Scientology’s Master Spies
For 24 years, they followed one man for the Church of Scientology. Then, for just over a single day, they came in from the cold.
This story was originally published on November 29, 2012 at our dot org legacy site. We consider it one of our most important stories about Scientology’s legacy of spying, and we decided to find room for it here at our Substack so it will have an ad-free archival home. — T.O.
This week, we learned that a lawsuit filed against the Church of Scientology by two of its former private investigators was quietly settled, and no terms were made public. In September, before settlement negotiations began, the two detectives spent just more than 24 hours giving the only interviews to reporters they ever will. Here now is one account of that brief period that provided a rare window into the shadowy world of Scientology surveillance.
1.
Junior was in the front passenger seat. Junior’s Brother, in the back. The car was speeding down I-37 to Corpus Christi for a reunion with Three, who hadn’t seen Junior and Junior’s Brother in about twenty years.
The Duke was no doubt aware of the meeting, and was probably in a high state of agitation over it.
The passenger van had left San Antonio at about 11 in the morning on Tuesday, September 25. It carried two attorneys, a reporter, and two men who had spent most of their adult lives trying to be invisible. They’re ex-cops from California who, in 1988, went to work for the Church of Scientology, and for the past 24 years were paid to spy on one man without revealing their presence.
They are Paul Marrick (“Junior”) and Greg Arnold (“Junior’s Brother”), and they were hired in 1988 by a church executive named Marty Rathbun (“Three”) on behalf of his boss, Scientology leader David Miscavige (“The Duke”), and spent more than two decades tailing Pat Broeker (“The Gardener”), whom Miscavige considered a rival to his leadership.
Code names were only part of the layers of secrecy Marrick and Arnold had to live with to remain human ciphers until just a few months ago. It was still difficult, they said, to talk freely about what they had gone through.
On September 20, they filed a detailed, amended complaint in a lawsuit against Miscavige and Scientology, saying that they had been promised employment for life by the church, which stopped paying them in June.
The lawsuit claimed that in spying on one man for so long, Marrick and Arnold gave up other opportunities in law enforcement and made themselves difficult to hire. The church, they said, made assurances that they would keep them on, even if The Broeker Operation ended. Then, suddenly, they were let go.
But more than an employment dispute, the lawsuit was remarkable for several reasons. Scientology is known for using private investigators to keep tabs on former members and journalists. But this assignment was special — only a handful of church executives knew anything about Marrick and Arnold and their work, Rathbun said. The sums were stunning: between $10 and 12 million, much of it paid in cash, to watch only one man. Investigators don’t usually sue the church, and Miscavige is rarely named as a defendant. And the venue — a small county on the Texas Coastal Bend — was an unlikely place for a court fight that threatened to ensnare two men rarely or never seen in public: Miscavige, and the man he wrested control of the church from, Pat Broeker. The unusual case was garnering national and international attention.
Multiple attempts have been made to elicit a comment from the church, which has not responded. Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw told the Tampa Bay Times that Marrick and Arnold’s lawsuit was a “shakedown attempt.” She said the two detectives were contract workers for the church, but didn’t provide specifics after saying their accounts were full of untruths.
After nearly two months of negotiations, the two sides reached a settlement and the lawsuit is over, it was learned this week. Terms are not being announced.
But on that day in September, Marrick and Arnold were preparing with their attorneys for a court battle, and their star witness was the man who first hired them in 1988, former high-ranking church official Marty Rathbun, who lives in little Ingleside on the Bay, near Corpus Christi.
Rathbun defected from Scientology in 2004. In 2009, he resurfaced by starting a blog that is highly critical of his former employer.
As a result, Marrick and Arnold were sent to San Patricio County that year to case Rathbun’s house and produce a surveillance plan.
“Here I am, surveilling the guy who hired me,” Marrick said, remembering that job three years ago.
Now, the two men were pulling up to the driveway of Rathbun’s home.
And they were being watched.
2.
Greg Arnold was working for the Desert Hot Springs Police Department in California’s Coachella Valley when he says he was approached by another cop named J.J. Gaw about part time work in 1988.
“He said, ‘I’ve never told anyone this, but I’ve done work for the Church of Scientology.’ He asked if I was interested,” Arnold says.
Arnold agreed, and his first job for the church was to serve as a bodyguard for Gaw and a woman as they went to a federal penitentiary to interview a prisoner.
