3 Messenger training

Maureen Bolstad was sent to California to be trained to work beside the movement’s founder: but she wasn’t told the whole story about L. Ron Hubbard.

Maureen Bolstad was delighted when got the call to transfer from Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida to the International Base at Hemet, California.

For one thing, it meant she would get to go back to her home state. “Florida is nice for a visit, but California has always been my home.”

Her superiors also made it clear that this was a significant step up. Bolstad was “going over the rainbow”, which in Scientology terms meant she would be working closer to L. Ron Hubbard, the movement’s revered founder.

In Florida, Bolstad had already started training for work with the Commodore’s Messenger Organization, a group of teenagers who acted as Hubbard’s envoys and aides. But when she arrived at the International Base, she learned she was in line for an even more important post.

“I was told I was being recruited to be a Messenger on Duty.” That meant she would be working with Hubbard on a regular basis.

“Someone was always ‘on watch’ at any given time to tend to Hubbard's needs and to ‘keep distractions off of his lines’, so that he could do his research and write, etc,” said Bolstad.

But that was only half the story: anyone working with Hubbard also had to adapt to his various eccentricities: a complete intolerance of dust and smells, growing paranoia – and terrible rages.

Adell and Ernie Hartwell could have warned her. 

They only got involved in Scientology because of their daughter. Following her in when she joined in the late 1970s they found themselves being whisked to a secret desert location (Indio, California) where Hubbard and his crew were making movies.

Adell Hartwell did not mince her words about Hubbard when she testified in the 1982 hearings into Scientology in Clearwater Florida.

“I saw him throw fits. I actually saw him take his hat off one day and stomp on it and cry like a baby. I have seen him just take his arm like this and throw it wild and hit girls in the face.

“And one girl would follow him with a chair. If he sat down, that chair had to be right where he was going to sit. One girl missed by a few inches, he about fell off of it, and she was put in the RPF.”

Her husband Ernie agreed: “He was a screaming maniac the three or four times that I saw him," he told the hearings.

It was during this time of course, that the young David Miscavige worked at Hubbard’s side.

Back then however, Bolstad had no idea just how difficult Hubbard could be. Nor did she fully understand why Hubbard was living in seclusion.

“Being Fabian”

“I actually did not know that Hubbard was hiding from the law, I was never told this. I was just told that he kept his location secret because he was being ‘fabian’, which is a quality Sea Organization members are supposed to understand.

“It had to do with avoiding evil influences in society by being hard to aim at and find. It seemed all pretty cool, cloak-and-dagger, exciting.”

In the glossary to Hubbard’s Welcome to the Sea Org lectures, fabian is defined as “remaining elusive, hard to hit, refusing direct engagement with an enemy. From the name of a Roman general, Quintus Fabius Maximus (died 203 B.C.) who successfully employed such tactics.”

That definition indicated Hubbard’s real concerns.

In 1977, FBI raids on Scientology offices in the United States had uncovered Operation Snow White, an extensive spying operation on US federal government offices, which led to many senior Scientology executives being successfully prosecuted.

By the early 1980s 11 senior Scientologists, including his own wife Mary Sue, had received jail sentences over the affair.

Hubbard himself had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case and, fearing arrest, had kept his whereabouts a closely guarded secret.

But all that was about to change, Bolstad was told. Now he was ready to come out of seclusion.

“They needed Messengers on Duty… because the idea back then was that Hubbard was going to come back, he was going to be able to make the Hemet base his home, his office. They needed a new set of Messengers trained to be on duty with him, so I was one of those.”

It was a very specific training, designed to meet Hubbard’s particular needs, she recalled. “I had to learn how to carry a cassette recorder, a notepad and an ashtray and a bag full of things like sunglasses and sun tan lotion and gloves and things like that.”

They would role-play how to behave in front of Hubbard: their trainer played the Commodore and they had to be sure they responded correctly.

