Whatever OT 3 and the subsequent OT levels may have been, one thing is certain: they were perfectly timed. Mikael Rothstein, a professor of religion at the University of Copenhagen who specializes in new religious movements, has commented that a number of "UFO religions" emerged during the 1960s. "Hubbard"s noting that human souls-thetans-are spiritual implants that originate in another world is ... quite parallel to religious a.s.sumptions expressed by UFO religions," he said. Most of these groups were "very much concerned with the mind-body complex and the impact of extraterrestrials. Hubbard was not original in that respect."
But where Hubbard was original was in how he packaged this sci-fi mythology-just as he had been with Dianetics. Scientologists did not have to believe in OT 3. They had to do it. Then they would attain secret knowledge and wisdom unavailable to more pedestrian members. And the more they did it, the more enlightened-and invested-they became. This approach was so successful that within months of Hubbard"s announcing OT 3, Scientologists from all over the world began beating a path to Valencia, Spain, to do the level aboard Hubbard"s ship.
The stated purpose of becoming OT was to "help Ron clear the planet" -which included fighting psychiatry. But most public Scientologists had a far more selfish goal in becoming an Operating Thetan. "OT was talked about as the be all and end all," said Mike Henderson, who joined the Church of Scientology in the early 1970s. "You"d be completely powerful, would have total control of matter, energy, s.p.a.ce, and time ... you would be able to do anything." Though no one, to Henderson"s knowledge, had ever achieved this level of consciousness (not even Jesus or Buddha had been OTs, but "just a shade above Clear," according to Hubbard), the fantasy was sold so effectively that "going OT" became for Scientologists the equivalent of reaching nirvana or finding the Holy Grail.*
By the late 1970s, thanks to ma.s.sive promotion, nearly every Scientologist aspired to the OT levels. The headline of one ad summed up Scientology"s new direction: "Clear, OT, and Total Freedom." And because Scientology was now a worldwide spiritual enterprise, it was easy to pursue that goal, provided one could afford it. In addition to the ships and the Saint Hill Manor, there were now Advanced Scientology churches in cities such as Copenhagen and Los Angeles, enabling more people to go Clear and do the OT levels. To initiate them into the movement, large Scientology churches now functioned in most of the major cities in Europe and the United States; also, dozens of franchised missions, some run by longtime Scientologists, were in operation, and many were far more successful than the formally established orgs.
Hubbard"s role took on more and more characteristics of a messiah. As the "Source" of all of Scientology"s teachings, Hubbard was decreed the creator of every bit of Scientology scripture, which was considered infallible. To guarantee that his word was followed exactly, an office was set up at every Scientology organization in the world-complete with a desk, chair, telephone, ashtray, and pack of Kools-and run by an official called the "LRH Communicator," whose job was, as Jeff Hawkins put it, "to make sure the org did exactly what Hubbard said to do." The standard tech became a fixed product, sold only at official Scientology organizations around the world.
Hubbard himself, at least the standardized version-maverick, adventurer, seaman; an ascot-wearing hero to whom members were encouraged to write letters, telling of their wins-was heavily marketed. By the early 1970s, a new addition appeared on the list of his personas. Hubbard had written a poem t.i.tled The Hymn of Asia, in which he presented himself as Metteya, the reincarnation of Buddha. The Scientology magazine Advance promoted this new image, presenting drawings of the Founder sporting a reddish topknot and dressed in Indian robes. Jeff Hawkins thought this was great marketing. Kids all over the world had been embracing Eastern philosophy. Why not cast L. Ron Hubbard as a modern Buddha?
If in doubt about a problem or decision, members were told to ask themselves, "What would Ron do?" Scientology events were punctuated by tributes to Ron. His followers, whipped into enthusiasm by pa.s.sionately recounted success stories, stood to face Hubbard"s portrait, clapped in unison, and saluted him with Scientology"s official cheer: "Hip, hip hooray!"
As the Great Leader L. Ron Hubbard was becoming ever more iconic, the real L. Ron Hubbard was becoming increasingly isolated, locked into the fantasy world he"d created aboard the Apollo. To his followers, he was an aging Peter Pan who entertained them with talk of past lives. He"d been a racecar driver of the alien Marcab civilization. He"d sailed with the Carthaginian fleet and had served as a tax collector during the time of the Roman Empire. He was also convinced that he"d buried treasure during his previous incarnations and led his crew on expeditions to find it, following a course he said he"d charted two thousand years earlier and looking for hidden troves of gold and jewels in the Canary Islands and along the coasts of Italy, Spain, and North Africa.
But in the opinion of the parents of his young converts, particularly those in the United States (where in a pre-Internet era, news of Scientology"s travails in England and Australia traveled slowly, if at all), the eccentric and volatile L. Ron Hubbard was no Peter Pan, but rather a Pied Piper, captivating their children with his idealistic vision of a cleared planet and then spiriting them away into a life of utter dedication to Ron and his mission. From the late 1960s onward, the FBI was flooded with mail from worried parents, urging the bureau to investigate the mysterious and, according to some, "sinister" and "subversive" church that seemed to have taken control of their children. ("I am literally petrified at this point that [my son] has been brainwashed by the "processing" he has undergone in "Scientology,"" one anguished father wrote to J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1970s. "I have seen my son"s personality deteriorate and become progressively worse to the point where now there seems to be no sanity present.") Aboard the Apollo, Hubbard urged his crew to write to their families-"If your parents or friends are the kind who worry about you, BE SURE AND WRITE THEM AN AIRMAIL LETTER regularly," he declared on May 2, 1969. "Otherwise they give us [problems] by asking the government to check up on you to see if you"re all right."
But finding the Commodore and his crew would prove difficult. The Apollo had been ejected from Greece in 1969, after the Greek government received complaints about Scientologists proselytizing on Corfu. Hubbard and his Sea Org set out to find a new home. In 1971, the Sea Org set up a small land base outside Tangier, using what by now had become their new cover name: the Operation and Transport Corporation. If asked, they were to say that they were employees of an international business-management company.
Just a year later, Hubbard pulled up stakes again, after receiving word that the Church of Scientology in France was about to be indicted for fraud. Fearing he might be extradited from Morocco to Paris to testify, and worried about Morocco"s worsening political situation, he decided to skip out of Europe altogether and spent most of the next year in New York City, hiding out from French authorities among its populace of eight million people.
