Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (32 page)

1. COB Asst

2. COB Secretary

3. COB Communicator

4. COB Sec for Correspondence

5. COB Sec for Compliance

6. COB Sec for Incoming Traffic

7. COB Sec for Outgoing Traffic

8. COB Typist

These people recorded everything he said throughout the day and then turned those tapes into streams and streams of orders that were sent out in triplicate to anybody and everybody that had anything to do with any of them. The recipients then had to word clear his orders before they were allowed to do anything on them. There were over 2000 pages of transcripts that dealt solely with the subject of doing the Int Base org boards and postings!

There were lists and lists of every single different possible personnel scenario that could be put into place at the Int Base. Does CMO Gold stay its own org? Does it get put in the Exec structure of Gold? Does it move into CMO Int? Does Annie Tidman stay the CO? If it goes to Gold then she can’t still be the head as she and Lisa Schroer, the CO Gold, don’t get along that well. Does CMO Gold move across the property, does it stay where it is? All of these issues and about a thousand more had to be taken into account for each org and all of the postings that were being done.

For at least the last seven years, the org boards and postings had gone like this: All of the postings get worked out by a committee of whoever thinks they are the current exec structure in charge. They then order the internal staff to draw up charts with pictures of everybody being proposed so it can be seen who will be posted where. Personnel files and experience are rarely used – this is a “who would I like to do what” drill that gets done by a few people. If the persons doing this drill don’t like you, it is likely you will end up on a post that sucks. This drill takes at least a few weeks and the list is nearly done. There are, however, a few Watchdog Committee and higher exec posts like Gold Div heads that are still vacant. Nobody wants to do those posts since they know that these have a very high turnover rate, at which point the whole thing stalls out and cannot be finished. Dave Miscavige calls a meeting and then all of these people who are doing the org boards and postings get hauled up to Building 50 or the WDC conference room for nine hours to hear what people Dave thinks should be on what posts and which people he DOES NOT want on certain posts. After this meeting, they start over on the list and have to somehow put all of the pieces back the way Dave wants them and still be able to come up with rosters that make sense. Add into this that they now have to offload five people and that four people blew since the last list was made. So now they have to somehow get rid of some posts, or name some people who are not even at the base to take these posts once they get to Int. Oh yeah, no new people can come to the Int Base until the org boards and postings are done, so no new personnel arrivals have gone to Int for nearly seven years. There have been over 500 offloads, though.

Oh, yeah, and many things are not allowed until all of the Int Base org boards and postings are done. This applies to ALL INT BASE STAFF unless otherwise noted: liberties (days off); meal breaks longer than 30 minutes; canteen privileges; getting married; bonuses; having rank (all Int Base staff were demoted to a rank of “Swamper” in the year 2000. Swamper is the very lowest rank you start out with when you first join staff); Sea Org Day; promotions; Thanksgiving; Christmas; New Years; birthdays (except COB’s – bring on the gifts!); going home to berthing (if you are directly related to getting the postings or org boards done),

Back to the main story here! We were locked up in the conference room and Dave was going to come down and meet with the key execs about the music studio. It had just been redone for the fourth time and Dave wanted to go over what he found when walking through the studio that afternoon. When one of these meetings happened, you had about twenty people who went into a room and did not come out for hours on end. You would see COB come and go as he pleased, but the people in the room did not leave for any reason, no bathroom breaks, no snacks, nothing. When Dave left or was going to be gone for a bit, sometimes they could duck into a nearby room, grab a protein bar, take a bathroom break and go right back into the room for fear that he would return while they were gone. No one was allowed to come into a meeting once Dave had entered the room. Once he was in it was locked down, so to speak. No one came or went unless he directed it. This particular day’s meeting was to be at 3:00
 p.m.
in the conference room in CMO Int. This room holds about 20 people max and that was with ten sitting on one side of the table and the rest standing behind them or sitting in chairs behind those at the table. The other side of the table was for Dave. He usually sat at the table and had a set variety of items that had been placed there by his stewards before the meeting: water (a specific brand that only he drinks. No one would dare drink that same brand of water!), protein bars, ashtray, pack of Camel non-filter cigarettes, pens, paper, tape recorder (unless room is hard wired for recording, which all Int Base conference rooms are). The attendants of this meeting were the CST guys, Russ Bellin and his staff who were running projects at the Base, CMO Int execs, and Gold Execs. Annie Tidman was there as she was directly running the Music Studio re-re-re-re-renovation and up-up-grade that was currently being done.

