Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of BeliefFriday, February 06, 2015In 2013, Bob spoke to author Lawrence Wright about his book, "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief," which delves deep into the history and practices of the Church, including its hostility toward reporters and strong ties with Hollywood. With the debut of the film version of his book at Sundance last week, we revisit the conversation...
BOB GARFIELD: You're not the first journalist to delve into Scientology. The St. Petersburg Times now the Tampa Bay Times, did it. The Los Angeles Times did it, Time Magazine and an author, Paulette Cooper.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: She was the very first to do an exposé of Scientology in the middle seventies, and the Church harassed her. They framed her for threatening the President with assassination and threatening the Church with a bomb threat. It was all phony but they got her indicted. And it wasn't until the FBI raided the Church in 1977 and found a file called Operation Freakout that they discovered that there was a plan all along to drive Paulette Cooper insane or to get her locked up and imprisoned.
BOB GARFIELD: Operation Freakout, the dirty tricks and the harassment of Cooper, foreshadowed another initiative of a breathtaking or a stomach-turning scope. Tell me about Operation Snow White.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: L. Ron Hubbard was paranoid about the information that the government was amassing on Scientology at the time, so he ordered his wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, who was in charge of what was called the Guardian's Office - that was their sort of secret police and CIA - to infiltrate organs of American government and foreign governments, and also Washington Post, other newspapers. They infiltrated the IRS, the FBI, the Justice Department. They infiltrated the American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations.
BOB GARFIELD: With moles, members as employees.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Yeah, more than 5,000 people were employed in this effort to gain control of all the pertinent information about Scientology, either steal it or change it or just bring it to the awareness of the Church.
BOB GARFIELD: Throughout the book, you employ neutral language.
You keep your cool, even when you're writing about David Miscavige, who comes off as a violent sociopath. [LAUGHS] And you’re equally detached-sounding when you write about L. Ron Hubbard himself, despite the lies and the paranoia that you also describe. But there is one character in the book who just can't escape your opprobrium, and that's Tom Cruise. [CLIP/MUSIC UP AND UNDER]:
ANNOUNCER: Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise, Scientologist.
TOM CRUISE: I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist and it’s something that you have to earn.
[END CLIP]
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: The Church was always looking for an exemplary figure that would represent Scientology to the world, a shining celebrity that would give credibility and attention to the Church. He's their symbol. He’s the most important Scientologist, except L. Ron Hubbard, there ever has been. He's their main pitch man. It’s his close friend, David Miscavige, who runs the Church. It’s Tom Cruise, who benefits materially from the labor of these impoverished Sea Org workers who have built him an airplane hangar for his airplane collection and handcrafted a limousine for him and surround his household staff and cook his dinners.
BOB GARFIELD: And, if you're right, pimping him a girlfriend.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: You know, he was breaking up with
Penelope Cruz and he let it be known that uh, he wanted another girlfriend, and they auditioned a number of different Scientology women, and they came upon a very attractive Iranian-American. Her name was
Nazanin Boniadi, and they told her that they had a mission for her. And they put her in the Celebrity Center, away from her family, and they took her shopping in Beverly Hills for a new wardrobe. They fixed her hair. They fixed her teeth. And then they took her to New York. There she found the object of her mission was Tom Cruise. She moved in with him, lived with him for a while and then went in with him in his hideaway in Telluride. David Miscavige and his wife came, and one night they were talking, and Miscavige speaks in a kind of rapid Philadelphia brogue and she couldn't quite understand him. And so she, a couple of times, asked him to repeat himself.
And the next day everybody was inflamed with her, the way she treated the leader of the Church. And after that, Cruise decided to have nothing more to do with her, and she went off to Clearwater, Florida, the spiritual headquarters.
She was made to clean out a garbage dumpster and clean a public toilet with a toothbrush.
BOB GARFIELD: You observe in the book that the fate of the Church of Scientology hinges on its staying in good graces with the Internal Revenue Service, which gets to determine whether an organization is a bona fide tax-exempt religion. At the moment, the IRS is copacetic with David Miscavige and penal punishments and harassment and, and violence?
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: That tax exemption was granted in 1993. The Church of Scientology at the time was a billion dollars in arrears on its past taxes. It just decided not to pay taxes. And it had to get a tax exemption or it would go out of business. So they launched 2400 lawsuits against the IRS and individual agents. They had private investigators trailing agents to see who drank too much, who was fooling around, and they published personal stories smearing the character of people that were working for the agency.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, it’s one thing to bully an author and another thing to bully apostates. But the IRS, the IRS?
How do you man-handle the IRS?LAWRENCE WRIGHT: It’s amazing to think about that this rather small organization could bring the IRS to heel. But they really were intimidated by Scientology. So the deal was that those lawsuits would stop and those personal stories would stop, and the Church gained its exemption. And once that happened, the vast protections of the First Amendment encompass the Church and its behavior...http://www.onthemedia.org/story/265094- ... ranscript/The Scientologists and the Film Critics
