The Church of Scientology?

No, it’s a mysterious group of masked men and computer hackers called Anonymous who say are committed to dismantling the powerful religious organization renowned for its celebrity members such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

Over the past few months, Anonymous has picketed and protested at Scientology centers around the world from Australia and Atlanta to Brussels and Boston. They’ve also hacked into the church’s Web site, posted numerous videos on YouTube criticizing the church and have been accused of harassing church officials.

Now the church is fighting back with its own public relations onslaught, releasing a recent video titled “Anonymous Exposed,” which identifies individual it said were members of the group and accuses them of being accessories to criminal acts that include death threats and destruction of property.

“We wanted people who were unaware of what’s going on to know about the criminal acts permitted by their leaders,” church spokeswoman Karin Pouw told ABCNEWS.com, adding that the church is working with federal and local law enforcement. “[The video] summarizes our position.”

Members of Anonymous try to remain anonymous, but ABCNews.com has reached several individuals who say they are members of the group and who talked on the condition that their names not be revealed.

“Anonymous contains all kinds of individuals, academics, college students, members of law enforcement, media professionals and blue collar workers,” a 25-year-old member of Anonymous with a computer science background told ABCNEWS.com in an e-mail, on the condition that he remain unidentified. “We are united by a mind-set, not by a membership card… We have no leaders and adhere to the true definition of a collective.”

Responding to claims made in the church’s video and statements from Church of Scientology leaders equating Anonymous with domestic terrorists, the Anonymous member wrote:

“Anonymous does not support, encourage or condone threats of violence in our campaign against Scientology. The ‘bomb threat’ video was reported to the FBI and to the media as soon as it was seen on YouTube. They were both told that this video was not produced by Anonymous.”

Other members of Anonymous, who were college students in California, also denied that they have made any violent threats and claimed that they believe in lawful protest against what they perceive as the heavy-handed tactics of the church. The also e-mailed ABCNews.com on the condition that their identities remain anonymous.

An FBI spokesperson declined comment.

For at least three decades, Scientology has gained a devoted following in Hollywood and around the world among those attracted to its message of self-help, and it has drawn ridicule and suspicion for some of its more controversial beliefs and its secretive nature.

But it was two recent events that propelled the members of Anonymous to act. Sources told ABCNEWS.com that they were initially intrigued by the publication of Andrew Morton’s biography of Tom Cruise, which was highly critical of Scientology. That drew them to the Internet for more information where they came across the leak of several church videos on YouTube featuring Cruise’s wildly enthusiastic praise of Scientology.

The church called the book “a bigoted, defamatory assault replete with lies” and subsequently it was not published in the United Kingdom and Australia for fear of libel lawsuits.

The Anonymous members were particularly offended, however, by the church’s attempt to have the leaked videos removed from the Internet. The church claimed showing the videos was a copyright violation.

“Those heavy-handed attempts to censor the Web outraged members of Anonymous,” said church critic Dave Touretzky, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. “A lot of these Anonymous members are young kids and weren’t aware of the [church’s] history. They became curious about Scientology when the Cruise videos hit YouTube and saw how the church was reacting.”

In the middle of January, Anonymous sent a message to the church that included the threat, “We have therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. … We shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology.”

The church claims that on Jan. 18, they received 241 harassing phone calls and death threats. On Jan. 22, it claimed that three churches received bomb threats. Three days later, Anonymous broadcast a video that included protesters break-dancing in front of Scientology facilities.

On Feb. 10 and March 15, thousands of Anonymous members protested against the church in cities around the world, including Dublin, Melbourne, Toronto, London and New York. Many of the protesters wore masks inspired by the V character from the movie, “V for Vendetta,” who was an anarchist leader fighting to overthrow a totalitarian government.

True to their name, most of the protesters have remained anonymous. But two of them, 21-year-old James Farrell and Charles Hicks, were arrested in the Atlanta area March 15 outside the George Church of Scientology in Dunwoody.

“They were arrested for screaming and cursing on a bullhorn, which is against our hazardous conditions ordinance,” said Dekalb County spokeswoman Keisha Williams. “Three others were cited or ticketed for violating the same ordinance.”

