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My life at FLANZO, Flag and Int.

mate

Patron Meritorious
Thank you Petey for your story. and I think your song tells it all. It really is wonderful that you have decided to tell your story.

BTW, I did receive your PM and I apologise not responding sooner. I promise I will answer your PM and bring you up to date as to what has happened to those you knew in Sydney.

Regards, David.
 

dchoiceisalwaysrs

Gold Meritorious Patron
What an extremely well written story Petey! And thank you for telling it.

I think I am going to install an eaves trough around the edge of my desk as so frequently now as the horrors come forth a torrent of cleansing tears cascade washing the past away.

I met Emile a few times and really liked him. Did you get to know him well?

That is a good link you gave about your com-ev and I linked through to find Martin Ottman' affidavit, http://www.tr-l.org/ which is long but in chapters and contains a tonne of information.

I am thankful for your presence and for the help you provided by telling your story, and your offer to help others too.

Very glad your got your real life back. Super:happydance:
 

Purple Rain

Crusader
I felt so sad for you, Petey Cougar, reading that. I would also love it if you would record that song for us. Just for us exes ... pleeeease?

:prettyplease:
 

HappyGirl

Gold Meritorious Patron
I felt so sad for you, Petey Cougar, reading that. I would also love it if you would record that song for us. Just for us exes ... pleeeease?

:prettyplease:

I only read your first post so far and it did make me sad and it will take me a while to read the rest and catch up, so I don't know what the song is that they are talking about yet, but I want to hear it also, please. :D
 

Boojuum

Silver Meritorious Patron
Thanks for speaking up

PC

Thanks very much for sharing your story. It meant a great deal to me.

I was especially happy to see the comments or conclusions LRH had made about you that were patently false. Many of us exes have great difficulty in finding fault with LRH. It's easier to blame DM or "mu's" on the problem.

The top of cos hasn't really changed and LRH frequently spouted delusional conclusions that were forced to be accepted as fact. The brutality and paranoia of the cos was eagerly invented and enforced by LRH.

Many cos policies are typically unworkable. Brutality and paranoia are short-lived solutions. It's no surprise that the stories I read on ESMB are ripe with stupid orders having disastrous consequences--full of brutality and paranoia. Why? Because much of the focus of the cos was to build up LRH at the expense of having a sane, expanding organization.

Thanks for speaking out. Enjoy your freedom!
 

Petey C

Silver Meritorious Patron
I hope you don't mind me asking questions but : Is his sister in Scn? Are you in contact with her? Mike's son that she mentions, is still in Scn. I that your son?


No, yes and no. The son who remain in Scientology is Paul, Mike and Cherie's son. As far as I know Cherie and Paul are still in.

Thank you Mary for your lovely words.
 

Petey C

Silver Meritorious Patron
Thank you all for your comments on my story, which overwhelmed me. For the first time in decades I actually feel as though a burden has started to roll off me, and it's in large part due to the warmth and understanding of people like you. A big, big thank you from me.

So as not to hog the airways, I'll answer some of the questions you ask here.

1. Bruce Bolstad. I knew him when he was a squirt of about 12 or 13, so of course it never occurred to me he could have married anyone! In my mind and until I see him again he'll always be a cheeky adolescent, much loved for his spirit around FLANZO in the 70s.
2. Did I know Emile well? Yes, we met for the first time at Int under guard, and spent maybe three months locked up with others. We carried on a correspondence for some time after we both got out and then it sort of drifted to a stop. Do you know what he's doing these days?
3. Music stuff. I've moved on to other sorts of music (happy music played in bands, mainly!) and technologically am not really with it enough to know how to make something available to exes. But if you have any ideas, let me know!

From the bottom of my heart, thank you all again.
 

x-x

Patron with Honors
I probably knew you, I remember going to the SO building on the harbor.

A few questions,

what enhancement did you get?

what is your case level?

Do you know what happened to Franks and what is your assessment of him?

