Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (26 page)

Before this time, I had no idea that Dave Miscavige had ever been involved with technical matters of this nature. I knew he knew that some of the upper levels delivered at Flag (called the L rundowns) were the biggest money making service that Scientology had ever had. I had heard those words come out of his mouth. But either way, he said he would be overseeing this select group of people that were doing services at Flag and HE would show the Flag staff how awesome he was by doing this. As far as I knew, Dave was a Class IV Auditor trained at Saint Hill in England in the 1970s when he was 12 years old. He was not a case supervisor.

Dave continued with the next public person. He prefaced it with the fact that this girl had paid for a large amount of services and should be treated well and made sure that she continued on the Bridge no matter what. Her name was Lisa McPherson. He read through her auditing folder and pointed up things that had been done wrong on her case and told the staff that he was going to review her folders and make sure that she was being handled correctly and not being let to chase butterflies while she could be gotten up the Bridge.

We were up on the balcony of the auditorium while this was taking place. The balcony is near the back of the auditorium, but there were staff within 20 feet of us sitting in the seats below. One guy lifted his arm and looked at his watch as Dave was talking and instantly Dave went into a tirade.

“YOU WANT TO GO HOME??” Dave’s voice boomed, “Really? I am here doing your jobs, and you are worried about getting home and getting some sleep. I will come back there and smash your fucking watch! While it is still on your arm!” If Dave Miscavige was upset before, he was genuinely pissed now. That was just the sort of thing that would set him off. Here he was trying to show them how he was doing their jobs and how he was doing what they should be doing and they could give a hoot. They just want to go home and for him to stop talking. We knew exactly what this meant. This was not going to end anytime soon now. And most likely, the guy with the watch would be getting his own reaming, either by Dave personally or one of his staff.

The briefing ended probably an hour later. Before everyone was dismissed, Religious Technology Center staff scooped up “watch guy” and led him backstage. Just the plain theatrics of this one guy being lead off would serve as an example to all of the other staff there that they were on notice. The rest of the staff then quietly filed out.

Someone from the Religious Technology Center came up to the balcony.

“Do you have the tape?” she demanded.

“Yes, Sir, we are just rewinding it now,” I said to her.

All of Dave Miscavige’s briefings were recorded on camera with the mics on stage being fed into the recording deck. He would probably have this tape sent back to the base and make all of the staff there watch it as well. Why not? He could play this video to them and show them how he was doing all of their jobs as well. After all, he was literally bypassing several echelons of Scientology’s command structure all the way from Religious Technology Center, the base and Flag executives by even talking to these people. At a minimum, he was doing the job of the Technical Secretary for Flag. COB was doing a job fifty levels below himself. But this was how Hubbard did it back in the day, so this is how Dave Miscavige would do it.

The briefings were a regular occurrence for the next several weeks. We would play videos of bad sessions, you name it. Dave was going to rub their faces in any little fault he could find anywhere in Clearwater. He was going to keep rubbing their faces in these things until they started doing things his way.

One day, Dave Miscavige asked us to cue up a tape that he was going to play for the Flag crew at that night’s briefing.

The tape was a semi-confidential tape called “A Talk on A Basic Qual” I say semi-confidential because it was not broadly released to public and was only available on certain courses. Students could only listen to it in the course room and they were not allowed to take it out of the org.

The briefing took place and afterwards COB called a few of us into the Green Room behind the Auditorium. One of his staff had called up to the balcony and asked us to bring the cassette he had played to the Green Room.

Dave Miscavige was all excited. He had an idea. In the tape, LRH talked about two things that set something off in Dave. LRH talked about drilling auditors and he talked about an E-Meter that had specific qualities that the current E-Meters did not have. This night would “change Scientology forever” Dave Miscavige said. No kidding. He was right.

Over the next few months Dave would live in Florida and tinker with every single area of Flag until it ran like a well-oiled machine. Everything from the way the Sandcastle auditing rooms were set up to how people went in session.

