"If you really want to enslave people, tell them that you're going to give them total freedom." -- L. Ron Hubbard

In the language of Scientologists, the above information reflects what they include in their "Dead Agent Packs" --- dossiers of all the dirt they dig up on people critical of their "religion." Often they disseminate damaging information like this to the friends, family, landlords, and employers of anyone who dares speak of---or worse, publish --- anything derogatory about the "church." So what I'm doing here is Dead Agenting myself before we begin, beating them to the punch.

Recently I spent two weeks undergoing an initiation to Scientology for this magazine. My experiences constituted only the beginnings of the beginnings of what this cult is all about, but it was enough to leave me strung-out with fear, watching my back, and wondering where the next element of harrassment was going to come from.

Scientologists don't like it if you leave. Even if you leave quietly.

There is a saying adherents fondly quote: "The way out is the way through." Deep thoughts passed on by decade-dead megalomaniacal psychopath Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, in whose writings church followers find a labyrinth so complex, so full of elitist jargon and weird science that those trapped in it cannot see that the way out is the way through --- the fucking door.

So, of course I had to join...

"Is anything bothering you?" asks a fat, bespectacled, pock-marked dweeb named Richard.

"Yeah, Dick," I mutter, mentholated cigarette dangling from my lips.

"I wanna quit smoking."

"Scientology can help you with that," assures Richard in scripted mantra, through what I'd soon understand to be the trademark Scientology sweat-on-the-upper-lip smirk. Richard then tries to sell me a paperback copy of Dianetics --- the Scientologist's bible of "The Modern Science of Mental Health," written by Hubbard, the self-proclaimed source of all things Scientological. I balk on the book and get cracking on the testing instead.

The tests take an hour, during which Richard, a 20-year Scientology veteran, performs menial janitorial labor around the center. My results come in with a "very good," respectably high IQ of 130. My personality profile, however, falls deep into the "unacceptable state," with my rock-bottom scores indicating me as being heavily "depressed," "unstable," and "nervous," and with a near complete "lack of accord" thrown into the psychotic soup for good measure. Naturally, that measure would be my willingness to sign up for the Hubbard Dianetics Seminar at the low, low cost of $125 (credit cards accepted). It is a bargain that nets me a beautiful, hard-bound copy of Dianetics, as well as a paint-by-numbers style workbook.

With assurance from Richard that "Scientology could help" repair my totally fucked-up personality, we shuttle over to the menacing, big, blue Hubbard Foundation. Along the way, Richard regales me with stock-in-trade anecdotes of how Scientology is responsible for the successes of Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Nicole Kidman, Kirstie Alley.

Isaac Hayes even lives at the Celebrity Centre Manor Hotel, for crying out loud.

In a registration office at the Foundation I meet Ramaldo Flores --- a slick, six-year veteran who, glancing at my low test scores, deems me "suicidal."

"Not to worry, though," he soothes. "You're in the right place, with the right technology."

Acting quickly, Ramaldo ushers me up one flight to a classroom where I meet my supervisor --- a brutally clean-cut robot named Phil with that Scientology smirk tattooed on his sweaty upper lip. Turns out that Phil had "read Dianetics in the Navy about 20 years ago, and after taking time to understand every word, Scientology changed {my} life."

Funny, he still looked like a sailor.

After devoting only five hours of my life to this cult, somehow I have already signed my name, address, and phone number to all kinds of seemingly irrelevant paper work. Tomorrow, I am informed, my coursework will begin. In a collegiate daze, I amble out across the parking lot, noticing troops of zoned-out, militarily outfitted men and women marching around acres of Scientology real estate with a malevolent glare in their eyes as jarring as the afternoon sun.

Scientology may be one of the most dangerous and well-financed cults in existence. In less than five decades, it has crafted its own strange brand of mind-control techniques and cultivated a security and intelligence apparatus called the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), which now rivals those of numerous developed countries. Scientology also relies on the obedient labor of both grunt-level workers and the 3,000-plus elite staffers who work for what the cult calls its Sea Organization. These maggot legions actually dress in pseudo-seaman's garb, including dark blue suits adorned with ribbons and nautical lanyards, and hold ranks such as captain and ensign. This naval obsession stems from Hubbard himself, who was known as The Commodore.

If you're already thinking "wacko," something on the far side of Captain Crunch, wait --- it gets better.

According to Scientology (and stemming directly from Hubbard's "vision"), 75 million years ago, an evil ruler named Xenu implanted "thetans," or spirits, in volcanoes on the planet Teegeeack (known more recently as Earth). All humans are made up of these thetans, which are basically good but terribly misguided little buggers. The problem, you see, is that things called engrams, which come from early traumas, cause us spiritual pain and unhappiness. We all got 'em; we all gotta get rid of 'em.