Farrell and Hicks could not be reached for comment.

At another Anonymous protest that day in Mountain View, Calif., protesters handed out fliers advertising a Web site called www.exscientologykids.com, where former church members complain about their experiences.

One of the Web site’s founders is Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of current Scientology leader David Miscavige.

Church officials in Mountain View said they have contacted the local police in Mountain View to report several threatening phone calls.

“I believe they are domestic terrorists,” said Scientology’s public affairs director Matt Ward.

But one of the protesters disputed that said ex-Scientologist Bill Offermann, a 63-year-old painting contractor who attended the rally and is not a member of the group, although he communicates with its members.

“They seem to want to expose the truth rather than make far-fetched claims. … With the power of the Internet, there is very little that the church can do to stop them.”

As part of his attempt to combat “aggressive secularism” in Irish society, he issued invitations to Catholic bishops, the Church of Ireland, the Jewish Chief Rabbi and Muslim leaders to take part in multi-faith talks.

But the Church of Scientology, which counts film stars such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its members, was left out.

According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, its Irish representative Gerard Ryan, wrote a letter of protest to Mr Ahern asking whether this had been a “pointed snub”.

“Perhaps this was simply an error of omission, and if so, I apologise for any inference I may have inadvertently made.

“However, if our church was deliberately not invited I would greatly appreciate if you would tell me why,” he wrote.

A spokesman for Mr Ahern wrote back in March last year to say that the letter would be brought to his attention — but there was no further communication with the church.

The scientologists had previously sent a DVD entitled ‘This is Scientology’ to Mr Ahern’s department and offered to meet officials at any convenient time to discuss “issues of mutual concern”.

Utopia

It says “the aims of our Church include the creation of a civilisation without war, crime or insanity, and whilst such an apparent utopia may seem unduly optimistic, nevertheless we have achieved some expertise in the handling of such issues.”

The Church of Scientology claims to have millions of members across the world, but critics have accused the organisation of financially exploiting its members by charging them fees to access information and resources.

Mr Ahern set up the church-state dialogue process after a highly publicised speech in 2005, in which he condemned “aggressive secularism” for marginalising the role of religion in society. He invited the leaders of 15 Christian churches as well as Jews, Muslims, Baha’is and humanists to Dublin Castle for the launch last year.

Mosque

The FOI request for letters sent to Mr Ahern’s department also revealed that the Cork Muslim Society attempted to enlist his help in getting a permanent mosque in the city. Its vice president Dr FW Radwan, pointed out that it had to use a rented premises for its 5,000 members.

Mr Ahern received a letter from Archbishop Brady of Armagh last June congratulating him on his re-election as Taoiseach.

He also received a personal letter from Bishop Edward Daly, perhaps best known for his role in helping the wounded on the day of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972.

He thanked Mr Ahern for his visit to the cross-community Foyle Hospice in Derry last year and his “major and significant role” in the peace process.

According to the correspondence, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin wrote to Mr Ahern to invite him to attend Mass to mark World Peace Day on New Year’s Day.

Clearwater is prepared for its enemies. It’s a warm, if overcast, Saturday in February, but all the storefronts lining the sidewalks of this sleepy town on the Gulf Coast of Florida are shuttered. The streets are mostly barren, and at the sight of strangers, the few passersby quicken their pace and avert their eyes. Outwardly, Clearwater has all the hallmarks of an unexceptional beach community - there’s a Starbucks on the corner, and new construction projects dot the shoreline. But today the cranes are still and the scaffolding is empty. No one is lining up for lattes. Everyone, it seems, has disappeared.

“There’s one!” says Patricia Greenway, my guide, as we drive past a dark-haired woman in black slacks and a short-sleeve white shirt. When she notices us eyeballing her through the car window, she raises her hand like a scandalized starlet confronting the paparazzi. “See - she’s hiding her face,” Greenway says quietly, sounding like the host of an Animal Planet safari special. “They feel that if they’re exposed to entheta, they’ll lose their bridge.”