It was Hubbard"s first time in the United States since the mid-1960s and, accompanied by a bodyguard and a private nurse, he spent most of the year sequestered in an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, watching TV. "He really wanted to see what was going on in the culture," said his former nurse, Jim Dinalci. "He wasn"t very impressed, but he kept the TV on all the time because he wanted to understand the mindset, the b.u.t.tons he"d have to push to get people into Scientology."
After ten months in New York, Hubbard flew back to Europe. He returned to the Apollo, now anch.o.r.ed off Lisbon, and set sail for the Canary Islands. In Tenerife, in early 1974, Hubbard suffered a motorcycle accident, breaking an arm and several ribs. Convalescing for several months, Hubbard spent most of the time in a red velvet chair, a throne of sorts, with various pillows and foot cushions, screaming at his aides. "The red chair to us became a symbol of the worst a human being can be," one young aide, Doreen Smith, later recalled. "All we wanted to do was chop it up in little pieces and throw it overboard."
In his isolation, Hubbard was coming to resemble the reclusive Howard Hughes. He"d insist that the ship, and any other place he ventured to, be given the white-glove treatment. He also became sensitive to smells and banned the use of perfume, and scented detergents and soaps. He was convinced that far more evil forces surrounded him than he"d ever let on. Now that he"d discovered body thetans, who knew what their intentions might be? He began to scrutinize the people around him, who, by Hubbard"s own reckoning, were composed of scores of these individual ent.i.ties. Did they mean him harm? Who-and what-among his own staff was friend, and who a secret foe?
Hubbard intensified his security checks, asking the Sea Org and even his own family if they had relationships with foreign governments, or if they"d ever had "unkind thoughts" about Hubbard. Those who fell victim to his wrath were subject to a particular disciplinary measure called the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF). Members on the RPF were not allowed in normal crew areas of the Apollo and were banned from communicating with anyone outside their own group, said Glenn Samuels, a former Sea Org member who worked as an auditor aboard the Apollo. In 1974, Samuels, then twenty-five, was distracted by marital troubles, earning him a six-month stint on the RPF as punishment. "We lived in a dingy hold in the ship infested with roaches, and slept on pee-stained mattresses formerly designated to be thrown out. Study took place there as well." Members awoke at dawn and were sent off to clean toilets or duct shafts. If anyone made a mistake, he was made to do push-ups and run laps around the ship. Walking was prohibited; members had to run everywhere, and even in baking heat were required to wear black boiler suits.
"It was brutal," said Samuels. "But much worse than the menial labor was the extreme "untouchable" aspect of the whole thing. You were considered "evil" ... especially if you had upset the Commodore, LRH." One boy who had committed such a sin was stowed in a chain locker for several days. "When he asked Hubbard if he could get out, LRH said, "You got yourself in there; get yourself out,"" Samuels recalled. "Another young girl was so disoriented from working so hard that she fell into the hold, about twenty feet down. She was twelve years old."
As the 1970s wore on, Hubbard banished more people to the RPF. Virtually no one aboard the Apollo was safe. "It was scary because at his whim you could end up in the h.e.l.lhole-for real or imagined errors," said Samuels. "And not just the Flag crew was sent; but executives, plus three of Hubbard"s personal stewards, a cook or two, three of the ship"s photographers."
When Hubbard finally recovered from his motorcycle accident, the Apollo, which had been sailing off the coast of Portugal, set course for Spain. But the Spanish authorities, like the Moroccans, wondered about the strange, rust-streaked ship whose crew claimed to be affiliated with an international management group. The ship left Spanish waters after the Apollo mistakenly tried to enter one of the country"s largest naval bases. Hubbard directed his captain to set a new course: ejected from European and North African waters, the Apollo would now cross the Sarga.s.so Sea and ply the Caribbean.
A senior marketing executive at the Publications Org, Jeff Hawkins now lived in Copenhagen with his wife, Tina, a fellow Sea Org member, and their seven-year-old daughter, Gwennie. In June 1975, he was summoned back to the Apollo to become part of a new international dissemination unit. Thrilling to Jeff, Hubbard, impressed by his work, had asked for him personally.
Much had changed aboard the Apollo in the four years Jeff had been away. Gone was the spit-polished, crisply military style of its crew. Now a bohemian atmosphere prevailed. Sea Org members sported beards, long hair, shorts, T-shirts, and bikini tops. Theater sets were strewn on the deck, along with musical equipment belonging to a band composed of Sea Org members, who called themselves the Apollo All-Stars. There also seemed to be a harem of young girls at the center of things. They dressed provocatively in tiny white shorts, white midriff-baring shirts, and chunky platform shoes.
These girls, the children of Scientologists, as it turned out, were called the Commodore"s Messengers. Many of them had grown up on the Apollo, having been sent by their parents to serve in the Sea Organization. As the youngest people on the ship, they"d been deployed at first as go-fers, running messages to and from L. Ron Hubbard and other members of the crew, but over time, Hubbard began to rely on the Messengers as his personal caretakers, and as his eyes and ears.
DeDe Reisdorf, one of Hubbard"s favorite Messengers, was thirteen years old when she arrived on the Apollo in 1971, with her sixteen-year-old sister, Gale, and her parents, Charles and Pauline Reisdorf, longtime Scientologists who"d joined the church in the 1950s. Most of the girls on the ship were also in their early or middle teens-the oldest, DeDe recalled, was perhaps seventeen. Many were there without their parents (Charles and Pauline Reisdorf departed the Apollo in 1973, leaving their children behind). "I hated it at first," recalled Gale, who served as a lookout on the ship and also as a steward to Mary Sue Hubbard and her daughter Diana. "I cried almost every night for two or three months. But then I just accepted it, and it became my life."
Messengers washed and ironed Hubbard"s clothes, laid out his pajamas, prepared his bath, helped him dress, attended him while he ate, and took careful notes on every minute of his day. When Hubbard slept, two Messengers waited outside his door in case he happened to need anything (at which point he"d bellow, "Messenger!"). Messengers lit his cigarettes, and when he walked around on deck, two would accompany him at all times: one person carrying his ever-present pack of Kools, the other holding an ashtray to catch the droppings.
Messengers also parroted Hubbard"s words, mimicked his tone of voice, and spoke for him. The job, as Gale explained, was to "pa.s.s on what he said, exactly, and then report back how the person responded-exactly." Jeff Hawkins recalled several occasions when, asleep in his bunk, he was awakened in the middle of the night by the small hand of a Messenger laid gently on his chest and the words "The Commodore wants to know ..." He would then be expected to spring to attention and answer the question, after which, he said, "they"d say "Thank you" and fade away into the night."