So what do we do? Simple counseling sessions with something called an E-meter --- a crude lie-detector-type device that Scientologists claim measures mental energy, locating and ridding you of troublesome engrams. Called auditing, this process isn't cheap. At rates that rise rapidly to $1,000 an hour, you can become what's known as an Operating Thetan, or OT.

Still with me? Of course, Scientology doesn't stop there. Hubbard, in his deluded wisdom, devised ever more steps for the disenfranchised to progress through, including eight echelons of spiritual development, denoted as Operating Thetans I through VIII, along the "Bridge" to total bankruptcy. Costs in this progressive scheme can sometimes reach into six figures.

"I'm Mark," I say.

"Ahh! Mark Ebner!" he exclaims. Now how in hell does Kelp know who I am? Could it have been those forms I signed? Hmmm...

Phil dispatches me down to a screening room to view videotapes on the life and times of L. Ron and the process of Dianetics auditing --- whereby the bad, bad "reactive mind" is diminished toward the state of "clear"; where, as Hubbard would have it, we all function in the pleasurable state of using only our "analytic minds" to the utmost, free of all those silly, annoying engrams, or mental images of painful experiences.

Yawn. At this point, I'll take painful experiences for a ticket out of here, but. . .

Back with Phil, I must conjure up tales of my reactive mind at play and record them on a work sheet, then duly turn it over to him. Which of course means that my painful scenarios now become the property of Scientology, Inc., no doubt to be used against me later.

If you think about it, how clever in design is this "religion"? Only by confessing painful, personal information can you hope to be helped.

At the same time, of course, you are divulging private facts about yourself to organizations connected with people who will have absolutely no qualms about using them against you should you cross them. The Commodore sailed a wacky ship, but the course he navigated seems ingenious at times.

Despite Scientology claims that it's not hypnosis, auditing assuredly mirrors the hypnotic induction therapy I've received in the past. In 10 easy steps, the preclear runs through traumatic experiences in his or her life, repeating them aloud to the auditor again and again, until they reach a state of "cheerfulness" about them. How can this work? Try saying the word "ball" 50 times aloud, over and over, until it doesn't mean anything to you anymore.

During our session, Rob admits to me that he "really enjoys" these auditing experiences. Again and again, he insists on relating tales of the humiliation he felt as a fat kid on the baseball field. By this time I am praying only that I don't get paired off with a dork like him in future sessions. Prayer --- that's the ticket, but they don't encourage that in this 'religion.'

Now I get to audit her, acting as though I were one of them. Almost immediately, the woman begins crying over an incident that happened in an airport or something; then later became nearly hysterical over a sister who pissed her entire family off by deciding she wanted to be a flight attendant.

Most counseling sessions involve some surrender of will. Likewise all religions. Where Scientology moves from dubious to dangerous is in the fierce possessiveness it shows for its members.

Is Scientology a cult? "I'd say so," says the outspoken Robert Vaughn Young, who ran Hubbard's public relations during his 20 years in Scientology. "One of the primary characteristics {of a cult} is something that excludes dialogue or any definitions outside of the parameters of its own system of information. Hubbard said it was a 'scientific method' that could be tested, but if you say you want to test his method, they consider you to be attacking."

The Creed of the Church of Scientology, written by Hubbard in 1954, states:

We of the Church believe... That all men have inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others.

You are free to utter upon the opinions of others, but you are not free to lie. So they would say, 'This is a lie, therefore you are not free to utter it, and now I am going to sue you."

Scientology may litigate more, and more aggressively, than any religious outfit in the world. The OSA operatives harass people via a Fair Game Policy (which Scientologists claim they discontinued, but is alive and well), which licenses them to, in Hubbard's words, lie, trick, sue, and/or destroy anyone who has been declared "fair game."

After a Time cover story about Scientology ran in June 1991, the church not only sued the magazine for libel, it also sued former member Steven Fishman and his Florida psychiatrist for $1 million each for "defamatory" comments they'd made that appeared in the article.

While the $416 million suit against Time is pending [as of the date of this essay], attorneys for Fishman came up with an ingenious way to fight back: at a Christmas party held at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, several celebrities --- including Juliette Lewis, Kelly Preston, and Isaac Hayes --- were subpoenaed for depositions to be given in the case. Not long after, Scientology lawyers dropped their suit. The Time case goes to trial in January.