Arnold said he waited around as Gaw and the woman talked to Andrew Daulton Lee, the man convicted of espionage and drug dealing who was played by Sean Penn in the movie The Falcon and the Snowman.
“They wanted information on Robert Lindsey, who had written the book, and who was now looking into Scientology,” Arnold says. (An archive search shows that in the 1980s, Lindsey was indeed writing about Scientology for the New York Times — he wrote the Times obituary for L. Ron Hubbard when the Scientology founder died in 1986.)
“I don’t know what happened in the interview. I just went along as protection. It was easy money,” he says.
Gaw then asked Arnold if he wanted to ditch his police job and start to work full time for the church. Arnold, who had spent more than seven years on the force, says he was ready for a change.
Before he could be hired full time, however, he had to be interrogated. “They did an e-meter test on me,” he says, referring to the electronic device that Scientologists believe can detect negative thoughts by holding onto its metal sensors. Arnold was asked if he was secretly working for the government, or if there were other things he was hiding. He passed the examination.
Meanwhile, another of his Coachella Valley colleagues, Paul Marrick, was also recruited to join him.
The two young men — Arnold was 29, Marrick, 28 — were taken to Scientology’s secretive international headquarters near Hemet, California, where they met Marty Rathbun, who was then 31.
Rathbun was part of a youth movement in the leadership of Scientology, which had been raided by the FBI in 1977, resulting in the prosecution and imprisonment of eleven of its top officials, including Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue. Fearing that he would be sucked into the prosecutions, Hubbard went into hiding in 1980. Only a handful of people knew where he was, and they included a young married couple who were his caretakers, Pat and Annie Broeker. Hubbard appeared to have named the Broekers his successors, but when he died in 1986, they were pushed aside by Miscavige.
Rathbun was part of Miscavige’s new cohort that had taken over the organization. Brash and competent, Rathbun had quickly risen in the church, and was serving as Miscavige’s trusted enforcer. What Miscavige needed done, Rathbun made happen.
“Marty gave us a briefing on the guy they wanted us to follow. He made it clear that this job was for David Miscavige,” Arnold says. “The target was Pat Broeker. They called him ‘Hubbard’s errand boy,’ and said he was an alcoholic. They said there was $1.8 million that was unaccounted for. So he was a thief and a drunk and they wanted him watched.” (They were also told Broeker may have stashed away highly secretive, unpublished Scientology writings by Hubbard, but Marrick and Arnold say they never found evidence of this.)
Today, Marrick and Arnold say little of what they were told was true. Broeker was not a drunk, he didn’t live like he had millions stashed away, and he was in fact a modest man who craved learning and lived quietly.
Now, they realize, they were put on Broeker simply because of the threat he represented to Miscavige’s leadership of the church. Having taken over Scientology in a power struggle, Miscavige worried that Broeker could speak out and undermine his claim to lead the church, they say.
But on August 8, 1988, they only knew that they were part of a team of investigators watching Broeker, who at that time was living at one of Scientology’s properties, a ranch near Creston, California, where Hubbard had died two years earlier.
“We were told it would be a three week assignment,” remembers Marrick.
3.
“In 1988, there was no Internet, no cell phones. Things were a lot different then,” Arnold says. “We knew very little about Scientology and nothing about Pat Broeker.”
“We thought we were following a crook,” Marrick adds.
While Broeker lived on Scientology property, he was also driving it. His car was registered to Scientology’s printing arm, Bridge Publications. So the church, Marrick and Arnold say, authorized putting a tracking device on it, a magnetic device on its battery cable.
“We had a radio detection finder. It was crude, but it could give you the general direction he was in,” Marrick says.
They also had help. A man named John Brousseau worked at the ranch, and would tip them when Broeker came or went.
“Joe’s going to St. Louis” was code that Broeker had left the ranch. “Chicken’s in the coop” was the sign that he’d returned, they say.
“I remember that,” Brousseau says today. “I even went and attached the tracking device on his Ford Pickup. I wired it to the truck’s battery so they never had to change batteries in the unit. It was a little midnight work with a pen light.”
Brousseau is one of the most recent “Sea Org” workers to leave Scientology’s secretive International Base, east of Los Angeles. (We wrote a lengthy two-part story about him earlier this year.)
JB, as he’s known, says Broeker was unaware of the surveillance keeping a tight watch on him. “Not a clue. He was completely clueless. My surveillance would supplement theirs. And I reported directly to Miscavige,” Brousseau says.
