Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (25 page)

Meanwhile the guy on the other teleprompter was asleep. He had been up for a week straight and sitting in a small, cramped place in the dark for more than two minutes will do that to you. The sleepy guy had the teleprompter that was one third usable. The apple juice guy was a wipe out on his.

Upon being told about the disastrous occurrence with the video footage, Dave Miscavige wanted to review the video tapes himself and verify what was being said. He went down to the editing bay to review the footage. While he was waiting, he noticed the footage from the cable cam at the event. One of the operators in the bay tried to get him to come over and look at the footage he had been waiting to review. Dave Miscavige would have none of it. The poor video editing staff member cringed. This staff member had already watched the tape that Dave Miscavige was now watching, so he knew what was coming. The cable cam operator was doing the sweeping crowd shots of the arena and the stage and then after the shot he would point the camera straight down, bring the camera back up and do it again. Well the cable cam guy had given himself a bit of a challenge. There was a halfway good looking woman sitting in the front row of the crowd wearing a long flowing dress that was low cut in the upper frontal region. The cable cam guy would point straight down and get a really close up shot of her breasts, focusing right in on them before going onto the next shot. After two hours of practicing this, he had gotten very proficient and some would say that he had it down to an art. It really was art after all. Too bad the woman in the front row was Shelly Miscavige, Dave’s wife. Anyway, so there was Dave, at the end of the tape and watching his wife’s breasts up on the screen in video editing. By the time Dave finally turned around, the editing staff had braced themselves for the inevitable onslaught of profanities that ensued. To top it off Dave Miscavige was assured that the footage of his monumental phrase “The war is over” was in fact completely unusable.

Dave Miscavige said that unless they fixed the footage, no videos of this event would be sent out to the Scientology organizations. This was a big deal as usually Gold made video tapes the week after the event and had them sent out to all organizations around the world to play at events that had already been scheduled.

Something like this always happened at events and it was routinely a problem getting the videos edited and sent out for the organizations to play for the local public. COB would want all the speech flubs fixed, bad live edits fixed and a plethora of other errors corrected in the “final” copies that were sent out. Most organizations were supposed to have their local events the week after the live event but usually they were told to hold off for weeks and sometimes months until they got their video copy of the event.

One day I was sitting in my office on my computer. The computers we used in the Sea Org at the Int Base in 1993 were completely state of the art - for 1980! They were green monochrome monitors that were connected to a giant, room-filling VAX/VMS mainframe system. We had our own super fruity word processor system that had been upgraded to be able to print on Laser jet printers! We had a primitive message system that would spit out reports on you if you did not answer someone within a certain amount of time. And you could also get telexes on this super high-falutin’ system.

I got a telex from one of the organizations in Los Angeles. They were writing to me to report that their video copy of the recent event was low quality. This did not make sense. Dave Miscavige was in the video editing bay screaming and yelling because no videos were ready to send out and here I was reading a telex from LA about a video they were watching that was low quality. I had to drive to LA to check some laser discs that were being made, so I made a note to check into this further.

The next day, after checking some laser disc masters in Pioneer’s plant in Carson, I made my way over to the organization I had received the report from. I went into the lobby where they had a big screen TV with VCR set up. Sure enough, they were playing a video of the recent event! I was amazed. The event was playing on the TV but not one person was there watching it. The video was off color, had horrible audio and looked like it was copied over a football game that hadn’t been erased. You could even hear the football announcers during portions of Dave Miscavige talking. I removed the tape from the machine and was immediately confronted by one of the local staff members.

“Where are you going with our event video?” he demanded.

“I’m confiscating it,” I said as I walked away toward the lobby exit.

“You can’t do that, it’s our only copy!” he exclaimed.

“Sure I can. I’m the quality control and I just did.” I answered.

I was amazed that they even had a copy. How did they get it? Where did they get it? There was more to this story than I knew.

On a hunch I walked across the street to another organization. As I entered the lobby, sure enough, the event was playing there as well. It was not as bad as the first video but it was definitely not something that I would ever pass off as okay. I went over and removed the tape. Again, a staff member came over to try and stop me.

“Can I help you?” he asked me.

“Yeah, you can tell me where you got this video tape,” I told him.

“Well, we got it from the events unit like we always do,” he said, trying to grab it back out of my hand.

“Well, it is being confiscated for being low quality. It’s no good. I am from Gold and you are not getting this tape back,” I said as I walked out.

I didn’t even look at the video playing in the next lobby I entered; I removed it from the machine and made my way outside to my car parked in the lot.

I have to get back to Gold and find out who is making these videos, I thought to myself. I wondered how many videos were out there and where they had come from.

When I rolled into the base, it was starting to get dark. I made my way back to my office with the confiscated videos. The Commanding Officer, Wendell, and the Watchdog Committee member for Gold, Ken Mortensen, were both sitting in the next door office and they saw me as I walked in.

“Marc, can you come in here for a minute,” Ken said.

I walked in. There were several executives standing around the room.

“We just got some telexes from LA. It appears you stole all of their event videos in a single afternoon. Why would you do this, Marc?” Ken asked.

It appears that during my trip home, the staff down in Los Angeles had been busy little bees.

Before I could even answer, Wendell chimed in with his two cents. “You know that this is the most important event in Scientology’s history and you are directly cutting across COB’s message to the public by taking those videos.”

Now I was confused. The videos were shit. It was my job to take the videos. I was the quality control for all Scientology videos!

“The video copies were sub-standard and faulty at best,” I told them, “And they were not made here and no one authorized them to be made. They were pirate copies.”

“It doesn’t matter, Marc, you are cutting across COB’s message to the public. You can consider yourself off post if you do not give video copies back to those orgs tonight! Go sort this out,” Ken told me, while Wendell nodded in agreement.

