Hadyn James, Nov 2009

To refer to myself as T. Paine is not entirely accurate because there is another key element to the persona of T Paine — that of my wife Lucy who contributed a stream of vital information, data and even Intel on David Miscavige and his practices.

Though neither of us had anything like the full picture, we found that between us we had enough to piece things together.

Whereas I began my Scientology staff-life in London org in 1975, Lucy started in one of the huge missions in Sacramento in 1976, witnessing firsthand the carnage as Miscavige laid it to waste. And so went a number of other big, booming missions at that time.

Shortly after my nine years in the Church’s legal department came to an end, around 1985 — when I was thrown out by Miscavige — Lucy was promoted to the CMO. And as I rose through the ranks again as the first CO Pac Base Crew and from there into the Landlord office (buildings), Lucy assumed an executive post at CMO Int and was often in direct earshot of Miscavige and on other lines to observe him as he carried out his campaign to destroy management which culminated in the international Scientology stat crash around June 1990.

And shortly after I had completed the RPF (assigned when I was the Flag Landlord under direct pressure from Miscavige) it was Lucy that had the courage to pull the plug in late 1990 when we were both at Int HQ and Miscavige became too crazy to bear. “We” became pregnant and, according to Miscavige’s strange dictates regarding families in the Sea Org, we had to be banished from the base to some far flung small and failing org as punishment for our “offense”.

At first we were sent to a Scientology church doing moderately well (Washington D.C.). But in a weird twist of fate Miscavige visited D.C. org with Marty Rathbun and Shelly Miscavige within a few days of Lucy and I arriving. Miscavige was furious to find us there and was abusive to Lucy though she was pregnant and he knew it. Clearly Washington D.C. was much too good for the likes of us and we were quickly shipped back to Los Angeles.

Haydn James, back in the day

The Sea Org paid us very little in all the years we had served (a few dollars a week) but it did at least provided some form of room and board, even clothing (uniform). We landed in England with nothing, no possessions and no money. I think we were given a little over $1000 between us which is a pittance in the big wide world when you’ve been in the Sea Org for so long that you have no car, no home, no furniture, no household goods and few regular clothes.

The city of Birmingham was in the middle of one of the coldest winters in history when we landed and the state of the local Church of Scientology did nothing to warm us. It had only three demoralized staff, the premises it occupied was the upper floor of a huge warehouse located in the warehouse district of the town, an area devoid of people. It had no phone lines and no heat because it couldn’t pay its bills and the property was so big and costly it couldn’t pay its rent. It had around a quarter of a million dollars in debts and few public. We were supposed to handle it and “boom the org”. It would have been easier to begin from scratch; we were actually starting from way behind the line.

My pregnant wife Lucy, our 8 year old daughter Marika and I lived close to the poverty line. During that severe winter of 1991 we huddled in a top garret room (with little heating) in the small house we moved into, sharing it with the family that lived there. It was so cold indoors that it would be some months before we discovered the refrigerator we had been using was utterly broken and had been for years. But the food had remained perfectly preserved. We later dubbed the place “slug house” because when we came down in the morning there was always silver slug trails criss-crossing the living room carpet it was such a decrepit old place.

The next accommodation we moved into was dubbed “Rat Villa” for reasons that become obvious from the title.

It got so desperate almost a year later that I actually left Birmingham staff on a long leave of absence and started to work for a company owned and run by a Scientologist installing high tech industrial heating systems in Europe — the only time I wasn’t on Scientology staff in what was otherwise a continuous 31 year period. Lucy ran Birmingham Org in the meantime and I sent her money and we began to move away from the poverty line but orders from management for me to resume church staff started to rain down. After four short months I returned to work at the Church of Scientology in Birmingham. I now had a little money in the bank but it would not last long.

Effectively we were subsidizing our own involvement with Scientology and we still had not accumulated any real household goods other than things for the baby that had arrived (Katrina), who’s round, chubby, little smiling face kept us going. But as the father of the family I felt bad that I had dragged Marika to England to live in poverty and that Katrina had been born into it.

But Katrina and her feisty, hilarious older sister (Marika) kept us laughing all the way, our feet rooted firmly on the ground but our spirits raised.

Marika and Katrina - Birmingham days

 All in all, those first few years in Birmingham, the condition of the org, the regular legal suits from the landlord due to $100,000 being owed in rent, our lack of money and necessary possessions, the fact we had two children to provide for were the most stressful of my life up to that point. But bit by bit we built the org. We managed to move it to better; smaller premises situated near the center of town (lots of people milling around) which we renovated ourselves and we began to be able to pay the org debts.

Lucy and I both trained in admin tech and I also trained as an auditor and C/S.

