Inside Scientology (21 page)

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." Assigned 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-assured; 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 cumulative 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 assignments 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 entitled "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.

At the time of Hubbard's disappearance, in 1980, a key priority for the Church of Scientology was protecting their Founder from legal action. The Operation Snow White documents had given the public its first glimpse into the secretive world of Scientology and the mindset of its followers. Now a New York grand jury was investigating the church's longtime harassment of the writer Paulette Cooper and the role L. Ron Hubbard may have played in it. The IRS, meanwhile, had begun a criminal investigation of Hubbard; the government suspected he was still in charge of the church and profiting from it handsomely, wherever he was.

In Los Angeles, David Miscavige, who'd impressed his superiors with his gung-ho attitude and problem-solving skills, became part of a special team within the Commodore's Messenger Organization called the "All Clear Unit." Its mission was to meet with church attorneys to find ways to get around the myriad legal issues that had driven Hubbard into exile. One way to do that, they decided, was to design a new corporate architecture for the church, an undertaking that, with Hubbard's blessing, became known within Scientology as the "Corporate Sort-out." The overall idea, said Larry Brennan, then the senior executive in the Scientology legal department who oversaw the project, was to create a legally defensible structure that would give Hubbard and the Commodore's Messenger Organization full legal control over Scientology while at the same time "insulat[ing] both Hubbard and the CMO from any legal liability for running the organizations of Scientology by lying about the level of control they really had." This reorganization seemed like fraud, said Brennan, but the structure was so complex that deciphering the fraud was almost impossible.

The new structure would also establish a new hierarchy, giving unprecedented power to the Commodore's Messengers, who would soon maneuver their way into control of every facet of the organized church. "The new corporate structure made top management think they could do just about anything without legal worry," said Brennan. "In other words, Miscavige could now do just about anything he wanted and there was no one to stop him, unless Hubbard did."

Brennan, who'd served as the legal director of the Guardian's Office, became the overseer of Scientology's legal bureau once the Commodore's Messengers took control of the church. He met Miscavige in 1981. Now the self-appointed head of the All Clear Unit, Miscavige was twenty-one years old and, a highly aggressive and frequently belligerent young man, had come into his own. Though he could be supportive of those upon whose approval he depended, Miscavige was mistrustful of many others, with an "almost pathological" certainty, according to one former colleague, that he, of all the Messengers, was right. To some he seemed like a reflection of L. Ron Hubbard on his very worst days, cursing and barking orders at other Sea Org members, including some staffers much older than he, or screaming at those who disagreed with him. He chewed tobacco and in meetings would frequently make a show of spitting the juice into a cup. Brennan was appalled. "As I saw him, DM was like a highly impressionable spoiled child."

DM idolized L. Ron Hubbard, the only boss he'd ever known; but unlike many seasoned Sea Org members who knew the Founder's propensity for changing his mind, Miscavige also took everything that Hubbard said literally. And what Hubbard was saying from his secret location was, by his second year in hiding, increasingly extreme. The Founder had returned to his original love, writing fiction, in seclusion, and was at work on the book that would become his opus:
Battlefield Earth.
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But he was also convinced that Suppressives had infiltrated the movement, particularly the Guardian's Office, and in missives signed only with an asterisk (in an effort to distance himself from Scientology management, Hubbard had adopted the asterisk as his "signature" on church documents) issued directives for his aides to spit on other staff members, strike those who seemed to oppose his wishes, or even send people to jail. While it would have been an act of sacrilege to disobey L. Ron Hubbard, "some of us would still not do the most awful things Hubbard talked about as they violated our sense of right and wrong just too much," said Brennan. "DM, on the other hand, would blindly, and violently, follow such orders."

Among the first of Hubbard's orders had been to clean up the Guardian's Office, which the Founder had determined was infested with "criminals." Miscavige and his All Clear Unit attacked this task with gusto, soon altogether dismantling the Guardian's Office— whose power had exceeded the Messengers' own. The first maneuver in this offensive was to remove the person Hubbard now saw as wholly responsible for the debacle: his wife, Mary Sue. Out on bail and appealing her conviction, she still held the lifetime position of Controller.

In May 1981, Miscavige visited Mary Sue in her Los Angeles office and told her that, as a convicted criminal, she could no longer be officially connected to the Church of Scientology. It would be "for the good of the church," as well as for the good of her husband, if she resigned, he said. Furious, Mary Sue refused and, in one often-told account, became so enraged that she threw an ashtray at Miscavige's head. But the twenty-one-year-old was intractable.

