A walk past the San Francisco Org and a simple personality test forever altered the trajectory of David Fennick's life, leading him to the heart of a Scientology storm. As our esteemed guest, David shares a rare, unfiltered view of the controversial 1982 Mission Holders Conference, an event that marked a seismic shift within the Church of Scientology. Through his account, we're transported to a world of rigid control and dramatic displays of authority, as we hear firsthand the methods employed to align members and mission holders with the organization's strict codes of conduct.
The air in the conference room was thick with tension as nearly a hundred participants faced the formidable Clive Dodell of the International Finance Police Office. David, a relatively new member at the time, narrates the chillingly effective group sec-checking session and the unforgettable moment when an attendee's hesitance led to a staged declaration of suppressiveness. This episode isn't just a recount of past events; it's a deep exploration into the power dynamics that ripple through the very foundations of the Church and the people within it.
As we bid David Fennick's farewell, remember that the story of Scientology continues to unfold. Upcoming episodes will shed light on the intricacies of the Celebrity Center International and the lives touched by this enigmatic organization. Join us for these insightful discussions, as we step beyond the known narratives and into the complex tapestry that Scientology has woven through the years.
A link to the Mission Holders Conference write up from David Fennick:
https://pierreethier.wordpress.com/
Website: ao-gp.org
Be social and join US!: collegeofindependentscientology.com
Take our personality test and get a free evaluation: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RHJQ6DY
A walk past the San Francisco Org and a simple personality test forever altered the trajectory of David Fennick's life, leading him to the heart of a Scientology storm. As our esteemed guest, David shares a rare, unfiltered view of the controversial 1982 Mission Holders Conference, an event that marked a seismic shift within the Church of Scientology. Through his account, we're transported to a world of rigid control and dramatic displays of authority, as we hear firsthand the methods employed to align members and mission holders with the organization's strict codes of conduct.
The air in the conference room was thick with tension as nearly a hundred participants faced the formidable Clive Dodell of the International Finance Police Office. David, a relatively new member at the time, narrates the chillingly effective group sec-checking session and the unforgettable moment when an attendee's hesitance led to a staged declaration of suppressiveness. This episode isn't just a recount of past events; it's a deep exploration into the power dynamics that ripple through the very foundations of the Church and the people within it.
As we bid David Fennick's farewell, remember that the story of Scientology continues to unfold. Upcoming episodes will shed light on the intricacies of the Celebrity Center International and the lives touched by this enigmatic organization. Join us for these insightful discussions, as we step beyond the known narratives and into the complex tapestry that Scientology has woven through the years.
A link to the Mission Holders Conference write up from David Fennick:
https://pierreethier.wordpress.com/
Website: ao-gp.org
Be social and join US!: collegeofindependentscientology.com
Take our personality test and get a free evaluation: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RHJQ6DY
Hey there, independent Scientologists. Discover a new perspective to your bridge by visiting aohyephangporg. Get in session with remote auditing using the Theta Meter. Are you curious about where you stand? Head on over to aohyephangporg now and take our free personality test. Join the growing group of independent Scientologists today.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to another AOGP Outside of the Church podcast. I'm Jonathan Burke, your host, and I have a very special guest today, david Fenwick. David was a witness to the notorious Mission Holders Conference in 1982, which was the line of demarcation of power being taken away from the Mission Holders in Scientology, the Church of Scientology. They were doing very, very well in the late 70s and the early 80s. Up until that point, david was fortunate enough to be witness to this. Without further ado, david, what can you tell us about how you ended up being at the Mission Holders Conference in 1982?
Speaker 3:Well, hello there, first of all.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Did you go to the Mission Holders Conference in?
Speaker 3:1982? You were right out of high school, right I was. I actually dropped out of high school in the fall of my senior year. There was some. That's a whole different story, different story with some complications of its own. But by the time I arrived in San Francisco I had moved to San Francisco probably probably late September, early October of 1982. I originally was angling myself to get down to Oceanside, california, carlsbad, california. Things didn't work out there for me so I went back up to San Francisco where I had been, where I had lived in part of 1981, then moved back to San Francisco the fall of 82.
Speaker 3:I was staying at a YMCA hotel in the Civic Center, part of the downtown area in San Francisco and if you're walking from that YMCA, where I was, down one of the streets toward the main market street, you come across McAllister Street, which is where the San Francisco Org was at that time and it was a very large building. They had a big building and they had a big, large number of staff there also. It was a pretty good size Org. It was a very good size Org. The front face of the outside area facing the street of the Org was a large glass panel straight across from side to side with two doors on each end, and there was a sign in the window at that time, a little sign that said free personality test, and I would walk by there a few days and finally decide you know what I think I might want to take this free personality test. That was just something I was curious about. I went in, I took the personality test and sat down with a registrar and signed up for a few basic courses. What they showed me in my personality test I agreed with, which made me more willing to see what else they had to offer. So I got enrolled on a couple of basic courses.
Speaker 3:I think I started with the ups and downs of life course, then I did the personal integrity course and after a few weeks of doing that I got together with one of their Book One auditors. I had a session. I had a five hour session of Book One auditing that I really liked and it really made a really had an impact on me During the session. But after the session I really I got really keyed out after the session and that that kind of strengthened my reality and my affinity towards what this church of Scientology was offering. So I had never heard of Scientology before then. It was all. It was all new to me.
