless, many could be characterized as an independent, if biased, research library: a repository for troves of Scientologist doc.u.ments, newspaper articles, letters, affidavits, and other materials that might otherwise take a researcher months to acquire. Because scans of those doc.u.ments have been freely posted on these sites, I have turned to many of them as a secondary source of information, keeping in mind their anti-Scientology bias. In every case, I have been extremely careful which doc.u.ments to use; whenever possible, I acquired the originals or original photocopies of all historical materials.

All quotes are sourced in these notes except in the case of a subject who was interviewed by me and was speaking to me. Unless specified, it should be a.s.sumed that all quotes by a single source within a single paragraph come from the same page or doc.u.ment noted.

Scientology's policy letters and bulletins are voluminous, so when citing them in the notes, I have used the church's standard abbreviations. Hubbard Communication Office Bulletins and Policy Letters are referred to by the acronym HCO.

Introduction.

The description of the New York Church of Scientology, and the people who work there, comes from my own observation and notes from several visits I made to the organization in July 2005 while on a.s.signment for Rolling Stone. In order to get a sense of what a newcomer might experience upon simply walking into a Scientology organization, I concealed my ident.i.ty as a journalist (though not my name or any other important details of my life) and was thus availed of the typical "orientation package" offered to newcomers: lectures, films, and introductory auditing. As this would amount to an "undercover" bit of research, I could not take notes while in the New York church. However, I wrote copious notes just after leaving it each day, recalling every part of my conversations and other important information gleaned from my interaction with Scientologist greeters and registrars. Many of these observations first appeared in an article I wrote forRolling Stone, "Inside Scientology," in February 2006.

The statistics on Scientologists' previous religious affiliations found in this chapter come from Scientology's primer What Is Scientology? and from the church's website, www.scientology.org.

page [>] In Germany, where the church: Kate Connolly, "German Ministers Try to Ban Scientology," The Guardian, December 8, 2007.