Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Scientology, a scathing critique of the organization that became an instant best-
seller. In Belgium, after a ten-year investigation that concluded that the group
should be labeled a criminal organization, prosecutor Jean-Claude Van Espen
recommended that Scientology should stand trial for fraud and extortion. The
organization vowed to fight the charges.
It was the enemy within, however, that was potentially the most damaging. As
Tom, in his character as Stauffenberg, loaded his briefcase with explosives, a
Scientology renegade was about to detonate his own device. Behind bullet-proof
glass in a building in Stuttgart protected by armed guards, a man who claimed to
be a former Scientology minister, Christian Markert, spent three days telling
secret agents about his experiences inside the organization. Fearing that he
would not be safe in America, where many former Scientologists believe—
sometimes with good reason—that the local police work hand in glove with
Scientology organizations, Markert, a German citizen who had been living in
Buffalo, New York, fled to Germany for safe haven. It was an ironic inversion of
the dark days when Jews escaped Nazi Germany and took refuge in America.
The story Markert told the German intelligence agents was familiar yet
chilling. A difficult relationship with his parents, a checkered career, including
arrest warrants for fraud in France and Ireland, and a search for meaning in his
life after the death of his mother had led him to Scientology a decade before. To
verify his identity, Markert, now thirty-six, had a letter from the Scientology
legal department in Buffalo attesting that he was a good and long-standing
member of the organization. He said he worked for Scientology in Ireland and
California before his stint in Buffalo.
Not only did Markert run the bookstore, but for a time he claimed he was the
director of the Office of Special Affairs in charge of intelligence, in particular
harassing former Scientologists who had criticized the organization. As proof, he
handed over sensitive OSA documents that conformed to similar directives and
orders held in the extensive archive in the Scientology commission in Hamburg.
He told the German police that he had coordinated the systematic harassment of
families and individuals. Those who stayed silent were left alone; those who
attacked their former faith were dubbed “Suppressive Persons” and faced “the
full wrath of the organization.” The method, as per training, was always the
same. First, he would gather the so-called confidential “ethics” files that
contained confessions about sex, drugs, and rocky roads, looking to find and
exploit an individual’s “ruin.”

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According to Markert, one family, a husband, wife, and daughter, was
harassed every day for a year, receiving thousands of unsolicited visits,
telephone calls, and threatening letters. Markert told the secret agents that as a
result of the pressure, the wife, then judged a Suppressive Person, had made two
unsuccessful suicide attempts. The third succeeded. “I didn’t think anything of it
at the time,” he said. “As a Scientologist you don’t view death as much of a big
thing, you just talk about dropping the body.” Markert and his staff did not see
themselves as engineering her death. After all, the actions were consistent with
instructions outlined years before by L. Ron Hubbard when he declared that an
enemy of Scientology could be “tricked, sued, or lied to or destroyed.” Even the
interviewing agents, who knew about Scientology’s tactics, were shocked by his
allegations of calculated cruelty at the dark heart of an organization that calls
itself a religion. “It was the first story he told me when I met him,” recalls Ursula
Caberta, the commissioner for the Scientology Taskforce in Hamburg.
Markert was a walking blueprint for Scientology’s future policy, a strategy
that placed Tom Cruise at the heart of their expansion into Britain and Europe.
He claimed that these plans were unveiled at a meeting with David Miscavige in
Hemet in April 2007, where Markert was offered the chance to help build the
organization in Europe. Scientology was desperately short of linguists, for
example using non-German-speaking staff from England in Berlin. During his
first—and last—visit to the base, Markert reported feeling as if he were entering
a high-security prison. There was a pervading sense of paranoia about the place.
Before meeting David Miscavige, Markert had to undergo rigorous security
checks, as if he were meeting the President of the United States.
While the group traditionally treats the outside world with grave suspicion, at
that time many inside the organization were discussing the way that a classic
Scientology strategy had neutralized an imminent threat from the media. John
Sweeney, an award-winning journalist working for BBC Television in London,
had been sent to America to see if Scientology was a cult or a religion. Certain
that Sweeney would be critical, they rolled out a familiar Scientology tactic to
discredit him. The plan was simple but effective, to harass Sweeney and his
camera team around the clock until he eventually lost his cool and “freaked
out”—ideally, with the shadowing Scientology camera team there to capture the
action. Showing critics to be angry or out of control fatally undermined any
arguments, however coherent, they advanced about Scientology. As a former
Scientologist observed, “It’s a very straightforward plan. They ‘bull bait’ you
until you blow, pressuring you for so long that they mess up your mind.”
The scheme worked better than expected. In March, at Scientology’s alarmist
Psychiatry of Death exhibition in Hollywood, Sweeney finally lost his temper,

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shouting and screaming at senior Scientologist Tommy Davis, son of actress
Anne Archer, who had been hounding him throughout his trip. As Sweeney later
explained, “I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight,
been denounced as a ‘bigot’ by star Scientologists, and been chased around the
streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers. Back in Britain, strangers have
called on my neighbors, my mother-in-law’s house, and someone spied on my
wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.”
When the confrontation was screened on the BBC’s flagship investigative TV
show, Panorama, in May, it earned record ratings—and 2 million hits on
YouTube worldwide. While Scientology took full propaganda advantage,
spending an estimated sixty thousand dollars on promotional DVDs and other
materials, the majority of comments were in favor of the beleaguered reporter.
“After a week of Scientology, I had lost my voice but not my mind,” Sweeney
said, now realizing, with the benefit of hindsight, that he was set up.
Even as Scientologists were discussing their coup against the BBC, Eugene
Ingrams, a notorious private investigator regularly employed by Scientology,
was probing the family background of Southern California radio talk-show host
Vince Daniels after he had dared to criticize the work of Narconon, the group’s
drug rehabilitation program, on his show. By August he had resigned from
KCAA radio station, citing differences with the management.
While Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard placed great credence on black
propaganda, Miscavige had succeeded beyond Hubbard’s dreams in executing
the founder’s policy of using celebrities to bang the drum for the faith. Markert
claimed that Miscavige indicated that stars like Tom Cruise and John Travolta
would be used to spearhead the drive into Britain and Europe. Tom would build
on his existing role as a roving ambassador, using his celebrity to gain access to
politicians and other movers and shakers in business and showbiz. As Miscavige
observed, a politician did not have to be a Scientologist to promote the cause; he
just needed a good Scientologist behind him. “He made it clear that celebrities
like Tom Cruise are doing everything they can to get into Europe and give
Scientology a higher profile,” recalled Markert. “Miscavige sees it as a big
market—Scientology has already been successful in Italy. He talked about it in
depth.” The Scientology leader even boasted that Tom’s studio, United Artists,
was seen within the organization as essentially a pro-Scientology outfit. He
hoped to see the studio increasingly staffed by dedicated Sea Org disciples who
had cut their technical teeth at the Gold production studios in Hemet. In Lions