Numerous Scientology officials, particularly those loyal to David Miscavige, applauded his initiative. It was felt that Mary Sue Hubbard had blackened the name of the church; now it was only right that she be ostracized. But some members of the Sea Organization, particularly those who'd known the Hubbards aboard the
Apollo,
believed that Mary Sue had been treated too harshly. Among them was DeDe Reisdorf, by then married and known as DeDe Voegeding.

Voegeding was the Commanding Officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization. L. Ron Hubbard had appointed her to this post in the spring of 1981, and it was a daunting responsibility for the twenty-three-year-old. Her job involved not only parroting Hubbard's demands but also making executive decisions and giving orders to longtime Sea Org officials. It also required Voegeding to serve as the main communication line between the Church of Scientology at large and L. Ron Hubbard, via Pat Broeker.

Broeker had devised a strategy by which an aide needing to meet with him went to a remote pay phone to call him, let it ring twice, and then hang up, signaling for Broeker to call back. Then the aide drove to an appointed spot between Gilman Hot Springs and Los Angeles. Because these meetings generally took place at night, Voegeding wanted a male Messenger to accompany her. David Miscavige often volunteered.

Broeker was always happy to see Miscavige, who'd been his roommate for a period in La Quinta. "I think Pat was dying for someone to talk to," said Voegeding. "He was holed up with LRH." Unfortunately, Voegeding never had the time for small talk—running the church was more than a full-time job. But Miscavige and Broeker would spend an hour or two joking and smoking cigarettes. After a while, they'd developed such a rapport that they would walk off together to speak privately, leaving Voegeding waiting by the car.

Not long after Miscavige began accompanying her to these meetings, in August 1981, L. Ron Hubbard abruptly removed DeDe Voegeding from her post as head of the Commodore's Messenger Organization. The reason, she was told, was that Hubbard had found out that she'd ordered Scientology's prices reduced without his permission, a grave sin; even worse, she was accused of breaching security by hinting at Hubbard's true whereabouts to the British writer Omar Garrison, who'd been commissioned by the church to write a biography of the Founder.

Hubbard had signed the order for her removal. Nonetheless, Voegeding felt sure that the Founder had been fed false information. "I had been with him enough times in hiding, so knew how it worked, and how it worked was that all communication to him was vetted," she said. "I'd never told anywhere where he was—I had no idea where he was. And the other things I was 'guilty' of were basic management decisions I would do again, like lowering prices to bring in more customers. I still feel that LRH would have agreed, if I'd been given the chance to explain. But there was no opportunity for an explanation."

Within weeks, more Scientology officials had been removed, including Hubbard's longtime public relations adviser, Laurel Sullivan, who was accused of "spying" on the Commodore's Messenger Organization for the Guardian's Office. Both Sullivan and Voegeding had been close to Mary Sue, whom Miscavige and Pat Broeker had mutually declared a "criminal."

Now, with the Controller out of the way and some of her key supporters sidelined, David Miscavige and his allies in the All Clear Unit embarked on a brutal purge of most the Guardian's Office, stripping hundreds of people of their positions with no warning. Also removed were many other Sea Org executives who'd had nothing to do with intelligence activities but who, like Sullivan and Voegeding, had simply been close to L. Ron Hubbard or his wife. Over the next year, Miscavige, on orders from Hubbard, accused hundreds of Scientology officials of crimes ranging from stealing church funds, to disobeying Hubbard's instructions, to being on the payroll of "external influences" such as the CIA.

The "crims," as Miscavige and his associates called these officials, were summoned to Gilman Hot Springs, where the Messengers, led by Miscavige, ordered them to scrub floors, eat table scraps out of buckets, and sleep on the floor, watched over by armed guards. They were also made to endure hours of interrogation, sometimes performed by up to six Messengers at once. These were known as "gang bang" security checks.

Here is how Homer Schomer, once a chief financial officer for the Church of Scientology, described one of several gang-bang security checks he was given in the early 1980s: "It lasted from about ten o'clock in the evening to eight o'clock in the morning ... During this time I was just bombarded with these questions asking who I was working for. Was I working for the CIA? Was I a plant? Was I working for the FBI? Where was all the money I stole? Where were all the jewels I stole?"