A few comments,

82 was a turbulent time, I was put on the decks in 83 and more or less off loaded however I resurfaced a few years later after more or less doing my own thing and then had some very good auditing on FPRD pilot and got up to OT 4.

I was in LA a couple of times in the 80's and say Franks, he discussed staff who "had balls so big they dragged on the floor", I thought it was pretty tasteless. He also issued orders which wrecked our area.

However I am always prepared to look so if you have another side to the guy please elaborate.

I love the purges, I had a fellow staff member who wrote up as her withholds all the things I had said about our senior. (which later got repeated back to me by her, thats an abuse of a private communication)

And of course there is nothing like a fairly green staff who has no clue to the background of why things are being done who changes them. The GO did some very successful things, it also did some patently off policy things like mixing PR and intel.

I tend to think some rat third partied you to LRH. But something you might like to give consideration to, which I say in the kindest way, that the nature of charge is that it is hidden, therefore if someone gave you a wrong item, you get charge off the actual right item which is restimulated.

The way out of this mess which I have been through too, is to try to be pan-determined.
 

Mick Wenlock

Admin Emeritus (retired)
Good to see you posting on here Petey!!! I never knew much about how things were in ANZO - good to start getting the picture. Surprisingly enough it sounds very similar to FOLO UK!!
 

Winston Smith

Flunked Scientology
Thank you all for your comments on my story, which overwhelmed me. For the first time in decades I actually feel as though a burden has started to roll off me, and it's in large part due to the warmth and understanding of people like you. A big, big thank you from me.

So as not to hog the airways, I'll answer some of the questions you ask here.

1. Bruce Bolstad. I knew him when he was a squirt of about 12 or 13, so of course it never occurred to me he could have married anyone! In my mind and until I see him again he'll always be a cheeky adolescent, much loved for his spirit around FLANZO in the 70s.
2. Did I know Emile well? Yes, we met for the first time at Int under guard, and spent maybe three months locked up with others. We carried on a correspondence for some time after we both got out and then it sort of drifted to a stop. Do you know what he's doing these days?
3. Music stuff. I've moved on to other sorts of music (happy music played in bands, mainly!) and technologically am not really with it enough to know how to make something available to exes. But if you have any ideas, let me know!From the bottom of my heart, thank you all again.

Zinjifar has hosted me several times on his website, and if you could make an MP3 of yourself, he would most likely do the same for you. Just need to get a good mike and software and mess with it until you figure it out. I use Magix, but there are lots of programs out there. I had to diddle with it for some time before I was happy with the result however.

Great story...so happy you are free and getting over it all.
 

Petey C

Silver Meritorious Patron
"You cannot be a musician without a song in your heart." Leonard Bernstein

My song came back.


Hey Winston. Nice quote! I've got a good mike and someone with a good mixing desk so maybe, just maybe .... !
 

Petey C

Silver Meritorious Patron
I probably knew you, I remember going to the SO building on the harbor.

A few questions,

what enhancement did you get?

what is your case level?

Do you know what happened to Franks and what is your assessment of him?

...
I tend to think some rat third partied you to LRH. But something you might like to give consideration to, which I say in the kindest way, that the nature of charge is that it is hidden, therefore if someone gave you a wrong item, you get charge off the actual right item which is restimulated.
QUOTE]

Not sure what you mean by "enhancement".

I'm not sure I can say anything that would change your mind about Bill Franks. Like a lot of the execs, he could be pretty out there verbally and otherwise; he could be (and was) very tough. But he was also I think pretty fair. He had this ability to stare you down and could be quite intimidating (those pale blue eyes and patrician features!). But on a personal level, he was good to work for/with for that brief time. I think he acted from good intentions, and think he probably saw more clearly than many others what was coming down the pike.

I have rejected all Scn doctrine for so long now that I don't even really understand what you mean about charge and restim!
 

Panda Termint

Cabal Of One
Don't worry about it, Petey, x-x has attention on the subject of "charge and restim" (a subject which is better rejected and forgotten).
 
