[Today’s guest post is by Bruce Hines.]
The year was 1993 or 1994. It was a brief segment of my 24-year career in Scientology’s “Sea Organization.” The location of my post then was on the “Int Base” (the international headquarters of the entire Scientology network) near Hemet, California. The location of this 500-acre property was top secret in that strange world, known to only a small percentage of Scientologists everywhere.
However, at that time I was spending most of my time in Los Angeles, which was about 90 miles away. Usually I was in LA Monday through Friday, then drove back up to the Int Base Friday night, and back to LA again in the wee hours between Sunday and Monday. Because of my close proximity to Scientology-related things in LA, I sometimes was tasked with matters that had gotten the attention of some people in top management.
So, one day I was instructed to go see a lady named Jenny. She was a very pleasant person, tall and slender and blond and attractive. She was an Int Base staff member who was on a special “project” in LA. It is the nature of this project that makes this little tale interesting. Some may remember that Tony has written things about work being done by Sea Org members to benefit Tom Cruise personally. One such story was about John Brousseau customizing an airplane hangar and other things. In a similar vein, Jenny was the person in charge (the Project I/C) of work to do renovations and decorating in a house in the LA area belonging to Cruise.
A project in the Sea Organization is a very formal thing. “Project Orders” get drawn up and reviewed and corrected and tweaked and finally approved by some high-up person. Since this project had to do with Cruise, the approving person would have been a senior member of the Religious Technology Center. I was not privy to those details, but I’d be willing to bet that David Miscavige and his wife, Shelly, were involved. The orders list out detailed tasks and other “targets” that are aimed at accomplishing the purpose of the project.
Qualified people then get selected to go on the project. They must be “not in ethics trouble,” have abilities and/or training related to the actions to be performed on the project, and have a record of having been productive in similar situations. They would have to receive and pass a “Security Check” (a kind of interrogation conducted while the person is connected to an electronic device) related to the project. They would have to carefully study the Project Orders and then pass an oral examination. They would have to build “Clay Demonstrations,” using playdough, showing the key tasks to be accomplished. They would then receive a special briefing and get “fired” (sent out) to begin the project.
I don’t know how many people were on this particular project in LA. But one could assume that it was at least three and probably more. While on a project, which might be expected to take weeks or months to complete, the person in charge would have to send “Daily Reports” (DRs) at the end of each night to a person at the Int Base responsible for “running” the project (the “Project Ops”).
These reports would go via an internal email system. A reply from the Project Ops would have to be received by the Project I/C before commencing the next day’s work. These replies gave instructions intended to keep the project members on task and making progress in the expected time frame.
The members of the project, including Jenny, all had posts on the Int Base. But while working on the project they were forbidden from doing anything related to their post. They could only work on the project. Some poor souls who worked in the areas of the project members’ actual posts were expected to pick up the slack, in addition to doing their own posts. The project members had to write up “hat turnovers” that laid out the things they were leaving behind that had to be taken care of by someone else.
Jenny’s actual post was in the “Commodore’s Messenger Organization for Golden Era Productions” (CMO Gold, which was separate from CMO Int). Jenny’s last name had been Gaynor prior to getting married. I don’t know if she is still in the Sea Org. In any event, it was unusual that I was ordered to get involved in some project. It wasn’t that I did any of the work that the project was doing. It was needed that I do some auditing on Jenny. She had broken her wrist from a minor accident working on Tom Cruise’s house. She had a cast on her arm when I arrived to see her. That state of affairs would not be a big deal in most normal organizations. She could still type the DRs, supervise the work being done, relay orders, and do other project work while her arm healed, right? That break would heal in a matter of weeks, after all.
However, in the Scientology world as laid out by L. Ron Hubbard, this was a serious situation. You see, it meant that Jenny was a “Potential Trouble Source.” She was “PTS.” That meant, in the “technology” of Scientology, that she was liable to make mistakes, foul things up, have accidents and injuries, get sick, and even take on characteristics of a “Suppressive Person.” And she was in charge of an activity that was making changes to Tom Cruise’s private property — as ordered by David Miscavige in order to impress him or woo him or something. Heaven forbid that anything got damaged.
Mr. Hubbard wrote a lot of things about the subject of “PTSness.” He wrote more on that topic than he did on almost anything. A person can be “Type I PTS,” “Type II PTS,” “Type III PTS,” “Type A PTS,” “Pretended PTS,” or “False PTS.” There are detailed descriptions of all of these categories, each with their own handlings, which can be relatively simple or quite complex.
The problem was that these supposed cures for PTSness did not work. That’s why, in my opinion, over many years Hubbard had to keep coming up with new explanations for PTS phenomena and what to do about them. Any person alive can occasionally make mistakes or have a minor accident or get ill. This includes all Scientologists, regardless of whatever “handlings” for PTSness they had undergone previously. It follows then that people who have been in Scientology for quite a while have experienced numerous attempts to deal with their “PTSness.” It can get quite messy. I remember withholding that I had caught a cold so that I wouldn’t have to go through being dealt with as a PTS.
Anyway, this was Jenny’s plight. I went to Cruise’s house where she and the other project members had been working. I don’t remember where that house was nor much else about it. I went in the evening when it was dark. I audited her in a small room near the front entrance and didn’t see the rest of the house. I gave her some “assists” (various auditing processes that were supposed to help her wrist heal faster). I gave her a “PTS interview,” which had the purpose of finding out details of her PTS situation. I believe I went there twice. I made written records that went into her auditing folder and then to some “Case Supervisor” who was located “uplines” (at the Int Base). The Case Supervisor would then have to decide what to do about this PTS situation.
My involvement ended there. I don’t know what happened to Jenny. She may have been “recalled” and replaced with another Project I/C. I also don’t know what work was being done at that house. I recall some mention of difficulties with large furniture getting moved and arranged. But the project would not have just been dealing with furniture. It is possible that it included managing outside contractors, though that is just a guess on my part. But one thing is for sure. There were an awful lot of Sea Org man-hours expended in a grand effort to win over Tom Cruise. There were many such efforts over many years. Anyone familiar with the goings-on at the Int Base would know that only David Miscavige could be behind those activities. It seems to have paid off.
— Bruce Hines
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It's mind-boggling to consider the depth and intensity of the suffering and abuse that scientology staff and Sea Org members experience every day, quite routinely...It's just "the way it is". It's all wrapped up in such extreme, dire, utterly portentous seriousness and urgency.
What a crock of stanky, janky shit.
Great report, though; thanks, Bruce!