Counterfeit Dreams

Preface

2010-05-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

From the Preface to the hardback edition of Counterfeit Dreams, available August 2010

This was not an easy book to write. For three years following my departure from the Church of Scientology, I was not able to write anything sensible about my experience. Then gradually, the onion layers of indoctrination started to peel off, one by one, and I began to get some distance and perspective.

I began writing my account as a blog, posting it chapter by chapter. I did this to put pressure on myself to continue writing, to finish the narrative. And partly to reach out to others who may have had similar experiences.

I knew that I could never tell part of the story; it had to be the whole story or nothing. When I would try to tell people about the abuses I experienced within the Church of Scientology, they would ask me one thing: why had I stayed so long? And understanding that meant telling the whole thing.

My blog account attracted an audience, and they kept the pressure on me to finish. Some of these were people, like me, who had left Scientology and they found in me a kindred spirit. Others, to my surprise, were people still actively involved in the Church of Scientology. They were shocked by my revelations as to what goes on at the top levels of Scientology, and, after reading my story, they began to re-examine their own involvement with Scientology. Hundreds of people have now left the Church of Scientology as a direct result of reading my story. And every week I get an e-mail or two from people who have newly left.

Once my blog account was completed, my readers and friends encouraged me to expand Counterfeit Dreams to book-length and publish it.

As I often have to explain to people, I am not anti-Scientology. While I am no longer a Scientologist, I have many friends who are and who practice the subject outside the Church. I wish them well. My objection is to the abuses of organized Scientology and it is these that I continue to expose and fight against.

I have also heard from many people who were never involved with the Church of Scientology. For some who have been trapped in an abusive group or relationship, my story resonates. If this book can serve as either a cautionary tale or a message of hope, it will have been worth writing.

Appendix: Why Speak Out?

2008-08-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

My own decision to speak out against my former Church, the Church of Scientology, was inspired by three brave young women who, in 2007, began a website called Ex-Scientology Kids. Kendra Wiseman, Jenna Miscavige Hill and Astra Woodcraft had the courage to tell their stories of growing up in Scientology. You could say they shamed me into it. If they were willing to put their names on the line and face whatever Scientology dished out, then what was I afraid of? So I began speaking about my experiences publicly, first on various online chat groups, then in radio interviews, and finally writing my whole story in my blog, Counterfeit Dreams.

There are many reasons not to speak out. And believe me, I've heard them all.

The first is what I call the "get over it" argument. The person speaking out is characterized as a whining victim who is stuck in the past and should just "move on." People who are former Scientologists may also add the Scientology twist that "you pulled it in" - meaning that anything bad that happened to you in your life is the result of your own bad actions. They might talk about "taking responsibility," which, to a Scientologist, means admitting that anything bad that happened to you in life was your own doing - and therefore you have no right to complain. "Taking responsibility," according to the Scientology way of thinking, means essentially that one should shut up about it and just move on.

This sort of thinking is so pervasive within Scientology that sometimes one does not even need to say these words to an ex-Scientologist - they are already thinking this way. And no one, particularly an ex-Scientologist, wants to be cast in the role of "victim." Scientologists strive to be "cause over life" and don't want to admit, even to themselves, that they have been victimized.

Certainly there are times in life when someone needs to be told to "get over it." If your spouse is still talking about "that guy who cut me off on the freeway" several days later, it's time to remind them to move on. But we are not talking about occasional rudeness or some slight, we are talking about serious and systemic abuse and human rights violations.

One would not tell a battered wife to "forget about it and move on." At least if one retains the slightest spark of compassion or humanity. One would not tell a rape victim that she "pulled it in." One would not tell an aging pensioner who has just lost his life savings to a con artist to "get over it." One would certainly not tell a Holocaust survivor to "stop whining and move on."

The only real victims are those who have been "shuddered into silence" by such callous and bloodless sentiments. The ones who feel they have to live in silence and hold their abuse close to the chest, lest others think less of them. The minute they decide to speak out, they cease being a victim. They are empowered.

There are people who would like all such victims to shut up about it. And key among those are the perpetrators. They can only continue their abuse if no one speaks out. The pedophile priest, the abusive husband, the sociopathic cult leader, can only exist by maintaining layers of secrecy about their real activities, keeping up that front of respectability. They are untouchable as long as their victims keep their mouths shut. The minute their victims open their mouths, the light comes streaming into their sordid little worlds. And the victims aren’t victims any more.

"Forgive and forget" some people say. Well, forgive, maybe, if someone comes to their senses and changes their behavior. Forget – never.

There is a point where silence becomes enabling.

David Miscavige will continue to abuse and beat staff as long as he thinks he can get away with it. But if he knows that his every move will be exposed, he may just think twice about further abuse. The message from those speaking out is "you can’t hide anymore – the world is watching."

Which brings me to the second objection to speaking out. Some of my friends who have left Scientology still cling to its principles. They still believe that there is a lot of good in Scientology, and most importantly, they still believe that Scientology's "OT Levels" are the road to personal salvation. Their belief is that the Church of Scientology was hijacked by David Miscavige and perverted, but that the subject itself is still good. We could argue at some length about this - and in fact we often do! But they object to anyone speaking out about the abuses within the Church of Scientology as they think it would be destructive to the subject of Scientology.

I can imagine that there were Catholics who felt the same way about those who were exposing priest abuse. They didn't want it talked about because they didn't want it to destroy their religion.

But the real question is this: If exposing abuses within a religion results in the destruction of that religion, then who is the source of that destruction - the person who exposes it, or the person who commits that abuse?

As a Scientologist, I was guilty of this kind of flawed thinking. I knew that David Miscavige and others beat and abused staff members. I knew that RPF Members lived in conditions of near slavery. I knew that Scientology's press releases were full of lies. But I shut up about it "for the good of the group." I had the idea that we had to present a united front against "the enemy," defending the Church and its leaders whether they were right or not, abusive or not.

But does that strengthen a Church, or weaken it?

Scientology has this wonderful term, "enturbulated theta" or "entheta." That is, anything which disturbs, agitates or upsets "theta," the life force or spirit. Thus, something that is "entheta" is something that upsets or disturbs Scientologists, and something that is "theta" is something that makes Scientologists calm, reassured or happy. People who make "entheta" statements are declared Suppressive. They are "suppressing" the calmness and happiness of Scientologists.

It has nothing to do with truth.

If a Scientologist were to talk about staff abuse or RPF prison conditions or criminal activities within the Church, that would be "entheta." It would upset people - even though it was true. If they ignore abuses or cover them up, that's "theta." It is calming and reassuring - even though it's false.

Most Scientologists know there is something very, very wrong with their Church. They see the signs. But they choose to ignore them. Why? Because they know that if they speak out, they will be censured. Their statements will be labeled as "entheta" and they could even be "declared Suppressive."

Imagine the Catholic Church threatening to excommunicate anyone speaking out about priest abuse, and you get the insidious oppression that Scientologists have to deal with.

Now imagine the Catholic Church threatening to excommunicate anyone who even listens to anyone complaining about priest abuse.

That's a pretty tight leash.

If there is one word that characterizes the operations of Scientology, it is secrecy. There is absolutely no transparency of operations. Scientologists have no idea where their money goes or who receives it. Scientologists are not allowed to know the names of the people running their own Church, outside of a few prominent figureheads. Church plans and operations are shrouded in "confidentiality." Staff are not allowed to speak candidly about their lives to outsiders, even close family. And any activity above them in the command echelon is kept secret from them. Sea Org Members are not allowed internet access, cell phones, radio or TV. Scientologists are discouraged from researching Scientology or Hubbard's life on the internet or visiting anything but the approved Church websites. Staff who leave have to sign elaborate "gag orders" that they will never reveal what went on inside.

Why? Why all this secrecy?

Scientology promotes itself as the "Road to Truth."

Yet it can’t face the truth.

Anyone who considers themselves a Scientologist – whether in the Church of Scientology or not – has to decide whether they want to be part of a religion that is based on truth, or one based on lies and secrecy.

It is time to ask those questions you never dared to ask before, and to reveal what you never dared to reveal before.

Which leads to the final objection – isn’t speaking out against the Church of Scientology dangerous? Don’t they come after anyone who dares to blow the whistle on them?

Sure, they try to. Hubbard’s policy is to always, always "attack the attacker." Never defend, always attack. So anyone who speaks out opens themselves to such an attack.

Every totalitarian regime, every fanatical movement, starts with a glittering goal, whether it’s a utopian future, a Third Reich or a Cleared Planet. The goal is so huge and so all-embracing that it seems that it will solve all of the problems of the world. In the future utopia, there is no war, crime or insanity. Everyone lives in peace and harmony, if they follow the One True Path.

"Obviously" anyone who opposes the group or movement or regime is an enemy – an infidel, nonbeliever, "wog" or Suppressive. Therefore ruthlessness against such enemies is not only condoned, it is required and rewarded. Those willing to set aside their humanity and become cold, fanatical and cruel instruments of the greater good will rise to the top of such a movement. Those who get in their way become "enemies" and are destroyed.

Thus a Hitler can come to power. Or a David Miscavige.

The Church of Scientology reacts as all fanatical groups react – by vilifying and denouncing anyone who dares to speak out against them or question their tactics.

And, like other fanatical religious groups, the biggest weapon they wield against their own followers is the granting or withholding of eternal salvation. This is not a joke to Scientologists. They believe literally that they are spiritual beings who were trapped and enslaved into human bodies millions of years ago, condemned to live life after life in darkness and ignorance, never knowing they live again and again. The promise of the "OT Levels" is that one will gain full awareness and thus remember one’s past lives and so achieve immortality, life after life. This is what Scientologists believe. This is what I believed.

So being "declared Suppressive" is not just name calling. It means that one is cut off from one’s "eternity" as a spiritual being. That is a heavy threat. To a Scientologist, it is not just the threat of death – it is the threat of death after death after death.

So Scientologists toe the line. They may notice something is wrong, but they won’t bring it up. They may see abuse, but they’ll keep quiet about it and try to pretend that everything is OK. They won’t speak out, or complain, or make a fuss. They do what they are told. If they don’t, they know they will have to visit the Ethics Officer. They will have to do "lower conditions." They will have to get "Security Checks" – at their expense. And at the end of it, if they don’t toe the line, they know that expulsion and a Suppressive Person declare awaits them.

It is spiritual blackmail.

Ask yourself, if that is the level of threat and duress that it takes to keep Scientologists in line, then is it really a religion, or has it become, finally, a fanatical, mafia-like cult?

I’m not here to argue the truth or falsity of Scientology’s "OT Levels." That is a matter, really, of religious faith. People can believe in whatever spiritual path they choose. But what Scientologists are not told is that Hubbard’s "OT Levels" have all been published online, and are even delivered by "Freezone" Scientology groups who have no connection to the Church of Scientology.

It is time to stop buckling under the Church of Scientology’s spiritual blackmail.

Suppressive Person is a meaningless term, even more so after its overuse as a political weapon within the Church. These days it means "anyone who gets in David Miscavige’s way."

Sure, if you speak out they will try to silence you. They will call you a liar. They will try to label you as a criminal or a terrorist or anything else they can pull out of their tired old bag of tricks. But every day, there are more and more people willing to speak out, and fewer and fewer willing to tell or support or listen to their lies. Every day, the Church has less money and less time and less people to carry out their vindictive attacks. Yet the numbers of their critics and whistleblowers is growing daily.

We are at a tipping point.

More and more Scientologists are quietly withdrawing their support from the Miscavige regime. Many are walking away from the Church of Scientology altogether. Key Church executives are defecting. Many are now speaking out, telling what they know. Doors and windows are being opened to let light in to the secret, dark world of Scientology.

If Scientology survives at all, in any form, it will be because Scientologists stopped tolerating abuse and lies and criminality in the name of their religion, tore down the veils of secrecy and demanded full transparency. It will be because present and past Scientologists had the decency and humanity to stand up and speak out, regardless of the threats and the attempts to silence them. And it will be because past Church executives had the courage to do what they know is right.

I don’t seek the destruction of Scientology. David Miscavige has already accomplished that, almost singlehandedly. I do demand that the truth be told, that the walls come down, and that common standards of human decency and honesty prevail.

It is time to speak out.

Chapter Seventeen: Freedom

2008-07-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

My wheels hissed against the asphalt as I drove north on 101, through Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Thousand Oaks. It was a drive I’d made many times, going up to see Mom. It was after midnight, and there wasn’t much traffic. A light misty rain dusted my windshield, but a touch on the wiper every few minutes kept it clear.

Boxes and bags were piled high on the back seat. More boxes filled the trunk. The Accord felt heavy, slow. I had put as many of my belongings into the car as I could. The rest, including my furniture and boxes of books – most of them Scientology books – were in a storage facility in Beaumont, just over the hills from the Base.

Streetlights cast a yellowish glow, haloed in the mist. Bits of civilization drifted by: a car dealership, a gas station. I looked at it all with new eyes, curious eyes. Me, the newborn citizen of this world – the world outside Scientology. As I started up the long grade at Newbury Park, cars rushed past, their taillights glowing in the mist. Let them rush; I was in no hurry. I had the rest of my life.

It was Saturday, April 16th, 2005. That morning, I had woken up in my dormitory room in the Old Gilman House. I had spent ten weeks in the OGH Compound, weeding and clearing brush, and getting Security Checking, hour after hour, to clean up all my "critical feelings about David Miscavige" by finding my "crimes against Scientology."

At the beginning of April, Manu and Michela had arrived at OGH. They had been told they were being offloaded as well, out of the Sea Org. We began working together, and soon any animosity melted and we all became friends. Security had purchased an old fire engine and wanted to get it cleaned up and polished, so Manu, Michela and I worked on that, day after day. Evenings, the two women would frantically write up ethics conditions formulas, petitions, confessions. They were desperate to get reinstated to the Base. They encouraged me to join them, but I said no – I was not interested in going back. In my mind I was already gone. I spent the evenings reading, or sorting and repacking my belongings.

There were two other CMU staff at OGH, two of the artists, Carrie Cook and Jimmy Yeoh, also slated for offload. With Manu and Michela gone, I estimated there were only about eight people left in CMU – really a skeleton crew. And it wasn’t as if Miscavige’s winnowing process had left the cream. Jimmy and Carrie had been the best designers. The only designer left, Kerrie Francis, had been the worst and slowest designer. And with Manu and Michela gone, there was no one left who could competently write a marketing campaign. CMU had been decimated, it was no more.

But the morning of April 16th had not been like any other. The Security Guards were in a panic. Those who were slated for offload had to be gone, right now, today. One can only imagine what the "flap" was. Maybe Miscavige was on his way back to the Base.

I said goodbye to Manu and Michela. They said they might go to Italy, where they both had family. Jimmy Yeoh gave me his e-mail address.

Most of my possessions had been brought out to OGH and stacked in a spare room, but some of the larger items were still out at the Kirby Apartments. A Security Guard named Salvatore Meo took me out to Kirby in the Security truck and we got the rest of my things, including a big queen mattress and my desk. It took two trips to get everything. Then Sal drove me to a U-Haul place in San Jacinto where I rented a truck. I paid for it – of course. I drove it back to OGH, where we loaded up the truck with everything I owned. Anything I was going to need immediately, I packed into my car. The rest was going into temporary storage.

Sal and I drove the truck up through Lamb’s Canyon, over the hills to Beaumont, where we found a storage place. I paid for the space, then Sal and I unloaded everything and locked it up. We about to head back to the Base to get my car when Murphy phoned. Change of plans: I was not to come back to the Base. Murphy would meet us with my car.

We waited at a nearby Dennys, sipping coffee until Murphy showed up. Sal and I got into my car; Murphy took the truck back. Sal drove my car. It was dark by the time we entered the lobby of the Hollywood Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard. We took the elevator to the 11th floor, where the Office of Special Affairs was. I was ushered into a conference room where there were a couple of OSA legal staff. There was a video camera at one end of the conference table, and a stack of documents. When they turned on the camera, Sal stood over to one side, out of camera range – having a uniformed guard standing behind me might look too much like "duress."

In my frame of mind, I simply signed whatever they put in front of me. Yes, I understand I have no rights, I can never sue the Church, I can never speak out against the Church, I can never reveal what went on at the Base, on and on. Yes, yes, whatever. Initial each page and sign the final page. Document after document, all recorded on video. It took hours.

Finally, we were finished. Sal handed me an envelope with a check in it. Five hundred dollars. This was my "severance pay."

Five hundred dollars? I had no idea what it cost to rent an apartment or buy food, but I knew five hundred dollars wouldn’t get me very far. It was a slap in the face. I had assumed, throughout my whole ten-week "offload" process, that the Church had some way of relocating staff they dismissed – even those who were "declared Suppressive." I had assumed there would be some kind of assistance in finding an apartment and a job, and sufficient severance pay to, at least, pay a deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment and living expenses for a month or so, until one could get a job.

It was not to be. I found myself walking back to my car with $500 in my hands. Fortunately I still had a bit of money left from Mom’s inheritance. Not much, but enough to live for – what? Four months? Six months? I had no idea what things cost.

I got in my car and just sat for a moment. I was parked on Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, in a car crammed with my belongings. I was 58 years old, and at that moment, homeless. I had a modest bank account, and a check for $500 in my pocket.

I had no place to go. My brother, my only living relative, was still a Scientologist. As a Suppressive Person, I had been told by Murphy, under no uncertain terms, that I was forbidden to talk to him. The last I’d heard from Kim he was moving to Clearwater. I had no address or phone number for him. I had lost track of Gwennie – she had moved without a forwarding address. I hadn’t heard from her in four years. And after 35 years working for the Sea Org, my only friends were Sea Org Members. I knew no one on the "outside." So it was just me. Me and my car full of belongings, sitting on Vine Street in Hollywood.

At that moment, I realized I could literally drive anywhere and start a new life: down the coast, up the coast, out to Arizona. But I knew where I would go – Santa Barbara, where my mother had lived. It was a city I knew and loved. It was by the sea. And it was in the opposite direction to the Base.

I slipped a CD into the stereo, and turned it up: the Rolling Stones’ "Start Me Up." I pulled out into traffic.

Half an hour later, as I drove up the coast, I felt strangely disembodied, floating. The music had stopped, and I slid along silently, down the long hill into the lights of Camarillo, then through darkened farm country to the lights of Ventura and the Coast. On my left, the Pacific Ocean glimmered in the scattered moonlight. I wound between cliff and ocean, riding the edge of the continent, drifting.

It was well after midnight when I finally pulled in to Santa Barbara. I took the downtown exit and headed up State Street. I found a motel with a vacancy and checked in. It was $100 a night. There went a fifth of my severance pay, but I didn’t care. I was exhausted. It had been a long day.

Santa Barbara - my refuge

Sunday morning, I woke feeling refreshed. I went outside and smelled the fresh sea air. It really came home to me then – I was free, and I was on my own. It was exhilarating.

At the same time, I felt an underlying panic. I had no job, no home. I had to get busy. I went across the street to an IHOP for breakfast. On my way in, I grabbed a local paper. As I ate, I turned to the classified section, apartments to rent. I knew that was my first priority: I had to find a place to live.

Ironically, I found a place available right on Bath Street, about a block from where my mother had lived. I went over and saw it, but it turned out to be unavailable. I called a few more places, then walked down State Street, got a haircut, and went into Barnes & Noble to look for some books on job hunting.

I’d been out of the job market for 35 years. I had no idea how to look for a job, or even how to write a resume. I got two books, Idiots Guide to the Perfect Resume, and What Color is Your Parachute, a book about career changes. I figured that’s what I was doing – a career change.
I didn’t want to pay another $100 for the room, so looked into other motels. I found one a block down the street willing to charge me $55 a night for five nights – through Thursday. The motel was run by a nice guy named Chris, who gave me some advice on apartment hunting.

Over the next few days, I looked at dozens of apartments. I finally settled on a small studio apartment near downtown on East Victoria Street. It was just right for one person, and the rent was low. I put in an application.

Meanwhile I was studying like mad every night on my job hunting books. I was still, to some extent, operating in "Base mode." I felt guilty if I wasn’t doing something, producing something, every minute. I didn’t want to be "idle." I ate my meals fast and got back to work. I was frantic. I even felt guilty because I wasn’t studying Hubbard’s works every spare minute. I tried to listen to a Hubbard lecture one evening, but I couldn’t keep my attention on it – I felt too anxious.

Then one day I was hurrying down State Street to grab a quick lunch, and I happened to notice it was a beautiful, sunny day. People were walking up and down State Street, just enjoying the weather, the shops, the cafés. I kept walking, and ended up down at the beach, watching the waves roll in and the gulls wheel overhead. Hours later, I returned to my motel room. The world hadn’t ended, nothing had been destroyed. Maybe it was OK to just relax a bit.

State Street

One of the books I was reading, What Color is Your Parachute, talked about the importance of envisioning your ideal career. That choice drives everything – how you write your resume, where you look for jobs, how you act during interviews. I decided that what I really wanted, more than anything else, was to pursue a career in graphic design. It was what I was trained in and what I most enjoyed doing. One of my main disappointments in the Sea Org had been not being able to do design work. Sure, I could just desperately take any job – driving a fork lift at Costco or "flipping burgers at McDonalds" as Miscavige liked to say. But why? I had some time; I wasn’t destitute yet. I would find a job in graphic arts.

I secured the Victoria Street apartment on Wednesday, picking up the key and paying the deposit and first month’s rent. Then I called U-Haul and arranged for a truck on Thursday. It was a long, long drive back out to Beaumont, 180 miles, filling up repeatedly on diesel fuel and agonizing over every dollar. I paid the storage fees, then loaded everything – single handed – into the back of the U-Haul and drove back to the Victoria Street Apartment. A couple of young guys who lived next door helped me unload. It was another long day and an exhausting one.

Friday and Saturday I devoted to setting up the apartment. I unpacked everything, then went to Sears and got everything I needed – bedding, pillows, shower curtain, iron, trash can. Then I went furniture shopping and found a cheap bed frame, a chair for the desk and some shelving from Home Depot. I set up the apartment, putting framed family pictures all over the walls. At least I would be surrounded by family in picture form. I had one picture of Cathy I’d managed to smuggle out by hiding it under another picture. I framed it and put it on the wall as well.

Jeff's house

Then – food. I hadn’t cooked my own meals in 35 years, and had no idea where to start. I found myself in Vons, meticulously inspecting prices and package labels. I just sort of got what I felt like eating and seemed easy to prepare. And I got what I thought I’d need for the kitchen – pots, pans, knives, silverware, dishes.

I remembered that Mom had mentioned once that my Dad’s old business partner, Merv Corning, lived somewhere in the area. I looked him up and called him out of the blue. He lived in Solvang, about half an hour north of Santa Barbara. Sunday I went out and saw him and his wife Tula. We hadn’t seen each other since I was about 12, but we spent a lovely afternoon together and he told me some very funny stories about my Dad. Merv was a very talented painter and he showed me his studio. It was nice – it was some kind of connection to family.

With the apartment handled, I concentrated on finding a job. I got my phone connected, and got a DSL line hooked up. I still had my laptop computer, the one I’d ordered when I was at the PAC Ranch. They’d erased all of my photos, but it still worked well. I got that hooked up and running so I could do internet job hunting. I ordered a printer/fax/scanner from Dell, and got a two-drawer file cabinet. I also got a big presentation binder for my "portfolio." I went through everything I had managed to take out with me – old Advance Magazines, promotion, books – and found enough of my old design, illustration and cartoon work to use. Surprisingly, it didn’t look too dated. I got it all copied at Kinkos and inserted into the binder.

I wrote a resume using a format that emphasized skills rather than work history. My Idiots book informed me that it was an acceptable format. I disguised my Scientology history as best I could, putting things like Bridge Publications and new Era Publications. Then I got the resume and some business cards printed at Kinkos.

I went through all of the online job sites I could find and posted my resume, and searched the sites for any graphic design jobs. I applied to every one I found, either by e-mail or regular mail. I created a file of every ad agency, newspaper, and magazine in the area, and started cranking out letters.

In my resume, I put that I was proficient in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. And I did have some familiarity, but not nearly enough. I invested in the Adobe Creative Suite and installed it on my computer. Then every night I would read manuals and drill on the programs. After a few weeks of this, I was pretty much up to speed.

I started noticing a change in my health. I was sleeping all night every night – eight and even nine hours. I was eating well. And I was finding time to relax. I started feeling a lot better and a lot healthier. And with that, I felt some sanity returning.

I found my old friend Jerry, from the Canyon days. He had his own video production company in Burbank, and I went down one Sunday and spent the day with him. He was glad to hear I was finally out of the Sea Org. Jerry himself had been out of Scientology for 30 years. He had nothing good to say about it. Despite everything I had been through, I still considered myself a Scientologist, and as almost a knee-jerk reaction, I defended Scientology and tried to get him to see it in a positive light.

I didn’t consider myself done with Scientology. I fully planned to do my "A to E" steps and get the SP declare lifted so I could once again talk to my brother. I was going to pay my "Freeloader Debt" – the bill that you get when you leave the Sea Org for all of the services you obtained while a Sea Org Member. I fully intended to do all this and remain a Scientologist. My priority now was finding a job – then I’d worry about getting back into Scientology’s good graces.

The weeks were going by, and still no job. I was phoning prospective employers every day, sending out e-mails, mailing resumes, and rushing out to interviews. I was in a quasi-panic about it – money was running out and none coming in. As I was rushing to an interview, I’d pass these homeless guys on State Street asking me for money. I came to resent them. I don’t have a job either, I’d think, but I’m hustling while you sit there in the sun! Later, when I had steady work, I was more charitable.

In May, I interviewed at a local weekly magazine called Casa. They needed a Production Manager – someone to lay the mag out and get it to press. We talked and they were impressed with my skills. They said they’d get back to me.

Gradually, gradually, I felt myself recovering. I’d get out and take a walk every day, longer ones on weekends. I got into hiking in the hills above Santa Barbara, eventually tackling La Cumbre Peak, the highest mountain in the county.

The view from La Cumbre Peak

The city was beautiful and calming. I’d take long walks on the beach and just relax. I felt like I was slowly gathering up the pieces of my life and getting back some pride and confidence and self-respect.

I still missed Kim and wished I could talk with him. I wondered if they had told him I was declared like the promised to. Probably not. I also wondered where Gwennie was. I tried Googling her name but came up with nothing.

Almost every night I had nightmares. I would be back at the Base, in a meeting with Miscavige, or waiting for a meeting. Or I would be at a Gold Muster, or roaming a strange nightmare version of Building 36. I came to expect the dreams. But every morning I’d wake in my own little apartment and smell the sea air and I’d know everything was all right.

At the end of May I got a call from Mark Whitehurst, the Publisher of Casa Magazine. He wanted to hire me – on a freelance basis at first. He wanted to pay me $16 an hour. I negotiated him up to $20. I had no idea if that was good or bad, but it seemed like I could survive on that when I did the numbers. I started down at Casa Magazine that week – five weeks after my job search had begun.

I got an e-mail from Jimmy Yeoh. He had been in Malaysia visiting family and had just arrived back in the US, in San Diego. He gave me Carrie Cook’s e-mail and I contacted her. She was in Vermont with her husband Peter, who had also left the Sea Org. She was working as a designer for a local magazine there.

On June 5, I began working at Casa full time, on the payroll. For the first time since being out, my income exceeded my expenses. It was a red-letter day, and I vowed that from then on, my income would always be greater than my expenses. I had some catching up to do.

Casa Magazine was a small office, half a dozen people. It was run by Mark Whitehurst and his wife Kerry, a pleasant couple about my age. The magazine was about 60 pages every week, and had to be printed every Thursday night and out on the stands Friday morning. A lot of the ads carried over from the previous week, but there were always new ads to be designed and laid out, and editorial content to be put together. I told them I was interested in art and so became the de facto Art Editor, interviewing artists and gallery owners and putting articles together. They had other freelance writers doing poetry, theater, movies, wine and so on. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays we’d be putting the whole thing together to get to the printer.

When I first started working there, we’d sometimes have to work "late" Thursday night to get an issue out – sometimes until 6, 7 or even, God forbid, 8pm. Mark was careful to check with me and make sure I was OK on that. I almost laughed. Even getting off work at 8pm was like a vacation for me!

"You really work well under stress," Mark told me. To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed any stress.

Mark had to "dial me down" a bit. When I first started working there, I wore a tie every day. He told me that wasn’t really necessary; Santa Barbara was not really a tie place. And he’d notice me working through my break times. "Take a break, take a break," he’d tell me. It took a while to get used to the idea.

With a job secured, my evenings and weekends became my own – a very new experience for me. I remember the first Friday, as I left the office Mark said, "See you on Monday." My immediate thought was "Monday? That’s two days from now!" Then I realized I had two days to do whatever I wanted. I went to the Zoo, the Museum, the library, went to movies, read books, took hikes. Almost everything was within walking distance of my apartment. I started thinking about painting again. When my birthday rolled around in June, I went down to the art store and got myself a set of acrylics, brushes and canvasses.

Out of necessity at first, I stopped using any Scientology terminology. I had to learn to speak without the shorthanded Scientology jargon I’d used for the past 35 years. And to do that, I was forced to rethink concepts. I had to take a Scientology concept and discover how to say it in English. Not surprisingly, I found myself re-evaluating those concepts. Without the Scientology slogan or bromide to fall back on to "explain everything," I had to start really thinking about things. It felt like old, rusted gears in my mind were starting to turn again.

When I first started working at Casa Magazine, I had some vague idea of using Hubbard’s "administrative technology." But as I worked in the office, most of it seemed unnecessary and time-wasting. Sure, I could work out an "org board." Why? It was six people, and everyone knew what to do. I could write a program. Why? It dawned on me that even as disorganized as that office was, it was producing rings around the Marketing area at the Int Base. There, it could take months to produce a single 16-page brochure, doing it over and over and over again. Here, we were getting out a 60-page magazine every week. There were no musters, no inspections, no hordes of executives and program operators swarming down for inspections, no Ethics Officers and Security Guards snooping around, no endless meetings, no recriminations, shame and guilt, no capricious rejects from executives trying to justify their existence. All we did was get out a magazine. And it was easy.

With my evenings and weekends free, I had more time to think about what had happened to me. On a whim, I had picked up 1984 by George Orwell and started to read it. I was struck by the parallels between the thought control systems described in the book and my experiences at the Int Base. In the book Orwell describes "doublethink" – the art of believing two contradictory ideas at the same time. I realized that Scientology was full of those. One was told to "think for yourself," for instance, yet in fact everyone knew that no disagreement with Hubbard was allowed. Scientology teaches that the secret to good communication is high affinity (liking) and high reality (agreement). Yet staff are taught to scream at each other and even physically abuse others. Scientology champions "human rights" yet runs an abusive RPF prison system. I had always known these things, but I had justified them, explained them to myself – in other words, I had become adept at doublethink. With that realization, the sense of hypocrisy, the gap between what is preached and what is actually practiced by Scientology, began to grow in my mind.

I had considered that the Int Base was an anomaly, an unfortunate deviation from the true nature of Scientology. But what if that atmosphere, that culture, was actually the culmination of the unrestrained application of Scientology? I had worked for 35 years to bring about a "Scientology World." Suppose that Int Base was a microcosm of what a Scientology World would be like in reality – an authoritarian regime where "downstats" are abused and any real human emotion is mocked and repressed. I would want nothing to do with such a group.

The tipping point came as I was trying to plan my finances. I knew that I was way behind. I had nothing for retirement, and I was already 58. I calculated out my monthly income and tried to itemize all of my expenses. One of the expenses was my Freeloader Debt. Even at $500 a month, it would take years to pay off. I felt frustrated.

Then an odd thing happened. I got mad. Why, I asked myself, should I pay them any money at all? I had worked for the Church of Scientology for 35 years, seven days a week, often 16 and 18 hour days, for next to no pay. I had no savings. How, in the name of all that is fair, do I owe them anything? I decided, there and then, that I would never, never, pay them a cent on any "Freeloader Debt." And, as that was the second step on the "A to E" steps to get the Suppressive Person declare lifted, that I would never, never do my A to E steps. Never. I owed them nothing. So they labeled me an SP? So what?

All of a sudden, I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Thise were things I didn’t have to worry about – Freeloader Debts, SP declares. I didn’t have to worry about those things because…a radical thought formed in my head.

Because I am not a Scientologist.

It felt good to think it, to say it, to scream it. I am not a Scientologist. I am no longer a part of that madhouse called the Int Base. I no longer have to practice doublethink. If something is wrong, I can say so, honestly and openly, without fear. I no longer have to justify abuses – to myself or anyone else.

I took my Scientology books and put them in boxes, then drove them down to recycling and threw them in the bin. It felt great. I am not a Scientologist.

I became determined to find Gwennie. I had last heard from her at the end of the 1990s. She was living in San Francisco with her boyfriend, and had just given birth to a baby girl, Devon. She had sent me pictures. Then, after 2000, nothing. My letters had been returned by the Post Office. I tried one of those net detective services. I gave them her full name and birth date, and a list of past addresses. After a few weeks, they sent me a long, long list of addresses and phone numbers that were somehow connected, they thought, with Gwennie. I despaired of calling all those numbers. Then, in the middle of the list, I saw the name Hare – my first wife’s maiden name. I thought it must be one of Tina’s relatives. I called the number and asked the woman who answered if she knew Gwen Wilson.

"Sure, that’s my Granddaughter," she said.

"Do you know where she lives now?" I asked.

"Yes, she’s right down the street." She gave me the phone number, and I called.

Gwennie was amazed to hear from me, and doubly amazed that I was out of the Sea Org and out of Scientology. She said, "I’m coming down, I’m leaving right now." Six hours later, she was at my door.

Wonderful Gwennie visits me in Santa Barbara

She stayed all weekend, and we spent hours talking. We walked down State Street all the way to the beach, and I told her all about what I had been through at the Int Base. It was the first time I had really unloaded to anyone. Our progress down the street was slow, because every couple of feet she’s stop and look at me and say "No way!" or "That’s nuts!"

It was an amazing experience for me. I had lived at that Base for years. That was "daily life." It was "normal." I was the one who was crazy, criminal, SP. To hear the reaction of someone outside that bubble was priceless. That’s nuts! And I was free to say, yes, yes it is.

I went from laughing to crying to laughing. Gwennie would hug me when I cried, and laugh with me when I laughed, and we somehow made it through the weekend like that. I told her everything, and I felt unburdened, liberated, free.

I vowed to come up and see her, and I did, and still do. Every few months I see her and my wonderful, amazing granddaughter Devon.

Devon with "Grampa Jeffie"

I started searching the internet for information about Scientology, and about Miscavige. I visited all the sites that had been "forbidden" to me while I was a Scientologist, and learned all of the things that had been hidden from us. I was amazed at how much I didn’t know about Scientology’s history, about Hubbard’s life. I was incensed to learn the magnitude of the lies I had been told through the years. In a few weeks on the internet I discovered more about Scientology’s history than I had known in 35 years on the inside. I began to realize how sheltered we had been and how much our information had been controlled.

On one of the sites, I found a name I recognized, and a phone number. It was Chuck Beatty, someone I’d known for years in the Sea Org. I called him and we talked. He connected me up with a Yahoo chat group called XSO. I was amazed to find that there were hundreds of Ex-Sea Org Members who were members! I began to post on the chat group, using my real name. Soon the floodgates opened, and I began to get e-mails from all over the country – and even from other countries – from people I’d known in the Sea Org who had now left. Where I thought I had no friends on the outside, now I found I had hundreds.

I began to travel to see some of my old friends. I drove out to an Ex-Sea Org reunion in Las Vegas, hosted by two wonderful sisters, Terri Gamboa and Janis Grady. There were about 50 Ex-Sea Org there, people I’d known from Copenhagen, from the Apollo, from Clearwater, and from the Base. While I was there, I spent a relaxing afternoon with Bill Dendiu and his new family.

After I got back, I got an e-mail from Scientology’s "International Justice Chief," taking me to task for "consorting with known SPs." Somehow they had planted an OSA spy at the reunion. I wrote him a scathing e-mail back, taking him to task for spying. I informed him that I was no longer a Scientologist and to never write to me again or presume to tell me who I could or could not associate with. That felt great.

Christmas 2005, Jimmy Yeoh and I went up to Seattle and spent Christmas with another former PDO staff member, Georgianna. George was gracious enough to invite us up to spend the holidays with her family. It was my first real Christmas in many years.

I made frequent trips to LA to see many friends there. Gabrielle Allen, now married and running her own marketing company, invited me down for barbecues and parties. I visited my "hijita," Yael, in Huntington Beach. She's gone back to school, works at a great job and is rebuilding her life.

And always, when we’d get together, we’d talk, tell stories, and laugh a lot. It was amazing to hear people tell their side of a story – things had been so shrouded in mystery and secrecy in the Sea Org that you never quite knew what was going on. To be able to speak openly and find out what really went on behind the scenes was amazing – and salutary. I was able to find out, first hand, from people who had been there, exactly how Miscavige had taken control of the Church. And I found that his physical violence and beatings of staff had started much, much earlier.

I got back in touch with my first wife, Tina, and we began to regularly e-mail back and forth. I also found my second wife, Nancy, now living in Pennsylvania and working for an environmental construction firm. I was happy to hear she was doing well, and we began exchanging regular e-mails. Today I am close friends with both of these ex-wives.

But there was still someone I wanted to talk to more than anyone else – my brother Kim. I had talked to Gwennie about it and she said it was ridiculous that I couldn’t talk to my own brother. She even volunteered to call him for me. I didn’t want to get him in any trouble with the Church, but I did want to let him know that I was out and living in Santa Barbara and doing well. Gwennie tried some numbers I had, but they were all disconnected.

I began searching for Kim, but even the net detective service came up with nothing. Finally, in an internet search, I found a mention of his daughter Slayde. It was an unusual name, so I didn’t think there was more than one Slayde Hawkins. It was on the Reed College website and was her senior thesis. I called Reed, and they put me through to Alumni Services, as she had graduated the previous year. They said they could not give me her e-mail address – school policy. I explained that I was her uncle, and asked if they could relay a message to her. They agreed to do that. A few days later, Slayde called me. I explained to her that I was out of the Sea Org now and in Santa Barbara, but I couldn’t talk to Kim because I was declared. I asked her if she could just call him and tell him I was OK.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was Kim.

"You know, you’re not supposed to talk to me," I said.

"I don’t give a shit about that," he said. "You’re my brother. I know you’re not Suppressive!"

We talked for an hour. He told me they were living in Clearwater now to be close to Flag. His wife Cathy, who had been out of Scientology for 30 years, was now back "on lines" and doing courses. I told him all about my new life in Santa Barbara and what I was doing. I was vague about why I had left, not wanting to get into it with him. I just told him that I had "been through some rough times." He asked me if I was doing anything to get "back on lines," and I said no. I told him I was done with Scientology. "Wow," he said, "I don’t know what you went through, but it must have been rough if that was the result."

After that, we talked every week, every Saturday morning. I never elaborated on my Int Base experiences and he never asked.

About six months later, Kim and Cathy flew out to California for a business trip. I drove down to see them and we spent the weekend together. At one point, Kim and I had some time together to talk.

"OK, spill," he said.

"You don’t want to get into it," I demurred.

"No," he insisted, "I do. Tell me what happened."

Over the next hour, I told him everything. The conditions at the Int Base, the abuse, the beatings, the crippling of Int Management.

"I thought there were checks and balances to prevent this sort of thing," he said. "Isn’t there a Watchdog Committee?"

"Name one person on that Committee," I said. Of course, he couldn’t. No Scientologist could – it’s "confidential."

After I had told him everything, he was quiet. Then he said, "I’ve known for some time that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. What you’ve told me confirms what I’ve felt."

They went back to Florida. The next weekend he called me – our usual Saturday morning call. He was at Flag, attending an event. He had arrived early and secured a good seat, only to be thrown out of his seat as it was needed for someone "more important." He had left in disgust. We talked for a few minutes and then hung up.

About ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was Cathy, his wife.

"I’m going crazy; I have to talk to someone," she said. "I chose you."

"What’s going on?" I asked.

"I don’t want to be in Scientology any more," she said.

I asked her why, and she gave me a litany of mishandlings – having to get endless repairs on her auditing, at her own expense. Being told to take services she didn’t want. Being pressured constantly for money.

I asked her if Kim had told her any of the things I’d gone over with him in San Diego. She said no. I gave her a rapid summary.

"Gee, my complaints sound like nothing," she exclaimed. "But I don’t know what to do – I can’t talk to Kim about it, he’s such a dedicated Scientologist."

"Try it," I suggested. "I think you’ll find him more open that you think."

The next day my brother called.

"We’re out," he said.

They started researching on the internet, as I had, all the "forbidden" sites. And they started posting on the XSO chat group, using pseudonyms. Before long, they had an OSA staffer on their doorstep, with printouts of their posts. How he obtained posts from a private chat group he never explained. He told Kim that he would have to disconnect from me, or be declared Suppressive.

"You picked the wrong family," Kim told him. He refused to disconnect.

Today, three years after my exit from Scientology, I’ve created a new life for myself, a life of happiness and freedom. I am surrounded by a group of amazing friends and my incredible, loving family. I live in Portland now, a city I love, and run my own very successful freelance graphic design business. My brother and Cathy live in Portland too, and we see each other all the time. Just last year Gwennie gave birth to a son, Eden, and now I have two awesome grandchildren. I get down to see them as often as I can. I have fully reclaimed my life.

Every once in a while, someone new leaves the Int Base, and I hear the latest news. The most recent person to leave told me that things had gotten "much worse." It strains my imagination to even conceive of what that would be like.

A few of my good friends remain inside. Foster still works in the PAC Mill, still operating that same CNC router. He’s been there now for almost six years.

And Cathy still soldiers on at the Int Base, still on the post of Port Captain.

It is for them, and other friends still "inside the bubble" that this narrative is written. I hope someday, somehow, they can read it. If I had only a few moments to reach those inside, I would say to them only, "I am still here, I am still your friend, I will always be your friend."

I write this also for those tempted to follow Scientology’s Yellow Brick Road – so you can see in advance the nature of the man behind the curtain.

