Paper part 1
THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY AND THE FREEZONE
Terril Park
Many have heard of the Church of Scientology (COS); fewer have heard of Freezone or
Independent Scientology. Freezoners or independents are people who still practice Scientology but
do not associate with the COS. In fact, they can't. If one does Scientology outside the Church, one is
automatically considered a "Suppressive Person" or SP. According to COS policy the suppressive
person is an enemy of Scientology and an anti-social personality. But Freezoners and independents
argue that “Scientology” can refer either to the subject itself or to a series of interconnected
corporations known as the Church of Scientology. For a variety of reasons that will be reviewed in
this essay, they prefer to practice scientology outside of the COS.
In a sense, the forerunners of the Freezone were the Scientology Franchises, later renamed
Missions. Franchises began in the early fifties when they were started up by people with lots of
auditor training and experience. These were the greatest flowering of Scientology and spurred its
greatest expansion. The Missions were very user-friendly and usually had very skilled counselling
staff. A stellar example was Martin Samuels who headed the Mission of Davis, a university town in
California, and who expanded it to 5 missions with a total of 500 staff. Martin started the Delphian
project in Oregon in 1973, which was to research alternative energy. He also started a school for the
children of those on the project. The school became very popular with other scientologists since it
used Scientology study methods. After 12 years of work he had 5 missions and 12 schools. In one
year he had 3000 people doing a Scientology communication course in his missions
(
www.instinct.org.bluesky/bs7-2.htm).
In October 1982 there was an international Mission Holders Conference in San Francisco. During
the conference, the new management of COS led by David Miscavige, stamped its authority on the
Missions. All mission holders had to sign new contracts with COS. This gave COS control over the
missions, with the ability to enter mission properties at any time and confiscate money from them
for alleged infractions against COS (
www.instinct.org.bluesky/bs7-2.htm).
A few weeks after the conference Martin Samuels lost his leadership role in all his Missions and
was declared a suppressive person. A friend who lives in Davis, and was a member of the Mission
in its heyday, says the mission there now only has one employee (personal communication, 2004).
Before the changes initiated at the conference it was possible for Mission staff to earn enough to get
mortgages and buy property. In comparison, at more or less the same time, I was on staff in the
London COS and I earned about £5 per week.
The 1982 Mission Holders Conference resulted in the largest schism in the history of Scientology.
Many thousands resisted Miscavige’s efforts to exert more control over the missions and left the
COS. Some mission holders took their missions into the Freezone.
After the attempts to impose strict regulations on the missions, Scientology field auditors, the
individuals who trained as auditors but who operated independently of Scientology churches were
the next to experience greater attempts at regulation . A new organization was formed by Miscavige
and the central leadership of the COS in December 1982, the International Hubbard Ecclesiastical
League of Pastors (or IHELP). Field auditors had to agree to be bound by decisions of IHELP.
According to information in Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky, this organization coerced and fined
field auditors (
www.instinct.org.bluesky/bs7-2.htm). These actions against the missions and field
auditors were in large part what started the expansion of the Freezone.
My Involvement in Freezone Scientology
I have been one of the most active advocates of Freezone Scientology since 2000, usually
promoting it on Scientology Internet forums with “Success Stories” several times a week for more
than 15 years. With the success stories I also link to Freezone Yahoo forums, two of which I own.
For maybe 12 years, from around 2000 to 2012, I was averaging 20-25 new members to forums
and/or people wishing to be directly connected to an auditor per month.
In what seems to be a counter-intuitive action I had more success in getting people connected to the
Freezone on forums that were primarily critical of Scientology/COS. In fact there are no open
forums on the subject that are not primarily critical. For example I'd post on My-Space, which one
would expect to be neutral on the subject, and I'd be criticized as much there as I was on
“alt.religion scientology,” a notoriously hard-core critical forum. However quite a few who were
interested in Scientology would be on such forums.
The internet has made it quite easy for scientologists who no longer wanted to be connected to COS
to meet and connect with like-minded people, and to connect up with an auditor if they wish to get
auditing. Freezone or independent Facebook groups are proliferating. As of this writing, there are
few people joining Yahoo Freezone forums, and Facebook forums are now the popular place to go. I
serve as a moderator on one, “Free Scientology Chat,” and about one new person joins a day.