Speaker 3:So I had no idea of what was going on behind the scenes, behind you, exactly behind the scenes, with Scientology. As it turns out, at that time there was a whole lot going on behind the scenes. I'm not even aware of any of it. If you go to here's, here's what I'll say I will. I will as, as we go through this podcast, I will reference several times about an eight page, eight or nine page PDF report that I put together a few years ago about my, about my experience with the Mission Holders conference. If you like, you can. You can go to Pierre Atheer's WordPress blog and maybe after you, john, if after you put this podcast together.
Speaker 2:I can put a link on YouTube for it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if you go to the main homepage of Pierre Atheer's WordPress blog, scroll down on the main homepage until you come to an article called revisiting the MHC, and that's the report about it that I put together. To recap, how did you end up?
Speaker 2:How did I end up where now, at the Mission Holders conference. So how did you get in there, since you were a new Div6 public?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I so I go into detail about it in the report. But basically by that time, early November of 82. I was at the point where I knew a lot of the people at the org and I was friends with with many of them and it was, it was just a comfortable, it was just a comfortable, comfortable place to hang out for me. And one night I was sitting in the main first floor lobby area. I was sitting on the couch and there was a table there with some magazines, I guess.
Speaker 3:And at one point I just kind of turn my head to my right to look at the front door and there's a whole bunch of people coming through the front door. And when I say whole bunch, I mean repetitively, almost just an endless stream and an endless stream of people coming through the front door, which for the time that I've been there that seemed pretty unusual. But they're come, they're coming through the front door and they're immediately turning to the left in front of the reception area where there's a hallway with a staircase going up to the second floor and they're all going up the staircase and the the public executive secretary at the time. Her name was Martha Kirchen. She was later married to another staff member at the Oregon, a guy named Boris Levitsky, but her maiden name was Kirchen, and she was going and she started to go along with the flow of people going up the steps. And I'm sitting on the couch and I look over at her and she looks at me and she says, hey, dave, come on, come on up. And I was like, well, okay, I didn't know what she was referring to and she was just kind of like inviting me to go upstairs with everybody else. So I'm like, okay, I got, I guess. So, no problem, I'll check this out.
Speaker 3:We go upstairs to the second floor Academy, which was the Div II Academy, and it was a very large room that they had for their Div II Academy. It wasn't like a small bedroom size room with two tables and some chairs, it was. It was substantial. I go in to the Academy and to my surprise, the entire room is filled up with people. And however long I was hanging out there that night before I went upstairs, I couldn't notice all these people coming in. That filled up the Academy beforehand, as I, as I tell in my report, it was. It was completely by chance, just happenstance, nothing planned, nothing was suspected. Like I say in it, I was. I was just in the right place at the right time. Yeah, I was totally, totally the effect of the circumstance. So, yeah, that's that. That's basically the lead in to how I, how I, wound up in that room.
Speaker 2:What was the demeanor of the people when they were coming in?
Speaker 3:Well, I was still down in the front lobby, in the downstairs lobby, looking at all these people coming through the front door. Several of them had a lot of them had these white uniforms on, some sort of like officialness, looking to them. And when I got up in the room, everybody was quiet. There was no socializing between people sitting next to each other. Everybody was just seated and quiet. And even after I got up there there still continued to be people coming through that front door downstairs, walking up the steps and walking across the hallway to the second entrance to the Academy. There was actually two entrances.
Speaker 3:The Academy was that big and when I got in there there wasn't much room to sit down. I just sort of like went through the door which entered the back of the Academy and I just sort of like hung out by that entrance door in the corner of the Academy, standing up. Standing up, there was a couple other people. One or two other people around me had found a chair of some sort, but I think I was standing for the most part. There was some sort of a partition that I was able to lean on during the time, so it wasn't entirely uncomfortable, but I was standing for the most part, I think.
Speaker 2:How long did people keep filing in?
Speaker 3:I would say the event between the time I got there and by the time the main speaker began his announcements, I would say a good 10 minutes or so passed by and there were still people filing in. And when I say people filing in, I don't mean public, I mean C Oregon staff members who were there to conduct the meeting.
Speaker 2:Okay, so there were a lot of C Oregon members in the white uniforms, in the white uniforms.
Speaker 3:Okay, so let me back up here a moment. Okay, as I say in the report, I have to make this disclaimer this event that I was at was not the original Mission Holders Conference that made its claim to fame. During the weeks that followed that original conference, upper management restaged the conference again several times for general staff and public. The original conference was held at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel in October of that year, and the replay that I sat in on occurred in the first or second week of November.
Speaker 2:Okay, and when you say replay, you mean this was a live event.
Speaker 3:That they redid Correct. When I say replay, I don't mean like they videotaped it and then showed everybody in there the film of the replay, no right like a video, like they do with events. Here's the video. Yeah, exactly yeah okay. So they basically redid the whole conference all over again. However, they tailored it to the audience which we were, which was general staff and public.
Speaker 2:Okay, so my question would be this is a conference for Mission Holders being held at San Francisco Horton. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Not really Okay. The original conference was directed to and tailored for all of the various Mission Holders at that time. But the message that upper management was communicating to those Mission Holders they wanted general staff and public elsewhere around Scientology to know what that message was that they sent to the Mission Holders.
Speaker 2:And that's where it gets interesting. Yeah, yeah, they did it.
Speaker 3:Again, this was at the San Francisco org, so this was not far from the original conference, and the message that they wanted to impart was that in their view in town.
