[Today’s guest post is by Bruce Hines]
Obsession with secrets and secrecy is an integral aspect to the bizarre world of Scientology. It seems to me that it stems from some kind of megalomanic paranoia of the founder of that cult, Lafayette Hubbard, and of his successor, David Miscavige.
There are numerous examples. For many years, the location of the international headquarters was known to relatively few Scientologists in the world. The first time I went there, I rode in a van for about an hour, got dropped off in an out-of-the-way parking lot, and then got picked up by another van that drove the rest of the way to the “Int Base.” And that was after having to endure hours of security checking, part of an elaborate screening system to keep undesirable people from knowing where that place was. These days, thanks to the Internet, it is easy to find out where Gilman Hot Springs is, and that this is the location of units that used to make up the top management of Scientology. I don’t think international Scientology is still managed from that location these days. I wonder if the fact that the secret is out has anything to do with that.
Ever since Hubbard had to leave England and decided to start the Sea Project, relatively few people knew where he was. The same is now true of Miscavige. Messages between key executives, plans, strategies, projects, the activities of private investigators, finances, legal actions, and many other things are all on a strict need-to-know basis.
The fixation on confidentiality extends to the theory and techniques involved in most of the auditing and training levels on the “Bridge to Total Freedom.” (Boy howdy, that’s a misnomer!) These subjects include all of the so-called “OT Levels,” “Power Processing,” and the original “Clearing Course.” Only people with the appropriate clearance are allowed to learn about them. Getting the clearance includes receiving and passing lengthy security checking (interrogation while connected to a kind of lie detector), having a good ethics record, having reached the right “case level,” having contributed sufficiently to the “church,” and having atoned for any past transgressions.
Hubbard wrote quite a bit about the necessity of keeping the materials associated with these levels under lock and key (his words) and to carefully limit who has access to them. He said bad actors might misuse information to the detriment of others. He also said that a person who learned about such things before they were mentally prepared could get sick or severely mess up their mind. That seems to be an attempt to scare people off. But I wonder if the real reason had to do with maintaining a monopoly for monetary gain. Methinks yes. Plus, it is an effective carrot to keep people paying money to gain more and more magical knowledge.
Belying this reasoning is the fact that for years now, it has been relatively easy for anyone to read all about this super-secret information on the internet. No one has been harmed by doing so. I have never heard of someone getting pneumonia from reading about the “Wall of Fire.”
Anyway, I’ll give an example that illustrates the extremes to which the powers that be will go to to keep these secret materials out of the wrong hands. In 1991, I happened to have been sent on a “Sea Org Mission.” At that time, all of the “bulletins” that describe auditing at the levels of “New OT V” and “New OT VII” had been revised. These levels are also known as “NOTs” (“New Era Dianetics for Operating Thetans”) and “Solo NOTs.” Supposedly, if you believe the PR, the information in those materials was being corrected and gotten more “on-Source.” That wasn’t actually true. The main people working on that revision, Sue Koon and Rat Mithoff, and of course ultimately approved by Miscavige, added all kinds of instructions and auditing steps to those bulletins. The auditor’s actions in delivering NOTs to someone changed considerably. Those “corrections” were quite an undertaking. The name at the bottom of all those bulletins was L. Ron Hubbard, making it appear that he had written, or at least approved, those issues. However, clearly, he had been dead for something like five years.
Once all those materials had made it through the rigorous approval process, they had to be printed in the characteristic red ink on white paper and placed in fancy binders. The people working on that part similarly had to have appropriate clearances. The binders themselves had to be designed and approved by Miscavige.
Next came the “release.” An elaborate plan had to be drawn up, approved, and put into action. This is where I got involved. Part of my mission was to get all these binders securely locked up on the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida. My tasks also included briefing the crew, getting all the auditors and case supervisors trained on the new materials, overseeing the auditing done based on the new materials, and getting the old materials destroyed in a way that ensured confidentiality.
It is mind-boggling how paranoid scientologists are about keeping people from reading any of their secret stuff and the extreme lengths to which they will go. They refer to the binders with the bulletins in them as packs. Each pack had an electrical connection hard-wired to it. The packs were stored in special filing cabinets that had numerous jacks that mated with the plugs on wires from the binders. Each cabinet was connected to an elaborate security system that would loudly go off if protocol weren’t followed.
In the Sand Castle building at the Flag Land Base, there is a course room where people were trained to audit themselves on Solo NOTs. The door to that room had an electronic lock that could only be entered with a key card. The windows to that room had some kind of high-tech windows that turned opaque when it got dark outside. This was to prevent someone from sneaking up to see or maybe photograph through the window. Pages in an open course pack lying on a desk might be visible. Inside the course room was a separate room where the filing cabinets stood. A student would sign out a pack and then have something like 60 seconds to get to their chair and plug the pack into a jack on the desk. If that didn’t happen, alarms would sound and security personnel in another room in the building would be alerted. The whole time the student was reading the materials, their pack was connected electrically by a wire to the desk. At the end of the study period, the procedure was reversed to get the binder back into its filing cabinet.
Oh, I almost forgot, the “paper” in the packs was a super-strong plastic that could not be torn out. A special printing process was used to get the words onto the sheets. The binder rings were extra strong and could not be opened.