In the earlier days of the Freezone, in the 2000s, I knew of only two places where one could go to
train as an auditor in the US, and I knew of most Freezone activities. Now there are at least 14 that I
know of and it’s harder to keep track nowadays (see
www.freeandable.com/business-listings/by-
category/65-auditors.html).
Defecting to the Freezone
In 2004 I travelled through the US with the aim of meeting Freezoners who I knew from
conversations over the internet but had never met; I also met many I did not know. One of these was
an old timer who worked with Hubbard and was a personal friend in the early fifties, Phil Spickler.
He has a website (
http://community.freezone-tech.info/phil-spickler/) and has put up quite a few
videos of interviews with himself. He was either the first Mission holder or one of the first; his
mission was in Palo Alto, California. The founder of the Stanford University’s remote viewing
project was Hal Puthoff who came from Phil's Mission. Phil also audited the NFL quarterback John
Brodie, then the most highly paid athlete in America. Brodie had hurt his arm in a car crash, and for
an American football quarterback that was very bad and possibly career-destroying news. He
consulted at least six doctors with no good results. A friend urged him to consult with Phil and
although reluctant he eventually did. This is as good an example of the effectiveness of Dianetics
and Scientology as you'll get. Brodie’s book, Open Field, describes what he did in the auditing
which was so effective that Brodie then won an award for being the Most Valuable Player in the
National Football League. He gave Phil a Trans Am (an American muscle car) as a thank you
present.
In 1975 Phil on his own initiative communicated with the then IRS commissioner, a fellow Jew, and
commented that they both had backgrounds in a religion that suffered from suppression, and that he
would like to do something about the apparent suppression of his current religion Scientology. The
commissioner sent a special envoy to visit Phil and the envoy said it would not be difficult to get
religious status for COS again. The main problem was that most money went into a Hubbard
account, not a COS one. The envoy left Phil with all the paperwork needed to handle that and regain
religious recognition. So Phil sent it to top management. For his trouble he recieved a slap on the
wrist. Phil then became a Freezone auditor around 1991. This was a very bad move by Scientology
management because it squandered the good will Phil had developed with the IRS. The IRS was
later asking for back taxes of one billion dollars. This would have bankrupted COS."
Rathbun " Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior" p151.
So they instituted over 2000 lawsuits against the IRS and some of the individuals working there,
and carried on fighting the IRS until 1993 when the IRS reversed its earlier position for reasons still
not clear.
Ron’s Orgs in the Freezone
The Ron’s Orgs in Europe, Russia and former Russian states have been very active in spreading
Freezone Scientology. They were originated in 1984 by the former third in command after L. Ron
Hubbard and Mary Sue Hubbard, Bill Robertson. When he found that he could no longer contact
Hubbard, Robertson acted on instructions he claimed to have received from Hubbard himself. He
said that Hubbard had told him that if Robertson could not contact him for a prolonged period, he
was to start Scientology afresh. So Robertson went from the U. S. to Europe where he had spent
some time helping to build up Scientology and did just that. In 1984 he formed Ron's Orgs [Ron’s
Organisation and Network for Standard Technology] and coined the term Freezone. The Ron’s Orgs
flourished over the next decade.
Around 1995 when the Internet started expanding enormously, a group of Russians wrote to some
of the senior people in Ron’s Orgs and asked to meet with them. The meeting went extremely well
and they returned and delivered Scientology courses to around 50 Russian people. The Ron’s Orgs
have expanded enormously since and they now have somewhere between 30-50 organisations in
Russia or former Russian states, as well as some in other countries. There are some 2000 active
members of Ron’s Orgs (Hauri 2013). Ron’s Orgs have been particularly strong in auditor training.
They have between 50-100 class 4 auditors, who can deliver all the levels of the lower part of the
Bridge to Total Freedom, and around 25 “L's” auditors. The L's offer the most powerful Scientology
auditing available and require the highest level of technical training. At this time, there are probably
more L's auditors in Ron’s Orgs than the COS. In fact, one can observe some Ron’s Orgs auditor
training in a production by the UK’s channel 4, “The Beginners Guide to L. Ron Hubbard.” It is just
about the only TV programme to ever comment positively on Scientology (see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emKvMPGSc0s).