Speaker 3:There was a new sheriff in town and they were going to show them who's boss. And you have crossed their line because you public and the Mission Holders and staff and staff members were letting KSW go out. Okay, in other words, you were not practicing keeping Scientology working, okay, and so their message was that they were going to crack down on it. And they were going to crack down on you if you were a contributing perpetrator of that issue, okay.
Speaker 2:So how many people were there when the event started, after everybody filed in and filled the room up?
Speaker 3:I would say close to 100. Okay, close to 100. And that room was big enough to hold that many people too. Okay.
Speaker 2:And were there Mission Holders there?
Speaker 3:If there were, I didn't know of any.
Speaker 2:However, I doubt it because they probably went to the earlier one.
Speaker 3:They probably went to the first one, the original conference, which was directed to them specifically, and I'm quite sure that none of them wanted to Repeat it Go through it again.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, all right. So how did it get started?
Speaker 3:Well, at one point a tall guy with a mustache, tall, tall, dark-haired guy with a mustache stood up and he probably did 70%, 80% of all the talking during the meeting. Maybe somebody else prefaced him in the very beginning for a minute or two, but all I remember is him. And later on during the conference, toward the end of the conference, I found out from one of the other San Francisco staff members who was in that room. This guy's name was Clive Do-Dell. I had never heard of him. I didn't know who he was, but later on, in fact many years later, I learned that he was working within the International Finance Police Office that the church had established at that time and he was a deputy within that office.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, we've established who was doing most of the talking. Correct, okay, and so what ensued from the point that he introduced himself? Can you give us sort of a running record, a narrative of?
Speaker 3:He wasn't rude, he wasn't angry or act like he was specifically ticked off. I would say he generally kept his cool, but he was very firm and direct and he was very serious and he talked in some grave tones. I would say Okay. He didn't fly off the handle to the point where everybody was like this guy has lost it. No, everybody took him seriously and listened to what he had to do. In other words, he commanded the respect and the attention of everybody there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he had, he had to use our vernacular, he had some ethics presence, so to speak.
Speaker 3:I would say so, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:He had the ethics presence to command everybody's respect and attention and certainly the subject matter that the entire conference was about, the original conference and all these replays, the entire context was out ethics to begin with, on behalf of the mission holders themselves, on behalf of the mission holders themselves, not keeping KSW in, letting the tech slip, in other words. So as far as a synopsis, I will refer to what I wrote down in here. Let's see here, excuse me, at the time the most notorious mission holder at that time was a guy named Kingsley Wimbush who was a mission holder at the Stevens Creek Mission in the San Francisco Bay Area and he took the brunt of the criticism and he was the subject of a lot of the focus, I'm sure, at the original conference. But at our event also, and basically the speaker's communication was revolved around KSW, how it had gone completely out the window they had felt at the Stevens Creek Mission. Kingsley Wimbush was declared at that time. Our speaker at my event wanted us all to know about that and know how serious a situation it was.
Speaker 2:So he was the head on the pike.
Speaker 3:He was the head on the pike for that event and at that time, yeah, he I think the speaker told us about Kingsley Wimbush and how he had his own pet process that he referred to as de-dinging, and in my report on Pierre's site I have a link that you can click on at the bottom of the report. I think it's the link describing. It's a link that has Kingsley I think it's Kingsley Wimbush's brother describing what that de-dinging process was all about and I think he explains how he his, perhaps what the justification was for it or how it really was not as bad in his view as the church was making it how to be. But you can look at that reference if you like to. So we got an earful about that.
Speaker 3:Another thing that they ran over us with was there was a non-LRH written book at that time that was actually being sold in the org bookstore. An author named Ruth Minshul wrote a book called how to Choose your People, which is basically a reworded synopsis of the tone scale and the different manifestations and how to work with the tone scale. These management people at the event made sure to tell us that that book was to be removed from the bookstores and was not to be sold and we should not be looking at it because it's not source, it's not LRH, it wasn't written by LRH, so therefore it's not okay. A few other things toward the end of the event they singled out several staff executives from, I think probably a few from some other orgs or missions. Perhaps they ordered those handful of executives to fly down to flag the next week at their own expense and do some hadding courses, such as the FVBC course, the Vol-0 course, the KSW course, maybe a couple of others.
Speaker 3:But they were very serious about that. They ordered these executives to fly, if not the next day or two, certainly by the next week. There was a long table set up along one side of the room with about six or eight E-meter stations assembled across this long table and the idea was that they were going to have a large group sec-checking session go on, security check session take place, and they probably called up at least five, maybe ten, perhaps a few more people up to these E-meter stations at one point and sec-checked them.
Speaker 3:They did that this morning in front of everybody who was sitting in that room up to 100 people, now, it wasn't. I was at the opposite side of the room from that E-meter table so I certainly could not hear the confessionals that were going on by whoever they sec-checked and I'm sure that the people that they sec-checked were speaking quietly enough that it wasn't like the whole room could hear what they had to say and they would be embarrassing themselves. You probably had to be sitting very close to that wall on that side of the room to hear what they were saying, but that still occurred. David Mayo was at this event. He was. I describe how I first saw him in my report At the beginning, before the event started, when I was in the corner of the room and everybody was still filing in all the rest of the staff members I was able to look out the door into the hallway and watch them as they walked by and they all had this serious military, no-nonsense look on their face, except for this one guy who came in and he wasn't and he was not wearing a.