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AnonyMary

Formerly Fooled - Finally Free
I hope you don't mind me asking questions but : Is his sister in Scn? Are you in contact with her? Mike's son that she mentions, is still in Scn. I that your son?


No, yes and no. The son who remain in Scientology is Paul, Mike and Cherie's son. As far as I know Cherie and Paul are still in.

Thank you Mary for your lovely words.

Thank YOU, Petey. Things are going to get bertter and better as you sspeak your mind and the oppression wears off.

Best wishes,
Mary
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
I was in LA a couple of times in the 80's and say Franks, he discussed staff who "had balls so big they dragged on the floor", I thought it was pretty tasteless. He also issued orders which wrecked our area.

However I am always prepared to look so if you have another side to the guy please elaborate.

My personal experiences with Franks when he was ED Int was that he was a cold SOB. I found him disturbing.
 

Petey C

Silver Meritorious Patron
My personal experiences with Franks when he was ED Int was that he was a cold SOB. I found him disturbing.

Yep, he was that too and I guess that's what I was saying in my long post. I get the idea he was the way he was long before Scn/SO and not because. But I'm also saying that once you got through the outer frigidaire, he could be warm and empathetic. Like most people, I guess. I find this hard to write because every time I go to say something, I can find a reason to say the opposite.

Cold is one thing, cruel is another. Was he cruel?
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
Yep, he was that too and I guess that's what I was saying in my long post. I get the idea he was the way he was long before Scn/SO and not because. But I'm also saying that once you got through the outer frigidaire, he could be warm and empathetic. Like most people, I guess. I find this hard to write because every time I go to say something, I can find a reason to say the opposite.

Cold is one thing, cruel is another. Was he cruel?

I have no personal experience with seeing him be deliberately cruel.
 

mysterysandwich

Patron with Honors
Personally, I find yours a lucid and very well-written account of the time period-especially that of Sydney where I was also present and know/knew most of the people you describe. Reading it was incredibly evocative.

It has inspired me to consider making my own contribution here.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write and post this.


The last part of the story

So what’s to tell about the RPF. It was pretty dingy and I was pretty grossed out, on one hand, but on the other hand, I felt freer than when I was on post. I made a dramatic attempt at leaving and was almost successful. I was determined to go and because of this had to do endless conditions until finally I came up with a conclusion that was acceptable. (That was, stay.) We had to audit anywhere and everywhere in the Fort Harrison dungeons and I became an expert at just lifting my feet off the floor as the mice ran around but never taking my eyes off the meter/PC. Real Laplaine got me reprieved after three endless months. He was in PAC and was starting up something called the Central Marketing Unit and I was to head it up. So off I went.

PAC was a wild ride for me. I spent a few months building up this marketing bureau and I thought I did well. However, last year I finally opened up the box of letters I had been carting around with me for 30 years and started reading. I felt so sad for my former self, the young woman who was me in 1982. David Michel, who was D/ED Estab Int (and had been in the SO five minutes) read out a telex from LRH that said I (a) had crashed the book income through a pricing change at Pubs (when I never went on such a mission), (b) was spreading entheta around Flag (when I had not even been there for six months), and (c) was the “who” of ANZO. I like this last one best and still brag about it.

I was pretty disaffected by now. As a fairly low-level insignificant creature, I didn’t really know what was going on other than there was widespread paranoia. David Miscavige was just coming into prominence and we heard secretly that Messengers were tumbling out of WDC. There was some kind of huge mystery going on about LRH, but no-one really knew what. I didn’t know anyone at PAC so didn’t really have anyone to discuss all of this with.

Anyway, back I went to the RPF. The PAC RPF was scary as hell to me. I was a young single woman who knew no-one in LA or PAC, and it was a tough gig. My daily assignment was to sweep the carpark at the far end of the complex. I was almost always alone with no-one around for hundreds of yards, and was stopped and leered at and propositioned by every weirdo on the Boulevard. I could have disappeared and no-one would notice or care. It was almost as bad as being monstered by Phyll Stevens!

