Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (34 page)

I guess CO CMO Int thought that I had learned my lesson and suffered enough. On my third day out at the ponds, I was brought back to the garage and ordered to get cleaned up. After an hour, I was brought back over to the CO Gold’s Office and asked if I had had a change of heart. I don’t even remember what I said. But the entire time I was talking, I thought of how I would one day escape this place and write about this experience.

That night when I got to wash up, I took a two-hour shower to try to get the stench off me. It did not work. I think it took a week for all of the crap to work its way out of my pores, nose, throat, and ears. Even my eyes would tear crap mud. It was the most disgusting, humiliating experience of my entire life. Yeah, I had suffered well enough.

By this time — it was now 2004 — there were at least four or five senior executives in Int who had been declared SPs. There were goldenrod issues posted up on the Int notice board saying, “Ray Mithoff is hereby declared a Suppressive Person.”

Sue Koon, Marc Yager, Mark Ingber, Ray Mithoff and Guillaume Lesevre were all declared suppressive and had to work and stay in the same room together in CMO Int. It was referred to as the “SP Room.”

They were not allowed to mix with the rest of the Int Base crew except when Dave called a meeting and their presence was required or requested. And even then, when an event would come up, they would write their speeches and attend and even speak at the event as if they were still the CO CMO Int or ED Int or whatever. It was surreal. You would have guys digging ditches and scooping up crap in the aeration pond and the next thing you know they would be in a tuxedo on stage at the Shrine yapping about the latest international expansion of Scientology.

As the months went by and the SP Room had more and more people assigned to it, the rest of the crew were instructed to get these guys to admit to all the crimes that they had committed against Scientology. At first these confessions would consist of a bunch of the Int Base executives sitting in a room together yelling at them to confess their crimes. Rarely would any of them actually come up with anything of any real significance, but after a while they started coming up with some really mind-blowing things.

One day when both Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre were on a roll, they started telling us stuff that was just plain crazy in terms of things that people were told happened back in the 1980s. In the 1980s, both Marc Yager, CO CMO Int, and Guillaume Lesevre, ED Int, were running all of Scientology internationally while getting advice from LRH and being told what to do by Dave Miscavige, who was COB ASI at the time. Well, Guillaume and Marc were false reporting and manipulating the international statistics to make it look like they were doing what they were being told and it was working. Through this entire period, they were regularly receiving huge production bonuses and large cash payments for the stellar statistics to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. During these years, LRH even went so far as to write several Executive Directives about the international expansion occurring at the time and he created the International Birthday Game and all sorts of things, all based on the false information being fed to him by Guillaume and Marc. The entire time this was being done with the justification of them “not wanting to let LRH down.” They had started a lie that could not be undone. It was for this reason that they started comparing statistics to well known landmarks and cooking up how things could be conveyed to make them sound better than they ever were.

Marc Yager was the undisputed king of this. He would take a stat like international student completions and turn it into the biggest expansion ever realized. Even though it was drastically down from the year before. He would take the figure of 12,000 student completions internationally this year and say something on the order that if you took all those courses and stacked them end to end it would reach all the way around the moon! Well, yeah sure they did. He would calculate that if each single piece of paper in the longest course pack they had was laid out it would be 3500 feet long, then you have that many packs and checksheets and you multiply it times 12,000 and you end up with a figure of miles that is more than the circumference of the moon. It still does not say that the previous year they had 15,000 completions. And it also does not take into account that everyone reporting in on that figure was padding the figures they reported and so you had people in some orgs finishing a two hour course and then never ever coming in again being counted as “Scientologists.”

So, after Guillaume and Marc got on a roll, Marc confessed that with his falsely obtained riches, he went on to do even more despicable things. Someone even told me that when Scientology was running a campaign against
Time
magazine and Eli Lilly and driving their stock prices down, Marc Yager confessed that a few weeks before the campaign ended, he purchased a large number of shares in Lilly’s stock, knowing that the price would be going back up!

Up to that point, many Int Base staff could not understand how both Guillaume and Marc had expensive sports cars while the rest of us struggled to be able to buy cigarettes each week. Well the answers started coming, and they were coming in spades.

We heard how the Key to Life and Life Orientation Courses were compiled completely wrong and how they were never supposed to be the way they were released. Ray Mithoff had misunderstood what LRH had laid out in the advices for the courses and he could not think with what LRH had intended the courses to be. This one was confirmed by Dave to be what actually happened. But now that they had been released and thousands of public had either done the courses or paid for them, they just let people keep doing them knowing that they were complete crap and an exercise in futility.

We got to hear about how the Scientology Lower Grades were revised and instead of a person having to do thirty commands for each Grade, the grades materials had been revised so that in order to complete each grade a person had to have a floating needle on 300 commands even if they were done after 30 commands. This alone increased the time it took people to complete the grades and slowed people down enormously on getting through their auditing. But people had to pay a lot more to get the auditing, so they left it that way and for years it has been a situation needing resolution. Of course this was all done under the direction of Dave Miscavige and he personally checked and approved all of this, but now that it was a problem, it was conveniently shunted off to someone else as their “overt.”

We got to hear about how Ray Mithoff was the highest technically trained person on the planet and how, while he was responsible for insuring the technical accuracy and standardness of the course and auditing materials being issued, he was rubber stamping these items and in most cases not even bothering to read them at all.