Their “bridge” is the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” the path to enlightenment, levitation, time travel, and all-around invincibility peddled by L. Ron Hubbard under the name Scientology. “Entheta” is us. The enemy.

Ever since Hubbard, the portly flame-haired naval enthusiast, accomplished liar, pulp fiction writer, and unlikely cult leader, came ashore here in 1975 after leading his flock on an eight-year sea voyage throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, Clearwater has been known as the “spiritual mecca” of Scientology. Members call it Flag Land Base. Beginning with its purchase of the Fort Harrison Hotel that year, the Church has methodically acquired most of downtown Clearwater, save for the library and the courthouse, amassing nearly 1.7 million square feet of office and residential space and turning the city center into a virtual Scientology campus. More than 1,200 Church staff members, and somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000 Scientologists - including Kirstie Alley (who purchased her home from Lisa Marie Presley) - live and work here. Which is exceedingly creepy, especially when they’re nowhere to be found. Even so, I am skeptical when Greenway and her associate, Peter Alexander, both outspoken critics of Scientology, hesitate to get out of the car and walk around. What could really happen to us? The sidewalk is still ostensibly public property.

Alexander, a soft-spoken former vice president of Universal Studios who now lives near Clearwater, attained the Church’s second-highest level of spiritual awakening, OT VII, or Operating Thetan level seven, before he defected in 1997. At one point, Alexander says, he was so consumed with Scientology that he carried around a Church-issued beeper that alerted him whenever his minders decided he required counseling. Greenway, a no-nonsense blonde with a pack-a-day voice and an easy laugh, was never a Scientologist. Alexander hired her in the mid-’90s at his architectural design firm, which at the time was run using Hubbard’s principles; she resisted the workplace pressure to join Scientology and eventually convinced Alexander to leave the Church. They both joined the board of the Lisa McPherson Trust - a now-defunct anti-Scientology organization that battled the Church in Clearwater for years - and made a feature-length film called The Profit about a megalomaniacal leader named L. Conrad Powers who founds the Church of Scientific Spiritualism.

Greenway and Alexander have steered clear of downtown Clearwater for several months and fear that if they’re spotted in the area, the Church will unleash private investigators on them (as they claim it has in the past), and that a new wave of troubling phone calls and attempts to meddle with their business will commence. This strikes me as paranoid. Eventually, we park the car and get out. Alexander points to a Greek-columned stone building that once housed the town bank. It is now the headquarters of the Office of Special Affairs, the Church’s public relations arm and current incarnation of the Guardian Office, which was the epicenter of the black-bag hijinks for which Scientology is famous - infiltrating the Department of Justice, hatching schemes (which were never fully realized) to blackmail critics, bugging IRS offices, and so forth. A discreetly posted security camera peeks out from atop the building. “They’ve got 110 cameras downtown,” Alexander says. “Just wait.”

Within minutes, a paunchy middle-age Latino man with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing khakis and a white golf shirt, emerges from the adjoining parking lot. He walks silently to a spot a few feet away from us, points a digital camera, and begins snapping our picture. I say hello. He says nothing. I ask him if he’s a member of the Church. He stares, grim-faced, at the camera’s LCD screen. Alexander and Greenway are casual; they’ve been through this before.

As we continue down the sidewalk, a bus with tinted windows passes by. Greenway explains that it’s a Scientology bus. The Church leaders don’t trust the staff to own cars, she says, and they don’t want them walking around with entheta, either.

Greenway points across the street. The venetian blinds in the storefront opposite have been opened to reveal an office with at least half a dozen people inside. One of them, a clean-cut young man, is standing by the window, pointing a video camera, and slowly pivoting to keep us in the frame as we make our way down Cleveland Street.

The Scientologists are monitoring their enemies. And they are expecting more to come.

