Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (39 page)

One of Flinn’s most interesting and contested points had to do with hagiography, by which he meant attributing extraordinary powers—such as clairvoyance, visions of God or angels, or the ability to perform miracles—to the charismatic founders of a religion. He pointed to the virgin birth of Jesus, the ability of the Buddha to “transmigrate” his soul into the heavens, or Moses bringing manna to the people of Israel. Such legends are useful in that they bolster the faith of a community, Flinn said. The glaring discrepancies in Hubbard’s biography should be seen in the light of the fact that any religion tends to make its founder into something more than human.

Flinn was asked to testify about a policy Hubbard had written in 1965 titled “
Fair Game Law,” in which he laid down the rules for dealing with
Suppressive Persons. That category includes non-Scientologists who are hostile to the church, apostates, and defectors, as well as their spouses, family members, and close friends. “A truly Suppressive Person
or Group has no rights of any kind,” Hubbard wrote. Such enemies, he said, may be “tricked, lied to or destroyed.” In 1965, he wrote another policy letter ambiguously stating, “The practice of declaring people FAIR GAME will cease. FAIR GAME may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations. [The new ruling] does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP.” The supposed revocation of Fair Game took place before Operation Snow White, the
harassment of
Paulette Cooper and other journalists, the persecution of defectors, and many other actions undertaken by church insiders that were done in the spirit, if not the name, of the original policy.

“Almost all religious movements in their very early phase tend to be harsh,” Flinn reminded the court. He contended that they tend to evolve and become more lenient over time. As for
disconnection, he declared that it was “functionally equivalent to other types of religious exclusions,” such as shunning of nonbelievers among
Mennonites and the
Amish. In the
Book of Leviticus, for instance, which is part of the Torah and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, idolaters and those who have strayed from the faith were to be stoned to death. That practice has disappeared; instead, Orthodox Jews will sit Shiva for the nonbeliever, treating him as if he is already dead. “So this kind of phenomenon is not peculiar to Scientology,” Flinn concluded. The implication underlying Flinn’s testimony was that Scientology is a new religion that is reinventing old religious norms; whatever abuses it may be committing are errors of youthful exuberance, and in any case they are pale imitators of the practices once employed by the mainstream religions that judges and jurors were likely to be members of.

In the 1990s, Flinn had interviewed several Scientologists who were doing
RPF in Los Angeles. Their quarters didn’t look any worse than his cell in the monastery, where he slept on a straw bed on a board. He asked if they were free to go. They told him they were, but they wanted to stay and do penance.

Flinn admits to having been a cutup when he was in the order, and he felt out of place. “I was an Irishman
in a sea of Germans.” He would be sent out to dig the potato field as punishment for his misbehavior. However, when he finally decided to leave his order, instead of being incarcerated or given a freeloader tab, he was given a dispensation releasing him from his vows. He never felt the need to escape. He took off his robe, put on civilian clothes, and walked away. His spiritual adviser gave him five hundred dollars to help him out. He was never punished or fined, or made to disconnect from anyone.

IN TRUTH
, the
IRS was ill equipped to make a case in court that Scientology—or any other creed—was not a religion. Moreover, the commissioner of the IRS,
Fred T. Goldberg, Jr., had to balance the longing on the part of some of his executives to destroy the church
against the need to keep his resources, both human and financial, from being sucked into the black hole that Scientology had created.

One afternoon in Washington, in October 1991, Miscavige and
Rathbun were having lunch at the Bombay Club, a swank Indian restaurant near the White House. Miscavige was fed up with the stalemate, which looked as if it could go on forever, in an endless stream of billable hours to the church’s attorneys. At the lunch, Miscavige announced to
Gerald Feffer, one of their lawyers, “Marty and I are just going to bypass
you entirely. We’re going to see Fred.”

Feffer laughed at the thought that Miscavige would talk directly to the commissioner.

“I’m not joking,” Miscavige said. “Marty, do you want to go?”

The two men hailed a cab after lunch and went to 1111 Constitution Avenue, the IRS headquarters, and announced to the security officer that they wanted to see the commissioner.

