Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(66)

Miscavige and Broeker would communicate in code on their pagers. At any hour of the night, John Brousseau, who was Miscavige’s driver, would take him to one of the several designated pay telephone booths between Los Angeles and Riverside County to wait for a call revealing the rendezvous point. It was usually a parking lot somewhere. The drivers of the two men would wait while Miscavige and Broeker talked, sometimes for hours.

Gale Irwin, who had been on the Apollo when she was sixteen years old and had risen to being the head of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, began to wonder what was going on. Hubbard’s dispatches had become increasingly paranoid, and his only line of communication to the outside world was through these two ambitious young men. Nearly every one of the original Messengers who had joined Hubbard on the Apollo had been purged. David Mayo, who was Hubbard’s personal auditor, had also been shut off from contact. He, too, became suspicious of Miscavige and ordered him to be security-checked, but Miscavige refused this direct order from a superior. Gale Irwin says she confronted him, and Miscavige knocked her to the ground with a flying tackle. (The church denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.)

Brousseau got a call from Irwin. She was agitated. She told him that Miscavige had gone psychotic. She said she had to contact Pat Broeker right away for a meeting. When Brousseau asked to talk to Miscavige, Irwin began shouting orders at him, saying that Miscavige was raving and had to be restrained. In no way could Brousseau talk to him! He must arrange the meeting with Broeker immediately!

Brousseau drove her to a prearranged pay phone outside a Denny’s restaurant in San Bernardino, which was used only for emergencies. As they waited for the call from Broeker’s driver, a black Dodge van came barreling into the parking lot and slammed to a halt between Brousseau’s car and the phone booth. The doors blew open and half a dozen men spilled out of the van, including David Miscavige. Irwin says that Miscavige used a tire iron to pummel the pay phone, without much effect. Finally he was able to yank the receiver off the cable. Miscavige ordered Irwin into the van, and she meekly acquiesced.

With this action, the coup was accomplished: Miscavige and Broeker were now fully and defiantly in control of Scientology. The founder was isolated, caged by his notoriety and paranoia. No one knew if the orders coming from over the rainbow were from Hubbard or his lieutenants, but now it no longer mattered. Irwin was busted. A year later, in 1984, Miscavige declared her a Suppressive Person, which would happen to nearly every one of the original Messengers, the most trusted circle of Hubbard’s advisers. David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.

There was one last obstacle that Miscavige had to remove. In 1979, as a result of the FBI raid, Mary Sue had been charged and convicted of conspiracy, along with ten other Scientology executives, and sentenced to five years in prison, despite the evidence that her health was in decline. She suffered from chronic pancreatitis, a painful condition that made it difficult to digest food. “She was frail and thin and completely oblivious to anything she had done wrong,” recalled a Scientologist who escorted her into the back door of the courthouse in Washington. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be photographed.’ That was more important to her than the fact that she was going to jail for five years.”

While her case was on appeal, Mary Sue was placed in a comfortable house in Los Angeles, well away from Hubbard. She posed a dilemma for the church, and particularly for her husband. Hubbard was concerned that he might be indicted by a grand jury in New York that was looking into the church’s harassment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had written The Scandal of Scientology. If Mary Sue were sufficiently alienated to implicate Hubbard, Scientology would be devastated. Hubbard dictated frequent letters telling her what to say to prosecutors; the letters would be read to her and then destroyed. A crew of Messengers spent weeks sorting through all the orders and correspondence relating to Operation Snow White and other possible criminal activity that the FBI had not seized, making sure that Hubbard’s name was excised from any damning evidence.

Mary Sue still commanded the loyalty and affection of many Scientologists who saw her as a martyr. Moreover, she refused to divorce Hubbard or to resign her position as head of the Guardian’s Office. The sprawling intelligence apparatus that she built still operated in secret, behind locked doors. The Commodore’s Messengers Org and the Guardian’s Office were parallel and sometimes competing arms of their founders, and they had often struggled for power, in a kind of bureaucratic marital spat. Now that Miscavige was fully in control of the CMO, he concluded that the GO had to be ripped out of Mary Sue’s grasp—but without upsetting her to the point that she sought revenge.

In the spring of 1981, a delegation of Commodore’s Messengers—including Miscavige and Bill Franks—went to meet Mary Sue at a conference room in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Each of them wore a hidden microphone. Miscavige’s audacious plan was to seize control of the GO and place it under control of the Messengers, who numbered only about fifty at the time. Several thousand Guardians were still working for Mary Sue. She had treated them kindly, paying them decent wages and allowing them to live in private homes. Most of them remained loyal to her and thought that she was being made a scapegoat. They would have to be purged.

Mary Sue received the delegation of Messengers coolly. Her case was still on appeal, but the outcome was clear: she was taking the fall for a program that Hubbard, after all, had put in motion. She understood the influence she still wielded in the church and the threat she represented. She demanded to deal with Hubbard himself, but Miscavige refused. He controlled access to the church’s founder so thoroughly that even his wife couldn’t talk to him. Indeed, they hadn’t spoken in more than a year. Mary Sue cursed Miscavige and threatened to throw a heavy ashtray at him. But her negotiating position was not strong, unless she was willing to betray everything she had worked to build with the man she still believed was a savior.