It’s been a bad couple of months for the Church of Scientology. In December, German authorities took a significant step toward outlawing the group, announcing that they “do not consider Scientology an organization that is compatible with the constitution.” In January, St. Martin’s Press published Andrew Morton’s Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, which painted a scathing portrait of the actor’s chosen religion as a money-mad, fascist mind-control sect led by Cruise’s closest friend, David Miscavige, a gun-loving high-school dropout with a Napoleon complex who runs his religion like a paramilitary group. Morton’s book kicked off yet another blistering round of bad PR for the image-obsessed Church, with headlines about its efforts to draw in Katie Holmes, allegations that Cruise functions as the Church’s second-in-command, and the far-fetched belief among some Scientology “fanatics” that Suri Cruise was actually sired using Hubbard’s frozen sperm. It debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

Then came the video. You’ve probably seen it by now - leaked footage of Tom Cruise accepting the Church’s Freedom Medal of Valor award at a 2004 gathering of the International Association of Scientologists. Slickly produced, with the theme from Mission: Impossible pumping along in the background, the clip features a manic Cruise exhorting his co-religionists to commit themselves to the cause. “Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it’s not like anyone else,” he says. “As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it. Because you’re the only one who can help.”

The Tom Cruise video first appeared on YouTube on January 14, the day before Morton’s biography went on sale. (According to one longtime critic of Scientology who is in contact with other anti-cult activists, the leak was purposefully timed to coincide with the book’s release.) It was up for one day before the Church forced YouTube to take it down, citing copyright infringement. The clumsy attempt at censorship angered many on the Web, including the Manhattan media site Gawker, which obtained its own copy and continues to host the video despite the threat of a lawsuit. At press time, the footage had been viewed more than 2.7 million times.

Then came Anonymous. On January 21, a video titled “Message to Scientology” appeared on YouTube. A brilliant work of agitprop, the video (embedded below) features a monotone, computer-generated voice speaking in staccato against a mesmerizing backdrop of gathering clouds. The message, which bears quoting at length, is ominous:

“Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous. Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation, suppression of dissent, your litigious nature: All of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. … We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

Within hours of the video’s posting, all hell broke loose. Almost immediately, the Church’s main website, scientology.org, went down under a distributed denial of service attack, a classic hacker technique that overwhelms a target’s website with phantom user traffic until it crashes. Scientology offices worldwide were flooded with prank phone calls and so-called black faxes - pages upon pages of blank black pages - tying up their phone lines and emptying ink cartridges. Dozens of proprietary Church documents - videos, lectures, and course materials worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in Scientology’s pay-to-pray scheme - began showing up on YouTube, BitTorrent, and countless websites.

Anonymous is the catchall term for an amorphous group of online activists-slash-hackers-slash-pranksters-slash-dadaists organized loosely around two online message boards, 4chan.org and 711chan.org. Anons, as they call themselves, are steeped in the anarchic and exceptionally juvenile culture of the Internet, and function as something like online yippies. The lolcats meme, for example - a series of inexplicably funny pictures of cats with comically misspelled captions like, “I can has cheezburger?” - first emerged on the 4chan boards, and its members have claimed responsibility for a long list of feats, including taking down white nationalist websites and stealing the passwords to 72,000 MySpace pages.

Anonymous managed to disrupt the Scientology website for three days. And in a show of force - and a surprising departure from its previous, Internet-focused projects - it also dispatched legions of real live protesters to Scientology facilities around the world for coordinated pickets.

Add to that the recent defections of several prominent Church members, including David Miscavige’s own niece, Jenna Miscavige Hill - who is openly attacking her uncle and the Church - and Mike Rinder, the Church’s former chief spokesman and public face, and you can see why the folks in Clearwater are wary of outsiders.

“It’s looking like the perfect storm,” says Dave Touretzky, a research professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a longtime critic of the Church. “I just can’t believe what’s happened over the last six months. It’s all falling apart for Scientology now. We’re looking at the end times for them.”

