Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (17 page)

“That’s fine,” he said.

“Okay,” I say amazed that there was such a trick as bee pollen, knowing full well it was probably the cream cheese danish that did the trick.

We went ahead and started the auditing and it went on for about an hour. Half the time I would space out and think how Tom Cruise could possibly be auditing me. Finally, we ended and Heidi came over to give an end of session exam. After each auditing session you have to get one of these to show that the auditor is not falsifying the session notes or saying that the session went awesome when it sucked. It went fine as far as I could tell and said so.

We said our goodbyes and I left. I was done for the day. Hopefully I could just go back to work and not have to deal with anybody in my department who may have heard about my little excursion to the canteen earlier.

I walked back into tapes and everybody wanted to know how it went. They knew. I told them I was not supposed to talk about it and that I would get in trouble if I did. I went back to work and pretended everything was the same as it had been.

This went on every weekday for a few months until he was done with his introductory auditor training. It was a very interesting time. After that, I was watched over to make sure that I did not end up in big trouble, because after all, I was the guy that Tom Cruise audited. If I went south, or god forbid, some out-tech had occurred; it would be blamed on my auditor, Tom Cruise. That could never happen. 

Tom would come to the base off and on. You could always tell when he was there because we had to clean for a full week and make sure that the place was perfect.

One night in late June, around 1:00
 a.m.
, we saw a car carrier pull into the main gate and all it had on it was a single car. It was a brand new Mercedes. As soon as we saw it, we knew whose it was. There was just no question. As we headed over for breakfast the next morning, we saw Nicole looking at the car. It was a birthday present for her. Tom came speeding up on his motorcycle and screeched to a stop inches away from Nicole causing her to scream. Apparently Tom was a bit of a prankster. That was the last time I saw Tom or Nicole in the 1990s.

After that, he just stopped coming to the base at all.

The rumor was that someone at the base had been telling an outside source that Tom was not only in Scientology, but that he was coming to the Int Base and getting Scientology training. It was true, but Dave Miscavige did not want the broad public to know this. Part of the idea of having Tom get trained and do all the courses was so that, when everyone did find out he was in Scientology, he would be in far enough that the onslaught of criticism would not affect him and he would stay in.

After a few days, the leak was found. A guy named Brad Kugler in the central marketing unit was running around on the decks. I knew Brad because I went to Delphi with his younger brother Ryan. When I was at ABLE, I knew his father, Ben, because he was regularly a source of high figure donations. So Brad was getting sec checked full time. Brad being security checked out of the blue at the same time as the Tom Cruise leak was a sure sign something was up. The word on the street was that he was talking to his mom on the phone and telling her about Tom’s visits. She was then, in turn, giving the data to someone at some grocery store gossip magazine. Brad was gone within a few days. He was offloaded from the base and his mom was supposedly declared an SP. Brad’s wife Tasha was made to divorce him. Whether any of that was true, there always had to be a “head on a pike” when some flap occurred. That was Dave’s way of getting closure. You could count on the pain and agony dragging on until someone got RPF’d or declared suppressive. Then we would all concentrate on the next flap on Dave’s plate.

Anyone who had phone access at the time lost it. Since one guy used the phone to secretly tell his mom some data, no one on the property could call out without going through reception.

To top it off, Tom Cruise was not showing up anymore either. His secret garden was not so secret anymore.

It was August 2nd, 1990. It was like any other day. We had gone home at 8:00
 a.m.
and I was quick to get to sleep. At noon I was awakened, not by someone, but by the noise of the rain. It had been deathly hot out and, being August, rain was the last thing I would have expected. I got some shorts on and went outside. It looked like what you would imagine hell would be like if it was located in the town of Hemet. The sky was literally black with clouds. The rain was coming down in sheets. The water had no place to go. It pooled up where it fell. The apartment complex parking lot was flooded and the sidewalks were covered with water and it was starting to come inside the front door of the apartment. This was crazy. I could not believe this was happening. I headed back inside. I threw a bunch of towels on the floor inside of my door to keep any water out and soak up what had already made its way inside.

I fell back to sleep, got up at 4:30
 p.m.
and headed outside. Tony and CB were outside and we talked about the rain that had woken all of us up. The bus usually picked us up at 4:45
 p.m.
It was now going on 5:00
 p.m.
and no sign of the bus. At 5:15
 p.m.
, I called in on a pay phone in the manager’s office. Someone would be sent out to get us.

At 5:45
 p.m.
this Italian guy showed up in his car. Marcello was his name. He did not speak English very well, but for the most part you could understand what he said.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked him. “Why didn’t the bus pick us up?”

“I was come get you,” Marcello said. “The base flood all over. Roads not open.”

Oh boy, this wasn’t good. Marcello had actually been in town picking up someone’s stuff and got stranded because he could not get back to the base on the closed roads. When he called in, they told him to go and pick us up and try and get back to the base somehow. Sanderson Street was flooded out in Hemet so that way was no good. The other road to the base, State Street, was flooded though not as bad, but the road towards the base from that direction had been completely blocked with a mountain load of mud.

After about an hour, we finally managed to get through on the Sanderson side and come around the west side of the base. It looked like a war ravaged country. There were trees down everywhere. Not just branches and leaves, whole trees toppled over and uprooted. There were huge palm fronds all over the place.

As we drove into the main gate, it hit me. There were people all over the place, covered in mud. Everyone was wet and dirty and it looked like chaos had broken out. We stopped at the main booth. Security grabbed a bunch of stuff out of Marcello’s trunk. It belonged to Jacques Boucher. He was sitting at the back of the security booth looking rather down. He was on his way to the Rehabilitation Project Force in Los Angeles. He was the guy in the audio division who made all the production masters for the Gauss line, it didn’t look good for Jacques.