Speaker 3:I want to say he was not. I want to say David Muscavige was not wearing a white C Orchie uniform.
Speaker 2:You mean David Mayo?
Speaker 3:No, no, oh, oh oh.
Speaker 2:Muscavige was there.
Speaker 3:David Muscavige I'm referring to, right, not not David Mayo. David Mayo had his own adventures during this time of 82 and 1983 and his own entanglements. But as far as this conference replay, david Mayo was at least I don't think he was. I'm sure he wasn't. But what I'm saying is it definitely was David Muscavige who was there for this event and as I was watching the people walk past, david Muscavige, as I remember, he was much shorter than everybody else and he, he was dressed differently and he, he was definitely not walking in with a serious, we mean business. Look on his face. He had the opposite. He had this literally a happy go lucky. I'm having fun type of look on his face as he, as he walked, as he walked down the hallway along with everybody else.
Speaker 2:Hmm, yeah, so his demeanor was completely different than just about everybody else.
Speaker 3:Exactly, exactly. So everybody, everybody's demeanor was serious and we're here for business and we're not. We're not screwing around here. But David Mayo, or David Muscavige, just looked like a do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. I mean, he was just, he was just. He looked like he was just hop skipping and jumping into that meeting. You know he was, he was, he was there to have some fun. That's what the look on his, his face, said to me. So, and like us, and of course at that time I'm brand new to Scientology I didn't know who this guy was, but I just remember that he was the. He was the one guy acting so differently, walking in as everybody else. And then, of course, years later, as I'm still in Scientology and David, david Muscavige, rises up and his pictures and his video and his speeches are are everywhere to be seen for the public. By that point I recognized oh yeah, I remember that guy. He was at that Mission Holders conference that I was at. So that's that's how I connected the dots.
Speaker 2:Those those there. Okay, so David Mayo was not there.
Speaker 3:I'm 99% sure that he was not, because I didn't. I didn't know what he looked like at that time. I know what he looks like. I know what he looks like now, but I certainly don't remember.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he wouldn't. He's one of those type of people that would stand out, that look that different.
Speaker 3:You know he's just yeah, and he was. This is the fall of 1982 and I would guess that he was already in the process of being blackballed by Superman to the point, to the point where they wouldn't want him to be at that event.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Any yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, okay. So what else happened? Let me see.
Speaker 3:Let me see Sack, check, plant, flag, the book Kingsley Wynbush. I would say the event lasted. I think the event might have lasted about an hour and a half. It was not a short 20, 25 minute Informational, informational, yeah, yeah, they. They took their time to drive their point home.
Speaker 3:In the beginning of the event, the main speaker, clive Do-Dell. He asked the audience if anybody in attendance was new to Scientology or maybe was not, not, not really really that involved in Scientology, because this event was intended only for people that were very much involved. So when he said, when he asked us anybody new here, I raised my hand and I was the only one. I was the only one that did raise my hand and I'm in the corner of the room and he's in the front and he looks over at me.
Speaker 3:He asked me what have I done in Scientology? And I said, well, I've done two basic courses and I've had five hours of book, one auditing. And I was trying to be very straightforward, upfront, honest about it and he paused for a moment and then he, I guess he looked up at me and he said okay, you can stay. It was just like that. So, even though I was brand new to Scientology. You know, about five or six weeks in. At that point I'm brand new and didn't know anything. I was given the okay to be there, so I had. I had official permission to be there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what else can I say? At the original conference, the sources that I read told me that there had been at least four people declared suppressive at the original conference, and two of them were being Kingsley Wimbush and his wife. When you read in Ben Coradine's book Elron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman, when you read his book because he was there at the original conference and as far as I understand, his book has the best description of that conference At the beginning of the conference, one of the mission holders was declared on the spot because he refused to take a seat in the front row of the, of the, of the, I guess, of the of the of the of the room that they were in. He, he refused to take a seat in the front row of the audience. So they declared him for that.
Speaker 3:And at the conference, at the event that I was at, the exact same thing happened again. And, of course, everything I'm describing to you is what I learned many years later. Okay, I didn't know what that event was when I was there. Just as, just as a quick, as a quick side note, I'm watching. I'm watching this whole thing go down, not knowing anything about it, Not knowing any, who, what, where, why or when, or that this was a replay of an original hearing that they had. I didn't. I had no idea, but later on, after learning about the original conference, I read how someone was declared for not taking a seat up front, and then I remembered how that exact same thing happened at the conference that I was at.
Speaker 2:And do you know who it was that was was not wanting to sit in the front row.
Speaker 3:I don't know who it was. I didn't know at the time and didn't didn't recognize the guy. However, the more I think about it, the more I want to say that I may have seen it. I may have seen this person who quote, quote, unquote, got declared. I may have seen him many years later. I may have In as I, as I, as I describe in my report. My conclusion now about that declare, that second declare for the guy not taking a seat up front where I, where I was at. It was all fake, it was. The whole thing, was an act. The whole, the whole declare was staged so as to mimic what happened at the original conference.
Speaker 2:Hmm, so he's like a strong man.
Speaker 3:They yeah, I guess they. They declared a. They declared a mission holder at the original conference for not wanting to take a seat in the front of the audience, and they felt that that declare had so much psychological impact on the audience that they wanted to make sure they did it again and and and try to repeat the same impact to to the audience that I was at. So they staged a fake declare so as to just the fear of God and people.