Scientology, of course, has always thrived when it’s under attack. Hubbard was keen to make sure that its enemies, whether real or imagined, loomed large in the lives of his adherents. He railed against “the forces of evil [who] have launched their lies and sought, by whatever twisted means, to check and destroy Scientology” - whether they be IRS agents, psychiatrists, or reporters, whom he dubbed “merchants of chaos.” A pillar of the Church’s theology is the existence of “suppressive persons,” who must be avoided, or “handled,” in the Church’s euphemistic jargon. In 1967, Hubbard promulgated what he called the “fair game” policy, whereby anyone judged to be an antagonist “may be deprived of property or injured [and] tricked, sued or lied to, or
destroyed.” (He later withdrew it, citing “bad PR.”) Miscavige has chosen his own aggressive, protomilitant style, pumping up Scientology troops with talk of an “assault on planetary suppression” and the “global obliteration” of psychiatry, Scientology’s bête noire.

Scientologists covertly infiltrated one critic’s life, befriended her, and, an FBI agent later told her, framed her by using stationery with her fingerprints on it to send bomb threats to the ChurchIn keeping with Hubbard’s fair game dictate, every time Scientology has been attacked, it has quickly struck back, which is what makes the current barrage against the Church so remarkable. Not long ago, anyone brave enough to publicly criticize the organization suffered dearly. Paulette Cooper, an investigative journalist whose 1971 exposé, The Scandal of Scientology, was the first mainstream book to criticize the Church, found herself subjected to what she described as a 15-year campaign of harassment. Scientologists covertly infiltrated her life, befriended her, and, an FBI agent later told her, framed her by using stationery with her fingerprints on it to send bomb threats to the Church. Branded a lunatic, she became suicidal, lost her boyfriend, and was down to 83 pounds when a 1977 FBI raid on Scientology offices in L.A. and Washington, D.C., turned up documents indicating she had been the target of “Operation Freakout” - a coordinated campaign to get her “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks.”

Fourteen years later, after writer Richard Behar wrote a blistering cover story for Time headlined “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power,” the Church unsuccessfully sued the magazine for $416 million and sicced six private investigators on Behar himself, obtaining his phone records and credit reports, and digging into his personal life. Likewise, former Scientologists who have spoken out have found themselves cut off from their families and worse. Alexander says his clients have received calls from people claiming that he ripped them off. He believes the calls were placed by Church members.

As recently as February, according to Miscavige’s estranged niece, a reporter for a British tabloid received a vaguely threatening phone call after interviewing her. The reporter had contacted the Church’s press office seeking a response to Hill’s claims that the religion tears families apart. Shortly thereafter, he received a call from a stranger asking if his mother knew that he was working on a story about Hill. The caller then recited the writer’s mother’s home address. Soon after, the story was killed.

The journalist, a freelancer whom Radar has agreed not to name, says the story never ran because it lacked a celebrity angle. But he acknowledges that he received a troubling call and that his status as a self-employed reporter without the backing of a newspaper made it difficult to ignore. “If it weren’t little old me, I wouldn’t blink,” he says. “But I have blinked, and there’s not much that can be done about it.”

Few expect the hackers behind Anonymous to blink. In fact, rarely has an opponent of Scientology so gleefully played into the Church’s paranoia and xenophobia.

“It’s not against their people or religion,” says one Anonymous member who, predictably, declined to offer his identity. “We respect the right for them to believe what they want. We oppose their lawsuits and their bully tactics. Every religion goes through its stages of infancy. The Catholics had the Crusades, but for the first time in history, the common people have enough power to stop Scientology before it gets to that.”

Given Anonymous’ decentralized nature, it’s difficult to gauge the individual motives of its members. Literally anyone with a computer can “join.” And it’s not just hacker nihilists: doctors, lawyers, and professors are involved, they claim. “Anonymous,” says a member who calls herself Sarah, “is a collective group of individuals with no leader, who do anything they can and want.”

A few days after Anonymous’ “Message to Scientology” appeared on YouTube, powder-filled envelopes arrived at 19 Los Angeles–area Scientology facilities. The powder was harmless, but the FBI was called in to investigate. Anons interviewed by Radar disavowed the mailings and suggested the envelopes were sent by Scientologists themselves to discredit Anonymous - a tactic the Church had used against Paulette Cooper - and claimed that, as a free-form public movement, members have no control over every action taken in their name. Another wayward attack, according to “Sarah,” involved someone faxing hundreds of pages with only the word “nigger” printed on them over and over again, to a number mistakenly believed to be affiliated with the Church. She regrets that, but says she’s helped “successfully stop a lot of other people who had really stupid plans.” The Church has denounced Anonymous as a “cyber-terrorist group” committing “hate crimes” and accused them of “bomb threats, death threats, and threats to burn down Church buildings.”