We went straight into tapes. The day shift staff filled us in on what had happened. The whole base had been completely flooded. The villas were flooded. The mountain above the G units turned to mud and flowed over the highway and straight into the G’s. Supposedly, at least two or three units were destroyed. There was damage all over the base from trees falling on cars, buildings and other structures. The rain had caused several million dollars worth of damage.

Just as we were getting filled in, we were told there was a mandatory muster in the dining hall for all crew.

This was never a good sign, the only time there were random musters called with all the crew was when someone was going to be roasted.

When we got there, hundreds of people were already clearing out the tables and chairs and moving them to the crew side. We were going to be piling into the officer side and standing as a group; the crew side was used for storage of the chairs and tables. The entire base was in the dining hall. Everyone was lined up by their individual organization. Gold was in front and all the others were lined up in back. There was a podium and microphone set up in front of the room facing us. This was for Dave Miscavige – COB RTC. He was going to address us.

After everyone had been accounted for and were all lined up, we waited there at attention for what seemed like forever. It was probably 10 minutes, but when you are standing there with the noose around your neck waiting for the hangman to throw the lever that drops the floor beneath your feet, time stands still.

The doors by the officer’s side shook a little. Dave Miscavige came storming in. He went up to the podium and started screaming at us. We were the heathens responsible, we had caused this flood, we were scum, we had sabotaged everything that he or LRH had ever tried to do, we were the reason security checking was developed, we were the reason the drug rundown was developed, we were the reason why the purification rundown was developed, we were scum, and the entire org was assigned a condition of Confusion! 15-minute meal breaks, no canteen privileges, no liberties, no nothing. And everybody automatically lost two Team Share cards and weren’t able to get them back until the entire organization was upgraded out of lower conditions.

He had yelled a lot of other things while we were standing there. It was so intense and loud that two crew members standing in line fainted while he was screaming. They literally fell over while standing there, passing out as they hit the floor.

Religious Technology Center staff filed in from all directions and passed out a goldenrod issue that had been printed up.

It was an official printed version of Dave Miscavige’s lashing without the vulgar profanities laced throughout. It also had a shopping list of all the things he wanted done in order for us to be upgraded from lower conditions. It was a list of all of the things that he had been trying to get done for years. Now that there was a flood, the list contained repairing all the damage the flood had done as well. One of the items on the list was that the Gauss line had to produce 50,000 tapes per week.

After the issue was passed out, COB stomped out and we all stood there motionless. Everyone was in shock. The place already sucked when we had all our “privileges” in place. Now it would really suck. The Commanding Officer told everyone to go back to their areas and write up their condition formulas. He gave us a pep talk about how if we did this standardly, we would be upgraded and out of this in a few weeks.

There was another muster at Building 36 that night. Everybody was going to be up all night getting the mud out from under the buildings that had flooded and patching up other damage. The Tapes staff were typically exempt from these sorts of things since we had to produce tapes no matter what, and if we were off somewhere digging out mud, no tapes were being made. We went back to our areas. One good thing about being on the night shift, we were staying all night anyway! Some of the day shift crew were made to go and dig out mud while the night shift crew stayed and worked.

Everyone also had to get condition formulas written up and submitted before anyone was allowed to go home for the night. We just went back to work as usual and did our thing.

The whole organization ended up staying up all night. No one went home.

In the morning, we went to breakfast for only 15 minutes and went to get on the bus. We were told that we were not going home and that we had to stay for morning muster. If we did not get on the bus, we would not have a ride home and would end up being stuck at the base all day.

We went back to Building 36 to wait for muster. As the crew gathered, tension rose. Not only were people in a bad mood from having lost the privilege to sleep, having a shortened breakfast and being assigned lowered conditions, there were a few crew who considered themselves above the rest, as they began calling out staff for being more out-ethics than others. Someone made a wise crack while standing in line, and one girl called him on it saying he was a joker and degrader and that he was to turn in a Team Share card. They started arguing and people were telling them to shut up and get back in line.

Just then roll call was started. The master at arms called out the divisions as he always did. As he was reading them out, someone very loudly interrupted him. He was an officer I had never seen before. He was dressed in a different Sea Org uniform than the rest of us. It was the uniform a Sea Org member wore while on a mission into another organization. It was Greg Wilhere, an officer in Religious Technology Center. Standing next to him was another guy that I did recognize. Greg began addressing us:

“We are on a mission in your org. We are being run by COB directly and we will be reporting back to him daily. Obviously, you all read yesterday’s issue. Well we are here to enforce that issue and make sure it gets done. We are also going to have some new rules around here in regards to how you guys operate.

“Everyone is to be where you are supposed to be when you are supposed to be there. There are going to be several musters each day. If anyone is late to any one of those musters, even by ten seconds, you will be assigned an all night amends project.

“If that same person is late a second time, they will be instantly assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force in Los Angeles – no exceptions.

“Each day you will all participate in team drills as an organization.

“Each day you will participate in marching drills as an organization.

“Each day you will participate in Chinese Schooling key L. Ron Hubbard data.

“This is the only way you guys will be able to become a true organization and get out of your lower conditions.

“I will now turn this over to Mr. James Byrnes who will run you on Chinese school and marching.”

The other guy walked out in front of the crew. He looked down the lines of crew and told people to get straightened up and to stand in straight lines. Then he went back to the middle of the muster site. He started barking out commands.

“Ten Hut!