I left and headed down to video editing. I was distraught to say the least. Here it was my job to control the quality of videos being made and if one single video was found that was not okay, it was my butt. I found some bad videos and then was told that I would be taken off post if I didn’t give them back.

I walked into video editing and sat down to try and figure out what I was going to do. No sooner had I arrived, COB and Marc Yager came walking in. COB looked at me and saw I had a very worried look on my face.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked in a pissed off voice.

I could tell that these would be my last few minutes at the base.

“Well, Sir, I heard about a video playing down in LA that was bad quality. I went down to LA, verified that it was bad quality and then found a few more at the other LA organizations and I confiscated them. Now I was told by Wendell and Ken that if I do not give the videos back to those organizations tonight I am off post, Sir.” I said and braced for the inevitable.

COB turned to Marc Yager. “You get Wendell and Ken down here right now! They are both toast!”

“You,” he said looking at me, “are the only one around here that is doing what I want. You find out where any of these other videos are and get them all rounded up and sent to you. Do not stop until you get every last one that exists.”

“Yes, Sir,” I said, thinking I must have dodged another bullet meant for me.

Just as I was making my way out, I could hear Dave Miscavige laying into Wendell and Ken. If there was one thing that Dave Miscavige seemed to love to do it was yell at people. He had obviously been doing it for years as he did it effortlessly and could be heard from over a hundred feet away. Oh well, better them than me, I thought with the typical dog-eat-dog base mentality.

In the end, it would cost about $90,000 to have a high-end visual effects company in Los Angeles fix the 12 seconds of footage of Dave saying, “The war is over.” It would take months to get an edit of the event approved by Dave.

At least ten people from throughout Gold were given a Committee of Evidence and two were sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force. Most of the staff involved in the event lost the remainder of any rank they had achieved in their decades of service to the Sea Organization, and they were assigned hundreds of hours of amends to do (in their sleep time) to make up the damage they had caused. It was a blood bath. It was the worst situation since the 1990 flood.

1993 would spark the beginning of a new era of cruel and unusual punishment.

And it took me more than a year to gather up every one of the 1235 copies of that video that were passed around. It turned out that a “pirate copy” operation had been in place for years. I say “pirate” as everybody knew about it besides COB. The night the events were held, one SVHS copy of the event from the video production truck would go to COB and one other SVHS copy would go to a guy who would make a bunch of video copies locally in LA. Those copies would then get sent out, copied again and distributed to the smaller organizations. Turns out that because Gold took so long getting the final event videos approved by COB, this shadow operation had been put in place. Since I was the new guy and hadn’t been grooved into the whole system, I ruined it for everyone. Up until that point, COB thought the events being watched were high quality edits that he was approving weeks after the event. Instead, most Scientology public were seeing all the errors, bad audio mixes and crappy speech flubs made in the live event that Dave would spend weeks having staff at Gold cut out so that the public wouldn’t see them!

After the 1993 International Association of Scientologists event and the deal with the IRS, it seemed like Dave Miscavige had nothing to do anymore. He was getting more and more involved with everything happening at the base. From technical revisions of courses to the color and type of the carpet in the dining hall, Dave had to approve it or dictate what it would be.

If Scientology as an organization were being driven like a car, who would the driver be? Who was behind the wheel of Scientology, so to speak? The answer is simple, Dave Miscavige. He controlled every single aspect of all operations and any major decisions were made by him.

In 1995, I was sent to Florida to install several new systems at the Fort Harrison hotel and surrounding buildings. I had to install several new equipment items in the Flag Auditorium, Sandcastle, and Coachman training building.

Dave Miscavige was at Flag the entire time I was there. He was running everything at Flag. Because he was there, and he wanted to use the Fort Harrison auditorium to brief the Flag staff on a regular basis, I had to make sure that if I ever unhooked anything or rewired the mix board or other equipment in the auditorium, the system had to be able to work in minutes if Dave Miscavige needed to use it.

I had set up a sound system for an outdoor wedding that took place at the Sandcastle. Dave Miscavige would be attending the wedding of two Sea Org members who worked with him, so because of this, I had to set up the sound system. If Dave had not been attending, then nothing would have been done, but because he was going to be listening, Gold staff needed to set up the sound system. God forbid that Dave would not be able to hear the ceremony properly!

Dave liked to give the entire Flag Technical delivery staff a briefing at least once a week. When I say briefing and Dave Miscavige in the same sentence that is Sea Organization slang for a lashing or toasting.

These briefings would take place in the Flag auditorium and usually it would just be Dave Miscavige on the stage and all the staff seated in the auditorium. Since these staff were dealing with public during service hours, the briefings would take place after hours when they would normally be sleeping.

The first briefing he did while we there was a real toasty one. He had been reviewing public Scientologists’ auditing folders and was looking for things that were messed up so he could give the staff some lashings. He was pissed about certain public not being forced onto certain actions. The Flag staff were not being persistent enough and making the public do the services that Dave wanted them doing.

For this particular briefing, all of the Flag technical staff were there.

He started going through individual public auditing folders and saying what the public should be on and was toasting the staff for not having them on these actions. The public that he brought up in this briefing were burned into my mind since they had special significance for me.

He mentioned one particular public named Dan Kingsbury, the very same Dan Kingsbury with whom my mother had a child. Dan was supposed to be moving up the Bridge, but had taken a break to get some dental work and so had not been progressing. Dave said this was an excuse not to get up the Bridge and that Dan should have been handled and never allowed to take a break to get dental work. Now I do not know if there was a picture of Dan’s teeth in his auditing folder, but anyone who knew Dan would agree that it might have been a good idea for him to get some dental work. But alas, the picture of his teeth wasn’t in there and regardless, Dave was now going to make sure that Dan was forced onto his next auditing and Dave himself would be overseeing it.