Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (20 page)

We set up the mess hall for a briefing and moved all the tables and chairs out of the way.

We were lined up just like on the day when we were assigned Confusion. COB walked in. He announced that we had made the target of 50,000 tapes in one week on the Gauss line. Our names were all read out. We all went up to the podium and were given chocolates and flowers. After we filed back in line, Miscavige announced that we were upgraded out of lower conditions and that we could have an hour dinner to celebrate Thanksgiving.

It was Thanksgiving? That was one of the things about the Int Base. It was like in Vegas where they don’t have clocks. At the Int Base, there were no seasons, there were no holidays. Just weeks that ended on Thursday. You knew when it was Thursday and that was about it.

We had Thanksgiving dinner and gave thanks that we were going to have our 30-minute meal breaks back and would be allowed to purchase snacks and sodas again and maybe even get paid. Sadly, we were happier than we had been for most of the year.

We had spent almost 2 years on the night shift. It was Tony, Agnese and I. Several hundred staff members worked on the base during the day and about ten staff worked at night.

There were both pros and cons to being on the night shift.

Cons:

1. No one is around.

2. Sunlight is only visible when you are supposed to be sleeping.

3. If you miss the bus from berthing to the base, you are stuck at berthing with no means of transportation.

4. Same thing going home, if you miss the bus, you will be stuck at the base all day.

5. You are tired all the time.

6. If any executive comes through and does an inspection during the day, the day shift blame anything they can on the night shift because we are not there to defend ourselves.

7. If you are single, the chances of meeting a girl on the night shift are very low.

Pros:

1. No one is around.

2. No standing around during lengthy breakfast and lunch musters.

3. No mid-day inspections.

4. No snoring roommates keeping you up while they sleep.

Being on the night shift was a lot different than working days. Sure, there are tons of jobs all over the world that are done at night. But working on the night schedule at Gold was different. There were very few areas of Gold that had an official night shift. Most divisions would have day shift people that often stayed and worked through the night, but they had to be there the next day as well. The other areas that had night shift people were Security and the galley. That was it. Security night shift was made up of Danny Dunagin, the Night Watch Chief and whatever guard pulled the smallest straw that week. They would rotate the second night shift guard. The galley night shift consisted of a few cleaners that did all of the really dirty cleaning work that no one else wanted to do. These people were regularly cycled out with the latest person that had really managed to screw something up on the base.

Now in addition to the night shift staff, there were those that lived on the base. The list was not long, but it was interesting. You had:

1. COB RTC - Dave Miscavige. He lived in the Lower Villa with his wife Shelly, COB Assistant.

2. Inspector General for Admin - Marc Yager and his wife Michelle Yager. Lower Villa.

3. Inspector General for Tech – Ray Mithoff and his wife Gelda. Lower Villa.

4. Inspector General for Ethics – Marty Rathbun and his wife Anne. Lower Villa.

5. Annie Tidman (formerly Broeker) – She lived in a small house near Old Gilman’s house.

6. Gary and Carmen Wiese. They lived in what was called the Maintenance man’s house.

7. Security guards. Just about all of the guards lived on the property in Old Gilman’s house in a room packed full of people.

8. Jon Horwich, his second wife Stephanie and daughter Roanne. They all lived in the Horwich house.

So in addition to the night shift, these people were sometimes seen out and about at night.

I remember hearing a story about how Hubbard used to do inspections aboard the Apollo and that he had an uncanny ability to walk into a room and go straight to the drawer where there was something that shouldn’t be there. One of the stories I heard was that one of the cooks had put a pair of boots in an oven and Hubbard walked into the kitchen during the day and went straight to the oven, opened it and found the boots. I heard this story because it was rumored that Dave Miscavige had this uncanny ability as well. Staff would tell similar stories about how, during inspections, if there were one thing out of place, he would find it no matter what. Before I was on the night shift, I really did not pay much attention to this and thought it was just another one of those mysteries that goes unexplained.