Meanwhile, the church is doing legal battle with alienated former members who have been posting on the Internet copyrighted teachings and damning testimonials about the church's darker side. Young, always active on the hugely popular Internet newsgroup, alt.religion.scientology, predicts the Internet "is going to be to Scientology what Vietnam was to the United States.... This will be their Waterloo in the end," says Young.

So..more subconscious subterfuge, at least until tomorrow.

With the afternoon free for me to be me, I decide to get away from the mind matter of Dianetics and explore the Scientology angle at --- what better place --- the Scientology Celebrity Centre.

Those who have the most freedom in the organization --- enjoying comfort levels and privileges made possible by the cheap labor of grassroots members --- are the celebrities of Scientology. The list runs from the obvious to the truly absurd in personality. The humorless Tom Cruise, workout buddy of Scientology chairman David Miscavige, cuts the perfect Rondroid profile: humorless, elitist, defensive, basically emotionless, and angry. Cruise's past and present wives, Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman, are also Scientologists. Said to be beyond the level of OTIII, here is what Cruise has mastered off the set:

After achieving the state of "clear," joining the ranks of about 50,000 who came before, he is supposedly immune to illness and free of his reactive mind. As an advanced operating thetan (with his godlike abilities fully restored) he can now create life; he can create universes; he has cause over matter, energy, space, and time; and he is free of the bonds of the physical --- functioning totally on the spiritual.

(Question: If Cruise is all that, then why couldn't he create a hit out of Far and Away? Just asking.)

Other high-profile celebrities with Scientology ties include Priscilla Presley and Lisa Marie Presley Jackson, Anne Archer, Sonny Bono, and Chick Corea. Some may find it an uneasy relationship. Scientology needs its celebrities --- Hubbard called them Opinion Leaders --- and will go to lengths to keep them in the fold. When the carrot doesn't suffice, Scientologists know where to find the stick.

In the suit against Time source Steve Fishman, Scientology's former head of security, Andre Tabayoyon, filed a 60-page deposition declaring that cult leaders keep special files on the stars that contain supposedly confidential information derived during auditing sessions. However, he went on, "the contents of such folders have been culled and used against people. . .{as they could be against} John Travolta {and others} should they ever attempt to leave the Scientology organization."

The deposition was submitted to the court as part of a dispute over who should pay costs after Scientology withdrew its suit. The Church of Scientology submitted its own declarations, denying the contents of the affidavit and attacking Tabayoyon's credibility and knowledge of events.

But sources interviewed by SPY confirm Tabayoyon's depiction of a dichotomous world at Scientology's security-obsessed camp in California, Gilman Hot Springs. He points to celebrities' receiving perks like an apartment with a $150,000 gym and private chef; a Mercedes convertible, two motorcycles, and a motor home; and a $200,000 celebrity-use-only tennis court.

So celebs are given special treatment. So a couple hundred thou doesn't sound like a huge expenditure for an organization that is raking in untold millions annually. Except where do you think the money comes from? From legions of lost souls who go ahead and shell out every dime they can squeeze from their credit cards. Not only that, but who do you think does construction and upkeep on these celebrity digs? Yep, those same scrubs.

On the other side of camps, like the one at Gilman, out-of-standing members toil in the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF) to work off their Scientology sins. This practice of using labor as punishment --- either for breaking the rules or failing to meet work quotas --- is widespread in Scientology. Banishment into the RPF can last several months, during which time members may not speak unless spoken to; must perform menial, often degrading tasks; subsist on a diet of rice and beans; endure terrible living conditions; and wear armbands denoting their lowly status.

Robert Vaughn Young served 14 months. "It's brutal simply because of the hard work you have to go through. There are people over 50 in there, 65 even --- working for a few days around the clock, which we often did. I suppose if I had been 25 and in the military l wouldn't have minded it so much physically. But, in fact, if you're working slow, you're admonished and undergo additional penalty even for the fact that you just can't do it. They would say, 'Don't give me excuses.

Just make it go right.' For the life of me, I can't figure out why I was being driven to the edge, other than as a point of control.'' Tabayoyon, in his sworn declaration, charges that RPFers at Gilman helped build apartment cottages for use by the likes of Cruise, Travolta, Alley, Edgar Winter, Priscilla Presley, and other Scientology celebrities. Even more frightening is how Scientology has taken the industry of celebrity and pitted it against the entertainment business in an effort to influence public opinion. Last summer, for example, Presley Jackson called MTV and threatened to block its use of any of her husband's or father's work if it broadcast a negative segment on Scientology. MTV ran the story, but watered it down.

The bookstore clerk with the fixed stare gladly escorts me through the mansion's ground floor to the registrar's office, where I am greeted with vichyssoise warmth by Rachelle Shay.