Recent Developments
There is another label given by the COS to those who practice Scientology outside the Church. One
is called a "squirrel," which is defined as someone who doesn't really understand Scientology and
therefore messes people up. A good recent example of this negative labelling is its application to
Marty Rathbun, former second in command of COS and leader of the Religious Technology Center
from 1987 to 2004, when he left the Church. Rathbun previously was entrusted with auditing all the
Church celebrities, such as Tom Cruise, John Travolta and others, and also the top executives of the
COS.
Around 2009 Rathbun started a blog which was particularly scathing about the head of the Church,
David Miscavige, claiming that he physically abused his juniors, destroyed most COS management
functions, and imprisoned most of the top executives of the Church, including Rathbun. He also
started to give auditing outside of the established COS structures to those who wanted it. Shortly
afterwards COS sent a team of so called “squirrel busters” to his residence. They wore cameras in
their hats and harassed Rathbun and his wife Monique for 199 consecutive days (Childs and Tobin
2013b). Eventually Marty and Monique moved to a secluded new property, but there again they
found spy cameras trained on their house and a strange neighbour whose job seemed to be that of a
spy. That neighbour, three separate Church organizations, and other individuals including David
Miscavige have been named in a lawsuit by Monique alleging harassment (Childs 2013).
The Rathbun case shows how far the COS is willing to go in order squelch dissent and inhibit the
practices of Freezoners and independents. In Marty Rathbun's latest book Memoirs of a Scientology
Warrior, he estimates that from 1981-86 the COS spent $100,000,000 in litigation, at least some of
it against Freezoners (Rathbun 2013: page 313). In response, the COS claims that it is acting within
its rights. For example, in the ongoing lawsuit brought against COS by Monique Rathbun, Marty's
wife, one of COS's lawyers said
COS had the right to hire private eyes to determine whether Marty was delivering services in
violation of copyright. The Rathbuns forfeited their privacy by conducting the business of
delivering Scientology services in their home (Childs 2014).
That statement also shows how the COS moves back and forth between describing itself as a
business (which, in this case, is defending its copyrighted materials) and a religion.
Rathbun has also endeavoured to expose the ways in which the COS has waged a battle against
Freezone Scientologists. He has published a document from Office of Special Affairs, a part of COS
that handles investigations and dirty tricks, public relations, finance and legal matters, that describes
a long and detailed plan to destroy Ron's Orgs. It reads in part: “Program Purpose: To terminatedly
handle the Freezone in Russia and CIS as a source of black PR on Scientology and as a travesty of
standard tech that ruins peoples spiritual future” (Rathbun 2010).
Like many other Freezoners and independents, I believe that this type of activity runs counter to the
assertion in the creed of the COS that assures that “all men have inalienable rights to their own
religious practices and their performance” (See Church of Scientology 1978: 188). That sentiment is
underscored in Hubbard’s pamphlet, The Way to Happiness, which, in its eighteenth precept,
encourages its readers to “Respect the religious beliefs of others” (Hubbard 2015).
The Church of Scientology Versus the Freezone
In 1992 the COS wrote its enemies list, amounting to nearly 2500 names and groups. In December
2013 another near 2500 names of enemies had been sneaked out by someone who was on staff for a
while and hid a camera in an umbrella handle (see
http://xenu.net/archive/enemy_names/enemy_list.html). On the first half of the enemies list 280
groups named all seemed from their names to be Scientology Freezone groups. Most of these
groups no longer exist.
David Mayo provides a vivid example of how COS deals with dissidents. Once the Senior Case
Supervisor International, the senior Scientology Tech consultant, he apparently co-authored with
Hubbard some of the confidential upper levels that can be delivered in the Scientology “Bridge.”
The “Bridge” is the series of counselling actions from beginning steps to higher steps up to the
upper levels. These upper levels resulted from David's efforts to audit Hubbard when it was thought
he may be dying in late 1978 (see Touretzky 2015).