This, then, is my story. I am neither hero nor rogue, neither victim nor fanatic. Perhaps a bit of each. Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that the line between good and evil passes through the heart of every person. We all make choices. Some are good and some bad. Some are wise and some are foolish. And in the light of hindsight, we can often see that yesterday's wisdom was indeed folly, and in yesterday's foolishness there was sometimes wisdom. I am just a man who followed a dream, some might say to the bitter end, and wound up lost in some very dark and strange places.

I do not look back with regret. I look back, I hope, with greater wisdom, greater tolerance, and greater compassion.

One day, about a year after I had left the Int Base, I took a long walk down State Street in Santa Barbara, all the way to the beach. At the end of State Street, Stearn’s Wharf juts out into the Pacific Ocean. It is a long pier, filled with shops and restaurants. I walked all the way to the end, past all the souvenir shops, past the fishermen with their lines dangling into the water. I walked to the very end and looked out over the broad Pacific. It was a bright and sunny day, white clouds on the horizon, and distant sailboats tacking in the wind. I felt the salt breeze in my face, the warm sun.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a heavy gold ring. It was blocky and ugly, a huge square with the number 25 embossed on it, and over that, the Sea Org symbol. It had been presented to me in 1996, for 25 years service in the Sea Org. I felt its weight in my hand.

Then I spun and with all the force I could muster, hurled it in a long curving arc out over the waves. It disappeared without a trace.

I turned and walked back towards town.

Chapter Sixteen: Nine Lives, Part Two

2008-07-24T00:23:00.000-07:00

The famous CMU "flat files" where COB liked to hold court. Left to right, CMU artists Thomas Bourke, Carrie Cook, Kerrie Francis and Cynthia Coleman

When I got off the van, I found Cathy waiting. She gave be a big hug. "I knew you were coming back," she said. It was April, 2003 and I had just returned to the Base after four months of exile to "Big Blue" in LA.

I was amazed to find myself accepted back on the Base as if nothing had happened. People started to call me "Nine Lives." I was always coming back. But then that was the Sea Org motto, wasn’t it? "We Come Back."

In my absence, virtually nothing had happened on the CD lecture marketing. No new releases had been planned, no new promotion had been designed or written. It was as if time had stood still. Miscavige had ordered that a Lecture Marketing Team be put into place. Yael would not be a part of it – I found out that she had blown.

There was a huge meeting held in MCI with the entire Base present. The only purpose was to get a Lecture Marketing Team appointed – and "comply" with the order from COB. They asked for volunteers. I felt I had no choice – why else had I been brought back? I walked to the front. Out of hundreds of staff, only about a dozen volunteered. It was finally narrowed down to four people – myself, Dan Koon, Mariette Lindstein (a former RTC staffer now working in CMU), and Cebron Walker (a staff member in the LRH Personal Public Relations Bureau). After some vetting, we were all approved to be the new Lectures Marketing Unit. Dan was to be the leader, I was to be the Copywriter.

Once again, we had events coming up and we needed to decide what to release. The first event was on May 9 – the Dianetics Anniversary Event. We decided to release a series of lectures Hubbard had recorded in 1951 called the Human Evaluation Lectures. They went with the book Science of Survival. For the Freewinds Maiden Voyage Anniversary Event, we decided to release an early Hubbard Congress. I started writing the copy for these releases.

I was also put back onto the Purification Rundown. I had already done it twice, but somehow it was thought this was the root of my "problems." I just had to keep at it and keep at it and somehow eventually all the toxins and LSD would be out of my system and I would be a good Base staff member.

On one of his inspections of CMU, Miscavige suddenly stopped in the middle of the room and pointed at me. "What’s he doing here?" he demanded. I was immediately hustled out of the room. I was not to be physically in CMU any more. In a bizarre arrangement, I was set up with my computer and materials in a basement room, in HCO, and I worked from there, writing copy. I could work, I just couldn’t be in CMU where I might "upset COB."

One day, all of Gold was called to a special, mandatory meeting in MCI. When we arrived, all of the Gold executives were at the front, along with executives from CMO Int and RTC. There was a strange circle of chairs at the front of the room. I was directed to sit in one of them. I soon found out that this was for the Gold "troublemakers" – which consisted essentially of anyone who was actually doing anything in Gold, submitting things to COB, or producing anything. These were the people who were "causing trouble on COB’s lines – basically, everyone on his lines. Dan and Mariette were included.

What was supposed to happen was that each of these "troublemakers" was to get up in front of the group and confess their crimes. They were to describe the "criminal operating basis" or "op" that they were using to make Miscavige wrong and sabotage projects. And the Roman Circus atmosphere was beyond anything I had ever experienced at the grueling staff meetings. The crowd wanted blood.

One by one the circle of "troublemakers" got up and attempted to say something, anything, to satiate the blood-lust. "That’s not good enough!" someone in the crowd would yell. "Come on, tell us your real crimes." I saw more than one person break down. Jim Mortland, a man I respected and liked, was led off in tears.

Finally it was my turn. I tried to say something, but was almost instantly shouted down. One beefy guy from the Cine Props Department, Clark Morton, stood up and yelled, "Come, on, tell us your real crimes!" Clark had formerly been a CMO Executive, now busted down to being a propsman in Cine. I could see his face reddening as he screamed.

A voice rang out behind me, "This is the guy who lied to LRH!" It was Nathan Story, a Gold exec. The crowd roared for my blood.

In early September 2003, I was offloaded again. I was taken out to the "Int Ranch," a property about eight miles east of the Base, called, incongruously, "Happy Valley." It had been used as an RPF detention camp for the Base, but Miscavige had shut down the Int RPF and sent them all to LA. Since then it had been mostly deserted, cared for by a small maintenance staff, led by a blonde woman named Rikki Drake. Rikki had been the RTC Rep in Clearwater when the whole Lisa McPherson flap had happened. She had been spirited out of Clearwater and sequestered on the Ranch, not allowed to talk to anyone. I joined a small group of other offloadees, who were cleaning up the Ranch for a big influx of people. We found out that about 60 people were slated for offload from the Base. Miscavige was weeding out the chaff.

Dan Koon hadn’t known anything about my offload. When he found out about it, he raised a stink, and got me reinstated to the Base. I left the Int Ranch just as a huge bus pulled up, full of people from the Base.

I spent another month in my basement copywriting office, trying to write, but still shunned by the rest of the Gold staff. Then in mid-October, for no apparent reason, I was sent back out to the Ranch. It was now full of people, all on work crews, and all being prepared for offload. No one knew where anyone was going. We didn’t know if we were being offloaded from the Base to another Scientology Org, or offloaded from the Sea Org entirely. No one knew anything.

Our possessions started to arrive, in boxes. We had to go through everything, throw out what we didn’t want to keep, and make sure any "confidential" material was taken out – anything with the Base address on it, any photos of the Base. One by one, we were called into an office and shown our "Suppressive Person" declare. Hubbard had directed that anyone offloaded from the Base was to be declared Suppressive.

I assumed I was being offloaded from the Sea Org, and resigned myself to it. I was terrified at the thought that I would never see Cathy again.

I was assigned to chopping wood with two other guys, Jason Bennick and Micky Estrada. Jason was a feisty little guy, and had at one time been CO Gold. At one point he had been a favorite of DM, now he was in disfavor. Mickey had been a drummer for the Golden Era Musicians. There was a huge pile of logs – several large dead standing trees had been taken down and sawn into sections. Our job was to chop it up into firewood to be sold. We used sledge hammers and wedges, or an axe, and sometimes a chain saw. It was very hard physical work, and I got into great shape. Jason and Mickey were both very funny guys, and we spent a lot of time telling jokes and laughing as we chopped. At one point, I told Jason how my grandfather used to call me "Jeffer," and his Tennessee accent turned it into "Jeffa." Jason loved this, so I soon became "Jeffa" to one and all.

One day, Jason, Mickey, and a bunch of the others disappeared. Whatever was going to happen was happening. People were disappearing. Then a week later, in early December, I was told to pack my bags and get onto a van with a bunch of other people. I was leaving – for somewhere.

The van drove for hours, into LA, through LA, and north on the 5. Then we started winding up through a mountain road, mile after mile. It seemed to go on forever. Finally we pulled into what looked like a ranch, and got out into a bitterly cold night. We were ushered into one of the nearby cabins, where a group of people were huddled around a fire. A voice called out.

"Jeffa!"

Jason explained to me what was happening. We were being given "one last chance." We had been sent to the "PAC Ranch" in the mountains above Santa Clarita, California, about an hour’s drive from LA. The Ranch had been used as a boarding school for Sea Org children, to keep them out of their parents’ hair so they could concentrate on their jobs. But the children were grown now, and the school had been closed. The Church was considering one of two options – either sell the property, or turn it into a Narconon Drug Rehabilitation Center. If it was to be sold, the property had to be cleaned up and repaired. If it was to be a Narconon, full feasibility planning would have to be done and a conditional use permit obtained from the county. We were going to do both.

The next morning, I was able to get a look at the Ranch. It was nestled in Bouquet Canyon, 3500 feet up in the Santa Clarita Mountains. About a mile away was the Bouquet Canyon Reservoir. The place was bitterly cold. But it was beautiful – and far, far away from the Base. We all began to relax a bit. As purgatory, it wasn’t bad.

Bouquet Canyon Reservoir

There were about 35 of us there at the Ranch. The only supervision we had from the Base was an MAA named Chris Guider, who would show up once a week or so. Otherwise we were on our own. And amazingly, there were no restrictions on us – we could come and go as we wanted, go into town for supplies, whatever. In this new spirit of freedom, I asked for my car from the Base, and Chris drove it down the next time he came. It’s amazing no one blew, but we took the "second chance" seriously.

One of the offloadees, Jim Mortland, took charge. He had been Estates Secretary at Gold – the division that handled grounds, building maintenance and construction at the Base, so he knew how to run a project like this. His Organizing Officer was Sarah Blythe, and she had experience in architectural planning, design and construction. I liked Jim and Sarah, they were friendly and easygoing. It became clear that there wouldn’t be any yelling or screaming or abuse.

We put in a rudimentary organization – three of the women were assigned to the "galley" – preparing the meals. The rest of us split up into work crews. In the mornings, we started cleaning the place up. Some of us cleared the brush and got rid of junk, others repaired electrical and plumbing lines. In the afternoon, we started working on the Narconon feasibility study.

I was already thinking about a new career in Scientology. I had no intention of going back to the Base. I had always had some interest in architecture, and I thought about pursuing that. I knew there was a big architecture office in LA that was designing all of the new org premises. Maybe I could learn more about it and join that office. I talked to Sarah and told her I wanted to do the architectural planning that would be needed for the feasibility study.

Three of us were assigned to Building Planning: myself, Jacquie Kenenaar and Cynthia Coleman. Cynthia had been one of the artists in CMU. Between us, we would do all of the architectural planning and put together a presentation for the county.

I still had money, so I ordered a nice laptop from Dell by mail. Jacquie and Cynthia also ordered computers, and Jacquie got a printer. I also got some architectural software – AutoCAD – which was good for drafting. Sarah managed to get a program from the architecture office in LA which was used to do 3D modeling of buildings. It was called AutoVIS and was a version of 3D Studio Max with a lot of architectural bells and whistles. I knew nothing about the program but determined to learn it. So we were pretty well set up – all using our own money.

Christmas came and went, and once again I was away from Cathy. I had ordered some presents for her by mail and sent them to her. Then, the day before Christmas, Chris had arrived with a big bag of presents from Cathy – mostly Christmas goodies and warm clothing, both of which I appreciated!

I wrote to Cathy every week, enclosing photos I’d taken of the Ranch, and, sometimes, poetry I’d written, but never received any letters back. I found out later that she was writing to me every week as well, and never received my letters. Both of our letters were piling up in a basket in the Security Office in the basement of Building 36. Meanwhile Cathy, of course, was being pressured to divorce me. She refused.

We settled into a work routine. In the bitterly cold mornings we’d clear brush. Then in the afternoon we’d do the Narconon planning. And in the evening we’d study. I was studying the AutoVIS program.

We managed to get some big topographical maps of the Ranch and scanned them in, which gave us the extent of the property. But there were no plans for the existing buildings, so the first thing we did was run around and measure everything. With the measurements, I did detailed "as-built" floor plans of all the buildings, using AutoCAD, which was fortunately fairly easy to use. Other members of the team did planning as to how many buildings would be needed to establish a Narconon, and we did a second set of plans showing the proposed building extensions as well as new buildings.

This facility was going to be the showcase Narconon for Southern California, so part of the planning was a large information center/convention center/auditorium to be built near the entrance. I did a floor plan for it, then decided to do a 3D model of it in the computer. I conceived it as a sort of mountain lodge, built with logs.

I had started learning the AutoVIS program at the beginning of January. Within four weeks I had mastered the program and done a fairly sophisticated 3D model of the Information Center, complete with stone, glass, wood and metal textures. And I had a ball doing it. I was looking forward to my possible new career in the Church’s architecture office. Somehow, I was sure, Cathy could join me in LA.

The proposed Information Center, modeled in AutoVIS

Strangely, instructions came that I was to get back onto the Purification Rundown. As there were no facilities to do it at the Ranch, I ended up driving into LA every day to do the Purif for five hours a day at the Hollywood Guaranty Building on Hollywood Blvd. I drove down with another guy from the Ranch, a German, Wolfi Frank, who was getting daily auditing. Then I’d work in the evenings.

We completed the presentation and Ken Hoden (also one of the offloadees) took it to the county and pitched it. I heard later, long after I left Scientology, that it had been approved, but Scientology was now in a pitched battle with the local residents over whether or not to have a Narconon there. It was never built.

In early February, Sarah called me into her office. She had just been talking to Chris Guider on the phone.

"How would you feel about returning to the Base?" she asked.

To her surprise – and mine – I started crying. "No," I finally managed to say. "No, I don’t want to go back there." Sarah said she understood and would go over it with Chris.

But I was not to have a choice in the matter. The next evening, Jim rushed up to me and told me that I had to get in my car right now and drive to the Base right now for a meeting. I tried to object, but there was no questioning the order. Whoever had delivered the message to Jim had scared the living daylights out of him, and he didn’t let up until I was in my car and out the gate.

I took the back way to the Base, taking the old Pearblossom Highway across the desert, then down through the Cajon Pass on the 15. I had plenty of time to think. Part of me was terrified at the prospect of returning to the Base. But another part of me thought about the beautiful woman waiting for me there, and as I drove on through the night, those visions of Cathy came to dominate my thoughts.

I pulled into the Base about eleven at night, and was rushed into the conference room in Building 36, where I waited for about an hour. Finally, the door opened, and David Miscavige walked in – by himself. This was unusual; he normally had a large entourage.

"You heard Dan Koon blew," he said. I shook my head.

"Yeah, he took off in January," he said. "So I’m willing to consider the possibility that I offloaded the wrong guy."

Miscavige went over with me what he needed. He was still hell-bent on getting all of Hubbard’s lectures out on CD – it was his top priority, and therefore the top priority for the Base. The first to be released would be the "Basics" or "Milestones" – the name hadn’t been decided. These were lectures that went with a particular LRH book, and there were about ten of these book-lecture series combinations. Reproducing the lectures on CD and packaging them up was pretty straightforward, but there was also to be a supplement booklet for each lecture series, containing Hubbard’s written essays from the period, as well as a written introduction to each series. It was the introductions that he needed me for. These had to be well researched and well written, laying out the Scientology history and technical development that led up to that particular series of lectures. Dan had been writing these, but he was gone. So, I had been brought back.
Another chance at glory.

As soon as the meeting was over, I found Cathy, and we hugged for a long time. She was living in a dormitory, but we soon arranged to get our old room back.

I had a desk set up for me in CMU. There was a new Lecture Marketing Officer on post, Rick Cruzen. Rick had been at the Base forever and had worked in many areas, mainly in Audio. He was a brilliant guy with a reputation for being able to solve problems. He was glad to have my help, and we started working together to get the CD lectures series packaged and ready.

The next day, Miscavige came down to CMU and took up his usual position at the flat files, with all of CMU and various executives on the other side. He threw out is usual bit of opening gossip: "Did you hear what those guys at the PAC Ranch were up to?"

It turned out that Jim Mortland and Sarah Blythe had been having an "out-2D." This had been discovered and reported by Jason. Miscavige took me to task for not having seen and reported it myself. He told us they were all being sent to the RPF, every one of them.

"You just barely escaped," he told me.

The Base seemed deserted. There had a lot of offloads over the past year, and now there were only about 350 people on the Base. At its biggest, the Base had almost a thousand staff, now it was down to a third of that. Miscavige kept talking about "getting rid of the deadwood" and "getting rid of the SPs." He had even threatened to close the Base entirely.

CMO International and Executive Strata, I found out, were confined to the Base – they were not allowed to go home. That had already been going on for three months. They slept underneath their desks and showered in the garage. The word was that Miscavige had "declared them all SP" and they were working on their "A to E steps" in the CMO Int conference room every day. The "A to E steps" were the steps an SP was supposed to go through to stop being an SP. Miscavige also had them on "mest work," cleaning out the septic ponds at the west end of the property.

He had informed both CMO Int and Exec Strata that they "had no org board." This seemed odd to me as both organizations had existed for years on some sort of organization chart, but DM insisted it was wrong and he had not approved a new one. So part of their feverish activity was hours spent revising their org board and submitting it to DM. He routinely rejected anything they sent to him. Meanwhile, he told them that no one was on post as they had no org board. This was to go on, literally, for years.

Marc Yager, Guillaume Lesevre and Mike Rinder were spending a lot of time "on the decks." They could be seen out in the Swamp, near the OGH house, clearing brush in their blue boiler suits. When it came time to do an event, they would be gotten off the decks, rehearsed, and put in front of the cameras reading off a teleprompter. I am sure the Scientology audience had no idea where they had gotten those nice tans.

Even RTC itself had been decimated. All of RTC staff, except for Miscavige’s personal staff, had been suddenly demoted to CMO International, This included long-time veteran executives like Greg and Sue Wilhere, and Norman Starkey. They were all in CMO Int now, in the "unposted" mess. It was amazing, but there was literally no one on post or operating at the top of Scientology except one person – David Miscavige. He was unchallenged, and what he said was law.

I got to work, and wrote the first four of the introductions needed. One day COB showed up in CMU and, as usual, held court across the flat files. He began railing at me, "This is the guy who sabotaged all the earlier CD releases!" he proclaimed. He demanded to see what I had been doing. I brought the four introductions I had written. He slammed them down on the counter.

"I can offload you again, you know," he screamed. "You’ll be flipping burgers at McDonalds."

"Yes, Sir," I stammered.

"Yes Sir? Yes Sir?" he shouted. "You want to get offloaded? Get him out of here!"

I was grabbed by the Chief MAA, Gerald Duncan, and hustled down to the HCO offices, where I was put into a room and told to start writing up my crimes. A few minutes later, someone cam dashing down from CMU. "You’re needed back up there right away!"

I rushed upstairs. Miscavige was still there, with the group around him, but everyone was oddly quiet. Miscavige was reading my introductions and making notations on them.

"These are pretty good," he said finally - as if nothing had happened. "I’ve made a few notations of things to be fixed, but otherwise well done." He handed them back to me.

I was saved – for the moment anyway.

I began to work feverishly to complete the rest of the introductions needed. I was one of the group that was on "COB’s schedule," which meant staying up until the wee hours of the morning and then coming in at noon. We would usually get called to attend a meeting with Miscavige in late afternoon or evening, and these could go on for hours. He would review the work that had been done, usually tear it to shreds, and then dictate what was to be done "and on my desk first thing in the morning." As the meeting might not break up until midnight, we then got to work and finished the submission for the next day.

It became usual for me to arrive home just as Cathy was getting up. Then I would have four hours of sleep, if I was lucky, and take the noon bus back to the Base, ready for another round. For the entirety of 2004, I averaged 4 hours sleep a night, often less.

The meetings could get volatile. During a break from a meeting in the Lower Lodges, Miscavige ended up repeatedly slamming his hand into the side of my head, then he went over and knocked Marc Yager to the ground.

Once he was giving a tour of "Building 50" – the RTC building – to a group of executives. The building was nearly empty. He was talking about CMO International someday taking it over. We moved from room to room as he described what could go in each room. As he was leaving one room, he had to pass right by me, and without warning he punched me in the gut. "I can smell Black PR a mile away," he said. I tried to reply but it just came out as a croak, I couldn’t breathe.

In the middle of Building 50 was a huge covered courtyard, going up two stories. Miscavige set this up for himself as a sort of conference room on steroids. He liked to take all of the submissions that people had sent him and pile them up on tables and say "Look at all the things I have to handle. I’m wearing every hat on this Base." At the same time, he insisted that everything come to him and that only he could give final approval.

At one of these meetings, he threw Mike Rinder off his chair and onto the ground. Mike, like many of the CMO Int Execs, had been trying to curry favor by grabbing some part of the "Basics" release and "handling it." This was seen as the path to redemption – but it was more often a path to catastrophe as Miscavige trashed whatever work they had done. One of his favorite punishments was to have executives run laps around Building 50, and sometimes he would send the entire conference out to run laps – 25 or 50 times around the building.

Another punishment was "overboarding." The offending person would be taken to the swimming pool and thrown in, fully clothed, by the MAAs. After 2000, this was the only use that pool ever got.

Of course, any punishment meted out by COB was soon copied throughout the Base, so "overboardings" and "laps" became the usual. One night we were out at the Castle at a Gold muster, and as I had missed some deadline or had something rejected, I was assigned to 15 laps around the Castle – a huge building. That was something like two miles. I ran it – in my street shoes. One was not allowed to put on running shoes!

The top of my left foot was rubbed raw and hurt like hell. In my few hours at home, I dressed it as best I could, and went back to work. The next night I started to feel feverish and weird. I stumbled down to MCI to see if I could get something to eat, and ended up passed out on the floor. A Security Guard found me. By the time I got to the Medical Officer, I was running a high fever and there was a bright red line running up my leg as the infection traveled. I ended up in sick bay for a week, then on crutches. Of course, I got accused of "making the CO Gold wrong" for having me run those laps.

In December, COB was down in LA and ordered a bunch of people down to LA. It included all of the key executives, Marc Yager, Guillaume, David Bloomberg, Norman Starkey and scores of others. I was included, as well as Rick Cruzen. Michela and Manu also came from CMU. Manu was the CO CMU.

Miscavige was operating from the ASI building on Hollywood Boulevard, so he had us take over the ground floor. It was insane. Everyone was expected to continue working on whatever they were working on, so soon truckloads of files started to arrive with everyone’s work. The room was a mess. We would have long, abusive meetings with DM, then everyone would frantically try to get something done. It was a colossal, but typical, waste of time. Henning Bendorff was there and took the opportunity to knock me down several times.

During one meeting, Miscavige told me, Manu and Michela that we were all offloaded as of that minute, right onto the streets of LA. The three of us left by the main door and were actually walking down the street, when the doors burst open and the rest of the group chased after us and brought us back.

"What do you mean by leaving?" they demanded. "You must have crimes!" It was all just a bit too crazy for me to comprehend. I was happy when we at last got back to the Base.

Amazingly, we had half a day off for Christmas shopping. Cathy and I went out to the mall in Cabazon. I knew we would never have Christmas itself off, so treated the day as our Christmas, and I bought Cathy whatever she wanted. She saw a $500 dress she liked – so I just told her to get it. We wandered around and had coffee. It was the first thing resembling a day off that we had ever had. And it would be the last.

Cathy was happy. She had at last been approved to go onto the post of Port Captain Gold, which meant she would get to deal with external PR and community relations, the things she most loved doing.

I finished all of the introductions for "the Basics" and started on the Congresses. These were big events that Hubbard had held, where he gave a series of lectures over a weekend. There were about 20 of these Congresses. To get them all done in time, COB assigned three of us to it full time – me, Rick Cruzen, and LRH Biographer Dan Sherman. I had worked with Danny on and off over the years. He was supposed to be Hubbard’s "official Biographer," but there was no biography forthcoming. He spent most of his time writing "Ron Magazines" – puff pieces about Hubbard’s life – or writing Miscavige’s speeches.

Miscavige wanted us near him, so set us up in a corner room up in Building 50. Miscavige’s personal staff were glad to see us there. "The building has been so empty," they told us. It was true; except for Miscavige and his personal staff, it was deserted, a big echoing hulk of a building.
Working in that corner office late at night, we could hear him in his big courtyard conference room, roasting some executive. We couldn’t hear the words, just an agonized howl reverberating through the empty building, like some rabid beast trapped in the depths of a vast and echoing labyrinth.

Relations between Miscavige and I, never that good in the first place, got icier. Soon I was being excluded from meetings. I’d show up and he’d say "get him out of here!" I’d be rushed out so as "not to upset COB."

Once I was standing with him and Rick, and he turned to Rick and said, "Look at this guy," indicating me. "He’d just love to punch me. I wish he would. Then I could really unload on him."

Finally it all came to a head after one particularly flappy meeting with COB in February 2005. It was decided that I would be "overboarded." I was allowed to change into a blue boiler suit, then escorted out to the lake. Danny Dunegan, a Security Guard, was present in case anything "happened." After all, I was a 58 year old man, it was the middle of a February night in the high desert, and the lake was freezing cold. I stepped to the edge of the pier and the MAA pushed me off. I hadn’t expected the water to be so cold. Gasping for breath, I struggled to the dock and was pulled up, soaked and shivering.

I changed back into my uniform and went back up to CMU. Manu, the CO CMU, told me that Rick Cruzen was up in Building 50 with COB. At that point, the MAAs came through saying that everyone had to secure (go home) NOW. It was a COB order! The buses would be held until everyone was on board. Manu and I didn’t know what to do. We could get in trouble if we secured while Rick was still in a meeting with Miscavige. We could also get in trouble for defying the COB order to go home. We were finally prevailed upon to go the bus.

Everyone crammed onto the buses. The only seat I could find was way at the back. Then we heard that Miscavige had come down from Building 50 and was inspecting to make sure everyone was on the bus.

Suddenly, he appeared at the front of our bus, and began walking down the aisle, scanning the faces. Finally, he spotted me at the back.

"Did you know I was still in a meeting with Rick Cruzen?" he demanded.

"Yes Sir," I said.

He addressed the bus in general. "Do you see that? Do you see the level of responsibility I have to deal with? He knows I’m in a meeting with his senior, and he decided to go home." His eager audience made the appropriate sounds of disgust and righteous anger.

"I’m sick of dealing with CI," he said. "Every staff member at this Base needs to go home tonight and make a decision, whether they want to become a real Sea Org Member or not." He stormed off the bus. Manu and I were hustled off the bus, amid shouted curses. After some discussion amongst the Gold execs, we were hustled back on the bus, to go home after all.

Cathy was already there. She took one look at me and knew something was wrong.

"What happened?" she asked.

I tried to explain about being thrown in the lake and the bus ride home. She couldn’t understand what I was talking about. I’m sure I sounded half crazy. Finally she did the only thing she could think of to calm me down – she had me clean the apartment. Mest work, the universal solvent.

I mindlessly cleaned the room. I had reached the end. I had to purify myself once and for all.

Tomorrow, tomorrow would be a bright new day, a brave new world. I would purge myself. I would confess to everything, anything. I would reach into the blackness of my soul, the core of my being, and dredge up and vomit out every secret hatred, every vile perversion and fetish, every black and evil thought. I would cleanse myself forever, let go of my "stubborn, self-willed exile" and emerge a bright and triumphant being, a perfect Sea Org Member, an ideal citizen of this new Base, this new Miscavige world, never doubting, never questioning, never failing, steely-eyed, working tirelessly towards the goal of a Cleared Planet, a perfect Scientology world where every citizen marched forward into a bright new future in perfect lockstep, ever faithful, ever dedicated, ever OT…

Sleep wouldn’t come. In the dark, Cathy’s hand found mine, and held on tight. I think she sensed, like me, that this was no new beginning.

It was the end.

Chapter Fifteen: Nine Lives, Part One

2008-07-23T23:55:00.000-07:00

New Years Event, 2000 (Photo famously photoshopped by the Church)

I had a splitting headache, one of my knock-down, please-cut-my-head-off migraines. I could barely see straight as I coiled electrical cords and carried them to the waiting truck. I just wanted it to be over, so I could sleep. It was about two in the morning, and we were breaking down after the 2000 New Years Event at the LA Sports Arena. It had been an unmitigated disaster. The Gold crew were working doggedly to break down the event, but the scent of raw fear was in the air – there would be hell to pay for this.

Planning for events was always late, and it was always a massive emergency to get everything done in time, but this event had taken the cake. Miscavige had decided that this could not be like any other event. After all, it was the dawning of a New Millenium. It had to be the biggest, baddest, most spectacular event ever held. Miscavige’s vision was truly awe-inspiring. He, David Miscavige, would be the one and only speaker. He would tell the story of the history of Scientology, of Hubbard’s life and breakthroughs. He would trace the history of Scientology through the 60s, 70s and 80s, showing expansion after expansion, win after win. And finally he would show his own triumphant victories – the brilliant management reorganization, the Golden Age of Tech, the unprecedented expansion of the Church under his direction. It was to be a brilliant tour de force, a defining moment in Scientology’s history, with Miscavige as its glittering center.

Behind him, on huge screens, there would be constant pictures, illustrating each point of the history. There would be video presentations of key parts of the narrative, about 20 videos in all. The problem was, someone would have to find all those photos. Someone would have to write all those scripts. Someone would have to edit them all. It was massive – and only a few weeks to prepare everything. The event would go out live to all orgs.

The entirety of the Base was mobilized to make it happen. As I had some video editing experience, I was sent down to LA with a team to edit one of the videos. The Commanding Officer Gold, Steve Willett, bless him, assigned Cathy and I to the same team. It was broadly known now that we were engaged, so the wagging tongues were stilled for the moment.

We spent a week in an editing bay in Hollywood, putting together a complex video presentation that would represent about five minutes of the two hour presentation. The other videos were being done at editing facilities all over Los Angeles. We were up day and night, taking turns on the reception couch for a few hours nap. On Christmas Day, I went out to Canters and got our "Christmas Dinner." And we carried on. But Cathy and I didn’t care. We got to be with each other constantly. It was, in fact, the only Christmas we would spend together in our five years of marriage.

We rushed our finished video down to the LA Sports Arena, to the editing trailer. Other videos were arriving right up to a few minutes before the event, with editing staff working frantically to get it all loaded and programmed. There was an atmosphere of barely controlled panic as the minutes counted down to the start of the event.

Cathy and I found seats on the upper level. By now I was well into a screaming migraine after a week with virtually no sleep. We watched as Miscavige strutted onto the stage to thunderous applause and began his presentation, all lights and eyes upon him. It soon became obvious that something was terribly, terribly wrong. The pictures on the screens were not matching what he was saying. Sometimes they would inexplicably go black. I covered my face. Oh, this was going to flap.

Somehow the event limped forward, the visuals struggling to keep up. And finally it was over. The audience filtered out, and the Gold crew mustered down below and were told to break down the event, taking down the huge set, the lights, the audio equipment, and loading it into trucks. As the night wore on, I felt worse and worse, my head pounding.

Suddenly, Cathy was there by my side. "Come on, get your stuff, I’m taking you home. I’ve cleared it with the MAA." The Master at Arms was the Sea Org term for the Ethics Officer, who was in charge of crew mustering and schedules. Cathy was my angel of mercy. I collapsed into the car and she drove me back to the Base.

As predicted, the wrath of God, or at least Miscavige, descended on the Base. The entire Base was out-ethics and criminal. Everyone was to do "lower conditions." All liberties were cancelled. All leaves were cancelled. All holidays were cancelled. And these rules stayed in effect until I finally left the Base five years later.

And our marriage was one of the last – if not the last – marriages to be performed on the Base. We had planned to have a nice ceremony out at the Castle and invite friends, but that was not to be, given the current atmosphere. In fact, we were repeatedly discouraged from going through with it - it was "not a good time." But we got married anyway, by the simple expedient of grabbing a minister, Ken Hoden, and two witnesses late one night and holding the ceremony in Ken’s office.

Cathy and I managed to get a room at the Kirby Apartments. All of the Base crew had been consolidated into that one apartment complex, and there were no "wogs" living there any more – and so the apartment complex could be guarded at night. The two-bedroom apartments had been made into three-bedroom apartments by the simple expedient of walling off the living room. So we shared a small apartment with two other couples. As I now had money, thanks to Mom, we set about furnishing our room, setting up an ideal nest, a haven. We had a wall of books, a nice sound system, a huge bed, big closets. Cathy had great taste in clothes, but rarely got to wear them. We stocked the refrigerator with food that we liked, so we could always have a meal when we came home.

Cathy hated her job in Sales – it was not what she wanted to do. She loved PR and was very good at it. She had been the "Port Captain" on the Freewinds, dealing with all the "shore" people – merchants, government, local dignitaries. She was friendly, outgoing and caring. But here she was, stuck behind a desk, trying to make money for Gold. Meanwhile I was still on Dianetics program execution under Michela, and hating that. The room became our refuge. Once a week, on Saturday night, we tried to have a romantic evening, with candles and wine.

We also got a new car, a 1998 Honda Accord. It was everything I wanted, a dark luminescent green with leather seats. We had to dash out to Palm Desert one Sunday morning when we were supposed to be on CSP to pick it up, racing madly back to the Base to make it in time for muster at 12:30.

But conditions on the Base continued to deteriorate. It was like an armed camp. Gold had "betrayed COB" and therefore the whole Base had to "make amends" to Miscavige. We worked for hours and hours on his new office building, on the grounds around the building and around Hubbard’s mansion. Often these "all hands" would go late into the night, and finally, sometime in the wee hours, we would get the OK to "secure" (go home), and the buses would roll out. Then we would be back on post first thing in the morning, tired and sore. These became more and more frequent.

Building 50, the RTC building, with Bonnie View behind it

Staff musters and meetings got more and more vicious, with people being called up in front of the group and their transgressions and crimes read aloud. You were expected to shun anyone who was "in bad" and you could get in trouble for even talking to "downstats."

In late 2000, Miscavige did a series of "evals" – evaluations. These were done according to a formula laid out in Hubbard’s policy letters. You were supposed to find a Situation, and then, following a rote analytical procedure, discover the Why for the situation and the Who. These evals came out with great fanfare – all staff had to study them intensively, as well as a long list of Hubbard references. These evals were supposed to be the thing to turn the Base around and get it in-ethics and productive.

As Miscavige was doing the evaluation on Marketing, I came under intensive investigation, and found myself in a "gang-bang" Security Check, with the Chief Master at Arms, Gerald Duncan, grilling me on an E-meter, and Marty Rathbun, Inspector General RTC, standing behind him, shouting accusations.

"What was that? What was that?" he shouted, pointing at the dial of the E-Meter. "That read on the meter. What is that? What’s your crime, Jeff? Come on, spit it out!"

This went on and on. The only thing my mind went to the time when Hubbard had written an ad about "get rid of your reactive mind," in 1982, and I had surveyed it and found out it was negative – people didn’t want to get rid of their reactive mind. At the time, Hubbard had been pleased with the surveys.

"So what’s the CRIME?" Marty shouted. "What did you DO?"

"I don’t know, maybe we should have tested the ad itself…" I was grasping at straws.

Marty rushed out. The next day, the Marketing Eval came out. Foster and I were the Whos. We had "lied to LRH" about a survey, presenting "fabricated survey results" to prevent LRH’s ad from being run. We had then "wasted over 70 million dollars" on ineffective ads and thus had sabotaged Scientology Marketing for all time. We were the reason why Marketing was bugged. The handling was to bring me before a Fitness Board and offload me from the Sea Organization.

I was outraged. After 30 years service in the Sea Organization, they were just going to cast me out because of a bunch of lies in an eval? It was insane!

When I was called to appear before the Fitness Board, I had my documentation. I had the actual survey I had presented to Hubbard, as well as his correspondence back to me, showing I had not made up the survey or lied to him, and in fact he had commended me for the survey. I presented the actual statistics for the Dianetics Campaign showing the sales, and the results in terms of Org income. During the period of the campaign, I had not wasted money – in fact the campaign had made on the order of 200 million extra income for the orgs, over and above what they were making. I produced the commendation from Hubbard for the campaign, as well as earlier commendations from Hubbard for Advance Magazines I had done. I presented my 30 year record in detail.

After that, they could not offload me, not if they had any conscience at all. So I was simply removed from post and put onto deck work. The eval still stood – no one was about to contradict Miscavige or tell him that his eval was wrong.

I was restricted to the Base. I lived, with a group of other "deckies," in a rundown trailer parked up in the "OGH" compound. We worked on the grounds, weeding, trimming, cleaning gravel paths. Steve Willett, the former CO Gold, was one of my fellow "deckies" and we became good friends. Cathy smuggled food to me whenever she could.

Finally, I was deemed sufficiently rehabilitated to again join the rest of decent humanity, and went back into CMU, as a copywriter. But it wasn’t a triumphant return – anything but. I sort of crept in the back door and tried to keep a low profile. I was still treated like dirt by the rest of the Gold crew.

Manu was now running the Dianetics Campaign, and she wanted to do a new infomercial. She asked me to write it. I contacted some of my old infomercial people, specifically Tim Hawthorne, author of The Complete Guide to Infomercial Marketing. He gave me some data about current infomercial trends, then hooked me up with one of the most successful infomercial writers in the business. I put together a script under her direction, which she finally pronounced as excellent. I submitted it to Miscavige.

The next day, we were all called up to the CMOI trailers for a meeting with COB. CMO Int was housed in a big doublewide prefab office trailer. It had been surrounded with pathways and plants to make it seem less transient. In the middle of the trailers was a large conference room, surrounded by cubicles. When I arrived, the space was filled with 30 or 40 people – all of WDC, all of Exec Strata, and key Gold Execs. One side of the table was empty, for Miscavige. Everyone was crammed on the other side or at the ends. After a nervous wait, Miscavige strolled in and threw my script on the table.

"Did you see the crap this guy’s writing?" he announced. Then he picked up the script and began to read out sections of it, in a voice laden with sarcasm.

I wanted to say something about why I had written it the way I had, some of the research that had gone into it. I stood. "Sir, if I could just…"

That was as far as I got. "You see how he talks to me? This is the kind of crap I get from Gold." He turned on me. "All I want from you is what your crimes are. Why don’t you just confess right now, in front of this group, what your crimes are."

I said nothing. I was frozen again.

"Look at him!" Miscavige yelled. "See how he looks at me?"

Then to my horror, he leapt up on the conference table and launched himself at me, shoving me back against the cubicle wall behind me, grabbing my shirt and half tearing it off me, striking me in the face again and again. Then he shoved me onto the floor. My feet ended up tangled in his. "Let go of my feet!" he shouted. I complied, terrified. Miscavige turned and stalked out of the room.

No one else had moved, they all sat like so many frozen statues.

"Get up, get up," someone hissed. "Don’t just lie there – don’t make him wrong for hitting you!"

Don’t make him wrong. Was that all they could say? I staggered to my feet and somehow managed to crumple into my chair. Miscavige came back in and ordered me to stand up. I was escorted out by the MAAs and into a room, where I spent the next several hours on an E-Meter, confessing my crimes. Then I went back down to the basement rooms of Building 36, the HCO offices, awaiting reassignment to the decks. An envelope arrived for me. In it were the buttons from my shirt and some loose change that someone had found on the floor. Then an RTC messenger arrived – with a shirt, sent down from COB. How thoughtful. Except the shirt he had torn had been a $50 shirt I had paid for myself. The replacement shirt was a used shirt from Costumes that looked like it had been made in the 70s, stained and worn, with a button down collar. I put it straight into the trash.

I never told Cathy about what had happened. She asked me why my face was scratched, and I told her I had fallen down. Cathy would hear no ill about Miscavige. She had worked for him for a while, making all of his travel arrangements, and she had even traveled with him and Shelly. She had pictures of the three of them together. Even her dismissal from RTC hadn’t tarnished her opinion of him.

After a few weeks on the decks, I was again deemed fit company for honest people, and rejoined CMU as Copywriter. But I felt even more broken and despondent. Everyone assumed it was my fault, something I’d done, that had enraged COB. And I half believed it – but I had no idea what it had been. My attitude?

One Saturday, I was out on Renos, clearing away weeds around the half-finished Berthing Buildings, when I was called up to see the CO CMO Int, Marc Yager. He explained that the woman holding Audiovisual Exec Int, Laura Marlowe, had just blown. She had left behind a huge undone project, which he wanted me to complete. It had to do with the release of Hubbard’s lectures on CD.

As usual, Scientology was about ten years behind the industry. With a typical mistrust of anything not blessed by Hubbard, we had waited until 2001 to get into CDs – all of Hubbard’s lectures were still on cassette. We had released one set of lectures on CD – a "Special Edition" of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course – 72 lectures. Only 1000 sets were made, specifically for "the most dedicated Scientologists" – which was Miscavige’s code for "richest.’ I had written the copy for it. The special release was to raise money for the project of releasing Hubbard’s lectures on CD. Now Miscavige wanted to get into it big time, converting the entire Hubbard lecture catalog to CD. The problem was, no one really knew what that catalog contained. Hubbard had given over 2000 lectures, and no one had ever heard them all. They all had to be counted and cataloged. We had to know which ones went together in sets, what they were about, whether they were for advanced students or for "raw public." We needed to know the date, the length of the lecture, the sound quality. It was a mammoth project.

After explaining the scope of the project, Yager leaned towards me and added, "by the way, I’m proposing you for Audiovisual Exec Int."

I was dumbfounded. "But… Sir, I was just…on the decks…" I wanted to say I was just beaten up by the Chairman of the Board RTC.

He dismissed my concern with a wave. "We all have our ups and downs." He looked at me thoughtfully. "I always wondered why you never became a player."

A player. Yes Sir, you’re so right Sir, I’m an idiot Sir. That kind of player?

For the project, I was to have an assistant, Yael Sherlock. Yael had been in CMU since the LA days, about 13 years. We called her "JVA" for Jewish Venezuelan Princess. Her family was from Caracas and were well-to-do. She had a Latin temper and a Jewish sense of humor, which made her charming and funny. I liked to practice my high school Spanish with her. As she was my daughter’s age, I called her hijita, "little daughter," and she called me jefecito, "little chief." We made a good team: I was a fast reader and knew Scientology pretty well, and she was methodical and precise. We set up an office in a corner of the CMO Int trailers. She set up a massive spreadsheet and we began filling it in. There was no time to listen to all the lectures of course – that would have taken over a year, time we didn’t have. So I mostly skimmed transcripts to get the sense of the lecture, listening to only a few. We had a matter of weeks to get it all done.