Fast forward another ten years of working hard seven days a week for modest wages and its late 2004. We have built the largest and best, most viable church the UK had ever seen. All org debts have been paid, even its future rent was paid for the best part of another decade because we bought out the lease of the previous occupants. There was a million dollars in Birmingham Org accounts. We had between fifty and sixty staff, 11000 square feet of space, smack dab in the center of the bustling town center. We had a jolly and thriving Scientology community (if you take out the IAS regging that has been picking up pace). We had kitchens on the premises with which we fed the staff; few people worked other jobs (moonlighting). We had Flag trained sups, auditors, a Class VI Senior C/S, a cramming officer. We had gone from being the worst org in the UK and probably the world, to the best in the UK and one of the best in the world – we received a regular bulletin called the “worst to best list” of all Scientology organizations around the world which listed all their actual main statistics and we were in the top ten percent on the planet.

I am not trying to say Lucy and I built this org alone, we had some fantastic staff working alongside us in Birmingham; engineers, authors, musicians and other incredibly able and talented people who had given up or put promising careers on hold to help.

And as the years passed we increasingly saw firsthand the “trickle down” effect of Miscavige’s destructive acts, policies and attitudes as they took root in Class V orgs. And sure enough, at the height of our success with Birmingham Miscavige reared his head again and ordered Lucy and I out of the org when he visited the UK for one of his IAS event holiday. I don’t know whether it was my counter intention to IAS regging (the IAS and I, on occasion had had  “words”) or Lucy and my resistance to the so-called Ideal Org strategy which we never implemented, or whether we were putting Miscavige’s pet London Org project in a bad light which we would likely continue to do. Only Miscavige knows the answer. But we were ordered out nevertheless. And many tears were shed by a great many people when the day came for us to leave.

So we finally returned to the fold in 2005 at church management in LA.

While we were doing the Veterans Return Pgm (in which Lucy and I both Method 9 word cleared the entire body of LRH management technology) we also worked part time on the Senior HCO files project, sorting out the international ethics and personnel files. Lucy got to see the international data files too. We were both (quite independently) left with an indelible impression that an enormous number of valuable staff and public had left Scientology or staff, been kicked out or declared in the years we had spent banished to the UK. The number was incredibly large and as a percentage was out of all proportion with staff and public numbers. We didn’t know why at the time, though in fact it was obvious, it was due to Miscavige’s sabotage and perversion of the justice systems.

And it was while we were working on the Senior HCO Files that I learned an interesting fact. I was approached out of the blue one day by an excited young girl who worked in Senior HCO. After confirming my name she told me that she had just completed a compilation all my post stats — she had managed to collect the stats for every post I had ever held in my thirty year staff career. I was impressed. But then she told me that she had checked the stats a number of times, and verified them. She concluded that I had been upstat on every post I had ever held. I was pleased to hear it but at the same time I had an uneasy feeling. If I had been upstat on every post, if I had that kind of record then I should have had ethics protection. Instead I had been royally busted out of Special Unit/OSA by Miscavige in 1985, assigned to the RPF under direct pressure from him in 1988, I had been thrown out of Int along with my wife due to his policy in 1990, and ejected from Washington D.C. by him. Finally I had been kicked out of Birmingham on his direct order in early 2005. Very interesting I thought. What was even more interesting was the fact that he did little of the dirty work himself. It was mostly done at arm’s length or at a distance. Unfortunately for me and my family, the trouble he caused us would not end there.

When we completed our Veterans Return Program, Lucy was posted as the Sea Org Programs Chief (over all the advanced orgs in the world) and I became the Deputy Commanding Officer of the management org (what used to be called the Flag Command Bureau).  And it was a very sad scene we witnessed too. We saw that management was destroyed or utterly negated, from the top down. We finally understood why most of the management units out in the continents did not function. Not one line of the entire LRH management tech Lucy and I had painstakingly word cleared was in use. Miscavige was clearly running the whole show (if you can describe it that way) via his RTC Reps. And it was a disaster.

It was also very clear that Miscavige micro-managed all the advanced orgs and FSO via his RTC Reps and that they were short circuited and stat pushed Advanced Tech Value of Services Delivered which was the RTC stat (very strange) and along with the so called Ideal Org strategy such actions were placing an unbelievable and inordinate strain on the upper OTs, a group Miscavige had effectively commandeered as his own and upon whom he would continue to bear down in a frantic and furious attempt to extricate himself from his self-created mess called International Scientology.

We tried to make the best of it and carry on, but things were coming to a head. Our daughter Katrina (now just 14 years old) became unhappy with life in the Sea Org in LA (it didn’t seem to be anything like my descriptions – and she was right). She broke the news to me early one morning, sitting on a bench by a bus stop on the outskirts of PAC (because of Miscavige’s weird co-mingling rules I wasn’t allowed into PAC to see my daughter, something that contributed to the problem). It was the first time my rose colored glasses began to shatter something I now often thank Katrina for. She told me with all the solemnity and dignity she could muster that she didn’t want to be in the Sea Org but that she didn’t want to pull Lucy or me out because she knew what being in the Sea Org meant to us so she would just go back to England and live there. She was barely 14. I was choked, both incredibly proud of her strength and devastated at the same time — my world fell apart.