“Miscavige was looking for some hidden information, hidden files, hidden money, or original Hubbard documents that Broeker was supposed to have,” he adds. “But I don’t think anything really came of all this searching.”
Broeker soon left the ranch and moved in with a woman who was a veterinarian in Paso Robles. (By then, he had split with Annie Broeker, who would live out the rest of her life at Scientology’s Int Base near Hemet until she was moved to a Hollywood apartment to die in secrecy in 2011.)
Marrick and Arnold say they looked for ways to get closer to Broeker in Paso Robles. They rented the house next door, and asked a young woman to live there. She didn’t work out, so they replaced her with another woman who would eventually became Arnold’s wife. With her in place, they installed sensors to keep watch on Broeker’s house.
Concerned about their operation attracting the attention of local law enforcement, they purchased a police radio scanner. While monitoring it, they noticed that it picked up private conversations that people nearby were having over the new invention of cordless telephones.
“Ding!” Marrick says, remembering how that discovery gave them an idea.
They checked the legality of it, and sure enough, not only was it legal to eavesdrop on cordless phone conversations, but the law also allowed the recording of such calls.
As part of their operation, Marrick’s father, “Big Paul,” was enlisted to befriend Broeker. Over time, they became close, and Big Paul was invited to the Broeker house. He gave Broeker’s girlfriend a gift of a cordless phone for Christmas in 1988.
Over the next year, Marrick and Arnold taped every conversation that Pat Broeker made over the phone. They still have the tapes, and listened to them again recently with their attorneys to prepare for their lawsuit.
“We’d been told he was a drunk and a thief. That was false. He’s a true believer in Scientology,” Marrick says. “He’s an introvert. He likes reading and studying.”
(If Marrick and Arnold were careful to keep their surveillance activities within the law, John Brousseau says the church itself wasn’t so concerned about legalities. While Broeker was still at Creston Ranch, he says, he installed a listening device that switched on whenever Broeker made or received a call on the ranch’s circuit. Brousseau listened in on those conversations, which were mostly between Broeker and his Paso Robles girlfriend. “I felt really weird listening to them,” he says. “But this wasn’t my own origination. I was told to do this stuff. Miscavige said, ‘This guy’s probably got shit hidden, and we need to track it down. We need to follow him.’ Miscavige absolutely knew what was going on.”)
Besides listening to Broeker’s conversations, Marrick and Arnold also paid sanitation workers to have his trash delivered to them. Sifting through it, they gathered more information about his habits and activities.
Marrick and Arnold were paying other informants. They were paying the rent on houses, cars, and they were paying teams of other investigators.
But then, the church wanted to know that it was getting its money’s worth.
4.
In the spring of 1989, Miscavige planned a meeting with Broeker at Joshua’s Restaurant, a prominent establishment in Paso Robles at the time. Marrick and Arnold were told by Rathbun that Miscavige wanted to be followed, he wanted the meeting videotaped, and he wanted it to happen without his being able to detect that it was going on.
“Miscavige wanted to test our abilities,” Arnold says. “He wanted to make sure Broeker wouldn’t know that he was being followed.”
Marrick can vividly recall watching the discussion between the two men from a distance. “Pat leaped on the table. He was talking down at David and wagging his finger in his face. We could not hear what he was saying, though,” he says.
From the phone calls they were listening in on, Arnold added, they got the impression that Broeker had no fear of Miscavige.
After the meeting, Rathbun told them that Miscavige was unable to detect their presence. They had passed the test.
“After the test, Marty told us to take over the operation,” Marrick says.
“We were told that we would have jobs for life,” Arnold adds.
Following the test, they were called down to Los Angeles for a meeting with Rathbun at the Bonaventure Hotel. They were escorted to a room, where a woman was waiting with an e-meter. It was time for another interrogation, asking the same questions to find out if they harbored secret animosities against Miscavige, Rathbun, or the church.
After passing that test, Rathbun gave them four cashier’s checks for $8,000 each. It was their first week’s pay.
“Take over this thing,” he told them.
“We had to tell the others that the operation was over. But it really wasn’t,” Arnold says.
From now on, Marrick and Arnold were on their own. Only the two of them, Rathbun, and Miscavige would know that they were being paid to watch Broeker.
5.
In 1990, Marrick and Arnold received an odd instruction: they were not to read the Los Angeles Times. That year, Times reporters Joel Sappell and Robert Welkos had produced a major series exposing the secrets of Scientology.