As "emissaries of the Commodore," Messengers were addressed as "sir." Eventually they would be given their own org, the Commodore"s Messenger Organization, with their own hierarchy, and ultimately they held almost as much authority as the Commodore himself. Among the privileges allowed the Messengers were the right to enter any room (except Hubbard"s) without permission, the right to view anyone"s private case folders or personal auditing files (except Hubbard"s), and the right to be disciplined or given orders only by a higher-ranking member of the Commodore"s Messenger Organization or L. Ron Hubbard himself.
The Messengers, as Hubbard"s envoys, were dispatched on a.s.signments that ranged from finding out why a certain engine had failed aboard ship to discovering why a Scientology organization"s statistics happened to be down. It was extremely demanding: even at thirteen or fourteen years of age, they were not allowed to return until they had solved the problem. While many referred to their service to the Commodore as fantastic training for jobs they"d hold later in life, they also admitted that they"d ceased being children the moment they entered his employ. The Messengers worked long hours, got time off only occasionally, and received hardly any education. "We had three hours a day of reading, writing, and arithmetic-nothing else," said Karen Gregory, a Messenger who came on board the Apollo when she was twelve. Their teachers were other Sea Org members-"no one in particular"-and often a person who lacked training as an educator. The students showed up if they wanted to; rarely would a Messenger be punished for not doing her homework, Gregory said. At the age of sixteen, they were allowed to stop school altogether. If they could type eighty words a minute, they could stop even earlier. "I spent hours trying to type eighty words a minute so I could be done," Gregory said.
Hubbard could be cruel to his Messengers, and his ever-shifting moods caused even the toughest to occasionally burst into tears. "He was a roller coaster," said DeDe Reisdorf. "His expectations were always the max and you wanted to please him and get a "well done" from him. But sometimes he would be in such a c.r.a.ppy mood, you wanted to run and hide in the closet"-which several of the Messengers did, according to her.
But the mission motivated the Commodore"s Messengers just as it had their parents. "Obviously we knew that other kids didn"t live this way, but we didn"t really think about it one way or another," said Gale. "Yes, the work was hard. I didn"t go to school. A GED was not considered necessary or even thought about. But I never considered that I would be doing anything else, as I had given my life to this endeavor." She and everyone she knew "felt like we were doing the most important thing there was, which was to help people become happier and to help mankind get out of the mess we were in as a human race," she said. "It was a pretty n.o.ble cause."
It was also the great teen adventure of a lifetime. On his good days, L. Ron Hubbard was "charming and funny," as DeDe said, as well as generous. "He was never inappropriate," said Gale, but he doted on the Messengers: sending them flowers on their birthdays and often buying them expensive gold and sapphire rings or earrings as Christmas presents. He considered himself their surrogate father-many felt he was closer to them than he was to his own four children by Mary Sue, who were also on the Apollo-and he also considered himself their tutor. As Reisdorf recalled, he was particularly fond of teaching them tactics for use on covert missions. "Once, in Curacao, he decided to teach us how to "lose tail," as he called it. So he gave us drills to do, like having one or two Messengers follow a third, and then see if she could lose them in town." The girls spent the entire afternoon practicing escaping from one another, she said.
Mary Sue Hubbard, the mother of four teenagers of her own, tried to take responsibility for the girls-sometimes at the behest of their parents-but it wasn"t easy. "Some of the Messengers were pretty wild," Reisdorf said. "Our logbook always had notes as to where to find people. Like ... "If you"re looking for Jill she is currently sleeping with Allen.""
Eventually, Hubbard inst.i.tuted a "no s.e.x until marriage" rule (possibly at Mary Sue"s insistence, DeDe thought) within the Sea Org. This toned things down a bit, though not much. The girls simply married their beaux. Hubbard did not oppose a teen marriage-indeed, he once informed his Messengers that anyone who got married would receive a promotion-but he insisted on approving the match. "He expected the guys we were dating to ask him for permission to marry us," said Reisdorf. Over the years at sea, there were numerous weddings on the ship, attended solely by the crew-even the Messengers" parents would not be allowed to attend, as the ship was always in a "secret" location. In 1974, one of Hubbard"s favorite Messengers, Terry Gilham, was married to the Sea Org member Gerry Armstrong in a double wedding ceremony with friends and fellow shipmates Trudy Venter and Pat Broeker. Hubbard gave away the brides.
"It was a bizarre scene," said Jeff Hawkins, who spent the summer and early fall of 1975 aboard the Apollo, designing Scientology"s new brochures. It was the first time Jeff had been admitted to Hubbard"s rarefied circle, and he was both mystified by the goings-on around him and also determined not to let his perplexity show. What Hubbard said in meetings dealt largely with promotion-after his television-watching sojourn in Queens, Hubbard believed that Scientology needed to use more visual imagery to attract the younger generation. To accomplish this, he established a Photo Shoot Org to take pictures for Scientology publications, using the teenage Messengers as models.
For nine months, the crew of the Apollo sailed around the Caribbean, stopping at various ports to shoot photographs. As a public relations effort, the Apollo All-Stars held impromptu concerts on the docks. The group maintained its cover as the Operation and Transport Company. But the mysterious ship, its odd Commodore, young crew, and penchant for secrecy still raised suspicion at every island port in which it tried to dock. One Trinidadian newspaper, having heard a rumor that the Apollo was connected to the CIA, irresponsibly suggested that in addition to housing spies, the ship was also linked, in some nefarious way, to the gruesome Manson murders in Los Angeles.
Over the summer and into the fall, Jeff began to sense a subtle change in tone aboard the ship. "I could see executives rushing around and hurrying into meetings, but people were silent about what was going on." When Jeff asked, he was told it was confidential. By autumn, the Apollo had sailed to the Bahamas. From there, a cadre of Sea Org officers disembarked and flew to the United States.
The nearly decade-long voyage of the Commodore and his Sea Org was at an end. Flag had become too small to accommodate the number of Scientologists clamoring to do the OT levels and other exclusive courses. And the Sea Organization had grown-no longer based aboard ship only, it had offices all over the world. Scientology needed to return to terra firma and establish a land base. They would choose the sleepy Gulf Coast community of Clearwater, Florida, where at the end of 1975, the Scientologists quietly began to arrive.
Hubbard, Mary Sue, and a small retinue settled five miles north, in the town of Dunedin. As with everything about him, the Commodore"s location was a closely guarded secret. Once or twice, however, Hubbard ventured out, appearing in Clearwater dressed in a beret and khaki safari uniform. Unaware of what Scientology would ultimately have in store for their town, few locals even recognized him.