Eventually a Messenger came and got me to go to the CMO HQ for some kind of special sec check. I don’t remember much about it but once again, I was done with dissembling and pretending to be a good soldier, so I just answered the questions as frankly as I could. I really wanted to get in their face and snarl a little. There was nothing left to lose. This is a good feeling as it makes you reckless and fearless. Reckless I surely was.

***

Next thing, I was told to pack a few things as I was going to Int (though they never said this). So I packed a toothbrush and a few clothes and was driven off into the wide blue yonder. I left my suitcases and passport at PAC in my dorm. How trusting. I was totally clueless – had no idea really of what LA connected with, where Int was, what was happening or why. I just got in the car like a lamb. I didn’t think to make a phone call to my mother in Australia, nothing. Even at that low time, I still trusted Scientology and Scientologists to take care of me.

We got there late one afternoon late in 1982. What I remember so vividly was how blue the sky was, and how strong the scent of eucalypts in the dry heat. Just like Australia. I was suddenly homesick.

I fetched up with a roomful of people. Kerry Gleeson, Bess Sullivan, Allen Buchanan, Roger Barnes, Pat Hunter, Emile Gilbert, Chris Stevens (CHRIS STEVENS!!! OMG!!!!), John Nelson, David Mayo, Julie Gillespie, Peter Warren, several others. Cautiously, we whispered among ourselves – why were we there? What was happening? What was the connection between us? (I hadn’t even met some of these guys, though of course some were known to me.) No-one knew.

Eventually I was taken to an MAA who gave me a charge list to read. You can see it at http://www.tr-l.org/mott0096.htm. What I remember was there was an airplane overhead, up high, and I could hear its drone as it flew into the horizon. Ever the musician, I remember a drone slowly descending and diminishing. It was a powerful metaphor. This is it for me, I thought. It’s all over now. This is the end of the line.

The Bill of Particulars or whatever the hell it’s called was a total mystery to me. I – and the others – were being charged with “insubordination”, treason, mutiny, conspiracy, theft, and things I didn’t even understand such as “neglect of fiduciary duties”. (I’d agree about the insubordination, though.)

****

We spent a month or two at the Massacre Canyon site, amazed and disgusted by the ship in the desert and by the wealth around us, especially in the CMO. We did heavy MEST work: dug sewers, weeded the orchards, scraped paint, painted walls, washed dishes endlessly. I don’t remember much about the Comm Ev though it must have been held. I do remember being woken up several times in the middle of the night and being marched down to the mess hall where we were harangued by lawyers and Messengers, and told over and over again that we were “going to be put in the pokey”. Even then, desperate as I was, I was contemptuous about use of that term and immediately knew it was an LRH-ism, cute and coy and disagreeable. I also knew by then we could not be jailed for things we had not done. In some ways I welcomed the potential for “wog” justice which surely could not be as evil as the Scientology version. We were told we had to write confessions and if we did, we might be let off lightly. I had nothing left to confess after two RPF trips in one year.

The weather got colder and I think the Comm Ev reported no findings, and I believe the Chair was punished and another Comm Ev convened. I never did see a copy of the findings. Meanwhile, we were increasingly an embarrassment at Int so we were shifted one night to Happy Valley. Bess and I immediately volunteered to be cooks, and Pat was our kitchen girl. Everyone else was put onto MEST work although it was increasingly desultory.

Bess and I used to talk about Coober Pedy, an opal mining town in the outback, and somehow that became Petey Cougar, hence the name.

During the nights, the men started melting away. We’d wake up one morning and there’d be one, two, three less for breakfast. I guess they walked up the dirt road to the main road and hitch-hiked out of there. As for me, I didn’t really have a clear idea of where I was except “a few hours out of LA”. I had no money and few clothes with me. My passport was back at PAC. I had no-one to go to in the USA, and no way to get there. I was up shit creek.

Peter Warren got beaten up by David Miscavige. David Mayo’s car brakes were seriously tampered with when he was leaving. John Nelson got heavied several times. Most of us were either gone or too insignificant to bother with.

