The OT 7s turned away at the gates: A Scientology blunder that reveals so much

After our recent special series about Scientology’s most secretive subsidiary, the Church of Spiritual Technology (part 1, part 2, part 3), we heard from an unlikely source about CST’s bizarre secrecy.

It was one of our longtime friends in the ex-Scientology community, someone who has had us over to their home in Denver and who we first wrote about a full decade ago.

Cindy Plahuta had a long career in Scientology and experienced a lot of different things. But one of the strangest happened in the mountains above Los Angeles.

In late 1997, Cindy and her then-husband moved from West Hollywood to Lake Arrowhead, an alpine community in the San Bernardino Mountains that circles the lake.

They didn’t know anyone, so one way they got to know some of their new neighbors was a real classic: They joined a local bowling league.

Among the other bowlers they got to know was a 16-year-old boy who lived in Crestline, another mountain town about 10 miles to the west. And because they bowled together, they would offer rides, and the young man ended up in their house.

When he was there, he noticed they had a copy of Dianetics on a shelf, and he asked them if they were with “that Scientology place.”

Which place, they asked?

As far as they knew, Cindy and her husband had moved to a community without any Scientology facilities at all, even though they were both very dedicated members. In fact, they were both “OT 7” at the time, referring to “Operating Thetan Level Seven,” perhaps the most difficult of the arcane auditing levels that go up to OT 8.

Their young friend explained that the local newspaper had done a story about a Scientology location near the hamlet of Twin Peaks, which was roughly halfway between Lake Arrowhead and Crestline, and that the place was digging a vault and local residents might hear noise from the construction as dynamite was used.

Cindy said they had no idea what he was talking about. But as OT 7s, they felt that if there was a Scientology operation in the area, they should really present themselves.

Their young friend pointed out where the facility was on their next drive, and they made a note of the location.

“The next morning, we went over there,” Cindy says.

They were OT 7s, she remembers thinking. Surely any Scientology location would welcome them.

“We went to the compound, and you know it has this guard shack. There was an intercom there, and we talked to Jane,” Cindy remembers.

Jane McNairn, who is listed as secretary in Church of Spiritual Technology corporate papers, came to the guard booth to talk to them.

Cindy says they explained that they had recently moved into the area, that they were OT 7, that they didn’t know about this place, but that they were ready to help out if they were needed.

She remembers that she really wasn’t prepared for the reception they got from Jane.

“She told us we were not to tell anyone about that place,” she says, and they were told to go back home. Then, later that afternoon, McNairn showed up at their house, to make sure they got the message.

“Then, a few days later, she called us and asked us if we had run into any Germans,” Cindy says.

At the time, Scientology had been the subject of a couple of documentaries by German news crews, where a battle brewing between the church and the German government had been a big story. The German crews had gone to the trouble of paying for flybys in airplanes over secretive Scientology bases.

“If you see any planes, any Germans, call me right away,” Jane told her, Cindy remembers. “But we never ran into a German or any planes.”

She says she also heard from another, even higher official in the church, who told her (good-naturedly) that she wasn’t supposed to know about the compound.

But she wondered, why weren’t they supposed to know about it if it had been written up in the local newspaper?

Later, of course, Cindy learned all about how CST operates its vaults in several places and is maybe the most secretive of Scientology’s operations, keeping the whereabouts of its compounds even from other Scientologists. And the facility that Cindy visited in 1997? Eight years later in 2005, we believe, it became the home for Shelly Miscavige, and has been ever since.

A couple of years after her visit to the compound, Cindy was going through a divorce and was spending less time in Lake Arrowhead, and she even began considering joining Scientology’s Sea Org. However, this not only involved signing the Sea Org’s billion-year contract, but also filling out a comprehensive “life history” which would included being interrogated on an E-meter.

Scientologists believe that the E-meter can literally read their minds, and so Cindy figured there was no way she’d be able to hold back that she’d stumbled on the secret base at Twin Peaks, and that she’d been told to keep quiet about it.

She called McNairn and even drove back up to the compound to talk with her again at the guard shack.

“I showed her the life history I had to fill out. But she said, no, you can’t write that down. No one, not even in the Sea Org, knows about this place.”

Cindy never did join the Sea Org, but while she was contemplating it, she worked out of an office at PAC base, the big blue complex in Los Angeles, where she was a public Scientologist helping to raise money for the Super Power project in Clearwater. She did that from 2001 to 2003 and sent us a few photos from that time, which we’ve posted here.

While doing her fundraising, she met Matt Plahuta. They married and she moved to Colorado in 2003.

By then, she says, the fundraising had begun to raise her doubts about Scientology. “I was being pushed to join the Sea Org, but the more I raised money, the more I saw,” she says.

Like so many other Scientologists, when “The Basics” were released in 2007, it contributed to her growing disillusion with the organization. (Leader David Miscavige re-released books and lectures by L. Ron Hubbard, expecting all Scientologists to buy new versions of books they already owned, and at about $3,000 a set.)

Cindy says she left the church for good two years later, in 2009, and began making contact with other people who had left in recent years, like Mike Rinder and the Headleys.

Then came the incident that we first wrote about involving Cindy. In 2010, she shared with her daughter Kara Landry what she had heard about top executives like Heber Jentzsch in “The Hole,” a hellish prison for people who had fallen out of favor of Scientology leader David Miscavige.

Sadly, Cindy’s daughter responded by turning her in to Scientology “ethics,” and then disconnecting from her.

Cindy hasn’t heard a word from her daughter ever since.

Meanwhile, she also received stunning “disconnection” letters from friends, which we also published.

We were grateful to Cindy for giving us those insights into Scientology’s toxic policy that rips apart families.

But she also provided another crucial detail about Scientology’s prevarications and double-talk.

In 2016, after learning that the lawsuit by Luis and Rocio Garcia had been forced into Scientology’s “religious arbitration” by federal Judge James Whittemore, Cindy wrote her own letter to Scientology’s “International Justice Chief” pointing out that she and Matt had signed similar contracts with the church that had doomed the Garcia lawsuit.

Cindy pointed out, however, that she welcomed the opportunity to have an arbitration over the large amounts of money that she had donated over the years, and that she now wanted back. So, following Scientology’s policy, she formally asked IJC Mike Ellis for an arbitration.

She never got a reply.

She pointed this out in another letter to Judge Whittemore, and we are glad to be reminded of it. Cindy Plahuta, with her letter to the IJC (which you can see here), proved that Scientology’s “religious arbitration” policy is merely a legal strategy that the church uses to derail lawsuits and nothing more.

We really owe Cindy a debt for her fortitude taking on the Church of Scientology and its secrecy and unethical behavior.

But we can try to help her out in a small way: She let us know that she’s launching a new YouTube cooking channel, and we encourage you to give it a look!

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Chris Shelton is going Straight Up and Vertical

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