Miscavige wanted to set up a CD manufacturing facility in Gold, and this was being masterminded by Russ Belin, the CO of CST (Church of Spiritual Technology). Russ was Miscavige’s go-to guy when it came to research and technology. His organization, CST, had figured out all the technology to put Hubbard’s work on archival gold discs and platens and seal it in underground chambers hidden around the world. Miscavige had called on Belin to design the new E-Meter, the Mark VIII. Now he had charged him with putting together the CD line. Russ needed our data, and he needed it fast.

Yager rarely came to see us. I began to realize that I was, once again, the buffer. This was a hot and potentially flappy project, so Yager needed to distance himself from it, put someone in charge who could take the fall if anything went wrong. Laura had copped out on him, he had to get another body in there fast. Base Survival 101. But his proposal to post me as Audiovidual Exec Int never went anywhere, and he gradually lost any interest in the project.

Regardless, we did get all the information to Belin, and he was very pleased with its completeness and accuracy. But our project wasn’t done. The next part was to find all of Hubbard’s public lectures – lectures to non-Scientologists. They were all to be released as his "Classic Lectures" – and Miscavige wanted them released at the New Years Event, just a few months away. It was a near-impossible task, and once I realized the scope of it, a totally impossible task. It would require finding all of the Classic Lectures, designing packaging, working out a full mail-order subscription plan, and setting up Gold as a mail order operation. The professional mail order people I talked to estimated six months to get Gold set up as a mail order operation – we had less than two months. As we approached the end of the year, it became clear to one and all that the release would not make it. The solution? Someone had to take the fall for it. Guess who.

I was on the decks again through Christmas and New Years. Not that anyone else had any time off. After a few months of "mest work," I was once again deemed fit for human company. In spring I went back to CMU. I found out that I was to be the "Lecture Marketing Manager," with Yael as my assistant. Why? The Freewinds Maiden Voyage was coming up in June. Russ Belin was just about finished installing a massive CD production line in Gold. Miscavige wanted to announce the first broad public release of LRH lectures on CD with a big fanfare. He wanted to know which series to release. No one knew what to propose to him. No one wanted to make a decision, stick their necks out. The solution? Get Hawkins off the decks. Get him to make the decision. Perfect. I was on the hotseat again.

One could say I never learned. But I got impatient with all this waffle and prevarication. A decision had to be made. You gathered all the data, worked out a plan as best you knew how, and presented it clearly. As Hubbard had said once, "why is your neck so precious?" What was the worst that could happen? I’d be back on the decks.

Miscavige was in Clearwater at the time – had been all year. We held phone conferences with him from there. After I’d had a chance to work something out, I was called up to a little room in CMO Int where there was a conference phone – the senior execs were already there. I was seated right next to the phone. After a minute, Miscavige came on the line.

"OK, what have you got for me." All eyes swiveled to me.

I laid out my plan. We would do a broad release of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course for all Scientologists. This had been released in a limited edition the previous year, so expanding to a full release made sense. This was also one of Hubbard’s most famous and popular series. As a second series, I recommended The Phoenix Lectures, a good series on basic Scientology principles recorded in 1954. And for Advanced Scientologists, a series of Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures dealing with broad society and governments. After I finished laying it all out with my rationale, COB said that the proposal was approved, and we could go with it. There was a collective sigh of relief around the table.

We prepared the release – all the packaging and promotion. The Copywriter now for CMU was Dan Koon. Dan was a highly trained auditor and had been an executive in the Senior C/S Int Office under Ray Mithoff. I never knew what happened, but he was no longer "on tech lines." He was also a good writer, so had been posted in CMU. Dan and I got along well, and Miscavige was happy with the campaign and the promotion once we had it all done. It launched on the Freewinds in June at the Maiden Voyage Anniversary Event, and was a big hit with Scientologists. There were record sales.

We followed it up with the release of the Classic Lectures in September, at the Auditors Day Event. Yael and I had completed much of the campaign in 2001, and while I had been on the decks in early 2002, Yael and completed the computerization of Gold’s mail order lines. It was a subscription system – Scientologists signed up to receive one a month for four years.
Just prior to the release, a group of us were ordered to Clearwater to meet with Miscavige on marketing. The group included me, Dan Koon, the Senior Magazine Editor, Anne Bradley, the Director of Advertising and Promotion, Helen Pinder, and Marketing Exec International, David Bloomberg. Bloomberg had taken over after Ronnie Miscavige, DM’s brother, had left the Base with his wife Bitty a few years prior. We never knew exactly when Ronnie had left – in typical Base fashion, he simply disappeared, and nothing more was said. He became a non-person, as if he had never existed. Dave Bloomberg was a big, dynamic Australian. He had been a top moneymaker for the Sea Org in Australia, and had been promoted to Author Services, where he had been Executive Director. I found Dave to be intelligent and likeable, and enjoyed working with him.

We arrived in Clearwater, and met with Miscavige in the West Coast Building on Fort Harrison Avenue. There was a big conference room on the ground floor. He told us that he had a series of drills for us to do. The first was to go into the nearby Flag buildings and sell the new CD series to public Scientologists. We were to report back at the end of the day that we had sold something – he said that anyone who couldn’t sell anything didn’t deserve to be in marketing.

I have never claimed to be a salesman – in fact, I’ve always been lousy at it. I tend to talk too much. I spent the whole afternoon talking to different Scientologists, telling them about the CDs, but with no luck. Finally Dave Bloomberg took pity on me and set me up with someone he knew would buy.

We reported back to the conference room, and I was able to report I had sold something. Anne and Helen hadn’t sold anything. Miscavige immediately said they were offloaded from the Base, and sent them to work in the galley (kitchen) at Flag. I never saw either of them again. He then met with Dan and I over the next few days and we went over future plans for lecture releases. At the end, he looked at me across the conference room table.

"I bet you’re glad I didn’t offload you," he said.

I held his gaze for a second, then just smiled.

The release of the Classic Lectures was that weekend, and Dan and I stayed for the event. I saw a number of things that had to be handled right away on the campaign and called Yael in CMU. She put me on the speaker box, and I started rattling off instructions, rapid fire. Yael told me later that one of the people listening in at her end asked, "who’s that?" Yael said it was me. "That’s Jeff?" they said.

It was true, I was re-energized. I was no longer the shadow that had been moping around CMU. Dan and I fed off each others enthusiasm. On the way back to the Base, we stopped by several of the LA orgs and did inspections of their address lists. We had all kinds of ideas of how to improve the campaign.

When we hit the Base it was like, as I told Dan at the time, a bullet hitting a pool of molasses. Suddenly everything was serious again, everything was impossible, and there were dire consequences for the slightest misstep. I felt all that fire dying.

Cathy was happy to see me, and proud that I had done well. As always, she had faith in me and my ability even when no one else did.

Within a month or so, the sales of the CDs had started to slip, as we went over the bell of the sales curve. Most active Scientologists had purchased at the event or shortly after. It became harder to get new sales. We switched to mail order promotion, sending out a series of three mailings to the active lists. There were only about 200,000 names on the list, which supposedly represented everyone who had ever taken a course or received auditing in Scientology – including beginning courses. It was a small list to begin with, but there were a high percentage of names with unknown addresses, and a lot of names of people "not currently on lines." How many active Scientologists there really were was a matter of conjecture, but I estimated maybe 40,000 or 50,000 max.

The result of the mailings was predictably poor. Once again, I was a "downstat," and it was Ethics Conditions, penalties, investigations, and abuse. Miscavige made it known that he and he alone had created those initial sales with his brilliant event, and now Marketing had dropped the ball by failing to produce any results. Soon I was once again a pariah, a failure.

Miscavige also wanted to produce a comprehensive chart, showing all of Hubbard’s Lectures. I had done a chart when I was first sorting out the lectures in 2001, but he wanted something permanent, something Orgs could display. I did a number of different versions – but nothing was ever right.

I once again became the target of Miscavige’s wrath – and violence. In the midst of a meeting in CMU, he suddenly started slapping me in the face, and knocked me onto the floor. When I got up, I had a cut on my cheek. Miscavige turned to Laurisse Stuckenbrock, his Communicator. "Lou," he said.

She dug in her purse and produced a bottle of antiseptic and daubed it on my cut.

"Do you know why I beat you up?" Miscavige asked me.

"No, Sir," I said.

"To show you who’s in charge," he said.

There were certain staff who were Miscavige’s "pets." One of them was Henning Bendorff, the Art Director Gold. When I first met Henning, he was a quiet Swede, talented and diligent in his work. He designed the big, ornate sets for Miscavige’s events, and was soon in his favor. As his favor with Miscavige grew, his arrogance and ruthlessness seemed to grow as well.

Taking his cue from DM, Bendorff began to get physical with me. He would come up behind me and forcibly shove my face into my computer keyboard. Once he threw me so violently to the floor that my nose began to bleed. I was filth and he was the golden boy – so he could do what he liked with me.

Eventually I was found guilty of crimes – wasting money, neglect of duty – and I was removed from post in disgrace and sent back on the decks. My friend Foster was also on the decks, and the two of us began working on the Berthing Buildings. Yael was also assigned to the same worksite.

The foundations of the Berthing Buildings had been started eight years prior. After the buildings had been redone and fixed many times, they still stood as empty shells. The latest "flap" was that it had been discovered that the floors had not been properly attached to the walls, and it would take millions of dollars to correct. Meanwhile, we cleaned the grounds around them, and worked on some exterior stone masonry.

One afternoon, Matt Butler, "Murphy," the Security Guard, drove up in the Security truck and told Foster and I that we were going to the RPF in Los Angeles. We were being offloaded from the Base.

We weren’t particularly shocked or upset. We weren’t anything. Deck work, RPF, whatever, it was all the same. By this time, Foster and I were just resigned to whatever fate had in store for us. We grabbed a bag of clothes and headed down with Matt. Amazingly, we talked him into stopping at an In-and-Out Burger on the way down as we hadn’t eaten.

We routed in to the RPF in the Big Blue building, and were assigned a bunk bed in a crowded, cluttered dormitory that held about 40 men, floor to ceiling. We were told we had to wear black jeans and a grey T-shirt or sweatshirt at all times, the "uniform" of the RPF. There were about 200 people on the RPF at the time, men and women. We were not allowed phones of course and could speak to no one outside the RPF. We began work in what they called the PAC Mill, a huge furniture shop in the bowels of the Complex. There, hundreds of RPFers worked, making furniture for Scientology organizations. We were assigned to work crews. Foster and I resolved to make the best of the RPF and graduate as soon as we could.

The next day, we were called to the RPF In Charge’s office and he handed us the phone. It was Murphy. "You guys aren’t on the RPF," he said. "You need to report to Pac Base Crew for posting." Foster and I just looked at each other in disbelief. It was probably the shortest RPF stay in history.

PAC Base Crew was the organization that took care of all of the maintenance of Big Blue – mechanical, electrical, construction. They also ran the galley (kitchen) and the motor pool. And they ran the PAC Mill. Foster was assigned to the Mill, I was assigned to Finishing, where they stained, painted and lacquered the finished furniture. That evening after work, Foster and I found ourselves walking the streets of Los Angeles, laughing about the odd turn of events and our sudden relative freedom. It was Christmas.

Jeff in the PAC Mill Finishing area

I learned all about furniture finishing, mastering brush and spray techniques, as well as faux finishes. I also ran a furniture upholstery shop and learned how to do it. My friend Caroline Mustard, now on the RPF, ran a crew in the upholstery shop. Foster, with his computer savvy, took over a new CNC (computer numerical control) router and got it into operation. We lived in a crowded dormitory in the main building.

I wrote to Cathy every week. Sometimes she’d even come down to the PAC Base for events and sales conferences. Whenever she was there, I tried to see her. It was awkward. If we were seen too much together she would get a Knowledge Report. She told me later that she was under constant pressure at the Base to divorce me. But she refused.

In January 2003, the Int Management Public Relations Officer, Jean Michele Wargniez, came down from the Base to the Mill. I knew JM well, but of course had to call him "Sir." He wanted to find out if the Mill could make trophies. They needed a huge trophy shaped like Saint Hill Manor in England, to award to Scientology organizations who had reached "the size of Old Saint Hill." This was an ongoing incentive game for the Orgs. Hubbard had built up the Saint Hill Organization to hundreds of staff in the mid-1960s, so any organization that could expand to that size would get one of these "Saint Hill Size" awards. They had contacted various trophy firms and had been told each trophy would cost $10,000. Foster and I told them we’d make it for a lot less.

Foster used architectural elevations from the Manor itself, and programmed them into the router. Then he etched them onto Formica, the windows, brick texture, everything. Meanwhile I had a team of RPFers modeling things like balustrades, columns and vases. We then assembled all the pieces into an exact scale model of the Manor. The whole model came apart into 30 pieces, and we made rubber molds of each part, then cast each part in resin. I learned a technique called "cold metal casting" where we mixed copper and brass flakes into the resin. We then assembled the resin pieces and polished them up to a high sheen. It looked exactly like a bronze casting of Saint Hill Manor. The model was then mounted on a shiny black base with a plaque. It had taken us seven weeks – including learning how to do it. And we had done it for about $500. I preserved all of the molds and documented exactly how to do it for future trophies.

Our finished project - the Saint Hill Size Trophy

In March I was promoted to Director of Art and Signs, where I designed and manufactured all of the signage for the new Applied Scholastics center in Missouri – on time and under budget.
In April, I was in my office when the door opened, and David Miscavige walked in, with Shelly and Lou. He was on an inspection of Big Blue.

"Jeff, what are you doing here?" he asked.

I tried to explain my promotion to Director of Art and Signs, but it turned out he had no idea I was even in the Complex. I don’t know where he thought I was – or if he even gave it any thought.

But something had been set in motion.

A couple of weeks later, my phone rang. It was Murphy, the Gold Security Guard.

"You’re to take the next van back to Gold," he said.

Chapter Fourteen: Death and Resurrection

2008-07-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

Jeff on "Renos," 1996, laying foundations for the Berthing Buildings with Vikki Chaney and Steve Hall. The Film lab is in the background, and, beyond that, Building 36.

I sat speechless for a moment, the words refusing to sink in. Nancy has blown.

Bill sat across from me, with just a hint of a smile on his face, as if to say we all knew this was coming, didn’t we?

"How?" I managed to say. "When?"

"She drove to Ontario Airport and took a flight to Pittsburgh. She called Security from her parents’ house to say that she had left and was not coming back." He paused. "They asked her, ‘what about your husband?’ You know what she said?" Bill was enjoying this.

I shook my head.

"She said, ‘I have no husband.’"

This cut me to the quick. I looked away. Why hadn’t I paid her more attention? Why hadn’t I acted, talked to her, done something?

"You’ll be better off without her," Bill told me, clapping me on the back. I guess he thought that would make me feel better. No longer saddled with a "downstat."

I discovered our joint bank account was leaking like a sieve, as Nancy withdrew money from it to handle whatever exigencies she was experiencing. We had about $5,000 stashed away. I let it run until it was down to about $500, then shut it off. I had to keep something. In our eventual divorce "settlement" (really just a casual agreement between us), I kept the car. I went down to Ontario Airport a few days later and found it in short term parking, paid the bill, and drove it back to the Base.

It fell on me to pack up all of her stuff and ship it to Pennsylvania. Sorting it out was hard – after 15 years of marriage, our possessions were hopelessly intermingled. I didn’t have any time off to do this, of course, so every night after post I’d spend an hour or so sorting and packing, alternately cursing Nancy and crying. It took weeks. Then, finally, it was all gone. I packed up my own things and moved into a men’s dormitory at the Kirby Apartments.

It had been fifteen years since I’d lived in a dormitory, and it was a shock. There were fourteen men living in a two bedroom, two bath apartment. The bedrooms had four men each in them in bunk beds, there were two men in the dining room area, and another four in the living room. The place was a mess, and smelled of unwashed bodies and laundry. The kitchen was a jumble of soda cans and Top Ramen containers. I had a lower bunk and no closet space. I put most of my possessions into storage. Sunday mornings I tried to whip my roommates into some sort of enthusiasm about cleaning the place.

When I had lived with Nancy, we could at least enjoy a private room and a kitchen shared only with one other couple. Going home at night had provided a bit of a break. Now, I had to scale things down, live in a tiny space and endure the sounds and smells of thirteen other bodies as I tried to sleep. It was depressing. But this was how Sea Org Members lived if they weren’t married.

Ironically, Bill Dendiu himself blew just a few months later. And this time it was for good – he wasn’t "recovered" this time. The post of CO CMU fell to Caroline Mustard. I’d known Caroline for years – she was a big, flamboyant redhead from England – via Canada. In the 1960’s she had been part of the British music scene – she had been a singer herself and her best friend had been Marianne Faithful. She was a woman of volatile moods – she was usually either demonstrating a manic enthusiasm or a complete emotional breakdown. There was no middle ground for Caroline. Whenever she had a "brilliant idea" (and her ideas were always brilliant!) she would browbeat one and all into an appropriate enthusiasm. I could tell when Caroline had had an idea as she would soon whip up a certain group of CMU women into frenetic laughter and piercing screams. It fell to me to ask the prickly questions like "have you actually surveyed this?" so I would get branded as a dour wet blanket who didn’t appreciate her genius, a role I was happy to fulfill. But with all that said, I liked Caroline and we had become good friends.

Caroline was very soon way over her head. As I had experienced on the CO CMU post, it was a constant barrage of demand after demand – far more than could ever be accomplished. It became common to hear her talking sweetly to some executive over the phone, then slamming down the receiver and loosing a string of four-letter words.

The final straw came as we were approaching the annual IAS event in October 1995. This was an event commemorating the formation of the International Association of Scientologists in 1984 as an international membership organization dedicated to "defending Scientology." In practice, that meant donating money to Scientology that could be used to hire lawyers, PR firms and private investigators. However it had been found years earlier that it was easier to get money from Scientologists if you said it was going towards "Planetary Dissemination," therefore a big presentation of a "new Scientology Campaign" had become an essential part of the IAS Event planning. And usually, it was left to the last possible moment.

"We’ll never get it done in time," Caroline wailed. "It’s impossible to get a big public campaign done on this Base, it’s just impossible!" But then she had her "brilliant idea."

She was going to send me to Los Angeles to connect up with Scientologists who were pros in the ad business, and work with them over the next week to develop a "brilliant" campaign. She wanted me to "repeat what I had done with Dianetics in the 1980’s" The only difference was, I wouldn’t have any funding, I wouldn’t have any help…and I wouldn’t have any time. I would run into this repeatedly in the coming years – people who wanted me to duplicate my "successful actions" of the 1980’s, but without actually forming a unit, training anyone, doing any research or surveys or taking the time to put anything sensible together. It was all supposed to magically fly out of my head in an instant and then somehow magically get done without any actual work.

But I was game, foolishly so. I went to LA, commandeered an office in Bridge Publications, and started calling every Scientologist advertising person I knew – Wendy Gillotte, Peter Green, Randy Stith, Joe Spencer and others. They were all Scientologists, but not on staff or in the Sea Org – they all worked professionally in advertising or graphic arts. I briefed each one of them on the project and the deadline – one week. They all thought I was crazy. Wendy was the most level-headed and sane, and she and I began poring through the binders of research and surveys I had brought with me, and working out possible strategies and ads.

I was supposed to get a researcher – Linda Sukkestad, my old SBMU surveyor. But she didn’t arrive. I was supposed to get some funding to at least pay people something – but nothing came. Caroline wouldn’t take my calls, she was always "too busy." I began to realize I had been set up. Caroline knew it was impossible to put an ad campaign together in that time, so she had set me up to take the fall for the failure – and meanwhile keep the pressure out of CMU.

Ironically, the only person who called me was David Miscavige.

"What are you doing in LA?" he asked.

I explained I was putting together the campaign for Scientology for the IAS Event.
"Why don’t you do it up here?" he asked. I explained that I was working with Scientology pros as no one in CMU could be spared to do it.

"Well, if you have to work with pros, fine," he said, "but bring them to the Base."

But I was too far into it, and the deadline was only a few days away. Wendy and I were working day and night. I wasn’t getting any sleep. Finally, the day before the ads were due, we ended up out at Peter Green’s studio, with Peter and his layout people putting ads together as Wendy and I and anyone else I could corral wrote them. It got later and later and I became more and more desperate.

At one point, about four in the morning, running on nothing but coffee and adrenaline, I just lost it, and burst into tears. I was at the end of my sanity. Wendy quietly motioned me outside, and we went for a long, long walk through the darkened streets of Burbank. I talked, she listened. When she had me calmed down, we went back and finished the ads. Then, as the sun was coming up, I got in my car and took them up to the Base. I don’t know what Wendy thought of my rant, but she just listened with patience and compassion that night, and earned my respect.

The next day, Ronnie, Marketing Exec Int, called me and told me that the ads were all approved. They had been very much liked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had somehow pulled it off. But Ronnie also said that they would not be shown at the IAS Event – we would be developing a whole campaign around these ads, including TV ads, for launch next year.

Caroline was pleased, but I knew I’d have to keep my eye on her. We were still friends, but I now knew that she wasn’t above sacrificing me to save her own neck. Survival on the Base depended on being at least a little politically savvy and watching your back. Old time executives – the real political players – knew that if you had a potentially hot or flappy activity under you, the first thing to do was get a junior appointed or assigned to it. Then you were buffered if anything went wrong. The junior could take the heat for any failure, and the exec could discipline the junior responsible – even removing them from post (and appointing someone new to be the buffer). Meanwhile they would act contrite and repentant to Miscavige and scrape by without serious harm. The key thing was to make the junior make all the decisions and prepare the "CSW" (Completed Staff Work). The exec merely signed off on it as it was passed through him, and some execs would even write "OK on your OK" beside their signature – claiming, if anything went wrong, that they had been "too busy to read it." This might get them a hand slap. Thus the really practiced executives could slip and slide their way out of almost any flap – by having a junior handy to throw under the bus.

My "approval" on the Scientology ads was too good to be true. In early 1996, Miscavige decided he didn’t like them after all. He stormed down to CMU to take us to task, followed, as usual, by a retinue of executives from CMO International and Exec Strata. Miscavige was always flanked by his two assistants. His wife, Shelly, was posted as "COB Assistant" and Laurisse Stuckenbrock ("Lou," a plucky Aussie) was "COB Communicator." The three of them always dressed identically. If COB was in whites, Shelly and Lou would be in whites. If he was in black (which he often was – he liked the all-black uniformed look), then they were all in black. Shelly and Lou carried two small tape recorders, and these were used interchangeably to record his every word. The tapes were then rushed up to his office where his personal secretarial pool would transcribe the tapes and then issue the transcripts to all concerned staff (carefully editing out the profanity and threats). Most staff had thick binders crammed with these transcripts. It wasn’t unusual for meeting to go on for four or six hours, and the massive transcripts were turgid, rambling and often contradictory.

There was a long row of flat files at the back of CMU, and this was COB’s favorite place to hold court. It made a sort of stage with him on one side, flanked by Shelly and Lou, and everyone else on the other side – the "audience." He declared that the ads were "pieces of shit," and asked if anyone had any other ideas for Scientology ads.

Steve Hall, the CMU Copywriter, said that he had done some ads six months ago, but that they had been rejected. Miscavige demanded to see them.

I had known Steve since being in LA, he was a very bright, very funny man – the CMU "class clown." Even in the roughest of times, he could get us laughing. He had this pair of funny sunglasses with candy-striped rims that he kept in his drawer, and every time someone was getting roasted by an exec, he’d slide those out of the drawer and put them on "to ward off negative radiation." This became a standard gag, and it was all we could do to keep from laughing.

Steve was a great copywriter too – he had taken a class from a professional copywriter, Mike Whitlow, and had gotten quite good at it. His ads were clever, quirky and humorous – a rarity in Scientology promotion. He was, like me, a bit of a rebel who didn’t just go with whatever Hubbard had dictated, but tried to do something new and effective.

Miscavige had a look at his ads and thought they were good. "Why weren’t these used?" he demanded. Guillaume Lesevre, ED Int, and Marc Yager, CO CMO Int hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that they had rejected them as "too far out." Miscavige gave them a withering glare, and then ordered Steve to write the Scientology Campaign ads.

I met with Steve and we went over all of the research, as well as the list of ideas Wendy and I had come up with. Steve took it from there and wrote a series of ads, some for the book Scientology: Fundamentals of Thought ("FOT" – every book title had its acronym) and some for Scientology: A New Slant on Life ("NSOL"). Meanwhile, I fleshed the whole thing out into an actual marketing campaign, with an analysis of publics, a research analysis, media strategy, budget and so on. We even worked out how the Org Public Divisions would tie into it.

In the middle of this, Steve Hall was suddenly transferred to the Cine Division to write scripts. He was very upset. He had taken the time to get himself trained as an advertising copywriter and loved doing it. He knew nothing about scriptwriting. But, the transfer had been dictated by Miscavige. Steve had been well liked in CMU and his work respected. In Cine, however, he was treated from the start as a second-class citizen, harassed, threatened and abused on a constant basis for his seeming inability to get a script approved. He did manage to get a series of Scientology ads completed for FOT and NSOL. These were run on TV eventually and did well. He also wrote some brilliant ads for the book Scientology 8-8008 and for Have You Lived Before This Life? They were produced and shown at an event to get campaign donations – but never aired. Steve lasted a few years in Cine, but turned bitter and disillusioned, and finally blew.

With the Scientology Campaign completed, I prepared a presentation of the campaign and all of the advertising. I ended up presenting it to Miscavige alone – just me and him in the Lower Lodges conference room. It was a one hour presentation. At the end of it, he said it was all approved. I was ecstatic. For that one brief moment, it seemed that Miscavige and I were on the same page, the same team. He had me repeat the whole presentation for all of RTC, who were immediately called down to the Lodges. As they were ushered in, I was pulled aside by Shelly and told I was not to talk about what I was about to see. She indicated two bedraggled, filthy figures being ushered in to stand at the back. It was Greg Wilhere and Norman Starkey, the two most senior executives in RTC. They had obviously incurred Miscavige’s wrath and were doing "deck work."

CMU was ecstatic about the approval. We had a campaign to launch. I asked Caroline who would be the Campaign Manager.

"Why you are," she said.

At this point my post was called Director of Research and Planning. My job was to supervise market research – I had two staff who handled that – to work with the designers and writers to put together the creative work, and to work out the media planning. I was the only person in CMU with a long track record in all of those areas. The actual execution of the campaigns was handled in a different division, the Marketing Execution Division. Here were the Project Managers, people who acted as Programs Operators, taking the written campaign program and getting it done, target by target.

For Caroline to say that I was going to execute the Scientology Campaign was saying, in essence, that I was being removed from Director of Research and Planning and posted as a junior staff member in the Marketing Execution Division. I was outraged. I refused. But once again, it was a "COB Order." He wanted me to run the campaign, period. "You should take that as a compliment, an honor!" Caroline insisted.

The Director of Marketing Execution, a young Italian woman named Michela Stave, was also not happy about the situation. She was tall, dark-haired and strikingly beautiful, in a petulant sort of way, and very Italian. She had wanted to run the Scientology campaign herself. I think she considered it her chance at glory. She resented me coming in to her division and it soon became obvious she was not going to make it easy for me. Michela had been an "executive" or Programs Operator for her entire Scientology career. She had never put together a marketing campaign, written an ad, or designed anything. Her one talent, if you could call it that, was intimidating and bullying others into doing her will. She was known for screaming at the top of her lungs at her juniors, calling them "motherfucker" and "cocksucker" in her thick Italian accent.

A few days after I arrived in her Area, Miscavige stopped by and grilled me a bit about the campaign. He asked if any of the TV ads would be showing on prime time TV. I said "Yes, Sir." After he had left, Michela grabbed the media buys and went through them, then wrote a scathing "Knowledge Report" about how I had "lied to COB" as most of the ads were not running in prime time. She screamed and yelled at me at the top of her voice for "lying to COB" and immediately took over the campaign herself. I was relegated to being the "Dianetics Campaign Manager."

I entered purgatory. I became everything that I hated. I had rebelled against Kerry Gleeson in 1982 because he had insisted I run the Dianetics Campaign via the orgs. Now I was running a Dianetics Campaign via the orgs. I had railed against mindless Programs Operators who robotically badgered others for "Compliance Reports." Now that was my only job. My stat, literally, was "Number of Compliance Reports," and Michela ruthlessly screamed at me, assigned conditions, and pulled Team Share Cards if my stat dipped. Life became a stupefying, dragging hell.

My fellow inmate in hell was a young woman named Manuela Spencer. I had known Manu for years, since we had been in the trailers. She was pretty and intelligent and, unlike Michela, could actually write copy and come up with marketing ideas. Michela turned over running the Scientology Campaign to her. Manu and Michela were best friends, but when it came to the job, Michela ran roughshod over Manu just as she did everyone else. Manu was intimidated by her.

I looked for any excuse to escape, to do something else. In 1996, Miscavige was preparing his Golden Age of Tech for release, along with a new E-Meter. It was a complex subject with a lot of new drills and procedures to train people. Miscavige’s dream was to make training as rote as possible, so anyone could be trained to just execute a set procedure. This was supposed to stamp out any possibility of squirreling – everyone would just be trained and drilled to perfection in the same exact procedure. He took great pride in demonstrating various facets of his plan – at one meeting, he had a completely untrained person – Julie Caetano – drill Ray Mithoff, who was a Class XII and the most senior technical person in Scientology – Senior Case Supervisor International. It seemed that the demonstration was as much to humiliate Ray as to demonstrate his point.

He was concerned that the "Golden Age of Tech" be communicated correctly, so he wanted a team of copywriters to put the promotional copy together. I of course volunteered, to get away from my "day job." We spent weeks, day and night, writing copy, and I learned to write some of my best copy with an RTC exec standing over me with a stopwatch. It was a round-the-clock rocket ride. The high point was when one of my pieces came back with COB’s handwriting on the top: "Now this is copywriting!"

That became my life – weeks and months of drudgery, being a "Program Operator," punctuated by special projects where I could do a bit of writing and creating.

Meanwhile the Base continued to expand, and we were still working every Saturday on "Renos" to complete building projects. CMO International and Exec Strata moved out of Del Sol and were put into a temporary building (made from pre-fab trailers) between the 200’s and Del Sol. The old hotel was completely renovated and set up for staff auditing. The huge Cine sound stage was completed at the west end of the property – built to look like a Scottish castle. Work started on the huge RTC building at the top east end of the property, and also on a huge mansion to replace Bonnie View, to be a new home for LRH. If any of us had any doubts as to why this 9.4 million dollar house was being built for Hubbard, complete with office and secretarial facilities, Miscavige made it clear one day. "It is not a museum," he said. External contractors were being used exclusively for Hubbard’s house – no "all hands" there!

The Cine Castle, with its duck pond in front.

Throughout 1996 and 1997, Miscavige was often gone from the Base, either in Washington DC or Clearwater, handling legal and PR work. We didn’t know it at the time, but he was handling a very specific "flap." In December of 1995, a woman named Lisa McPherson had died in a room in the Fort Harrison Hotel.

When Miscavige left, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and for a few weeks or months there would be, if not calmness, at least a slight lessening of tension with everyone somewhat able to get on with their work. Then a buzz would go through the Base, and there would be frantic projects to clean up the Base, clean up the offices, get urgent projects completed and generally prepare for the onslaught. Years later, I saw the movie The Devil Wears Prada and laughed at the scene where Stanley Tucci runs through the office yelling "Gird your loins, people!" It was exactly like that.

The first thing Miscavige would do when he hit the Base was do an inspection, walking through all the Base spaces with a cadre of executives and asking pointed questions. And woe be to the staff member who manifested any nervousness or hesitation – he was obviously "hiding some crimes" and would be rushed into Security Checking. It wasn’t unusual for someone to hit the RPF as a result of these inspections. I witnessed Miscavige walk into a room and at someone, saying with contempt "what’s he still doing here?" The person was on his way to the RPF within minutes.

I came to dread Miscavige’s inspections and meetings. He was always intense and intimidating, and accompanied by a crowd of executives, eager to curry favor with him by acting as his Greek chorus. We would usually have some warning that "COB is coming down to CMU" and every executive on the chain of command would start running in, usually out of breath. After a crowd of fifteen or twenty execs had congregated, Miscagige would suddenly appear. Sometimes he’d throw out a derogatory little tidbit: "Did you guys hear what that asshole Gary Weise just did?" Then he’d describe some staff member’s "out-ethics" in detail, everyone nodding in agreement about what an out-ethics scumbag Gary Weise was – and hoping they weren’t next. Then he’d take up whatever he had come down to see us about – sometimes slamming a submission down on the counter before proceeding to pick it apart. He had a way of talking about people in the third person, as if they weren’t there. "Look at him," he’d say, pointing at some staff member. "See how he looks at me." Or "Listen to how she talks to me." He’d often throw around threats of RPF, or even offload. "You’ll be flipping burgers at McDonalds," he’d say.

I found that, in those confrontations, my mind would simply cease to function. The words would not come. It was as if a switch had been thrown, shutting off my brain. I would stand there stupidly, with people around me urging me to say something. But I had nothing to say.
Oh, I’d seen others handle these confrontations smoothly, particularly Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre. The words seemed to come easily to them: "Yes, Sir, you’re totally right, I see that, that was stupid of me, I’ll handle it right away, I’ll get my ethics in…" Placating words, words of self-abasement and capitulation. But somehow, when I was on the spot, in the hotseat, those words never came. I wanted to explain, to elaborate, to discuss – but any attempt in that direction would be instantly shouted down by the assembled execs: "backflash!" And Miscavige would point at me, "You see? You see how he talks to me?"

So my mind jammed, a system shutdown, and I just stood there stupidly. What is wrong with me? I thought. Why can’t I speak? I began to feel more and more like some kind of invalid, a mental cripple who could not function in normal society.

At first, I was gotten into Security Checking to "find my crimes." For me to behave like that, I must have crimes. When that didn’t work, it was correction. I needed to be cured, healed. I was instructed to do the Purification Rundown again – it must be residual LSD in my system from 1967 that was causing me to malfunction.

That was fine with me. The program was done five hours a day – that was five hours less on the firing line. I got to run outdoors and get fresh air and exercise, then spend hours in the sauna where I could relax and read and unwind. And I had to get eight hours sleep a night to do the program. With the sleep, exercise and fresh air, I started to feel better.

I followed the Purification Program with the Running Program – the one where you run around a pole for five hours a day. Some people thought it was a punishment – I loved it. I got thin and fit. In the midst of it, I had to have a hernia operation. I asked the doctor how soon I could be running again, and he said about a week. He asked me how far I ran every day. "About ten miles," I said.

He gave me a look. "And you’re how old? Fifty one?" He just shook his head.

All of this made me feel better, but I was still as hapless as ever in my confrontations with Miscavige. But I laid low and worked at my thankless job as Dianetics Campaign Manager. Sometimes I would daydream about leaving, getting out of there, as others had done. But I couldn’t think about it seriously. I would have to turn my back on Scientology, on my whole life. I would never be able to do my OT Levels. I would be cut off from every friend. It would be a sort of suicide. And where would I go? What would I do? It was just a daydream, but not a very practical one.

And I was lonely. It had been three years since Nancy had blown. I went home every night to the crowded dormitory and a lonely bunk. I wanted someone – I wanted to get married again.

But finding a prospective partner at the Base was a daunting task – if not impossible. You had no time off. Every waking moment you were surrounded by people, hundreds of eyes watching you. If a man and a woman were observed to be paying too much attention to each other, the Knowledge Reports would fly, and they would be reprimanded – sometimes publicly. It was called "flowing and glowing" and was heavily ridiculed. It was "out 2D."

The phrase "2D" came from Hubbard’s Eight Dynamics – he split life up into eight parts – self, sex and family, groups, mankind, all living things, the physical universe, spiritual beings and "infinity." The Second Dynamic was sex and family, and its abbreviation, "2D," became a colloquial term, as in "they’re having a 2D" or "I’d like to mock up (create) a 2D with you." When a person did something wrong or unethical on the second dynamic, it was called "out-2D." And on the Base, that included flirting, holding hands or even "flowing and glowing." It could wind you up in trouble.

Even so, life goes on, and people did somehow manage to get together. As I had a car, I could sometimes get away with offering a likely woman a ride home – it meant fifteen minutes of private conversation, more if we stopped at a Burger King or In-and-Out Burger. And then there were odd moments at mealtimes or on the bus ride home where one could strike up an innocent conversation. But even that could backfire. One of my cautious advances ended up with an ugly Knowledge Report filed on me.

In mid-1998, I noticed a new staff member in the Golden Era Productions Sales area, an attractive, petite woman with long brown-blonde hair and luminous hazel eyes. She intrigued me. A lot of people seemed to know her, and we had a lot of mutual friends, but I had no idea who she was. I did a little discreet detective work and found out her name was Catherine Fraser. She had been on the Freewinds as Port Captain and then had been brought to the Base as RTC staff. Something had gone wrong and she had ended up assigned to Gold.

One night, we were doing an "all-hands" in the LRH Book Compilations Unit. This was a fairly regular occurrence. A division would get backlogged or in trouble and the whole staff would jump in and handle the situation. The all-hands was going to go all night, and about three in the morning they announced there was pizza in MCI. I happened to be working next to Cathy, who wasn’t able to leave just then. So I asked her if I could bring some back for her. It was a simple start.

As the Rx7 was off the road, I was riding the bus to and from the Kirby Apartments. One night, by putting a book casually on the seat beside me, I kept the seat empty until I saw Cathy coming down the aisle. Then I lifted up the book and smiled at her. She sat down, and we talked.

Something amazing happened during that bus ride, as we made small talk. I looked into her eyes and sort of got lost. I described it later, in a poem to her, as feeling like I was a diver at the top of a tall diving board, about to plunge into a pool far below me. A thought crossed my mind: this is my wife. It wasn’t "Gee’ I’d like to marry this woman," it was just a fact. This is my wife.

Cathy told me later that the same thought entered her mind at that same instant. This is my husband. Being together seemed the most natural thing in the world.

The next day, which was a Saturday – a Renos Day – Cathy pulled me inside, into her office, and said she had to talk to me. "You know, I’m still married."

"Oh," I said. My disappointment must have shown.

"I’m separated from my husband," she told me. "He’s still on the ship. We’re in the process of getting a divorce."

I smiled at her, a little sadly. "OK – thanks for letting me know."

About an hour later I ran into her out on the lawn. "Thanks for being honest with me," I said.
She looked at me slyly. "You know, I won’t always be married…" Our eyes locked. We both smiled.

From then on, we found many excuses to be together. We would casually talk at mealtimes for a few minutes, and managed to sit together frequently on the bus and talk. Sure enough, tongues started to wag, and Knowledge Reports started to fly. Cathy, being the "married woman," got the brunt of it.

The entire Gold crew mustered three times a day on the patio behind MCI, after each meal. We lined up in straight rows, by Division. The executives stood in front. Roll was taken and every person was accounted for – over 400 people. Then there would be uniform inspections, announcements and news. Cathy was made to stand up on a low wall, facing the crew. Then the CO Gold, a cold-hearted martinet named Lisa Schroer, enumerated Cathy’s crimes, her "out-2D," her flirting with me – her, a married woman! I was mortified. I wished I could be up there instead.

We stopped talking to each other and tried to avoid each other. The last thing I wanted was to get her in any more trouble.

A few months later, at Christmas, we had a staff party. Cathy said she had to talk to me, so we went outside. She said she had been proposed to go to Clearwater to handle PR there. She thought that might be best if she were to go. Then she could get her divorce and come back, and we wouldn’t have the strain of trying to avoid each other. I agreed that was probably best. I said I would wait for her for a year if it took that, I would be here.

Again, she got in trouble. Someone had seen us together. She was found to be not qualified to go to Clearwater because of her "Out 2D." Yet we had never touched each other, never even held hands.

We spent the next year ignoring each other. We did not look at each other or speak to each other for one entire year. I would watch her from a distance, then go home at night and write poetry to her, poems I hoped she would someday read:

Cold wind through stark trees
A stranger hurrying by
She’s wearing your face

At the end of the year I managed to get away for two days to see my mother in Santa Barbara. We spent a wonderful time together, walking all over the city, one of the most beautiful in the world. We visited Mom’s favorite parks and gardens, and talked and talked. At 82, my mother was still sharp as a tack, working every day as a tutor. We talked as we had never talked before, and she told me things about her life with my Dad that I had never known. I told her I had found the woman I was going to marry, and she was very happy.

"I’ve put my affairs in order," she told me late one night as we sat in her apartment.

"Oh Mom, you’ll be around for a while yet!" I tried to make light of it. She smiled sadly.

Two months later, in February 1999, I was suddenly called down to the conference room in Building 36. Muriel Dufresne, who worked as an external PR for the Base, had me sit down and then solemnly told me, "Your mother died."

I called Kim. He said he and his wife Cathy were heading up to Santa Barbara right away to take care of all the arrangements. He said there would be a service the following Saturday and he needed my help with that. I said I would get up there as soon as I could.

But I couldn’t leave. I had to get auditing. In order to leave, I had to pass a Security Check. The sessions went on and on, day after day. I got more and more desperate. But I was told, no, I could not leave, I had to finish my auditing. It took four days, four frustrating, maddening days. Finally, on Friday, I was allowed to leave. As the RX7 was still inoperational, I rented a car and raced up the coast and met Kim and Cathy.

They told me Mom had died suddenly on Saturday night. She had been in the middle of writing a letter – to me. When I read her half-finished letter, I cried for the first time since hearing of her death.

Kim and I worked late into the night working out Mom's service, and on Saturday, we held the service for about 40 of her friends in a little community center downtown. Kim and I spoke, telling stories of her life, and many of her friends spoke as well. At the end, I read from the Scientology funeral ceremony. When I got to the line, "Goodbye, dear Evelyn," I looked up, tears streaming down my face, to find there was not a dry eye in the place. She had many, many dear friends.

We chartered a boat and took her ashes a mile offshore, where we scattered them on the water, along with flowers from the service. I felt a tremendous weight lift. "She’s gone," I told Kim, and he nodded, smiling. We sat in the bow, our arms around each other. "Does this mean we’re grown up now?" I asked him.

"No," he replied, "We can still be kids."