Chapter 6.
Over the Rainbow.
ON THE EVENING of May 21, 1976, two covert operatives from the Guardian"s Office, Gerald Wolfe and Michael Meisner, both using forged government IDs, entered the U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., intent on breaking into the office of Nathan Dodell, an a.s.sistant U.S. attorney who was investigating Scientology. After informing the security guard that they were there to do legal research, the pair signed the log at the front desk, took the elevator to the law library, and then exited through a back door and walked down the hall to Dodell"s office, where they entered with a stolen key. The men made copies of six inches of government files pertaining to the investigation, returned the originals, then left.
One week later, on the evening of May 28, Meisner and Wolfe returned to the same courthouse, and using the same tactic, removed and copied even more files from Dodell"s office. On June 11, they attempted to do the same thing. But this time the night librarian, having noticed the men previously, had alerted authorities. Two FBI agents approached Meisner and Wolfe as they waited in the law library for a cleaning crew to vacate Dodell"s office. Telling the agents that they were doing legal research, the men presented their identification and were allowed to leave. But Wolfe had mistakenly handed the FBI his actual identification card, resulting three weeks later in his arrest for use and possession of a forged government ID. By August, a grand jury investigation into the Wolfe case had turned up Meisner"s name and connected him to the Church of Scientology.
At a hidden location in Los Angeles, Meisner, at the urging of Mary Sue Hubbard, among others, agreed to turn himself in. But he was kept waiting for eight months while the Guardian"s Office sought to concoct an appropriate cover story. By the spring of 1977, a frustrated Meisner threatened to leave California and return to Washington if the situation was not resolved. Instead, he was put under watch by Scientology guards on orders from his Guardian"s Office superiors. In June 1977, a full year after the courthouse incident, Meisner managed to escape his captors and placed a call to the U.S. Attorney"s Office in Washington, D.C., which phoned the FBI. He was later taken to Washington, where he agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy felony. Then he told all to the grand jury. Two weeks later, on the morning of July 8, 1977, FBI agents raided the Church of Scientology"s headquarters in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and carted away close to fifty thousand incriminating doc.u.ments. The government had uncovered Operation Snow White.
Hubbard"s quiet small-town life in Florida didn"t last long. Still paranoid, he"d fled Clearwater in February 1976, leaving the fledgling Flag Land Base behind when the Guardian"s Office discovered that a local reporter was closing in on Hubbard"s true ident.i.ty. Mary Sue and a core group of Messengers joined him and found him a new refuge about two hours east of Los Angeles, in the desert community of La Quinta. They called this sprawling $1.3 million ranch their Winter Headquarters, which was immediately given a code name: "W." The large, hacienda-style main house, known as Olives, served as a dormitory, while another house, called Palms, became the dining hall. Hubbard"s home, known as Rifle, was a bit removed from the main property, across several open fields. Aside from his Messengers, Hubbard"s disciples were not told where he went. The Messengers simply said that he"d gone "over the rainbow."
Hubbard was now sixty-five, with thinning hair, an expanding belly, and a temperament that grew more bellicose by the day. But he had developed a new pa.s.sion: the Commodore wanted to be a film director. At the ranch, Hubbard would eventually establish the Cine Org to produce instructional films for students learning to be auditors. He strolled the grounds dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, shouting orders at his young a.s.sistants, who quickly learned to operate camera and lighting equipment.
The Messengers had by now come to adopt Hubbard"s mannerisms to a remarkable degree. "If Hubbard screamed at the Messenger when he issued his order, then the Messenger screamed at the person to whom the message was intended," one young Sea Org member, Sylvana Garritano, later recalled. "Some of the Messengers could duplicate Hubbard"s voice almost perfectly." The longtime Scientologists who witnessed his behavior were appalled. "Hubbard had gotten to a point where he didn"t have direct interactions or communications with anyone," said Alan Walter, who had watched the rise of the Messengers on board the Apollo between 1968 and 1975. "These kids became his voice."
But though the Messengers were closely involved with Hubbard, it was the Guardian"s Office that had become the most powerful ent.i.ty in the Church of Scientology, other than Hubbard himself. Based at Saint Hill, but with eleven hundred staff members all over the world, this extremely sophisticated branch stood outside the official chain of command, as a watchdog.
Scientologists hoping to join the Guardian"s Office went through a rigorous screening process, not unlike what an applicant to work for the CIA might endure. A typical background check would include a review of the aspirant"s activities and friendships as well as those of his or her parents, grandparents, and other relatives and friends. All of this material was then compiled in secret dossiers, which made the Guardians especially vulnerable. Though any Scientologist, staff or public, could be subject to internal investigation, these dossiers gave the church particularly sensitive material that could be used against any Guardian who stepped out of line; stringent loyalty was the only line of defense. If staff members rebelled, they might be followed, their phone might be tapped, or their family hara.s.sed with threatening phone calls. "It freaked you out," says one former official. "You had no idea what they were going to do, except that you knew that you would be hunted down."
This kind of hara.s.sment fell under a Scientology policy known as "Fair Game." Originally written by Hubbard in 1965, the "Fair Game Law," as Hubbard called it, instructed Scientologists on how to handle Suppressive Persons, both within and outside the church. "A truly Suppressive Person or Group has no rights of any kind, and actions taken against them are not punishable," Hubbard wrote. He later explained that such enemies "may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed."
In 1968 Hubbard, concerned over the increasing international scrutiny of Scientology and its policies, issued an order to cancel Fair Game, stating that the phrase itself "causes bad public relations." But Hubbard did not ban the practice of Fair Game, which was implicit in his directions for how to treat journalists, judges, hostile lawyers, government agencies, psychiatrists, and myriad other forces that were, by Hubbard"s definition, suppressive to Scientology.
To gather information on various targets, the Guardian"s Office maintained a clandestine army of informants, both Scientologists and private investigators, all over the world. They were often "regular people you would never suspect, so they were never detected," recalled one former Guardian, and they often worked for free, performing tasks ranging from attending meetings of anti-Scientology groups to asking neighbors or friends about the person they were investigating. A special intelligence unit with the Guardian"s Office Bureau of Information, known as Branch One, was charged with digging up sensitive material pertaining to the IRS, various psychiatric groups, and government agencies such as the FBI and the CIA. "If you wanted to apprentice in clandestine activities, that was the place to do it," recalled the former operative. "These guys were masters at deception."