One of my so-called “co-conspirators” saved me. (I won’t say who, but you know who you are, and I am eternally in your debt.) He somehow managed to negotiate his own release and, with it, mine. One day in late December we were both driven to the Int base. He slipped me $5 as he left the car, along with his brother’s phone number. I waited in the car and got driven back to Happy Valley. But he promised me he was going to shake me loose, and I trusted him. I had no other option. One evening, an SO mail van came up and got me, and drove me to PAC. The driver did not want to wait for me but wanted to take me straight to the airport, but I said I had to call Australia to get a ticket to fly home. And if he didn’t wait, I said, I would go to the first police officer I could find and tell them I had been imprisoned by the Scientologists and how would he like to be responsible for that? So he waited while I called home. It was Christmas Eve in Australia, and I was lucky to get my mother, and she was lucky to get me a ticket before everything shut up tight for the week. I grabbed my suitcase and passport and off we went. On the way, I tore off my disgustingly filthy, worn jeans in the van and hurled them onto the road. I think I might have yelled “Fuck you, Scientology!” out the window. The driver dumped me at LAX at 7pm on the 22nd of December, with $5 in my pocket, a phone number, two suitcases and several boxes.

I went to the Qantas counter and got my ticket. I put my stuff in a locker and called my friend. I didn’t have enough for anything to eat so I just wandered round the airport sitting close to groups of people at departure gates, for safety. I kept expecting Rick Aznaran or some security guy to come charging up shouting “Oh no you don’t!” My earlier fearlessness and recklessness had dissolved into the acute realisation that if my friend didn’t come for me, I would be alone in a deserted airport all night.

My buddy eventually came by quite late, and boy was I glad to see him. My plane didn’t leave until the next day so we went to his brother’s place. In the end, we were both so exhausted that we slept in and I missed the flight. He took me back to meet the next plane and lent me another $60 to cover the excess baggage costs. By this time my nerves were absolutely shredded.

The first time I felt safe was when the plane door shut and the Aussie steward welcomed us aboard. I was on my way home. It was Christmas 1982.

****

After I escaped in 1982, I was manic and crazy and didn’t know how to deal with my experience. I knew only a few people who had left Scn, and none of them had been to Flag, but I found them and talked until my tongue fell off. There was no other way back then to work through my confusion, grief, shame, horror, blame, sorrow, craziness. Like many others who leave, I was ashamed that we had been taught to think of kind, generous, helpful strangers as “wogs”. My friends and family were patient and gentle with me and offered me shelter and did not judge. I went around in a furious, crazy world till early February 1983, when a miracle happened. On the same day, the government changed, the drought broke, and I started to cry. I wept for weeks, it seems. Eventually I found my way out of it and restarted my life.

In the years since then, I’ve rebuilt my life. The point came when I had been out of Scientology as long as I’d been in it, and now those years seem like a distant nightmare. A lot of the emotion has drained away. I learned a few things. For example, you can’t change what’s true by denying it. I know how to spot – and stand up to – a bully from a thousand paces.

I have kept my Scientology past a secret except to close friends and family. I’ve been out so much longer now than I was in. But since the Xenophon call for an inquiry, my views have changed. I want to make myself known, and I want to be able to help others the way people helped me when I was broken and lost. I want the world to know what Scientology really is.

But I also want to remember, and cherish, the friends I had in the SO, the many people like me who were there to make a difference. That we were taken for an almighty ride makes no difference to our pure intentions.

I wrote this in a song:

Though the memories still wake me in the night,
they’re dimmer with the light
And while it may be slow, it’s not as bad as when I had to go
But trees still stand determined and alive – their roots go very deep
And somewhere down the line I will survive – I’ll dream of rain before I go to sleep

Hearts survive
Dreamers never die
And through the years no tears have reached my eye

Tears like rain, they come to me again
And bring a bloom to everything I see
Tears like rain, wash away the pain
And roll away my sorrows out to sea.



Thank you for reading this.
 
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