Dave had concluded that if Flag could make perfect auditors — lots of them and rapidly, they could drive the nearly one million dollar a week income at Flag up to two or even three million by streamlining every single aspect of Flag. And if they could do that in every area of Flag, then why wouldn’t they be able to do that in every organization in the world? The Golden Age of Tech was born. Dave Miscavige would codify and perfect every single aspect of every single thing in Scientology so that there was no longer any thought process involved whatsoever. The auditors would just be programmed to do the right thing and people would get perfect auditing. Dave would essentially build a huge machine that would crank out Scientology services.

Within weeks the Flag Gross Income was over one million every single week. Dave had 30 people brought down from the base to work on technical investigations and handlings that he wanted done. This mostly involved staff at Flag being busted off post. He met with staff from the Church of Spiritual Technology about designing and researching out a new E-Meter. Meanwhile, Dave had staff at the base compiling new drills that would be put in place for any and all technical training courses in Scientology.

Dave had managed to take anything that involved any part of “friendly” or “personal” out of Scientology. It was now a machine that had one route and one answer, and that answer was being programmed into every staff member, every public, everyone that had anything to do with Scientology. If you did not follow the exact route laid out in the Golden Age of Tech, you went to Ethics, no exceptions. If someone refused Ethics and they were in any way irrational or “nuts”, they did the Introspection Rundown or were security checked. Period. There were no exceptions. Dave’s new machine was a factory that only had exact options. Gone were the days where you could talk to someone and sort something out or decide what was needed based on what they thought. The thought process had been taken out of the equation. Any talking about it had been taken out of the equation. You looked at the routing form or program and if it said Int Rundown, that is what the person had to do.

The policy on Keeping Scientology Working was quoted heavily. “We’d rather have you dead than incapable,” Hubbard wrote in the policy that appears as the first thing you read in every single Scientology course. Well that’s just what happened in December of 1995. Lisa McPherson, one of the few people that Dave Miscavige had been personally overseeing and supervising, had died. Dave knew he was personally involved in this one. Anyone that had anything to do with the “LMP” situation, as it was referred to, was watched like a hawk.

The two Religious Technology Center representatives at Flag who had been executing Dave’s orders regarding Lisa were brought back to the base and were posted as dishwashers in the galley. The senior case supervisor on her case was made a cleaner at Flag. One of the rooms where Lisa had been held and examined was cleaned out and wiped down completely. Any traces of anything Lisa were erased. People were given an official story of what happened even if they thought differently from what they witnessed.

Dave Miscavige had messed up big time. He knew it, and a lot of people that worked with him, for him or around him, knew it. Some how, some way he had to make this go away. While behind the wheel, he had crashed and although he was surely at fault and there were witnesses, this would be classified as a hit and run and he would not be caught. Not yet at least.

There were people that were there when this all happened. There are at least five people that know the truth about what happened to Lisa McPherson. Those people will eventually tell their stories and the truth will come out. While they might be morally wrong for not having spoken out, I am sure their hesitation stemmed from concern they would end up just like Lisa if they did so.

The International Landlord Office was located at the base. This was the office responsible for making sure that every single organization in the world was in a building that was big enough, well located and properly designed and set up in accordance with Hubbard policy.

The landlord office had photo binders which contained detailed pictures of each organization around the world. In the front of the binder was a picture of the building exterior and then photos of all interior rooms, walls, furniture, toilets, sinks, broken floor tiles. You name it, they had it.

Now there were about ten staff in the landlord office. A few designers, a few space planners, a few logistics people, some project managers that went around and supervised individual renovations projects and the International Landlord. This last post was the most frequented post in the entire joint. I think that there was a new International Landlord about once a year. I can remember at least seven of them, and I didn’t have much interaction with them.

My initial involvement with the landlord office was when I helped build their offices as part of the weekly all-hands renovations in 1990. The landlord office is located in what used to be a gas station adjacent to the main highway that runs through the property, in the “garage” or “estates” building as it would later be named.

