Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (37 page)

N
ow that he was firmly in control of the church,
Miscavige sought to restore the image of Scientology. The 1980s had been a devastating period for the church’s reputation, with Hubbard’s disappearance and eventual death, the high-profile lawsuits, and the avalanche of embarrassing publicity. Miscavige hired
Hill & Knowlton
, the oldest and largest public relations firm in the world, to oversee a national campaign. The legendarily slick worldwide chairman of Hill & Knowlton,
Robert Keith Gray
, specialized in rehabilitating disgraced dictators, arms dealers, and governments with appalling human-rights records. As representatives of the government of
Kuwait, Hill & Knowlton had been partly responsible for selling the
Persian Gulf War to the American people. One of the company’s tactics was to provide the testimony of a fifteen-year-old girl, “
Nayirah,” to a human-rights committee in the
US House of Representatives in October 1990. Nayirah described herself as an ordinary Kuwaiti who had volunteered in a hospital. She tearfully told the House members of watching Iraqi soldiers storm into the prenatal unit. “They took the babies
out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die,” she said. The incident could never be confirmed, and the girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and had never volunteered at the hospital. The propaganda operation was
, at the time, the most expensive and sophisticated
public relations campaign ever run in the United States by a foreign government.

Gray had also worked closely with the
Reagan campaign. He regaled the Scientologists with his ability to take a “mindless actor
” and turn him into the “Teflon President.” Hill & Knowlton went to work for the church, putting out phony news stories, often in the form of video news releases made to look like actual reports rather than advertisements. The church began supporting high-profile causes, such as Ted Turner’s
Goodwill Games
, thereby associating itself with other well-known corporate sponsors, such as Sony and Pepsi. There were full-page ads
in newsmagazines touting the church’s philosophy, and cable television ads promoting Scientology books and
Dianetics
seminars.

Then, in May 1991, came one of the greatest public relations catastrophes in the church’s history.
Time
magazine published a scathing cover story titled “
Scientology: The Thriving
Cult of Greed and Power,” by investigative reporter
Richard Behar. The exposé revealed that just one of the religion’s many entities, the
Church of Spiritual Technology, had taken in half a billion dollars in 1987 alone. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the parent organization were buried in secret accounts in Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and Cyprus. Many of the personalities linked with the church were savaged in the article.
Hubbard himself was described as “part storyteller, part flimflam man
.” The
Feshbach brothers were the “terrors of the stock exchanges,” who spread false information about companies in order to drive down their valuations. Behar quoted a former church executive as saying that
John Travolta stayed in the church only because he was worried that details of his sex life would be made public if he left. The article asserted that Miscavige made frequent jokes about Travolta’s “allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior.” When Behar queried Travolta’s attorney for the star’s comment, he was told that such questions were “bizarre.” “Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress
Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist,” Behar wrote.

“Those who criticize the church
—journalists, doctors, lawyers, and even judges—often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up, or threatened by death,” Behar noted. He accused the
Justice Department of failing to back the
IRS and the
FBI in bringing a racketeering suit against the church because it was unwilling to spend the money required to take the organization on. He quoted
Cynthia Kisser, head of the Cult
Awareness Network in Chicago: “Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen.”

After the
Time
article appeared, Miscavige was invited to appear on ABC’s
Nightline
, a highly prestigious news show, to defend the image of the church. He had never been interviewed in his life. He rehearsed for months
, as much as four hours per day, with
Rathbun and
Rinder. He would prod them to ask him questions, then complain that they didn’t sound like
Ted Koppel, the show’s courtly but incisive host. Miscavige would ask himself the questions in what he thought was Koppel’s voice, then respond with a hypothetical answer. He sorted through what seemed to his aides an endless number of wardrobe choices before settling on a blue suit with a purple tie and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. Finally, on Valentine’s Day, 1992, he went to New York, where the show would be broadcast live.

The interview was preceded by a fifteen-minute report by
Forrest Sawyer about Scientology’s claims and controversies. “The church says it now has centers in over seventy countries, with more on the way,” Sawyer said.
Heber Jentzsch, the president of the
Church of Scientology International, was featured, claiming a membership of eight million people. Sawyer also interviewed defectors, who talked about their families being ripped apart, or being bilked of tens of thousands of dollars. Richard Behar, the
Time
reporter, recounted how Scientology’s private investigators had obtained his phone records.
Vicki Aznaran, a former high official in the church, who was then suing the church, told Sawyer that Miscavige ordered attacks on those he considered troublemakers—“have them, their homes, broken into, have them beaten, have things stolen from them, slash their tires, break their car windows, whatever.”

Koppel allowed Miscavige to respond to the Sawyer report. “Every single detractor on there is a part of a religious hate group called Cult Awareness Network and their sister group called
American Family Foundation,” Miscavige said. “It’s the same as the KKK would be with blacks.” He seemed completely at ease.