“Is he expecting you?
”

“No, but if you phone him on the intercom and tell him we are from the Church of Scientology, I’m sure he’d love to see us.”

Within a few moments, several of the commissioner’s aides came down to the lobby. Miscavige told them that he wanted to bury the hatchet. He said he knew how much hatred there was on each side, going back for decades, and that an intervention from the top was necessary. An hour later there was a call in their hotel room saying the commissioner would see them the following week.

In that first meeting with Goldberg, in a drab government conference room at a giant table, Miscavige, Rathbun, and
Heber Jentzsch were facing about a dozen upper-level government bureaucrats, including the commissioner. The level of distrust
between the negotiating parties was extreme, made even greater for the IRS representatives who knew that Scientologists had stolen documents and wiretapped meetings in that very building. Both sides had an incentive to bring the hostilities to an end, however. Miscavige and Rathbun made their carefully rehearsed presentation. Miscavige recited a litany of examples in which he felt the IRS had singled out Scientology for unfair treatment. “Am I lying?
” he would turn and ask Rathbun theatrically. Rathbun had a briefcase stuffed with documents obtained from the 2,300 Freedom of Information Act lawsuits the church had filed, or the countless public records that the church had combed through. Among the many internal memos the Scientologists had gathered was one they
called the
Final Solution document
. It was the minutes of a meeting in 1974 of several top IRS executives who were trying to define “religion” in a manner that excluded Scientology but not other faiths.

Miscavige made it clear that the barrage of lawsuits lodged against the IRS would come to an immediate halt if the church got what it wanted, which was an unqualified exemption for all of its activities. When Miscavige finished his presentation, Goldberg called for a break, but he signaled to Rathbun to hang back. Goldberg asked him privately if the government settled, would Scientology also turn off the personal attacks in
Freedom
magazine?

“Like a faucet,” Rathbun told him.

Goldberg appointed his deputy commissioner,
John Burke, who had no history with the conflict, to oversee a lengthy review of Scientology’s finances and practices. That process went on for two years. During that time, Rathbun and Miscavige commuted to Washington nearly every week, toting banker’s boxes stuffed with responses to the government’s queries. Two hundred Scientologists
in Los Angeles and New York were mobilized to go through the books of the church’s tangled bureaucracy. The odds against success were high; the courts had repeatedly sided with the IRS’s assertion that the Church of Scientology was a commercial enterprise. Miscavige and Rathbun were very much aware that the future of Scientology, if there was one, awaited the result of the IRS probe. Either the panel would rule against them, in which case the church’s tax liability for the previous two decades would destroy it, or they would fall under the gracious protection of the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment, in which case the Church of Scientology, and all its practices, would be sheltered by the US Constitution.

Overshadowing this debate was an incident that renewed the public concern about the dangerousness of totalistic movements. In February 1993, agents for the US
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tried to execute a search warrant on a religious commune a few miles east of
Waco, Texas, that was run by a Christian apocalyptic group calling themselves the
Branch Davidians. The leader,
David Koresh, was stockpiling weapons, practicing polygamy, committing statutory rape, and was said to be physically abusing children, although that last charge was never proved. Following a shoot-out that caused the deaths of four government agents and six Branch Davidians, the
FBI began a siege lasting nearly two months and culminating in a catastrophic
blaze—broadcast all over the world—that consumed the entire compound. Seventy-five members of the sect died in the final assault, including twenty-five children. The Waco siege threatened to create a backlash against all new religious movements. On the other hand, the government’s handling of the siege, and the disastrous finale, provoked an international uproar. The hazards of unorthodox belief were clearly displayed, as were the limitations of police forces to understand and deal with fanatical movements.