“The Church can confirm that appropriate law enforcement authorities are investigating the criminal acts of Anonymous,” Scientology spokeswoman Karin Pouw wrote in a 10-page response to Radar’s questions. “[Anonymous] will not disrupt the Church’s normal activities of serving its parishioners and the community.” (Click here to read the church’s entire response in PDF form.)

In a sign that they were more than just a passing Internet fad, Anonymous soon graduated from pulling pranks just for the “lulz” - anonyspeak for shits and giggles - to real-life, up close and personal activism. February 10 is the birthday of Lisa McPherson, the 36-year-old Scientologist who died from dehydration in Clearwater in 1995 while in the Church’s care. She was allegedly in the midst of a psychotic breakdown, and the Church was reluctant to hospitalize her for fear that she would be treated by a psychiatrist. McPherson’s death sparked a round of back-and-forth litigation and galvanized anti-Scientology groups. On what would have been her 49th birthday, Anonymous scheduled protests in front of Scientology facilities in 100 cities worldwide. They planned to wear V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks, hand out leaflets, and carry signs. According to Anonymous, 6,000 people showed up around the world. My first visit to Clearwater’s eerily deserted downtown was on February 9, the day before the planned protest.

Invariably, former Scientologists do the same thing when they first leave the Church: They log onto the Internet and start searching. “Members of the general public know more about Scientology than decades-long members do,” says Chuck Beatty, a 27-year veteran who worked for Author Services, Inc., the powerful Scientology organization that manages Hubbard’s copyrights. As a rule, Scientologists are forbidden from exposing themselves to any of the dozens of websites - xenu.net, chief among them - devoted to exposing the Church’s sordid past and nefarious nature. While much of the information has been available on the Internet for years, you once had to actively seek it out. Interest in the Tom Cruise video and media coverage of the Anonymous campaign has pushed this information out in front of a mass online audience, reinforcing the view that Scientology is a cult and cutting into its recruitment efforts. “Celebrities are gaining them exposure and ridicule,” says Beatty, “but they’re not gaining them members.”

“Robert Vaughn Young once said the Internet is going to be Scientology’s Waterloo,” says frequent Scientology critic and journalist Mark Ebner, referring to a high-level defector. “And he was right.”

Scientology’s outlandish creation myth is a closely held secret within the organization - learning about it prior to reaching OT III is said to cause mental retardation or, by some accounts, death. But for potential recruits, it is a simple matter of Googling - or watching South Park - to learn that Hubbard believed an interstellar overlord named Xenu killed billions of beings in an attempt to thwart galactic overpopulation 75 million years ago. Their souls, Hubbard taught, infest Earth-goers and can only be removed through a hybrid of counseling and interrogation known as auditing, using an E-meter, or crude lie detector.

Faced with an increasingly skeptical public here at home, former members say, the Church has begun to target its recruitment efforts at communities statistically less likely to have Web access. In particular, it has stepped up its efforts in Central America, where, according to remarks made by Mike Rinder at a Scientology gathering in 2004, the first lady of Honduras is a convert. Critics point out that much of the anti-Scientology material available online has yet to be translated into Spanish, making Spanish-speakers an easier sell. The Church has also set its sights on African Americans, opening up a center in Harlem in 2003 and making a strong play for Hollywood supercouple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. At a 2006 gathering, Miscavige spoke glowingly of Kimora Lee Simmons’s efforts to distribute a personalized edition of Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness, featuring her image on the cover, to schoolkids in New Jersey. (Simmons’s rep denied she was a Scientologist after video of Miscavige’s speech became public. Watch the video below. Miscavige lauds Simmons’ contributions to the church at 6:15.)