“We had to take notes on whatever she was saying and know when to turn the recorder on and know when to hold the ash-tray out so, learning how to basically be a super-secretary… to type really fast.”

Typing was not much of a problem as she had already learned that at school. But other skills were new to her.

“I had to learn how to duplicate a verbal message – meaning the person would say the message and I had to be able to remember the whole message exactly, word for word, and repeat it back to them – and then also go and tell another person that message without any alterations, including the tone that it was said in.”

Miscavige mimicked Hubbard

Bolstad’s account of the Commodore’s particular needs – which matches those of former messengers who worked alongside Hubbard – finds an echo in Miscavige’s later behaviour.

For once he was sure of his position at the top, he became just as demanding, just as intolerant of anything that did not meet his standards.

Int Base veteran Jeff Hawkins, who for years suffered verbal abuse and even beatings from Miscavige, remembers the panic that set in when Miscavige returned from a trip away.

“When he’s about to return to the Base, it’s a scene like the one at the beginning of The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly is arriving at the office and everyone is scurrying madly: ‘Gird your loins, everyone!’

“The Base is usually cleaned in a panic the day before, offices spruced up, and everyone on high alert,” he said.

“The day he arrives, he usually does a walk-through of the Base, visiting all areas. Everyone knows he is looking for ‘bad indicators’ – someone who tries to hide, or gives an inappropriate response, or doesn’t give a proper greeting, or appears too enthusiastic and so on.”

If you did not pass muster in Miscavige’s eyes, you could be hauled up before the Ethics Officers – Scientology’s thought police – said Hawkins. Their job was to correct any hint of dissent through lengthy interrogations and, if necessary, punishment details.

“Needless to say, there is an atmosphere of suppressed panic throughout the Base, while everyone assures each other ‘how great it is to have COB back on the Base.’”

COB, of course, is Miscavige: Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center.

Everywhere Miscavige went, he went with an entourage, said Hawkins.

“They always dress identically to DM. If he is dressed in all black (a favorite costume), then they are in all black. If he’s all in white, they are too. If he is dressed casually, they are too.

“They carry two small hand-held tape recorders. The minute he starts to speak, one of these is turned on, so that his every word is recorded.”

The tapes would then be rushed away to be transcribed and converted into memos, which when issued had to be given top priority.

“And one could not have or express any disagreement with these orders and reams of paper. To do so, even in the slightest, was to be hauled off by the Ethics Officers…”

All this, however, was two decades down road.

Hooray for Hubbard

Bolstad felt honoured to have been selected and happy she was finally going to meet Hubbard, the Commodore himself.

“I wanted to meet him because so many people absolutely adored him and they would always clap at his picture – hip-hip-hooray and all that stuff.”

In the early days of her membership, back at the centre in California, she had learned that praising Hubbard was part of the routine: it was, for example, a standard part of the graduation ceremonies when someone had completed a course.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘I had these had great wins on my course. Thank you L. Ron Hubbard,’ and they would turn around to his picture and everyone else would turn around to his picture and clap and stand up and say ‘Hip-hip hooray’…”

And Bolstad, at the time, felt the same sense of devotion. “I had this idea that he had discovered this great truth that was going to revolutionise the psychiatric field, I greatly admired and respected him…

“It was sort of like if you’re starving or in need of water and someone gives you a glass of water without you having to ask I mean that is sort of how I felt, like ‘Oh wow, you really understand these things in my life.’”

As things turned out however, she never got to meet him.

Hubbard stayed in hiding, accompanied by just a handful of followers, until his death in 1986.

And when it became clear that Hubbard was not, after all, going to be coming out of hiding, Bolstad was reassigned to other duties.

Before long, she had begun a hectic period of international travel as part of Scientology’s film unit.

---

For more on the messengers, see Russell Miller's unauthorised biography of Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah.

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.

8 Life at the Base

Former residents at Scientology’s International Base recall a harsh regime where every aspect of life is tightly controlled.

