Back in early 1979, when I worked in the basement of the Manor as USGO's Director of Income, Mike Rinder was fairly new heading the USGO, having been on post only a few months. He was surrounded by a tight-knit clan of veteran SO members and every week they had an FP meeting.
I dealt directly with the roughest, toughest, meanest battleaxe of those veteran GO staff: Val Lisa, who headed the infamous B1 Bureau of the USGO and was also the FP Chairman for the USGO. All USGO FP members were Sea Org USGO.
In my files were all the individuals who had left the GO or Sea Org (GO members were SO or 2-1/2 or 5 year contracted Non-SO then), as well as all the scn franchise missions and orgs that had been sent Missions/Interference by the USGO who were billed for those interference Missions.
My predecessor had also occasionally filed Mission Orders in the debtor files, which was quite a shocker to me at the time. Val Lisa later discreetly entered my office one night and removed these, as well as anything else she felt was of interest - personal or otherwise.
I was always voice-recorded, so pretended not to notice. She took things on a somewhat regular basis, sometimes returning then, sometimes not.
So I had the Riverside Mission USGO files and the COSMOD files before the SP Declares came out, as well as the files for every org or mission/franchise that had ever been sent a Mission (official Sea Org term for an interfering bunch of dedicated SO members sent by the USGO to find and destroy SPs and handle "flaps"). Mark(Marty) Rathbun was nobody important back then and not involved directly in these, btw. His power came later, through DM. This was Mike Rinder's time.
I had a few unforgettable conversations with the sneaky, vicious B1 witch Val Lisa about Mike Rinder, which may give others here a better glimpse of what was going on at the time.
Every Friday morning, after the Thursday night FP Committee, Val Lisa would go over my collections lineup with me. In the beginning, she wanted me to collect the mission/franchise debts, which I hated worse than collecting from individuals. The ex-GO members were quite sweet, the Riverside, COSMOD and other missions/franchises were extremely angry and upset.
I couldn't blame them. Here were these hyped up, outrageous bills for tens of thousands of dollars for USGO Missions/Interference that did nothing but upset staff and stir up trouble, Missions that caused more trouble than they helped, supposedly handling "shore flaps" that had begun as nothing more than a few upset public but by USGO interference, abuse and exacerbation, became huge, blown-up emergencies (a "Hill 10" in scino-speak).
One Friday morning, after battleaxe Val pushed particularly hard and even subtly threatened me for not collecting from COSMOD and Riverside, I told her I had contacted the EDs and they could not afford to pay those bills but I thought there was a possibility that smaller, regular payments could be worked out. Hearing this, Val's eyes went hard and her mouth stretched tight into a cruel, toothy grin. "No," she said, "That is not acceptable. Those bills need to be paid in full and I want them paid this week."
"But they can't!" I said, "How can you force them to pay money that they don't have?"
"We'll see about that," she said, and went on about how they were squirreling LRH tek.
Over the next few weeks, I received a few small payments and reported these in my weekly income breakdown. Val became increasingly infuriated.
One day she came into the office actually happy! She told me that she had been working on Mike Rinder for weeks, but Mike was soft and kept refusing to allow B1 to take the next actions. She said he was new and green and didn't have the experience or understand how tough it was dealing with squirrels and SPs, but she was teaching him and he was slowly coming around and she thought Mike would approve her plan soon. (She never let on the details of her plan to me as I was not officially GO staff, simply on loan from AOLA.)
Val Lisa was a bully and she had a lot of power. Her world was black and white, full of only good hats and black hats. The clan of high-ranking SO members was the inner group within the group that ran things. Mike Rinder was not yet one of them, he was a figurehead then, and initially was the only one who resisted and held back the storms of SP Declares on COSMOD, Riverside and elsewhere - at least for a month or two. Eventually, he gave in.
Clearly, those Mission/franchise SP Declares and their financial ruin were Val Lisa's personal brainstorm and desire. It was Val Lisa's personal mission to blow up all those lives and destroy those franchises completely.
Most SO members only had a short brush with people like Val Lisa. Mike Rinder had to deal with her insanity nearly every day, for years. Val thought of herself as his "mentor." Eventually, Val Lisa's scientological psychopathy and the isolated bubble of the world of the Sea Org and GO rubbed off on Mike Rinder, too, just as Val planned.
I'm not sure anyone under the thumb of Val Lisa and saturated with the PTS/SP tek of scn for that long would have done much differently than Mike Rinder. He was far better than many people I can imagine in his post. Mike Rinder sometimes approved cancellations of SP Declares without requiring A-E or Comm Evs or Boards of Review circuses. Cancellations of SP Declares only occurred for a short time period in the early 80s. Melanie (something) and Jergen Brock as CJCs assisted those cancellations, but Mike did as well. That may not sound like much, but under the circumstances, it was huge.
Back then, Mike Rinder was a man of few words and the occasional bark. He had a poker face and sometimes sneered. On his own, though, he could and would listen to logic. Unfortunately, he came to believe in squirrels and SPs as evil. Unlike Val, though, Mike would sometimes see when someone was incorrectly labeled and did not want the person to suffer. He was not psychotic, like Val, but he was influenced by her and others like her. Deep down, Mike retained some compassion, some sense of humanity and logic that could sometimes be reached, despite the GO persona.
Val was right, he was soft-hearted, but she hardened him. Bitch.