Even as Scientology comes under assault from outside forces, it is also, say former members, bleeding from within. “I see more and more people leaving and willing to speak,” says Tory Christman, who worked in the Office of Special Affairs for 20 years and says she spent more than $200,000 on Scientology courses before dropping out in 2000. Christman left - or “blew,” in Scientology parlance - because she has epilepsy and wasn’t permitted to take medication for it; psychiatric and neurological drugs are a serious no-no. But after two decades of working her way up the Bridge, she was forced to confront the fact that even L. Ron Hubbard could not cure epilepsy.

“At the top ranks, there’s a very high blow rate,” says Beatty. “They can’t take it anymore.”

Indeed, Scientology faces an inherent conundrum: Adherents are ushered up the Bridge with specific promises that they will be able to leave their bodies at will, stop time, read minds, and never succumb to illness. As long as there’s another level to rise to, former Scientologists say, it’s easy enough to convince yourself that your magical powers are just around the corner (even if they were supposed to have already materialized). “I got in it because I thought the out-of-body experience was real,” says Beatty. “And after 20 years, I found out, it’s not. But by the time you’ve gotten there, you’ve dumped a couple hundred thousand dollars, or like me, 20 years of your life into it. You don’t want to give up. It’s a group fantasy.”

To keep that fantasy, and the attendant revenue stream, going, the Church has had to come up with new ways to dangle advancements beyond OT VIII - ostensibly the highest level you can reach, according to Hubbard - without seeming too craven. In 1995, Miscavige announced what he called “the golden age of tech,” which was essentially a claim that Scientology’s auditors had been doing everything all wrong. “We just discovered a treasure trove of L. Ron Hubbard,” Miscavige said, meaning that everyone needed to do their courses over. And pay for them, naturally.

But the coup de grâce of Scientology’s campaign to keep its members motivated and their wallets open is a massive 380,000-square-foot Mediterranean Revival structure, occupying a whole block in Clearwater across from the Fort Harrison Hotel, known as the Super Power Building. Though the Church broke ground on the building a decade ago, and almost everything has been flawlessly in place on the exterior since 2004, it is still not completed. According to the Church’s website, the Super Power Building will contain 889 rooms on six floors, a dining room that can serve 1,400 people, facilities for 1,200 staffers and 1,600 “parishioners,” five miles of carpet, and 180 miles of electrical wiring. The Church has announced and ignored innumerable completion dates; it now says it expects the building to open in mid-2008.

Some former Scientologists attribute the delay - for which the Church has been receiving daily fines of $250 from the city - to the Church’s fund-raising prowess. Donna Shannon, a former member who donated a total of $50,000 toward the construction of the facility, says that as long as the Church can appeal to members for donations, ostensibly to help finance the building, it will remain incomplete.

Scientology’s new building will include an antigravity simulator; a human-size gyroscope; oversize furniture to help determine spacial relationships; and a circular track to run around, over and over againBut others say that the Church is still perfecting the secret training regimen the structure was intended to house - the super power rundown, a course that will give Scientologists, well, superpowers. The building’s amenities will include an antigravity simulator; a human-size gyroscope to teach students how to orient their bodies; television screens that move around, rapidly flashing images to drill members on how to perceive subliminal images; a facility for producing a variety of odors to train the olfactory sense; oversize furniture to help determine spacial relationships; and a circular track to run around, over and over again. The rundown is a new course that even OT VIII’s will want to pay for.

Matt Feshbach, a billionaire hedge fund manager and devoted Scientologist, is one of the lucky few who has experienced a pilot program of the super power rundown. Apparently, it works. “I’m not dependent on my physical body to perceive things,” he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2006, adding that he had already saved the life of a young boy with his new abilities by stopping him from running into the street.

One Scientologist who has apparently forsaken his superpowers is Mike Rinder, formerly head of the Office of Special Affairs and chief spokesman for Scientology. In what many ex-members describe as a significant black eye for the Church, Rinder blew last summer and now lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. Rinder was one of the most powerful men in the organization; it was his Australian baritone that proclaimed on ABC’s 20/20 in 1998: “Every few thousand years a man comes along who is so extraordinary he changes the course of history, and L. Ron Hubbard is one of those men.”