David Mayo was declared a suppressive person in 1983. After that, he met up with other former
associates and they decided to start their own splinter group delivering Scientology. They called it
“Advanced Ability Centre,” and by February 1983 some 30 associated organisations around the
world formed.
The aggressive actions of the COS to preserve the purity of COS doctrine and practice frequently
led to expulsions of former members, and many of them become independent or Freezone
practitioners. For example, in October 2013 eighteen of the most influential Scientologists in South
Africa were declared suppressive persons. They are highly trained and have served Scientology for
many years or even decades and it’s looking like they are going to take the rest of the Scientologists
in South Africa out of COS and into the Freezone (see
https://backincomm.wordpress.com/).
Many similar events can be quickly summarized. In 2012 an entire Israeli Mission, Dror, left COS
en masse (Lewis 2014). One of its co-founders, Tami Lemberger, had twice won Auditor of the year
awards by COS. But she had received a copy of Debbie Cook’s revelatory 2011 email (see Cook
2011) which described in detail how asking for donations for matters was against Hubbard’s
policies. Her Husband forwarded it to COS management asking for comment but was treated as
disloyal and subsequently decided to cut all ties with COS. Similarly, in Los Angeles in 2010 a
Taiwanese scientologist has started her own organisation and taken all or most of the Taiwanese out
of LA Scientology Orgs to study there. She also has an Org in Taiwan which has 100 staff. It must
have previously been a COS mission since it has been in existence for 12 years (see Flasch 2010).
Developments like those listed above lend credence to the comments of Jillian Schlesinger, who left
the Sea Org, the paramilitary wing of the COS composed of its most dedicated members, in
February 2014. In an interview she claimed that “I’ve been to orgs all over California, and they’re
empty. There are maybe five people there. And some of the fancy course rooms at the Ideal Orgs?
They’re being used for storage” (Ortega 2014a).
The perspectives offered by Freezoners and independents raise substantial questions about the
COS’s estimates of its own membership. Different sources from the Church suggest that the
membership is anything between 10 and 15 million (see Rinder 2014). But
there are several official government statistics that appear to be more accurate. The 2011 UK census
estimated that there were fewer than 2500 Scientologists in England and Wales
(see
https://scicrit.wordpress.com/2015/...the-uk-what-does-the-2011-censusdata-tell-us/).
Similarly, the 2011 Australian census identified fewer than 2200 Scientologists there
(see Cannane 2012). Further, the ARIS survey in the US estimated that there were 25,000
scientologists in the US in 2008. Very roughly scientologists in the US are about 50% of the world
total. Jefferson Hawkins, who headed the Scientology Central Marketing Unit, had access to all lists
of members and other information; he estimates that at most COS has 40,000 members (Ortega
2011).
Other efforts by the COS to inflate its impact on the world have been questioned as well. In the
2014 New Year’s event at Flag in Clearwater, COS’s largest organisation and the only place where
some of the upper levels of Scientology training are delivered, Miscavige showed videos purporting
to be Scientologists being interviewed on two Irish Radio programs, Ocean FM and BBC radio
Foyle, in Northern Ireland. As it turns out, they were both faked. When someone phoned up Ocean
FM and asked about this program the station said it was not their studio in the video and the person
doing the interview is not known to them. On the 19th Jan a spokeswomen for the BBC said about
the video, “The BBC is an independent, impartial organisation. Any misuse of its brand is
considered a serious matter and will be investigated” (see Martin 2014). In the video the front page
of the Donegal News is shown with a story about COS’s effort to campaign against drugs. Mr.
Columba Gill, the editor of the Donegal News, described the front page depicted on the video as
“bogus” (see Hickey 2014). There were also claims that the efforts of COS had cut drug-related
crime by 85% in Dublin. But the Irish government statistics show a drop of 7%. Although getting
actual statistics of COS activity is difficult, Mike Rinder, former International Spokesperson for the
COS, gets sent information from all over from insiders, and ex-scientologists and Freezoners who
sometimes observe activity in COS and all reports are of greatly diminished activity. Clearly those
inside the COS and those outside it have very different perceptions of the health of the Church.
Part 2 to follow.