Jeff and Kim: still kids

As I was leaving Santa Barbara, I asked Kim if he could loan me some money to cover the rental car. He said sure, and added, "You won’t have to ask anyone for money for a long time." Mom’s estate had turned out to be larger than we had imagined. By Sea Org standards, I was rich.

Mom had a little Honda Civic, which I took with me, driving it back to the Base. I now had two cars, the defunct RX7, and the Civic. I ended up having the RX7 towed away for charity.

I was driving out of the Kirby Apartments one morning after I got back and saw Cathy standing there, waiting for the bus. She looked at me and our eyes met for a second, a brief flash of compassion and understanding. She’d heard about my mom.

1999 was a long, long year. The big project was the publication of Dianetics in 50 languages. I had somehow gotten back on my earlier post of Director of Research and Planning, and it fell to me to decide which languages to publish in, and to craft an international campaign for its promotion. I had something like two weeks to do all this, which I somehow managed to do. The translations were being done by an outside translations mill – a lot of them ended up being pure crap. But the important thing was to get the editions out there, so it could be announced at an event "Dianetics has been published in 50 languages!!!"

As for a campaign, I not only had no research for all of the countries we would be releasing the book in, but no way to get anything done in those countries. There were no Scientologists there. I ended up using commercially available research and, rather than planning out a campaign, worked out a program for volunteer projects that would go into each country, arrange book distribution, do surveys, and supervise advertising and PR for the book.

Of course, as soon as the plan was done and approved, I got transferred back under Michela to get it done. We got Scientologists to volunteer to go to different countries with the project I had written, and get the book launched there. It was a harebrained, desperate scheme, but we ended up actually doing it in a number of countries. At the end of a year, we had sold 450,000 books – 9,000 average per language. It wasn’t huge, but it was something.

As the year ticked by, I despaired of ever being with Cathy. We continued to ignore each other and never speak, and I wondered, does she still love me?

One day in November, I was walking up the stairs to CMU. I saw Cathy on the landing, talking with someone. As usual, I ignored her and started to walk past. Suddenly her little hand shot out and grabbed my arm.

"I have to talk to you," she said. One look in her eyes told me everything.

"Tonight, on the bus." I replied. She nodded.

For the first time in over a year, we met at the bus and sat together. She told me that her divorce had come through. She was a free woman.

I don’t remember what we said, but that fifteen minute ride seemed to take hours, and at the end of it, I had proposed, and she had accepted. I walked her to her dormitory door and, for the first time, held her in my arms and kissed her.

I didn’t know what the road ahead would bring, but I knew I would now be traveling it with a soulmate.

Jeff and Cathy, 1999

Chapter Thirteen: Attacks and Infomercials

2008-07-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine attacks!

I had never been this close to a real cobra before. As it rose up and spread its hood, I could feel my hackles raise and a primordial fear tickle some primitive level of my brain. The handler said we were perfectly safe, but even so, I didn’t want to get too close to the thing.

It was hot in the small room, with bright photographic lights illuminating the tabletop set. The props department had made a large replica of a Prozac capsule, a couple of feet long, with the blue and white halves pulled apart. The snake lay coiled in between the halves, now raising its head and spreading its hood as the handler goaded it. The photographer, Ted Horner, was peering through the viewfinder, waiting for the right moment to hit the shutter.

Suddenly and without warning, the snake struck out blindly, scattering the Prozac halves and falling writhing onto the floor. Ted and I had a race to see who could make it out the door first. We regrouped outside while the handler collected up his snake. We looked at each other’s pale faces, then burst out laughing at the insanity of it all.

It was about three in the morning, and we’d been flat out, day and night, preparing a series of full page ads to run in USA Today. In early May, 1991, Time Magazine had run a cover story on Scientology – "Scientology: The Cult of Greed, How the Growing Dianetics Empire Squeezes Millions from Believers Worldwide." The cover showed a many-tentacled octopus with a volcano exploding out of its head. Staff were discouraged from reading the article as it "contained OT data." But vetted copies were made available to certain staff on a need-to-know basis.
Staff were made to read a Hubbard issue called "Signs of Success." In it, he said:

"Whenever we’re really winning, the squirrels start to scream. You can tell if somebody is a squirrel. They howl or make trouble only when we’re winning."

Technically, a squirrel was someone who practices an altered version of Scientology outside the Church. But, by extension, this was taken to mean any Suppressive Person. That was the message from the top – we were successful and winning, therefore the SPs were screaming and yelling. It was just a sign of our success! So we needed to continue and be more successful, while handling the lies the SPs were spreading.

To handle this negative article, we were going to run daily full page ads in USA Today for two weeks. It was assumed that Scientology would not get a fair shake in the media – everyone knew that the media was biased against Scientology – Hubbard had said so. Therefore we would get the word out by placing our own ads.

And the strategy – attack, of course. Hubbard had said, "never defend, always attack." So the ads would not talk about Scientology or try to correct what was said in the article, they would attack Time Magazine. CMU was given the job of designing and laying out these ads, which had been written by the Office of Special Affairs. Two of the ads attacked Time for having "supported" Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. That was a bit of a stretch as Time clearly says their "Man of the Year" does not represent an endorsement. But a picture of a Time Cover with Hitler on it and the legend "Man of the Year" was a powerful negative image. And it was all about image – positioning "the enemy" with negative images and ideas. Other ads attacked them for supporting LSD (in the early days of its research) and psychiatric drugs, and for their supposed ties with drug giant Eli Lilly, maker of Prozac. The Scientology article, we asserted, was supposedly engineered by Lilly as payback for the Church exposing the dangers of Prozac. A series of ads were also made attacking Eli Lilly, including the one showing a cobra coming out of a Prozac capsule – which we were finally able to capture on film.

We followed it up with an 80-page booklet, laying out the whole conspiracy. Our former PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, were also mixed up in it. They had also been pressured by Eli Lilly, the booklet asserted, to drop the Church account. The booklet was called "The Story Time Couldn’t Tell: Who Really Controls the News at Time Magazine and Why" and the cover featured a photo Steve and I had set up showing an old-time glass paneled office door with the word "Editor" on it, and silhouettes of a big, beefy guy with a cigar browbeating a weaselly-looking little editor. The booklet was printed up and inserted as a supplement into USA Today. The whole campaign cost millions of dollars – not to mention weeks of sleepless nights.

The USA Today campaign was just the first of many projects Bill had me supervise. After Bill went back on the post of CO CMU, I had wanted to go back on my previous post, Director of Advertising and Promotion. I had been successful there and knew what I was doing. But Bill would have none of it. He appointed me to the post of Quality Control Exec under him. It soon became apparent that he wasn’t so much interested in quality control as having a spare body around that he could toss special projects to. In addition to the massive USA Today campaign, our marketing releases in 1991 included an encyclopedic twelve-volume set of Hubbard’s Technical Bulletins, as well as a huge collection of every lecture he had given to the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course – over 400 lectures on cassette.

I still had my hand in the Dianetics Campaign. Now, it was being looked on as a "failed campaign." Sure, we had sold millions of books, but those millions hadn’t come in to the orgs. Why sell more books? What we needed to do was get those millions of book buyers into the orgs! It reminded me of a story I’d heard about Milton S. Hershey, the chocolate magnate. Supposedly he was traveling by rail when a reporter asked him, "Mr. Hershey, your product is so famous, why do you bother to advertise?"

"How fast is this train going," Hershey asked.

"I guess about 60 miles an hour," replied the reporter.

"Then why don’t we unhook the engine."

Well, we had unhooked the Dianetics engine for sure. After years of "reorganization," budget cuts and useless sports sponsorships, sales had declined to a few thousand a week. But it didn’t look like that engine was going to get hooked up again anytime in the foreseeable future, and meanwhile we could still polish the silver in the dining car, so to speak.

I did a series of surveys to find out what was happening with the people who had bought Dianetics. Some had never even read it. Others had started to read it but had gotten bogged down with it. When asked why they weren’t using it, applying the "auditing" techniques, many said they had never understood that Dianetics was a system of "do-it-yourself therapy." Or they had found it too complex.

I conceived the idea of producing a film called "How to Use Dianetics." It would explain the basic principles of Dianetics, with a lot of visual examples and diagrams, then would show the steps of a Dianetics session, so simply presented that anyone could do it. I set to work writing the script.
My office at the time was in the CMU "executive trailer." I banged away at the script, carefully following the book. I also coordinated with RTRC staff – Ron’s Technical Research and Compilations. They were all trained auditors and helped to check over my technical points. Finally it was completed and approved, and went into production in Gold’s Cine Division. My old friend Mitch Brisker, who had directed some of my TV ads in 1985 and 86, had been subsequently hired by Gold as a film director. He was not Sea Org, but was paid a substantial salary as he was a "professional." I still enjoyed working with Mitch – he hadn’t lost his wry sense of humor.

In early 1992, the third floor space in Building 36 was completed and ready for us to move in. We toured the space and could hardly keep a straight face. It had been designed by someone as a non-artist’s idea of the kind of space artists would like. It was hideous. It was a huge attic space, about 11,000 square feet. It had been originally designed as a warehouse, so was completely windowless. The roof sloped in on four sides, giving it an enclosed, claustrophobic feel. False walls and soffits tried to disguise the sloping roof, and as an "artistic" touch, someone had decided to run pink fluorescent lights all around the roof above the soffits. After the first month up there we turned off the pink lights – permanently. Although once for a laugh late at night, we turned off all the lights except for the pink fluorescents, and put on some heavy 1970s disco music. It made the perfect night club.

The space was divided into cubicles, but there was a concern that cubicle walls would "cut communication," so they were reduced to waist-high pony walls. They made an almost incomprehensible maze. My friend Charlie Rush came to see me once, when my desk was right next to the front entrance. But to reach my desk you had to go way to the back and then wind your way forward again through the maze of pony walls. Charlie eventually found his way to my desk and asked brightly, "Where’s the cheese?"

Swirly abstract patterns decorated the pony walls and carpet, completing the look of sheer gibbering insanity. With the lack of windows and clocks, it was like a poorly designed Vegas casino. This is the space I would work in, sixteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, for the next twelve years.

My Dianetics film, "How to Use Dianetics: A Visual Guidebook to the Human Mind," was released with fanfare at the Dianetics event on May 9th, 1992. It was a big hit with Scientologists, and we began to sell copies from the Org bookstores. But I wanted to get it into the hands of the Dianetics book buyers. That was who it had been written for. To do that, I started on the second part of my plan, to write and produce an infomercial we could put on TV. An infomercial, or "long-form advertising," would give us 30 minutes to explain and sell the product.

Jan Gildersleeve, who had been my media director since 1986, had a lot of experience with infomercials. She had worked extensively with Ron Popiel of Ronco fame and knew quite a bit about producing and running infomercials. Although Jan was not a Sea Org Member and lived in LA, I was still in touch with her by phone and occasional trips to LA. With her assistance, I started studying up on the subject, how they were written and structured.

There were several different styles on infomercial being done, and I settled on one called a "documercial," something that looked like a documentary but still hard-sold a product. It also sounded less commercial, something we always had to maintain a sensitivity to as we were a "Church." Jan hooked me up to some top infomercial people – Greg Renker, Tim Hawthorne and others – and they were able to give me some of the do's and don’ts. They recommended that the half hour program contain three "calls to action." That was a two-minute segment where the product was shown and hard sold. This was interspersed with the "program," composed of three eight minute segments.

What product to advertise was the subject of a lot of research and planning. Eventually we decided on a "complete Dianetics kit" including the book, the "How to Use Dianetics" video and four of Hubbard’s lectures on Dianetics.

The "Dianetics Kit" - book, video and audio cassettes

I completed the script and it went into production. Again, Mitch directed. As the main spokesman, we hired a Scientologist actor, Michael Fairman. Michael was one of those hard-working character actors that everyone recognizes but no one remembers his name. He had been a regular on "Hill Street Blues" and "Cagney and Lacey" and had done a zillion other TV shows and films. He was wonderful to work with, bringing a sense of both authority and warm friendliness to the part. For the "calls to action" we used a young novice actress named Kelly Yaegerman. She was a real live-wire, and managed to make the Dianetics Kit sound both essential and sexy.

When we completed the half hour program, I arranged to have it tested with a focus group. I probably have the distinction of being the only person in Scientology who has ever actually tested something out with a focus group. We used a company in LA, and they had two separate groups tested. They watched the program holding little dials that they moved to indicate how interested they were, then there was a discussion afterwards. This was fascinating. One of the things we discovered is that they simply did not believe it. They did not believe that a person could have a situation handled so rapidly with Dianetics. On the program, it looked like it had been handled in a few minutes. We re-edited it, dissolving between a series of sessions to show passage of time. With this and a few other tweaks, it was ready to go on the air.

Interestingly, the Cine staff resented having to re-edit the program. They were done with it, and for me to ask for a re-edit indicated I had not done it correctly the first time. I was therefore "out-ethics" and was imposing on the "upstat" Cine staff to correct my error. I tried to explain the concept of focus group testing to them, but they just didn’t get it. You were supposed to get it right the first time. After all, Hubbard always did, didn’t he? Who could argue with that sort of logic?

To handle the media placement, we hired Williams Television Time in Santa Monica. Katie Williams, who ran the place, was known as the "queen of infomercials." She was a fireball and had built her company into the largest and most successful infomercial media buyer in the US in just a few short years. When we first started using them, they were bursting the seams of a small office building off Santa Monica Boulevard, and had set up several trailers in the parking lot to handle the overflow, while they planned their move into a huge office building nearby. Katie was enthusiastic about the Dianetics project. They would handle both the media booking and the reporting and analysis of the results.

To handle the calls, I retained West Telemarketing in Omaha, Nebraska. I was repeatedly challenged on the point of hiring an outside phone service – "Why can’t we just direct the calls to the Base and set up a few staff to take the calls?" I had to explain that when the infomercial aired, you could get 100 calls in a few minutes. When it wasn’t airing, operators would be idle. Calls could come in any time of the day or night. After I presented the facts, people could see the point – it was the only way to handle that volume efficiently. I went out to Omaha and met with the people there, and saw how they were set up – a huge space with row after row of operators. As soon as the phone rang from our infomercial, our script would pop onto the screen, so any operator could take the call. A key point was that there was no selling needed – the person was calling to order, so all that was needed was order takers. I was impressed with the operation.

At the end of 1992, we began piloting the "Dianetics Documercial." The results were not as good as I had hoped, but still, we were selling the Dianetics kits by the hundreds each week.
The final piece of the puzzle was our own internal "Dianetics Hotline." A key part of the package, in addition to the book, video and audio lectures, was the promise that buyers of the kit would have access to a toll-free Dianetics hotline, where trained Dianetics consultants would answer questions about Dianetics and help them with their Dianetics auditing. A glassed-in area had been created at the back of CMU (with, of course, an "artistic" squiggle across the glass), and there were two full-time operators posted there. One was Caroline Mustard’s son, Josh Charbonneau, a very funny and intelligent young man, and Pat Gualtieri, a veteran old-time Public Divisions staffer. Pat’s good humor was matched only by his girth. He genuinely cared about people and loved to talk, so he was perfect to man the phones. For any overflow, we had the rest of CMU staff, and a yell from the "1-800 Unit" would send everyone scrambling to the phones.

I enjoyed talking to people on the phones. These were people who had already bought the Dianetics Kits, so they were already interested and involved. And I felt like I was really helping people. These conversations with real people, helping them with their lives, seemed to make it all worthwhile.

They had a lot of intelligent questions about how to audit Dianetics. Their most common difficulty, it turned out, was finding someone to audit with – as they had to have another person. So we started a referral system. The names were all on computer, so it was simple to match them up with someone from the same ZIP code. This aspect of the campaign grew like wildfire, and soon we had hundreds of these "Dianetics Co-Auditing Groups" springing up.

Bill liked to micromanage the infomercial placements. I would go through the results every week and do a fairly detailed spreadsheet analysis of where we were getting results. Based on this, we would work out a strategy, and then Bill and I would race down to Santa Monica and go over the results with Katie. Bill liked to micromanage Williams Television Time as well, and we would often spend hours down there, going over their buys in detail. Katie was amazingly tolerant of this sort of thing, although I’m sure it drove her staff crazy.

The Dianetics Documercial was a constant flap. The results were never good enough, and any "downstat" was a calamity. Since joining Golden Era Productions, we would attend the weekly staff meetings held every Friday night in MCI. We would clear the tables out and set up the chairs theater-style. At that point there were between 400 and 500 Gold staff. The meetings followed a set formula – dictated, of course, by Hubbard. The first section was called "flaps and handlings." Each area had to get up and announce to the group what "flaps" (disasters, emergencies, downstats) they had in their area and what the "handling" was for the flap. The atmosphere was more Roman circus than business meeting, however, and the crowd wanted blood. They wanted all the gory details of the flap, and most importantly who had goofed and what the "Ethics handling" was going to be on that person. Any attempt to play down or justify a flap was greeted with jeers and catcalls. The crowd demanded ruthless justice on anyone who had slipped up.

Quite often, it fell to me to announce CMU flaps, particularly if it involved the Documercial. I found after a while that if you were at all hesitant or seemed unsure, the crowd would pounce like jackals on a wounded antelope. What worked, interestingly enough, was to appear to be angry – not at the crowd but at the situation. If I appeared to be angry and emphatic when I delivered my flap and handling, the crowd would go with me. I got pretty practiced at this. Others were not so lucky and it was common to see some luckless staff member dissolve into confusion or tears and get hauled away while their senior took over the announcement. It was brutal, and I came to despise the staff meetings.

"Lower Conditions" were also a part of daily life at Gold. Hubbard had devised a system of "conditions" (states of existence) and "formulas" (what you do to handle). These were rote and unalterable, and always followed in a set sequence. As you went up the conditions, carefully following each formula, you ascended from Normal to Affluence to Power. But as you went down the conditions, you descended to Emergency, Danger, Nonexistence, Liability, Doubt, Enemy, Treason, and Confusion. To ascend out of those conditions, you had to rigorously follow their formulas, and the application of these formulas was monitored by seniors and Ethics Officers.

The most difficult condition to get out of was Liability. You were supposed to "deliver an effective blow to the enemies of the group," then "make up the damage by personal contribution far beyond the ordinary demands of a group member." This consisted of an "amends project" on your own "personal time." As we were already working seven days a week, 16 or more hours a day, "personal time" was a bit of a joke. That meant sleep time.

Once you had completed this "amends project," you had to "apply for re-entry to the group by asking the permission of each member to rejoin and rejoining only by majority permission." Keeping in mind that Gold, at that time, was between 400 and 500 people, this became a Herculean task. What you had to do was write up the steps of your program, and then make about 100 copies of it. At every meal time, you had to pass these out in a flurry, get people to sign them, and then collect them all back up – and deal with the few nitpicking staff who would take you to task over the "effectiveness" of your blow to the enemy or the length of your amends project. It would take three or four days of this to get the majority required. It was an insane waste of time. I suggested several times that people should be allowed to petition only the staff of their division or department, but no, that was not what Hubbard had said.

People in "Lower Conditions" had even fewer rights than the other staff. They could not take breaks. They could not go to the Canteen for coffee or a snack. They were not allowed to drive their own cars. They were expected to work later than other staff.

To add to this already Draconian system of discipline, Hubbard had devised something called the "Team Share System." He said it was to make Gold staff realize that they had a stake in the organization, like a shareholder. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with actual shares. Each staff member was issued five cards, a Social Card, a Bonus Card, a Pay Card, a Chow Card and a Berthing Card. If anyone was guilty of an infraction, a senior or an Ethics Officer could "pull a card." If you lost your Social Card, you could not take any liberties or attend any events or parties. If you lost your Bonus Card, you would not be paid any bonuses. This was kind of a null card as we weren’t paid any bonuses anyway. If you lost your pay card you could not collect your pay. If you lost your Chow Card you had to eat beans and rice only. And if you lost your Berthing Card you had to sleep outside, or in your office – you could not go home. At the end of the issue laying all of this out, Hubbard blithely stated, "A system of awards also exists." Well, that was news to us. No "system of rewards" had ever been issued.

It was not surprising that the Team Share System kept falling out of use. Seniors and staff would just forget about it for months at a time. Then some huge effort would be made to "get it back in." Execs would agonize over "why the Team Share System won’t stay in." Any staff member could have told them, if they had dared. The system was hugely unpopular – because it was nuts.

So between lower conditions and losing cards, the average staff member was being chased through his paces like a rat through a maze.

If all that were not enough, David Miscavige added his own unique games to the mix. At one point, he had a hundreds of black baseball hats made, each one embroidered with the name of a job on the Base, everything from CO CMO Int down to the Gaffer in Gold. In Scientology, a person’s job is called his "hat." Miscavige claimed that he was wearing everyone’s hat, and therefore he had them all in his possession. He had a big shelving system made in MCI where the hats were displayed. To "get one’s hat back," one had to present a petition to Miscavige, showing how one was diligently doing one’s job. This went on for months and months. He loved to rub it in with anyone and everyone, high and low, that he had their hat.

Another time, he went on a kick of pinning big, obnoxious, neon-colored badges on people that said derogatory things on them, like "I am an SP," or "Stat Crasher" or just "Wheeeee!" (his favorite for Marketing staff). Again, you had to wear the badge at all times and petition Miscavige to have it removed. It was just raw degradation – to show he held the power and could make people do what he said.

I was seeing less and less of my family, but still kept in touch. In the summer of 1993, I found out from brother Kimball that he had gotten back together with Cathy Mullins, his college sweetheart. He had gone through a messy divorce with his previous wife, Deborah, years earlier. Then one day Cathy had found him. They had dated in college and in fact it had been Cathy who had gotten Kim into Scientology. She had gone to the Flagship Apollo in 1967 and had worked as a personal steward for Hubbard himself, but had gotten into trouble and had returned to the US and dropped out of Scientology for 30 years. Now she had found Kim again, and they had decided to get married. I was happy for them, and we promised to get together later in the year.

In August, I got a letter from Gwennie, and I was amazed to see that the return address was Dana Point, California – just over the mountains from Hemet! Gwennie had kept in touch over the years, sending me her graduation photos from Rutgers, and then postcards from various exotic locations as she and her surfer boyfriend Ben traveled around the world. They had ended up in Bali, surfing and living in a grass house. But now she was back, and living close by.
Nancy and I managed to get an OK to take a Sunday off and we drove over to see her. We took Highway 74 through the Cleveland National Forest and down into San Juan Capistrano. I found Gwennie’s address in Dana Point without a problem.

Jeff and Nancy visit Gwennie, 1993

The last time I had seen her she had been a 12 year old girl. Now she was a 24 year old woman – and drop-dead gorgeous. She gave me a big hug and introduced us to Ben, her big handsome surfer-dude. We spent a wonderful day together, exploring the beach while Ben surfed with his buddies. Gwennie filled me in on her plans – she was looking for production assistant work in the film industry. I couldn’t get over it, she had grown up so beautiful, talented and bright. We promised to keep in touch and Nancy and I drove back to the Base. In fact, we did meet once more that year, at a big family Thanksgiving. Mom was there, Kim and his new wife Cathy, two of Kim’s kids, Nancy and I, and Gwennie. Although Gwennie and I would keep in touch by letter, we were not to meet again for another twelve years – and then under very different circumstances.

I kept in close touch with Mom. Although we were now forbidden to make family calls without an Ethics Officer secretly monitoring the call, I got around that by calling Mom every Sunday morning from a pay phone in town. It was strictly verboten, but I didn’t care. Mom's older brother, my Uncle Frank, ended up moving to a retirement trailer park in Hemet, just a few minutes from the Kirby Garden Apartments, where Nancy and I were now living. One day, Mom coyly announced that she knew where Golden Era Productions was. She had driven past the Base and had seen the sign. After that, she would mention to me whenever she was going out to see Frank, and Nancy and I would sneak out during our Sunday morning "CSP" time and meet Mom at Frank’s. Again, this was completely forbidden, but I didn’t care. It was a minor revolt and it meant I could see Mom.

In September, we started preparing for a huge, confidential event. CMU got an advance briefing. Miscavige had been negotiating with the IRS in secret and, amazingly, had reached a settlement with them. The word was that we were going to get full religious tax exemption for Scientology. Our job was to prepare a bunch of booklets and materials explaining the tax agreement that would be handed out to Scientologists. It was all very hush-hush – no one was to know anything about it until it happened and was announced. The event date was put off several times, as the final agreement had not come through. Then all of a sudden it was full speed ahead and the event was set for a week later. Orgs were scrambling like mad to get people to the event. The LA Sports Arena was rented for the event, and flights and buses were chartered to bring as many Scientologists to LA as possible. We worked around the clock for most of that week to get everything ready. On the day of the event, we were still at the printers when the event started, packing all of the printed materials into delivery trucks and rushing down to the venue. We delivered the materials to the staff who were to hand them out after the event, then snuck into the arena.

The place was packed. There must have been ten thousand people there, the biggest assembly of Scientologists that had ever been brought together – and that will probably ever be brought together. A mammoth set had been constructed at one end, huge columns and torches. Miscavige was in his element. He stood at a raised podium, every eye in the place upon him, as he rolled out the story of how he and RTC Inspector General Ethics Marty Rathbun had been walking down the street in DC and on a whim decided to stop in and see IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg, and how that chance meeting had ultimately resulted in complete tax exemption for the Church of Scientology. It was a spellbinding story, with himself as the hero, and he told it masterfully.

"The war is over!" he screamed at the climax of his presentation. On cue, the band struck up triumphant music, streamers showered down on the audience, and the big screens behind Miscavige erupted with the words "THE WAR IS OVER" flashing again and again. The crowd went completely nuts.

It seemed that Scientology had won out at last. No more battles, no more enemies. Now, I thought maybe, just maybe, we can concentrate on disseminating Scientology and forget all the politics and infighting and defensive actions.

I carried on working on the Dianetics Campaign, trying to codify exactly how to get people using Dianetics, forming groups and eventually coming in to the orgs. We had sold 40,000 Dianetics Kits, and had managed to create nearly 1,000 Dianetics groups. This latter fact caught the attention of the senior execs, and it was decided to do a video about these groups and show it at the May 9th Event for 1994. A small film crew was sent out from Gold all over the US to film these people and their "wins" with Dianetics, and the footage was brought back and edited into a half hour documentary about Dianetics groups springing up "just like 1950." The film actually ended up being poignant and down-to-earth, unlike a lot of Scientology productions, which tend to be super-glossy and over-the-top. The people were very real, and their descriptions of their co-auditing and their wins were from the heart. The Musicians scored it with a lot of country fiddle and acoustic guitar. Ronnie Miscavige narrated it. The "Grassroots Dianetics" video was shown at the 1994 May 9th Event and was a big hit.

Getting people from their little Dianetics groups into the Orgs was the final step, the final link. Phil Anderson, one of my original staff from the Strategic Book Marketing Unit, was in charge of the Dianetics Campaign, and he and I decided to tackle the matter of Dianetics Seminars once and for all. These seminars had been tried many times over the years, some successful, some not. We researched it out and found out what made them successful when they were. We did a lot of surveying. And we carefully worked out a turnkey Dianetics Seminar – three promotional mailings to Dianetics book buyers in an area, phoning to the Dianetics Book Buyer list a week prior to the event, and a complete script for the seminar event itself, including showing the "How to Use Dianetics" Video and splitting them up for co-auditing. We had it figured out right down to the name tags.

Phil and I flew out to Atlanta and piloted the whole thing there. The org was thrilled that we were actually there to help them – I gathered that they mostly got stat and money demands from Management, not much hands-on help. We held the seminar in a nearby hotel and had almost a hundred people in the room. By the end of the seminar, most of them were excited and winning. It looked like we had a great formula.

We piloted it in about twenty other locations, all over the country. Phil would go out and do them, sometimes with Pat Gualtieri. We were pulling in an average of 50 people over a weekend, just like clockwork. Often it was 100 or more. And these people were coming in BMWs and Mercedes – intelligent, college educated people, eager to find out about Dianetics.

It was a turnkey seminar package, and it was ready for implementation. The problem was, I could not get anyone interested. In fact, my proposed Dianetics Seminar package was rejected by Exec Strata. Why? I was holding the seminars in hotels. Therefore the orgs could not count the attendance on their "Bodies in the Shop" statistic! I am not kidding, this was the objection. The seminars had to be held in the org, period. I pointed out that our seminar pattern was drawing 50 to 100 people on a weekend, and most orgs did not have space for 50 to 100 people. Atlanta Org, for instance, would have been hard pressed to fit 15 or 20 people in their Division 6 area. "Well, then, they’ll just have to hold smaller seminars," they said. It was final, they had to be held in the orgs. And by org staff, not by some outside marketing tour.

We tried to get orgs to run them, but little actually happened, and the "perfect" Dianetics Seminar pattern died a quiet death. Once again, everything had been in place for a boom. And once again, it had been dropped.

The Base continued to expand. With the completion of Building 36, the Base security perimeter had been enlarged. A massive project had been done to fence the property in with razor-wire fences, cameras, and motion detectors. A new central guard booth was constructed next to Building 36, with Security headquarters set up in the basement of that building. Next to Building 36, a huge new film lab had been constructed, so that Gold would no longer pay exorbitant lab fees to have films developed and printed. Sea Org crew were trained on how to process film and maintain a dust-free environment. The Film Lab was a huge investment in money and time. Unfortunately, it would end up being used for only a few years, until the industry went digital – something one would have thought the "powers that be" should have predicted.

Beyond the Film Lab, the foundations were being laid for the "Berthing Buildings" – four huge staff apartment buildings.

One day after the evening muster, we were all ushered back inside MCI and given an urgent survey to fill out. One of the questions, seemingly innocently asked, was "Would you rather live in town or on the Base and why?"

I knew there was no such thing as an innocent question. There was no doubt that we were going to be moving to the Base so the only possible reason for such a question would be to ferret out and handle "counterintention." We had to put our names on the surveys, so I knew the wrong answer would inevitably get one in trouble. So I answered that I would rather live on the Base (of course!) and gave all the reasons I knew they wanted to hear. I had gotten pretty good at surviving.

Many people unfortunately missed that point and answered candidly. One of them was my wife.

Late that night, the entire Base was called to an emergency meeting in MCI. There was no time to set up seats so we all stood. RTC staff lined the sides of the hall like riot police. After a wait, Miscavige came in and took the podium. He was furious, and began screaming and yelling, his face turning practically purple. Some people had dared to answer the survey that they would rather live in town! What out-ethics criminals! What degraded dilletantes! These people had "other fish to fry." They wanted to be able to get to shops on Sunday morning. They didn’t want to be woken up at all hours of the night to handle some emergency. They wanted personal time away from the Base. These people were obviously off-purpose scum.

Then he singled out one person for special abuse. Nancy. He read her survey in full. One of the reasons she had given was that she wanted to be able to decorate her apartment the way she wanted, not according to some "enforced Scottish motif." A gasp went through the hall. Everyone knew the "Scottish motif" had been dictated by Hubbard himself! This was the worst sort of heresy!

Nancy was removed from her post - she was writing ad copy at the time - and sent to do menial work, what they called "deck work" as a holdover from the ship. She had to do her lower conditions and petition to come back to the group. When she returned to CMU, she started working answering the phones in the 1-800 Unit. But she was broken, she wasn’t the happy, funny Nancy I knew. She became withdrawn and didn’t want to talk, even to me. Give her time, I thought. She’ll spring back like she always does.

One Saturday in May 1995, Bill called me into his office. There was a big event being held that night, the May 9th Event, and Nancy and a bunch of other people had gone down to LA to print up the promotion and get it to the event hall. Nancy had taken our car, the Mazda RX7.

Bill had me sit down. It appeared he had something serious to tell me, yet he seemed oddly smug.

"Nancy has blown," he said.

Chapter Twelve: Over the Rainbow

2008-07-10T22:16:00.000-07:00

The Int Scientology Base, circa 1989

Scientology’s International Base is located on the sloping foothills at the north end of California’s San Jacinto Valley, about ninety miles east of Los Angeles. When I first moved there in 1989, the valley was still mostly a rural farming community – sheep still grazed on fields near the Base. But the area was being rapidly taken over by LA’s "Inland Empire" suburbs, spreading out east from Riverside like a virus. Nearby Moreno Valley had already achieved the dubious status of "fastest growing city in the US," and cookie-cutter suburbs were starting to spill over the hill.

The San Jacinto Valley hosted two towns: San Jacinto, at the east end of the valley was a sleepy farm community that had maintained its picturesque downtown area, more out of neglect that any attempt at historic restoration. Hemet, located to the south of the valley, was the upstart younger sibling, complete with a row of franchises, mini-malls, and fast food joints along its main drag, Florida Avenue - including a big Wal-Mart.

The little resort community where the Base was located had been known for more than half a century as Gilman Hot Springs. It had been a favorite vacation resort in the 1920’s, and had hosted movie stars, gangsters and socialites who would motor out from LA to relax and soak. I once came across an old deco letterhead for Gilman Hot Springs showing an illustration that looked like something out of the Arabian Nights, all palm trees and exotic-looking buildings. You could still see the shells of the old baths set into the side of the hill – dry as a bone since the 1950s.

In addition to a spa, the Gilman brothers had built a two story hotel, the Hotel Del Sol, and two groups of bungalows, the "Ranchos" and the "200s" (after their room numbers). After Highway 79 was built, bisecting the property, they had put in a restaurant called the Massacre Canyon Inn – commemorating, for some reason, a famous local Indian massacre. Two blocks of rooms were attached to the restaurant – "The Lodges." At the upper eastern end, they had added a swimming pool and a bunch of larger modern apartments, "The Villas." And at the far eastern end of the property were a group of apartments called the "G Units" or "Gs," adjacent to a nine-hole golf course, also part of the property.

The run-down resort had been purchased by the Church of Scientology in 1978 as an alternate secret "summer headquarters" for Hubbard. Old timers still called the place "SHQ" or just "S." Hubbard, then living at a confidential location in La Quinta, California, directed that the property be purchased by another front organization of his invention, the "Scottish Highlands Quietude Club." Hubbard was apparently tickled by the idea that the San Jacinto Valley resembled the Scottish Highlands. He must have only seen the area in the early spring, when the hills were actually green for a few short weeks before turning permanently yellow. Nonetheless, he dictated that all building renovations were to be done in a "Scottish motif." This was done after a fashion - all the buildings were given blue tile roofs, whitewashed walls, and stone veneer detailing. The result was more Disney than Dundee.

At the top of the property, a house had been renovated for Hubbard. It was called Bonnie View, as it commanded a sweeping view of the valley. Hubbard, however, had never lived there.

The "shore story" for the local San Jacinto and Hemet "wogs" was that this facility was Golden Era Productions, a film production company for the Church of Scientology. The locals were not to know that there were any Scientology management organizations or key executives on the property. To bolster the illusion of a film company, the swimming pool had been converted to an approximation of a 19th century clipper ship, with masts, rigging, and decks. The locals were told it was a "movie set," although nothing was ever filmed there. It was called the "Star of California."

The "Star of California

The Sea Organization has never been known for its creativity in naming buildings and places. In fact, they usually take the simplest course of keeping all the old place names, but abbreviating them. Thus, the Massacre Canyon Inn, now the staff cafeteria, or "galley," became "MCI." The Hotel Del Sol, which now housed the Senior Executive Strata and the Commodore’s Messenger Org International, became simply "Del Sol." The Qualifications Division, where staff received their training and auditing, was in "The Spa." RTC was housed "up the hill" in the Villas.

By the time the Planetary Dissemination Organization arrived in January of 1989, the Base was bursting at the seams. There were over 700 staff, and growing every day. Most of Gold’s filmmaking activities were crammed into the Garage, which was a jumble of painted backdrops, costumes, props, and administrative desks. The actual film shooting was done in a miniature sound stage on the south side called, for some obscure reason. "The Gym." The Golden Era Musicians, who did the music for films and events, had a newly-built state-of-the-art Music Studio on the north side, complete with an expensive Massenburg mixing board. Audio production – the duplication and packaging of Hubbard’s lectures on cassettes – was jammed into a building next to the Music Studio. And all of Gold’s executives and administrative staff were crammed into temporary trailers uphill from the Ranchos, awaiting construction of a huge office building on the south side.

Security at the Base was tight. We could not tell anyone, even family, where we were located. The property was fenced in on all sides to keep out intruders, and had a main Security booth near the garage. Every gate had a security lock with a combination, and Security also maintained a mountaintop lookout to the north, called Eagle, manned at all times by a Security Guard with a high-powered telescope and, it was rumored, a high-powered rifle.

As there was no office space for PDO, five trailers, one of them a bathroom, had been hauled in and parked along a rutted dirt road on the northern side of the property. We set up shop in these and began production. With our move to the Base, we began to be referred to as "Central Marketing Unit," or "CMU." The two names, Planetary Dissemination Org and Central Marketing Unit, would change back and forth several times over the years. It was felt that "Central Marketing Unit" was too commercial-sounding for a Church, but here at the Base, amongst us insiders, it served.

At one time, all of the Base staff had lived on the property, in the G Units, the Lodges, the 200s, and various houses scattered about the property. Some senior staff lived in the Villas, including Miscavige. With the influx of new people, there was no way to house everyone on the property, so apartment units were rented in Hemet, about eight miles away - the Kirby Garden Apartments, the Devonshire Apartments, and the Vista Apartments (which were reserved for senior executives).

After living for years at the Big Blue Complex, the Devonshire Apartments seemed like heaven to Nancy and I. At the Complex, we had lived on the fourth floor of the main building in a one-room apartment with a sink and a toilet. To bathe, we had to walk down the hall to one of two big communal showers, one for men and one for women. At the Devonshire, we shared a two bedroom, two bath apartment with another couple, and the place had a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. It seemed like unbelievable luxury.

Staff were transported to and from the Base in several large old school buses, which had been painted white and emblazoned with the "Golden Era Productions" logo. They left early in the morning and returned late at night. Nancy and I still had the old Honda, so we drove in every day, picking up stragglers who’d missed the bus.

As the Director of Advertising and Promotion, I had the middle trailer on the west side, which was full of my artists, writers and magazine editors. The trailer to the north of me housed the Research area, and the trailer to the south was Marketing Execution. Across the road was the PDO executive trailer. At times it seemed like an old Western town – we were always tracking in either dust or mud from the dirt road outside.

I had a good group under me. My Creative Director was a young deaf man named Thomas Bourke. He and I had worked together in the Dissem Bureau in Clearwater and were good friends. He could lip-read flawlessly and operated amazingly well without hearing. Under him were a variety of artists and designers, each with a different talent. Carrie Cook was the most talented and the easiest to work with. She had been a designer in New York and knew what she was doing. Cynthia Coleman was a competent designer, but often temperamental. Kerrie Francis was an accomplished oil painter, but nearly useless on a computer. Betsy Byrne was talented in layout and typography and easy to work with – I started using her for all the public campaigns. These, plus a few writers and magazine editors, made up the team. I ran them with a light touch and strong direction. I knew you could not be heavy-handed with creative people or their work would start to suffer.

As a group, we had a lot of esprit when we first hit the Base, and could get rowdy. I remember having dinner for the first time in MCI. We all sat together, and soon, as usual, we were joking and laughing, and we got pretty loud. I soon noticed that the rest of the dining room was oddly silent, and a lot of faces were turned to see who was making all that noise. It was our first indication that the Base was not as freewheeling as LA had been. There was an atmosphere of caution, of looking over one’s shoulder to see who was watching, an unwillingness to stand out too much or be too conspicuous. At first, this attitude puzzled me. I had expected that at Scientology’s International Base, the "tone level" would be high, the "affinity" and "communication" would be high, and people would be friendly and outgoing. But it seemed to be just the opposite. After I’d been there a while and saw how the Base operated, I began to understand.

One of the basic principles of Scientology is that if a person is critical of another, it is because they have committed an "overt act" (harmful act) against that person. To justify the wrong they have done, they become critical of the other person. Any criticism or "natter" was therefore seen as a sign that the person had committed "overts," or crimes.

Hubbard had further developed this "technology" into what he called the "False Purpose Rundown," which was to handle "Black PR." He defined "Black PR" as "false vilification of a well-intentioned person or group." Hubbard was, of course, "well intentioned," so any vilification of Hubbard fell under this dictum. By extension, Miscavige was, of course, "well intentioned," so any criticism of Miscavige was also "Black PR." And so on down the command chain. It was definitely a top-down datum – obviously, anyone senior on the command chain had "better intentions" than the junior staffer. Therefore a senior being critical of a junior did not fall under "Black PR."

Anyone hearing natter or criticism was required to report it – even if it was your best friend or spouse. Failing to file a "Knowledge Report" after one had heard such criticism was itself an offense.

The first action when "Black PR" was reported was to bring the person in for a "Rollback" interview. The person was questioned as to where they had heard this critical datum. If they had not heard it from anyone else, then they were the originator of it, so it was to one’s advantage to name someone else as the originator.

Once the "Black PR" has been found, the person is given "Security Checking" on an E-Meter in order to unearth the "crimes" which had inspired this calumny. The Sec Checker keeps at it, hour after hour, getting the person to confess to crime after crime until they recant and publicly retract the "Black PR." This was the "end phenomenon" – a "viewpoint shift."

So everyone at the Base was understandably cautious about what they said, and if they had any negative opinions about what was going on, they kept them strictly to themselves.

The orders and directives of the senior executives were referred to as "Command Intention." This was a term that had originated in Hubbard’s time. When a person joins the Sea Org they take an oath, and one of the points is, "I promise to uphold, forward, and carry out Command Intention." Anyone found not energetically carrying out the orders of Command is accused of having "counter-intention," or "CI."

There was one way to respond to an order from a senior, and that was just a "Yes, Sir," and hop to. Questioning the order, asking for clarification, any objection to the order or any back-chat at all was termed "backflash," which Hubbard defined as "any unnecessary response to an order." Anything other than a "Yes Sir" was deemed unnecessary.

And there were plenty of executives around. In the beginning of the Sea Org, ranks had been established based on service and production. One could work up from "Swamper," the lowest, through Petty Officer, Midshipman, Warrant Officer and so on up to Captain. Originally, one was only required to address one’s senior in rank as "Sir." A Petty Officer in a higher organization still had to address a Midshipman as "Sir," even if they worked at a lower echelon. And only officers were addressed as "Sir." This was all covered in "Flag Order 38" one of the first issues of the Sea Org.