“It’s all ‘Black PR,’ they told us,” Arnold remembers. So naturally, they ran to get copies. “The L.A. Times called Pat Broeker the ultimate spy or something. And I remember saying, ‘Paul, we’re not tracking an errand boy, we’re watching 007.'”
Increasingly, their own lives were resembling a Bond movie.
“Over the years, we had to develop more elaborate second lives,” Marrick says.
“We had to have cover stories,” Arnold adds.
Arnold pretended to be a real estate appraiser. Marrick repaired windshields, and made sure always to have his equipment with him. But mostly, they were listening as Broeker was negotiating his exit from Scientology with church attorneys over his cordless phone.
Ray Jeffrey listened to the tapes with his clients. He says what struck him were conversations that Broeker was having with Gerald Feffer, a well-known Washington DC lawyer. In Feffer’s negotiations with Broeker, the issue was surprisingly small time and strange. Broeker wanted an old pickup truck, and he wanted Hubbard’s parrot.
“Broeker said he was in communications with Hubbard, who wanted the bird,” Jeffrey says. (Hubbard had died three years earlier.) “And this big attorney was negotiating over the truck and the parrot.”
Another church attorney had lengthy discussions with Broeker about leaving the country, they say.
And when Marrick and Arnold heard that, they began looking into the possibility of finding new jobs in law enforcement.
“Marty went ballistic,” Arnold says. “He said, we’ll take better care of you than law enforcement will.”
Rathbun confirms that, on Miscavige’s orders, he told the two ex-cops that they were better off working for the church than going back to their old jobs. Even if Broeker went overseas and the operation ended, they were assured, they had jobs with Scientology.
So they listened as Broeker planned first to go to Ireland, and then to Australia. But then the deal fell through.
Instead, Broeker packed up and headed east.
“One day he was planting tomatoes in his yard, the next day a U-Haul truck showed up,” Arnold says. A slow speed chase ensued, and they followed as Broeker drove into New Mexico.
Arnold says that raised alarms with the church. “They thought he was going to the vault.”
One of Scientology’s most secretive organizations, the Church of Spiritual Technology, places vaults in various places where Hubbard’s writings and lectures can be etched on steel plates and sealed in titanium containers to survive a nuclear holocaust. At the New Mexico vault, near the town of Trementina, there is also a large residence, known as an “LRH House,” where a reincarnated Hubbard might take up living on his return to Earth.
But Broeker didn’t go to Trementina. Instead, he turned north and went to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to join his family. He arrived on Christmas Eve, 1989.
(A call was placed recently to Broeker’s brother-in-law in Cheyenne, but when Pat was asked for, his brother-in-law said he was sick of reporters calling and angrily asked not to be called again.)
Unable to repeat the same setup they had in Paso Robles, Marrick and Arnold kept watch on the Broeker house from a nearby park, using spotting scopes.
Over the next several years, until 1993, they kept watch as Broeker began working at a hospital as a cardiac technician while studying medicine. Marrick and Arnold hired a hospital greeter to tip them on Broeker’s activities.
Broeker, they say, met a new girlfriend who was also a technician.
Then, one day, he vanished.
Marrick and Arnold caught a break, however, when they found in his girlfriend’s trash a tissue with a Council Bluffs, Iowa address scribbled on it. Sure enough, Broeker was there.
“24 years of surveillance is part science, and it’s also an art,” Marrick says.
For the first two years he was living in Iowa, Broeker studied medicine at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha. But then he stopped, and Broeker began to make contact with other former Scientologists and outside critics of the organization as his trash indicated that he was experimenting with encryption software, Arnold says.
They say that it particularly alarmed the church that Broeker was reaching out to a man named Robert Vaughn Young, who had been Scientology’s top spokesman until his defection. (Young died of cancer in 2003.)
At one point, Broeker and Young met by passing a note in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and then took separate routes to an Applebee’s restaurant. Arnold took a seat at the table next to them, and eavesdropped as they talked about Miscavige.
“Our job was to gather information but be completely invisible,” Marrick says. “We never harassed anybody.”
Broeker also arranged a meeting at a hotel with some of Scientology’s biggest critics of the time -– businessman Bob Minton, ex-Scientologist Jesse Prince, and Robert Vaughn Young.