Well, one night on my way back from eating midnight rations, I was walking past a building and out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Dave Miscavige in one of the offices going through desk drawers. I did not see anyone else, the room had all of its lights on and you could see into the room but if you were inside you could not see people outside. It was 12:30
 a.m.
Why the hell would he be going through people’s desks in the middle of the night? I paused for enough time to process the scene and not an instant more. I knew better than to stop and ask questions. I walked on as if nothing had happened. I also did not bring it up to my fellow staff. This would be my little secret. I would take note and go from there.

The next day after dinner, there was the single muster that the night shift crew attended. It was one of those musters that we dreaded. Someone had gotten in trouble with Miscavige and now everyone was being punished for it. Turns out one of the staff members had hidden old and unanswered despatches, some of which had been from Miscavige.

COB had done a surprise inspection in the area earlier that day and he found the unanswered stale dispatches as soon as he walked into the room.

Now everybody had to answer every dispatch they had and each person’s senior had to inspect and make sure that there were no other stale dispatches anywhere else in the area.

Every person had to get a pass before they could go home that night. Another perk of the night shift. Whereas everyone else had a few hours to comply with the latest order, we had all night!

As I was walking back to Building 36 from the mess hall, I noticed a crowd of executives yelling and screaming outside of the office of the staff member who had just been brought up. There were people jammed into his office and you could tell that it was a bunch of executives trying to make it look like they were doing something to get COB’s orders complied to. It was a show. As soon as they were done yelling at this guy, they knew they had to get back to their office and hide their own stale dispatches before COB came by again.

But then, as the moment was being filed in my head, it hit a previous “COB going through office drawers” moment on file. He had been in there just last night. He was going through drawers last night. He was looking for that stuff last night! He then did his “inspection” today with his whole entourage and of course he walked in and went straight to the hidden dispatches. Sneaky bastard. I immediately pictured Hubbard running around the Apollo ship in his slippers at 2:00
 a.m.
going through the kitchen and finding boots in the stove. Maybe Hubbard had taught Miscavige this tactic. Maybe this is secret upper level technology that I would find out about years later. Or maybe not.

From then on, every time I heard about situations where COB found so and so, I would laugh inside and wonder how many offices he had to hit before finding the “booty” the night before. If the crew only knew.

At the Int Base, there was a drill for everything that would possibly happen. No matter if it was manmade or an act of God, there was a drill for it. The severity of the situation determined how many people were involved in the drill. This was loosely based on Hubbard’s Introduction to the Sea Org tapes. He said a well prepared for emergency is not really an emergency because you have anticipated it. So we had our list of drills that would go into place based on various emergencies. These were:

1. Flood Drill

2. Fire Drill

3. Earthquake Drill

4. Power Outage Drill

5. Blow Drill

6. Intruder Drill

7. Protest Drill

Now, there were also varying severities of any one of these drills. Each Saturday the entire crew would play out one of these scenarios as if it were happening. Sometimes they would mix it up and combine drills. Like say for instance there was a power outage, that called for the Power Outage drill but also since there would be no power, the security systems were down, which meant there would be a Security Drill happening at the same time.

Most of the drills were slight variations of each other and depending which drill was called, you would go to a specified location and wait for instructions.

For a Flood Drill most people would go to their work areas and be on standby to make sandbags.

Fire Drill involved pulling out all of the fire hoses and hosing down the building.

Earthquake Drill was a no brainer; check your local gas feed, know where the water and power feeds are, get under your desk and wait for instructions.

Power Outage Drill was a pain in the ass. Each area had to turn off everything in their area and then wait until instructed to turn everything back on. For us, this one was the worst, because most of our equipment was electronic and had settings that were stored in memory. Shutting them off for ten to fifteen minutes would wipe them out and we would need to reset everything when we next went to work. As an added bonus, the security system, lights and sensors would be down in the event of an outage, so every male staff member had to spread out along the fence of the property and form a human perimeter all the way around the property. You would have to be within, say, 100 yards from the next guy or at least be able to see him. If you encountered an intruder, you had to make it known and get others to respond to your location.