Branch One was a self-contained cell that very few Scientologists, including other Guardian"s Office officials, were aware of. It was headed by a longtime Scientology official named Jane Kember, a "fanatical Scientologist," as the writer Jon Atack described her, who served as the Deputy Guardian for Intelligence, working directly under Mary Sue Hubbard. Under Kember"s direction, but with the blessing of Mary Sue (and, it is generally believed, that of L. Ron Hubbard), Branch One used illegal tactics to perpetrate what would later be revealed as the largest program of domestic espionage in U.S. history: Operation Snow White.
The scope of this operation, which was intended to "cleanse" Scientology of its negative image by purging any critical doc.u.ments about the church or its founder, was enormous. Beginning in 1973, Branch One planted Scientology operatives inside the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, the Better Business Bureau, the American Medical a.s.sociation, and many other local and federal agencies.* There they stole and copied tens of thousands of doc.u.ment files in hopes of gleaning information that could be used to threaten, or silence, opponents of the church. Guardian"s Office operatives launched smear campaigns, bugged government offices, and engaged in breaking and entering. For these illegal acts, members received commendations, Scientology"s equivalent of military medals. They penetrated anti-cult organizations and had even made moves to infiltrate U.S. military organizations, such as the Coast Guard. Though experienced agents of the Guardian"s Office carried out the more sophisticated operations, many young Scientologists, believing they were protecting their religion from persecution, were pressed into service. "We were religious zealots, militants, in our viewpoint," recalls one former Guardian. "Our perspective was "This is my religion, and I will do anything to help it survive, even kill for it.""
"It was all very exciting, and also really confusing if you were a kid," recalled Nancy Many, who while a young staff member at the Boston Organization was trained in subterfuge by the Guardian"s Office and then tasked with a number of "covert ops." Most involved getting herself hired for an administrative job at a government agency that collected information about Scientology. For example, Many worked for a year at the Boston Consumer Council, where, she said, her mission was steal and photocopy consumer complaints about the church, give them to her Guardian"s Office handlers, and then replace the originals the following day. "I was nineteen or twenty, and though I knew what I was doing, I actually never thought it was illegal," she said. "I thought I was "stealing Xerox paper," as it had been explained to me. That"s how naive I was."
Many was also asked to take part in the campaign against the journalist Paulette Cooper, the author of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology, published in 1971. It painted a scathing portrait of Scientology"s recruitment practices, its auditing processes, and its battles against government oversight in both the United States and abroad, causing the church to sue Cooper for libel; over the course of the decade it filed at least eighteen other lawsuits against her (all of which have been settled). Church operatives tapped her phones, broke into her apartment, posted her number on bathroom walls, and handed out fliers to her neighbors, alleging that she was a prost.i.tute. They also stole Cooper"s stationery; then they framed her. Using her stationery, they sent several bomb threats to the New York Church of Scientology in 1973. As a result, Cooper was arrested and indicted on three counts of felony; she faced fifteen years in prison if convicted.
"For months, my anxiety was so terrible I could taste it in my throat," Cooper later wrote. "I could barely write, and my bills, especially legal ones, kept mounting. I couldn"t eat. I couldn"t sleep. I smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, popped Valium like M&Ms, and drank too much vodka." Finally, in 1975, after Cooper took and pa.s.sed a sodium amytal test (the "truth serum" test), the government decided not to pursue prosecution.
That same year, Nancy Many, working in the Boston Organization"s covert intelligence office, was asked to break into the office of Dr. Stanley Cath, Cooper"s psychiatrist during her student years at Brandeis University, in order to steal Cooper"s psychiatric files. When Many refused-she clearly understood that breaking and entering was illegal, she said-another Scientologist in her office was tasked with the theft, which he committed with ease. About a week after this incident, Many said, the Boston Organization received a Telex from Hubbard, highly commending the Boston office for a job well done. "And that was the only thing we did," she said. "So anybody who says that LRH did not know what was going on-forget it. There was nothing else we had done to deserve a "very well done" from Hubbard himself, except breaking and entering."
In 1976, Scientologists planned what they hoped would be their final offensive against Cooper, a five-point scheme known as Operation Freakout, intended to get the writer "incarcerated in a mental inst.i.tution or jail," as the mission stated. Its central intent was to frame Cooper, who is Jewish, as the perpetrator of bomb threats against two Arab consulates as well as against Henry Kissinger and the president of the United States, Gerald Ford. Once again, Scientologists conspired to acquire a piece of paper with Cooper"s fingerprints on it, similar to their tactic in using her stolen stationery. "One night, I was at this reporter"s hangout in New York when someone came up to me and handed me a piece of paper, with a joke that wasn"t funny," Cooper told me. "I couldn"t figure out what that was all about and handed it back to him and continued joking with the other reporters. When I came home, I suddenly realized the guy who"d given me the paper had been wearing gloves indoors. And I just began shaking. The only reason he would have had to approach me like that with that piece of paper was to get my fingerprints again."
Fortunately for Cooper, Operation Freakout was never fully enacted, for by the summer of 1976, the Guardian"s Office had become distracted by the apprehension of Meisner and Wolfe in Washington, D.C. By the following summer, the government had seized a huge cache of files from the church"s headquarters in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., which revealed the full extent of Operation Snow White. Hubbard"s name was not found on any of the doc.u.ments. This, his aides knew, did not mean he was not involved: Hubbard had not only ordered Snow White, but he had also quite probably been aware of every aspect of the operation. Mary Sue, the "Controller," had always been careful to brief her husband verbally so as to prevent any doc.u.mentation of his connection to sensitive Guardian"s Office operations. Nonetheless, Hubbard worried that the FBI might come looking for him.
One week after the government raid, Hubbard and three of his Messengers got into his Buick station wagon just after dusk, drove through the gates of "W," and sped off into the desert. At the wheel was Pat Broeker, age twenty-nine, who was at the time one of the few male Messengers at La Quinta. With him was DeDe Reisdorf and a third Messenger, Claire Rousseau. They arrived later the next day in the low-rent city of Sparks, Nevada, on the Truckee River. Here, they decided, was an out-of-the-way spot where no one would think to look for the flamboyant Commodore. Broeker was charged with finding Hubbard a suitable hideout. To make the hunt for lodging look legitimate, he and Rousseau posed as a married couple. Reisdorf was a cousin, and Hubbard an elderly uncle. Four days later, after spending a few nights at a motel under a.s.sumed names, the group moved into an anonymous little two-bedroom apartment.