All that had changed at the Base. An addendum to Flag Order 38 had come out saying that anyone in a higher organization was senior to anyone in a lower organization and had to be addressed as "Sir" whether they were an officer or not. I had, over the years, advanced to Warrant Officer. Now I found that I had to address even green teenagers as "Sir," if they worked for CMO International or Exec Strata.

And they did. There were legions of what was called "Programs Operators." Every activity on the Base was put into extensive programs, with pages after pages of program targets. It was the job of these Programs Ops, usually young girls, to roam the Base and demand "compliance" to program targets. In order to be able to count a done target on their statistic, they had to have a formal "Compliance Report." So on Thursday Morning just before the stat reporting cutoff of 2pm, one would find hordes of these Programs Ops descending on staff like angry wasps.

I think that teenage girls should never be given drugs, alcohol, or power. Because they become addicted. They would descend on staff and "demand compliance." Any backtalk got a shout of "BACKFLASH!!" and "You’re CI." If they weren’t addressed as "Sir" they would scream "Get your Flag Order 38 IN!" They would threaten to send you to Sec Checking to uncover your "crimes." They became, many of them, holy terrors.

It seemed to me, after I had been at the Base for a while, that for every person who was actually doing something, there were legions of Programs Ops, Inspectors, officious martinets and executives of various echelons, all demanding something from the staff member and threatening dire consequences if not "complied to." It was, in a word, top-heavy to the max. And it was all aimed at making staff "compliant."

All of which led to a sort of arrogant elitism, a Base-wide, rigid caste system that was defined by who had to call who "Sir." RTC looked down on CMO International, CMO Int looked down on Exec Strata. And at the bottom of the heap was Golden Era Productions, looked down on by everyone.

In this atmosphere, the average staff member was somewhat cowed. The safest course was to simply keep one’s mouth shut and do as you were told, try to blend in and keep a low profile. I, of course, had never been much good at that sort of thing. I instantly found myself at odds with the zeitgeist of the Base.

But then, as a marketing group, we were cut a bit of slack. We were expected to be creative, as long as we didn’t color too far outside the lines. We were expected to come up with innovative ideas. Giving marketing presentations to a group of executives was always interesting. The room would be dead silent during the presentation, no one sure how to react until Miscavige had either given it his blessing or censured it – then the assembled executives would jump on the offered bandwagon. The best execs, the real political players, became expert at reading Miscavige’s moods.

CMU’s main job, when we first began working at the Base, was packaging – new book covers, course pack covers and lecture series cassette binders. All of Hubbard’s works were being repackaged and reissued. Apparently, according to what we were told, all of Hubbard’s books and writings had been combed through in exacting detail by LRH Technical Research and Compilation (RTRC) staff, comparing them with the handwritten manuscripts, original lecture recordings and notes. Everything had been verified as "100% On-Source," which meant they were completely verified as being true to his originals – Hubbard, of course, being "Source" of Scientology. This was a big deal with Scientologists – they wanted pure Hubbard, nothing changed. This would be a big sales point for the newly released materials.

Our job was to design the packaging and keep up with the releases. Each product being released – something like 200 in all – had to have packaging and promotional literature. We had to hustle to keep up with the flow of these new materials.

To accommodate this volume of new releases, Miscavige has started to hold six major televised events every year – March 13th (Hubbard’s birthday), May 9th (Celebrating the first publication of Dianetics), the Freewinds Maiden Voyage Anniversary on June 6, Auditors Day in September, the IAS Anniversary in October, and a big event on New Years Eve. Each of these events were videoed by the Golden Era Productions film crew, and then the resulting program was sent out to all of the orgs, who held their own events several weeks later and showed the video.

Earlier in Scientology’s history, Hubbard had held something called "Congresses," usually several times a year. He found these a good way to get Scientologists briefed on the latest "tech," and incidentally boost course enrollments and book sales. After Hubbard ceased doing them, Scientology Orgs took over holding them and soon found that they provided a quick and easy boost to the income. Hubbard eventually had to forbid them, as he found that after each artificial burst, the stats would crash lower than before. "Repeating Congresses" were tearing orgs up. But with Hubbard gone, Miscavige reestablished these frequent events as a way to jack up the sales stats six times a year. He would preside at most of these, acting as Master of Ceremonies, briefing on the latest "expansion news" and releasing the newly packaged Hubbard materials. As to the inevitable dip in stats after each event, he had a ready answer – he had done his job by masterminding the event and the release, but others had failed to follow up on his brilliance. This became his constant litany.

With six events a year now being held, one every two months, and several new releases for each event, our lives became a scramble from one release to the next. Long hours and "all-nighters" became the order of the day, to meet the impossible deadlines.

We had other odd jobs as well. One of them was to produce special course certificates for Tom Cruise. It was an open secret that Cruise was frequently on the Base, doing an intensive program of Scientology training and auditing. Each time he completed a course or an auditing "Rundown," we would prepare a certificate, an ornate, handmade job that would take hours to craft. For "security" purposes, these certificates were made out to "Thomas Mapother," his real name. Every once in a while we’d catch a glimpse of the man himself as he bombed between the trailers in his sports car, raising a cloud of dust. He’d hit the button on the security intercom, shout "Cruise!" and peel off down Highway 79, leaving a star-struck and dust-choked CMU behind.

Once a week, every Saturday, all staff on the Base participated in "Renovations" or "Renos." This went from early morning to dinnertime, with each staff member assigned to some task that would contribute to upgrading the buildings and the grounds. While building contractors were hired to do the major construction work, Sea Org crew did everything else – including framing, drywall, mudding, block wall, stonework, planting and landscaping. I enjoyed getting out once a week and getting some exercise and fun. In letters to my Mom I explained it as "like a kibbutz – we all contribute to building the place."

The expansion plans for the Base were massive. One of my earliest "Renos" jobs was working as part of a team to make a scale model of what the Base was going to look like when finished. We worked from topographical maps and architectural blueprints for accuracy, and ended up with a model about four by six feet. It looked amazing – there were to be buildings for Gold, RTC and CMO International, a big manor house for LRH (for his return!), a film lab, four apartment buildings for staff, access tunnels under the road, and a huge sound stage shaped like a Scottish castle!

MCI, the staff cafeteria, was already under renovation, and so for a few months we ate our meals on the south lawn under a big, windy tent. The crunch of sand in our food became a familiar sensation.

The first new building was to be a big three-story office building on the south side to house the Gold administrative areas and manufacturing facilities – E-Meter manufacturing, audio reproduction (Hubbard’s lectures on cassette), and shipping. Soon we saw the foundations appear and the huge building started to take shape.

Despite the grueling schedule, Nancy and I still managed to get a bit of time off now and then – a "liberty" every second week if our "stats were up." Nancy’s family sent her money to buy a car, and with that and a trade in of the Honda, we managed to get a Mazda RX-7, a car we loved. When we managed to get a day off, it was fun to bomb around in our little sports car. We explored Idyllwild, a mountain resort town in the nearby San Jacinto mountains, and went shopping in Palm Springs.

Nancy with the new car, downtown Hemet

Every Sunday morning, we had until noon to clean our apartment, do laundry, and do some shopping in Hemet – usually at the Wal-Mart. This Sunday morning personal cleaning time was called "CSP," an acronym for "Clean Ship Program," after the original program on the Apollo that had instituted the weekly cleaning time. We had a phone in our apartment and I’d call Mom every Sunday morning.

Nancy worked in the Marketing Execution area, and was responsible for executing the Scientology Campaign that we had devised in LA. The Dianetics Campaign was being run by Caroline Mustard. We weren’t doing car racing anymore, but Bill wasn’t done with sports sponsorships yet. He had hatched a scheme for Dianetics to sponsor Ted Turner’s 1990 Goodwill Games. The Goodwill Games had been devised by Turner in response to the politics and boycotts surrounding the 1980 and 1984 Olympics. The first Goodwill Games had been held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1986, and Turner had scheduled the second for the summer of 1990. Through our Media Director, Jan Gildersleeve, a sponsorship was arranged.

A new Sea Org recruit was brought in to supervise the effort, Gabrielle Allen. Gab was an attractive lady who had attained the highest OT Level, OT VIII, as a Scientology public. She had been part of the effort to get Dianetics released in both Russia and China, and was seen as something of a PR whiz. Recruiting Gabrielle was considered a feather in CMU’s cap. She began extensive preparations to make the most of the Dianetics sponsorship.

Bill didn’t wait around to see this sponsorship come to fruition. In early 1990, he "blew" – the Sea Org term for someone who just up and leaves – jumps the fence. Ronnie Miscavige, Marketing Executive International and Bill’s senior, called me to his office and said I would have to take over as CO CMU.

I had no burning desire to do so. Having seen and experienced the mindset of the Base, I knew that I would be right in the epicenter of the top-heavy micromanagement. But Ronnie informed me that Bill had been "recovered," which means they had located him and brought him back to the Base. Ronnie said he wanted to put Bill back on as CO CMU, but not until he was "cleaned up." Bill had been assigned to menial work – "mest work" it was called, from the Scientology acronym for matter-energy-space-time. He was put on maintenance of the grounds. It was expected that his cleanup might take a year, and Ronnie asked me to hold the post until then. I reluctantly agreed.

Bill had gotten off easy. Anyone else would have been assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force, the RPF, but Bill was a favorite of the Miscaviges. He was given an easy second chance. I began to see that the application of discipline on the Base had everything to do with whether or not you were in David Miscavige’s good or bad books.

There was no question as to who was running the Base and, by extension, international Scientology. Miscavige presided at management meetings, issued a constant stream of orders, and roamed the Base with an entourage of executives, barking out commands. His only erstwhile rival, Pat Broeker, had mysteriously disappeared several years earlier, and was never spoken of. Following Hubbard’s death, we had assumed that the Broekers would be taking over Scientology. After all, an issue had appeared, supposedly written by Hubbard just before his death, naming Pat and Annie Broeker "Loyal Officers" and, seemingly, his heirs apparent. But in April of 1988, Miscavige had suddenly and mysteriously cancelled the issue, saying it had been forged by Broeker and hadn’t been written by Hubbard after all. No replacement issue from Hubbard was forthcoming to clarify succession – and Miscavige assumed control. Pat Broeker was never seen again. Annie Broeker, now using her maiden name, Tidman, resurfaced, quiet and chastened. She took over as the CO of the "Commodore’s Messenger Org Gold," a special unit of the CMO that supervised Golden Era Productions.

As CO CMU, frequent meetings became part of my routine. Some were presided over by Miscavige, others were not. A key meeting was called "ICC," or International Coordinating Committee. It was composed of the senior execs of CMO International, known as the "Watchdog Committee," and the Senior Executive Strata under ED Int. Too often, these just became a series of demands for things needed from CMU. I would leave each meeting with a long list of things needed by each executive, and knowing there was no way I could get it all done with the existing staff. We had grown slightly, to about 30 people, but were still far short of the 54 we had in LA. And we were doing about ten times the work.

My least favorite meeting, however, was the Int Base Financial Planning Committee, which was to me like going for a three-hour root canal. I hated finance, long meetings and internal politics, and this was a heady dose of all three. It was attended by the heads of various Base Units who relied on Sea Org Collections for funding. Sea Org Collections worked like this: every Scientology Organization in the world would send the bulk of their local income to their Continental Office, keeping only enough to barely cover their weekly operating expenses. The Continental Office then forwarded the funds to the International Finance Office. The bulk of that money went directly into Sea Org Reserves and was untouchable by mere mortals. A portion of it came to the Int Base FP Committee to support the Base organizations. Golden Era Productions was expected to make its own way through the sale of Hubbard’s taped lectures and E-Meters, but all the other units vied for a portion of this SO Collections amount. The main two contenders were Central Marketing and the Office of Special Affairs. OSA was the reincarnation of the old Guardian’s Office, responsible for public relations, legal, and some shadowy intelligence and covert operations functions. They came every week with huge demands for funds for attorneys and private investigators. We were getting maybe $500,000 a week to the Int FP, and OSA’s demands would often take most of that. When it came to a showdown, OSA simply claimed their expenses were "vital to the survival of the Church." End of discussion.

All of which meant less and less funding for the Dianetics Campaign. It was down to half of its earlier budget, with most of that going to promotion for the upcoming Goodwill Games, rather than for what I considered standard promotional actions. Even our TV ads were centered on the Goodwill Games. We had filmed an ad with an Olympic gymnast, Charles Lakes, who was a Scientologist, and had started airing that, promoting the book and the sponsorship. But sales continued to plummet. Much as I might have liked to get out of that sponsorship and back to mainline bookselling, we were committed.

In the middle of 1990, I flew up to Seattle for the opening of the Goodwill Games. Gabrielle had been up there for a week with a team of PRs preparing for the events. When I saw how big the event was, and how little visibility there really was for Dianetics on the ground, I was shocked. Dianetics was almost invisible except for a few banners dwarfed by the venues and by other advertising. We had some receptions for key people from the publishing industry – at one of them, John Travolta showed up to sign autographs. But overall it seemed that Dianetics was just another little voice shouting for attention amidst hundreds of advertisers – including some of the very biggest. How were these sports sponsorships ever supposed to sell books?

Meanwhile, the demand was on to develop more "raw public" campaigns. With Hubbard’s book about the Purification Rundown, Clear Body, Clear Mind, being reissued, Miscavige also wanted to be able to announce to the Scientology public (at an event, of course) that there was going to be a big public campaign for the book. We were given the task of creating it. I had a new CMU staff member, Janadair Swanson, assigned as the "Purification Product Manager." I walked her through the creation of the campaign, and we made a television ad for the book. I was still fascinated with computer graphics, and I had an ad made showing a transparent human body morphing into a river and back into a body, showing how the body got polluted with toxins and clean again.

We had a break in that Kirstie Alley agreed to be the spokesperson for the campaign. She liked the Purification Rundown as she had been helped by it. She was starring in "Cheers" and was at the height of her popularity.

Somehow, Janadair misunderstood how Kirstie’s image was to be used. She produced a poster with Kirstie’s face on it, promoting the book, and this went out to the bookstores for the launch. However, when Kirstie saw one in a bookstore, she blew up, claiming that she never approved a poster. Before I knew it, this "flap" had reached Miscavige, and Janadair was hauled off to the RPF. An error like this should have merited some minor discipline, but Janadair was not liked by Miscavige. And there I was, with a new campaign launched, a tiny budget, and no Marketing Manager to run it.

To cope with the campaign and get it going, I took the researcher who had worked on the campaign, Linda Sukkestad, and put her on as Purification Marketing Manager. Linda was one of my original staff from the Strategic Book Marketing Unit. While not brilliant creatively, she was a reliable hard worker.

Within a few weeks, she too was assigned to the RPF on some minor infraction. I objected to Ronnie, but he said there was nothing he could do.

This was too much for me. How could I run a unit when key staff could just be arbitrarily assigned to the RPF on any pretext? And why was it that anyone attempting to run the Purification Campaign was suddenly railroaded into the RPF? How could someone like Dendiu blow the Base and just get a slap on the wrist, while other staff would have the book thrown at them for a minor infraction? It made no sense, and the more I tried to make sense of it, the crazier I got. And there was no one I could talk to about it – any objection would be deemed to be "natter" and would end me up in a Security Check. I ended up losing it completely, screaming and yelling uncontrollably at an RTC staff member who happened to visit my office at the wrong time.

By the time Dendiu was deemed to be "handled" sufficiently to resume post, I was a train wreck. I was tired of fighting to salvage these campaigns that no one else seemed to have the slightest interest in. I was sick of the craziness, the politics, the endless meetings and visits from Programs Operators.

Bill was re-appointed to the CO CMU post, and Ronnie thanked me for doing a good job holding the post in his absence. Bill, however, was not so generous. The minute he reappeared on the scene, the denigration started again. The plummeting Dianetics stats were all because of my inept management. I was a failure. Of course I felt, at that moment, like an utter failure myself, and that didn’t help. I retreated into a shell, wanting nothing more to do with running CMU. Bill could have it.

Coincident with Bill’s return, it was decided that CMU would become a part of Golden Era Productions. In other words, we were going to the bottom of the food chain. When Bill announced the move to CMU staff, there was silence. It didn’t take a genius to see it for what it was – a slap in the face.

The southside office building had been completed, and, in a demonstration of typical Sea Org naming brilliance, was now known as "Building 36." It contained all of the Gold executives, Treasury, the "Hubbard Communications Office (Communications, Personnel and Ethics functions), as well as manufacturing areas for E-Meters and tape duplication.
The earlier plan was for CMU to occupy a floor of the planned Senior Executive Strata building, but with this change, it was decided to put CMU on the third floor of Building 36, a windowless attic space currently occupied by stock shelves. Plans were started to clean out and renovate the place.

There was no question that CMU was being downgraded as a function, squeezed into another organization’s structure, and shunted off to an out-of-the-way attic space. I didn’t know why this was happening, I just knew that it was.

Why did I stay? Many years later, after I had left Scientology, I would ask myself that question. Why did I carry on despite the denigration, the politics, the craziness? But leaving was never an option in my mind. The overall mission, the overall purpose of Scientology that I was dedicated to always loomed largest in my mind. The daily craziness, the long hours, the abuse, all seemed like temporary distractions, minor bumps and potholes in the larger freeway of Scientology’s mission. There had always been abusive, cruel people in Scientology – Doreen Casey, Kerry Gleeson and others. They had faded away. I had endured. Call it stubbornness, bullheadedness, tenacity. I was determined to carry on and achieve the aims of Scientology as I saw them, despite any bastards that got in my way. If I was beaten down, so what? I would lick my wounds for a while and then get up again. I would prevail, and the ultimate mission of Scientology would prevail – a world without insanity, war and crime. We were looking at the sanity and happiness of future generations. Wasn’t that worth a few privations and late nights? Wasn’t that worth a few hard knocks?

So I stayed. "It can’t get any worse," I reasoned.

I would soon find out how wrong that statement was.

Chapter Eleven: Planetary Dissemination

2008-07-01T23:24:00.000-07:00

The Dianetics Pontiac Fiero, racing in the
Camel Grand Prix of Southern California at Del Mar

"You wanted to see me, Sir?"

I poked my head into the office of the new Commanding Officer of the Planetary Dissemination Organization, Ronnie Miscavige.

"Yes, come in Jeff." He indicated the chair across the desk from his deputy, Bill Dendiu, and I sat down. They both looked very serious.

It was early January, 1987. Ronnie and Bill had arrived unexpectedly that morning. They had briefed the staff of my Strategic Book Marketing Unit that they were sent by the Chairman of the Board RTC, David Miscavige, to establish a new Planetary Dissemination Organization, which was to include my unit. Ronnie was to be the new CO of this org, and Bill was his Deputy CO for Production.

I didn’t know much about them. I knew Ronnie was David Miscavige’s brother, and I could see the family resemblance. Ronnie was taller and had blond hair and he seemed more easygoing, more laid back than his intense younger brother. Dendiu, I knew, had been a major figure in the Portland Crusade, and was known as a go-to guy who could get the impossible done. He bore a certain resemblance to the actor Michael Keaton, and had, in the distant past, done standup comedy in Hollywood. I would get to know Bill very well in the coming years, and would discover that conversations with him tended to be a one-way monologue. He could be very funny. He could also be cruel and abusive, and it was that side of him that I saw first.

"You’ve been ripping off the Church," he began.

"I beg your pardon?" The last thing I expected was an attack.

"That bonus system of yours – you and your staff have been ripping off thousands of dollars of Church money," Dendiu spat out. His face was flushed red with anger.

"Wait a minute – that bonus system was approved by the Int Finance Office…" I stammered.

"You think that gives you the right to make more than any other Sea Org Member?" He challenged.

"We’ve been selling more books than anyone ever has in the history of Scientology," I countered. "We have it on every major bestseller list…"

"You’re making more money than the Chairman of the Board RTC!" he screamed. Of course that was a lie. At that time, Miscavige was paying himself over $85,000 a year, and our bonuses were a few thousand dollars a year. And I’d spent my savings on a second-hand car I was using to do my job!

Bill was not to be deterred, and it went from bad to worse, with accusation after accusation. "You’ve been sleeping with Jan Gildersleeve, haven’t you?" he screamed.

The thought was ludicrous. I was very happily married to Nancy. Jan, my Media Director, was brilliant, plain and practical.

I tried to appeal to Ronnie. "Can I speak to you privately?" I asked. Something was very wrong here – I needed to find out what. He shook his head, and sat placidly watching. Obviously this was part of their orders, to viciously attack me – but why?

The accusations went on and on, for more than an hour. I was screamed at, accused of every crime under the sun, and finally assigned a "lowered condition." I finally left, broken and very confused. We had just ended the biggest book sales year in the history of Scientology. I had been responsible for the sales of millions of books. Dianetics was on all the major bestseller lists. Why was I the subject of a vicious personal attack? It made no sense. And there was no explanation forthcoming, other than that I was "out-ethics."

Ronnie and Bill set up their office across the hall from my corner office on the 3rd floor of the Main Building. They began emptying out all of the offices on that wing of the building – this was to be the new Planetary Dissemination Org. They began running me and my unit with daily "Product Conferences" and inspections.

By February, Dianetics book sales had started to drop – as they did every year at that time. In fact, every publisher in the United States was experiencing the same drop, it was called "seasonal variation." But Dendiu was having none of it. After all, Hubbard never mentioned "sales curves" or "seasonal variations," so they didn’t exist. According to Hubbard, there was only one thing to look at, and that was the weekly line on the graph. If it was up, the person was OK, if it was down, the person was "downstat" and "out-ethics." "Don’t get reasonable about down statistics," Hubbard preached. "They are down because they are down…Any duress leveled by ethics should be reserved for down statistics."

Never mind that even with the slight February dip, we were still selling more books than anyone had ever done in Scientology’s history. I was "down stat" and that called for duress. And Dendiu was willing to supply that duress. He began talking publicly and noisily about how "incompetent" I was and how I was a failure at running the campaign. This was repeated over and over until I half believed it myself. He announced that he was "taking over the campaign" from his position as D/CO Production. This is what Hubbard called "bypass." When statistics go down, it is expected that the senior declare a "Danger Condition," bypass and handle the situation directly, ignoring the junior.

Of course, Bill had absolutely no idea of what to do. He had, literally, no clue as to where to start to handle the campaign. He fell back on another bit of Hubbard "tech," the "Power Change Violation Repair Formula." This is supposed to be done when a "Power Condition" (the highest condition there is, when statistics are going up, up, up) was violated as new incumbents lost touch with earlier "successful actions." He never acknowledged that my campaign had been in a Power Condition, but did the formula anyway.

He had me draw up a long list of the "successful actions" that had gotten the stats up. So I did. He then turned this into a program, a series of targets to be accomplished, and called it "Program X." Then he would call meetings of all concerned and call off these targets and demand "is that DONE?" and if not, the person had hell to pay.

Of course, this had nothing whatsoever to do with what had been successful. What had created the sales was a lot of teamwork and initiative, good research and analysis, and good creative solutions by everyone on the team. To replace that with these top-down, authoritarian meetings, full of threat and bombast, was a travesty. And, of course, it didn’t work.

One of the most ridiculous examples of this kind of robotic "stat management" was the Self Analysis campaign I ran in 1987. Self Analysis was a book that I’d always found fascinating. It was a series of Dianetics processes (exercises) that a person did by themselves, just be reading them. I had tried it and found it fun and therapeutic. I decided to release it in paperback and devised a campaign for it in 1986, including designing a new paperback cover.

This was the mid-1980s, and my target demographics – always a moving target – were mostly concerned about their careers and achieving financial stability. I worked out a slogan to appeal to them, "If you’re not moving up, you’re falling behind." I also had a tag line for the book "The 30 Minute Mental Workout." Mitch Brisker shot a TV ad for me, which intercut between a guy using the book, and the same guy running up a staircase. It was fast-paced and grabbed attention.

A new cover for Self Analysis in paperback

I launched the campaign in early 1987 with a small TV buy. We had sold a lot of books in to the stores and when the ads hit, the sales went straight up. The book had phenomenal "legs." With just a bit of TV, the book started flying off the shelves, and immediately went onto some of the major chain bestseller lists.

The sales followed a sort of bell curve. Except it was more like a whale, with the steep initial sales being the head, and a long, long decline being the body of the whale. And there was a lot of blubber under that curve – or a lot of Hubbard in this case – hundreds of thousands of books
The problem was, after that initial month, it was all "downstats." Therefore the campaign was a "failure." And as a "downstat," and I enjoyed a year of Dendiu’s "duress."

The Sales Whale

By the end of 1987, we had sold a half a million copies, and Self Analysis was ranked as the 11th bestselling trade paperback in America by Publishers Weekly magazine. And I was sick and tired of pursuing a campaign that had got me nothing but grief, verbal abuse, and "lower conditions." The Self Analysis campaign was finally abandoned as "failed."

When I wasn’t dodging threats and barbs from Dendiu, I was arguing with Ronnie about "organization." I was trying to keep my unit together, somehow, anyhow. I argued that my unit should be kept intact, and other units formed around it, to market other things. If you wanted to market Dianetics Seminars, for instance, start a "Dianetics Seminar Marketing Unit" with its own planner, researchers, and project managers. Ronnie argued that this violated one of Hubbard’s dictums – there were to be no "duplicate functions" in an organization. In other words, there could never be two Research areas – even if they were researching entirely different things.

Ronnie eventually prevailed. The resulting "organizing board" dismembered my unit completely. My Researcher, Josie, went into a general research pool, where I no longer ran her. From that point on, little real research got done. My PR Officer, Joann Milan, was reassigned to the LRH Public Relations Bureau. PDO would have no PR area as it was a "duplicate function." That was the end of any volume of Public Relations for Dianetics – it soon faded to nothing as Joanne was assigned "other duties." I was reposted as the Advertising and Promotion Secretary for PDO. So I still had the artists and designers and media people under me. I could run that much, but no more.

I remember that crew muster as if it were yesterday. We lined up in the hallway of the new PDO, in the order of the newly worked out "Divisions." I saw my staff assembling in other lines, not behind me. I felt the bitter taste of defeat. And I felt an inner rage I could not express, didn’t dare express. The Strategic Book Marketing Unit was no more.

That was March, 1987. You can mark that date on a graph of Church of Scientology booksales, and see that as the point where booksales leveled and then began a steep, long term drop. The momentum was hard to kill. Sales leveled, but stayed high for the next year. Within two years, booksales began a steep nosedive that continues to this day. Organization statistics stayed high through to 1991 as the boom petered out. After 1991, Scientology statistics began a steep, steep plunge from which they would never recover. When I finally left the Church in 2005, they were still falling.

"Don’t worry," Ronnie told me. "You’re not losing a unit, you’re really gaining a whole organization devoted to public dissemination."

I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe that the dream wasn’t dead, that we could do even more. And it looked like the newly formed PDO was really going to be a success. We now had an HCO Division that was recruiting like mad. We took over the whole 3rd floor west wing and it was renovated to make it clean and modern, with a glass door at the entrance and wall-to-wall grey carpet. Ronnie and Bill started absorbing more and more marketing functions. They took over all of the Scientology magazines and absorbed their staff. They took over WISE marketing (World Institute of Scientology Enterprises – the org that oversaw the activities of all Scientologist-owned businesses) and demanded personnel from them. Same with Scientology Missions International. PDO was growing and growing, and soon we were over 50 people – and doing all kinds of marketing activities for the Church.

Dianetics was rapidly becoming a second fiddle, but everyone still gave it lip service as PDO’s most important campaign.

For all the seriousness of its beginnings, PDO grew into a great org to work for. Bill had his abusive moments, but could also get the staff laughing with his incessant comedy monologues. When the "stats were up," he enjoyed treating the crew to a nice dinner, a movie, or an LA Kings Game. For Christmas, we got to join the Int Base Crew, who, in those days, spent three days at Big Bear Lake.

PDO partying hard after an "upstat" week. Jeff and Nancy to the left. Ronnie (white shirt) and Bill (red shirt) are standing, at the far end of the table.

And we still had time off when the stats were up. Nancy and I took advantage of that to see LA and to visit my family. Kim was living in the Valley with his wife and three kids, and Mom was living in Santa Barbara, back from her two year sojourn to Tanzania. I loved visiting her in Santa Barbara – the city seemed so beautiful and free.

Thanksgiving with the Hawkins family. Mom and Kimball at left,
Kim's wife and kids to the right.

One day in mid-1987, I got a taste of what campaigns would be like in the new PDO organization. Ronnie called us together for a briefing, and announced that we would be picking up where the abortive Jack Trout fiasco had ended off - we would be doing a big public campaign for Scientology. We were all excited. Scientology had a negative public image, and it would be great to handle that with proper research, surveying and testing.

"We have to make a presentation in two weeks," Ronnie concluded.

Two weeks? That was a joke. To research, conceive and plan out a major public campaign would take at least three to six months! Even Trout had had three. I met with Ronnie privately and voiced my concern. We could do nothing of real value in two weeks. But he was implacable. The deadline was two weeks. I would just have to "make it go right" he said, quoting another Hubbard maxim.

The research division went into overdrive and in a few days served me up a rehash of my Dianetics research as to target public and demographics, with a few surveys added. Ronnie gave the research a cursory look, and decided that the slogan would be "Scientology: Improving Life in a Troubled World." I got with Rick Rogers, my non-Sea Org pro designer, and we brainstormed some ad concepts. We came up with some concepts that were polished, but somewhat plebeian. I came up with an outline of a media strategy, and we put the whole thing on presentation boards, and Ronnie and Bill rushed up to the Int Base to "pitch" it. I expected a resounding reject, with an instruction to get serious, buckle down and do some real honest research and come up with something brilliant.

To my shock, it was resoundingly approved. They loved it. Ronnie and Bill were high-fiving everyone. See? All that market research, demographic studies, media research, testing and analysis wasn’t needed! All you had to do was do some lick-and-a-promise research, get a bright idea and pitch it! This was to become the standard operating procedure in PDO that I’d be fighting – or failing to fight – for the next seventeen years.

There were other campaigns that started entering in to the mix. In June was the Maiden Voyage of the new Sea Org vessel, the Freewinds. The ship had been bought in1984 and completely refit. It was to be the location for the delivery of the highest OT Level at the time, OT VIII. We designed and printed a bunch of promotion, course packs and literature for the ship. And with each of these added campaigns, there was less and less time being spent on Dianetics. But for Bill, Dianetics didn’t require any time – he had his "Program X," and he just had to pound staff to get it done.

One of the criticisms leveled at the Dianetics Campaign was that it "wasn’t bringing people in to the Orgs." I knew that wasn’t true – it had fueled an unprecedented org boom – but it was hard to show a direct correlation as orgs did not keep track of how many people were coming in from the campaign. That was ironic, since everything else was statistically micromanaged. But "people coming in from the campaign" wasn’t an approved Hubbard stat, so no one ever tracked it.

To handle this supposed lack of people, we began marketing Dianetics Seminars. Hubbard sometimes referred to Dianetics as "Book One" (since it was the book that started everything). Some enthusiastic field people had started delivering "Book One Seminars" to teach people how to do Dianetics. These were getting some success, so I put together a TV ad promoting the Dianetics Seminar. Mitch Brisker filmed the ad, which starred Judy Norton-Taylor, a Scientology celebrity famous for her role as Mary Ellen in "The Waltons" TV Series. We started making the ad available to the orgs and they had some success with it. This was a problem I would work on over the years, finally coming up with a solution seven years later.

In June 1987, a French Scientologist, Phillipe deHenning, created a stir when he raced at LeMans with "La Dianetique" blazoned across his car. He ended up winning in the C2 Class (the lighter cars). The French Orgs went to town with this, making posters of Phillipe and his car.

To say that Bill Dendiu was a sports fan would be an understatement. He was fanatical about any and all sports, and had a seemingly photographic memory when it came to the subject. Phillipe deHenning’s win inspired Bill to do something like that in the US, and he began meeting with a sports marketing firm to see if a racing sponsorship could be lined up.

I did a bit of research on the demographics of car racing fans, and recommended against it. Racing fans were not heavy book readers – quite the opposite. I didn’t see how promoting Dianetics on a race car was going to sell books. But there was no stopping Bill.

"You’re just being elitist," Bill charged. "Scientology isn’t just for intellectuals or college boys – it’s for everyone!" It was an argument I would have many times.

"But we’re selling books," I countered. "It makes sense to promote to people who actually buy and read books."

"Who says that racing fans don’t read?" Bill said defensively.

It was no use. Bill had his sights set on a racing sponsorship, and there was no stopping him. Eventually he connected up with Penske Motor Sports, one of the biggest Formula 1 racing sponsors at the time. We ended up going out to a Penske car dealership in Encino, to meet with the man himself, Roger Penske. As Bill didn’t have a car, we drove out in my beat-up Honda Accord (paid for from my lavish bonuses!). I was feeling decidedly embarrassed about going to visit one of the richest automobile magnates in the US in my old clunker.

Penske was smooth and sleek. With his helmet of silvery white hair and tanned, leathery skin, he somehow reminded me of a lizard in an expensive suit. He was cordial, and gave us a tour of his Indy Car museum in the basement of the dealership. He seemed eager for us to sponsor one of his cars, and we discussed the details. He was running three cars that year, all his new PC-17s. And he had three top drivers, Rick Meers, Al Unser, and Danny Sullivan. Their starting positions were 1, 2 and 3. It looked like a great opportunity to be right in the front ranks of the Indy 500.

Bill was beside himself with excitement. He had me put together a series of presentation boards, including an illustration of a Penske PC-17 with a big "Dianetics" on the side. We then went up to the Int Base and Bill did the song and dance, talking about how many people would see the race live, how many would see it on TV, the visibility it would give Dianetics and so on. No mention was made, of course, about my concerns on the demographics. It turned out that Mark Ingber, the WDC member over Sea Org Reserves, was also a big racing fan, and he was all for it. In short, Bill sold the idea and all the senior execs were excited about the idea – including Miscavige.

The Trade Sales staff at Bridge Publications were also excited. I prepared a sales presentation for them, and they started pitching it to the big book chains and distributors. Bob Erdmann met with the buyers of major book chains and promised them tickets to the Indy 500. They reciprocated with big orders and agreed to in-store displays to coincide with the race.

And there was another wrinkle to this that was to become increasingly important over the years. And that was making money from Scientologists. An organization had been started in 1984 called the International Association of Scientologists – the IAS. It had been started as a means of raising money for Scientology’s legal defense. But the IAS sales people ("Registrars," or "Reges") found that it was easier to raise money for "dissemination" than for legal defensive actions. It was sexier. Soon I was preparing sales presentations for the IAS moneymakers and the Flag "Reges" to use to solicit donations from rich Scientology public. This turned out to be very lucrative – Scientologists were captivated by the idea of a Dianetics race car in the Indy 500 and would pay big money to support it. Unfortunately, little of the money so raised ever actually made it into the campaign coffers.

In April 1988, almost as a fluke, Dianetics showed up as #1 on the New York Times List. Since popping onto the list in August 1986, it had remained on the list, week after week, for over a year, hovering around number 3 and 4. Like a runaway freight train, Dianetics continued to sell and sell on sheer momentum. Then in April it suddenly peaked at #1 on the list. People went crazy. This was just before the big Dianetics Anniversary event that was held every year on May 9th, the original publication date of Dianetics in 1950. Bill and I – and the whole PDO crew – were feted at the Int Base. We were all driven out to San Jacinto, Bill and Ronnie and Nancy and I in a stretch limo, and the rest of the crew in a big Mercedes bus. We were given a big dinner in a white tent set up on the grounds of the Int Base, then watched the May 9th Event, being broadcast from Flag, with the Int Base crew. We were treated like royalty for a day.

Suddenly, the deal with Penske fell through. He informed us he wanted out. Why he pulled out was never clear – what I was told at the time was that he was pressured by Eli Lilly, who were headquartered in Indianapolis, to not allow his cars to be sponsored by Scientology. In other words, it was an "enemy action" by the psychs and big pharma companies against Scientology. This kind of conspiracy was the inevitable reason given for anything going wrong.

Eventually, Penske ended up paying us a settlement, but we had to do some fast stepping to salvage the situation. Bill ended up flying out to Phoenix to meet with racing legend Andy Granatelli – "Mr. Indy 500" – and his brother Vince. They were fielding a Lola-Cosworth in the 1988 Indy 500, driven by Columbian racer Roberto Guerrero. Guerrero was an up-and-coming driver – the previous year, he had led the Indy pack for 182 laps, then lost his clutch and ended up coming in a close second after Al Unser Sr. In September, he had suffered a crash in a test session at Indy and had ended up in a coma for 17 days. Now he was fully recovered and looking at another crack at the trophy.

Bill charmed the Granatellis, and they agreed to have Dianetics as a co-sponsor. We were on again! I revised all of the promotion to show Dianetics emblazoned across the Granatelli Lola-Cosworth and feature Roberto Guerrero. As part of the deal, we were to have a duplicate of the car available which we could take to sales shows and events. It ended up getting pushed out on stage at Flag to wild cheers and ringing cash registers.

I planned the 1988 American Booksellers Association Convention booth to be built around the car, which would be sitting right in the booth. We would have TV monitors mounted up above the booth so convention attendees could watch the race – which was being held that same weekend. Posters of the car and Guerrero would be available to the booksellers.

I was in charge of the ABA presentation. The convention was being held in Los Angeles that year, and I went down early to get everything set up. Meanwhile Bill took off for Indianapolis, along with some senior Church execs – including David Miscavige, Ronnie, Mark Ingber and others. They had a huge box overlooking the track, where they could entertain the bigwigs from the publishing industry, as well as wine and dine Miscavige and company.

I remember being on the floor of the ABA Convention that Saturday. The car was gleaming and bright, all the monitors were tuned to the race. Excitement was running high as the announcer said those familiar words, "Gentlemen, start your engines." And they were off.
Guerrero was in the #12 position. I watched him go into the second turn and – crash.

That’s right, crash. Right into the wall. Finished. Caput. Guerrero was fine, but the car was a total loss. It was one of those moments when the entire universe seems to close in to a single black tube. All I could see was a distant TV screen with cars going around and around, surrounded by blackness. A wave of horror washed over me. I could only imagine what was going on in that posh booth at the Indy 500 racetrack.

I quietly switched the monitors so they were showing a loop of the Dianetics TV ads, and tried to go on with the convention, business as usual.

To add insult to injury, Penske’s Rick Meers and Al Unser finished first and third, respectively.

The reaction was amazingly mild. Dendiu, and the senior execs, did not seem discouraged from their racing goals. Bill had negotiated a series of races with the Granatellis, and the racing schedule continued unabated through to the end of the year, with Guerrero piloting the Dianetics car in Long Beach, Indianapolis and Portland – with mediocre results. Racing fever had hit, and there was no slowing down.

The book sales never responded to the racing in the slightest. In fact, they went down. With large amounts of the campaign budget getting siphoned off to racing sponsorships and promotion, there was less of the usual advertising being done, and sales started to slide.

One side benefit of the whole Indy 500 caper was a new PDO recruit named Becky Bigelow. She was the daughter of veteran Indy driver Tom Bigelow and had literally grown up in the Brickyard – and she was a new Scientologist. She was hired initially to assist at the Indy 500, then stayed on in PDO for many years, eventually marrying Ron Miscavige Senior, Ronnie and Dave’s dad.

In late 1988, Gordon Spice, who had been Phillipe deHenning’s sponsor and co-driver for the 1987 Le Mans "La Dianetique" car, entered a series of GT races in the US, and Dianetics sponsored one of his entries in the Camel Grand Prix of Southern California - a Pontiac Fiero driven by Bill Koll. The PDO crew all got to go down to Del Mar and watch the race, proudly wearing our Dianetics racing jackets. If we weren’t selling books with the racing, we were at least having a good time.

PDO crew enjoying the Del Mar race - in their new Dianetics racing jackets and t-shirts!

In early 1989, Ronnie announced another change in PDO operations. We would be relocating to the Int Base in San Jacinto. Ronnie was to become Marketing Executive International, and we would be a unit directly under him.

I viewed the move with mixed emotions. It would cut us off from direct contact with Bridge Publications – whom we were meeting with daily. It would make meetings with Jan Gildersleeve, Len Foreman and any other outside professionals difficult. And on a personal note, it would isolate me from my family. I considered petitioning to keep the Dianetics Campaign in Los Angeles and re-form the campaign unit within Bridge Publications. Ronnie vetoed the idea. But I had no idea how the campaign would be run from an isolated base in Southern California’s high desert.

My other misgiving was that not everyone was being allowed to go. There were "stiff qualifications" for people going to the Base. They looked at drug history, sexual history, ethics history and so on. Everyone was being scrutinized with a fine tooth comb, as only the elite of the elite got to go to the Int Base. How I ever qualified I don’t know, given my checkered past, but I was "already Base cleared" so it somehow wasn’t an issue.

We had 54 staff at the peak in LA. When the winnowing process was finished, there were only fifteen people cleared for the Int Base. The rest were reassigned to posts in LA. PDO had been stripped back to barely more than my original Dianetics unit.

And as we left for San Jacinto, I had a sinking feeling that this was only the beginning of the end.

Chapter Ten: Rolling at Last

2008-06-27T23:06:00.000-07:00

It was a warm August day in 1986. I was in my office on the third floor of the main building in the PAC Scientology complex in LA – "Big Blue." We had the windows open and the fans running, to try to suck in any vestige of a breeze that we could. Out the open window, I could see Fountain Avenue below me, and across the street, New York George’s, where I sometimes had a bowl of chili. A simmering haze hung over the jumble of two-story apartments to the south – mostly Armenian and Vietnamese neighborhoods.

But my attention was on the stat graph on the wall next to the window. Since mid-June, the sales of Dianetics had been climbing vertically. I had already added several extensions onto the graph, making it climb up the wall. Of course I could have re-scaled it, but it was more fun to just tack on the extensions so it got taller and taller. The numbers were amazing – we had gone from selling 3,000 books a week through the major chains to over 6,000 a week.

And this was real sales, too. Later, people would say it was all "Scientologists going out and buying the books." No, not on my watch. That’s not the way I did things.