She offers a confusing explanation of the difference between Scientology and Dianetics (Scientology being the tech-no-spiritual realm, Dianetics the realm of the mind). Then she guides me through the Purification Rundown, a daily regimen of vitamins (the niacin, calcium, and magnesium cocktails), and oral shots of olive oil to loosen my fatty tissue, along with a program of running and sauna sweating, where it is suggested that I may experience acid flashbacks --- sign me up! --- and recurring "sunburns" manifesting the release of residual drugs and radiation from my system.

Rachelle hand-holds me as we pass through a vaguely comical underground "French" village, or what I would imagine as a downscale version of La Petite Monde at Euro Disney --- complete with a tiny theater. The Purification area is like a small health club with --- my god! --- women and children lining up for potions and being escorted into saunas. Vichy, France, ring a bell? I'll take "Collaboration with the Nazis" for $2,000, Alex.

Back upstairs, Rachelle encourages me to sign up for the Purif now.

Total cost of the program, with discounts: $1,790. Clear body, clear mind, clear spirit... clear bank account? The hard sell has begun.

I tell Rachelle that my savings are prudently reserved, not available for such an outlay of cash. No problem! She makes a play for my credit cards, but they too are maxed out. No problem! She simply gets on the hammer to a numbers guy named Nick, who instructs her on which of my cards will be easiest to get increases on, and she even dials my MasterCard 800 number for me.

Following instructions, my card turns gold, and altough I can use my new fortune now --- I hang up and tell her I won't be receiving the new card for a week. No problem! She strongly suggests that I put the balance on my American Express card now, and pay it off later, with my newly established credit line.

Still, I resist. Let's wait a week, darling, okay? Okay --- in the meantime she'll set up a physical exam for me. My doctor? Nope, definitely a Scientologist physician. Forty bucks? Okay, I'll bite.

Been awhile since my last physical anyway.

Call a Scientology organization and ask what it can do for, say, asthma. A phone call to one of its outfits got a promise of a "guaranteed" cure for the ailment based on L. Ron Hubbard's "asthma rundown." Registrars will promise you a life free of illness and psychological maladies. The promises, like almost everything else, sound scripted.

A recently disaffected Scientologist (and established entertainer) confides: "I was brainwashed from the second I walked in because of the way they insisted I'd get better and successful, and my stomach problems would be healed. While spending nearly $35,000 on auditing, I was constantly sick, and never got well."

Finally, she met someone who talked to her for hours and taught her that Scientology was a scam, that the tech does not work and that Hubbard was not God. She underwent a minideprograming, and she learned the expensive trade secrets in the upper levels of the bridge were science-fiction garbage. She was coached on how to get her money back, and after protracted efforts, Scientology reimbursed her in full to avoid publicity problems.

She's one of the lucky ones.

Another woman, call her Marge (most who leave the cult fear further harassment if they speak out against their experiences, and so prefer to remain anonymous), got roped in by way of her job. Her boss's hard sell, coupled with the articulation of the nobility of all goals Scientological --- "You are trying to go free, you are fighting the biggest fight of your life" --- almost cost her her health and her sanity.

"Well, I got routed onto the Purification," explains Marge. "I have never done drugs in my life, yet I was on the Purif for almost five months. It was a nightmare beyond my wildest imagination."

During her time on the Purification Rundown ("sweating out toxins" in a sauna), Marge suffered panic attacks, dizziness, and nausea. One day, she was found blue-lipped on the waiting room floor, hemorrhaging. Instead of taking her blood pressure or calling an ambulance or even a doctor, they explained away her bleeding as "restimulation" from radiation she had absorbed from ultrasound testing she'd had years before.

They attributed her panic to "a really bad event" she went through "a long time ago." She was remanded to the program, and when she finally snuck off to a noncult doctor, she was diagnosed with heatstroke and anemia.

Hubbard's tech, policy, and doctrines are never wrong. Anything adversely affecting the physical or mental health of a Scientologist gets hung on that individual as something that either happened to her in the past, or as something she brought on herself.

Priscilla Coates, volunteer chairwoman of the L.A. branch of the nonprofit Cult Awareness Network [now owned, staffed, and opperated by Scientology], calls this common cult tactic "doctrine over person," meaning that doctrine never fails, only people do. "Hubbard wrote the manual of justice that still applies," she explains.

Later, I am whisked to an examiner's office, where I finally get my hands on the cans of the fabled E-meter. First I have to write an essay about my experience, or "wins," with the seminar. I whip off a page about my increased awareness of the Reactive Mind and the need to eradicate it. A false-smiling fat lady with piercing blue eyes hands me a couple of tin cans alligator-clipped to wires attached to the E-meter.

