Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [84]
But Broeker still maintained control of Hubbard's handwritten auditing notes, including his research for the as-yet-unreleased OT levels 9–15. This was Hubbard's final legacy: original material that was both lofty in purpose and, church officials well knew, potentially lucrative. Scientology made most of its money off auditing fees; many Scientologist OTs had been waiting for the vaunted "upper levels" for years. Whoever controlled this sacred doctrine, Miscavige understood, controlled the church. The younger Messenger now set out to get it.
Toward the end of 1987, Miscavige gathered a team led by Rathbun, and together they drove to see Broeker to demand that he relinquish the documents. Rathbun later said that Miscavige confronted Broeker but that it was Annie who "finally broke under the pressure" and, when her husband wasn't in the room, told Miscavige where Broeker was hiding the materials: in several filing cabinets in his storage space at Newberry Springs.
Not long after this confrontation, Miscavige and Broeker were in Washington, D.C., to meet with church lawyers. Taking advantage of Broeker's absence, Rathbun, in California, assembled a team of roughly twenty men to drive to Newberry Springs. When they got there, Rathbun called the ranch's caretaker with an alarming bit of news. He had just received a tip, Rathbun said, that the FBI was preparing to raid the property. They'd be there in two hours, and they would surely cart away every bit of paper in the place. It was essential that he be let in to safeguard Hubbard's papers—there was no time to waste. The story, which Rathbun said he'd cooked up with Miscavige days before, "worked like a charm." Within an hour, the men had entered the ranch and, with the caretaker's permission, took possession of the filing cabinets.*
Just after midnight that evening, Mark Fisher, one of Miscavige's senior aides, was awakened by a call. It was Miscavige, still in Washington. In a few hours, Miscavige said, Rathbun and Norman Starkey, another ASI executive, would be arriving at the Int Base in a truck. Fisher was to let them into the "LRH safe room," a private chamber located next to his office. Miscavige didn't elaborate on what the men were going to put in the safe, but Fisher knew it was important because Miscavige told him to change the security codes to the room once they left. "Don't let anyone in—and especially not Pat Broeker," Miscavige said.
Fisher then got a call from Starkey. "We're here," he said. Fisher got dressed and rode his Honda 110 up the hill to his office, on the other side of the property. Rathbun and Starkey were waiting, with several other men and a set of large filing cabinets.
The safe room, which looked like a study, had bookshelves concealing false walls. Behind these walls were safes for Hubbard's personal valuables, including jewelry, and some filing cabinets, the contents of which Fisher never knew. "There was room for these new filing cabinets to be added, and so they just wheeled them in. Marty and Norman didn't say anything to me about it at all, but I could tell what this stuff was," Fisher said. "LRH had been dead for over a year at that point and I assumed that his research materials were in Pat's care. So when these papers showed up in filing cabinets in the middle of the night, and I was told that I wasn't to let Pat near them