“I worked for many years for Scientology. Some of it was good, some bad,” said Jeff Hawkins. “Then I was transferred to the International Base in Hemet and it went downhill from there.”

The International Base, a compound of 500 acres, lies at the base of a range of hills at the north end of the San Jacinto Valley, southern California, about 90 miles east of Los Angeles. It is the heart of Scientology’s empire.

There, a few hundred dedicated Scientologists work long hours for $50 a week – sometimes less – to keep the movement working around the world.

Staff there are all members of the Sea Organization, which was founded by Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1967. And as members of the movement’s most dedicated group, they are expected to submit to tight security and discipline.

“It is entirely surrounded by a chain link fence, topped with razor wire,” said Hawkins. “The razor wire faces inward.” Security guards staff the booths at all five entrances.

Motion sensors every 20 feet are set to trigger an alarm and turn on the perimeter lights. Cameras photograph passing cars on the road outside: they can even capture licence plate numbers. Further up the hillside is an isolated installation known as the “Eagle” look-out post.

Most Scientologists know the site as Gold Base, or Gold, home to Golden Era Productions, which produces the movement’s training and publicity films. Those in the know call it International Base, the Base – or just Int.

For this is where the movement’s leader, David Miscavige, is based. And whatever it says on paper about Scientology’s management, said Hawkins, Miscavige is the only person in charge.

“In reality, he is the autocratic, dictatorial, unchallenged head of Scientology. What he says is what happens, and nothing happens without his approval.”

Hawkins’ description of the base has been confirmed in affidavits and Internet postings by several former members – as has his insistence that Miscavige is the unchallenged leader of the movement.

In describing life at the base, Hawkins evoked the nightmarish world set out in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. “You are literally watched and controlled every moment,” he said.

Most, if not all, staffers lived on site at the base, said Hawkins. And just as you would have a hard time getting into the base unnoticed, a staff member would find it equally difficult to leave without permission – something more than one former worker there has confirmed.

Hawkins said he spent more than a decade at the base. “It is a virtual prison, with barbed wire all around it. Incoming and outgoing mail and phone calls are monitored,” he recalled.

“No one is allowed on the Internet, or to have cell phones, or to watch TV. Calls to family are covertly monitored. You are literally watched and controlled every moment. And staff there get little sleep,” said Hawkins.

“When I was there, over the last four years, I was averaging four or five hours a night,” he recalled. Working 16, 18, even 20 hours a day, seven days a week was not unusual, he added.

John Peeler, who used to be one of those responsible for enforcing discipline at the base, confirmed Hawkins’s account. He worked with what was known as Department Three: the ‘Ethics and Security’ section of Scientology.

Peeler’s job was to check that nobody was complaining about their life at the base – especially not to outsiders.

“For years, I was in positions responsible for reading through people's personal mail from friends and family to make sure that there was nothing negative about Scientology,” he said.

He also monitored calls staff members made to the outside world. “There were rooms with phones that had dual hand-sets, one for the person making the call and the other for security or an MAA (Master at Arms) to listen in on the call itself,” he recalled.

“So when you were talking to your family, you were literally being listened in on by someone sitting right there with you.”

The surveillance made it impossible for staffers phoning home to speak frankly, said Peeler. “When talking to family on the phone, there's literally nothing you can really talk about because your whole life is at the base, so all you can really say is that you're doing fine and miss them and hope to see them someday, ‘Soon, I promise!’.”

Security guards at the base used to search the living quarters of staffers when they were at work. “In fact, you had no idea that you even had an inspection at your living quarters, unless a security guard or MAA pulled you in to confront you on something they found in your room.

“These inspections are done in order to find out if people have any ‘out-security’ or confidential materials, any TV sets, any personal computers, any phones or anything that would seem odd enough to question the individual. Laptops are strictly forbidden.”

Peeler’s job was not just to monitor staff members, but to check that loved ones on the outside were not too hostile to Scientology. If they were, then he had the power to declare them a “suppressive person”, or SP: an enemy of Scientology.

