The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology (29 page)

The Church denied David Miscavige abused staff with obscene language, saying the allegation was beneath contempt.

One ex-member of the Church later told me that this kind of potty-mouthed, one-way abusive language was standard from David Miscavige. Another of his favourite sign-offs was YSCOHB.

Decoded, it means: ‘YOU SUCK COCK ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Is there anybody there?’

O
n our last day in California we headed directly to the Concrete Angel on L Ron Hubbard Way. Around the back of the left wing of the angel was the door pin-pointed by Jeff Hawkins as the RPF prison. I had called Tommy several times. No answer. But as we approached the door, my phone rang. It was Tommy. I told him we were recording the call and that we had heard that ridiculous numbers of people on the RPF programme were being held in a kind of dungeon in Lebanon Hall.

Tommy: ‘John, have you lost your mind?’

‘No, Tommy, I have lost my voice.’

That was true. The combination of yelling my head off and doing pieces-to-camera in the chopper had left me hoarse.

Tommy: ‘That is the most preposterous ridiculous insane abusatory disgusting thing I have heard you say to date.’ I always admired Tommy for his understatement.

‘OK, well prove me wrong then Tommy. Let me in to this building.’

Tommy stayed on the phone, as I gave him a running commentary: ‘I am knocking on the door.’

Knock, knock, I went, knock, knock, knockety-knock.

It was a 21
century version of
The Listeners
, Walter De La Mare’s spooky poem: 

Is there anybody there, said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door?…

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:-

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word…’

As in the poem, no-one answered.

Tommy and I kept batting away at each other over the phone, as was our tradition. Reinforced by Jeff Hawkins, I asked him about Xenu and about David Miscavige – did he go around thumping people?

Tommy was giving no quarter: ‘Lies… your behaviour is utterly reprehensible and the level of unprofessionalism is appalling…’

‘You won’t let me into this building, will you?’

‘I will absolutely not. No, considering your behaviour, considering you went so crazy inside of one of my facilities that two of my staff ran off to get help for fear that you were going to become violent because you have what I could only call a psychotic break… you are clearly an unstable individual…’

‘Thank you very much, that’s very kind of you. But I do not think I had a psychotic break. I reacted under pressure to your attempts to brainwash me.’

You get the drift.

Later, their Scientology attack video,
Panorama Exposed
, showed an empty meeting room behind the closed door I was knocking on. It wasn’t wholly compelling proof that what Jeff Hawkins had told me had never been the case, that it had been a mind-prison and, prompted by our interest, they had moved the people somewhere else. Or Jeff may have been wholly in the wrong, as the Church says.

Tommy and I ripped chunks out of each other, telephonically, for a while and then we were joined by Sylviana, the black clad camerawoman from Sea Org, who started filming me, pounding on the door.

‘We are filming for BBC Panorama,’ I said. ‘What are you filming for…?’

‘I love filming,’ she said. Sylviana had a cold beauty and an exotic accent – Argentinian, Paraguayan, or something like that.

‘Have you ever seen David Miscavige, or anyone…?’

‘That is none of your business,’ she said.

‘It is my business because I am a reporter,’ I said, cockily. ‘My business is everybody’s business. That is what reporters do. So the question is: have you ever seen David Miscavige…?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘The Xenu story? Is that true?’

‘It is a lie,’ stressing the last word with such vehemence that it was quite disturbing. Phonetically, it sounded like: ‘Eez a liiiiiie.’ Then Bill’s tape ran out.

That Saturday, according to Sci’gy-Leaks, was the first day when Tommy and Mike were not fully ‘handling’ us and were able to engage with their campaign to persuade the BBC to pull our programme before it was broadcast. It was also the first day for the Leader’s Office to address their perceived multiple failures at length. Again, the reader should bear in mind that the Church and David Miscavige deny that Sci’gy-Leaks is genuine. Much of the to and fro is boring and repetitive; some of it is meaningless gobbledegook; some of it just plain crazy.

The Communicator waxed long and loud about my failings:
‘He missed the JT
[John Travolta]
interview insisting instead of interviewing a nut. And it just continues. We told you COB wasn’t doing the interview and that if what you wanted was anything to do with Scn you would have approached him in UK where he was in plain view and greeting people as they entered the Church. COBs role is not to handle public relations and does interviews rarely, if at all.’

Subject pronouns are words like ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘he’. In the above ‘He’ is Sweeney; ‘We’ is the Church; ‘you’ is Sweeney; ‘he’ is Miscavige. Muddling subject pronouns leads to confusion. This is the linguistic equivalent of a
Dr Who
episode featuring a disgusting scrambled egg style mess called
The Brain of Morbius.

Miscavige’s Communicator, in setting out why an interview was not on, referred to the ‘
falsehoods BBC preseneted 20 years ago
’ – homage to the 1987 Panorama ‘
The Road to Total Freedom?
’ of blessed memory.

The Communicator babbled on for a bit: ‘
-How come you haven’t nade it clear to him that you refuse to forward his request as Sweenys behavior is so bigotted, his conduct so irrational that you sonsider him unstable?

-Are you actually hiding out and letting him screw aroundoutside our properties such as the complex as your handling?’

What is unfair about this message from on high is that neither Tommy nor Mike could stop us from doing our jobs. It wasn’t their fault that none of the points the Communicator raised addressed the grave criticisms made by ex-Scientologists to us. This feels like a classic example of the failing of an organisation where top-down control prevents the lower orders from explaining to the bosses what is happening in the real world.

Mike replied by demonizing me – the default position of the Church faced with scrutiny:
‘he is a bigot and has psychotic breaks. Tommy said that there is no way he is taking him inside one of our buidlings after he had his psychotic break on wednesday. A break so outrageous two of the female presenmt ran to get help as they were sure john wld get violent.’