Speaker 3:Try to try to try to recreate that, that, that that fear and impact, and that's what they did. I was in the corner of the room and I just look. I just looked to my right because I'm almost I'm almost up against the back wall of the academy, where this guy was he when I first got in, I want to say that he was actually sitting down in a chair, but once the main speaker began speaking and the event began, he actually stood up, put his back against the wall and Maybe, maybe, maybe, he had his arms crossed in front of him defiantly. He may have had both. He may have had his arms crossed in front of him at one point, or maybe, as he was waiting, he had his hands behind his back, but the point being was that he was deliberately not taking a submissive posture in the audience the way everybody else was. That's the main takeaway. And so, as he's standing with his back to the wall, clive Do-Dell in front looks back at the guy and says excuse me, sir, you know we have some open chairs up here in the front. Do you think you could come up here and take a seat in front for us please, so you can hear us all much better.
Speaker 3:Perhaps he said the guy just looks up at him and goes no, like no, no, he didn't. He didn't say F, f, u, but that was the tone in his voice. No, I'm not going to sit up there, no, and Clive Do-Dell just kind of like hesitates for a moment. I think he looked down at his papers and then looked back up at the guy and said okay, sir, you are hereby declared suppressive. And it was. I mean, it was just like that. And everybody in that room had dead I mean dead silence. You could hear a pin drop. Everybody knew what had just happened. Well, everybody was duped by what just happened because they were fake staging this declare and everybody fell for it is what I'm saying Because they did. They did a pretty good reenactment of the declare and the funniest thing for me okay now I didn't. I didn't start laughing, but since I'm brand new to Scientology at the time, I'm probably the only one in there who doesn't know what just happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you were, so you were an initiate, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I didn't know what Scientology ethics were, I didn't know what the Seard was, I didn't know what a declare was, I didn't know what a suppressive person was, all this stuff. I'm probably the only one in that hundred room hundred people room that didn't know what had just taken place and like, like I say in my in my write up, I'm thinking to myself declare suppressive, declare suppressive Is he? Is he saying that he officially thinks this guy is a jackass? I'm sorry, but that's kind of that. That's exactly what I was thinking to myself. And now I didn't, I didn't like stop the room and say, hey, wait a minute, excuse me, sir, can you explain that please? No, I just okay, whatever, I just I just held it to myself, right. But even though I thought it was kind of corny, okay, I could see how heavy the room was at the time when it happened and how everybody else was, you know, certainly not amused by it.
Speaker 3:That happened at the beginning of the of the beginning, at the beginning of the conference, and and and of course the purpose of it again was to reenact what they really did for real the first time and kind of like set the tone. Let everybody know we're not f'ing around, we mean business here and just just get everybody to take, take them seriously. And they, they pulled it off very effectively. Every I think I think everybody took it, took it seriously. The people, the people who were much more informed than I was, they didn't say anything during that conference, at least if there was a few people who were, who perhaps knew, knew about the original mission holders conference and knew all the turbulence that was going on within Scientology at that time. If there were any of those people in the audience, they did not question and they absolutely did not challenge all of these Seard members who were delivering it.
Speaker 3:There were probably the tape the main table, the main, the main lengths of tables that were lined up end to end against each other in the front of the room where all of the Seard members sat. There was probably 10 or 15 people at that front center table, between between 10 and 15. And then there was probably another. There could have been another five or 10 Seard members that were just standing standing around the room as observers and just, you know, adding, adding more Seard members to impart a larger management presence at the event.
Speaker 2:So would you liken it to sort of like what you you see Congress do when they have a hearing sort of a thing where there's a table at the front with a bunch of people sitting sitting at it, you know, and then everybody else is sitting on the other side and and and they're more the audience, except for the people that are being asked questions. Except there wasn't any particular person being asked any questions, it was more of a. Let us inform you of the following.
Speaker 3:Correct you could, you could. You could roughly compare the physical seating layout to these various congressional hearings that you see on C-SPAN.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, yeah, very, very good, I got the picture. What's?
Speaker 3:that.
Speaker 2:I got the picture, you know, of how it was sort of marked up. Now, Miss Gavage wasn't in this group of people at the front.
Speaker 3:Miss Gavage was in the group of people in the front. David Miss Gavage was sitting on on the far, on the far right of that table. So if I'm, if I'm in the back of the room and I'm looking at the front, my right side, which would have been his left side of the table, but he was, he was actually in the corner, relatively in the corner seated at the table, and, from what I've read, he had a very high profile at the original conference and did a lot of talking and came off, came off as the sheriff at the original, at the original conference, at this event that I was at, he did not say a word, he did not speak, he did not get up and take the microphone and introduce himself. Let everybody know I am David Miss Gavage and I am, and I'm really the ultimate badass at this event, and you don't know it yet, but try to mess with me and you'll find out. Okay, right, he did it. He did it. He didn't try to swing his weight.
Speaker 2:In other words, he was sort of in the sort of in the shadows a little bit, letting everybody else do the heavy lifting.
Speaker 3:Exactly, he decided to stay in the background and maybe, maybe, maybe he got more than his fair share of macho time at the first event, maybe he got more than his fair share of sheriff time, and so he decided that. Okay, I'll put it back in my pants.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And I will. I'll keep my mouth shut for this time. I'll let someone else have the limelight. Now. I think that that that if, if, if I had to guess that that might have been the calculus being behind it.
Speaker 2:And then. So what happened with the people that were were being sex checked at the end? Did they they'd say anything about them or anything, or did it just end quietly and just kind of fade?