On October 8, more than a thousand Scientologists stood and cheered in the Los Angeles Sports Arena as Miscavige announced, “The war is over!” The IRS had settled with the church. Although the terms were secret, they were later leaked to the
Wall Street Journal
. Instead of the $1 billion bill
for back taxes and penalties that the church owed, Scientology agreed to pay just $12.5 million to resolve outstanding disputes; the church also agreed to stop the cascade of lawsuits against the agency. In return, the IRS dropped its investigations. “The magnitude of this is greater than you can imagine,” Miscavige said that night at the Sports Arena. He held up a thick folder of the letters of exemption for every one of the church’s 150 American entities. The victory over the IRS was total, he explained. It gave Scientology financial advantages that were unusual, perhaps unique, among religions in the United States. For instance, schools using Hubbard educational methods received tax exemption. Eighty percent of individual auditing on the part of members was now a tax-deductible expense. Two Scientology publishing houses that were solely dedicated to turning out Hubbard’s books, including his commercial fiction, also gained the tax exemption. The church even gained the power to extend its tax exemption to any of its future branches—“They will no longer need to apply to the IRS,” Miscavige marveled. From now on, the church could make its own decisions about which of its activities were exempt.

“And what about all those battles and wars still being fought overseas?” Miscavige continued. “Well, there’s good news on that front, too.” In the past, he observed, foreign governments would say, “You are an American religion. If the IRS doesn’t recognize you, why should we?” As a part of the settlement, Miscavige revealed, the agency agreed to send notices to every country in the world, explaining what Scientology was. “It is very complete and very accurate,” Miscavige said of the government brochure. “How do I know? We wrote it!”

Miscavige summed up the mood in the Sports Arena: “The future is ours.”

A MONTH AFTER
the church’s historic triumph over the IRS in 1993,
Rathbun blew. He had come to see Miscavige in a different light during the two years they labored over the tax case. The last six months of the tax case had been particularly arduous. During that period, he slept only about four hours a night. The former athlete was a physical wreck. “I’m only doing this
for LRH,” he told himself, as he and Miscavige ate dinners together night after night in Washington and trudged back to the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “I’m not going to be this guy’s bitch for the rest of my life.”

No doubt the stress affected Miscavige as well. On the night of his big victory speech in the Sports Arena, Miscavige showed up for a run-through, but the stage manager,
Stefan Castle, was still fiddling with the cues for a complicated laser and pyrotechnic display. According to Castle, Miscavige stormed out into the arena and began to strangle him
. Miscavige let him go before any real harm was done, but it was an alarming signal.
Amy Scobee, head of the Celebrity Centre at the time, also noted that Miscavige’s personality began to shift immediately after the IRS decision, becoming more aggressive and hostile. At the party at the Celebrity Centre following his speech, Miscavige rudely shoved her aside as he entered. “You just want to get rid
of me,” she remembers him saying.

As far as Rathbun was concerned, it didn’t help that Miscavige scarcely acknowledged him in the speech that night. Immediately after the event, reporters from
The
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
were calling Rathbun to ask about Miscavige’s salary, which had been disclosed in the IRS documents. Miscavige and his wife together were making more than $100,000 a year—not an extraordinary figure by the standards of world religious leaders, but quite a contrast to the $30 a week most of the Sea Org members were earning. Miscavige was outraged by the impertinence of the reporters, and Rathbun felt that he was taking it out on him. This was all coming at a time when he had been postponing a final visit to see his father, who was dying of cancer.

The
St. Petersburg Times
published an editorial demanding that Congress investigate the tax-exemption decision. Rathbun was sent to
Florida to turn around the
Times
editorial board, who were not at all persuaded by his arguments. Miscavige was furious that
Rathbun failed to handle the situation. One evening,
Shelly Miscavige called everyone in Rathbun’s office together, and in front of his subordinates she stripped the captain’s bars off his uniform.

The next day, Rathbun took four gold Krugerrands that he had stored in a safe, got on his motorcycle, and drove to Yuma, Arizona. He called his father in Los Angeles from a bar, but a church official answered. He was waiting there with Rathbun’s wife, Anne, who begged him to come back. Rathbun felt guilty and conflicted. Drinking steadily, he somehow made it to San Antonio, although he was in frequent communication with church leaders. He finally agreed to call Miscavige, who apologized for his treatment. “You know the kind of pressure
I was under. Please just see me,” the church leader said, adding that he could be in San Antonio in a matter of hours. “No, I want to see the Alamo,” Rathbun told him. They agreed to meet for dinner at the Marriott in New Orleans two days later.