COB came in and immediately asked who had been into the studio lately. Of course only one or two people had and even they were probably lying, so he told everybody to go and look at the main control room. The music studio was right next to CMO Int so it was a 30 second trip over there. The musicians were in there and they had a look of horror on their faces; obviously COB had been by there recently. They said that he had come in, asked some questions and left.

We returned to the conference room. After a bunch of back and forth questions and guesses from us on what was wrong, we were told by Dave that the mix board was crooked and we were all sent back to the studio control room to see what he was talking about. Okay, back in the conference room he proceeded to give us a lecture on mixing and how it’s done. He then asked for a copy of the “Queen’s Greatest Hits” CD to be brought down to the conference room. After it arrived, he played the CD for us and told us to listen. You have got to picture this: You had twenty people who probably didn’t give a crap about Queen, had not eaten, were tired and who did not care about mixing, or who at least were certainly not going to take away a whole lot in terms of learning about it today; yet, we listened.

While Dave was playing the CD for us, I think it was during “Keep Yourself Alive,” he suddenly became ecstatic and jumped up from the table. “I just had a great idea!” he exclaimed. He was the happiest any of us had seen him in months, almost in glee about this new idea that had popped into his head. He said that we should get something to eat, and then get all of CMO Int rounded up and into the WDC conference room for a meeting in about an hour. He said to remove the table from the middle of the room and make sure that there were enough chairs for EVERY SINGLE PERSON to sit down. He was very clear to make sure we understood this part. The room was to be cleared out. Now, the WDC Conference room is much bigger than any other conference room on the base. It is two very large trailers put together with no walls or posts to block Dave’s view of anyone in the meeting. That is why he liked meeting in this room; he could be close enough to the greatest number of people in a meeting and could read their reactions.

With the table cleared out, there were a lot of people now in the room. It was all CMO Int crew with the addition of two Gold Execs. No one had a clue why we were there. We knew that Dave was happy about some idea that he had come up with while listening to a Queen album, but other than that the meeting purpose was unknown. It was now around 5:30
 p.m.

Dave showed up and talked about the org boards and postings. He also talked about how there had been over 500 people that had been musical chaired off post over the last five years. (He left out the part about most of them being as a result of his orders.) He then asked a few people what “musical chairs” means. About three people answered with the Scientology definition of musical chairs: frequent post changes. No one seemed to know that it meant something else. One guy from Programs said that it was a game. Dave had him explain the game to everybody.

“Good. So you guys understand the game?” Dave asked. “Okay, well today we are all going to find out how the entirety of Scientology feels about you guys playing musical chairs with the posts of international Scientology orgs and the Int Base. We are going to play the game musical chairs, but with a twist. You are all going to walk around these chairs here. While the music plays, a chair will be removed, and whoever does not get a chair when the music stops, well, that person will be offloaded from the Int Base. Those are the rules and that is the game. Oh, and the person who is left standing when all but one chair is pulled out will stay here and help me repost the base and get Scientology expanded. This is not a joke and I am not kidding. You guys have messed with me for the last time. I am going to find out right now and right here, who is the most determined to stay here.”

