9 Abuse in the Sea Org

To be in Scientology’s Sea Organization is to be part of the movement’s self-styled elite: but some former insiders have bitter memories of the harsh conditions and abusive treatment.

Workers at International Base are all members of the Sea Organization, which L. Ron Hubbard, the movement’s founder, once described as Scientology’s aristocracy.

Aristocrats or not, some former staffers at Scientology’s base near Hemet, California, say they suffered abuse from the movement’s leader David Miscavige and his lieutenants.

The original Sea Org served as crew members on a small fleet of ships that Hubbard sailed around the Mediterranean after quitting England in 1967.

Today, Sea Org members still wear naval-style uniforms, practise parade ground drilling and observe a strict disciplinary code. Recruits sign a billion-year contract in which they swear to work for Scientology in this life and millions of future lives.

The Sea Org’s motto is “revenimus”: we come back. There is even provision for a 21-year break at the start of each lifetime to allow time for loyal officers to grow up.

Sea Org members give up everything to devote their lives to Scientology. But life inside this supposedly elite cadre has little of the aristocratic about it.

Many former members have recalled working 14 hours a day or more, six or seven days a week for 50 dollars a week. Scientology provides meals and living quarters, which sometimes amount to little more than cramped dormitories.

But according to some former members, the military-style discipline is often gratuitously abusive.

Jeff Hawkins described something called Severe Reality Adjustments, or SRAs. “It means to forcibly get someone ‘with the programme’ by screaming at them, threatening them.”

Chuck Beatty, another former Base staffer, recalled overhearing someone being trained to deliver an SRA. “He was screaming and also slamming his hand on a table during the drilling I overheard,” he recalled. For a good 20 minutes the trainee bawled out his training partner.

And by the 1990s, former members recall, Scientologists were talking about delivering “face-ripping” SRAs.

Former Sea Org member Martin Ottmann was recruited into Scientology in his native Germany. But between August 1990 and July 1992, he served at Flag Base, in Clearwater, Florida, one of the movement’s biggest centres.

“We, the staff at the FSO [Flag Service Organization], worked the whole day and the whole week for $30 or less, and we got treated for that like we were criminals,” he wrote in an affidavit sworn out in April 19, 1996.

He recalled one incident in which an executive bawled out his junior in quite spectacular terms. “One day I saw her sitting at her desk and B___ standing directly in front of her.

“He was screaming at the top of his lungs directly in her face. I had never heard anyone scream like that. It sounded as if he wanted to blast her against the wall behind her.”

Just as Ottmann’s superiors screamed at him, so he screamed at his subordinates, he wrote. And he also described incidents in which Sea Org members physically attacked the people working under them – something he had done himself, he admitted.

In February 2002, Ottmann submitted a detailed citizen’s complaint about Scientology’s activities to the U.S. Attorneys Office. A letter acknowledging receipt was all the official response he got, he said.

More than 10 years on, the regime at Clearwater had not changed, according to two other former members. In 2005, Donna Shannon and her husband served briefly in the Sea Org there.

Shannon saw colleagues delivering SRAs on a regular basis. Four of five senior officers would gang up on one person, she recalled. “They’d get right in his face. This would last anywhere from five to ten minutes to half an hour.”

This kind of behaviour was the norm in the Sea Org, she said: “You get bullied, you bully the guy under you, who is supposed to bully the next guy down.”

Some people folded under the pressure, she said: but others thrived. “Some people take to it like a duck to water.” After a few months of that, she and her husband left the Sea Org – and Scientology – for good.

Bruce Hines, a former Sea Org member at the Hemet Base, recalled an incident involving David Miscavige. One summer in the early 1990s a storm caused a flash flood through the base. “Some of the buildings sustained some minor damage from water and mud,” he said.

Miscavige summoned all the personnel to a meeting and bawled out the staff responsible for maintaining the grounds.

“He said that they had not responded fast enough or well enough or something like that. He berated them for many, many minutes, his voice booming over the PA system in the meeting room. At one point he yelled at the top of his voice, "F___ you! F___ you!”

“Ranting and raving,” was how another witness described Miscavige’s behaviour. “That’s when I went – ‘No, this has gone too far,’” he added. He left soon afterwards.