She takes notes on my readings on the meter and on my answers to her perfunctory questions, repeating "Your needle is floating; that's a good sign." Then she abruptly stops, signs me off on a few more documents for my dossier, and routes me back to the classroom, where I am introduced as a graduate of the Hubbard Dianetics Seminar.

His commission-prompted plan is for me to stick with the Dianetics side of things: do my Purif there at the Dianetics Center ($2,000) and proceed on the Professional Dianetics Auditing Route, starting with a course valued at $300. Okay, counting prior expenses, if I continue on with this horseshit, I'd be in for close to $3,000 without even getting within bile-spitting distance of the tens-of-thousands-of-dollars state of clear. Later, Joe. Much later.

In the weeks after I walked from Scientology, my phone rang all day with calls from various registrars trying to get me involved again. My personal physician has since explained the pricey Purification Rundown as "utter bullshit, pie-in-the-sky stuff that is far from being physically sound. In fact, it could be dangerous --- especially the niacin intake, which can cause...liver damage, especially to a liver as susceptible as yours." I'm also smoking more than ever now, but that's okay. Fact is, many Scientologists smoke, emulating their late chain-smoking source of their apparent sickness, L. Ron Hubbard.

Through fronts, such as the Way to Happiness Foundation and Applied Scholastics, Scientology has targeted the classroom as a means to disseminate its literature in a get-'em-while-they're-young drive.

Other dubious organizations with ties to Scientology include the ironically named Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, the Concerned Businessmen's Association of America, and HealthMed --- all of which spread the word of Hubbard.

The city of Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, paid eighty grand to send about a 20 firefighters through Scientology's chemical detox program before an independent consultant labeled the regimen "quackery."

For hundreds of thousands of dollars and year upon year of brainwashing, you get secrets and revelatory experience tantamount to the understanding of a bad episode of Star Trek. Except, that's not it. Out of Scientology since 1989, Robert Vaughn Young likens his two decades in to a bad trip:

"There's a policy letter that Hubbard wrote where he just says, literally, 'If you have the tech and use it, it will protect you.' This is as close to the human shaman as you can get. You can't be harmed. This creates...alters a state of mind so that your judgment becomes so bizarre that suddenly you believe you're invincible. You're immortal, you're invincible, Hubbard is not wrong.

"Well, at that point, it's an incredible state that's been created, that one day you will wake from and say, 'Oh, my God. It was all wrong."'

Recently the church paid out the biggest libel award in Canadian history for defaming an opposing lawyer.

Church lawyers are having some success putting the clamps on those who criticize Scientology and divulge its hokum online, but the word about Hubbard's game has already been downloaded onto the hard drives of millions. Scientology's leaders have long flown the flag of First Amendment freedoms to promulgate their views; now they want to cudgel into silence those wired critics who try to do the same.

I attended one last Scientology function, called Auditor's Day '95, which, in short, resembled a Nuremberg rally for the '90s. No brown shirts present per se, but the lockstep uniformity of 5,000 Scientologists packing the Shrine Auditorium applauding to a slide projection of Herr Hubbard sent a chill up my spine as cold as the one I felt when I saw those children lining up for liquids at the Purification Center.

While waiting for the event to begin, I stood with a couple of Scientology women who asked a weasely OSA operative named Lazar what his office was responsible for. "We beat up Suppressive Persons," he said jokingly through the trademark smirk.

No doubt, after this article, I will be declared an SP, and I'm certain my Dead Agent Pack will be disseminated. This does not frighten me. Heck, lie and tell the world I am gay or annouce that my AIDS test came up positive. You no doubt hold the threat of revealing sexual orientation over the heads of more than the odd celebrity to keep them from defecting.

I've seen your Dead Agent packets. Nice job you've done slandering Priscilla Coates of the Cult Awareness Network, an altruistic housewife with two parking tickets on her record. Lemme see...what about the Dead Agent pack of lies you created about ex-high ranking Sea Org Scientologist Hana Whitfield? Your libelous reportage in the ironically titled org-speak rag Freedom Magazine falsely accused her of murdering her father. Your tactlessness in publishing and disseminating alleged photos of his dead body was also a sweet move in the name of religion.

As I ponder that creep Lazar's offensive joke about Suppressive People, I am considering challenging Chairman David Miscavige to a fist fight but why bother? He won't show up, for fear of getting served with a subpoena. Keep hiding, sailor boy, and don't forget to look both ways when you try to cross the information superhighway. And by all means, duck, as the cult of greed that Hubbard built, and you usurped, comes crashing down upon you.