The staffer concerned would then have to cut off all contact with that family member, a practice known as disconnection.

“I personally had people disconnect from family many times,” said Peeler. Disconnection policy is set out in the writings of the movement’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

The policy could also be applied to former members, and any staffer who escaped the base and quit Scientology knew the penalty, said Peeler. “I personally declared a couple of people SP who had blown the Sea Org – people who had taken off and never returned.”

Many of the dozens of people who have quit the senior echelons of Scientology in recent years spent decades inside the movement. Some of them were born and raised there.

In interviews and postings to the Internet, they have spoken of their sense of desolation when they first ventured into the outside world, cut off from their former friends and colleagues.

Today however, there is a growing support network of former members ready and willing to help them, thanks in part to the connections developed by Internet message boards and news groups.

Next: Abuse in the Sea Org

6 Jeff Hawkins' Story

One of the new wave of Scientology defectors describes why he devoted decades of his life to the movement: and why he finally quit.

Jeff Hawkins spent most of his adult life in Scientology before joining the recent wave of defectors from the top echelons of the movement. While he has still has fond memories of his time there, he has no regrets about leaving.

“I got involved in Scientology when I was still quite young,” he recalled. “I was living in Southern California and was part of the hippie culture. I was very actively involved in the anti-war movement, and was a voracious reader.”

Hawkins had experimented with the drugs culture, read Eastern philosophy and dabbled in the ancient Chinese divination system, the I Ching. “Like a lot of my generation, I was searching for a higher reality, beyond the shallow façade of 1960's society. But Eastern philosophy wasn't making it for me - too esoteric for a Western mind.

“When a friend told me about Scientology, it seemed like exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. It was spiritual, yet with a basis, they said, in science. You were told to try it for yourself, and make your own decision about whether it worked or not.”

Back then, he said, Scientology centres were packed with hundreds of young people just like him. “There was an atmosphere of incredible excitement and discovery.”

Hawkins was impressed by a video of the founder, L. Ron Hubbard talking. “He seemed to be a nice guy, very warm and friendly. He wasn't at all arrogant or didactic, but seemed to be a fascinating guy who had travelled all over the world and investigated all kinds of different civilizations.”

It was only after he left Scientology that he discovered that independent researchers had dismissed many of the claims Hubbard made about his life as lies.

Hawkins remembers the powerful effect that some of the early courses had on him. In one exercise, he recalled: “I had an experience of feeling out of my body and very serene.” Other exercises helped him get over his shyness and become more outgoing.

He had extremely vivid ‘past life’ experiences, he said. Scientologists believe that we have all lived past lives and that these can be recovered using the movement’s techniques.

“I also agreed with the aims of Scientology, which were to create a civilization without war, ignorance and insanity,” he said. So he decided to sign up as a full-time staff member.

“Once I was on staff, I began to encounter the ‘dark side’ of Scientology, particularly the late nights, no sleep, no pay, and the abuse of staff who didn't perform to expectations.

“Frankly, I blamed all this on a few individuals who had gotten in control, and believed they would soon be gone, and justice and sanity would triumph. This is sort of what you tell yourself. All this will pass.”

He recalled a constant sense of crisis and urgency inside the movement. “We were told that Scientology was at war with psychiatry and the big drug cartels, who were spending billions to wipe out Scientology.

“We didn't have billions, so we had to work harder and work all night and work for little or no pay, because we had to win the war. And anyone who didn't exert enough effort or who fell behind on quotas was ‘working for the enemy.’” And at the time, he believed it.

Then he was transferred to International Base near Hemet, California, where the most senior executives worked alongside the movement’s leader, David Miscavige.

“I could write a book on conditions at that Base,” said Hawkins. “They were bad when I got there, and went down from there.”

It was not just the long hours, the tight security and the constant pressure, he said. “There is a high incidence of physical and emotional abuse. I was made to run around buildings – up to two miles in street shoes – and thrown in a freezing lake.”

