Dear Tom,
It's time for you to start talking publicly about Scientology again.
Your religion is in serious trouble.
In 2005, you ended a longtime policy of not talking about the church by suddenly bringing it up in interviews. Most memorable, of course, was the way you challenged Matt Lauer, telling him that you had a superior understanding of the evils of psychiatry because of your Scientology training. Some wondered if you'd gone off the deep end, especially after the episode involving Oprah's couch. Soon enough, however, you clammed up about Scientology again. But in 2008, a video of you the church had made four years earlier surfaced, and it had a huge effect, both on your reputation and the church's. For better or worse, your strange words about, for example, how only Scientologists can help out at the scene of a car accident cemented in the minds of many that you were not only the truest of true believers in L. Ron Hubbard's unusual religion, but that you had become, in fact, its public face.
And that's why, today, you must come forward and speak for a church in crisis.
Tom, last week I was in San Antonio, and I saw with my own eyes the sworn court testimony of someone you once knew and respected.
Her name is Debbie Cook, and for 17 years she was "Captain FSO" -- the top executive who ran Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, Florida, which is called "Flag Land Base." Back in 1975, when you were still a Catholic kid growing up in Ottawa, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard got tired of running Scientology from a yacht in the Mediterranean, and moved operations from his "flagship" the Apollo to Clearwater, taking over the old Fort Harrison Hotel and many other places in town. With "Flag" now on land, the upper-level spiritual training that Hubbard was delivering on the ship could now take place at the Florida base.
Debbie Cook beckons members to "Flag"
Scientologists -- including celebrities -- save up to come to Flag to this day, and it's quite an operation, with the Flag Service Organization, FSO, employing about a thousand Sea Org members and a budget of over $100 million annually. I'm told it's something of a miracle that Debbie Cook managed to stay in her position running the place for 17 years. I guess it's no wonder that over time images of Debbie welcoming people to Flag in the church's magazine articles and internal videos came to represent for many church members their aspirations for what Scientology could be.
In other words, if for the outside public you became the face of Scientology, inside the church, it was Debbie's that came to mind for many.
That is, until 2006, when Debbie was suddenly called away from her job to the church's international headquarters -- known as "Int Base," a 500-acre compound in the desert east of Los Angeles.
As Debbie testified in court last week, Scientology's leader, David Miscavige -- best man at your last wedding, Tom -- needed her not only to keep running Flag, but also to take care of pressing matters at Int Base, in England, and in Spain. Running a 1,000-person operation in Florida while she was off taking care of other church emergencies was so stressful, she testified, she had time to eat only every other day, and to grab sleep only every other day as well.
I know, it's hard to believe, but then you probably already know that members of the Sea Org are a group of people accustomed to nearly inhuman deprivations. I mean, by this time, some 23 years after you first joined the church, Tom, you've been around Sea Org members and know that they work up to 100 hours a week, grabbing only three or four hours of sleep a night, with never a day off, or time to see their families. These are dedicated folks -- so dedicated, they join the Sea Org at a young age and sign contracts promising to work for Scientology for the next billion years. We wrote earlier about how some Sea Org members, making only about $50 dollars a week, helped customize a motorcycle for you, transformed an SUV, and also tricked out an airplane hangar that you own.
Debbie Cook was another of those exhausted, sleep-deprived, and very poorly paid workers who gave their all, year in and year out. But now, at Int Base in California, she found herself doing things that called for something else besides stamina: She was made to take part in a bizarre prison project.
I know this because I've talked to someone who was already in that strange prison -- known as "The Hole" -- when Debbie arrived. As we wrote earlier, Mike Rinder, who at the time held the post as the church's top spokesman, had been sent to the odd office-jail for reasons so trivial, he couldn't even remember them.
For a story last month, I asked Rinder to describe The Hole...
"It was the two double-wide trailers that were called the CMO Int building. It consisted of one main conference room with cubicles around it, and other office spaces, and a men's and a women's bathroom. That's all it was."
"Where did you sleep?"
"On the floor. Under a desk."
"For two years?"
"Yep."
"And Debbie Cook showed up one day and made you march down to the lake and jump in it?"
"It was October or November. Yeah, it was cold. She was on orders," Rinder says.
Later, Tom, Debbie herself was put in The Hole. How she got there was actually pretty cinematic, so maybe you'll appreciate it. Here's how she described it in court last week, while I was taking notes...
I was at the international base. Mr. Miscavige was not there, but I was supposed to be doing numerous things at the Int base at his direction. I was on the phone to him every day, sometimes several times a day. And there were certain things he was unhappy about, that weren't done to his satisfaction. Anyway, I was on the phone to him, somebody was pounding on the door. I was on the phone, so I couldn't answer it...Somebody pried the window open, two big guys came in. Mr. Miscavige said on the phone, "Are they there?" Yes, I said, they are. And he said, "Goodbye."
Apparently Mr. Miscavige has a flair for the dramatic.
The two gentlemen escorted Debbie to the same office trailers that Rinder had described. For the next seven weeks, it would be her home. In court, she gave a pretty vivid description of her time there, Tom. Like Rinder, she mentioned that there was nowhere to sleep but on the ground. She remembered also that there was an infestation of ants, and in a bid to punish these fallen executives even further, she testified, Miscavige had the air conditioning turned off as desert temperatures climbed past 100 degrees.
Debbie Cook testifying on Thursday in a San Antonio court
But the physical environment wasn't the only thing that made The Hole a living hell, Tom. Debbie testified that there was psychological terror too, in the form of mass confessions that the residents of The Hole had to take part in. Debbie testified to one case of forced confessions that we had written about earlier, and which brings up Scientology's troubling history as an organization infused with homophobia.
If it works for them God Bless them.