Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (29 page)

Karen de la Carriere was also a young intern at Saint Hill, and she was directed to join the others in the internship room. “They told us that David
Miscavige had struck his PC,” she recalled. “He had been removed from his internship, and we were not to rumor-monger or gossip about it. We were supposed to just bury it.”

David was not done with Scientology, however. At fifteen, he went Clear in his present life. On his sixteenth birthday in 1976, “sickened by the declining
moral situation in schools illustrated by rampant drug use,” he dropped out of tenth grade
and formally joined the Sea Org. He began his service in Clearwater; less than a year later, he was transferred to the
Commodore’s Messengers in California, where once again he quickly captured the attention of the church hierarchy with his energy and commitment. He rose to the position of Chief Cinematographer at the age of seventeen. After the skit that made such a poor
impression on Hubbard, David redeemed himself
in the founder’s eyes by renovating one of his houses and ridding it of fiberglass, which Hubbard said he was allergic to.

David Miscavige filled a spot in Hubbard’s plans that once might have been occupied by
Quentin, although Miscavige displayed a passion and focus that Quentin never really possessed. He was tough, tireless, and doctrinaire. Despite David’s youth, Hubbard promoted him to
Action Chief, the person in charge of making sure that Hubbard’s directives were strictly and remorselessly carried out. He ran missions around the world to perform operations that local orgs were unable to do themselves—at least, not to Hubbard’s satisfaction.
¹

HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING
his thousand-page opus,
Battlefield Earth
, in 1980. (
Mitt Romney would name
it as his favorite novel.) Hubbard hoped to have the book made into a major motion picture, so the Executive Director of the church,
Bill Franks, approached Travolta about producing and starring in it. Travolta was excited about the prospect. Suddenly Franks got a call from Miscavige saying, “Get me
John Travolta
. I want to meet that guy!” Miscavige began wining and dining the star. “He just moved in and took over Travolta,” Franks recalled. But he says that privately Miscavige was telling him, “The guy is a faggot. We’re going to out him.”

Fleeing subpoenas from three grand juries, and pursued by forty-eight lawsuits, all naming the founder, Hubbard slipped away
from
public view on Valentine’s Day, 1980, in a white Dodge van, with
velvet curtains and a daybed. It had been customized
by
John Brousseau, a Sea Org member who took care of all of Hubbard’s vehicles. The elaborate escape plan involved ditching the Dodge for an orange Ford. In the meantime, Brousseau purchased another Dodge van for Hubbard, identical to the first. He then cut the original one into pieces and took them to the dump. The Ford was chopped up and dumped as well.

Hubbard briefly settled in Newport Beach, California, in a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette. In the apartment next door were
Pat and
Annie Broeker, his two closest aides. Pat, a handsome former rock-and-roll guitar player, enthusiastically adopted the role of an undercover operative, running secret errands for Hubbard and going to any lengths to keep their location a secret. His wife, Annie, one of the original Commodore’s Messengers, was a shy blonde, totally devoted to Hubbard.

Hubbard soon decided that the Newport Beach location was compromised, so the three of them hit the road. Pat drove a Chevrolet pickup with a forty-foot Country Aire trailer, which mainly contained Hubbard’s wardrobe, and Annie piloted a luxurious Blue Bird mobile home that John Brousseau had purchased for $120,000 in cash under a false name. The Blue Bird towed a Nissan pickup that Brousseau had converted into a mobile kitchen. For most of a year, this cumbersome caravan roamed the Sierras, lighting in parks along the way. At one point, Hubbard bought a small ranch with a gold mine, but he didn’t really settle down until 1983, on a horse farm in
Creston, California, population 270, outside San Luis Obispo, near a spread owned by the country singer
Kenny Rogers. He grew a beard and called himself “Jack Farnsworth
.”

Hubbard had been used to receiving regular shipments of money, but after he took flight, the entire structure of the
church was reorganized, making such under-the-table transfers more difficult to disguise. Miscavige ordered that $1 million a week be transferred to the founder, but now it had to be done in a nominally legal manner. One scheme was to commission screenplays based on Hubbard’s innumerable movie ideas. That way, Hubbard could be paid for the “treatment”—about $100,000
for each idea. Fifty such treatments were prepared
.
Paul Haggis was one of the writers asked to participate. He received a message from the old man asking him to write a script called
“Influencing the Planet.” The script was supposed to demonstrate the range of Hubbard’s
efforts to improve civilization. Haggis co-wrote the script with another Scientologist,
Steve Johnstone. “What they wanted
was really quite dreadful,” Haggis admitted. Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but apparently the film was never made.