Marrick and Arnold were asked to do other assignments as well. At one point, they were sent to Indiana to gather information on several Eli Lilly and Company executives. (Scientology virulently opposes pharmaceutical companies that manufacture psychiatric drugs.)
One of those executives was Mitch Daniels, who is today Indiana’s governor.
“All we were told was that he was a lobbyist for Dan Quayle,” Arnold says.
“They’d tell us very little about why they wanted us to do this,” Marrick adds.
That job only lasted a couple of weeks, during which they took out memberships at a tanning salon owned by the wife of one of the Eli Lilly executives, hoping to hear some gossip about the company.
(Daniels declined to comment through his press secretary about the allegation that he was followed by Scientology.)
After he left Iowa, Broeker spent some time in Colorado before moving to the Czech Republic.
Broeker settled in the town of Brno, about 80 miles north of Vienna. Marrick and Arnold stayed in the US, but continued to keep watch on Broeker for the 10 years he was in Europe, from 1998 to 2007.
“We had to set up an entire organization in the Czech Republic. We hired an interpreter to hire a team out there. Then we hired another team to watch the first team to make sure they were getting true information,” Marrick says.
Those teams of private eyes found that, once again, Broeker was living modestly. “Broeker went to school there and taught English. So we hired a student to take his classes and record them,” Arnold says.
On Christmas Eve, 2007, Broeker returned to the United States, but Marrick and Arnold say they wouldn’t provide any more information about his current whereabouts.
“He doesn’t live in the Czech Republic anymore. We’re going to leave it at that,” Marrick says.
6.
Each day at 3 pm, when it was possible for them to do so, Marrick and Arnold would call in a report to Marty Rathbun at the international base on a special telephone that was only for that purpose. But after a point in 1993, Rathbun no longer answered it.
They learned many years later that Rathbun had temporarily “blown” Scientology — church jargon for defecting. Although Rathbun soon returned and remained in the church until 2004, he was never again put on The Broeker Operation.
Marrick and Arnold say that for the rest of the time, some 15 years, they reported to another Miscavige lieutenant, a woman named Linda Hamel, who is the president of the church’s Office of Special Affairs. (Her code name was simply “L,” the two men say.)
But sometimes, when they called the base on the dedicated line for their daily report, they would speak with a deep-voiced man who never identified himself.
“What do you have?” he’d ask.
Later, they saw video of David Miscavige giving presentations at Scientology events, and can now say that’s who they were talking to.
“Scientology leader David Miscavige had no contact with the investigators, never met them nor talked to them nor directed them,” Scientology’s spokeswoman, Karin Pouw, told the Tampa Bay Times in a statement, and claimed that Marrick and Arnold instead worked for church attorneys.
Marrick and Arnold deny that. Says their attorney, Ray Jeffrey: “In 25 years, they never had a substantive conversation with any attorney for the church.”
According to Jeffrey, Marrick and Arnold were getting paid annually about $250,000 each over the life of the project. But out of that money, they say, they had to pay all of the operation’s expenses — flights, rental houses, rental cars, teams of other investigators, sanitation workers, and many informants.
“We’re not wealthy, by any means,” Arnold insists.
In 1988, they had formed a partnership, Select Investigations (they incorporated in October, 1991). They received cashier’s checks — about $40,000 each month, divided into checks that were always under $10,000 each, for tax reasons — through 2001.
But Marrick and Arnold were traveling so much in the job, they were having a hard time getting the checks deposited. Marrick says their solution was to open a new account at a Los Angeles bank, and then take a stack of deposit slips to the church, asking them to deposit their pay.
From 2001 to 2007, the church did just that, and Marrick recently confirmed with his banker that during that time, the church deposited their pay in cash — about $40,000 a month, all in greenbacks.
Scientology is tax exempt, but that image, of a church carrying stacks of money to deposit for an ongoing spying campaign, seems hard to justify as a religious purpose.
In 2008, Marrick says, the church went back to paying in checks made out to Select Investigations.
7.
In 2008, all hell broke loose for Scientology. A videotape of Tom Cruise talking about his religion surfaced on the Internet in January, and when the church tried to suppress it, the Internet struck back — in the form of mask-wearing protesters who called themselves Anonymous. Later in the year, after there had earlier been reports of his death, Marty Rathbun started to reemerge from his long hibernation.
“We started to see a lot of Internet chatter about a coalition forming to oppose Miscavige,” Marrick says. “We thought Marty, [former church spokesman] Mike Rinder, and Pat Broeker might be joining up. We told OSA that Marty and Mike were going to be teaming up at least. Oh no, they said.”
