Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(74)
Miscavige still worried that Broeker was holding vital material back. A few months later, he and church attorneys went to the ranch to persuade the Broekers to hand over whatever confidential materials they might have to the church for safekeeping. While this was going on, a gang of a dozen powerful men assembled by Rathbun surrounded the ranch quarters and hid in the bushes.
Inside the ranch house, Miscavige and the lawyers argued that Scientology would never get its tax exemption if the church did not have in its possession its most important documents. Miscavige also threatened Broeker with the prospect of criminal prosecution. Rathbun had discovered that there was $1.8 million of Hubbard’s funds that Broeker couldn’t account for. Broeker appeared to cave in. He let Rathbun load the file cabinets in the ranch house into a truck. Had Broeker not agreed, Rathbun was prepared to signal his goon squad to storm the place and seize everything. It took months to sort through the voluminous files, only to find that there was really nothing there—certainly, nothing that resembled new OT levels.
In November 1987, the IRS notified the church that its criminal investigation had concluded. No charges were filed, but that also reduced the leverage Miscavige had over Broeker. A few months later, Miscavige decided that a final operation to retrieve the missing OT levels was in order. This time there would be no subterfuge, no subtle argument. Rathbun brought along a team of armed private investigators and off-duty LA cops as muscle, along with several other church executives. One of them found fifty thousand dollars stashed under the kitchen sink.
Miscavige concentrated his attention on Annie. He took her to a separate room and interrogated her as a detective barred the door, preventing her husband from seeing her. Eventually, Annie admitted that Pat kept a storage locker in nearby Paso Robles, and she coughed up the key. Rathbun’s team found more files, but not what they wanted. Rathbun eventually came to the conclusion that there were no further OT levels—no OT IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV—it was all a bluff on Broeker’s part, a lie that the church would have to live with, since the levels had been so publicly announced.7
In April 1988, Miscavige formally canceled Hubbard’s final directive, Flag Order 3879, that had named the Broekers Loyal Officers. Miscavige declared that Pat Broeker had fabricated the order, although he produced no evidence to substantiate his charge. Broeker’s last claim to the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard was destroyed. He fled the country, followed by two private detectives, Paul Marrick and Greg Arnold, who claim that they tailed Broeker for the next twenty-four years, even to foreign countries. They say they were supervised personally by David Miscavige and paid from church funds. “He lived a very quiet, normal life, and everybody around him loves him,” Marrick later said of Broeker. “So that’s his whole story from our perspective.”
The same day that Miscavige canceled Hubbard’s order, Annie showed up in a remote re-education camp, in the Soboba Indian Reservation in Southern California, that Scientologists called Happy Valley. It had once belonged to an order of nuns, who left a sign on the gate that said VALLEY OF THE SINGING HEART. An armed guard stood watch. Dogs were trained to track down anyone who tried to leave.
Miscavige was now in complete control.
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1 Miscavige has been circumspect about what missions he actually performed in his capacity as Action Chief. He once testified: “What is a mission? Okay. Well, you have a situation and a situation is defined as a departure, major departure from the ideal scene, and at the bottom of that there’s some Y. Y is defined as an explanation that opens a door to a handling. And if you have actually pulled the strings on the situation all the way down, you will now have a Y, which means that the situation can be resolved. A mission would take a situation, knowing what the Y is, and therefore knowing what exact handling steps are thus possible as a result of the door being opened because the Y was found by evaluation, and they would … operate on what is known as a set of mission orders, and the set of mission orders is an exact series of steps, sometimes consecutive, sometimes not, sometimes they can be done concurrently within each other.… These mission orders have an exact purpose to be accomplished, exact major targets, exact primary targets, exact vital targets, exact operating targets; they have listed the means of mission communication, and they have also listed the target date for completion.” He did not clarify the situation further. (David Miscavige testimony, Bent Corydon v. Church of Scientology, July 1990.)
2 The church categorically denies all charges of Miscavige’s abuse.
3 In 1989, an appellate court reduced the judgment to $2.5 million, which the church finally paid in 2002, plus interest, which brought the sum to $8.6 million.
4 The church claims that Hubbard’s income was generated by his book sales.
5 Rathbun was never able to apply those advanced techniques on his brother. In 1981, two boys walking their dogs near a vacant lot in Garden Grove, California, discovered Bruce Rathbun’s body buried under a pile of debris. The cause of death was never determined and the case was never resolved (www.ci.garden-grove.ca.us/?q=police/Unsolved/1981/Rathbun).
6 The police report confirms Rathbun’s story. “A suspect, tentatively I.D.’d as her husband, fired one shot through the driver’s side of the auto,” the report states. “He then forced her vehicle to stop, got out, and became involved in a fight with her male companion, during which time he was firing the weapon, a .22 caliber (short), 8-shot revolver.… The male companion was able to wrest the revolver from the suspect, at which point the husband fled.” The companion was identified as Mark Rathbun. The empty gun was found at the scene (Michael A. Shepherd, County of Los Angeles Case Report, Aug. 19, 1978).