Lucy and I proposed a number of sane solutions whereby we could accommodate the handling of Katrina and remain on staff. I even proposed in writing that I take Katrina back to England and become a Flag Rep in an Org while Lucy remained on her post in LA. Quite a sacrifice I thought but the powers that be would have none of it. We had to dump Katrina out into the world and both remain on post in LA – nothing else would be acceptable. In the endless “talks” it would often seem like good sense was going to prevail as we had real comm. cycles with our “handlers”. They seemed to understand. But they would return next day stony faced and zombie like, parroting back Miscavige’s immensely ruthless and unbending, out of valence viciousness. It was a no-go and a stalemate.

The terminals “handling” us began to use Katrina as a pawn in the matter. She came very close to making the decision to stay in the Sea Org for the next four years just for the sake of her parents. She would leave the moment she came of age (18). We couldn’t let her make that sacrifice so I realized that in the interim I would have to get her out of the picture, I would have to place her far away with a relative, out of harm’s way. So I proposed that I take her to Sacramento and I wasn’t surprised that it received immediate approval from the powers that be. I was to leave right away.

Driving the 500 miles north was the saddest journey I have ever undertaken. I had no idea when or if we would see Katrina again. I had very little time so I dropped her off at a relative’s house, paid my respects, gave my daughter a hug and left her, a forlorn figure disappearing in my rear view mirror, standing on the front steps as she waved goodbye as I struggled to drive away — it was hard to see the road in front of me.

I consider myself fairly tough but the whole experience gutted me. And Lucy would later remark how that night, back in LA, was the only time she had ever heard me cry myself to sleep.

The months passed slowly after that and Lucy and I became increasingly desperate. I had looked into the eyes of some Sea Org members that had been made to dump their kids – they were dead inside. And besides, I thought our strength came from aligned dynamics? Very strange indeed that at just about the highest level in Scientology; under Miscavige’s blatant influence, basic Scientology was not being applied.

In the end Lucy and I got fed up with getting the runaround and having terminals intentionally drag the whole thing out so we took off one day. And boy did that get their attention. I called OSA’s security chief from Sacramento 24 hours later. She understood (all of a sudden) that we should have been allowed to handle our scene with Katrina in a “humane” manner. It was all sweetness and light.

So Lucy and I returned to route out of the Sea Org, we had tried every other possible way to solve the problem — it was the only option available to us. The next few months were spent in what I termed “management prison”. My passport was held, our drivers licenses were taken along with our credit cards. We were guarded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Most of the time was spent in a windowless room in the basement of the management building. But I’ll say little more on that subject because our story was not any more horrific than any of the others you may have heard already.

While in management prison, I really couldn’t figure out why security and OSA went to all the trouble they did and why it took so long, until I realized the whole game was about trying to gag us, tie us down with legal documents and extract every ounce of discreditable data they could should the day arrive in the future when they might need it. Well, that day has arrived.

In late 2006 Lucy and I left the Sea Org after a combined 61 years on staff. For our pains we received freeloader bills totaling $200,000. And before the full truth had dawned on us we paid all our freeloader debts. We managed to lessen the bills but we still paid well in excess of $100,000.00

And I noted with interest that the majority of the people that dealt with Lucy and I regarding Katrina, from Qual staff to three of the four ethics terminals, all left the Sea Org within a short time after us, some almost immediately. I guess when you mess with peoples’ dynamics you reap the whirlwind.

For many months now Katrina, Lucy and I had been flying under the radar in Texas, ever since I had been to see my old friend Marty — what are the odds that, as vast as the USA is, Marty and I would both land within a short car ride of each other?

But the last member of our quartet (Marika) was still actively on lines. In fact she was about to go to Flag. I thought of briefing her on the real scene but thought better of it. I had an idea that Miscavige might just do my job for me. Sure enough a Flag auditor botched it royally, left my daughter in the middle of gross out tech, overrun and an unhandled red tag that they refused to deal with. They thought it more convenient to reject her as a Flag PC, that way they could just forget about it and go on with quickying Grades.

Within a few days Marika flew to Texas to be with her family. She walked in and said: “Why do I not want to go back to Flag? Why do I not want to go to any org?” So we told her. And after we answered all her questions I said: “What do you want to do now?” Quick as a flash her answer was: “Let’s go see Marty!” So we did.

- three independent women

Miscavige knows it too. Have you noticed how Miscavige dare not even name Marty? Not in the press, not in the ridiculous 80 page “Freedom” Mag, not verbally in OSA’s new tactic of “declare by rumor”. He is never referred to by name

All I can state is that the James family (Lucy, Katrina, Marika and I) are all extremely proud to know Marty Rathbun.

And yes, I am happy to say that we are all together now and that we are an INDEPENDENT FAMILY.

Written by Haydn James

(A.K.A. T Paine)

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