Hubbard spent the next six months in Sparks, highly paranoid (at one point, Reisdorf recalled, Hubbard, believing FBI agents might be lurking in the bushes, wouldn"t even walk in front of a window for fear of being spotted). But he quickly settled into a routine. He arose late in the morning, had a snack, and then did a solo auditing session. Then he began writing film scripts. In the evening, Reisdorf and her "uncle," often disguised in a hunter"s cap, would walk to the grocery store or to a nearby K-Mart. "Along the way he would make up songs and sing to me. His big joke was to try to push me onto those tiny little carpeted areas in these stores in Nevada that have the slot machines. Then he would say rather loudly, "Look, she isn"t twenty-one!! Arrest her!"" (Reisdorf, who was only nineteen when they left La Quinta, turned twenty in Sparks.) Back at the apartment, the group would watch a late movie. Then Hubbard would turn in for the night. In his bedroom, Reisdorf gave him a backrub while the other two Messengers sat on the floor with Hubbard"s ashtray and a gla.s.s of water or juice as he told stories or chatted to them about his latest writing project.
Only Broeker maintained contact with the rest of the Church of Scientology. When Hubbard ran out of money, or needed to pa.s.s on important orders, Broeker would notify the ranch, then meet another Messenger in Los Angeles. Broeker, who"d joined Scientology in the late 1960s after graduating from high school in Buffalo, New York, was an adventurous young man who had previously worked as a finance courier for L. Ron Hubbard, traveling back and forth from the Apollo to Luxembourg with a suitcase of cash. A pa.s.sionate reader of spy novels, he was nicknamed "007." Having studied up on all things espionage related, he took Hubbard"s p.r.o.nouncements about maintaining security very seriously. To avoid detection en route to and from California, he"d switch planes, dye his hair, change his clothes, or even, recalled Reisdorf, stuff cotton b.a.l.l.s in his cheeks to alter his appearance. The La Quintabased Messengers, in the meantime, would alert Broeker of the meeting place by putting an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the Los Angeles Times cla.s.sified section, indicating the location: the Los Angeles International Airport, a movie theater, or someplace else.
By the late autumn, Hubbard was getting tired of being on the lam. He yearned to go home, though he realized it would entail significant risk. The church had taken the government to court, arguing that the FBI had violated Scientology"s Fourth Amendment rights in the raid. It was a complaint that would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which, early in 1978, would refuse to hear the case. Meanwhile, word from La Quinta was that the FBI had Mary Sue and the ranch under constant surveillance. Hubbard"s wife had stood by him and loyally refused to implicate him in any of the misdeeds of the Guardian"s Office. Hubbard, nonetheless, worried she might still betray him. In Sparks, he tried to distance himself from her. "LRH would say over and over: "I didn"t know about what the GO was doing, right?"" said DeDe Reisdorf. "Pat and Claire and I would look at each other later and wonder if he was trying to convince us or himself. We all knew that Mary Sue ran pretty much everything by him ... maybe not the details of each mission, but up until then, he was very much in the loop on the Guardian"s Office stuff."
In December, Hubbard caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Now he felt an even greater urgency to return to the warmth of southern California. But for Hubbard to arrive, Mary Sue and her staff would have to leave. This was upsetting to many of the Messengers, including Gale Reisdorf. "Mary Sue was a wonderful sweet delicate lady, very much of a lady," Gale noted. Having helped to raise many of the Messengers from childhood, she tended to treat them as if they were her children. She made sure they ate and slept, and had days off-something that was unheard of with Hubbard, who often demanded that his Messengers stay up all night.
On January 2, 1978, Hubbard returned to La Quinta. Prior to his arrival, Mary Sue Hubbard had left the ranch in her BMW, moving into a house in the Hollywood Hills, secured for her by the church. After nearly twenty-six years of marriage, she would never live with L. Ron Hubbard again.
For now, Hubbard was in the clear, but elaborate plans were made to protect him in La Quinta. "W" was now a secret hideout. Security guards patrolled the property day and night, scouting for FBI agents, journalists, or other curious parties. Scientology books, tapes, and paraphernalia were kept strictly out of view, so as to maintain the cover story that the ranch was simply a movie studio. His young Messengers, staff, and crew were instructed to adopt "civilian" clothes-most wore jeans, T-shirts, and shorts-and when applying for driver"s licenses or other identification, doctored their social security numbers and used "safe addresses," which had been arranged for them by the Guardian"s Office so as not to reveal their actual residence. They were also designated aliases, which they were instructed to use even among themselves.
"My name was Steve something or other, and I had an ID saying I was from La Jolla," said Sinar Parman, a Los Angelesbased Scientologist who joined the Sea Org in 1977. A chef by training, he was sent to Rifle in June 1978 to work as Hubbard"s cook. Though it was only two and a half hours from Los Angeles, getting to La Quinta took almost two days, he recalled. "First, I was dropped off at a motel on Sunset Boulevard. The next day, someone picked me up and took me to a shopping center in the Valley. There, this other guy met me and drove me out to the desert." The driver took the longest and most circuitous way possible, he recalled, so as to shake anyone who might be following them. Finally they arrived at the gates of "W," where a teenage girl dressed in hot pants came out to greet Parman. "Welcome aboard," she said. "The Commodore welcomes you." Then she took him to the kitchen.
Hubbard by now had grown tremendously finicky and at times believed his cooks were trying to poison him. Suffering from ulcers and high blood pressure, among other ailments, he ate only bland food, banning onions, leeks, and garlic from his table. Some cooks prepared several meals at once for "The Boss." Frequently, he rejected a dish immediately upon tasting it. "Things changed," said Parman, who ultimately learned to adopt a Zen-like att.i.tude in the face of Hubbard"s many eccentricities. "One day he"d love what you made him, the next day he"d throw it across the room."
A team of Messengers washed Hubbard"s clothes, always by hand, using filtered water and then rinsing the clothes in buckets, sometimes more than a dozen times. "We"d go through this about ten times for every single piece of clothing," said Maureen Bolstad, a Messenger who was charged with cleaning Hubbard"s shirts. "Then we"d have to hang them up and hand-press them and dry them with fans. And then the clothes would get sniffed to make sure they didn"t smell of anything."
Bolstad, who"d joined Scientology in 1979 as a thirteen-year-old, had been recruited for the Sea Organization with the promise of help in finishing her high school education and paying for college. Instead, she"d been given a Scientology education, which consisted solely of learning how to serve L. Ron Hubbard. "I learned how to hold an ashtray and follow him around. Then I learned how to hold the ashtray and also hold a tape recorder at the same time. " Messengers recorded his every word and then transcribed it later. "I was trained to carry his bag filled with sunscreen and stuff, to look after his every need."