Meanwhile,
Miscavige consolidated his position in the church as the essential conduit to the founder. Miscavige’s title was head of
Special Project Ops, a mysterious post, and he reported only to Pat Broeker. Miscavige was twenty-three years old at the time and Broeker a decade older. As gatekeepers, they determined what information reached Hubbard’s ears. Under their regency, some of Hubbard’s most senior executives were booted out—people who might have been considered competitors to Miscavige and Broeker in the future management of the church—and replaced by much younger counterparts.

Miscavige and Broeker would communicate in code on their pagers. At any hour of the night, John Brousseau, who was Miscavige’s driver, would take him to one of the several designated pay telephone booths between Los Angeles and Riverside County to wait for a call revealing the rendezvous point. It was usually a parking lot somewhere. The drivers of the two men would wait while Miscavige and Broeker talked, sometimes for hours.

Gale Irwin, who had been on the
Apollo
when she was sixteen years old and had risen to being the head of the
Commodore’s Messengers Org, began to wonder what was going on. Hubbard’s dispatches had become increasingly
paranoid, and his only line of communication to the outside world was through these two ambitious young men. Nearly every one of the original Messengers who had joined Hubbard on the
Apollo
had been purged.
David Mayo, who was Hubbard’s personal auditor, had also been shut off from contact. He, too, became suspicious of Miscavige and ordered him to be security-checked, but Miscavige refused this direct order
from a superior. Gale Irwin says she confronted him, and Miscavige knocked her to the ground with a flying tackle. (The church denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.)

Brousseau got a call
from Irwin. She was agitated. She told him that Miscavige had gone psychotic. She said she had to contact Pat Broeker right away for a meeting. When Brousseau asked to talk to Miscavige, Irwin began shouting orders at him, saying that Miscavige was raving and had to be restrained. In no way could Brousseau talk to him! He must arrange the meeting with Broeker immediately!

Brousseau drove her to a prearranged pay phone outside a Denny’s
restaurant in San Bernardino, which was used only for emergencies. As they waited for the call from Broeker’s driver, a black Dodge van came barreling into the parking lot and slammed to a halt between Brousseau’s car and the phone booth. The doors blew open and half a dozen men spilled out of the van, including David
Miscavige. Irwin says that Miscavige used a tire iron to pummel the pay phone, without much effect. Finally he was able to yank the receiver off the cable. Miscavige ordered Irwin into the van, and she meekly acquiesced.

With this action, the coup was accomplished: Miscavige and Broeker were now fully and defiantly in control of Scientology. The founder was isolated, caged by his notoriety and paranoia. No one knew if the orders coming from over the rainbow were from
Hubbard or his lieutenants, but now it no longer mattered. Irwin was busted. A year later, in 1984
, Miscavige declared her a Suppressive Person, which would happen to nearly every one of the original Messengers, the most trusted circle of Hubbard’s advisers. David Mayo was sent
to the
RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.

There was one last obstacle that Miscavige had to remove. In 1979, as a result of the
FBI raid,
Mary Sue had been charged and convicted of conspiracy, along with ten other Scientology executives, and sentenced to five years in prison, despite the evidence that her health was in decline. She suffered from chronic
pancreatitis, a painful condition that made it difficult to digest food. “She was frail and thin
and completely oblivious to anything she had done wrong,” recalled a Scientologist who escorted her into the back door of the courthouse in Washington. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be photographed.’ That was more important to her than the fact that she was going to jail for five years.”

While her case was on appeal, Mary Sue was placed in a comfortable house in Los Angeles, well away from Hubbard. She posed a dilemma for the church, and particularly for her husband. Hubbard was concerned that he might be indicted by a grand jury in New York that was looking into the church’s harassment of
Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had written
The Scandal of Scientology
. If Mary Sue were sufficiently alienated
to implicate Hubbard, Scientology would be devastated. Hubbard dictated frequent letters telling her what to say to prosecutors; the letters would be read to her and then destroyed. A crew of Messengers spent weeks sorting through all the orders and
correspondence relating to
Operation Snow White and other possible criminal activity that the FBI had not seized, making sure that Hubbard’s name
was excised from any damning evidence.

