Former top Scientology executive who vanished in 2004 subject of new international search

[Jenna Elfman at the 2003 Hollywood Celebrity Centre gala. And who’s that behind her?]

One of the things we most appreciated about first getting to know Mike Rinder in 2011 is that he helped us understand exactly what it was like to be a prisoner in David Miscavige’s notorious gulag for his own executives, “The Hole.”

First exposed by the Tampa Bay Times in its monumental 2009 series, “The Truth Rundown,” descriptions of The Hole clued the public into just how sadistic Scientology’s ruthless leader is. In early 2004 Miscavige created the prison by locking a couple of dozen of his trusted aides in a double-wide trailer on the Int Base in San Jacinto, California that had previously served as some offices.

In his increasing paranoia, Miscavige simply locked up some of his loyal lieutenants in an office and kept them there. For years.

Rinder was sent there to be a prisoner in 2006, and over a few different stays ended up spending about two years in the Hole, he told us. And thanks to his eventually getting out of Scientology entirely, he was able to help us, with Amy Scobee’s help, put together a comprehensive list of all the prisoners in the Hole, which we published at the Village Voice in 2012.

After the Tampa Bay Times exposed The Hole’s existence in 2009, Miscavige made changes so that, if the FBI came knocking (and it just about did that year), his prison wouldn’t be such an obvious concentration camp.

When Valerie Haney left the base in 2016, The Hole still existed, she told us, but in a different form. The prisoners were still segregated from the general population at Int Base, but they could at least go home to an apartment to spend the night.

So, although the severe depravations of the Hole may have been attenuated, we still haven’t heard a word, nearly 20 years later now, about some of the people that Miscavige turned into prisoners.

And, the US government, except for that FBI interest in 2009-2010, just hasn’t seemed to care.

So it came as a surprise that someone, at least, is making a very concerted effort to find out what Scientology is doing with one of its original Hole inhabitants.

Some journalists in Austria in the spring began sending repeated requests for information to Scientology officials and to Austrian government agencies, asking why they couldn’t get some word, any word at all, about what had happened to an Austrian-born Scientology executive named Kurt Weiland.

At one time, Weiland was a very big figure in Scientology. You can still find descriptions of his rise to prominence on some of Scientology’s own outdated, defunct websites.

An ordained Scientology minister, Mr. Weiland became a Scientologist in 1973 and a Church staff member in 1974. He has worked at all levels of the Church’s ecclesiastical management. In the 1970s, as an executive with the Church of Scientology in Munich, he became familiar with every aspect of administering a local parish. Following this, Mr. Weiland became the Director of Public Affairs for the churches in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In 1981, he assumed responsibility for government and legal affairs for all Churches of Scientology in Europe and the Near East. In 1987, Mr. Weiland assumed his current executive position with the Church of Scientology International.

That “current” position referred to in this old website was External Affairs Director, Office of Special Affairs International. He worked directly for Mike Rinder, and helped OSA’s plots and schemes for external affairs.

In the mid-1990s, that meant doing battle with Germany for the way it was cracking down on Scientology. So that’s why you can still find photos and videos of Weiland wrangling Scientology’s celebrities to oppose Germany’s crackdown.

Scientology’s caption of this 1997 Freedom magazine photo: “Kurt Weiland, D/CO OSA Int, briefs John Travolta and Chick Corea before their appearance at the Helsinki Commission hearings on human rights abuses in Germany.”

And Weiland was still hobnobbing with Scientology celebrities as late as 2003, just before the creation of the Hole, which is testified to by the photo of him with Jenna Elfman at 2003’s Celebrity Centre gala (see above).

But then Weiland was thrown in the Hole, which Rinder confirmed for us when we put together our list. He also told Marty Rathbun about a case of Weiland literally being tortured in the Hole while Mike was a prisoner. He told Marty about it in a well-known series of videos the pair made while fishing from a canal behind Marty’s house in south Texas in 2011…

Kurt Weiland [was] sitting in a chair with two people standing over him in the center conference room in that building, and the AC in there was all above that building, and that room used to get frigid cold and the rest of the place would stay hot… anyway, he had Kurt sitting in this chair and he started pouring water over his head like just a bit, not like drenching him, but just a bit and a bit more and a bit more and a bit more. This went on for like a half an hour and eventually he was soaked from head to toe, but he was also cold and in fact he turned blue. Marty, I’m not kidding, he was blue. His lips were white, he was shaking and uncontrollably, unable to talk, in the end, because he’d sat there for 30 minutes under a freezing cold air conditioning vent with cold water being poured on a him, and it eventually lowered his body temperature…

Like other longtime, high-ranking executives that Miscavige turned on, figures like Heber Jentzsch, Guillaume Lesevre, Marc Yager, Norman Starkey, Ray Mithoff, and many others, they simply have never been heard from again.

The really unusual thing, however, is that someone is actually trying to do something about it.

In March, Scientology’s Karin Pouw and attorney Kendrick Moxon began receiving repeated requests for information about Weiland from journalists saying they were working for an Austrian news service based in Vienna.

The journalists also contacted the Austrian consulate in Los Angeles.

They tell us that the only response they received to their numerous requests for information was a single message from Moxon that read, “Who are you?”

They did share with us replies from the consulate, which acknowledged receiving their inquiries.

Well, it doesn’t look like the Austrian journalists are getting very far. But we appreciated that they reached out to us and encouraged us to get the word out that they are trying to find out what has happened to their countryman, Weiland.

Like we said, that anyone at all is making an attempt, even a quixotic one, to find out something about David Miscavige’s gulag prisoners is worth noting, we figure.

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Chris Shelton is going straight up and vertical

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