Not that it hadn’t been suggested to me. They had done it for the launch of Hubbard’s fiction book, Battlefield Earth, in 1982. They mobilized Scientologists to go in and buy multiple copies to push up the numbers on the launch week, to try to get it on the bestseller lists. But I wasn’t interested in doing things that way. I was trying to get new people in to Scientology, I reasoned. So why on earth have Scientologists buy Dianetics books? They already have the book. Who are we trying to fool?

I knew the reasoning behind it. Anything and everything to push the stats up, to get on the bestseller lists. It was that "stat push" attitude I had been fighting for years. Because in the final analysis, it was all fluff. It made you look good for a week, or a few weeks, and then reality caught up with you. I wasn’t interested. I was in for the long haul.

So I did it the hard way, with advertising and PR. I guess that was manipulative enough in its own way, but at least no more so than Coca-Cola or any other advertising. And at least it was real books getting into the hands of real people. And people were buying Dianetics – by the thousands every week. I was able to get actual weekly cash register sales from the two largest bookstore chains in the country, B. Dalton Bookseller and Waldenbooks, and from the largest independent distributor in the country, Ingrams. I compiled these together and used that as my primary statistic. It represented about a third of the national sales, so if we were selling 6,000 books a week through Waldens, B. Daltons and Ingrams, it meant we were selling something like 18,000 books a week nationally.

The only question now was how to keep it going. And that was what I was trying to figure out.

Across the office, a phone was ringing. Where was everybody? I hated it when people just let a phone ring on and on. Finally I went across the room and picked it up.

"What?" I said irritably.

"Have you heard?" It was the voice of my PR Officer, Joanne Milan.

"Heard what?" I asked. My attention was elsewhere.

"We made the list," she said excitedly.

My mind was trying to cope with this information. What was she talking about?

"Are you still there?" she said. "The list, the New York Times Bestseller list. Dianetics is on the list!"

Finally my brain processed the information and the news washed over me like a hot flash. The New York Times bestseller list – the Pulitzer Prize, the Oscar, the Holy Grail of bookselling. And finally we’d made it.

It hadn’t been easy. A lot of research. A lot of testing. A lot of trying things out and seeing what happened. A lot of falling on our faces. But finally, finally, it was all paying off big time.

It had taken four years. When we first launched the campaign in October of 1982, the results hadn’t been spectacular. In that first week, we sold something like 500 books. But Hubbard, bless him, came to the rescue. He pointed out that campaigns of this sort have to be continued over time. They aren’t a flash in the pan. They have to build and build. "You have a winning horse here that is not being fed enough oats," he said in a dispatch to management.

In these heady days, I thought of Hubbard as my ally against the legions of stat pushers, an inspired leader who could see past the weekly stat graphs; who could see the bigger picture, the massive dissemination of Scientology through books, the booming Scientology Orgs, the broad acceptance in society as Scientology went mainstream. Sure, he stood to gain personally through the royalties on all the book sales. Sure he was not paying for all of this expensive promotion himself – it was being done at Church expense. But that wasn’t why he was supporting the campaign, was it? Certainly as the visionary Founder of Scientology, he was looking to the broader picture, the main game of Planetary Dissemination.

But whatever the reason, my Strategic Book Marketing Unit had broad air cover and we were left to get on with it. And no one was panicking or calling for my head if the stats dipped for a week. I got a clearance to attend weekly meetings at Scientology’s International Base – in a "confidential location." My old friend Ken Delderfield, now working at ASI, drove me up there the first time, and I remember driving on and on through winding desert roads and finally coming to a rather run down former hot springs resort in San Jacinto, California, near Hemet. For years, we had weekly meetings there where I would brief Scientology’s senior executives on my current strategy and actions.

So we continued to pour it on. And gradually the sales improved. Soon Dianetics was on the Ingrams bestseller list - that meant that the book stores were selling Dianetics and then reordering from the distributor. Then the book appeared on the bestseller lists of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Bookseller, the two largest chains. We were rolling.

Len Foreman was hired on as a permanent publishing consultant. His contract was negotiated by ASI, and included a six-figure annual income. He was appointed as "President" of Bridge Publications, a title that was all but meaningless internally, but that gave him clout with the publishing industry – and gave Bridge a very credible public face. Len was given an office near to the building’s entrance where he could receive visitors. At this time, Bridge was on the west side of the "Big Blue" complex, fronting on Catalina Street. The front-lines "public areas" were poshed up to give Bridge a public façade.

Len advised that Bridge put together a sales force to handle the book trade. Don Arnow had been appointed the Trade Sales Manager, but he was a long-term Sea Org staffer and had no real experience as a salesman. Len wanted to hire a real publishing sales rep, and he recommended a guy named Bob Erdmann.

Bob fit the part. With his easy smile, his thin mustache, and his receding hairline, he could have been a salesman out of Central Casting. He always had a joke to tell. Bob had worked in the industry for years, and knew most of the buyers for the large book chains. He set to work right away negotiating with the chains to close big orders.

Len and Bob recommended that we work out a major re-launch of the Dianetics Campaign for the fall of 1983. This was to become a pattern – about every three months we’d introduce something new – a new ad, a new campaign, a new book cover – to keep the trade excited and buying. Every fall was a major new campaign, and we would hype the book trade on it at the American Booksellers Association Convention in June and take their fall orders.

In early 1983, I was visited by a Scientologist, Lon Tinney, who said he was a film director and would like to work on some new Dianetics ads. Lon seemed to be enthusiastic, and the idea of working with a Scientologist appealed to me at the time. With his blond hair and beard, he looked like an aging surfer, and he had a bit of a slacker-genius vibe about him. His claim to fame was that he had worked in some capacity on the original Star Wars film, and this gave him some cachet as a "Scientology celebrity." We became friends, and started working out ad concepts.

For one of the ads I wanted to feature a well-known Scientologist – a celebrity. We began negotiating with John Brodie, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who was probably the biggest Scientology celebrity at the time. John graciously agreed to do an ad. For a second ad, we decided to do an anonymous dancer who would promote Dianetics, and for the third ad, we resurrected the marathon runner ad – one of the original ads that Hubbard had seen and rewritten.

Lon and I went up to San Francisco and filmed Brodie in an empty Candlestick Park. Brodie impressed me as a genuinely nice guy, and he and I sat in a rental car and worked over his success story until we were both happy with it, then drilled it over and over until he could remember it all. After a number of takes, he got through the whole thing smoothly – and he looked great on film.

The second ad turned into a debacle. The movie Flashdance had just come out and Lon’s idea was to do a testimonial story that would capture some of that dancing excitement. It started out as a dance rehearsal and then faded into the actual performance at the end, with flashy costumes and lights. We rented a big studio space in Hollywood to set it up. This was when breakdancing was big and the finale was supposed to be some sort of breakdance move, with the dancer flipping around on the floor, but the dancer couldn’t do it smoothly and just looked clumsy. Julia, my de facto senior at ASI, was at the filming and was soon a nervous wreck – she could see it wasn’t going well. Lon shot it over and over – then said he could "handle it in editing" – a phrase I later learned was director’s code for "it looks terrible and can’t be fixed." We ended up scrapping the ad.

We filmed the third ad, the marathon runner, in Griffith Park – in the midst of a real marathon. It was strictly a guerrilla operation – no permits. We shot the tracking dolly shots out the back of a moving car, and otherwise grabbed shots on the fly. For all that, it ended up looking pretty good.

Jeff, Julia and Lon Tinney filming in Griffith Park

So we had two new ads to put into the mix, and we played the ads against each other and watched the results in sales. The most effective one was the John Brodie ad, which we ended up playing for several years – until he finally left Scientology after a disagreement with management.

Meanwhile I kept building up the unit. After changing offices several times, we finally ended up on the 3rd floor of the main building, in a spacious office in the southwest wing – the proverbial "corner office." We had two large rooms – plenty of space. Nancy became my "Organizing Officer" and handled all the internal matters such as staffing, training, and finance.

I considered public relations a key part of the campaign, so got a PR Officer, Joanne Milan. Joann was a pale, thin, nervous lady with a bright mind and a knack for press agentry. She and I would cook up ideas for press releases and then take them to the "LRH Public Relations Bureau" to get articles placed and interviews scheduled. The LRH PR Bureau had been set up to handle Hubbard’s public relations, and they had offices all over the world. The central office was in LA. I argued that there was no more important action for Hubbard’s PR unit to be doing than getting his books on the bestseller lists, and pretty soon, Joanne and I were virtually running the PR Office, even hiring additional people to get on the phones, place stories, and book interviews with Scientology celebs or spokespeople. Soon they were placing hundreds of stories about Dianetics every week. Joann and I would write the releases and they’d get them out. My favorite was the "flying grandmother" who had, at 82, "cured her arthritis" with Dianetics and had then become the oldest person in the US to get a private pilots license. People loved that story.

The LRH PR Bureau also hired a small PR firm – Dateline Communications, run by Bill and Bev Widder. Bill was an old-time PR man and a joy to work with, always coming up with great ideas to get the word out. He wasn’t a Scientologist, but liked working with us. He had even met Hubbard in the early 1950’s.

My researcher was a bright young woman named Joanne Hawkins. She was no relation, but it became a standing joke in the office when people would say to her "Oh, are you married to Jeff?" She’d smile brightly and say "No, he’s my dad!" She looked young enough to pull it off. For years after that, even when we no longer worked together, I’d call her "daughter" and she’d call me "dad." When she joined the unit, I told her we already had a Joann and she’d have to choose another name. I was halfway serious – it’s confusing when two people in a small office have the same name. She said she had once had the nickname Josie, so from then on she was Josie. Linda Sukkestad, the surveyor who had worked with us from the beginning, worked under Josie.

My star researcher and "daughter" Josie Hawkins - researching the Sunday funnies

And there was a Canadian couple who joined the unit – Phil and Diane Anderson. Phil was a fast talker and a bit of a scamp – we took to calling him "Eddie Haskell" after Wally Cleaver’s smart-ass best friend in the TV series "Leave It to Beaver" – whom he resembled. His wife was a sweet lady, a former ballerina, and very bright. Phil took over as my "Project Manager" – mainly running the sales and distribution lines – while Diane took over the finance lines under Nancy.

And then there was the office cat. Nancy had found a bedraggled kitten in the Complex basement and had cleaned it up and adopted it. She called him Nougie, after his nougat-colored coat. He became an endless source of entertainment. He was convinced that he was a dog and would play fetch with me for 15 or 20 minutes at a time.

Nougie the Office Cat

There were others who came and went, but this was the basic team over the years. I later added two designers and a Media Director – all Scientologists who were professional in those fields, but not Sea Org. They were paid regular wages. The unit was fairly stable at 10 or 11 people.

But our influence was wider. Joanne Milan was running half a dozen people in the LRH PR Office who were sending out press releases and booking interviews for Dianetics full time. She was also directing a Bill and Bev Widder in their actions. Phil was directing the Bridge Publications trade sales force. Josie was running an ad hoc network of surveyors all over the US. I was running a media firm, Ed Libov and Associates, with several hundred staff. So we were really directing the actions of hundreds of people, who in turn were reaching thousands of bookstores, TV stations, radio stations, magazines and newspapers all over the US. It grew into quite an operation.

Nancy worked out a bonus system, based on sales, and got it approved. This enabled us to get a bit of extra money, which we stashed away, and soon Nancy and I could afford a car, an old used Honda we bought for $2000 cash. That made getting around town a lot easier. I never paid much attention to organizing things – at least not with the obsessive zeal that most Scientology executives demonstrated. The usual procedure when starting an activity was to write an extensive project, detailing every single thing that was to be done in great and meticulous detail. This project was then to be followed to the letter with absolutely no deviation. I considered this a grand waste of time for several reasons – one of them being that one never knows what one is going to run into, so one has to stay very flexible to succeed. It’s like in a battle – they say any battle planning goes out the window the minute the first shot is fired. You can’t set everything down in concrete before you’ve even started work and expect that you’ve covered every contingency. It led to rigidity and stupidity. I recall someone from the Commodore’s Messenger Org writing to us and asking for "a copy of our program." Nancy dashed something off and we sent it to them – but it had little relation to what we were actually doing – which was a lot of testing, improvising and trying things out.

Another point was "Organizing Boards." Hubbard was obsessive about drawing up elaborate organization charts and claimed to have made breakthroughs in the area that turned an ordinary org chart into a "philosophical machine" that would assure success. As a result, Scientology executives labored for hours over these ornate org charts, and they would eventually appear on large formica boards with lots of dymotape and colored lines. I didn’t have time for that – everyone in the unit knew what they were supposed to do and who they answered to, so I kept it loose and light.

But the idea of an overall "Planetary Dissemination Organization" that would encompass all of the various Church marketing units had never died. Hubbard had written to the CO CMO International in 1981 on the subject, and that dispatch was still floating around, never "complied to." In mid-1983, there was another attempt to pull all of the marketing units together under one umbrella organization. It was short-lived.

I, for one, had definite ideas about how to conduct the Dianetics campaign, and wasn’t about to let anyone interfere with my unit’s operation. This tended to put me at odds with any "CO Planetary Dissem Org" who attempted to come in, with no real knowledge or familiarity, and order my staff or tell me what to do.

And, with our success and our air cover, it was too easy to do an end run around such interference. At one point, I was actually "removed from post" by an overzealous CO PDO, a guy named Mike Eves. As I often did when I got mad, I went and saw my friend Foster Tompkins, who at this time was running INCOMM, the Church computer operation. I fumed and stomped around, and Foster calmed me down and we worked out a plan. He set me up with a computer and a telephone in a back office in INCOMM, a sort of secret headquarters from which I ran my unit covertly. I sent a report right away to the CO CMO International, Marc Yager, and within a few days was put "back on post." Meanwhile, there had not even been a hiccup in our operations.
Through my friends at ASI, I found out that Hubbard was very pleased with the campaign, and in late 1983, he wrote:

"All those personnel engaged in the promotion, sales and marketing which has led to the tremendous success of the National DMSMH Campaign (U.S.) are highly commended. These personnel, after 33 years, have created an affluence in the sales of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. This is a tremendous accomplishment. I have no doubt that this will continue into the future and we will achieve our goal of a cleared planet."

In 1984, I got interested in computer animation, which was the buzz in the LA film industry. Tron had come out in 1982, and everyone was speculating about the possibilities. I got the idea to do a computer animated ad for Dianetics, including an exploding volcano. I got approval to do it, and began work with one of the first computer graphics firms. They had one of the original Cray computers, a thing that filled a whole room and looked like a big circular airport lounge seat. It came with its own humans – guys in suits with buzz haircuts and black, rubber-soled shoes. The guys who did the graphics, on the other hand, wore plaid workshirts and had unkempt beards. The ad was simple – the camera zoomed through a scary-looking maze and then emerged from the maze as a volcano explodes and then morphs into the Dianetics book. It’s the sort of thing that today a 16 year old could make on his laptop in an hour or so, but then it was a big deal. It took eight weeks of designing, programming and rendering. The result was, for that time, pretty amazing and got a lot of attention.

Gradually, we learned the ebb and flow of the publishing industry. Sales always peaked at Christmas, but I found I could get even higher sales in January by punching the advertising. The ads were cheap at the beginning of the year, but the store traffic was still high. Spring was always a down period, but picked up in the summer with vacation reading. New titles were released in the fall, and sales would gradually increase to the end of the year. I also learned how to pulse the TV ads for maximum effect – on for four weeks and then off for three. By the time the sales started tailing off, I’d hit it again hard.

Soon, the campaign started having an obvious effect on overall Church of Scientology statistics. The income of Churches around the US started to rise significantly. One of our actions as part of the campaign was to collect More Information Cards (or "MICs" – everything in Scientology has to have an acronym). These were cards that were slipped into the Dianetics books and were then sent in by people to request more information about Dianetics. I calculated at one time that about five percent of Dianetics book buyers sent in the cards. It was a seemingly small percentage, but with 10,000 or 15,000 books being sold every week, that amounted to 500 to 750 cards every week – people who had actually reached to find out about the subject. The cards were sent to the nearest Org, and they followed up on them. I was told by many Org "Public Divisions" staff that this was their main source of new prospects. It was the cards that were driving the boom.

This fact was well known by management at the time. Once I was talking to Mark Ingber, who at the time was the CMO Watchdog Committee member in charge of the Sea Org’s Financial Reserves. I was asking about the possibility of increasing the advertising budget. He leaned towards me confidentially.

"Frankly, your budgets are a drop in the bucket," he confided. "This campaign is making us a lot of money."

So the unit was protected, and we were allowed to run the campaign pretty much as we saw fit. In fact, we were all allowed to stay on post when the rest of Scientology took off to Portland in May of 1985 for the Portland Crusade. A former Scientologist, Julie Christofferson, had sued the Church of Scientology for fraud, and had been awarded $39 million in damages, $20 million of that against Hubbard personally. David Miscavige, by that time running the Church, mobilized virtually the entirety of Scientology to handle this "flap," chartering planes and buses to take Scientologists to Portland for a massive "Religious Freedom Crusade." The PAC Scientology Complex seemed empty, as every spare staff member was sent up there, even the RPF. Skeleton crews were kept at the service organizations to keep delivering Scientology training and processing (and making money). And we kept the Dianetics Campaign going. We got our chance to march later, in 1986, when the Wollersheim trial came to Los Angeles. We spent a few hours at the LA "Religious Freedom Crusade" marching around the courthouse downtown.

Nancy at the LA "Religious Freedom Crusade"

For about a year, Nancy left the unit and became Marketing Executive International, working as the senior Church marketing executive under the Executive Director International. She worked at the Int Base near Hemet, and we saw each other rarely, but as I had clearance for the Base, I would sometimes drive up on a weekend and spirit her off to a fancy hotel in San Diego.

In 1985, we started branching out internationally. Len and I went over to Europe for the Paris Bookfair, and also visited my old org, the Scientology Publications Organization in Copenhagen, now called New Era Publications International, or NEPI. There, I started a "Strategic Book Marketing Unit Europe" and found an In Charge for the unit, Andy Kunzli, who had been the Director of Promotion for the Advanced Organization there and was chomping at the bit to get into broad public campaigns. I also met the man in charge of book trade sales at NEPI, Michel Moatty, who would be a good friend for many years.

Len and I also traveled to the south of France to meet an old publishing contact of Len’s, Oswald Boxer. He was the man, Len told me, responsible for introducing paperback books to Europe just after the war. We wanted to hire Oswald to be the publishing consultant for Europe. He happened to be vacationing in Nice, so Len and I had to go through the ordeal of spending three days on the French Riviera. Oswald was a wonderful old man, and he agreed to consult for NEPI. Our Copenhagen arm soon began running their own campaigns based on the one we were running in the U.S.

In 1986, I met another Scientologist film director, Mitch Brisker. Mitch had done some TV ads, and was eager to do work for the Church. He and I hit it off right away, he was funny and smart. His family was Russian Jewish, and he showed me the best Russian restaurants downtown. He and I also shared a passion for the new Apple Macintosh computers. In those days, they were slow and had a tiny screen, but were lots of fun. As Mitch put it, "why spend an hour doing something when you can spend three hours and do it on the Mac."

Mitch and I decided to do the "Stunt Pilot" ad – one of the original 1982 ads that had been rejected by Hubbard and rewritten by him. We hired a stunt pilot and an old biplane, and rented a helicopter. Interestingly enough, we filmed the final scene, of the pilot holding the book, from a camera fixed to the wing as he flew. When we looked at the footage, it looked fake - like it had been shot on the ground. So we ended up shooting it on the ground, with the cameraman weaving and bobbing, and the propeller blowing everything around. It looked realistic.
In the middle of that shoot, I collapsed, and was rushed to the doctor – Gene Denk’s local clinic where there were Scientologist doctors. They found I had a collapsed lung. I was bedridden for a couple of weeks and the Marketing Exec Int at the time, Caroline Mustard, came to LA to finish the ad shoot and help run the unit in my absence. I recovered fine, and took back over the unit.

In early 1986, we had shocking news. We were all ushered over to the Hollywood Palladium on Hollywood Boulevard for a "special briefing." No one could be absent. Scientology public were also required to attend. Whatever it was, it was important – and serious. I wondered if there had been another FBI raid.

We were ushered in to the Palladium, which was eerily quiet as the audience filed to their seats. A cheesy graphic of a golden bridge and a large OT symbol had been hastily erected on stage. The lights dimmed, and a tiny figure walked out on stage and up to the microphone.

"Hello," he said, "My name is David Miscavige."

Miscavige had arrogated for himself the position of Master of Ceremonies, something he was to do consistently in the coming years. I think he realized the inherent power of that position – after all, it was the Master of Ceremonies who brought others on and off the stage.

He began to describe Hubbard’s OT research, how he was charting the upper OT levels. "Two weeks ago," he explained, "LRH completed his research. He has now moved on to the next level of OT research beyond anything we can imagine. At this level, the human body is nothing more that an impediment. Therefore, on Friday, the 24th of January, AD 36, L. Ron Hubbard discarded his body." ("AD" was "after Dianetics," which had been published in 1950.)

Miscavige told us that we should not feel grief, but I found myself tearing up nonetheless. Like most Scientologists, I had considered Hubbard a friend and mentor. I knew nothing of the reality of Hubbard’s final years, of his decline into madness and illness. The impression I had was that he had been lucid and in control to the end. Now Miscavige was saying that he had voluntarily "moved on" to the next level – a sort of suicide – to continue his "OT research."

The rest of the event went by in a strange blur. The Scientology lawyer, Earle Cooley, went into great detail about how the body had been handled, and repeated that Hubbard had been in control to the end. He told us that Hubbard had great confidence that "the Church was in good hands." Then Pat Broeker spoke, the man who had been with Hubbard for the last few years, and again repeated that it was Hubbard’s "causative decision" to leave the body. It was a strange event, and the cheers and applause bothered me. I wouldn’t discover for many years why that event seemed so strange – it was a complete fabrication. Hubbard had died in madness and pain, what was left of his mind addled by drugs, with Broker and Miscavige fighting over the scraps of his religion. But I knew nothing of this, I only knew that the Old Man was dead, and it was now up to us.

I redoubled my dedication. I determined that in 1986, I wanted to do a major re-launch of the Dianetics campaign. The book trade was getting complacent, and the sales had leveled. I needed something new, a whole new approach. At that time I got to know a Scientologist, Rick Rogers, who had worked in the ad business, at Chiat Day. I hired him to work with me and we began brainstorming a new campaign.

I wanted, somehow, to get people interested in what was in the book. Not just flash slogans and images at them, but pique their curiosity. I sketched out a print ad that had a picture of the book with a bunch of questions around it, like "Why do you lose self respect?" and "What makes people unhappy?" and so on. Each question had a page reference saying what page to find the answer on.

Rick liked the idea. "Why don’t we do it as a TV ad?" he suggested. We storyboarded it out. It was idiotically simple. A series of three questions appeared, white type on a black field. Each one listed a page number – but didn’t say what book. Finally, the announcer said, "The book? Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard." At that point we inserted the animated volcano from my "Maze" ad, and it morphed into the book. It was so moronically simple that people I showed it to didn’t get it. "That’s not a TV ad," they’d say.

Of course, since then, everyone has done white letters on black, and it’s become a cliché, but in those days no one had done it. We were, as far as I know, the first. And people just didn’t get it.
"Let’s just make the ad," I told Rick finally. "It will cost us nothing to put together, and then people can see it."

I hired two Scientologist musicians to do the background music, Geoff Levin and Chris Many. I had been listening to an electronic music group called Tangerine Dream, and told Geoff and Chris that I wanted something like that – something staccato and edgy. They made me the perfect piece – something that would get viewers wondering "what’s that?"

For the announcer, I hired a talented voice artist named Greg Burson. He asked me what kind of voice I wanted, and I said "The Voice of God." He nailed it, with a James Earl Jones basso rumble that dripped with Authority.

The final ad was just what I wanted – dark, edgy, mysterious. Something that would stand out amid the frothy TV clutter of the mid-1980’s, with its banal songs, color and glitter. This was minimalist and arresting. And when I showed it to executives, they finally got it – this would get attention.

I made another connection in 1986, a Scientologist who was a professional media buyer, Jan Gildersleeve. She had done a lot of work for Ron Popiel – the "Ronco" infomercial wizard – and knew a lot about direct response advertising. I explained to her my ongoing battle with my media firm, Ed Libov and Associates, how they wanted to just robotically total up Gross Rating Points, and I wanted to target niche audiences with specific programming. She got it right away. After a couple of meetings with Libov, she advised that we get a new firm, which we did, the International Communications Group, or ICG. Jan set about putting together the kind of media buy I had always wanted to do.

Ever since the beginning of the campaign in 1982, we had run what they call "spot buys" – individual cities. We ran anywhere from 10 to 20 cities at one time. We had never run a truly national campaign. One day, Jan came to me with some information about a new kind of television we could test out - cable. Of course, cable TV had been around in some form since the beginning of television, but 1984 deregulation had made it attractive to set up big commercial cable networks, and a lot of major players had jumped into the pool.

"It’s still very cheap," Jan told me, "because it’s not rated by Nielsen, and no one knows what kind of numbers it’s going to do. But the demographics of the cable viewer match our demographics exactly – young, educated, predominantly male. And it’s national."

I studied the programming. It was exactly what I was looking for. The demographics and the programming matched our target perfectly.

"Let’s do it," I told her.

"You want me to set up a pilot?" she asked.

"No, I just want to go with it," I told her. "The whole budget."

It was a gamble, but not a very risky one. The research said it was perfect. And I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. In six months to a year, cable would be too expensive. But we could do it cheaply if we acted now.

"The Gang" at an American Booksellers Association Convention: Jan Gildersleeve, Caroline Mustard, Michel Moatty, Foster Tompkins, and Jeff in front.

I pulled all the other ads and just went with the new "Questions" ads. I was going all out.

And it paid off. The minute we launched in June, the sales went vertical. I couldn’t believe the figures. And they just kept climbing and climbing. Four years of experience, four years of trial and error, was now paying off big time. Dianetics popped onto every major bestseller list, and in August 1986, went onto the New York Times Bestseller List – the prime list for the publishing world. It was to stay on that list for more than a year.

With the marketing of Dianetics rolling ahead, Int Management wanted to do the same thing for Scientology. They wanted to launch a big campaign that would handle the “Black PR” (negative press) about Scientology and make people think well of it. The decision was made to hire New York adman Jack Trout to put the campaign together. The reason they wanted to hire Trout is that Hubbard had spoken highly of him and his partner, Al Ries, when they published some pamphlets in “positioning” in the late 1970s. Hubbard loved the idea – it was simple and manipulative. He soon issued an internal directive calling for all marketing staff to read it, and adding in his own spin. The way Hubbard saw it, all you had to do was “position” yourself with something good, like an angel, and your enemy with something bad, like a devil (or a terrorist), and people would think well of you and badly of your enemy. In other words, it had nothing to do with facts or information, everything to do with image and manipulation. Trout and Ries had expanded on their pamphlets in 1981 with a book called Positioning: The Battle for your Mind.

So it was no surprise that when Scientology’s top execs wanted to hire an outside consultant, they decided on Jack Trout.

As I was considered the Church’s foremost marketer at the time, I was tagged to help set up the deal, along with Caroline Mustard, who was Marketing Exec Int at the time. Caroline and I flew to New York with Greg Wilhere, at that time Inspector General RTC. I’d known Greg for years and had a lot of respect for him. He was easygoing, friendly, and competent. We took a red-eye to New York, checked into an airport hotel for an hour, literally, to shower and freshen up, then took a helicopter into Manhattan. The Church was sparing no expense on this one. We met with Trout for several hours at his office, and briefed him on Scientology and what we wanted to achieve. He was provided with a huge volume of reading material to educate him on Scientology.

Trout agreed to the job, but stipulated several conditions. One was that no one would see his proposal beforehand. He didn’t want anyone monitoring or second-guessing his work. He said it would take him three months to prepare his presentation, then he would fly out and give his presentation to the Church hierarchy as one body. There were to be no previews. This was agreed to.

Three months went by, with excitement mounting. After all, the great Jack Trout, who had gained Hubbard’s imprimatur, was working on a campaign for Scientology!

When the long-awaited day came, a huge Marketing Conference was organized at a big hotel on Vermont, near the Complex. All of the key international Scientology execs came down in buses for the event. The hall was packed with Scientology brass and marketing people. Trout was the guest of honor, and, after some preliminaries, began his presentation.

“We were brutally honest,” Trout later told Time Magazine.

His proposed campaign advised that the Church step away from controversy, and focus on results. He presented some advertising messages which touted the beneficial results that people were getting from Scientology. And, most controversially, he advised to stop promoting Scientology as a Church and focus on its role as a self-help methodology.

He got a polite round of applause. And he was dropped like a hot engram. That was the end of Jack Trout’s Scientology campaign – it was never mentioned again.

Dianetics, meanwhile, kept going at a high roar. We rolled in to the Christmas buying season like a freight train, with over 30,000 Dianetics books selling every single week. It was a phenomenon. Churches were affluent and flooded with new, interested people. It looked like we were on the verge of making it – Scientology going mainstream.

I looked back on the past four years, and remembered my early trepidation about launching the campaign. I remembered my discovery that every single person who had ever run such a campaign in the past had been annihilated, shot from guns, blacklisted. It seemed I had not only escaped that curse, but had finally achieved the success that they had worked for. The future looked bright.

Little did I know that there was a bullet headed straight for my head.

And this time, I would have no way to dodge it.

Chapter Nine: Going My Way

2008-06-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Dianetics - going big time

Foster and I were in a state of semi-panic as we waited for Julia to get off the phone. We were in an isolated corridor in the American Saint Hill Organization, part of the Scientology Complex – the big blue building in LA. Julia, my de facto senior at Author Services, was huddled in one of the public phone booths, talking quietly, her back to us. Foster and I kept a respectful distance across the corridor, where we looked down at the courtyard below.

“Well, if it’s not approved, we can always jump out the window,” I joked. Foster gave me a nervous smile. We had stuck our necks way out on this one. But that wasn’t unusual for us.

Our preparations for the Dianetics Campaign were almost complete. The last piece of the puzzle was television ads. Scripts had been submitted weeks before, through Julia at Author Services International and up to the Old Man himself, L. Ron Hubbard. We were awaiting approval – but hadn’t heard anything back. Now was the last possible moment. As of 4 AM the next morning, a huge film crew would be moving out, driving 90 miles north to a location in Ojai. Cancelling the ad shoot at this point would be expensive, if not impossible. We had prevailed on Julia to please, please, make a phone call. Now she was talking with someone close to Hubbard – we didn’t know who.

We heard the phone click as Julia hung up the phone. Our hearts leapt into our throats.

“They’re approved,” she said.

The last five months had been a rocket ride, preparing everything needed to launch a huge marketing campaign for Dianetics – the biggest such campaign ever done by the Church of Scientology. And I had learned a lot in the process.

At the same time, it had been fun. At last I was doing what I wanted to do, and I was doing it my way – thoroughly and professionally. I was virtually autonomous, operating loosely under Author Services International. ASI was officially L. Ron Hubbard’s literary agency, with supposedly no connection to the Church. In fact, they were running everything. But I liked the people I was dealing with. They gave me great air cover and very few orders. I was mostly left to get on with it. Nancy and I kept decent hours, got enough sleep, and managed to get in our “study time.” I was mostly studying marketing and advertising.

We enjoyed being in LA after years in Florida. A Sea Org Member is supposed to get a day off every two weeks, called a “liberty” in the usual pseudo-military parlance. Nancy and I managed to actually take those days off, and saw the sights in LA – movies, the Universal City Walk, museums, or out to Venice Beach to see the crazy street performers. We often went to see my brother Kim and his growing family – my niece and two nephews. And Mom was living up in Santa Barbara – we’d go up and see her or she’d come into town. Thanksgiving and Christmas were once again family affairs.

Brother Kimball raises a family

But most of our attention was on getting the campaign launched. Nancy had her team of researchers and surveyors who were out every day. We had added a Public Relations member to the team, a young lady named Beth, who was working out how to get out publicity releases on Dianetics when the time came. She also got roped into a “confidential” proofreading project, which turned out to be Hubbard’s Mission Earth manuscript. He had completed Battlefield Earth, which was being prepared for publication, and this was his next work, a massive ten-volume science fiction series. Beth helped on the proofreading several hours a day at ASI, and came back increasingly disturbed. She was shocked by the graphic, and repeated, descriptions of gay oral sex in the book, and was appalled that such writing was coming from the Founder of a religion. She didn’t last long, and in fact soon decided to leave staff.

One did not criticize Hubbard.

One day, I got a strange phone call. After I picked up the phone and said hello, a strident and intense male voice came on the line.

“If I hear another report of any of your staff nattering about LRH Tech Films, they, and you, will be immediately sent to the RPF. Have you got that?”

I managed to stammer “Yes, Sir.” There was a click on the other end.

I had just had my first conversation with David Miscavige.

The “Tech Films” were Hubbard’s Technical Training Films. He had scripted a series of short, 20 to 30 minute films teaching various points of Scientology “technology,” from how to operate an E-Meter, to how to conduct an auditing session. Each film had a story line – characters who went through some drama to illustrate a point of technology. He had then directed the filming of a number of these scripts himself at his confidential location. Like his earlier photo shoots on the ship, they were strictly amateur hour. The sets were hastily thrown together, something a high school drama department would be ashamed of. The actors were all amateurs – staff thrown into costume for the occasion – and they would stumble their way through Hubbard’s overcooked dialogue.

But of course it was like the Emperor’s New Clothes all over again. No one wanted to admit that they didn’t see Hubbard’s genius in every detail. It was obvious to anyone with two eyes that they were pathetically amateur, but no one was willing to say so. One of my staff, Linda, had been so impolitic as to make a disparaging comment about the quality of the films within earshot of some other staff. The resulting “Knowledge Reports” had gotten to Miscavige, who took it as a personal affront. After all, he had been the “cameraman” on many of these early films. Hence the call. I took Linda aside and explained the facts of life to her. If one expected to survive in the world of Scientology, one did not say anything negative about the films, no matter how obvious their flaws.

We had enough to do without getting embroiled in politics.

For one thing, I had absolutely no idea how to get books into bookstores. But that was an advantage, too. At least I wasn’t under some delusion that I had all the answers.

One of the first things Foster and I did when we began the Strategic Book Marketing Unit in April, 1982, was to contact the sales staff at Bridge Publications to see what they knew about getting books into public bookstores. The guy in charge of sales was Don Arnow. He had been trying to learn what he could about selling to “the trade” and had talked to the manager of the B. Dalton Bookseller store on Hollywood Boulevard, a guy named Jim Levinson. Jim was a heavy, bearded man with a droll sense of humor. He and I would become good friends years later when he was the West Coast Rep for Publishers Weekly magazine.

“If you want to learn about marketing books to the trade,” Jim told Don, “talk to Len Foreman.” He gave Don a phone number. Jim would often remind me later, with a twinkle in his eye, that he had actually “started” the Dianetics campaign by linking us up with Foreman.

Don, Foster and I went out to see Foreman at his office in Brentwood. Len was a handsome, white-haired gentleman, friendly and courteous. He combined polished East Coast manners with a West Coast tan and smile, to great effect. The women in my unit would later refer to him as “the silver fox.” He had formerly been VP Marketing at Simon and Schuster in New York, and knew the business inside and out. And he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Foster and I rapidly took over the meeting and peppered him with questions, which he answered with a wealth of information. Foster and I started meeting with Len several times a week, and talked Bridge into putting him on a retainer as a consultant.

Foster and Jeff plotting over a beer, with Bev Witter, our PR lady

He laid out for us in detail how one got books into bookstores as a publisher. He told us about the large book chains, at that time B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and who their national buyers were. And he knew them all personally. He knew all of the major distributors who kept the independent bookstores supplied, and the “IDs” – independent distributors - who got books into drugstores, supermarkets and all the other “non-book outlets.” He told us that we must never bypass the IDs and try to get books directly into drugstores and supermarkets, as some of the Orgs had tried to do. “These guys are Mafia,” he casually explained. “They’ll just throw your books out.” He advised schmoozing the IDs, buying pizza for their delivery guys and so forth.

Bridge had tried to talk to the buyers of the national book chains, but they had routinely refused to carry Hubbard’s books. They had had some very negative experiences, from the days of Doreen Casey’s “Mission International Books,” when she had sent staff in to local bookstores demanding that they take Hubbard’s books. As they had been under “do-or-die” pressure, the staff had been pushy and overbearing with the bookstores, and the book chains had had complaints. They had also promised the bookstores big promotion campaigns, which never materialized, and the books had moldered on their shelves. They wanted nothing more to do with Dianetics or Scientology.

But Len smoothed it all over. “That’s all changed,” he would tell his contacts in the book industry. “This is a different group, and they are serious about launching a major campaign.” If they still balked, he’d turn on the charm. “Come on, you know me. You know I wouldn’t bring you anything flaky. These guys are serious.” Bit by bit they came around.

Foster and I started having weekly Dianetics Campaign meetings at Author Services International, attended by all of the senior execs of Scientology. David Miscavige, the Chairman of the Board of ASI, would sit scowling at the head of the table, and all of the CMO Int Execs, as well as ED Int and his executives, would be ranked along the sides. All of the key ASI execs would also attend. On paper, ASI was Hubbard’s literary agency, and was not connected to the Church. In fact, Miscavige was running all of Scientology from his position at ASI, through regular meetings with all senior Church executives - like the weekly book campaign meetings.

In the beginning, these turned into briefings, and Foster and I prepared charts showing how the book industry worked. We brought Len to the meetings as well, and he explained the ins and outs of the publishing business. He briefed the assembled execs on the problems that had been caused by Scientologists randomly going in to bookstores and badgering them, and urged that the Scientology Organizations not contact any of their local bookstores. That order did in fact go out.

Foster and I had no love for Kerry Gleeson, since the days that he was the CO of Flag Bureaux. He attended the meetings, and had to listen politely to what we were briefing on. But he was still trying for some measure of control over a campaign that was, by then, way out of his control. He insisted, in the meeting, that Foster and I meet with his Division Six (new public) Executive, Peter Warren (whose wife I had once locked in a closet). Foster said we weren’t interested in meeting with Peter.

“I don’t understand why,” Gleeson complained, “Why won’t you meet with Peter Warren?”

Foster leaned forward until his face was a few inches from Gleeson’s, and enunciated slowly: “Because Peter Warren is a Suppressive Person.”

It was one of those moments that stay with you, just because of their sheer cheek. But I knew at that moment that Gleeson and his execs had lost any power to interfere.

It wasn’t long after that that we heard that Gleeson had been removed from post. He was replaced by an up-and-coming exec from Europe, Guillaume Lesevre. Guillaume stopped by to see me on his way to the Int Base and asked me to have lunch with him. He wanted me to come to Int with him and be his Marketing Exec International. I declined, explaining that I had a campaign to launch. But the man impressed me with his kind, intelligent demeanor.

Len knew people who did book cover designs, and we set them to work on the covers for some of Hubbard’s basic books – Self Analysis, Fundamentals of Thought, Problems of Work. They produced some attractive, commercial covers that I somehow managed to get approved. We needed some great covers to display at the American Booksellers Association Convention, which was going to be held in June at the Anaheim Convention Center. We had a lot to prepare by then, including an entire booth design.

ASI also wanted us to design a cover for the upcoming biography of L. Ron Hubbard, which we were assured was immanent. Omar Garrison, a writer who had done books for Scientology before, was at work on it. We prepared a cover design for that book as well.

We had decided to launch two books – the paperback Dianetics, and Self Analysis in the larger “trade paperback” size. There had been some pressure to release the books in hardback – Hubbard notoriously despised paperbacks as cheap, shoddy substitutes for “real” books – but I had successfully argued that if the objective was to interest lots of people in Scientology, then volume was key, and volume meant paperback.

On Len’s advice, I had set the launch date for September, as he said that this was when a lot of book campaigns were launched. The books were “sold in” to the book chains and distributors through the summer, beginning with the ABA Convention in June, and then the campaign launched in the fall to sell them through the bookstores to the public – that was called “sell-through.”

But this schedule didn’t accord with Hubbard’s plans. His new science fiction book, Battlefield Earth, was set for release that fall as well. It was going to be published by St. Martins Press. Hubbard had a strategy, which was to follow the pattern of 1950. At that time, he was a well-known science fiction writer, and it was his original article about Dianetics in Astounding Science Fiction magazine that first sparked off the 1950 sales of Dianetics. Many of his fans at the time – those who read his fiction – became the early Dianeticists. Hubbard wanted to repeat the pattern, re-establishing his reputation as a science fiction writer and then re-promoting Dianetics into that “fertile ground.” For that reason, he wanted to launch Dianetics later. But I knew it couldn’t be too much later. The books would be in the stores in the fall, and we had to deliver the promised campaign – the stores had already been burned by Scientology’s past failures to deliver a campaign, we couldn’t let it happen again. After some negotiation with ASI, it was agreed that Battlefield Earth would launch in September, and Dianetics (with Self Analysis) would launch in October.

At this point, I happened to see an ad for Dianetics that Hubbard had written. He had sent it to the Division Six Executive International, Peter Warren, who was ED International’s assistant for public dissemination. The ad included the phrase “Get rid of your Reactive Mind,” which Hubbard claimed was a very deep, pervasive “button” and would cause people to buy the book on a stimulus-response basis. Foster and I were discussing this ad once in a meeting with Len Foreman.

“Sounds like a good thing,” he said.

“What does?” I asked.

“The Reactive Mind. It sounds like something valuable, you know, it allows you to quickly react to situations…”

Foster and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. We were so used to the insider terminology that we hadn’t even thought about the impression that phrase might have on someone in the public, someone not familiar with Scientology’s lingo. I organized some fast surveys.

The surveys were very revealing. People did think that the “Reactive Mind” would be something valuable, and thought that if you “got rid of it” you would be a zombie. I went over the results with Frannie at ASI, and she asked me to do up a report right away.

A few days later, Hubbard wrote back that he was very pleased with the surveys, and said that they confirmed “something he already knew since 1950,” that people find the Reactive Mind very valuable. He called for a few more surveys to be done, which we rapidly carried out, and he determined at the end of this that the button should be “Learn to control your reactive mind.” He commended me for the surveys, and I thought nothing further about it. Little did I know that this minor incident would play a major part in my eventual demise, twenty years later.

As work on the campaign progressed, I started working more and more with Len. He knew people in publishing, marketing and advertising, and we would often race around town seeing different professionals –inevitably stopping for lunch at Len's favorite restaurant, Canters, where he would regale me with his vast store of Jewish jokes.