He also had to sit through many late-night meetings during which Miscavige would harangue and browbeat senior executives, accusing them of being incompetent and “suppressive” – an enemy of Scientology. On several occasions, he saw Miscavige physically assault members of staff – and on several occasions he was the target.

“Ultimately I decided that this was no longer the group I had joined, and that the goals I believed in had been betrayed, and that it was never, never going to get any better. At that point I decided to leave.

“I was given 500 dollars’ ‘severance pay’ and basically put out on the street. Fortunately I had a bit of personal money and so was not destitute. A friend of mine literally had to live on the street for two weeks before he found his feet.

“I had no one to go to. My closest friends were still Scientologists and I was told that I could not contact them. This is ‘disconnection’. Any Scientologist in good standing has to disconnect from anyone who had been declared suppressive, as I had been.

“I had no friends outside Scientology. I literally picked a city at random drove up there, checked into a motel and started looking for an apartment. I found one in three days, then began job hunting.”

After 35 years in Scientology, Hawkins has built a new life for himself. But while he is ready to denounce the abuses he says are still going on inside the movement, he takes a balanced view of his time inside the movement

“No, I don't consider my time in Scientology a waste. I made many close friends and knew many wonderful people. I learned a lot of skills over the years. I had a lot of adventures and travelled the world. And I also learned a lot about groups and what can go wrong with them.”

People should avoid stereotyping members of the movement, he says. “Some people have the idea, I think, that Scientologists – or members of any cult or similar organization – are just mindless, brainwashed zombies. It just isn't true.

“By and large, they are intelligent, well-meaning and dedicated people. Some of the finest people I have ever known, in fact.”

But he added: “They are controlled through methods that are not limited to Scientology, things like peer pressure, milieu control, manipulation of purposes, goals and ideals, guilt, shame, the need to belong, the desire for purpose and meaning in life. Thus they can be trapped and used.”

For a detailed account of his time in Scientology, see Jeff Hawkins' blog: “Counterfeit Dreams”.

Next: John Peeler's Story

3 The Case against Miscavige

High-level defectors from Scientology are beginning to speak out about the movement’s leader, David Miscavige and the beatings they say he hands out to fellow executives.

Jeff Hawkins says he had no idea about David Miscavige’s violence until he was himself attacked for the first time in 2002 – and he had been working at the base for more than 10 years.

“People don’t say ‘Oh did you hear that Miscavige beat up so-and-so?’ – it is just not mentioned,” he said. It was only once he started attending regular meetings with Miscavige – or DM as he is known – that he says he found out the hard way.

“We were at one meeting – there must have been 50 people in the room,” said Hawkins, who at that time was a senior marketing executive inside Scientology. “And DM was reading out a report I had written, and he didn’t like it at all. He was reading it and making fun of it.” DM is what many Scientologists call David Miscavige, Scientology’s current leader.

“Then he started looking at me and then he started saying: ‘Look at how he looks at me, look at how he looks at me’. And everybody else is telling me ‘Stop looking at him like that!’ – and I’m like – ‘What?’ I was just there, you know?

“He got madder and madder and madder and all of a sudden he just jumped – he literally jumped up on the conference room table, launched himself at me, started hitting me on the head, knocked me on the ground … grabbed my shirt and just ripped buttons off… and then he knocked me on the ground and then he walked away.

“And the people around me were just – I guess they were petrified, but they were whispering to me to get up and to straighten myself up and to not make him [Miscavige] wrong.”

Another former member, who did not want to be named, confirmed the details of the attack. “I remember afterwards, somebody collected up the buttons and change that fell out of his pockets and gave it all back to him. He was really shaken.”

John Peeler, a former security officer at the base, said he had seen two other attacks by Miscavige on Hawkins.

Peeler recalled that whenever Miscavige singled somebody out for this kind of abuse, the base’s security officers would take that person down for interrogation to find out what their “crimes” were, said Peeler. “The same happened after DM beat up Jeff.”