Mary Sue still commanded the loyalty and affection of many Scientologists who saw her as a martyr. Moreover, she refused to divorce Hubbard or to resign her position as head of the
Guardian’s Office. The sprawling intelligence apparatus that she built still operated in secret, behind locked doors. The Commodore’s Messengers Org and the Guardian’s Office were parallel and sometimes competing arms of their founders, and they had often struggled for power, in a kind of bureaucratic marital spat. Now that Miscavige was fully in control of the CMO, he concluded that the GO had to be ripped out of Mary Sue’s grasp—but without upsetting her to the point that she sought revenge.

In the spring of 1981
, a delegation of Commodore’s Messengers—including Miscavige and
Bill Franks—went to meet Mary Sue at a conference room in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Each of them wore a hidden microphone. Miscavige’s audacious plan was to seize control of the GO and place it under control of the Messengers, who numbered only about fifty at the time
. Several thousand Guardians
were still working for Mary Sue. She had treated them
kindly, paying them decent wages and allowing them to live in private homes. Most of them remained loyal to her and thought that she was being made a scapegoat. They would have to be purged.

Mary Sue received the delegation of Messengers coolly. Her case was still on appeal, but the outcome was clear: she was taking the fall for a program that Hubbard, after all, had put in motion. She understood the influence she still wielded in the church and the threat she represented. She demanded to deal with Hubbard himself, but Miscavige refused. He controlled access to the church’s founder so thoroughly that even his wife couldn’t talk to him. Indeed, they hadn’t spoken
in more than a year. Mary Sue cursed Miscavige
and threatened to throw a heavy ashtray at him. But her negotiating position was not strong, unless she was willing to betray everything she had worked to build with the man she still believed was a savior.

It must have been galling for her to negotiate with Miscavige, who was twenty-one at the time—the age Mary Sue was when she married Hubbard. Privately, she called him “Little Napoleon
.” In exchange for her resignation from the GO, the Messengers offered a house and a
financial settlement. Mary Sue had substantial legal bills and no other means of support. Under the guise of having to sort out the messes that would be left behind in the wake of her resignation, Miscavige went over a number of different subjects, even including a couple of murders
that were alleged to have been committed by a member of the GO office in London. He wanted Mary Sue on tape, confessing to other crimes, which could then be fed to the government. This was done, Bill Franks asserts, with Hubbard’s knowledge: “Hubbard wanted her out
of the way. He wanted all guns pointed at her so he could go about his old age without worrying about being thrown in jail.”

Mary Sue lost her last appeal. She began serving a five-year sentence in Lexington, Kentucky, in January 1983. Hubbard never visited her in prison. Her letters went unanswered. “I don’t believe
he’s getting them,” she later reasoned. Mary Sue was released after serving one year. She never saw her husband again.

MANY PEOPLE WHO JOINED
the church under Hubbard would later contend that Miscavige’s machinations were opposed to the will of the founder. But there is evidence that Miscavige was acting on Hubbard’s direct orders.
Jesse Prince says that when Hubbard was angry at someone he would command Miscavige to hit or spit on them, then report back when he had done so.
Larry Brennan, who was a member of the church’s
Watchdog Committee in charge of dealing with legal affairs, had seen how a minor infraction could be inflated into a major offense that justified the most severe penalty. There were no mistakes; there were only crimes. Every action was intended. This logic brooked no defense.

Once a week, after Hubbard disappeared, Brennan had to drive ninety miles southeast of Los Angeles to the little town of Hemet in order to write up confidential reports to be sent to the missing leader. The church operated a secret base there in a former resort known as
Gilman Hot Springs. Two
Sea Org bases are located on the old Gilman resort, Gold and Int.
Gold Base is named after
Golden Era Productions, the lavishly equipped film and recording studio set up by Hubbard to make his movies and produce Scientology materials.
Int. Base is the church’s international headquarters. On the north side of the highway, nestled against the dry hills, is
Bonnie View, the house that Hubbard hoped one day to live in. Miscavige keeps an office on the
property. Few Scientologists, and almost no one outside of the church, knew of its existence. The local community was told that the bankrupt property on California Highway 79 had been purchased in 1978 by the “Scottish Highland Quietude Club
.” Most of the Sea Org members on the base had no idea where they were; they had been transported there overnight from the former base at La Quinta in a deliberately circuitous route.