Speaker 3:in the mist. I think it. I think it. It ended quietly while the sex checking was going on. There was no main speaker lecturing us during the sex checking, the sex checking kind of like. Almost like there was a pause during the event for the sex checking to take place, and even even though there was about six or eight E meter stations, were they divided or there was just meter, meter, meter, meter on top of the table?
Speaker 3:Meter, meter next to meter. There were no. There were no like physical barrier partitions between the E meters, so as to, you know, simulate a little bit of privacy between each session. Right, they were.
Speaker 2:they were just put up on the table and which is not KSW and its own right, by any means.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay.
Speaker 2:There's no, no such thing. There's nothing anywhere that says you do that, you take a person in session. You take a person in session. It's a violation of the auditor's code to do that next to somebody. I mean, you know there were back in the sixties, you know, I mean they were. There were so many people they were auditing out on the tennis courts in St Hill with a mark five and one hand and a clipboard on the other, basically on one knee, and that's how they did it. But you know, a confessional, an HCO sec check, clearly that's what this was. There's nothing that says that you ever do anything like that and that's a misappropriation of the confessional technology as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 2:So it's pretty scary and very dystopian to have something like that occur, because it's not supposed to occur that way. If anything, they should have said okay, we're going to take you in a room down the hall, we're going to ask you some questions, but I think, I think that that was done Similarly to what you were saying about this mock declares, because they were trying to put the fear of God and people and missing him, lots of people's withholds in.
Speaker 3:So doing this. I think they, I think I think there was an effort of showmanship in how they constructed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was very much staged, thanks, Staged.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. Now the people that the people that did go up to the emeter is to get sex checked. I don't think they stayed seated on the meter for very long. I don't think any individual sex check took more than a few minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they probably just asked the questions and said be here at 8am in the morning, we want to talk to you, some more type of thing. They just asked the questions and then, if in fact those people weren't strawmen themselves and they were just doing this to make it look really, really scary that you could be next type of the thing Possible.
Speaker 2:Because, you know, a sex check isn't going to last 20 minutes. A sex check is going to be a couple of hours at a minimum. At a minimum depending on the number of questions that they're asking.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay. The people that got up from the emeters who were being sex checked or whatever that process was, I can't say that they immediately left the room after their sex check. I think most of them just went back to their seats.
Speaker 2:Did they look pale?
Speaker 3:Well, like I say, I was on the total other side of the room so I couldn't get a close look at them, but they didn't. They didn't. Okay, if any negative information was revealed by them during a sex check, the speaker or the other people around them did not make an example of them in front of everybody, Like they said. Perhaps maybe they would sex check someone and then say, okay, hey guys, we got one here, this guy did this and that we're getting rid of him too.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, they didn't do that. Yeah, so they probably asked them questions and then had them come back later. I mean, that would really be the only thing that you could do is just get the reads on the questions method five and then you have them come back later. If in fact it was nothing, if there was something to it, so did they call them by name and say Joe Smith, sit down over here.
Speaker 3:Get on the cans. No, no, no. Whatever process that they used to to summon them to the emeter station was very quiet. You couldn't, you couldn't tell who was being.
Speaker 2:It was tacit, right, it was very tacit.
Speaker 3:They knew in advance or something.
Speaker 3:Perhaps, perhaps, but they didn't like, like, like in. In other words, they didn't, they didn't announce a roll call of all the people that they wanted to come up. You know right, apparently, apparently, maybe maybe they walked up to them individually or, like you say, per, perhaps the people that were checked already knew, knew in advance, that they were requested to come up for a check, but so that that that part lasted about about 20 minutes. But the thing in hindsight that struck me about the whole event was that around the org there was no promo posted about the event that was going to take place.
Speaker 3:Like in a lot of these class four orgs at the time, you would have a big sign in the lobby and signs hanging around the org for a free wins event, or the flag, the annual flag world tour right, or the the LRH birthday event. You, you vote, you always have promo and ads and signage. There was none of that zero for this event and what struck me later on was that when it was over, I didn't hear anybody talk about it, nobody. Nobody came to me and explained what it was. Nobody came to me with any follow up information that they might want, want want to give me.
Speaker 3:One of the staff members that I was, one of the staff members who was sitting near me in that back corner of the room was a foundation academy staff member girl named Karen Howe.
Speaker 3:I remember. I remember her specifically and I'm pretty sure that she knew what the back story of this whole thing was, because once we were well into the event, towards the end, I leaned over to Karen and I said hey, hey, karen, what's that guy's name? And I'm asking her about that tall guy with a mustache who was the main speaker, and I could tell by the look on her face and the way she responded to me that she knew she knew more than the average person about what was going on, than I did. And she didn't turn to me, she just looked straight ahead with this dead serious look on her own face and she just said Clive Doedell. So now, now this this Clive Doedell is a Seard member and in hindsight I wouldn't imagine that he spent any time before the event hanging around the San Francisco org. So how, how, how it is that Karen knew who this guy was. She, she had to have, she had to have a lot more inside baseball, about, about the whole thing, to know what this guy's name was.
Speaker 2:Sort of sort of as if he were a were an FBI agent or agent Smith in the matrix. You just knew he was a heavy he had he had.
Speaker 3:he apparently had some sort of reputation or notoriety, that that was imparted Well before I got there was was Marty Rathbin there. I don't remember seeing Marty Rathbin's face. Like I say in my report, the only two faces that I remember of all the people that walked in were David Muscavige and Clive Doedell. Those were the only, and you know and he was in there.