Then, in 2009, Rathbun started his blog, and Rathbun and several other executives appeared in a major series by the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), and Rinder also began, gradually, to speak out and did, indeed, join forces with Rathbun, just as Marrick and Arnold had warned.
The two investigators were told to keep an eye on all three of them — Rathbun, Rinder, and, as always, Broeker.
In 2009 they traveled to south Texas to do a comprehensive study of Rathbun’s neighborhood in Ingleside on the Bay, which is near Corpus Christi. They scanned the area for the best way to surveil Rathbun around the clock. Marrick says it would take special precautions.
“It’s Marty. You’re not going to just park a car in front of his house,” he says.
After submitting their plan, they were told to move on to other things. Watching Rathbun would fall to someone else.
In the 2009 St. Petersburg Times series, Rathbun revealed the existence of The Broeker Operation for the first time. He didn’t, however, name Marrick and Arnold as the investigators carrying it out.
If their cover hadn’t been entirely blown, Marrick and Arnold say the church did start to treat them differently after that story appeared.
“Things started to get scaled back,” Arnold says. And Hamel told them that if the church needed to make a statement about it, Miscavige would blame Rathbun for creating the operation.
“What about the last 15 years?” Marrick says he responded to her, pointing out that Rathbun hadn’t run the operation since 1993.
“Then the money started getting erratic,” Marrick adds. “Our perception was that Miscavige wanted it all to go away.”
Then, in 2011, things got really strange. In April of that year, several men carrying cameras in their hands or strapped to their foreheads showed up at Rathbun’s house, demanding to talk to him about the counseling he was giving “independent Scientologists” — former church members who have rejected Miscavige’s leadership but still adhere to the ideas of Hubbard.
Calling themselves “Squirrel Busters,” the group planted itself in Rathbun’s cul-de-sac and followed him around town for the next five months. (In Scientology a “squirrel” is a heretic who uses Hubbard’s “technology” in unauthorized ways, and is about the worst thing you can call a Scientologist.)
Marrick and Arnold say their surveillance plan had been used by the church to create a three-ring circus. “It was Three Stooges on LSD,” Arnold says.
“It doesn’t take a lot of finesse to just harass someone,” Marrick adds.
The intimidation squad told local residents that it was a documentary crew making a film about Rathbun, but a local reporter and Rathbun together discovered the truth — hiding at a local hotel was a man named Dave Lubow running the operation. If Marrick and Arnold were Scientology’s silent, secret watchers, Lubow was the private eye the church used for “noisy investigations” and intimidation campaigns.
The camera-toting goon squad managed to get Rathbun arrested at one point. And Marrick and Arnold say that when that happened, Linda Hamel admitted to them that the Squirrel Busters was a church operation. “We just wanted to see Marty implode,” they say she told them.
The Squirrel Busters faded away in November 2011. But Rathbun says he is still being watched. When people come to visit him to learn more about the Scientology independence movement, the church seems to know about it within minutes — some church members have been handed excommunication papers by church operatives within hours of leaving Rathbun’s house.
Meanwhile, the church was falling behind in its payments to Marrick and Arnold. By June, they were owed $100,000, they say. And then they were told no more payments would be coming.
They were out of jobs.
8.
On September 25, Marrick and Arnold drove from San Antonio to Ingleside on the Bay to see Marty Rathbun for their first meeting since 1993.
At the reunion, Marrick calls Rathbun “boss,” and the man who hired them in 1988 marvels at what shape Marrick is in.
“Look at you, too,” he says to Arnold. “You look like a young kid.”
Rathbun takes them upstairs, and asks their opinion about a house across the way he can see through his living room window.
For the last year and a half, the house has been empty, but Rathbun suspects that it’s being used as a lookout for Scientology’s private investigators.
Marrick immediately spots something: In an upstairs window, the one with the best view of Rathbun’s place, there are two small cutouts of blinds near the bottom far corner. They would be the perfect size for a camera lens.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Rathbun says, as Marrick and Arnold offer to show him how they had planned to surveil his house in 2009.
The three of them pile into Rathbun’s large pickup along with some members of a British documentary crew and a reporter in the truck’s bed.
Just as soon as they reach the corner and the house they had been looking at, they see a car pulling out of its garage. The driver spots Rathbun’s pickup, appears to panic, and quickly pulls back into the garage and lowers its door.
