Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology
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Authors: Marc Headley
Tags: #Religion, #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #Cults, #Scientology, #Ex-Cultists
Marc Headley grew up in Hollywood, California. His mother became a member of Scientology when he was just seven years old and he grew up around some of their most famous celebrity members. Marc would join an elite Scientology paramilitary organization at sixteen years old. By his thirties, Marc would become an integral staff member of Scientology's International Management Headquarters. After 15 years of over 100 hour work weeks, mental and physical abuse, and being paid under 50 cents an hour, Marc had experienced enough Scientology. In 2005, after a dramatic escape from the heavily guarded Scientology compound in Hemet, California, Marc was able to restart his life at 32 years of age. Marc currently lives and works in California with his wife and two young sons.
The International Base of Scientology. The sprawling 500 acre property located deep in the California desert. The local townspeople were told that Scientology lectures and films were being made there. But is that all that is happening there? It is the location of a multi-million dollar home for L. Ron Hubbard, built two decades after his controversial death. It is the home of Scientology's current leader, David Miscavige. Rumor has it that high ranking Scientology celebrities such as Tom Cruise have been there. So what really happens at the Int Base? Are the stories on the internet true? How does Scientology conduct management of its day to day operations? Reports from former members have shown up here and there over the past 20 years. Could stories of armed guards, weapons, staff beatings, and razor wire fences surrounding the entire property be true? If so, how could a facility like this exist in modern day America?
Hundreds of staff had made attempts to escape over the years. Some had succeeded but had never been seen or heard of again, but most had failed. Marc knew it would not be easy getting out of the Scientology compound. Why were people kept here? Why did more people not attempt to escape over the years? What was it that went on at the International headquarters of Scientology?
This is the story of what happened behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology.
BFG Books are published by
Blown for Good, Inc.
827 Hollywood Way Suite 213
Burbank, CA 91505
First published in 2009 by BFG Books, Inc.
Additional copies of this book can be ordered at
www.blownforgood.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)
Headley, Marc Morgan.
Blown for good : behind the iron curtain of Scientology / Marc Morgan Headley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
LCCN 2009931081
ISBN-13: 978-0-9825022-1-1
ISBN-10: 0-9825022-1-4
1. Scientology—Controversial literature. 2. Golden Era Productions—Employees. I. Title.
BP605.S2H43 2010 299’.936
QBI09-600123 2009931081
ISBN 978-0-9825022-0-4
Copyright © 2009 BFG, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written consent of both the author and the above publisher of this book. This excludes brief quotes used in reviews.
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Cover art, design and layout by Rectoverso Graphic Design.
International Headquarters of Scientology (map)
11. I Sometimes Wish I Were Dead
More books by Marc Morgan Headley
I want to thank all those who have spoken out about what happened to them behind the iron curtain of Scientology. Reading these accounts reaffirmed my suspicion that these were not isolated incidences or circumstances that had only happened to me.
I wish to thank all those that host internet message boards and sites that provide a place for people to voice their thoughts and tell their individual stories. These have a value that cannot be overestimated. For someone who got out and found these, it helped me to regain a perspective, find out the truth behind an entire body of lies, and helped me come to terms with having spent half my life living based on false information.
They also provided me a voice with which to speak out. I have gotten hundreds of emails and letters from people, thanking me for exposing what goes on behind the scenes at the highest echelon of Scientology, and attributing to my postings their own decisions to do as I did and break free of the chains holding them prisoner.
by Mark “Marty” Rathbun
After reading the first several chapters of
Blown for Good
, I made a mental note to write the author an email. I was going to suggest he have someone else write an alternate Foreword because he might not like what I have to say. While Marc Headley and I were stationed at the same international headquarters property of the Scientology’s elite Sea Organization for nearly fifteen years, his views of some of Scientology founder Hubbard’s writings and my views differed greatly. I never had time to write or send the note because I could not put the manuscript down. I was gripped by Marc’s personal story.
I came to find that while Marc’s opinions about occurrences we both experienced varied from mine, there was every reason they should. After all, Marc did not get into Scientology on his own volition. As a child his mother willed it upon him. I got in after two years of college entirely by my own choice. Marc was forced by circumstances to join the Sea Organization. I had willingly signed on in order to fulfill a purpose. Naturally the way we read material and viewed matters would disagree. Nonetheless, when it came to relating facts – without regard to view or opinion – Marc’s recollection and accuracy were remarkable.
Recognizing that Marc and I had utterly divergent reference points from which to view largely the same culture and experience, Marc’s account became that much more fascinating to me. I began to wonder, how many people had I interacted with over twenty-seven years within the Church whose back story aligned more with Marc’s than mine? On reflection, I decided probably more members of the Sea Organization (some eighty-five hundred strong when I left in 2004) who constitute the management of Scientology internationally had a frame of reference closer to Marc’s than mine. After all, over the past thirty years Scientology’s numbers of new members had been dwindling. The Sea Organization had increasingly relied on recruiting the teenaged kids of long-term Scientologists in order to keep its ranks filled.
A great deal of that majority were people whose lives I affected for better or worse from on high in the church’s leading ecclesiastical body, Religious Technology Center. As I read how progressively insane the dictates from my controlling organization became as they literally rolled down the hill at international headquarters in the foothills of the San Jacinto mountains in Southern California, and how negatively they affected people on the receiving end, a deep sense of remorse enveloped me. Sure, I had sought out people I had known that I had visited injustices upon individually, apologized and made things right. But Marc’s book recreated a culture I knew of and influenced, but did not live of. As I read of the pain Marc went through I remembered dozens of others similarly situated whom I knew during my Scientology experience but whose lives and feelings I was never afforded an opportunity to understand.
Marc alludes to others who will be telling their accounts from within the upper echelons of Scientology and how this will forward reform and healing. Such a scenario reflects Hubbard’s prescribed system of management. Hubbard called for a remote management body to draw upon a multitude of reports from various points within an organization being managed, then coolly evaluating the facts to get the most complete and accurate view of what it is really like on the ground. Only then could an organizational problem afar be sanely and effectively handled. The system was called the Multiple Viewpoint System of Management.
Hubbard eschewed the notion that someone in an ivory tower – no matter how intelligent - can receive one report and then arbitrarily dictate what is to be done several thousand miles away. What Hubbard condemns is precisely what Marc describes as current Supreme Leader Miscavige’s day to day operating basis. His description of Miscavige’s obsession with handling everything himself, while preventing thousands of others from handling anything is not only very accurate, it is also what Hubbard described as the fastest way to destroy an organization. Add to the mix Marc’s factual description of Miscavige as “evil and enjoy[ing] watching other people suffer”, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.