Ray even approved a Dianetics How To Video that contained detailed technical aspects showing how Dianetics Auditing was to be delivered, which was to be released to the public at an event and be distributed in the hundreds of thousands. It turned out that he didn’t even read the script or watch the video before he approved it.

This went on and on. Some staff in these meetings could not believe what they were hearing. The worst part was when COB came down and asked what they had coughed up and he was told. He was not surprised in the slightest. He had already known all this and was not impressed! He wanted to know what
else
these guys had been up to!

These were the top executives in all of Scientology and had been for decades and they were confessing crimes that would have gotten any other person in Scientology, well, declared an SP. Well they had been declared SPs and that was not changing them in the slightest.

The Int Base was rotten to the core. Dave Miscavige knew this. He had known about all of these crimes, yet these bogus courses were still being sold, the faulty auditing was still being charged for, the money was still being taken in by orgs all around the world. That was just his point. He was the only one trying to get these things fixed. Dave Miscavige was the only one trying to figure out how to convince the public who had already paid for these things that they should buy the new improved, revised version and go back and re-do the courses they had spent years doing and newly purchase the books they had bought and read many times before. And he was the only one convincing them to throw away the past several years of studies that had been done because those were the old “unverified by RTC” versions that he had released only five years prior. Dave Miscavige was the only person out of all of the people on the Int Base who was holding the line and enforcing what LRH had intended. Dave Miscavige was the only one curtailing the dangerous activities of International Management and forcing in a new era where people could go into an org that was posh and upscale and that cost a lot of money to make look nice.

Dave Miscavige was also the only one who already knew about all of these things as in most cases, he was the one that approved or directed they be re-released or produced in their current or previous forms.

Yeah, and Dave Miscavige was the only one that already knew all this and was NOT sitting in the SP hole at the Int Base.

he Int Base is a 500-acre property divided in half by Gilman Springs Road, or Highway 79 as we called it. Back in the old days if you wanted to go from one side of the property to the other, there were pedestrian gates that you would walk through, cross the highway and then go through the gate on the other side. This was fine for the occasional person going across. But when a meal was about to happen or just ending, you would have 600 people crossing the highway in one long stream. It was a bit dangerous, just like crossing the street with no traffic light.

In the early 1990s, the Soboba Indian tribe, whose reservation was several miles east of the base, decided they were going to make some money off of their little casino. Up until this time, they had a small building with a few gaming tables, slot machines and a steak restaurant. First, they worked on putting in a huge parking lot that could hold thousands of cars, and then they brought in the tents, three of them. Each of these huge white tents would hold an entire casino each.

There are two ways to get to the Soboba Indian Casino, You can drive from LA and come down Highway 60 East and then down Gilman Springs Road which takes you past the base, or you can come from the Palm Springs direction and go west on the Interstate 10 and take Lamb’s Canyon to Gilman Springs Road, which again takes you past the base.

There was one other way you could go instead of using Gilman Springs Road, and that was to take Sanderson Street to the Ramona Expressway. This way might have been a little faster even, but was little known.

The traffic going by the base was getting heavier and heavier. It was actually becoming VERY busy.

The road was pretty crappy and not well taken care of, and for the most part, was unlit at night.

And there was also a matter of the security problems that the road presented. Staff could (and had) easily slip out any one of six pedestrian gates and be gone forever. There was no way to control people coming in or going out these gates and even though there were security cameras at every gate, at night it was hard to see and many people had blown by simply walking out the gates and into cars that had pulled up to rescue them.

Dave Miscavige directed and approved a new plan for the highway that would not only make it harder to get out, but harder for cars to drive by. They would build two tunnels under the road and connect the North and South sides of the property together to get rid of the pedestrian gates.

Then the road would be made smaller by putting in a median and curbs on both sides of the property lines. While construction was occurring, the alternate route was to be made popular and promoted as faster and easier. The idea was that this road construction would handle all of the problems the old road presented.

In fact, if Dave had actually had it his way, the road would be rezoned and made a private road and gates would have been put up on the highway at both ends, preventing ANY through traffic. But he would have to settle for his acceptable plan.

This plan was easily approved through the city planners. Most of the time, anything built or constructed at Gold would be scrutinized by the city planners to no end. They did not seem to like us and whenever we were briefed on any of the city related stuff by the External PR staff, it was always how “despite all odds and the SPs in the City Planning Office,” they had managed to get a permit to build something.

For the road, though, the city whizzed everything through. Even though it was Dave’s plan to reduce the traffic, which would not appeal to the city, construction work was to move forward.

During the initial construction, the road was all but closed to through traffic. The amount of cars going past the base was down to hundreds instead of tens of thousands. It looked like the plan was going to work. People had already started taking the alternate route; so much so that we had heard that the Ramona Expressway was starting to back up at rush hour. This had never happened before and was a good sign that the traffic was being successfully redirected.

After two years of construction, the road and tunnels were completed. It was one of the nicest roads in Hemet or San Jacinto. To keep the road noise down, the asphalt was made very smooth. New road lines were painted in and turnouts were made for all four security gates. The tunnels meant no more waiting for cars to be able to cross the road and no more pedestrian gates that allowed staff to leave when they wanted to.

It appeared that Dave’s little plan had been successful. But a few short months later his plan would be foiled as it always was. A fairly large rainstorm had hit the area, and when I say the area, I do not mean Riverside, or Hemet or San Jacinto. No, I mean Gilman Hot Springs.