In addition to La Quinta, the church maintained a summer headquarters for Hubbard, known as "S." This was located on the site of a dilapidated resort in Gilman Hot Springs, an outpost thirty-six miles from Palm Springs. Purchased for $2.7 million in cash, the Gilman complex was set on over five hundred acres and featured a faded golf course, a worn motel, and several other ramshackle buildings. No one in the local San Jacinto area knew that L. Ron Hubbard was anywhere in the vicinity, nor that Scientologists had bought the resort. The new owners referred to themselves, variously, as the Scottish Highland Quietude Club, and the Western States Scientific Communications a.s.sociation. Richard Hoag, a Los Angeles attorney affiliated with the church, claimed to have purchased the resort for a condominium project.
An even more secret hideout, known only as "X," was also purchased in 1978. In March of that year, the La Quinta property was permanently closed down, and Hubbard moved with his staff to "X," a faceless apartment complex fourteen miles from "S," in the tiny town of Hemet. A sleepy agricultural town once surrounded by orange groves but now vanishing under layers of dust, Hemet was as far off the beaten track as Sparks, Nevada. The apartment complex couldn"t have been more pedestrian: it was located behind an acupuncture clinic and next to a Pick "n Save supermarket.
The Commodore"s Messengers shuttled back and forth between "X" and "S" in weekly shifts. They typically took a circuitous route and traveled in the middle of the night. "It was real CIA stuff," said Parman, then twenty-five, who found it thrilling: switching locations every week; driving, four people to a car, through the desert to arrive at a secret hideaway known only by an initial; using aliases; and relaying information covertly, by pay phone or by meeting in person to exchange information in supermarkets-a practice known as "cookie drops."
Some Messengers dreaded their weeks in Hemet because Hubbard was often in a black mood. The female Messengers suspected he missed his wife. "Mary Sue was always a calming influence on LRH and when she was around him, he was not as moody," recalled Messenger Julie Holloway.* "However, with her gone to L.A. he had major mood changes." He railed at his staff, exploding into tirades and then sinking into a sulky silence.
Hoping to one day live at "S," Hubbard ordered that a new house be built for him at the Gilman resort, perched on high. He specified that it be "dust-free, defensible," and surrounded by high walls with "openings for gun emplacements," according to one account. On most days, Hubbard went to Gilman to work on his movies and to oversee progress at the house, a rambling Tudor-style home named Bonnie View, with a sweeping view of the San Jacinto Valley.
In Los Angeles, Mary Sue Hubbard was trying to stay out of jail. On August 15, 1978, she and ten other Scientologists, including Jane Kember, who remained in England, had been indicted by a federal grand jury on twenty-eight counts of theft, burglary, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice for their roles in Operation Snow White. If convicted, Mary Sue faced a fine of $40,000 and up to 175 years in prison. She and eight other defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges, and for the next year, a score of Scientology lawyers fought tirelessly to prevent the case from coming to trial. Finally, on October 8, 1979, Mary Sue Hubbard and six other Guardian"s Office executives reached an agreement with the government to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy,* signing their names to a 282-page doc.u.ment detailing their various misdeeds, in lieu of a trial. Federal prosecutors pet.i.tioned the court, insisting the defendants be shown no mercy. "The crime committed by these defendants is of a breadth and scope previously unheard of," it stated. "No building, office, desk, or file was safe from their snooping and prying. No individual or organization was free from their despicable conspiratorial minds."
On October 26, 1979, the defendants, minus Kember and another church official, who were still fighting extradition, stood before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey and formally pleaded guilty to conspiracy in Operation Snow White. Mary Sue Hubbard and three other Guardian"s Office executives each received a five-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. The others received lesser sentences and fines, but all nine appealed on the grounds that the evidence against them had been acquired illegally. In April 1982, Mary Sue Hubbard lost her final appeal, and in January 1983, she was sent to a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. By then suffering from health problems, she served one year and was released. L. Ron Hubbard was named an "unindicted co-conspirator" in Operation Snow White. None of the seized Guardian"s Office files linked him directly to the crimes, and the federal prosecutors failed to make a persuasive case for his involvement.
Though Hubbard remained free, he grew increasingly worried that he might be subpoenaed, or hara.s.sed by the FBI, the IRS, or attorneys for several disaffected Scientologists who were suing him for fraud. Since the late 1970s, several top aides had left Scientology, including Hubbard"s longtime nurse, Kima Dougla.s.s. The Operation Snow White doc.u.ments had been unsealed, meaning that the scope of Scientology"s covert operations was now open to scrutiny by the press. Not even his top-secret new home seemed secure enough. On Valentine"s Day, 1980, Hubbard fled Hemet with his trusted aide Pat Broeker and Broeker"s wife, Annie. For the next six years, the press, federal investigators, and even his own children searched for him. He was never seen publicly again.
Chapter 7.
DM.
DURING HIS FINAL years in exile, L. Ron Hubbard"s only conduit of communication with the world of Scientology, aside from Pat and Annie Broeker, was another young Messenger named David Miscavige. Over time, Miscavige would become Broeker"s most crucial aide and, as Hubbard would later call him, "a trusted a.s.sociate, and a good friend to me." It was odd, many longtime Sea Org members would note: Hubbard had neither known Miscavige particularly well, nor did he ever see him personally while he was in hiding. But Miscavige, it would become eminently clear, was a uniquely determined young man. In due course, he would make himself Hubbard"s inheritor through sheer force of will.
Miscavige was born in Philadelphia in 1960 and grew up in a modest suburban home in Willingboro, New Jersey. His parents, Ronald Sr. and Loretta, a professional trumpet player and a nurse, were Catholics who raised their four children-Ronnie Jr., the oldest, followed by the twins David and Denise, and the younger sister, Laurie-to believe in Jesus and attend Ma.s.s at least somewhat regularly. Despite his Catholic faith, Ronald Sr. was drawn to Scientology, which he"d heard about from a business contact, and began to read some of Hubbard"s books, hoping it might help his younger son. A pint-sized, headstrong little boy, David was sickly, suffering from severe asthma and allergies. Though he yearned to play football-his father once reportedly filled his son"s pockets with metal plates so that David would meet the sixty-pound weight requirement for a Pop Warner team-his health problems often kept him on the sidelines. When David was around eight or nine, he was wheezing through an asthma attack when his father, rather than take him to a doctor, took him to a Scientologist for auditing. As the Miscavige father and son later told the story, the attack went away after a single forty-five-minute session.