Blow Drill was to recover and bring back runaway staff. This drill mainly involved Security. The security guards would try and figure out when the person blew, from where and how. Then Qualification staff would go through the person’s folders and find out if the person had confessed to any recent crimes or was in any kind of trouble. Security would go through the person’s personnel file and try to find out where their closest relatives lived to provide locations to check for the person. Recent mail and phone logs would be checked to see who that person had last spoken to. Teams of people would go to bus and train stations, airports and local hotels to look for the person. This drill would remain in full effect until the person was located and brought back to the base.

Intruder Drills and Protest Drills were very similar. All staff were to go inside, close the blinds and windows and wait there until the drill was over. No travel between buildings was allowed. Wherever you were when the drill started, that was where you had to stay. No exceptions.

If it was an Intruder Drill, when the intruder had been apprehended, the drill would be called off and crew could go back to normal activities.

If it was a Protest Drill, once the protest was over, the staff would be alerted when they were free to go about their business again.

We practiced most of these things weekly. The entire time I was at the base over a fifteen year period I think there were two trashcan fires and two floods. There must have been twenty protest drills and only a few intruder drills. The undisputed chart topper was the Blow Drill. You could go a full year or so without any of the other drills yet have thirty or more Blow Drills. Sometimes you would have back-to-back Blow Drills. Someone would blow and a Blow Drill would go into effect, which meant the security personnel were under the gun to find the person who had blown and were not watching everybody else as closely. This turned out to be a great time for someone else to blow. One time, someone who went out to check a train station for someone that had blown, got on a train themselves and was never seen again! It took two days before anyone had even reported him as gone because his superiors thought he was still on the Blow Drill! Soon there were only so many people that could be on the Blow Drill as too many people were blowing. Preventative measures were taken to prevent blows in the first place. Musters were held four times a day instead of three. Every single person had to be present and no one was excused for any reason whatsoever. If you weren’t doing well, you would get restricted to the base and would have to sleep on the property somewhere.

Quarter Masters were added to berthing. This was a staff member deputized as a security guard who would walk around the apartment complexes at night and make sure no one blew. To the general crew and local Hemet citizens, the quarter masters were passed off as extra neighborhood watch personnel. As more and more staff blew from berthing this seemed to be the solution. All male crew members would hold watch one night per week at any one of the various apartment complexes that were being used in Hemet. Of course the natural progression of this included having the quarter masters themselves blow while on watch! Then there had to be two staff at each location so they could watch each other! Then the quarter masters would sleep in during the day after being up all night and one of them would blow during the day whilst the other was sleeping. Eventually, there would be two shifts of QMs at every apartment complex during the entire night and all day!

In my opinion the Intruder Drills were the only ones that were any fun.

There were four memorable drills that occurred while I was on the base. Then one time, there was a Blow Drill and Power Outage Drill on the same day at the same exact time!

Intruder Drill #1

It was the middle of the day. A guy had committed a crime in Hemet and was chased by Hemet Police squad cars to a location south of the property and across the river. He got out of his car, ran across the levee and jumped the perimeter fence of the property. Not only did he get very badly sliced up by the ultra barrier as he scaled the perimeter fence, but he set off the ground microphones and fence shakers. The booth had already heard the police traffic on the radio scanner and now they had the alarms going off, signaling the intruder drill. Kenny Seybold (former security chief and current Exercise In Charge) was mowing a lawn down on the sports fields when he saw the intruder running across one of the lawns. He offered to help the guy evade his captors and jogged with him towards the main gate. Once they got within a few feet of the security booth, Kenny tackled the guy to the ground and held him until the cops came around to gather him up. This was the only intruder drill that the Security guards would remember as a “win.”