Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(102)
Rathbun was shocked, not just by being declared an SP, but also by the changes at Gold Base in the year and a half he had been posted to Flag. All communications into and out of the base had been cut off. The leader had several of his top executives confined to the Watchdog Committee headquarters—a pair of double-wide trailers that had been married together. By the end of the year, the number who were living there under guard had grown to about forty or fifty people. It was now called the Hole. Except for one long conference table, there was no furniture—no chairs or beds, just an expanse of outdoor carpet—so the executives had to eat standing up and sleep on the floor, which was swarming with ants. In the morning, they were marched outside for group showers with a hose, then back to the Hole. Their meals were brought to them—a slop of reheated leftovers. When temperatures in the desert location mounted to more than a hundred degrees, Miscavige turned off the electricity, letting the executives roast inside the locked quarters.
The leader ordered them to stay until they finally had rearranged the “Org Board”—the church’s organizational chart—to his satisfaction, which was never given. Photographs of Sea Org personnel were continually moved from one position to another on the chart, which meant that people were constantly being reassigned to different posts, whimsically, and no post was secure. About nine hundred positions needed to be filled at Int and Gold Bases, and the stack of personnel and ethics files was five feet high. This anarchic process had been going on more or less intensively for four years.
At odd, unpredictable hours, often in the middle of the night, Miscavige would show up in the Hole, accompanied by his wife, Shelly, and his Communicator, Laurisse Stuckenbrock, each of whom carried a tape recorder to take down whatever Miscavige had to say. The detainees could hear the drumbeat of the shoes as Miscavige’s entourage marched toward the trailers. The leader demanded that the executives engage in what were termed “séances”—endless hours of confessions about their crimes and failures, in this and previous lives, as well as whatever dark thoughts—“counter-intentions”—they might be harboring against him. If someone was not forthcoming with such confessions, the group would harass that person until he produced a confession. Sometimes these were sexual fantasies. That would be written up in a report, which Miscavige would then read aloud to other church officials.
The entire base became paralyzed with anxiety about being thrown into the Hole. People were trying desperately to police their thoughts, but it was difficult to keep secrets when staff members were constantly being security-checked with E-Meters. Even confidences whispered to a spouse were regularly betrayed. After one of COB’s lengthy rants, recordings of his statement would be sent to a steno pool, then transcripts were delivered to the executives in the Hole, who had to read them aloud to each other repeatedly.
Mike Rinder was in the Hole for two years, even though he continued to be the church’s chief spokesperson. Bizarrely, he would sometimes be pulled out and ordered to conduct a press conference, or to put on a tuxedo and jet off to a Scientology gala; then he would be returned to confinement. He and other executives were made to race around the room on their hands and bare knees, day after day, tearing open scabs on their knees and leaving permanent scars. Miscavige once directed De Vocht to rough up Rinder, because “he’s just an SP.” De Vocht took Rinder outside and gave him a going-over. But De Vocht was also frightened of Miscavige. He took to sleeping with a broken broom handle. When another executive spoke up about the violence, he was beaten by two of Miscavige’s assistants and made to mop the bathroom floor with his tongue.
Mike Rinder, former chief spokesperson for the church, in Florida, 2012
The detainees developed a particular expression whenever Miscavige came in, which he took note of. He called them “Pie Faces.” To illustrate what he meant, Miscavige drew a circle with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. He had T-shirts made up with the pie face on it. Rinder was “the Father of Pie Faces.” People didn’t know how to react. They didn’t want to call attention to themselves, but they also didn’t want to be a Pie Face.
In Scientology, there is a phrase that explains mob psychology: Contagion of Aberration, meaning that groups of people can stimulate each other to do things that are insane. According to former church executives, one day Miscavige arrived at the Hole and demanded that Marc Yager, the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, and Guillaume Lesevre, the Executive Director of the Church of Scientology International, confess that they were homosexual lovers. He threatened that Tom Cruise would come to “punch you guys out” if the other Sea Org members in the Hole failed to get a confession from the two men. The captive executives took this threat seriously. When Miscavige left, a group of women executives who had been appointed as leaders of the detainees urged some of the bigger men in the Hole to “give some people some black eyes before Tom has to.” Several men dutifully beat up Lesevre and Yager. Then one of the women reported to Miscavige that the men had confessed that they were gay lovers. When Debbie Cook, the former Captain of Flag Service Org and one of the most respected executives in the church, said that wasn’t true, she was declared a traitor. She was made to stand in a garbage can for twelve hours, as the other detainees demanded that she confess her own “homosexual tendencies.” The women in the room repeatedly slapped her and poured water over her head. A sign was hung around her neck, saying LESBO.