Len introduced me to a media company, Ed Libov & Associates in Marina Del Rey, and we began meeting with them to figure out how best to promote the books. And that depended on my isolating our “target demographic,” which I was getting rapidly worked out with a series of studies and surveys. I was able to get an OK to take our Scientology mailing list and run it through a demographic database. This resulted in a lot of tables, color-coded maps, pie and bar charts that I found fascinating. The best prospects for Scientology were young (25 to 35), some college education, urban, middle income. Men rated slightly higher as prospects, 60% to 40%. There was a lot of other information which I devoured, parsed and analyzed. We then started doing a lot of surveys, pre-qualifying the people we surveyed to make sure they were in the target demographic. Every day I would send the survey team out to do another survey. At night we’d tabulate the results and study them, then out they would go the next day with more questions. Pretty soon I was starting to know these people like they were family.

As part of my research, I studied every Dianetics campaign that had ever been done, from the first release of the book in 1950 to the present. They ranged from the mundane to the bizarre. I found out that, just over the past year, an abortive pilot campaign has been run in San Diego by marketing people from the Int Base – and apparently Hubbard had been calling the shots. They had made some TV ads on a space opera motif, with men in white space suits and helmets. Apparently the rationale was the same as when Hubbard had put such whole track symbols on the books – to manipulate the “wogs” with symbols from the OT III “Xenu” incident. They had also tried to sell hardback books. The results were apparently so embarrassing that the campaign had disappeared without a trace.

But I found one disturbing fact: everyone who had ever successfully run a big campaign for Dianetics had been destroyed – kicked off staff, declared Suppressive, and in one case, Diane Colletto, shot. She had run a campaign in 1979 that had gotten Dianetics on to the Ingrams West Coast bestseller list. She was killed by her husband in front of the Bridge Publications building on matters apparently unrelated to selling Dianetics. But this fact struck me as odd, and eerie. Why had every one of them been attacked? I resolved to keep my eyes open, and, while pushing ahead with the campaign, keeping my eyes open to see if anyone took a shot at me, and if so, where the shots came from.

But I found out some other things, too. Past campaigns, going back to 1950, had been successful when they narrowly targeted a certain public, what they call “niche marketing” these days. Conventional wisdom at that time was that you couldn’t sell books on television. This was 1982. No one had ever done it successfully. But I started thinking about it. Television was expensive, but in terms of cost-per-thousand (CPM), it was the cheapest medium. The problem was, it was a broad shoot, like a shotgun. You blared your message out to a lot of people who would never buy your product. That was what made it expensive. But suppose there was a way to hone in on your target public, to “narrowcast” the message?

I worked with my rep at the media firm, an older lady named Nancy. She educated me in such things as “gross rating points” and “target points.” I studied various types of media buys. It all seemed too expensive, too wasteful. The penny dropped one day when I was looking over a proposed media buy and saw Saturday morning cartoons listed.

“What’s this doing here?” I asked.

“Well, that gets you a lot of target points. There are a large number of your target demographics that are watching those programs.”

“But…” I tried to vocalize what was bugging me, “I don’t want to talk to people who watch Saturday morning cartoons!”

Well, which viewers of which programs would I be interested in talking to? I started going through programming lists. Soap operas, no. Old classic movies, yes. Stock car racing, no. Old Twilight Zone reruns, yes. It was all very subjective and not very scientific, but it was based on a lot of knowledge I had soaked up about our target demographic and what they liked. They weren’t followers. They didn’t watch what everyone else did. They were mavericks, iconoclasts, mold-breakers. They liked the odd, the intriguing, the quirky. They liked… well, the kinds of things that I liked, that most Scientologists I knew liked.

I had a lot of arguments with the media firm, because some of my choices went against traditional media wisdom. They fought me tooth and nail, but I managed to cobble together some kind of a media strategy that I knew would reach the kind of people I was interested in talking to – people who would be intrigued by Scientology.

The ABA Convention went well. We had everything ready – a big booth with huge transparencies of the new covers, literature and catalogs, and media schedules for the fall campaign. The reception from the book trade was lukewarm, but Len was able to pump it up. Walking around the floor of the ABA Convention with him was amazing – he seemed to know everyone. Every couple of feet someone would call out “Lenny!” By the end of the convention, we had “sold in” 250,000 books – most of that to a national distributor, Ingrams, who had warehouses all over the US and supplied most of the bookstores. Waldenbooks and B. Dalton declined to order, but said they would watch the sales and order from Ingrams. It was a start, a foot in the door.

In July, Foster was called up to the Int Base, and was briefed on a new project he would be doing – the computerization of all of Scientology management. I was crestfallen – I had thought that he and I and Bruce Wilson would do the Dianetics Campaign together – the three Musketeers taking on all odds. But Foster didn’t feel that this was a project he could turn down. He assured me he’d be located right there in the Complex and he still considered the Dianetics Campaign to be his project as well. He was as good as his word, and in the coming months and years we met often, and he helped me out many times – unofficially. I was also able to help him a bit – designing a logo for his new enterprise, the International Network of Computer Organized Management, or INCOMM.

Another blow came when I heard that Bruce and Tina had blown the Sea Organization – left “without authorization.” They had taken Gwennie, now 12 years old, with them and fled to the US Virgin Islands, where Bruce’s family lived. According to the rules of Scientology, they would be “declared Suppressive” and I would not be able to talk to them or Gwennie. As it turned out, I was able to bend the rules somewhat, convincing various Ethics Officers that Gwennie had only been 12 when she left, and was therefore “not Suppressive.” In that way I was able to keep in touch with her over the years with infrequent letters.

So with Foster on his new project, and Bruce blown, I was on my own as the Strategic Book Marketing Unit I/C, the SBMU I/C, which was to be my post for the next four and a half years. I had plenty to do getting the campaign ready for launch. After the ABA sales, the pressure was on to get a campaign together. Don Spector was writing TV ads. He had been Creative Director for BBDO West and Foote, Cone and Belding, and seemed to know how to go about it. He studied the demographics and surveys and wrote three ads. They were in a testimonial format – one was a marathon runner, one a businessman, and one was an airplane pilot. Each ad ended up saying that they owed their success to Dianetics. They seemed straightforward and competently done, so I submitted them to Julia Watson at Author Services, who had taken over as my de facto senior from Frannie, and she forwarded them to Hubbard.

Hubbard hit the roof. They were awful, he said. He took particular exception to the ending of one ad where a businessman threw a wadded up ball of paper and hit a wastebasket clear across the room – a sort of slam-dunk. Hubbard said that you never end an ad with something being thrown away as it says to the viewer, subliminally, that they should throw the product away. He tended to look at all advertising as a series of subliminal messages and these, he said, were sending the wrong subliminal message.

He proceeded to rewrite them, dictating exactly how the ads were supposed to go. After Julia showed me the dispatch, I called Don and had him meet me. As it was late, I told him to meet me at Sarnos, a restaurant up Vermont Street. Julia and I met him there and went over the ads with him. It was not going well – Don was a veteran Creative Director and for him to have his work rejected like this was unusual. In the middle of the meeting, Julia had to go take a call, and when she came back, she was white. She pulled me aside and said that I had to fire Don, we could not work with him. I protested, but she was firm – that was the order from on high. I somehow managed to talk to Don, tried to soften the blow, but he was crestfallen and stormed out. I never saw him again.

We had to find someone new, and fast. Our projected launch date was just a few months away. Len Foreman made a few calls, and recommended an ad producer named Jim Kellahan. Julia and I drove out to see him. We showed him the Hubbard ads, but he said he did not work that way, he scripted his own ads. Julia got the OK for him to write new ads, and he wrote four – two for Dianetics and two for Self Analysis. Julia sent the ads up to Hubbard for OK.

The ads had to be shot right away, and so Kellahin assembled a crew and set a date for filming. But weeks went by, and still we had heard nothing back on the ads. It finally came right down to the wire and that fateful afternoon in the corridors of ASHO. The last minute approval of the ads was the last piece of the puzzle that had to fall into place.

Nancy and I went on the ad shoot, along with Len Foreman. The first ad was about two mountain climbers. One of the mountain climbers slips, and the other one, the girl, rappels down and rescues him. Then they ascend to the top. The shoot took place on a remote mountain road in Ojai, and the stunt work was done on the side of a cliff next to the road. At the end of the day, a helicopter arrived and did the final, sweeping shot of the couple on the top of the mountain. It was impressive.

That night, Nancy and I snuck away and had dinner with my Mom, who was living in Santa Barbara. The next day we got on a boat and went out to the Channel Islands, where the second ad would be filmed. It was about a “marine biologist” who was studying the seals on the island and, of course, recommends Dianetics. On the long trip, I got to know the cinematographer, Laslo Kovacs, who told me an amazing story about escaping from Hungary with rolls of exposed film of Communist atrocities wrapped around his body. Kovacs had filmed such classics as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Paper Moon.

Once back in LA, Kellahin and crew filmed two simple testimonial ads for Self Analysis, our second release.

The ads were all masterfully filmed and edited, and were instantly approved for use. By October, we had everything in place – the books were in the stores, thanks to Ingrams, the ads were ready to go, the media strategy was set. At the end of October, we would push the button, and the largest campaign for Dianetics ever done would be underway.

And with it would come the largest boom ever for the Church of Scientology, a boom that would mask, for a while, the grim fact that the Church was beginning to fall apart at the seams.

Just prior to the launch of the campaign, on October 17th 1982, a Mission Holders Conference was held in San Francisco by David Miscavige. It was a bloodbath. He and other ASI and CMO International execs berated the Mission Holders for hours, calling them criminals. They were not allowed to leave the room. Anyone who objected was declared on the spot.

These were many of the top figures in Scientology at the time, men and women who owned and operated Scientology’s franchise operations. Many of them owned whole chains of Missions themselves. They were responsible for funneling thousands of new people into Scientology weekly. Their names were almost legendary within Scientology – Kingsley Wimbush, Martin Samuels, Bent Corydon, Brown McKee. Yet they were all declared, their missions seized. Even those not declared were assessed extortionate fines, and if they refused, were given “gang bang” Security Checks, where they would be put on an E-Meter and a group of executives would shout accusations at them.

Some of this filtered down to us. Some on the rumor line, some the “official line.” We were told that the Mission Holders were criminals, and were “robbing the Church” and trying to take over Scientology. We were told that the key Mission Holders were Suppressives, and they had to be dealt with very forcefully. Miscavige was asserting his authority and “saving the Church from SPs.”

The whole thing made me sick. How could those people all be Suppressive if they were responsible for bringing so many people into the Church? I didn’t know who was right and who was wrong. To me, it was another thing to add to my growing list of mysteries. Why had every person who had ever run a Dianetics Campaign been destroyed? Why had most of the highly productive Mission Holders been declared? It made no sense.

I thought that the campaign would, in some almost magical way, help to resolve all this - sort of like taking an old car out on the freeway and just blowing all the crud out of the engine. It seemed that getting a huge inflow of new people would help to blow the petty politics and infighting out of Scientology and get everyone on track.

And I was about to hit the accelerator.

Chapter Eight: Revolution

2008-06-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

Pancho Villa Rides

It was well after midnight and the Tampa airport terminal was almost empty. Just a few late-night travelers sitting on the benches, reading, trying to sleep or, like me, watching the movie on the screen hanging above the waiting area. They were showing Pancho Villa, the 1972 Eugenio Martin film with Telly Savalas as Villa. I was identifying with Villa – his betrayal and imprisonment, his escape, his revolt against his enemy, Huerta. I could feel Villa’s hot outrage. ¡Viva la revolución!

I had a couple of hours before my flight back to LA, so I was killing time, keeping one eye on the entrances, half expecting someone from Flag to come and escort me back to the Base.

No, I hadn’t blown the Sea Organization. But I had left Flag after receiving specific orders from Kerry Gleeson, now Scientology’s Executive Director International, to remain at Flag. Kerry wanted me to do things his way. But I knew his short-sighted ways wouldn’t work. Not for what I had in mind. What I was planning had to be done thoroughly and without shortcuts for it to work.

I was returning to Los Angeles, whether Gleeson wanted it or not. I was going to continue the project Nancy and I had started. For once, I was going to do things my way.

I had first escaped from Clearwater in mid-1981, when Annie Allcock and I had been fired on a mission to locate and hire a public relations firm for the Church of Scientology. Military terminology permeated the Sea Org, so when a Sea Org member was sent to do something, they were "fired on a mission." It gave the activity a sense of precision and purpose.

"Big Blue" - The Scientology PAC Complex

Annie and I went directly from the airport to the "big blue building," the former Cedars of Lebanon hospital, which had been purchased by the Church four years earlier. It was a mixed collection of buildings – the original hospital was a hulking V-shaped relic from the 20’s with ornate deco trim, while the newer additions were 50s "modern" - bland blocks of stucco and glass. The entire thing had been painted a hideous shade of bright blue, apparently on Hubbard’s orders – since the color blue was associated with the spirit. Inside, it was bustling with Scientology activity.

The building complex was known within the Sea Org as the Pacific Area Command – again, the military frame of reference - or PAC for short, and housed the Los Angeles Organization (moved up from 9th Street), the American Saint Hill Organization, the Advanced Organization Los Angeles, as well as the Sea Org’s Continental Liaison Office for the Western US. The idea was to have the "entire Bridge" in one place – that is, all of Scientology’s levels from beginning public services all the way to the OT Levels and advanced training, as well as the continental management office.

The new Executive Director International, Bill Franks, had set up his offices in the penthouse of Lebanon Hall, a towering deco structure jutting up from the center of the building complex. It served as staff apartments. The penthouse was spacious, with cluttered desks placed throughout the large main room. A balcony looked out over the grey haze of Los Angeles.

Franks had just been appointed as Executive Director, a position last held by Hubbard himself in the 1960’s, and resurrected as part of the "new management" of the Church. In theory, he was the top dog. In fact, he answered to the Commodore’s Messenger Organization. He was taking his new position seriously, and the office was a hive of frantic activity. Franks sat us down at a long conference table, and briefed us on our mission, which was to locate a public relations firm that could be hired by the Church to repair its damaged public image.

Annie and I set up offices in one of the lower floors of the Main Building, and started calling around and setting up appointments. We got ourselves outfitted with proper business suits and got a couple of briefcases so we’d look the part.

Jeff in LA

For the next three or four weeks we went around LA, meeting with a list of PR firms, from some of the best-known A-list firms to lesser-known companies. At night, we compiled reports about each firm – what they had said, a summary of their firm, and a client list (to make sure they were not retained by drug companies, government agencies or psychs – the enemy!).

Then one day we got called up to Franks’ office. We were to collect together all of our information and turn it in – he was firing us on a different mission altogether, something that had become urgent. He briefed us that a Scientology celebrity, Cathy Lee Crosby, co-host of TV’s "That’s Incredible," was putting on an anti drug TV special called "Get High on Yourself." It would include Scientologists like John Travolta as well as non-Scientologists like rocker Ted Nugent. Cathy Lee wanted the Church to launch a big Purification Rundown promotional campaign coincident with the airing of the show. Her assistant, Cathy Wasserman, also a Scientologist, was organizing the whole "Get High on Yourself" program and was the one coordinating with Bill Franks (later the allegation was made that she and Bill were involved in more than "coordinating").

But the catch was this: the TV special was set to air in three weeks. We had three weeks to put together a complete and professional TV Campaign.

I was torn. On the one hand, this was exactly what I wanted to do – launch big public campaigns for Scientology. On the downside, this was more of the same panic mentality that was destructive of any proper planning or preparation. The excitement of actually doing a big campaign won out, and I went for it.

I figured I had a little leverage at this point, so I insisted on a third missionaire, someone trained in market research and surveying – my wife Nancy. She was on the next plane. At least that part of my plan was in place.

We commandeered an office on the second floor of LA Org, and arranged for some desks and a conference table where we could have meetings. We contacted a Scientologist, Don Spector, who had worked as Creative Director for both BBDO West and Foote, Cone and Belding, and he agreed to work with us. He had a marketing researcher that he worked with, Janai Pringle, also a Scientologist.

We also had two more people added to our project, Steve Heard and Jack Dirmann. They were supposed to handle public relations. Steve was a former GO staffer, a very smart, very funny guy, and Steve, Nancy and I had each other in stitches half the time.

Steve had a clever idea to promote the Purification Rundown, which was to start a Foundation which would do scientific studies of the Rundown and thereby prove its effectiveness. He and Jack brainstormed the whole thing – it would validate the Purification Rundown, then go on to validate Hubbard’s "Study Technology." They decided to call it "The Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Education" or FASE. They actually did get it established, and it still exists to this day. If you look at their website you’d never know they started in that little office above LA Org as a bright idea to promote the Purification Rundown.

Meanwhile, Nancy and I did some fast research and surveys and assembled a campaign, with TV ads, print ads, and a surveyed slogan, which was, as I remember, "Bring them back to life." It was aimed at parents whose children were addicted to drugs. I ended up presenting the whole campaign to three executives: Bill Franks, Kerry Gleeson (who was still CO Flag Bureaux and visiting from Clearwater), and John Nelson, the Commanding Officer of CMO International. I felt like I was giving the presentation to three department store mannequins. None of them moved or changed expression throughout the presentation, which went on for an hour. There were no smiles, no nods, no questions. It was eerie. At the end of it, they got up and left.

And that was the end of the Purification Campaign. It was never mentioned again. Probably they had other things on their minds, as I was soon to discover.

One afternoon in December 1981, I got a call from Bruce Wilson in Clearwater. He was all excited about a meeting that had just happened there between management and the Mission holders. Not to be confused with Sea Org "Missions," these were people who owned and operated Scientology’s franchises. Scientology had used the term Franchise for many years, but in an effort to pump up "religious image," they had been renamed "Missions." These were smaller organizations, privately owned, that delivered basic Scientology courses and auditing. They had long been at odds with the GO, and some complained that their missions had been illegally taken away from them. A few had even sued the Church to try to get their missions back. With the collapse of the GO, the Mission holders saw a chance to right some of these old wrongs, and wanted a dialog with management. They were looking to the new Executive Director International, Bill Franks, to put it all right. After all, he was Hubbard’s successor and could do something about it. Franks, however, arrived to the conference under CMO Int escort. It was clear that they were really pulling the strings, not Franks. The Mission holders just saw this as more shenanigans, and demanded answers. They challenged the executives who were present.
Bruce was enthusiastic about the meeting. He felt it was part of a bright new era for the Church, where ordinary Scientologists could have a voice in Church operations and a dialog with management.

I called Kim and told him about it. By this time, he was out of the Sea Org and was a "public Scientologist." With three small children to care for, including a newborn baby, Kim and his wife Deborah had found it impossible to live with the limited time and money they had in the Sea Org, so had routed out and were now living in the Valley. Kim had worked his way back into good standing with the Church. He was happy to hear that there might be some reforms. He had had his own bad experiences on staff.

But the "powers that be," the CMO Int hierarchy, saw the Mission Holders conference differently. They saw it as a mutiny against their authority. Scientology, after all, wasn’t a democracy, where people could publicly air their grievances, it was a top-down authoritarian rule, and one did not question those in power. Within weeks, Bill Franks was off post, under guard, and Kerry Gleeson, still in Clearwater, had been appointed as his successor.

For me, all of these internal politics and power plays were a distraction. If we really were to put the past behind us and begin a new era for Scientology, then we had to get out into the public eye and make the subject known to people. That was what was ultimately important.

Jeff and Nancy - loose cannons in LA

Nancy and I discussed what we should do next, and we decided to make our move. I wrote a long petition to the CO CMO Int, laying out a plan to once and for all get a major public campaign for Scientology launched. I laid out the exact steps, which included exhaustive marketing research, isolation of publics, surveys, studies to find the most effective media, research into the book market, and so on. I estimated it would take six months to a year. Amazingly, the petition was approved, and Nancy and I launched the Market Research and Advertising Project.

We started systematically, working with Don Spector, the Scientologist adman. My first question was: what kind of people would be most likely to get interested in Scientology? So we started with a survey of existing Scientologists to find common demographics at the time they had gotten into Scientology – age, education, income, many other factors. And we started surveying broadly for current public attitudes towards Scientology – attitudes we would have to overcome and change. And at the same time, we began researching religious and spiritual trends in society that might work for us. I kept senior executives briefed with weekly newsletters. I knew that unless I kept up a constant flow of valuable information, my project could be cancelled in an instant. As it was, we began to be known and our work valued.

It was all off the cuff. We had the office over LA Org that we had been using, so we just kept that. We had no authorization, we were essentially squatters. The head of Bridge Publications, the Scientology publishing firm that handles all of Hubbard’s books, was a friend of mine, Edy Lundeen. I briefed her on the project and got her support. With that, I was able to slip her Purchase Orders and get a little funding for operating expenses. I managed to get our food and berthing covered from the Continental Liaison Office. So with a bit of scrabbling and negotiating, we managed to stay afloat.

Getting staff was another matter. One day, a girl named Linda walked into the office.

"I heard you’re going to be doing a big raw public campaign," she said. I told her that was right.
"I’d really like to work on that," she said hopefully.

"Great!" I said. "Sit down there, that’s your desk. Nancy will train you on how to do surveys."

A few days later, Linda’s senior showed up.

"I’m looking for Linda," he said. "She’s my staff."

"She’s working here now," I told him. Amazingly, he left, and I never heard another word about it.

Staff continued to wander in, and I would put them to work. Soon there were five of us. I let Nancy run them as a survey team, and spent most of my time researching publics, trends, and the ins and outs of the book industry. Gradually, the bones of a campaign began to take shape.

I never paid much attention to "organizing." I just worked out what needed to be done and then had people do it. But "organizing" things and putting everything on elaborate org charts was an obsession in Scientology, and particularly with Hubbard. At the beginning of 1982, management attention began to swing in the direction of marketing activities, and the first thing that had to be worked out by management was "how to organize it."

Hubbard had started mentioning this problem in a series of communications to John Nelson, the CO CMO Int. He stated that while he had always been able to do "seat of the pants" marketing for Scientology – putting out new courses and auditing rundowns when income needed a boost – real formal marketing required an investment of people, time and money. He seemed to be echoing what I had been saying. He told Nelson how to go about setting up a central marketing unit for the Church. He said to first start a small unit, without touching any existing units, train that unit in "wog" marketing tech, and then gradually pull all other units under that seed unit. It seemed like a simple plan. The only problem was that it actually required setting up and training a starter unit – and no one was willing to put the time or effort into actually doing that.

So the confusion about "how to set up a central marketing unit" rolled forward, getting more and more confusing and complex the more everyone avoided that first step.

Finally, in desperation, Nelson called for a conference at Flag to settle the matter. All of the heads of the existing marketing units would attend – me, the Dissem Aide Flag Bureau, the marketing people from "Golden Era Productions" and others. I flew to Clearwater for the conference, bringing Don Spector along as a professional advertising guy who had worked in agencies and might be able to throw some light on how to organize up a central marketing unit.

The conference soon degenerated into utter chaos. No one could agree on anything. I tried to present what I considered some sane ideas for setting up a marketing function, only to have them shouted down. For every suggestion I made, there were a dozen insane ones. I finally left the conference room in disgust, and sent Spector back to LA. It had been a colossal waste of time. I wanted to get back to work.

It was not to be. I was ordered to Kerry Gleeson’s office in the West Coast Building. He lit into me right away.

"Your project is a failure," he said. "You’re a failed Missionaire. You will never, never, get a campaign launched that way."

When I was still working at Flag under Gleeson, I would have caved under this kind of pressure, and agreed to whatever he wanted. But I was still frustrated and angry from the insanity of the "marketing conference." I was in no mood to agree with Gleeson, or to go along with any more crackpot ideas of how marketing ought to be done.

"You’re wrong," I said, surprising myself a little. "What I’m doing, real research and planning, is the only way to get an effective campaign going."

He looked at me oddly, shocked that I had dared to challenge him. "You’ve changed," he said, narrowing his eyes. "There’s something different about you…"

"You’re not going back to LA," he told me flatly. "You’re going to remain here as my Marketing Executive International. If you want to launch a big campaign, fine, you can do it via the Continental Liaison Offices to the Orgs."

That, I knew, was the sure route to disaster. The CLOs and the Orgs were caught up in Gleeson’s week-to-week stat machine. They would never, never devote the time and resources to running such a campaign that didn’t show immediate weekly stat results. No, the campaign needed to be centrally conceived and centrally funded and run – direct to the public.

"I’m not staying," I told Gleeson. "I’m going back to LA to do my campaign."

He was furious. "You are not to leave Flag. I demand a solution from you before you go anywhere. If you won’t be Marketing Exec Int, then who will? You’d better have a solution by tomorrow!" With that he dismissed me.

I left his office, seething. Factually, Gleeson couldn’t recall me – I was under CMO Int, not ED Int. I headed for the Dissem Bureau offices. I knew that I had friends there, and that one of them, Charlie Updegrove, had a car.

It was after midnight, but I could see lights still on. I banged on the door and peeked through the blinds. There were about five staff in there, staring at the door in a frozen tableau of fear. "Open up!" I shouted, "it’s me, Jeff." Finally they let me in.

"Charlie, I need a ride to the airport," I told him. Graciously, he didn’t ask any questions. We collected my luggage and headed out to Tampa International Airport. I booked the next flight to LA, an early morning flight.

Back in LA, Nancy and I set about consolidating our position. A new organization had been formed at the end of 1981 called Author Services. They were officially not a part of the Church, but were supposed to be L. Ron Hubbard’s literary agency. In fact, like everything else in Scientology, they were run from the top. As my future campaign would involve selling Scientology books, and that would mean royalties to Hubbard, they took an interest in what we were doing, and in fact began running us directly. I sent my weekly reports to Fran Harris, and she started having weekly meetings with us to go over project. She would report on our campaign progress to Hubbard, and would let us know what he said back. He seemed to be pleased with the progress we were making.

Gleeson made one final attempt to stop us. He had been spreading it all over Flag that I was "blown" and sent two missionaries, Debbie Vincent and Aledia Warren, with instructions to take over our market research project and reorganize it. When they arrived and briefed me on what they were going to do, I was furious. I tried to reason with them, but they were determined not to listen to me.

Somehow, I lured them into a supply closet, on the pretext that there was something important in there to inspect. I then closed the door on them and locked it, went to a nearby desk and called Frannie at ASI. I briefed her on what was happening.

"Don’t worry," she said. "I’ll call you right back."

I waited, listening to the pounding and muffled curses coming from the closet. Ten minutes later, the phone rang.

"It’s handled," Frannie said. "They’ve been recalled."

I unlocked the door and let the two furious women out.

"You’ve been recalled," I told them. "Now get the fuck out of my office."

And so we carried on, the surveys and research data piling up. I was getting a pretty good idea of who we should be marketing to and what their attitudes and needs were. It seemed that those most likely to be interested in Scientology were young and well-educated. They were people who were looking for change in their lives. I called them "seekers."

One afternoon, I went to the local drugstore to pick something up, and ran into Bill Franks. He looked hollow, tired. He was, I gathered, out of Scientology altogether by then. We talked for a minute, and I told him what I was doing. He wished me luck. That was the last time I saw him.

Then in April 1982, several things came together at once, like planets aligning. My old friend Foster Tompkins arrived on a mission to Bridge Publications, the Scientology publishing house for Hubbard’s books. There was going to be a major book convention in June in Anaheim, the American Booksellers Association Convention. This was a yearly national convention where publishers showed their wares and made deals with the book chains and distributors. Foster was to arrange for Bridge Publications to have a booth at this fair and sell Hubbard’s books.

Meanwhile, Bruce Wilson had started a new activity at Flag called the Library Donation Project. Its aim was to get Scientologists to buy books which would then be donated to public libraries. The profits were to go to major book campaigns.

At the same time, Hubbard had written a long memo to the CO CMO Int called "Planetary Dissemination" (later issued as a Policy Letter). In it, he stated that Scientology Organizations would continue to be small and static if they only sold to their existing public of Scientologists. In order to really expand, we had to reach out to new people, and the way to do that was with books. He called for a big book campaign to be launched.

The path ahead seemed clear to Foster and I. We would join forces, along with Bruce, in one overall project. That the three of us were good friends, and that all of us tended to be mavericks, only increased the appeal. I would handle the market research, advertising and media; Foster would handle the book trade sales, and Bruce would handle the funding. We would launch the biggest public book campaign anyone had seen.

We discussed what to call the combined project. "Book Marketing Unit" seemed obvious, but I could see an immediate problem.

"If we call ourselves the Book Marketing Unit," I told Foster, "then pretty soon they’ll have us running the orgs’ week-to-week book sales, and that’s all we’ll end up doing."

"Well, that’s tactical," Foster pointed out. "We don’t do tactical; we do strategy."

So the Strategic Book Marketing Unit was born.

And over the next four and a half years, the SBMU would reach a level of success none of us had envisioned.

Chapter Seven: The Land Base

2008-06-01T19:07:00.001-07:00

The Fort Harrison Hotel, 1976

I could see them from two blocks away – the protesters, holding their signs above their heads in the Florida sun. They were clustered on the sidewalk outside the Fort Harrison Hotel, where I was headed for lunch. So I would have to run the gauntlet. I felt a mix of emotions – anger at the protesters, embarrassment and awkwardness at having to walk past them, frustration that we were disliked by the locals.

We were instructed to just ignore them. It was the job of the Guardians Office to handle "the enemy," and that included these protesters. We were to just carry on doing our jobs, "Clearing the Planet." The GO would handle everything, so they told us. The only problem was, their handlings didn’t seem to be improving the scene. And some of their their tactics seemed to me to be boneheaded – like the time they decided to march on the local newspaper offices, the Clearwater Sun, dressed in Nazi uniforms. They were trying to say that the Sun was being Nazi-like. But for Clearwater residents, many of whom were retirees who had survived WW II, many of whom were Jewish, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, the appearance of Nazi uniforms on the streets of Clearwater was just upsetting. I found such attempts at "PR" to be just embarrassing.

But still, I had to walk past the protesters. I just wanted to get to the staff dining room, have lunch, and get back to work. And here they were, in my path. Who were they, I wondered? We had been briefed that they were local rednecks who had been riled up against Scientology by corrupt Clearwater politicians.

As I edged past them, a young guy, who looked like he could be a ringleader, leaned towards me.
"Is Dianetics working today?" he sneered. I felt an angry retort boiling up inside me, but I tamped it down. I just kept walking, eyes straight ahead. Don’t let him get to you, I told myself.

I found myself tense and scowling as I entered the cool of the lobby and climbed up the stairs to the staff dining room. I breathed deeply, tried to relax and enjoy my brief lunch break.

It had all started after we arrived in Clearwater at the end of 1975. After the Apollo docked in the Bahamas, more than a dozen missions had been fired from the ship, each one handling a different facet of the move to shore, and all of them, we were told, personally run by the Commodore.

A temporary "staging area" was established in Daytona Beach, Florida. There, in a big motel, the Neptune, delivery of Flag training and auditing continued, with Flag’s paying public living in the upper floors of the motel, and course rooms and offices set up on the ground floor. Hubbard checked into another hotel just down the road, and supervised operations from there.

There was a huge demand for Flag auditing, now exploding with the move to a Land Base. On the ship, the number of public who could come for training and auditing was severely limited. But with a Land Base, there were no limits on how many could come. After all, these were the highest trained Scientology auditors in the world, the Class XIIs, personally trained by Ron. And all of the sessions were supervised by LRH personally. "We can crack any case that walks up the walk," bragged Hubbard.

Four of us from the Dissem Bureau were sent to Daytona to continue putting out the Advance magazine – vital to Advanced Org stats. David Ziff was in charge as Editor, I was the designer, Annie Allcock handled typesetting and layout, and Andre Clavel was sent with us to do any needed artwork. We set up operations in one of the rooms, and Annie and I, both inveterate swimmers, managed a swim every day at noon in the cold Atlantic.

Meanwhile, there was a bustle of comings and goings as the permanent land base was readied in a confidential location. But nothing stays confidential for long, particularly if you’re alert. One day I heard a couple of Missionaires talking, and one of them mentioned that the city where the new facility was being set up was "appropriately named." A few minutes with a Florida map and I had it – Clearwater.

At the beginning of December, the entire Daytona facility moved across Florida to the new location – in just a few hours – with delivery of Flag services continuing uninterrupted. The public literally got up that morning in Daytona, were driven to Clearwater, and had their auditing sessions for that day.

We were briefed before we arrived that we were not to mention Scientology on the streets of Clearwater. No one was to know that we were Scientology. If asked, we were to say that we were with "United Churches of Florida" – a Hubbard brainstorm – supposedly a pan-denominational group setting up the hotel for training and conferences.

We were used to keeping our real identity secret, as we had to do it on the Apollo. Then, we were the "Operation and Transport Company." We had to remain "fabian," the Commodore has said, referring to the Roman general Fabius Maximus, who advocated victory by delay and harassment rather than by a decisive battle. Sea Org operations had to remain confidential, so that "the enemy" would not get wind of our locations and plans. Hubbard frequently used military terms to describe our ongoing struggle with the enemy – the psychs and the government agencies who were after us. In fact, our daily "to-do" lists were referred to as "Battle Plans."

I settled in to life in Clearwater. Florida was hot and muggy. It seemed to be a city that had stopped moving in time, preserved from an earlier decade, but preserved without refrigeration, so everything seemed to be in moldering decay – the cheap, boxy buildings, the aging cars, the elderly citizens.

But with all that, I was glad to be back in the US and enjoy simple things on my off-time like getting a decent hamburger or visiting the mall. The Fort Harrison Hotel had a swimming pool in the back, and a group of us spent our lunch hours swimming. We would run up to our rooms, change, and race down to the pool. Then when it was almost time to go back on post, we’d dash up and change, then race through the kitchen and grab some fruit so we wouldn’t starve. I heard later that the locals’ picture of Scientologists was "people with wet hair running through the streets carrying fruit."

Jeff at work in the Dissemination Bureau

In Clearwater, we were of course not allowed to wear any Sea Org naval uniforms; we had to dress in "wog clothes" so we would blend in – as if hundreds of oddly-behaving strangers suddenly descending on a sleepy Florida town could ever blend in.

I didn’t have any "wog clothes" so went to the local clothing store and got a nice white summer suit. We were supposed to dress as "upstat" (successful) business people – no jeans and t-shirts. When we first arrived, we were supposed to wear ties – that didn’t last long once the weather started warming up.

The Church had purchased five buildings in Clearwater. There was the Fort Harrison Hotel, an old eleven-story structure built in 1924. That was allocated to public service delivery as well as accommodations for both public and some crew. Two motels were purchased to handle the rest of crew berthing – the Heart of Clearwater motel on Cleveland Street, and an old Quality Inn, about eight miles from downtown. The Clearwater Bank Building, or "CB," on the corner of Cleveland and Fort Harrison Streets, and the West Coast Building, or "WB," housed the Flag Bureaux. We had, in essence, taken over downtown Clearwater, a fact which was not appreciated by the locals, especially when they inevitably learned that both "United Churches of Florida" and "Southern Land Development" (the company that had originally purchased the properties), were both fronts for the Church of Scientology.

It was hard not to notice the local hostility towards the Church. After our front groups were exposed, negative articles started appearing in the Saint Petersburg Times (gleefully dubbed "SP Times" by the GO) and the Clearwater Sun. A citizens’ group, led by Clearwater Mayor Gabe Cezares, was critical of Scientology’s attempted takeover of the town, and soon there were protests, with crowds of locals picketing in front of the Fort Harrison.

We’d been briefed on the demonstrations, on why they were occurring. The reason for the local attacks, we were told, was that the Mafia, in collusion with corrupt city officials, had planned to depress property values in downtown Clearwater, buy up all the property, then set up gambling casinos. When we bought the Fort Harrison and started fixing it up, that thwarted their evil plan. We were the good guys. But the politicians were stirring up the local citizens with lies about us. It was all part of the enemy cabal against Scientology.

At least, that’s what the Guardian’s Office told us. And they were the ones dealing with it. They discouraged us from reading the local newspapers. They were just full of "entheta" they said. "Entheta was a Scientology term, short for "entubulated theta." Theta was the word for the life force or spirit, and when that life force was disturbed, it was called "entheta." Colloquially in Scientology, the term referred to anything that was critical of Scientology.

We weren’t allowed to watch TV either. An order had come from the Commodore, who at that time was living a few miles up the coast in Dunedin, that staff were not to watch television. "An unproven why of crew disinterest in their posts is that what we’ve got is TV zombies who are not interested in life," he proclaimed. All of the staff television sets were immediately removed from rooms and put into storage. From that point on, we were cut off from the zombifying effects of TV – and also, incidentally, from any possible negative news broadcasts.

After we arrived, I went back to the post I had had on the ship, designing and writing promotion. In March, 1976, the Photo Shoot Org became Universal Media Productions, or "Unimed," and started making films as well as doing still photography. It was planned that they would do some promotional films to get more Scientologists to come to the Flag Land Base, as it was now called, for service.

Even though we were now on land, the location was still confidential. But we were allowed to tell our families that we were in the U.S. I eagerly called my mom, who had returned from Paris and was now living in Stockton, California. She was elated that I was now so close, and I told her I would get a leave and come visit.

There was another reason I wanted to visit. My sister, Susan, had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and my mother was caring for her. Susan had followed me and Kim into Scientology, and had ended up marrying a Scientologist, Bob Blanchard, who ran a mission in Hayward, California. She had reached OT III, but then had been diagnosed with cancer. Her Case Supervisor at the Advanced Org had advised some therapies that were only available in Mexico involving massive vitamin dosages.

I got my leave approved and flew to LA, where I met up with Kim. After he had left Copenhagen, Kim had joined the Sea Org in LA and was now staff at the Advanced Organization, which at that time was on Bonnie Brae in downtown Los Angeles, just a few blocks from LA Org, where Kim and I had first contacted Scientology. Kim had gotten an OK for a leave too, but was afraid it would be revoked at any second, so we got out of LA as fast as we could, feeling like a couple of kids playing hookey. We drove up 101 to Sacramento, driving through the night in the rain to get there.

It was great to spend a week with family, although Susan was in a lot of pain, but was happy to see us. Mom was trying to make things as comfortable for her as possible. Kim and I ended up taking apart his carburetor, spreading the parts out all over Mom’s living room on newspapers.

It was over all too soon. An image that remains in my mind is Mom and Susan standing out in front of the house as Kim and I drove off, waving frantically. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the image of my sister, growing smaller and smaller as we drove away.

Two weeks later, back at the Fort Harrison Hotel, I was checking my mail box to see if I had any letters. There was a scrap of paper there, printed on one side. The printing made no sense. I turned it over, and there, scrawled in the childish handwriting of the Receptionist, was one short sentence:

"Your sister has died."

I called Mom right away. We cried together on the phone. I asked if I should come back out, she said no. My brother Kim raced up from LA to help her.

There was nothing else to do but carry on. And there was lots to do. The location of Flag was no longer confidential, and Hubbard had launched tours to LA, New York and Europe to get more people to Flag. Each tour had a Class VII as main speaker, and a salesman-type, a "Registrar" as they were called in Scientology Orgs. They held huge events and promoted Flag auditing. And people started flooding in.

And if things had been tense on the ship, they were even more so within the office buildings of the Flag Bureaux. Kerry Gleeson, the Commanding Officer of the FB, continued to run the org by harangues, criticism, and threat. We had crew musters twice a day, and often specific staff would be called out and dressed down for their failings. Gleeson swore like a sailor, and soon his rough language spread to other execs and staff, and the level of profanity commonly used rose to a high that I had never experienced before, with female officers (who we also had to address as "Sir") vying with their male counterparts in the use of four-letter words – particularly when dressing down their juniors.

Gleeson was notorious for what was known as a "stat push." That meant doing anything and everything to "get the stats up." Unfortunately that usually meant doing things the easy way, which often consisted of just putting more and more pressure on existing Scientologists to pay more and more money, rather than putting time and effort into attracting new members. The stat-push mentality discouraged any longer range planning and fixated attention on immediate emergencies, superficial handlings, and the right-now actions of getting this week’s stats up. The pervading atmosphere was one of week-to-week panic, with dire consequences for those who did not "make it go right" to get their stats up that week.

The stress only intensified in early 1977 when staff began disappearing suddenly. The MAA (Master at Arms) would tap them on the shoulder, and they would be escorted away, not to return. We were told that they were "List One R/Sers."

"List One" was an auditing assessment list that included the top names in Scientology, like L. Ron Hubbard, Mary Sue Hubbard, and top execs. The person would be put on an e-meter, where he would be holding the electrode cans, and this list would be read to him. If the e-meter needle erratically slammed back and forth across the dial, it was referred to as a "Rock Slam," and it meant that the person had evil purposes towards the principal figures of Scientology. They were to be immediately sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force – no questions, no appeal.

One day, the MAA walked into the Dissem Bureau offices. It was like the Spectre of Death arriving. Everyone watched with dread as he walked across the room, hoping that he wasn’t coming for them. He walked up behind David Ziff and tapped him on the shoulder. David turned and saw him, and his face went white. He rose without a word and walked out with the MAA.

That’s how I became the Advance Magazine Editor.

I had to do some fast study to learn how to put one of these magazines together. There were some key recorded briefings from Hubbard and I listened to these. In addition to an article by Hubbard in each issue (edited from one of his recorded lectures), there was always to be an article about "Man’s Spiritual History." Hubbard laid out exactly how these were to be written. You took a spiritual subject, like divination, ghosts, alchemy, tarot cards, or a religious subject, like Sufism, Gnosticism or whatever, and researched the subject, then wrote an article about it, laying out what they believed. Then you summed up the article with a statement that "these people were searching for the truth about life, and they would be gratified to find that their long search for answers has at last culminated in the truths of Scientology." It was a formula, every article ending more or less the same. I would spend days at the Clearwater Library researching the article, then pound it out on a little Brother portable typewriter.

In addition to a lot of ads for books and lectures and the "OT Levels," there was something called "OT Phenomena Success Stories," which were stories from OTs about the abilities that they had gained on their OT Levels and how they had exercised their "OT abilities." These were solicited from the Advanced Orgs. A lot of them were things like finding a parking place with extrasensory perception, or sending a "theta" communication to a loved one over a long distance, and then having that person suddenly call. They were wild and weird, and very popular with Advance readers. Some I received were so bizarre I couldn’t even publish them, like one "OT" who claimed to have gone exterior one afternoon while sitting in an easy chair, gone to a distant planet, and Cleared it all by himself! I had to draw the line somewhere.