“You realize there’s a little bit of a problem getting people to talk critically about Scientology because, quite frankly, they’re scared,” Koppel observed.

“Oh, no, no, no, no.”

“I’m telling you, people are scared,” Koppel insisted.

“Let’s not give the American public the wrong impression,” said Miscavige. “The person getting harassed is myself and the church.”

Koppel then lobbed what seemed like an easy question for a man who had spent so much time preparing for this encounter. “See if you can explain to me why I would want to be a Scientologist.”

“Because you care about yourself and life itself,” Miscavige said eagerly. He gave the example of communication skills. “This is something that major breakthroughs exist in Scientology, being able to communicate in the world around you,” he said. “There’s an actual formula for communication which can be understood. You can drill on this formula.”

“So far in life, I haven’t had a whole lot of trouble communicating,” Koppel drolly noted.

“What in your life do you feel is not right, that you would like to help?” Miscavige asked. It was a classic Scientology technique, to find a subject’s “ruin,” the thing that was blocking his access to happiness.

“I feel perfectly comfortable with my life,” Koppel replied.

Miscavige switched tactics. “Let’s look at it this way, then, what Scientology does. If you look out across the world today, you could say that if you take a person who’s healthy, doing well, like yourself, you’d say that person is normal, not a crazy, not somebody who is psychotic, you look at a wall and they call it an elephant,” he said, extemporizing. “And you can see people below that—crazy people, criminals—that I think society in general will look at and say, ‘That breed of person hasn’t something quite right because they’re not up to this level of personality.’…What we are trying to do in Scientology is take somebody from this higher level and move them up to greater ability.”

“What about the folks ‘down there’?”

“We don’t ignore them. My point is this: Scientology is there to make the able more able.”

“Another way of saying that is: you’re interested in folks who’ve got money.”

Miscavige objected, claiming that the money in the church goes to good causes. “We are the largest social reform group in the world,” he said, adding that if a person stays in Scientology long enough, he’ll have plenty of money. Then he referenced
Sawyer’s report again. “The one girl there that was complaining about it, a girl named Vicki Aznaran, which by the way, this is a girl who was kicked out for trying to bring criminals into the church, something she didn’t mention.”

“You say a ‘girl.’ I think we’re talking about a grown woman, right?”

“A grown woman, excuse me,” Miscavige said. “She violated the mores and codes of the group.”

“Either you have made an accurate charge against someone or—what a number of … the pieces written about Scientology suggest is that when you have a critic before you, you destroy those people.”

“That’s easy to say—”

“You smear them.”

“That’s easy for the person to say, but she’s the one on that program smearing me.”

As for
Richard Behar, the
Time
reporter, Miscavige remarked, “The man was on record on two occasions attempting to get Scientologists kidnapped. That is an illegal act.”

The hour had ended, but Miscavige had just made another unsupported allegation. Koppel decided to extend the show “a few minutes,” but it went on another half hour without any commercial breaks. He asked Miscavige to explain what he meant about Behar. “Some people had called him up and he was telling them to kidnap Scientologists out,” Miscavige said.

“Now, kidnapping, as you well know, is a federal crime,” Koppel observed. “So, why didn’t you bring charges against him?”

“He didn’t succeed,” Miscavige said. “Ted, Ted, you’re missing the point.”

“There is such a thing as attempted rape, attempted murder, attempted kidnapping. It’s also a crime.”

“I think you’re really missing the issue, Ted, because my point is this: That man represents himself as an objective reporter. Here he is on record a full three years before he wrote this article, stating that he felt Scientologists should be kidnapped to change their religion.

“Second of all,” Miscavige continued, “let’s look at this article, and let’s not fool ourselves. It wasn’t an objective piece. It was done at the behest of
Eli Lilly,” the pharmaceutical manufacturer. “They were upset because of the damage we had caused to their killer drug
Prozac.”

“I’m sure you have evidence of that,” Koppel said. “You have affidavits?”

“Let me tell you what else I have—”

“You have affidavits?”

“From them? Of course not. You think they’d admit it?”
Miscavige said. “We put in a call to Eli Lilly. Their response was, ‘We can neither confirm nor deny.’ ”
¹

In
Sawyer’s report there was a brief clip of Hubbard telling his followers, “I was up in the Van Allen Belt
. This is factual. And I don’t know why they’re scared of the Van Allen Belt, because it’s simply hot. You’d be surprised how warm space is.” Koppel observed, “When I hear about a man talking about having been taken out to the Van Allen space radiation belt or space ships that were essentially the same thing as the DC-8, I’ve got to tell you, I mean, if we’re talking about this man’s credibility, that certainly raises some questions in my mind.”