Looking back at that first beating, Hawkins said he realised now that he had been guilty of what George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, called “face-crime” – wearing an improper expression on one's face. This was one of Miscavige’s obsessions, he said.

Another of Miscavige’s assaults took place when Hawkins was touring one of the buildings at the base with fellow executives, he said. As Miscavige was leaving one room he suddenly rabbit-punched Hawkins in the stomach.

“He just punched me in the gut to the point where I couldn’t talk. I was just croaking because he hit me so hard in the stomach … and he said to the other people, ‘I can smell black PR a mile away,’ and walked off.”

One Scientology dictionary defines black PR, or black propaganda, as "a covert attack on the reputation of a person, company or nation using slander and lies in order to weaken or destroy."

Miscavige is 13 years younger than Hawkins. He prides himself on keeping in shape: he even had a gym installed at the base. “I was 56 when Miscavige beat me up for the first time,” said Hawkins.

Over the years, he added, he witnessed between 10 and 15 of Miscavige’s assaults on at least four other executives. He would slap them punch them, wrestle them to the ground, he said.

And other senior executives, following Miscavige’s lead, started assaulting their subordinates, said Hawkins – a point confirmed by John Peeler.

Hawkins remembered one executive with particular distaste: “[He] used to routinely come by my desk take my head and shove it into my keyboard, just as his way of saying hello.”

As soon as Miscavige called a conference, said Hawkins, staffers would have to run to the venue. Once there, they might wait 20 to 30 minutes for Miscavige and his entourage to arrive.

“He would usually launch straight into an attack on someone. Everyone is hoping it’s not them. It’s usually whoever has submitted something to him – a script, a programme, a marketing proposal, an event proposal, whatever.

“He would rip the proposal to shreds, and the person along with it,” said Hawkins. “I never saw him do other than this. “Anything submitted to him was ‘sh_t’. He would invalidate the person and tear them to shreds in front of the group.”

Miscavige would run these meetings for up to six hours, well past midnight, said Hawkins. “And during the meeting, he would dictate exactly what had to be done ‘and have on my desk when I get up’.”

For one period of several months, said Hawkins, he had to work all-nighters only to have his latest proposal “ripped to shreds” at the meeting the following night. But this was the norm for senior executives.

“No one could do anything right. DM had to do everything himself. This was the constant mantra he would repeat and repeat at these meetings … He would always say he was ‘surrounded by SPs.’”

SPs, or suppressive persons, are enemies of Scientology.

And on top of that, he added, there was the violence. “I saw him beat people to the floor, shove them out of their chair to the floor, slam them up against a wall and so forth.”

In July 2008, Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw dismissed Hawkins' claims as “classic apostate behavior” in a written response to an article in The Portland Mercury.

“He grossly mischaracterizes the church, its purposes, and activities in an effort to harm its reputation,” she added. And she took personal offence at the allegations against Miscavige. “I know him personally, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the disgusting claims made by Mr. Hawkins could not be further from the truth.”

But Hawkins is far from being the first person to make such allegations. In many cases, these stories were first aired on a private Internet message board called XSO for former members of Scientology’s Sea Organization: its most dedicated followers. It was only later that they leaked out on to Internet news groups and message boards accessible to anyone.

Most of those who posted such accounts remain wary about revealing their identity. Some say they fear harassment from Scientology, while others worry that loved ones still inside the movement might suffer reprisals. Increasing numbers however are going on the record, and their stories appear to match.

Hawkins recalled Miscavige’s question after another assault. “He said ‘Do you know why I beat you up?’ And I said ‘No Sir’, and he said, ‘To remind you who’s boss.’”

For a detailed account of his time in Scientology, see Jeff Hawkins' blog: “Counterfeit Dreams”.

Next: A History of Violence

2 Accusing Miscavige

Former Scientology executive are speaking out against the movement’s leader, David Miscavige, accusing him of ruling through violence and intimidation.