I did shout. I may like a drink. But I am not a violent man.

‘…he then said we had tried to brainwash him!’

Yes. I believe they did try to brainwash me.

‘He also repeated request for interview w COB and Tommy told him he had not forwarded the request and wld nvr ever forward such a request in amillion yrs and wld do everything in his power to make sure sweeney never gets anywhere near cob as he is a bigot and abusive and we hv ansrd every false allegation and will answer to any others. Sweeney ended up hanging up and then geting back into his van and driving off as I am typing this and now heading up Virgil.’

We had not told the Church where we were going. Virgil Avenue was en route between the Concrete Angel and the location of our next appointment, with another ex-Scientologist.

The Communicator replied:
‘Your problem on COB is you didn’t fill the vacuum but just “da’s”. That’s due to your overts. Specifically hat dump.’

That sounds like utter mumbo-jumbo but let’s try to break it down:
‘Your problem on COB is you didn’t fill the vacuum
[deal with the BBC] but just “
da’s
”. [Dead Agents – knocking out critics with a file of black information.]
That’s due to your overts
. [Crimes against the Church]
Specifically hat dump
[a failure to carry out your mission – hat means post or job, dump means failure.] Translated, I think it means something like this: ‘You failed to do your job properly.’

Lifton’s test number six, ‘Loading the Language’, springs up here and it is worth repeating the psychiatrist’s specific point, that ‘the effect of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.’ The logic of the language from the Communicator is as round and smooth as a billiard ball. It chokes communication and reduces language to a series of Druidic insults to which there is no possible answer. To me, it seems mad.

The Communicator had a lot on her mind: ‘
As for the stupid allegation of being “aftraid” to see Sweeny, anybody who actually knows COB knows what a joke it is… Afraid? He’s met individuals from 10 Downing not to mention the home office
.’

No-one in the British government could confirm or deny that Miscavige had met individuals from Number Ten or the Home Office. Who exactly in Number Ten? No-one knows; or no-one is saying.

The Communicator went back to demonizing his staff: ‘
You’ve just gone PTS
[PTS=Potential Trouble Source, one step from Suppressive Person]
and not filled the vacuum as the fact is he barely sleeps AND YOU KNOW IT and doing this BBC thing because he’s trying to blackmail with threats of what lies he’ll spread is as obscene as it gets and a virtual guarantee it wouldn’t happen.
’

The subject pronoun ‘he’ switches from Hero Miscavige – who barely sleeps – to Demon Sweeney – who blackmails and lies – in the same sentence. We are different. This is primary school English and the Communicator has failed.

The Communicator drones on: ‘
What the hell happened to the fill the vacuum however? You’ve got the usual treason…
’

Treason is a heavy word. The Communicator uses it with foolish abandon.

‘
…and perfect excuse to do nothing because all of a sudden Tommys on the firing line and is worried he’ll choke a question when you idiots already knew if there was something he tommy didn’t know it would be the proof of what slime this idiot is…’

What slime this idiot is? Thank you very much.

The Communicator closes this message with a large dose of self-pity: ‘
Cob will finish all the materials, all the courses, all the buildings and their contruction, singl hand every event, keep the show on the road, then do TV (which he’s tried to get to for a year but god forbid you 2 do anything to ease his lines) and THEN defend himself because you have every excuse not to.’

Tommy leaps to set out his views on the Leader to the Communicator: ‘
I have never seen anyone
[Miscavige]
work harder or more hours and is as well the kindest, most genuine caring individual I know.
’

In Lifton’s foreword to Singer’s book, he writes on cults that ‘there is a pattern of manipulation and exploitation from above by leaders and ruling coteries and idealism from below on the part of supplicants and recruits.’

In the normal world, someone might reply to the delusional tone of the Communicator’s message by suggesting the real world difficulties the team was confronting. A supplicant in a cult would grovel.

The Communicator swept the applause aside and got on to their version of the story on us: ‘
Its time our documentary was put together as at this point it will probably be sensational.
’

It was.

The Communicator changed tack, to reply to Mike who was ‘handling’ my knocking on the door of the Concrete Angel:
‘Thanks. You’d better make sure security is in at those buildings. Obviously somebody is spreading more bs [bullshit] about the rpf but you neeed to double ensure secuirty is tight in those buildings as they could try to send somebody in with a hidden camera which is the last thing you need.
’

This appears to suggest that there might be something hidden inside the Concrete Angel the Church would not want the world to see.

‘Yes, his behavior sounds insane. Are you saying he LITERALLY said you guys brainwashed him (SWEENY)? And that this statement is on camera? If so, this guy should practically be under a restraining order… This dungeon bit is desperation and the same crap we’ve disproven a billion times. He’s been exposed as the bigot and dishonest journalist he is.’

Mike replied:
‘Dear Sir. Security is on red alert at PAC and CC. They are now in Griffith Pk… They film every car that goes by as Sweeney accuses us of following and spying on him which at this pt is more of his paranoia.’

He was dead right about the paranoia.

We had said our goodbyes to the Concrete Angel and drove towards our final interview with a defector. Paranoid, hunted, I thought we were being followed again, one suspect driver a blonde guy, old, moustached, maybe the guy who followed us when we came to LA in the first place in the dark blue Kia, a second, I remember, a tall, dark-haired chap. I pulled our car into a car park and waited. The dark-haired guy followed us, parked, and got out of his car. An ordinary person going about his business? Or a smart private investigator, suspecting that he had been smelt out, pretending to be an ordinary person…

‘He’s looking back at us,’ I said, urgently.

Bill: ‘I don’t think so. I think he was just sorting out his shit before he got out of the car.’