All those new materials had to be shipped from the Int Base in California to Clearwater. A couple of sea org members, who were authorized to see read the confidential information and had a high enough case level, went on their own mission for this purpose. They traveled with the boxes that held the packs. Ideally those boxes would never have been out of their sight. I imagine, though I’m not sure, that arrangements were made so that they could directly observe the loading and unloading of the boxes into and out of the luggage compartment on the plane. Then they flew on the plane as passengers. After landing they guarded the boxes as they were transported from the Tampa airport to the Flag Land Base in a dedicated van. There was an official handoff to me once the boxes were delivered into the appropriate areas.
The strangest part was destroying the old confidential materials that were already at Flag. These were also in packs in filing cabinets, albeit ordinary ones. The idea was that these outdated materials were “non-standard” and none of them could remain. One option would be to shred all those pieces of paper. That would have been a herculean task. There were, as I recall, about 100 packs, each a half to one inch thick. They all had to be gathered up, being sure no nooks or crannies were missed. There were several areas in that complex where packs were kept. Then they all had to be put into boxes and securely taped up.
The plan, that someone had somehow come up with, was to burn those boxes. But they had to be burned in such a way that only ash remained. You couldn’t just place the boxes in a vacant lot or something and light them on fire. So, what to do? Well, the city of Clearwater has a huge power generation plant. It burnt trash and garbage in very large furnaces that got to very high temperatures. The energy from all that heat was then converted into electricity.
Trucks drove into an immense staging area and unloaded their trash onto the floor. Then humongous cranes scooped up piles of the stuff and dropped them into hoppers that fed into the furnaces. There was continuous activity. It was quite an operation to behold.
The operators of that facility offered a service whereby companies or organizations could dispose of large amounts of confidential material. That is what the “church” had decided to do with all this NOTs stuff. I went with a driver in a van to that place with all the boxes in the back. We carried the boxes up to a higher level where there was a platform. From there was a doorway opening onto a conveyor belt. We watched as some workers loaded the boxes onto the belt and watched them travel towards the furnace. The only problem was that I couldn’t see the boxes actually go into the fire. That would have been impossible. But I requested the nearest possible access point and watched as long as I could. Still, I felt a little guilty. What if some evil people wanting to take down scientology were secretly at a point down the way who took those boxes off the belt? Or could there be a mechanical failure resulting in a box falling into an accessible area? Like I said, all that confidentiality involved a lot of paranoia. I wonder what those workers thought of me. They were pleasant and accommodating. But there I was marching around in my Class A uniform. That means I was dressed in something like a naval dress uniform — dark blue, and because I was an officer, a gold lanyard, gold buttons, gold stripes on the sleeves, and little campaign ribbons above the left-side pocket. Usually, a missionaire was required to be dressed in that way. Looking back, it was incredibly silly and frankly embarrassing. But I was inured to such situations and pretty oblivious to effects I was creating.
Think of the expense that scientology went to just to keep the wrong people from reading those arcane and inane writings. The special paper, the special binders, the special filing cabinets, the special printing process, the special and highly customized security system, and many other details large and small.
But I’m sure those efforts paid for themselves before too long. All the people in the world who had received NOTs auditing in the past were called in to get corrective auditing. This was the typical pattern. That part of the “technology” had been corrected and brought into a form that aligned with Hubbard’s actual intentions. Some bad people in earlier years had messed it up. So to get the full benefit of that type of auditing, one had to basically re-do that level. It was required, having been ordered by the case supervisor. That meant that a whole lot of people had to pay for more intensives. In this case it was usually at least two intensives, or 25 hours of auditing. That would be something like $15k a pop. Maybe more or a bit less, I don’t remember exactly.
But, really, what the hell?
— Bruce Hines
Leah Remini’s new judge sets a hearing
The new judge in Leah Remini’s lawsuit against Scientology is Holly J. Fujie, and she has set a May 29 hearing in the case.
MyNewsLA had this tidbit about Judge Fujie…
Last October, Fujie dismissed Jennifer McBride’s lawsuit against Lady Gaga in which the plaintiff who returned the singer’s stolen French bulldogs in 2021 sought the $500,000 reward offered, plus $1.5 million in additional damages, alleging she suffered emotional distress.
Detectives determined that McBride was in a relationship with the father of one of the men accused of assaulting Gaga’s dog walker, Ryan Fischer, who was shot in the chest, choked and beaten during the dognapping. McBride was later arrested.
May 29 is also the day that the Bixler lawsuit (filed by Danny Masterson’s victims) will argue for leave to file their second amended complaint in Judge Upinder Kalra’s courtroom, in order to add another plaintiff (actress Tricia Vessey) and racketeering allegations against Scientology.
So May 29 is going to be a very busy day here at the Bunker! We’re also watching what happens on April 16 when Jane Doe’s forced marriage lawsuit will hear Scientology’s motion for arbitration in Judge Robert Broadbelt’s courtroom.
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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
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The excitement of the upper level materials in the early days Electrified us young gullible war babies.
And as more materials were released like NOTS the bridge to total freedom became the only game in town. All of Hubbards schemes contributed to the idea that Hubbard had the true SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE.
For me there is no speculation any more regarding Hubbard being a computing psychopath. He stands head and shoulders above other cult leaders in his development of a true mind bending organization that fully brainwashes it members into full cognitive dissonance.
"But I wonder if the real reason had to do with maintaining a monopoly for monetary gain." Wonder no more my Bunkeroos, yes it is about Lron's 'monopoly'. You can't sell a 'mystery sandwich' without the 'mystery'. I love Bruce's writing and his knowledge of the way $cientology is sold is of great import to anyone looking at the Clampire. Maybe those who guard secret government papers could take a page out of the $cieno playbook?