Other punishments meted out at the Hemet base included being thrown, fully clothed, into the lake. This is a throwback to one of the punishments handed out by the movement’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard in the late 1960s and early 70s. Back then, it was known as “over-boarding”.

In those days, Hubbard and the original members of the Sea Org were sailing around the Mediterranean. When a ship was docked in harbour, crew members deemed to have failed in their duties would be thrown overboard as punishment.

The only ship out at the land-locked Base is a folly built in Hubbard’s honour: a full-scale replica of a clipper – complete with a sauna, jacuzzi and swimming pool. So for years people were over-boarded at the lake.

As Master at Arms, John Peeler used to supervise such over-boardings. Whoever was to be punished would be pushed into the lake from a bridge that went from the shore over to a small island in the lake, he explained.

“The crew member is allowed to take off his shoes, jewellery or watch and that's it,” he said. “You get pushed in by the MAA [Master at Arms] with the Chaplain reading something about leaving your sins to be washed away by the sea.”

Whole divisions working at the base – up to 30 people – could be over-boarded in a single ceremony if their results were not considered satisfactory, he recalled.

One occasion he recalled vividly. “An elderly lady froze up in the water and couldn't swim herself to the side.” He had to jump in himself and help her to the shore. The last he had heard, they had switched the punishment to the swimming pool.

Another punishment involved being made to run around buildings for hours in the summer heat, which in California can exceed 100 degrees.

Hawkins remembers that after one such punishment his feet were so badly blistered they got infected and he was laid up for a week with blood poisoning.

Another Hemet veteran remembers seeing people out running in the summer heat in full uniform wearing hard leather shoes. “One person was even being pushed around the pole in a wheelchair. They were all in uniform and that was in the middle of July, in the middle of the afternoon when it was the hottest.”

Both over-boarding and the running program were introduced by Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard when he ran the movement. In his day, the crew of Scientology’s ships got thrown into the harbour in their clothes. Sometimes they were loosely tied up and even blindfolded.

But the most severe punishment inside Scientology’s Sea Org is known as the Rehabilitation Project Force: the RPF.

Next: The RPF: Scientology's Gulag.

10 The RPF: "Scientology's Gulag"

Former members of Scientology’s Sea Organization remember the movement’s harsh punishment programme, the Rehabilitation Project Force with particular horror.

Life in the Sea Organization, which was set up by Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1967, was meant to be tough.

Former members have described a harsh regime, in which senior officers were trained to bawl out their subordinates like drill sergeants on a parade ground, and where a culture of bullying was rife.

But the most feared aspect of life in Scientology’s Sea Organization is its punishment programme: the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF). More than one former inmate has described it as Scientology’s gulag.

Former Sea Org member Homer Schomer spent three months in the RPF in the 1970s, on board one of Scientology’s ships, the Apollo. “Life in the RPF was despicable and degrading,” he declared in a March 16, 1986 affidavit.

“You lost all sense of self-esteem, freedom and human dignity. It was a world unto itself and you felt like a leper,” he added.

RPF inmates could not speak unless spoken to and had to run everywhere, he said: living conditions were “damp, cold” and infested with cockroaches. They ate the food left over from the meals of the regular crew.

“Members of the RPF were forced to wear black boiler suits. We slept very little everyday and awoke each morning to swab the decks,” he added. “We were allowed 30 seconds to shower and had to be up and ready in the morning within 15 minutes.”

But Scientology’s leadership insists that criticism of the RPF is based on a misunderstanding – or a distortion – of its role. They say it is about rehabilitating wayward members.

“Sea Organization staff who would otherwise be subject to dismissal for serious and/or continuous ecclesiastical violations are offered a second chance through the RPF,” says a statement in the ‘Misconceptions about Scientology’ part of its website.

“Personnel ‘burn out’ is not new to organizations, but the concept of complete rehabilitation is,” the statement adds.

Those on the RPF enjoy study and religious counselling to address any personal difficulties they might have, says the statement. They work only eight hours a day improving facilities at their place of work, developing a sense of teamwork among the participants, it adds.

“The work allows the individual to regain confidence in himself and the pride of accomplishment.”