"It was the reactive mind," David Miscavige later explained during an interview with the St. Petersburg Times. "From that moment I knew, this is it," he said. "That is the point in my life where I said ... "I have the answer.""
Ronald Sr. was also convinced that Scientology offered answers, and before long he"d enrolled his entire family in Scientology courses at the local mission in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. In 1971, he took his children out of school and moved the family to England, where they began advanced training at Scientology"s world headquarters at Saint Hill. For the sheltered boy from the Philadelphia suburbs, moving to Suss.e.x was a drastic change and would mark the end of his childhood.
There were many kids at Saint Hill in the early 1970s, many of them the children of Scientologists. Hubbard, who encouraged parents to look at their children as men and women whose bodies simply hadn"t attained full growth-"big thetans in little bodies," as some parents said-had never established rules about when a child could or couldn"t be audited, go to work, or audit others. A precocious overachiever, David Miscavige learned to audit when he was twelve. By thirteen, he was counseling people two or three times his age and, some recalled, giving security checks to senior Scientology executives. There was nothing for kids to do at Saint Hill other than work or study, but even so, David seemed unusually driven, recalled Neville Chamberlin, the onetime crewman on Hubbard"s Apollo. Chamberlin, who left Scientology in 1982 and later became an outspoken critic, had returned to England in 1979, and he met the Miscaviges soon after they arrived at Saint Hill.
They struck him as a dysfunctional family, particularly Ronald Sr., a notorious flirt who was reputed to have a violent streak. But David, still severely asthmatic, "was completely motivated to make something of himself," said Chamberlin. "I remember seeing him outside the auditing rooms one day, leaning, back against the wall, just desperately trying to catch his breath. He was on the way to give someone a session, and he was just standing there, holding his client"s folder, trying to get it together before he went into the room. He was thirteen or fourteen."
By the time he was fifteen, David Miscavige had returned to the United States with his family. Now a soph.o.m.ore in high school, he was, like many children raised in Scientology, enamored with the idea of helping L. Ron Hubbard clear the planet. It was a goal that didn"t necessarily jibe with his new life as a tenth-grader, and Miscavige would later tell friends in Scientology that he hated school and couldn"t wait to leave. He was shocked by the level of drug use among his peers and was quite sure of what he wanted to do with his life. Anything he still needed to learn, he reasoned, he could discover by working for the Church of Scientology as a member of the Sea Organization.
On his sixteenth birthday, April 30, 1976, Miscavige dropped out of high school, and with his parents" blessing signed a billion-year Sea Org contract. Shortly afterward, he was dispatched to Scientology"s new land base in Clearwater, Florida, where he was trained as a Commodore"s Messenger. Ten months later, he went to join Hubbard and his group in La Quinta.
Miscavige was one of the many young disciples who formed a protective shield around Hubbard at his desert hideaway, "W." a.s.signed first as a "traffic Messenger," managing the flow of communications to and from Hubbard, he showed an interest in cinematography and ultimately became a member of the camera crew, working with the Commodore on his technical films. Though he was barely seventeen, Miscavige struck numerous people as remarkably self-a.s.sured; he seemed to believe that he could do anything, including challenge the word of the Founder of Scientology himself. One day, the Scientologist Dan Koon recalled, while Hubbard was directing a film, Miscavige, on the camera, missed a shot. Hubbard furiously ordered the teenager to step aside and give the camera to someone else. To the surprise of everyone on the crew, Miscavige refused. "He looked right at LRH and said, "No, sir. This is my job and I"m going to do it,"" said Koon. "They had this big confrontation right on the set, and LRH finally said, "Okay, do it, but you better do it right." And he did. That was the only time I"d seen someone stand up to LRH."
Miscavige, however, didn"t work with Hubbard often. He was a junior Messenger whose access to Hubbard was limited. Unlike senior Messengers like Julie Holloway, Pat Broeker, or the Reisdorf sisters, Miscavige was never given the privilege of waiting on the Founder personally, and only occasionally stood watch outside his door. He seemed to hate the weekly watches, said Julie Holloway, and when Hubbard moved from La Quinta to "X," his Hemet apartment, Miscavige avoided going there almost entirely. "Not many Messengers enjoyed going to "X,"" she admitted. "LRH was in a very bad mood a lot of the time." Hubbard was at his most volatile during the period when David Miscavige knew him. "Unfortunately, David got the worst of LRH," said Holloway. "But I would never say that he knew how Hubbard operated or managed the organizations. I think his c.u.mulative history with LRH didn"t even add up to a year."
And yet Miscavige, despite having only a tenth-grade education, was a quick study with a shrewd understanding of power and where it lay. Miscavige was extremely deferential to Pat Broeker, for example, recalled Sinar Parman; of all the male Messengers, Broeker was closest to Hubbard. Miscavige also became friendly with Gale Reisdorf, who served as a member of a senior body of Messengers known as the Watchdog Committee, which oversaw the church. In 1979, the Watchdog Committee and the Commodore"s Messengers took full control of Scientology"s international management, shifting the power base from Saint Hill Manor to Los Angeles. Miscavige, by then nineteen, was given a new task: in addition to his camera duties, he was asked to run missions to other organizations.
The a.s.signments varied: sometimes he"d investigate reports that Scientology executives were not doing their jobs; at other times, he might simply go to pick up some camera equipment. He enthusiastically threw himself into his duties, one of which entailed recruiting Sea Org members to renovate the church"s new base, a former hospital complex on Sunset Boulevard known as the Cedars of Lebanon complex. Through these efforts, DM, as Miscavige was called, soon become a rising star in the Commodore"s Messenger Organization.
There were seven important things to understand about power, L. Ron Hubbard wrote in a 1967 policy letter ent.i.tled "The Responsibilities of Leaders." The most crucial point was to "push power in the direction of anyone on whose power you depend." It could take the form of sending the leader more money, handling the leader"s tedious business concerns, offering a "snarling defense" of the leader to his critics, "or even," as Hubbard said, "the dull thud of one of his enemies in the dark or the glorious blaze of the whole enemy camp as a birthday surprise." But the bottom line was that if one succeeded, he too would become powerful. "Don"t ever feel weaker because you work for somebody stronger," said the Founder.
It was a bit of advice David Miscavige would take very much to heart.