Speaker 3:No, I don't. I don't think he was there. I don't think. I don't think Norman Starchy was there either. Norman Starchy was at the original conference and he had he had a lot of FaceTime himself at the at the original conference. Norman Starchy wasn't there. Wendell Reynolds, who was at the original conference and was also, I think, the, the chief guy within the finance police unit that the Searge had, he was at the original one. I don't think he was at mine. Really, I would have to guess that the only name from back then that you still read about today that's still around.
Speaker 3:Yeah, is David Muscavige.
Speaker 2:Because everybody else is gone.
Speaker 3:Well, everybody else is gone, but, but I mean even, even the names of the people who are gone today that you, that you've heard of. I don't think they were there. Then is what I'm saying, right, david Muscavige was there, he was. He had not, he had not risen to the level that he is today, at that point, he was still working within a unit called Author Services, but apparently that had enough cloud of its own.
Speaker 3:But from the from, from the timeline of his that I think I've read, he had not, he had not consented, he had not consolidated all his power by that point. But he was, he was given, or I don't know. From what I've read, muscavige wasn't given anything, muscavige assumed yeah he just muscled his way in and became the head Mafioso.
Speaker 3:Right, right. So he was the the at that point. At that point he he had not assumed everything that he was going to, but he was still. He was still influential enough within the Seorgh in the fall of 1982 to command the respect of everybody, every other Seorgh member around him.
Speaker 2:And it would only four years later that LRH dropped the body.
Speaker 3:Yeah and I think, I think, from what I've, read that David Muscavige was one of the few at that time who had free and direct access to LRH, which I think gave him a lot of the clout that most other people did not enjoy back then. That's that that would. That would be how I connect the dots on that.
Speaker 2:Right. So in other words, the the. The whole purpose of this was was to say there's a new sheriff in town and we are putting you on notice that there is a new sheriff. We are the new sheriff and we will be making some wide changes, and we caught some people out and we wanted you to know that we're looking for others.
Speaker 3:That's a good way to put it which I had not thought of before. The way you describe their purpose was to put everybody on notice. That's a good description of how it came across and what they wanted to do and indoctrinating them. They held the original conference to deal with the mission holders themselves, and in my report I go into a little bit of backstory as to why they wanted to do that in the first place.
Speaker 2:I was going to bring that up, which is the missions of its own.
Speaker 2:The missions were doing a lot better than the class 4 orgs were financially and they saw a much larger slice of the pie. And it is my understanding that this whole thing was orchestrated in such a way that they, at the original one at the Hilton, they told them look, we want to see your books. You're going to pay us $10,000 to do this. If you don't pay us $10,000 and give us your books, you will be declared. We want to know how much you're making, who you're making it from, and we're going to be taking those people from you and if you don't do this, you're out. And I can speak from experience when I was a freshman in high school when this whole thing went down, the mission in Kansas City, which was far bigger than most class 4 orgs, but they never, ever leveled up to use a gaming term. They never, ever leveled up, for whatever reason, to being a class 4 org. And overnight this place was booming. There were people sitting out on the steps, it was really kind of an electric thing and there were some weird things going on at the mission. Three different types of OT level OT3 were being done. The mission holder was in the hospital with some sort of with pneumonia that he got, supposedly because he had gotten hold of the OT3 and all this stuff. So there were some wonky things going on, but the place was booming and people were winning.
Speaker 2:My dad was on services there and overnight it went from a booming org to all of the PC folders were taken out of the mission and ended up in somebody's garage. For over a year it was just booming lights are on, music coming out of the windows, kind of a thing, and everybody was doing great. And then they came down on everybody at the Hilton in San Francisco when they did this, word got out and it just became a ghost town For more than a year. And by the time I went to the org in Kansas City with my dad, this would have been, I'm gonna say, 1984.
Speaker 2:It was on Broadway in Kansas City and he had to shoe the prostitutes off of the front step with a broom and he was the only guy left from the mission. He reopened it and they turned it into a class for org, if you can believe that, with a one man organizing board. And he's still there to this day. His name is Alex. Carr Was my nemesis, so I don't know how to explain that whole thing, but I mean this it was one of the so what happened?
Speaker 3:What happened to all the other mission staff members Once. That happened when they went, when the church came in and converted it.
Speaker 2:Well, they had allegiance to Jeff Beanie, I believe his name was. He was the mission holder and they had allegiance to him and he said basically, for you know, podcast purposes, he said stand down, and it was shuttered at night and never reopened again. It was never a mission again and you know, people called people and all this stuff. So it was that shot that was heard around the world, type of the thing.
Speaker 3:And so everybody just kind of like disappeared.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody just said yeah, just said we're done, we're out. And when I was on staff in 1988, 89 by 89, I was given the commission as the OES to go in to the folder closet, which was a full of folders, and find any working phone numbers and call these people and try to get them to come into the York. I probably called oh, I don't know At least a hundred people. Yeah, one of these people would come in, most of them hung up on me before I could get a couple of sentences out of my mouth once they heard that.
Speaker 3:I was calling to the York. These were public and or mission staff holders. Yeah, or mission staff members.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah. And some of these people were clear. Most of these people were mid their grades type of thing. I looked at folders. You know, the auditing was okay, Wasn't anything suspect.