Not fast enough, though. Rathbun manages to jot down the license plate number.
A quick check on a computer later reveals that the car is registered to a Fidel Garcia Jr., and that his address is also the location of FNG Security Investigations in Corpus Christi.
“We just outed the house,” Rathbun says, sounding satisfied.
“I can’t believe he used his own car,” Arnold says.
“It’s amateur hour,” Marrick adds.
(Later, Rathbun went back to the house, looked into the windows, and spotted remote-controlled cameras that were aimed at his place. He later checked with the home’s owner, and found that it had been leased for the next three years by a Dallas private investigator who Rathbun and Mike Rinder each say the church has used for decades.)
Since he started blogging in 2009, Rathbun has become the most visible member of the growing independent Scientology movement. He insists that he’s not trying to take over Scientology or start a new church. Instead, he provides counseling — “auditing” in Scientology language — to other former members who still admire Hubbard’s ideas but don’t want to be a part of what they say is a controlling, misguided organization.
Still, it was Rathbun who helped set in motion the 24-year watch of Pat Broeker in 1988.
“I regret the whole thing,” Rathbun says.
And why would Miscavige spend so much money — about $500,000 a year for more than two decades — to spy on one man?
“He’s frozen in the moment when he committed the series of coups that put him in Hubbard’s throne,” Rathbun says.
Is Broeker, at 64, still such a threat to Miscavige’s leadership?
“Broeker couldn’t challenge him for leadership now. There’s no legal or PR way that could happen. Pat Broeker is not going to be handed a crown,” Rathbun says. But he does believe that current church members are talking to each other about making changes, and that Miscavige could be toppled.
“Pat could help that happen.”
And what about the significance of Marrick and Arnold coming forward after so many years in the dark?
“It’s right up there with the Tom Cruise summer meltdown,” he says.
Greg Arnold is now 53, he’s married, and he has a son and daughter. Paul Marrick turns 53 in November, and he’s also married with a son and daughter. The two men are too young to retire, but looking for new jobs seems almost impossible.
“Can you imagine our resumes? They’re going to call and verify employment? They’re going to want to talk to Miscavige?” Marrick says with a laugh.
Over the years, the two men read much about the church on the Internet and grew more cynical about their jobs.
“We started to question every operation we were ever on,” Arnold says.
“Everything we were told was lies,” Marrick adds.
But they feel that many current church members are in the same position.
“Scientologists, we feel, are decent people. Some of the things they’ve been forced to do — like disconnection — are things put upon them,” Arnold says, referring to Scientology’s policy that forces members to cut off all ties with those who have been excommunicated, even if it means disconnecting from a family member.
Marrick and Arnold learned about disconnection and many other subjects as they read avidly about Scientology in recent years. Then, when they lost their jobs, they put together their own account of their lives spying for the church in a thick manuscript, and were hoping to give it to a professional to prepare for publication. They knew, however, that their book would never see the light of day if a settlement with the church was reached.
Finally, as they prepared to leave Rathbun’s home, they were asked how they felt about the man they followed for so long. After their jobs were ended in June, were they tempted to reach out to Pat Broeker, to reveal themselves after all this time?
Arnold says they did discuss it, but they decided not to contact him.
And they figure Miscavige must still have someone watching his old rival, even today.
“David obviously cares about what Pat might say,” Marrick says. “It’s obviously important to him.”
After their brief reunion with Rathbun, Marrick and Arnold and their attorneys returned that night to San Antonio.
The next afternoon, after the two private eyes met with reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, their attorney Ray Jeffrey called, saying that he had heard from church lawyers, who were suddenly interested in negotiating a settlement to the lawsuit. Jeffrey said he was instructing Marrick and Arnold not to give any further interviews.
For just a little more than a day, the two spies had talked about their lives undercover. And now, they were going back into silence.
Two months later, we checked with Ray Jeffrey’s office to learn that he was on a week long vacation, and that the case had been “resolved.”
We sent a text to Arnold, asking about the settlement. He sent back a smiley face, and the words, “no comment.”
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"In 1990, Marrick and Arnold received an odd instruction: they were not to read the Los Angeles Times. .... So naturally, they ran to get copies."
I know this is a serious article, but I had a good laugh with this part.
The story verified the paranoia of the great minuscule leader of Scientology. He inherited that from Hubbard’s neurotic fears. And Scientology continues to cover up their border line criminal activities called “fair game”.