Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [87]
The most prominent leader of the Free Zone was David Mayo, once the highest-ranking technical officer in Scientology and the creator of some of the church's most sophisticated auditing techniques. A Scientologist since the late 1950s, Mayo had been trained by Hubbard personally and later supervised the Founder's auditing; he also audited Hubbard himself. In April 1982, Mayo received a letter from L. Ron Hubbard appointing him the guardian of Scientology's doctrine in the event of Hubbard's death. Shortly after, the Commodore's Messengers, who'd received copies of the letter, circumvented Hubbard's orders by accusing Mayo, with a group of sixteen other senior executives, of trying to take over the Commodore's Messenger Organization. Mayo was quickly removed from his post in the purges overseen by Miscavige.
But where many other executives in his position had abandoned Scientology, Mayo set up an independent auditing practice in Santa Barbara, called the Advanced Ability Center. Then he sent out a letter to the many Scientologists he knew, explaining the circumstances of his removal, and announced that he was open for business. Gale Irwin and DeDe Voegeding were among many Scientologists who flocked to the center in Santa Barbara. "It was wonderful," said Irwin. "There was none of the BS but all of the goodness of what we'd known Scientology to be."
Before long, Mayo's operation was grossing $20,000 to $30,000 per week, using the same techniques and materials that Hubbard had created for Scientology. This, to the church, constituted "squirreling," which made Mayo a target for Fair Game. As Jesse Prince, then a senior executive in RTC, recalled, "DM became infuriated and ordered Mayo's new group to be destroyed using all means possible." The RTC began a newsletter campaign, denouncing Mayo as a squirrel and accusing him of a broad range of crimes ranging from falsifying records and "altering" Hubbard's teachings to "sexually perverted conduct."
The RTC also organized groups of Scientologists who called themselves the Minutemen to hold noisy protests in front of Mayo's Advanced Ability Center. The church also hired private investigators to rent office space above Mayo's center and electronically bug his offices. One of these investigators, Eugene Ingram, was a former sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department who'd been fired by the department in 1981. Enlisting the help of other ex-cops, Ingram began a campaign of harassment, informing local business owners that they were investigating Mayo for white-collar crime and linking him, falsely, to international drug smuggling. The church also filed a RICO suit against Mayo's group, arguing that they were conspiring with other Free Zone dissidents to use some advanced auditing materials that the church claimed had been stolen from a European Scientology organization. In 1985, the church succeeded in getting a federal injunction preventing Mayo from selling Scientology services; by 1986, the Advanced Ability Center, bankrupt after several years of harassment and litigation, shut down.
But by then, thousands of Scientologists in Europe and the United States had dropped out of the organized church, disillusioned by Miscavige's destruction of the mission network, which many people saw as Scientology's life blood. By 1986, though Scientology officially claimed two million adherents, Sea Org members put the numbers at far lower: perhaps 500,000. Anecdotal accounts during the early and mid-1980s reported an exodus of hundreds from individual Scientology missions across the United States and thousands, perhaps even as many as thirty-five thousand, by Alan Walter's estimate, leaving the Church of Scientology.
But the tens of thousands of Scientologists who didn't abandon the movement readily accepted their leaders' assertions that Scientology was the victim of religious persecution and that the defectors were "heretics." The church responded according to the Hubbard playbook—with an adamant defense of Scientology. This campaign, known as the "Religious Freedom