Speaker 3:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 2:They didn't want to have anything, anything to do with the org. After the mission holders conference went down, just, it was just. Nope, sorry, not interesting, just okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 3:Let me let me back up this, this this whole blow up at the Kansas City Mission happened when the.
Speaker 2:This was the night of the thing that happened at the Hill.
Speaker 3:So every okay. So how many people at the Kansas City Mission knew at the time what was going on in San Francisco and what that was all about?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that they got phone calls from people that you know, because the mission holders knew mission holders, new mission holders, and you know degree of separation was maybe one or two people, and so there was a. There was a you know a chain call or something like that. I mean, that's for our younger listeners. This is back before. When somebody called, you didn't know who was calling until you picked up the phone and said hello. Right you know.
Speaker 2:So it was it. People called people. That was the. That was the fastest mode of communication. There weren't even fax machine. Fax machines didn't exist in 1982. There was a phone call that people got and literally overnight, God just gone and they didn't want to have anything to do with the church.
Speaker 3:What that tell? What that tells me, because I've seen that same sort of phenomena in in business before. Okay, what that tells me is that all of the mission staff members were not so much loyal to Scientology and the church more broadly they were. They were committed to and they really liked working for the specific mission holder in place at that time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that that's that's how it was and it's my understanding, especially in San Francisco, because a large contingent, it's the second largest contingent. Well, it's probably a tie between Portland and and San Francisco. The number of Scientologists. Remember they had the big, huge rally in Portland and stuff like that and you know all these people showed up, but a lot of those people came up from the Bay Area to, but San Francisco had had the second largest contingent of Scientologists on lines, second only to LA on the planet. And so they were. They were making very sure and and there weren't a lot, there weren't a lot of high power missions in the LA area. A riverside was one, yeah, one of the one, of the only ones. But in San Francisco it's a different story because there were a bunch up there.
Speaker 2:And then and then you, you fast forward to the mid to mid to late 80s. Somebody took over a lot of those missions and you know Stevens Creek went quote unquote, st Hill size and you know, and all that, and so there were quite a few of them that that survived it somehow. But the loyalty was with the mission holders and that's Scientology took a huge reduction in number of public overnight from this action and from from what the people that I've interviewed and that I've talked to you over the years for podcasts or had as public, it was very much a day where they were not going to suffer what was going on and so they just left in the church, probably reduced in size at least by a quarter, maybe closer to a third, maybe border, borderline with half, because there were far more missions that were doing well and class four orgs weren't, were, were not doing very well, and so they wanted to move that power and take those people and put them on class four lines, class four, class five org lines, so that they could then see the, the receipts, the money from the class four org, because the class four org is set up completely different or in a corporate structure, and they modified that big time since then. But you know, one of the things that hasn't changed is that, even though they have all these quote unquote ideal orgs with all this fancy stuff that that people have paid for, the org still has to pay rent for the staff has to pay rent for that building that was bought by parishioners because the church owns it. So they were changing the corporate structure of the church entirely with this event in San Francisco and letting people know that it was now going to be corporate. It was no longer going to be. You can buy a mission package for X thousands of dollars and buy this many books and all this stuff, and you can only you only have to pay. I forget what the percentage was, but it wasn't much and they were doing very, very well.
Speaker 2:A mission, a mission cannot make it clear, but a mission can audit people from the pier through grade four, and that's what these missions were doing and they were doing it very, very well. And a similar thing happened in Beverly Hills Around 2000,. I think it was around 2005. Don't quote me on that, folks, but it was something like that. Beverly Hills mission was doing really well, even within the new construct that the church had created, so well that Miss cabbage went in and said you're going to have to pay this money back to us. You shouldn't be making this much money and threatened them and or declared somebody I can't remember the specifics. One of my core supervisors from Tampa work worked at Beverly Hills mission when they were thriving and they were thriving, it was impressive and it's very nice location in Beverly Hills right off of rodeo drive. So it happened again to Beverly Hills mission and they did the exact same thing. They put some heads on a pike, the mission holders were calm and all of this stuff because they didn't want this getting out of hand. That missions were making more money than a class for org was because they see the lion share with it as a class for org.
Speaker 2:So anyway, we're running up to about an hour and 20 minutes here.
Speaker 2:I hope.
Speaker 2:I hope everybody's enjoyed the podcast and gotten a better understanding of how weird this whole thing was and that it was a title shift and it was a sea change for the church.
Speaker 2:So if anybody has any questions, post them on YouTube and we'll get a dialogue going and I'll point David on there and he can ask any questions as to what he experienced in the iteration that he saw at San Francisco org. So, david, thank you again for being on the show. We really appreciate it and it's been fun getting a glimpse back into that period when all of this stuff was going on and the church started to reform under a corporate structure that was in many ways not sanctioned by LRH. I often wonder how much he really knew about what was going on at that time. So if we can find anybody else that has any information on this, leave us a message on the YouTube channel and let us know, and maybe we can have you on the show and maybe we can have a three-way and talk to David more about this and get a little bit of a Q&A going on. Again, thank you, david, for being on the show.
Speaker 3:You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:You bet. So we'll catch you for another podcast on Friday. Everybody, quentin will be back and we have a really interesting show that's going to be about Celebrity Center International and this is going to be starting a new number of shows that we're going to have on different aspects of the church and everything like that. Get some new viewpoints going on. So for David Fenwick and myself, scientology Outside of the Church podcast, namaste, and we love you. Thank you so much. Bye.