For at least two years, it was one of the main topics of conversation on the Internet news groups and message groups devoted to exposing Scientology. But nobody was ready to go on the record.

Then in 2008, a handful of senior former members of the movement began speaking out in public to whoever would listen. Their stories were shocking but consistent.

They alleged that David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology, had for years been subjecting senior executives at one of the movement’s California bases to an abusive regime that ranged from expletive-filled tirades to physical assaults.

One of the new wave of whistleblowers is Jeff Hawkins, 62. Once a senior marketing executive with Scientology, he quit the movement in 2005 at the age of 59 after more than three decades.

Hawkins said Miscavige harangued his staff, often singling out individuals for a humiliating dressing down and sometimes physically attacking them. He saw a number of fellow executives assaulted and was the victim of several such attacks himself.

Two former Scientologists who worked alongside Hawkins have publicly confirmed his account, and other witnesses are waiting in the wings.

Much of the reported abuse took place during late-night meetings at the International Base, Scientology’s 500-acre, high-security compound at the north end of California’s San Jacinto Valley, about 90 miles east of Los Angeles.

Celebrity member Tom Cruise used to visit there regularly in the 1990s with his then wife Nicole Kidman.

Miscavige is a close friend of Cruise and served as best man at his November 2006 wedding to actress Katie Holmes. He is revered by many inside the movement.

But Hawkins said: "The International Base in Hemet, California, is run by fear, threats, and physical and emotional abuse.” Hawkins only left after experiencing what he calls "the dark side" of organised Scientology.

Hawkins described being assaulted on five separate occasions by Miscavige himself. "I was slapped repeatedly, punched, and knocked to the ground by him. That was in addition to his constant stream of profanity, threats and verbal abuse."

Other senior executives got the same treatment, he said. "He likes to keep those around him in fear and terror. It is ironic that while Scientology publicly preaches communication and tolerance, its leader, Miscavige, practises just the opposite."

John Peeler, who used to work as a security officer at the base, has confirmed Smith’s account. Peeler, 36, described two of the assaults on Hawkins by Miscavige, or DM as he called him.

“DM was grabbing and shoving him against a wall over and over and screaming in his face about how he was an SP [suppressive person] and deliberately not following his orders. He also punched him in the chest. DM was so mad he was red.”

A suppressive person or SP is what Scientologists call an enemy of the movement.

Marc Headley, another former member, has also confirmed Miscavige’s assaults on Hawkins in Internet postings and media interviews. In a speech in Hamburg on September 4, 2008, he said he had seen Miscavige assault several other executives.

And he has repeated the allegation in his lawsuit, filed in California on January 5, 2009.

Hawkins, Peeler and Headley are among a new wave of defectors speaking out about the abuses they witnessed and experienced at the California base.

Scientology’s representatives have dismissed them as embittered drop-outs from the movement and vehemently denied reports of Miscavige’s violence.

But their accounts echo previous allegations contained in court testimony and affidavits from former members stretching back over the past 20 years.

For years now, defectors have described how executives get training in how to scream abuse at subordinates; and how security officers routinely open members’ mail and monitor outgoing calls.

Former members have also testified to the bizarre punishments practised at the base. Staff members can be thrown, fully clothed, into the lake there. They can be forced to run for hours in the hot California sun in full dress uniform and city shoes.

They also say that those considered the worst offenders in the movement are held in a work camp known as the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF) for years at a time.

Miscavige, 48, rose to power in the early 1980s when Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, appointed a group of young executives to reorganise the movement.

When Hubbard died in 1986, Miscavige was one of the most powerful figures in the movement. Ex-members say he is now Scientology’s undisputed leader.

The former members' campaign against Scientology was boosted by the appearance in January 2008 of a group of young Net-based activists known as “Anonymous”.

This group, which has also declared war on what it says is Scientology’s abusive behaviour, has developed new websites critical of the movement and organises regular pickets of the movement’s offices worldwide.

Next: The Case against Miscavige