I wasn’t OT myself, so I shared with Advance readers the sense of mystery about these levels. And that probably helped me to build an aura of awe and wonder in the Advance magazines. Meanwhile I arranged to get onto the Solo Auditors Course so I could progress to OT. This was the course where you learned how to audit yourself. I eventually made it up to Clear, then went on to OT III at Flag, reading all about the evil galactic overlord Xenu and the creation of the "body thetans" in a courseroom in the Fort Harrison Hotel. So that was the big mystery, the "secret incident from 75 million years ago" that I had been writing about. Of course it was far-fetched – but in a way I expected it to be something that wild. I audited the materials and, frankly, didn’t feel all that different. But I figured my "OT abilities" would manifest themselves over time as I got used to my new state of being.

Working on Advance Magazine at last gave me the chance to create artistically, and I really enjoyed it. I did virtually everything on the magazine – illustrations, hand lettering, cartoons, as well as making props and directing the photo shoots with Unimed. Sometimes I’d spend an entire day just executing an illustration. I bought an airbrush and taught myself how to use it.

I was also running the publication lines for getting the magazine produced and distributed. To do this, I had Assistant Editors at every AO. As my brother Kim was the Director of Promotion at the Advanced Organization in Los Angeles, AOLA. He was my Assistant Editor there, and I depended on him to get me photographs, success stories and other items from AOLA, and he also got it printed. So we corresponded frequently – even if it was all business. He had just gotten married to his second wife, Deborah, who worked at Celebrity Centre. We talked about them moving to Flag – but it never happened.

In July, an alarming story spread through the Base like a panic. They were saying that the FBI had raided the Guardian’s Offices in LA and Washington D.C. Everyone was buzzing with the news but details were sketchy. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened. Finally we got a briefing of sorts – the raids were illegal, we were taking legal action, all the GO had done was "steal some paper" from government offices. It was all a tempest in a teapot, they assured us, and would soon be handled victoriously.

I was concerned that this negative press would get to Mom and that she would be worried or upset, so I wrote her long letters, explaining how we were only being attacked as we were "exposing their crimes," and that what they were saying was "all lies." It felt odd to write to Mom this way, but these were the things we had been told. Even to my ears it sounded strident, defensive.

In August, Mom came to Clearwater for a visit. After returning from Paris, she had been teaching in Idyllwild, California – ironically just a few miles from the future Int Base in Hemet. But she had another job offer from International Schools, this time in Tehran, Iran. She decided to drive across the country to bring me her car, which I would care for while she was abroad. As luck would have it, my daughter Gwennie was just returning to Copenhagen after a visit with Tina’s mother, so they decided to drive across country together to see me. I was elated – I hadn’t seen Gwennie for two years – since I’d left Copenhagen.

Mom and Gwennie visit Jeff at the Fort Harrison Hotel

She was eight years old now. I was able to get time off and we had a wonderful time together, went to the beach and saw the local sights. Then they flew together to Copenhagen, and my mom went on to Tehran and her new job. She was to stay there for two years – and become one of the last Americans to leave the country, six months after the Khomeini takeover.

In late 1977, Unimed left the Flag Land Base and moved to the confidential location where Hubbard was. Years later I would learn that this was at La Quinta, near Palm Springs in California, but at the time we just referred to it as "over the rainbow." They became a film production company, Source Productions, later renamed Golden Era Productions.

Hubbard was always releasing new auditing rundowns and procedures, and these would then be promoted broadly to get more and more people coming in for services. The "Sweat Out Program" was one of these. It was supposed to be a way to sweat out toxins and drugs with a regimen of vitamins and exercise. The original pilot program had us running out the causeway towards Clearwater Beach in rubberized sweatsuits. I refused to wear one. I said that if the purpose was to generate sweat, then I was already sweating at maximum, just by running in the Florida sun.

One advantage of the program was that I got in great shape. At first I couldn’t run more than a block without wheezing, but I gradually built up my stamina until I could run all the way to the beach. Even after the program was finished, I kept on running, rising early and jogging out to the beach before breakfast – a four mile run. Gradually I worked it up to eight miles a day. Late at night after post, a bunch of us would put music on in the main auditorium and do disco line dancing for an hour. It was the ‘70s after all.

Between the running, dancing and swimming, I got in great shape. I started "dating" again, although at Flag in those days it was strictly platonic. Necking or kissing could get you in big trouble, even an RPF assignment! But I managed to spend my days off with one girl or another, going up the coast to Tarpon Springs, down the coast to Sarasota, or just to the beach. I had my mom’s old Dodge, so I was able to get around.

In mid-1978, "entheta" once again struck. Eleven Guardian’s Office staff, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were convicted of burglary of government offices, and theft of documents and government property. Again, few details were forthcoming from the Guardian’s Office. We heard vaguely that the GO had been "infiltrated" and "set up" to fail in its mission to protect the Church, that those involved were "purged" from the Church, and that, after all, they "had done nothing more serious than steal photocopier paper." It was all fine, in other words, was under control, and the GO was handling it. It was all starting to sound a bit thin – it was pretty obvious that the GO wasn’t handling anything and was just making matters worse. The conviction was followed by a rash of "bad press" on Scientology. Again, I wrote to Mom reassuring her that it was all lies, that everything was OK. But it was pretty obvious everything was not OK.

In 1979, Bruce, Tina and Gwen came to the Flag Land Base from Copenhagen. Gwennie was ten by then, and it was great to be able to see her all the time. I was still on great terms with Tina, and Bruce was a good friend. I spend Christmas 1979 with them, and it was like being with family in a way.

Bruce became the Dissem Aide, so was my senior. We often talked about how great it would be to launch a big public dissemination campaign to counter all of the GO "entheta" and let people know what Scientology was really like. I was studying "wog" textbooks on advertising and marketing, trying to learn all I could about the subjects. After post time, some of us would gather in the Lemon Tree Café in the Fort Harrison - the staff after-hours hangout - and have long bull sessions about the big public campaigns that we should be doing.

But it was all just talk. In reality, no one was interested in broad public dissemination of Scientology. It required resources – staff and money that would be taken away from the right-now push for the weekly stats. It would take time to plan, launch, and ramp up a real campaign – time that no one had with the day-by-day emergencies. I became increasingly frustrated and sick at heart.

In late 1980, I found a new romantic interest, Nancy Pierce. She worked in the research and survey area of the Dissem Bureau, and was sharp and funny – a sort of blonde Carol Burnett. We began hanging out in our off-time – one of our first "dates" was going down to a jazz festival at Coachman Park over a dinner hour. Nancy could get me laughing like no one else – and she shared my passion for public dissemination of Scientology and my hatred of the Gleeson "stat push" mentality. We found we had a lot in common and became fast friends.

Soon we were sharing other passions – sneaking off after post to find a secluded spot. Of course, we couldn’t take it too far without getting in trouble, so we decided to get married. I called Mom and gave her the news, and she said she’d come out for the wedding, which we set for New Years Eve. Nancy’s mom, Eva, came down from Pennsylvania and the two moms had a great time. The wedding was lavish, held in the Chapel of the Fort Harrison. Deld was the minister, Bruce was best man, and Gwennie was the flower girl.

The wedding, with Maid-of Honor Brigitte, Nancy's mom Eva, Nancy, me, Mom, and Best Man Bruce.

We settled into married life, moving out to the Quality Inn, about eight miles from downtown, and driving back and forth in the old Dodge, now named "Lizzie." We continued to work at the daily grind in the Dissem Bureau, daydreaming in our off-time about someday running a big public campaign to promote Scientology, someday when we would be free of Gleeson.

In late 1981, the chance came. The Guardian’s Office had finally been dismantled. Mary Sue Hubbard and ten other Guardian’s Office staff had gone to prison. The Commodore’s Messenger Organization, located at a confidential location in California, had taken over all of management, including the functions previously handled by the GO. They had set up a "Watchdog Committee" (WDC) to monitor all of Scientology. Bill Franks had been appointed as Executive Director International, and had a council of executives, the "Senior Executive Strata," to directly plan and carry out Scientology expansion. It was a new era, a new leaf.

Part of the GO functions now taken over by WDC and Exec Strata was Church public relations. It was time to mend the "bad PR" generated by the GO. There was to be a mission sent to LA to find and hire a professional PR firm which would then be retained by the Church. Annie Allcock and I were named as the Missionaires.

I told Nancy I was going, and added, for her ears only,

"Pack up everything we own and put it in storage. Be ready to come to LA when I call for you."

She looked at me quizzically.

"I’m not coming back," I told her.

It was time to revolt.

Chapter Six: Back to Flag

2008-05-22T23:28:00.001-07:00

Willemstadt, Curacao, 1975. The Apollo is in the background

"Dissem Bureau crew – we’re to report to the Research Room right away for a conference with the Commodore?"

It was the voice of Jim Vannier, the Flag Dissem Aide and my new senior. I stood up from my tiny desk, jammed up against the bulkhead. A conference with the Commodore? Was this what life aboard the Apollo was to be like? Regular meetings with the Old Man himself?

I joined the rest of the Dissem Bureau staff – about ten of us – as we rapidly made our way along the Tweendecks area towards the stairway. Jim sent someone running down to the get the guys who were working at the small printing machine in the hold. We ran up the stairs and congregated on A deck at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Commodore’s inner sanctum.

"Is everyone here?" one of the Commodore’s Messengers yelled down from the top of the stairs. Like all of the Messengers, she was a blonde teenager, provocatively dressed in white stack heels, white shorts, and a white shirt tied in front – exposing an expanse of midriff. Wherever they went, male eyes followed them – but they were strictly off-limits.

"We’re just waiting for the printers," Jim replied. Just then the door to A deck burst open, and the came tumbling in. One was my friend Steve Boyd, whom I’d worked with at Pubs. The other was a young kid, who brought with him the strong, rank stench of body odor. With the ship docked in Curacao – right on the equator – and no air conditioning, the lower holds were like ovens. We all looked at each other in a panic – he couldn’t go into the Research Room smelling like that! But it was too late. The Messenger was impatiently motioning us to get up the stairs now.

We entered the Research Room. The Commodore was behind his desk, situated to the right as you came in. Between the desk and the door a dozen chairs had been hastily set up. The room was rich with a sort of maritime opulence – polished brass and varnished wood. At the left was a carved wood fireplace with a mirror mounted above it. On the mantel was a detailed replica of the Cutty Sark.

Given his famous sensitivity to smells, he was gracious about the odor that had just entered his space.

Leave the door open," he instructed a Messenger.

We all sat down, and I got my first closeup look at L. Ron Hubbard, Founder of Scientology and Commodore of the Sea Organization. He seemed heavier than he had when I’d last seen him, in 1971. His reddish hair was starting to grey, and was thinning on top. My attention was riveted on a large fatty tumor on the top of his head, only partially obscured by the thinning hairs combed over it. What is that? I found myself thinking. I found myself wondering, absurdly, if that was some manifestation of his "OT powers." There had recently been a series of Advance magazines – the magazine of the Advanced Organizations – that had talked about a new Hubbard book, Hymn of Asia, where he claimed to be Metteya, the reincarnation of Gautama Buddha. The articles had created a sensation in Denmark. The luridly colored pictures on the cover showed "LRH as Buddha," dressed in Indian robes, with a curious knot of red hair on the top of his head. The pictures of Buddha in the same issue showed him with the same sort of knot. Was this curious tumescence a part of the whole Metteya thing, I wondered?

Hubbard looked down at the papers scattered about his desk. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt with a light blue ascot. When we were settled, he looked up and surveyed the motley crew seated in front of him.

"I didn’t want you to think I was mad at you," he began, flashing us one of his trademark fleshy grins. "I know things have been a bit rough, but I thought it was time I gave you a bit of a briefing, to let you know where we’re headed."

He was, he informed us, no stranger to the graphic arts. He entertained us with a long story about his college days at George Washington University, and how he used to get the student newspaper together, back in the days of hot metal type, galley proofs and letterpress. No question about it, the man knew how to tell a story, and how to hold an audience. He relayed his experiences with the printing world, producing books at Manneys, a printer in Kansas, his introduction to photolitho printing and so on. We listened with rapt attention, convinced by the time he was halfway through his talk, that we were talking to a man well-versed in the world of promotion and printing.

We were already familiar with his many writings on the subject of art. As a pulp writer in the 1930s and 40s, an amateur photographer, a sometime poet, and a philosopher, he considered himself qualified to pronounce upon the true nature of art. In 1960, he had grandly issued his definition of art: "the quality of communication." He had followed this with a series of writings on what made art good or bad. He had also been issuing us a series of instructions on the exact steps to get a piece of promotion from the "idea" stage through to a printed product – what he called the "Assembly Line" for promotion. That was what we were supposed to operate on - to the letter.

He also had another project going. He had established a Photo Shoot Org, a group of staff who would help him shoot a series of photographs for Scientology promotion. They would go out and find a location on whatever island we happened to be visiting, and set up hastily assembled backdrops and props, according to "photo shoot scripts" they had been issued by Hubbard. Every day, Hubbard would show up, dressed in his khaki safari outfit – he loved costumes – and direct a series of photographs. These, he explained, were to be converted to photo brochures, which got across the entire message with photographs and brief captions.

"The world is becoming more and more illiterate in this TV age," he told us. Drugs and modern education – all part of the "psych" plan to destroy the world – had made people unable to read. These brochures would bypass that, with pictures. And we would design them.

"What I am trying to do," he summarized, "is, through the quality of communication alone, expand Scientology by ten, twenty, thirty times. That’s why you’re here."
We had our marching orders.

I had arrived in Curacao six weeks earlier, in June. Looking at the activity onboard from dockside, I had been struck by the difference between the Apollo as it had been in 1971 and the way it was now. Then it had seemed snap and pop, with the crew uniformed and serious. Now it looked like a bohemian colony. The forward well deck was stacked with theatrical sets and props. On the aft well deck, a group of colorfully costumed dancers was practicing a routine, while thumping rock music emanated from a group of musicians. The crew were long-haired and casually dressed – I could see men in Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, women in bikini tops and shorts. I suddenly felt over-dressed and over-serious.

I was assigned berthing in the aft men’s dormitory, which was crowded with bunks and insufferably hot. Many of the crew, I discovered, simply slept on deck where they could at least have a bit of a breeze. I eventually got used to the place – even routinely pulling back the covers before retiring and sweeping the cockroaches off the bed. We had our meals in the aft dining room, colorfully named the "Doggie Diner."

On arrival, I had been assigned to a new unit called the "Literature Unit," which consisted of me and Ken Delderfield. Our task was to create literature for Scientology, like brochures and fliers. That assignment lasted about a week, then we were both reassigned to the newly forming Dissemination Bureau, under Dissem Aide Jim Vannier.

David Ziff was already part of the unit. He was the Editor of Advance Magazine – the "OT" magazine of Scientology which contained articles about "Man's Spiritual History" as well as "OT Phenomenon" success stories, where OTs wrote about having "remote vision" and other "OT Powers." David’s new wife Mary, a wiry, spunky little Aussie, did the typesetting. Carol Titus did the "Rough Layout," which meant planning out the layouts. Annie McGinley did the layouts, and Deld was assigned as Printer Liaison. And there were two "LRH Artists" who did the paintings and illustrations – a Frenchman, Andre Clavel, and LRH’s son, Arthur Hubbard. Steve Boyd, whom I’d known from Pubs, handled the internal printing.

We never had another conference with Hubbard, but his Commodore’s Messengers were frequent visitors. They either relayed his instructions verbally, or presented large colored cards upon which the Old Man had written his orders or comments in his unmistakable handwriting. As I was doing the designing, I would sometimes get five or six message runs a day as the details of a piece were hammered out. And I even had message runs at night. The Messengers were instructed to wake a person by gently putting a hand on their chest, so they wouldn’t suddenly sit up and bang their head on the bunk above. I would feel this little hand stealing over my chest, then a voice in my ear:

"The Commodore wants to know…"

You had to come out of a dead sleep and up to speed in a matter of seconds.

Once I got to go on a photo shoot, when we were in Jamaica. The crew had staked out an area of land and had set up about ten or twelve "scenes" with crude backdrops and improvised furniture and props. Here was one meant to represent a doctors office, and, next to it, someone’s home. Of course they looked nothing like what they were supposed to – when you had just a few hours to create and set up ten scenes, it was pretty slap-dash.

The costumes were equally make-do. They had racks of old clothes, and it was a matter of finding something that was appropriate for the character and that more or less fit. I was cast as a radio announcer, so was put in a slightly oversized suit. It was agonizingly hot, and I began to sweat profusely. We all took our places in front of the set walls, and then the Commodore arrived with his entourage of Messengers. The Messengers would set up the camera for the first shot, he would look through the viewfinder, fiddle with the aperture and focus, and then start barking out orders to the actors as to where to stand and what to do. He moved rapidly from one set to the next, photographing them all in a few hours. Then he was back to the ship.

Of course, the resulting photos were awful. The shoddy sets, strange costumes and corny poses all combined to make photos that were truly cringe-worthy. Yet while everyone knew it, it was never stated aloud. Anything the Commodore did was brilliant and creative and perfect, and one kept any other opinion strictly to oneself. Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, no one wanted to be the first to admit that they didn’t see the Commodore’s genius in every shot.

And the photographs themselves were treated like precious gems. One never touched a transparency, they had to be handled only with cotton gloves. They were put in plastic sleeves and between board covers. I had to handle the photograph frequently as I was using them to design, and my hands were always shaking. Once I got so rattled that I dropped a transparency on the floor – hastily stooping to grab it and checking to make sure no one had seen.

The messages I received were generally constructive and encouraging, and the Messengers were unfailingly polite to me. Sometimes if I missed something they would take on a chiding tone or send me to "Cramming" – a crash study of something you’d missed. One day a Messenger handed me a card and it said "Cram on Comm Formula." The Communication Formula was Hubbard’s basic rules for human communication, something you learn on your first Scientology course. I was chagrinned. Why would he want me to restudy something so basic. The Messenger pointed to the back of the promotion piece. I had omitted an address for the person to reply to.

I designed brochure after brochure, with Hubbard checking every detail. One of them was a brochure for the local synagogue in Curacao – the oldest in the Western Hemisphere – consisting of photos that Hubbard had taken. It was being done for "port public relations."

The Synagogue Guidebook - photos by LRH

Another project I got involved with was an "Industrial Brochure" for the Port of Curacao. The ship had earlier done a "Tourist Brochure" for Curacao, featuring shots by Hubbard and promoting tourism for the island. That some of the same photos were also used for a "Come to Flag" brochure for Scientologists was beside the point. I studied up on the port – which is the largest deep-water port in the Western Hemisphere – and wrote the copy, and then took meetings with the local Curacao Chamber of Commerce. I didn’t own a suit, so I borrowed one from the guy who had the bunk above me – an Australian kid named Mike Rinder.

Mike was the Communicator for the Commanding Officer of the Flag Bureaux, Kerry Gleeson. Tall and sandy-haired, Kerry was one of those "anything-to-get-the-stats-up" executives whose major form of persuasion was screaming at staff, with a liberal use of profanity. I tried to steer clear of him as much as possible. His wife, Jill, was the Staff Captain, over all of the Commodore’s Staff Aides. There was one for each of the seven divisions of a Scientology Organization. CS2, over all Dissemination Divisions, was my old senior from Pubs, Robin Roos. CS6, over all the Public Divisions (in charge of getting new people into Scientology) was Hubbard’s daughter, Diana.

While I never heard the Old Man yelling or screaming – at least not when I was within earshot – the ship seemed to be in a constant state of quasi-panic. Tensions and tempers were tightly strung as seniors put the screws on juniors to get their targets done on time and get their stats up. Even in the somewhat more laid back world of Dissem, there was no leeway for a missed deadline or a botched job. And while the Commodore’s rejects were mild in tone, my handlings at the hand of seniors was not. Once, after a reject, I stayed up all night cramming on the color wheel, to get a submission up the next day.

Sometimes on dinner breaks, I’d walk down the dock a ways and look back at the ship. It was soothing to just sit there for a moment, away from the madness.

One day, I perceived a shift in the ship’s tone, a subtle change of gear. I could see executives rushing around and rushing into meetings, but people were silent about what was going on. When pressed, it was "confidential," the standard answer for any knowledge above your pay grade. But something was afoot.

Preparations were made to sail. Our destination was announced as South America – down the coast to Brazil. But that didn’t add up. We completed our "readiness for sea" preparations, getting everything lashed down, and soon we were underway.

Only after we had cleared the port was our real destination announced. We were going to the Bahamas. From there, a major evolution would be launched to move the entire ship to a land base. The final location was a secret – but it was in the United States.

After seven years, I was going home.

Chapter Five: Crash and Burn

2008-05-17T18:05:00.001-07:00

The Sea Org's European Station Ship Athena, 1971

A single work light hung on the railing above us, illuminating the side of the ship and the misting rain that was falling around us. But it didn’t seem to penetrate the cold, black water of Copenhagen’s harbor, swirling underneath our small boat. We were pitching up and down alarmingly, making it difficult for me to get a purchase on the side of the hull with the power wirebrush. Every time I tried to press the sander to the hull, the boat would slide away backwards.

Marcus and I had a simple task to complete. All we had to do was sand one side of the Athena’s hull, getting rid of any rust spots, and then paint the hull, first with the rust-preventing primer, then with white paint. Our deadline, or "time machine" in Sea Org parlance, was to have it done by dawn. Captain Bill was holding a special training exercise for all Sea Org staff from the AO, and the ship had to be ready. It was about two in the morning, and we had to hustle.

"This is getting nowhere," I told Marcus. I sat down on the gunwale of the small boat, my back to the Athena’s hull. "Here, hold on to my legs."

With Marcus holding my legs, I bent backwards over the gunwale, with the wirebrush over my head. Coming at the hull from underneath, I could just keep enough pressure on the side of the ship. I worked away at the rust doggedly.

It was summer, 1972. Marcus and I had been on the Athena’s Deck Project Force for about six weeks. I had spent a little over a year as Commanding Office of Pubs Denmark, and it had been a disaster, a nightmare of stress and pressure. I was glad to have the break, working at mindless tasks as a part of the Athena’s deck force.

There was no Rehabilitation Project Force in 1972, only a Deck Project Force. Here, "failed executives" like me and Marcus would mingle with new Sea Org recruits, all of us working together and studying Scientology in the evenings in a course room below decks.

Ironically, thirty-two years later, in 2004, when I was being proposed to be Books Executive International at the Int Base, a review would be done of my record as an executive, and I would be told that my stint as Commanding Officer Pubs was considered to be a success. I would express disbelief, as I remembered it as a complete nightmare. Not so, they would inform me. I had handled the debts incurred by Doreen Casey, and had amassed decent financial reserves for the Org. I had stabilized the place, and had increased the income slowly and steadily.

Well, that may have been, but "slowly" and "steadily" were not terms that were to be applied to Flag Executive Briefing Course graduates. We were the whiz kids, the wunderkind. When we arrived on the scene, statistics were supposed to rocket up vertically and keep climbing to astronomical new levels. Anything less than that was just not acceptable. Our heroes, our role models, were people like Alex Sibirsky, Kerry Gleeson and Bill Franks. Sibirsky in fact had spoken to the FEBC students while I was there. They had "boomed Boston Org" and were heroes. Stories abounded about their "take-no-prisoners" attitude – demanding production at any cost, keeping staff up day and night to meet targets, locking public into rooms until they wrote a check for their next service. Being "unreasonable" was considered a compliment – it meant you didn’t buy into any "reasons" for non-production. Executives who listened to staff "excuses" or cut them any slack were condemned as "worker-oriented" – a crime in Hubbard’s playbook.

When Tina, Lance and I arrived back in the Org in June, 1971, I thought maybe I could be that kind of tough, unreasonable executive. After all, we were trained in the latest Hubbard technology and audited on the confidential "L" Rundowns. We had been transformed into super-executives. We could rocket the stats just by force of will, by running roughshod over anyone who got in our way.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t wired that way. I’ve never been good at dominating people, or threatening them, or intimidating them. In the zeitgeist of the time, where such behavior was considered a strength, I began to think of my own inability to behave that way as a weakness. Maybe I wasn’t really strong or ruthless enough to be an exec.

When we first hit the org I tried to play the part. But all it took was a lifted eyebrow or a slight smile from Tina, and I would feel like a pompous fool. That wasn’t my style, that wasn’t me. I decided I would just be myself and run the org in my own way, and if that wasn’t good enough – well, I would have given it my best shot.

When we arrived, there were still some staff living in the "Dexion Hotel." We made sure they were getting enough pay and found them apartments to live in. Tina was great on finance lines, and put in some sensible financial policies that she administered with an iron fist. We sent two staff off on a recruitment tour to get more people on staff, and set about training the ones we had. We got the Address list cleaned up and put in order, then started sending out some sensible promotional mailings. It was nothing heroic; all just basic measures that we knew would improve the scene.

Me and Tina - happier days

But these were all measures that would take time to bear fruit. It was like helming a large ship – you give the rudder a few degrees, and then you wait and wait, and nothing seems to happen. Gradually the ship responds. And I knew the org would respond. But we were being watched. We had to report our "stats" every week, and the expectation was that the stats would begin rocketing up the minute we arrived. When that didn’t happen – and weeks went by without that dramatic stat miracle - the telexes became more and more demanding. My seniors had no qualms about being "unreasonable" with me.

And it seemed I had two seniors. The Sea Org had established a European Liaison Office in Copenhagen, headed up by Bill Robertson and his wife, Joan. "Captain Bill" as he was always referred to, was already famous in Scientology. He was known as Hubbard’s go-to guy whenever there was a challenging Sea Org Mission or an Org that needed a strong Commanding Officer. His mission as CO EULO was to expand Scientology into all of Europe.

Bill and I never quite meshed. We were, in many ways, polar opposites. He was a big, blustery man with close-cropped hair and a military bearing, while I was thin and long-haired. He got things done by force of personality – and he had plenty of both force and personality. Where I tended to be quiet and unassuming, he dominated the environment with his size and booming laugh.

"Captain Bill" Robertson

And yet, there was something about that laugh, that almost fanatically intense persona, that had an edge of madness in it. He loved to talk about Marcab, the Galactic Confederation, and all the rest of Scientology’s "whole track" mythos. Many years later, of course, he would split off from the Church of Scientology and form his own "Ron’s Orgs," heavily based on his own "whole track" visions. But that was in the future. Now he was the golden boy, and if he was mad, it was a very acceptable kind of madness in the world of Scientology, and staff hung on his every word.

He loved to tell a story about the early days of the Sea Org, when Ron himself had been teaching them celestial navigation one night on the deck of the Avon River (later to be the Athena). After the lesson, he paused, staring out at the stars, his eyes narrowing as if he could see far beyond this small planet.

"This is not the first time we have been together," he intoned.

Bill ate that sort of thing up, and so did his staff. It wasn’t just a job; it was a whole track, intergalactic adventure.

As Pubs was in Copenhagen, Bill considered that we were under him. But I had been briefed by CS-2, before leaving the Apollo, that we were under her, not under EULO – as we were international. This led to rather strained relations between me and Captain Bill right from the start. Whenever he came over for an "executive inspection," which was once a week or so, we edged around each other in a polite dance. He would "make suggestions" as to things that he thought should be done and I would tell him what a good idea it was and that I would take it up with CS-2 right away. As a man used to direct action – and used to being obeyed – I am sure my attitude frustrated and annoyed him.

About this time I got to know another well-known Sea Org Officer, Ken Delderfield, or "Deld" as he was commonly called. He had been fired on a mission to Europe to "make Policy broadly available." Policy, in this case, referred to Hubbard’s issues, printed in green ink, laying out all of his administrative and management "technology."

Ken, I was to learn, was a maverick, and the closest thing to an entrepreneur in the otherwise top-down, heavily authoritarian Sea Org structure. He did things his own way. He was supposed to make Policy available, so he devised a scheme whereby he would publish them in hard cover books. This would require a whole editorial, typesetting and publishing operation, so he set about establishing one. He recruited a number of staff, including his wife Rosemary, who had been the LRH Communicator Pubs. To fund this unit, he actually went around selling staff members the future books. Those who "got in on the ground floor," as he put it, would get them at a fraction of the final price. I bought a set of the volumes, as did a lot of other staff, and with these funds, he purchased IBM typesetting equipment – the kind where you had to hand-code the formatting as you typed. He set up his whole operation in the back of Pubs. He kept "The Commodore" briefed on what he was doing, and the "Old Man" was pleased as punch.

Tina and I continued our struggle to get the stats up. We were making some progress, but it was slow. There was no sudden vertical boom. One day I came into our Exec Offices and saw Tina reading the Flag "Orders of the Day." Since we were Sea Org Members on "Garrison Mission," the ship would send us the OODs, as they were called, which gave us an idea what was going on at Flag. We had to keep them confidential. All of a sudden Tina turned white and said, "Oh, my god."

"What is it?" I asked.

She showed me the item, something Hubbard had written in his "Command" section of the OODs:

"I saw that Action Bureau was about to send a mission to Pubs Denmark," he wrote, "however when I checked their stats, they were up. It’s important to always check the stats before firing a mission."

I went cold – and raced to check the stats. They were, thankfully, still up. But I realized what a razor’s edge we were living on – any serious dip in stats and we could find a Sea Org Mission on our doorstep. We were on a very short leash. Life became a week-to-week nightmare. Our stats – as with every Scientology Organization – were calculated every Thursday at 2pm. That was the "cutoff." The stats had to be up by then, so on Wednesday nights, we were often there late.

But outside of Wednesday nights, we didn’t work the crew around the clock. We made sure they went home and got sleep, and that they had time for their training. One day, after a very good week, Tina and I let the crew have a day off. We decided to see if we could run the whole org by ourselves, just the two of us. We had a ball, starting out in the morning invoicing the orders, packing them up and getting them shipped.

The Sea Org station ship Athena had moved from Helsingør and was now docked in Copenhagen harbor. As Sea Org Members, Tina and I were sometimes invited to go on weekend cruises on the Athena, where we would do drilling with other Sea Org Members from the Advanced Org.
The AO had also moved into town, so that it could be centrally located for public coming in by air or train. They were now both and Advanced Org (delivering the OT Levels) and a Saint Hill Org (delivering the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course). They were called Advanced Organization Saint Hill Europe – or AOSHEU for short - and had taken over the upper floors of a building on Jernbanegade, just off Town Hall Square and close to Copenhagen’s famous "Walking Street." When the second floor of that same building became available, we jumped at the chance to move Pubs out of its dockside warehouse and into the center of the city, close to the AO and the Athena.

Tina and I inspected our future premises, and they were a mess. The place had been a night club, and the walls were painted black, with graffiti-like squiggles in neon colors painted on them. Strange backdrops and props littered the space, looking like a bizarre circus from a drug nightmare.

We set about cleaning out the place over a weekend, leaving a skeleton crew to man the org delivery lines. We brought in two large roll-offs and stationed them in the building’s central courtyard. Then we just started tearing out all the weird furniture and backdrops, breaking them up and tossing them into the roll-offs. Then when the entire place was emptied out, we painted the walls white and laid down grey carpeting throughout the space. On Monday, the landlord arrived and we showed him what we had done – he was impressed, and we had a friend and ally. We then moved all of the book stocks, desks and equipment over, and got set up for business in our new home. Deld staked out a section in the back for his Policy book operation, and we set up our exec offices in the front, near the key dissemination and sales areas.

And that is where our attention was increasingly focused. The stats were slowly, slowly rising, but it wasn’t enough. We needed to create a boom. We needed to make more money, sell more books. My attention became increasingly riveted on the sales staff who were making daily calls to the orgs to get them to buy more books. I was always trying to figure out how to sell more books. I remember walking over to EULO, head down, not even seeing the city around me, just thinking and worrying and figuring about how could I sell more before Thursday at 2pm. Day by day I got more depressed, more desperate. My "ethics handlings" at EULO didn’t seem to provide an answer; they just increased the pressure, the desperation. Tina was feeling the pressure too, and more and more we were bringing our work and our worries home with us, spending out private time together talking about the org. The stress was taking its toll on our marriage.

Finally a Flag Mission arrived. The senior Missionaire was Tina’s brother Fred, an old-time Sea Org Officer. The other Missionaire was Sandy Stevens, an attractive young woman who was also an auditor. They tried to rally Tina and me and get us to take some strong actions to get the org going, but we were, by then, burned out. Both of us confessed privately to the Missionaires that we no longer wanted our posts.

The next morning, we dragged ourselves into the org to find a muster already in progress. Ken Delderfield was at the front, addressing the crew as the new Commanding Officer. We were hustled out of the org by the Missionaires and over to the Athena, where we were assigned to the Deck Project Force.

My friend Marcus Lanciai was already there, busted off of CO Stockholm. We had gone to the ship together, trained together, and now here we were, busted together. But after the constant nail-biting pressure of Pubs, being on the Athena was great. It was summer, we were working out in the sun, sanding, caulking decks, painting and varnishing. At that time, there was no RPF, it had not been invented yet. There was just the Deck Project Force, and we were all there together, failed execs and raw new recruits. It got a bit surreal at times – I was still signatory on the Pubs accounts, so once a week, I’d hear the click-click-click of heels across the deck as some Treasury staff member brought me the checks to sign, and I’d sit there on the deck, asking questions and signing checks. I’m sure the new recruits were wondering why a deckhand was signing checks!

I got tan and grew a beard. I learned how to operate the steam winch, and loaded and unloaded cargo and stores. On weekends, we took the ship out for cruises up the coast, and I learned how to helm the ship. Once on a warm summer day we dropped the anchor somewhere in the North Sea and dived overboard for a swim. The water was icy cold.

I enjoyed the present, and tried not to think about the future. I didn’t want to be an exec; I felt shame at having failed as an FEBC graduate. It seemed like I had betrayed the Org, my fellow FEBC students, and the Commodore.

Another casualty was my marriage to Tina. The mutual stress had taken its toll, and Tina wanted a divorce. I was in no mood to fight it.

I was informed that I would be posted as the Flag Banking Officer of AOSH EU. They had me studying finance Policy Letters. I had no idea who had decided this, but it seemed insane. I was an artist, a designer, and here they wanted to put me in Finance? It sounded like pure torture to me, crunching numbers all day.

Deld came to the rescue. He negotiated with EULO and convinced them to return me to Pubs Org, where he put be back on my old post of Production Secretary.

"I couldn’t see wasting your talents in Finance," he told me with a wink.

I moved into a dormitory in the staff house, which was about 20 minutes walk from the org, on Sankt Knuds Vej. Although we were divorced, Tina and I remained friends, and I would still see Gwennie every day. I would walk home for dinner, and when I got about half a block from the staff house, I would see Gwennie running out to meet me and give me a big hug. It was the high point of my day.

I immersed myself in my work. As Production Secretary, I ran a print shop which produced course packs and booklets. I had a printer, Tony, and a Dutch guy, Dirk, who did binding, but I learned all the machinery myself so I could do anything needed. The tape copying area was also under me, run by a tall Englishman named John Waterworth, and I was also over the Shipping Department, which was handled by a Scot, Neil Lumsden.

I handled Printer Liaison myself – "held from above" as they termed it. I liked that part of my job, because it allowed me to get out of the Org. I would go see printers all over town, traveling by bicycle. There was a freedom about cruising through the streets, the wind blowing in my hair, breathing the crisp, cold air.

One of my suppliers was Anderson Printing. Mrs. Anderson, an older Danish lady, had taken over the business when her husband died, and was having a terrible time trying to keep it afloat – she didn’t know the first thing about business. That became obvious the first time she submitted a quote to me – it was way too low. I sat with her and reworked the quote, showing her how to do it. She told me years later that if it hadn’t been for my patience with her, the business probably would have folded. She returned the favor –when I’d fall asleep in one of her chairs after a series of "all-nighters," she’d just let me sleep, and I’d find a hot cup of Danish coffee sitting there when I woke up.

One of my main printers was Mr. Permild. He had a very large shop and I did most of the book printing with him. He liked me to come over on Sunday and we’d sit around in his empty shop over Tuborg beer and pastry and plan out the next week’s printing.

The Translations Unit moved from Tangier in late 1972 and became a part of Pubs, so that function fell under me as well. It was headed up by a young Swedish woman, Anna. We had an on-and-off secret affair over the next few years – she shared a room with another woman and whenever the other woman was gone, I’d visit Anna. In those days, affairs between unmarried staff weren’t punishable by RPF assignment, as they later became. They were tolerated if you weren’t too obvious about it – other staff tended to wink at it.

But I was really adrift, just carrying on, day after day. The work was challenging, I was learning a lot about printing and production, but personally I was just drifting, marking time. Where did I go from here? What did I want to do with my life? I didn’t want to stay in Europe forever, and I didn’t want to just dead-end in a mid-level job at Pubs. The winters were long, cold and brutal, with snowdrifts piling up on the streets and the icy wind blowing into the city from across the Sound. In midwinter, you never saw the sun – it was dark around the clock. The summers were brief and warm, and in June the sun never set – you could go out at 3 in the morning (as I often ended up doing), and the deserted streets were bright as day. The Danes enjoyed their summers with a frantic abandon, and the parks and beaches were crammed with sunbathers – the women going topless. But before long, the cold winds were blowing again, and we were in for another long, grey winter.

We continued to hear about the terrific expansion in Europe. Captain Bill was sending missions out all over Europe and establishing new organizations. These were the heady, gonzo days of "anything goes" to get the stats up. "Postulate checks" became the rage, where a registrar would get a public to write a check for their services with no money to cover the check – based on the "postulate" that they would have the money in place before the check cleared. Of course, the checks bounced, but that was someone else’s problem – the executive or Registrar had already reported the "up stats" and was already a hero.

It was in this atmosphere, in early 1974, that two Missionaires arrived from Flag, with orders to boom Pubs by selling books to the rapidly expanding orgs in Europe. Frankie Freedman, the head Missionaire, was a real wheeler-dealer type, and his Second, Bruce Wilson, also seemed to be a fast-talker. They got onto the phones, and soon we were hearing about "big book deals" that were in the works, like 20,000 books or more. As Production Secretary, I was given a "heavy traffic warning" to gear up for massive book production that would have to be pulled off in record time.

I notified my printers to get ready for some large orders. They told me that paper was going to be the main problem as it could take weeks to get that much paper in. I was panicked – that kind of delay would not be tolerated. I told them to go ahead and get the needed paper in now.
The orders started to come in – 40,000 copies of The Fundamentals of Thought in German, 20,000 copies of Evolution of a Science in French and so on. I started the presses rolling. The org was in a state of frenzied excitement. I was up day and night getting the books printed and stacked on the shelves ready for the massive orders that were on their way.

And then, just as soon as it started, it was over. Frankie Freedman disappeared, back to Flag for "ethics handling." No money was coming through. The "big book deals" were mostly hot air. I was left with several tons of paper on the floor of various printers – none of it covered by purchase order. In other words, I was personally liable for it. So for the next few weeks, I became a paper salesman, getting rid of all "my" paper!

Bruce Wilson stayed. He ended up marrying Tina and he and I became good friends.

With the completion of his Policy books, now called the Organization Executive Course (OEC) Volumes, Deld had gone back to Flag, and a new Commanding Officer arrived from the ship, an old friend from the Edinburgh days, Judy Ziff. She was now divorced from David and was calling herself Judy Graham. She was a practical, no-nonsense leader who genuinely cared for the staff and the org.

With the printing I’d done for the "big book deals," we were now heavily overstocked on translated books. Judy decided to put me on as Dissem Sec, to put some steam behind our promotional and sales actions. I began producing a volume of promotion. I was a one-man band, acting as designer, copywriter, photographer, illustrator, platemaker and printer. I even supervised the Wednesday night stuffing parties to get the mail out every Thursday before the 2:00 pm "stat deadline."

I befriended a Dutch guy, Stefan, who was a photographer. I was training him up to be the Editor of the Auditor Magazine, which was also under me. On one of our days off, he and I traveled out to the country, Stefan with his camera and me with a sketch pad. We found an old farmhouse and he photographed it from many angles while I sat and did a sketch of it. Later that day I did a painting from my sketches. When I brought the painting in to the org the next day, Judy loved it and bought it from me straight away.

I still had no girlfriend. The affair with Anna was long over. A brief, torrid affair with a fetching Scottish girl, Helen, had ended badly the previous year. Stefan and I decided to remedy our mutual problem of lack of girlfriends, and went to a party for area staff hosted by the Advanced Org. There I met a Danish girl named Elin. She worked for the Guardians Office Europe. We hit it off right away, and I ended up spending the night at her apartment. A few days later, I moved out of the staff dormitory and into her flat. In those days you could still do things like that in the Sea Org.

It was an interesting relationship – neither of us could pronounce the other’s name. I called her "Ellen" (she insisted it was pronounced "ay-leen"), and she called me "Yeff." Sometimes at night I would stop by the GO offices to pick her up, and I started talking to the Deputy Guardian Europe, Alan Juvonen, about possibly joining the Guardians Office. The fact was, I was bored stiff at Pubs. I wanted to do something different, go somewhere else, maybe even back to the US. Maybe the GO was my ticket out.

But that was not to be. One day in mid-1975, Judy called me into her office.

"Look at this," she said, handing me a copy of the Flag Orders of the Day and pointing to the "Command" section.

I read the entry. Hubbard talked about forming up a dissemination unit on the ship, and, at the end, specifically said to "get Hawkins from Pubs Denmark." I felt a thrill run through my body. The Old Man had called for me personally. This was the ticket out I’d been waiting for.

"Obviously, it will take some time to replace you," Judy said. I could hear the hesitation in her voice. She wanted to stall for time, try to keep me there.

"I don’t think so," I said quickly, and named a possible replacement. "I can have him trained in a week." Judy grudgingly agreed to my plan.

It was hard telling Elin, but she understood. One didn’t ignore a personal summons from LRH. I suggested she come to the ship too, but I could see that wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was Danish, and this was her home.

A week later, I was at EULO, being briefed on my journey to the ship’s confidential location.

"Will we be going through Madrid?" I asked.

"No," said the officer. "You’ll be going via New York."

The ship had moved – across the Atlantic.