In 1993 I spent quite a bit of time in the landlord office drawing up plans for one of their biggest organizations in Europe. This was the Advanced Organization & Saint Hill Europe. This building would be the first to have a new type of auditing session surveillance system installed in all auditing rooms. We were supposed to install a microphone and two tiny cameras in every single room where auditing was to take place. These cameras and microphone would then feed into several central locations where they could be both viewed and recorded. Any number of people would then be able to watch these sessions.

I had installed this same system in Los Angeles already, as well as other audio visual systems at other organizations in the LA area.

The Danish building was almost entirely made up of solid brick walls, so planning the installation of hundreds of cameras and microphone wiring was no small task. It took many weeks to plan and many more months to execute.

While I was working in the landlord office I became familiar with one of the biggest projects that they had been working on. It was the new Flag Building. This was to be the new facility where the Super Power rundowns would be delivered across the street from the Fort Harrison Hotel. The building was HUGE. It was six stories high and entirely covered with glass panels. It looked nothing like the Fort Harrison Hotel at all. They had a full-scale model of the building on display in the office. It was very detailed and even had tiny little cars driving down Fort Harrison avenue and people on the sidewalks.

I was asked to look at the building because they would need to install the same camera and mic systems in that building as well. It was huge and had hundreds and hundreds of auditing rooms. I told them it would cost a lot of money for that kind of stuff. “We spent over $50,000 having this model made,” one of the landlord staff told me. “I think we will be able to afford the cameras with the millions of dollars that are being raised to build this building.”

Super Power - 1995

There were two girls that worked at the base in the Qualifications Division of Gold. Katie and Melissa. Both Katie and Melissa shared the same last name of Feshbach. They were not sisters, but cousins and both daughters of the famed Feshbach brothers. The Feshbach brothers were famous within Scientology because they were rich. Not only were they rich, but they were still rich after giving millions of their dollars to Scientology. So they were in fact, crazy rich.

Katie and Melissa were obviously not hurting cash wise. Most of us would live week to week on our $35 paycheck. Not Katie or Melissa. My wife was also in the Qualifications Division of Gold and worked with Katie and Melissa on a regular basis. When Katie got married to a good friend of mine, my wife and I shared an apartment with Katie and her husband, Josh.

Melissa had a car (given to her by her dad), but had not done Car School, so I would frequently get to drive it whenever I needed, in exchange for being her driver when she needed one. It was a very fair deal and her new car was in no way a detriment to me.

Well, at one point Katie and Melissa found out that their dads and their uncle were all coming up to the base! This was unheard of. Public Scientologists coming to the base? Only movie stars or musicians would normally come up here, not stock market short sellers! So sure enough, Joe, Matt and Kurt Feshbach ended up coming to the base for several weeks.

Then we found out why. They were all going to get Super Power! Supposedly Dave Miscavige had personally invited them to come and receive the highly confidential level as part of a handling program that was being done with them.

The Super Power pilots had been being done at the Int Base for a few years, in 1991 and 92 but that was it. The rundowns were delivered to about a dozen staff. It was a pilot program, something LRH had written up in the late 1970’s but that had never been released. It was sort of like the Star Wars movies. LRH had envisioned the processes, but the earth technology did not exist to do what he had laid out. Then LRH ended up handling all of the reasons he could never release Super Power by dealing with TRs (Training Routines) and then Key to Life (grammar and communication course). The first complete pilots were those in 1991. There were very few Int Base staff that were trained on all of the LRH writings on Super Power and they were the only ones who could audit it. And in order to audit on Super Power, you had to have first been audited on Super Power. It was like the chicken and egg problem. One of the rundowns on Super Power was designed to hone in all 57 perceptions, some of which included: Sight, Taste, Rhythm, Smell, Blood circulation, Gravity, Motion, Balance, Magnetic Fields, Compass direction and Pain.