You can imagine the horror on the faces in the room. There were about seventy people in the room and everybody knew that this was going to be a very cutthroat ordeal. And what did “offloaded” mean? There were so many meanings for this word at the Int Base that what he meant was not clear. To most this meant that they were going to be given $500, put on a bus to the middle of nowhere and told never to come back. Some had the hope that it meant going to a lower org, maybe. To some it meant going to the Rehabilitation Project Force in Australia, Canada or Africa where no external trouble could be caused. There was a lot of fumbling around to get the chairs into a giant circle. Dave had the Cine Sec Gold (Fed Tisi) bring up a video camera so the whole thing could be videoed. This was going to be a major production!

Dave played a few CDs. “We are the Champions” by Queen was not the right message for this. The Queen song that Dave ended up using was “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Dave Miscavige did not pick this song on a whim. He wanted the lyrics of the song to be burned in our minds. I had never before really listened to or understood the lyrics of the song. Dave had. He wanted us to feel like the guy singing the song. As far as Dave was concerned, we had been bad and this was our execution. We were all about to be blown away into the wind.

Anyway, the first people to go were the usual suspects, the older, more reserved bunch. As people would leave the game, Dave had them lined up in one area of the room. He would jab comments at them and apologize for it having to end up like this. If the person was married or had a spouse in Gold, he would ask them why they had not thought about this before. “Is it real to you now?” he would ask.

One guy, John Oldfield, was leaving the game. He was married to Megan Oldfield in Gold. She was a video editor and they had been married at least a few years. John had tears running down his face. Dave asked him why he was crying. John said that he was going to miss Megan and that he did not want to have to leave like this. Dave said, “Well, you never cried for me!” To prove that he was not kidding, Dave had one of his staff go off and come back with actual airline tickets printed up with the people’s names on them. They were handed out to people that had been kicked out of the game so far.

As the number of people still in the game grew smaller, Dave let the music play longer. This went on for hours. When it got down to around twenty people, it started to get VERY physical. Mark Ingber and Mike Sutter actually destroyed a chair by pulling it from each other and fighting and punching each other to let go of it. Mark Ingber actually ripped the seat of the chair from the frame and sat down on it on the floor! That counted and Mike left the game!

As the final people were weeded out, people were being thrown to the ground, pushed against walls and otherwise fighting for a chair. If you could imagine what it would be like if pro athletes played a game of musical chairs, that was what it was like for the last fifteen or so people. It was very sad to watch. People who had been best friends for years were throwing each other to the ground for a chance to get a chair. Those who had lost were made to stand there and wait. Wait and do nothing except wonder where you would end up, what would you do, whom would you ever see again? Many of these people knew nothing else except for the Int Base. They had very little or no family, or at least they had not seen their family in so long, they did not even know if they could go to them. No one had credit cards, bank accounts, or much more than 50 dollars to their name. Very few staff had driver’s licenses and fewer had vehicles. And even if they did have a vehicle, it either did not run or it had been years since they had registered or insured it. How would they live, how would they even eat? What would their spouses think of them? Would they be told that they were a suppressive person and never hear from their family or partner again? There were now almost seventy people standing off in this big group. These people were now being referred to as the “Offload Group” by Dave. Fifty percent of them had either been crying or were still crying at this point. The other half might have been happy to get the hell out of there or did not care enough either way to cry. The last four people were Greg Wilhere, Sue Wilhere, Mark Ingber and Lisa Schroer. Mark was literally thrown aside by Greg Wilhere. Lisa beat out Greg for a seat. Sue Wilhere and Lisa Schroer walked around a single chair for what seemed to be an eternity while Queen rang out. Then the music stopped and they fought for the single seat. As fate would have it, Lisa Schroer got the seat and Sue was sent to the side.

“A deal is a deal,” Dave Miscavige said to Lisa. “You can stand next to me. The rest of you are not done yet. We still have to figure out where you will all end up going.”

At this point, Dave told everybody to split up into groups of seven and that no couples can be in any one group. If both you and your spouse were in the room, you would have to go to different groups so that even once offloaded, you could not be together! The offloads were split into seven separate groups each with ten people. Dave asked the first group where they thought that they should go. Of course none of them could agree on one place as there were ten different people from ten completely different places in the world.