Although some critics of the program had “tried to intentionally misinterpret it”, the statement continues, they could not speak from personal experience.

“Those who know – graduates of the RPF program – attest to its enormous personal benefit, and their appreciation for being able to avail themselves of redemption as opposed to dismissal.”

But some graduates of the program retain bitter memories of their experience.

In all, Bruce Hines spent six years on the program, between 1995 and 2001: first at the Hemet base and then at the nearby “Happy Valley” ranch in the desert of southern California.

“There is no question that we were in confinement,” he said. “There is also no question that the program was designed to make us into obedient, unquestioning workers for the Sea Org.”

And yet he at first agreed to do the RPF because at the time he was, as he put it, a true believer. “I believed that Scientology offered the only road to salvation for all people and that it was the only thing in the world that could save mankind from a horrible demise.”

Once on the programme however, there was little chance of quitting. “From that point on I was under close, full-time supervision. I had to surrender my passport and my driver’s license.”

At the Hemet base, they were kept in a special compound fenced off from the other staff, he recalled.

“The area where we slept, ate, showered, and studied was surrounded by a fence at least six feet tall, which had motion sensors on it. The main security guard booth would be alerted if anyone touched the fence.”

He and a group of eight to 10 others were put to work doing manual labour, uprooting bushes and weeds and hauling rocks that weighed up to 200 pounds by hand or by wheelbarrow.

“Frequently, I encountered rattlesnakes, tarantulas and Black Widow spiders,” he recalled. “On one occasion a colleague on the program just missed being bitten by a rattlesnake.”

At night they slept in trailers, one for the men and one for the women, in triple-decker bug-infested bunk beds.

“All night long there was a night watch, or guard, who was a member of the base security force.”

When one night he tried to sneak out of the compound he was quickly intercepted and returned to quarters. And Hines witnessed two other escape attempts by a colleague, Maureen Bolstad.

The first time, one of the guards rugby-tackled her as she tried to run off. On another occasion, guards used a dog to track her down after she slipped away early one morning.

Bolstad herself recalls: “There were three – or maybe four – occasions where I was physically tackled when trying to leave.”

One time, in December 1997, she was frustrated at being confined to a room she got into a scuffle with one of the guards.

“He and I got into a fight and my hand was broken and I had several bruises on my rib cage because he had kept shoving me into these bookcases,” she recalled. She ended up with her arm in a cast.

“I actually did take a swing at him but I think he over-reacted, smashing my hand on the table like that."

It is hard to imagine her posing a physical threat to anyone. Bolstad is only 5’6” (barely 1.68 metres) and during her time on the RPF she was under-weight. Even now, a healthy 125 lbs, she is no heavyweight.

“No one had a car. No one had a radio,” Hines recalled. “No one could receive any magazines or newspapers. No one had a television. No one had a mobile phone. Such things were strictly forbidden,” he recalled.

On the RPF, you worked eight hours a day, seven days a week before any counselling, he said. And what Scientology described as therapy, Hines characterised as relentless pressure to admit that whatever you thought was wrong with Scientology or the leadership was in fact your fault.

“It is drilled into a person over and over that if they expressed some disagreement with Scientology or its main people or its organizations or their actions, then that person must have seriously sinned and have evil purposes,” he said.

One Scientology dictionary defines evil purpose as: "a definite obsessive desire to destroy."

He felt under such pressure during these sessions he even made up imaginary sins to satisfy his questioners, he said. Looking back today however, he saw it differently. “This surely sounds like mind control to me.”

Professor Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta, in Canada, would agree. He published a detailed study on the RPF in 1997, updating it in 2000.

One of Scientology’s most outspoken critics in the academic community, Kent’s study concluded that the RPF was about breaking people, physically and mentally, so they would conform.

He was so concerned about the stories of abuse he uncovered that he wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The gist of the reply I got was, ‘Look it would take people who just came out of that programme to come to us and complain about what had happened to them.’”

In the early years of its creation – in the Hubbard era – you might expect to spend only a few months in the RPF. Since Miscavige took over, say former members, some people have been stuck there for years.

Next: Claire Headley's Lawsuit