“Rinder leaving Scientology is like Goebbels leaving the Nazis,” says Beatty, who speculates that Rinder couldn’t put up with Miscavige any longer. Miscavige is notorious, former Scientologists say, for mistreating and screaming at underlings.

(Church spokeswoman Karin Pouw “categorically denies” any allegation that Miscavige has mistreated anyone: “Mr. Miscavige is a beloved and respected leader. Your question is offensive in the extreme.” As for Rinder’s current status in the Church, she says, “Religious membership is personal.” Efforts to reach Rinder through another ex-Scientologist who has been in contact with him were unsuccessful.)

Miscavige, for his part, is having trouble keeping his own family in the Church, let alone his henchmen. In 2000, his brother Ron and Ron’s wife, Bitty, left Gold Base - a formerly top-secret facility roughly 90 miles east of Los Angeles that serves as the Church’s international headquarters - for Virginia. Both Miscavige brothers were raised in the Church by their father, a Polish-born musician who joined Scientology while living in Philadelphia. (It was David, however, who caught Hubbard’s eye and served as his assistant from the age of 14.)

Ron Miscavige has remained silent since his defection. He did not return Radar’s phone calls or e-mails. But his daughter, Jenna Miscavige Hill - David’s niece - caused an uproar in February by writing an open letter to Pouw denouncing the Church’s policy of “disconnection,” in which followers are forced to forgo contact with anyone declared a suppressive person, even family members. Pouw had previously issued a statement in response to Morton’s book, claiming that disconnection is “the opposite of what the Church believes and practices.”

That, Hill says, is not true. “If they’re so arrogant that they can completely lie when people know the truth, they’re not going to change,” she says. “I felt like I had to say something.”

Hill says the Church tried to keep her from talking to her parents from 2000, when they left the Church (she was 16 at the time), until 2005, when she followed suit. Moreover, she describes a harrowing childhood as a third-generation Scientologist, in which, even as a small child, her life was heavily regimented and she was required to do manual labor.

From the age of six, Hill lived at Castile Canyon Ranch, a private Scientology-run boarding school near Hemet, California, about 20 miles from Gold Base, where her parents lived and worked as Scientology staff. (Scientology is divided into “staff” and “public” members; many of the staff are under total control of the Scientology hierarchy and receive courses for free or at a discount, while public members like Greta Van Susteren and Tom Cruise are free to do as they please and pay for courses.)

“I saw my parents once a week,” Hill says. Along with 80 other children of staff at Gold Base, she says, she woke up every morning at 6:30, put on a uniform, and cleaned her room until inspection at 7 a.m. Then she worked handing out vitamins to other kids. After that, she says, “We’d do rock hauling and demolition, dig trenches, plant trees.” When the grueling physical chores were done, she would study academics and Scientology materials until 9:30 p.m. “It’s kind of weird when you’re six or seven years old to have to study until 9:30 at night,” she says. “We had units, we had to call people Sir, we did close-order drilling. It was run like a military organization.”

Hill has fond memories of her uncle David from her time at Gold Base. Her family often spent Christmas holidays with Miscavige, she says, and he would take her to movies and even once to a hockey game. Things changed when, at age 12, she was drafted into the Sea Org, an elite cadre of Scientology staff. Hill recalls, “I went to Clearwater to visit some friends, and they said, ‘Here’s your uniform. You’re in the Sea Org.’ After that, it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t my uncle anymore. He was Sir. He’s like God there.”

In Clearwater, Sea Org recruits sign a contract promising one billion years of service to the organization; in the event of death, inductees are allowed 20 years to “grow the body” after they are reincarnated, at which point they are expected to report for duty. They are also required to fill out an exhaustive questionnaire bearing this quote from Hubbard: “You can’t be shot for what you have done, you can only be shot for what you haven’t told us.” The Church asks whether applicants have ever been affiliated with the CIA or Mossad or have ever held a security clearance, and requires them to fill out a detailed sexual history, including “any perversions” and “who, what was done, and how often - be as complete as you can.”

During her four years in Clearwater, Hill says she went to school once a week. She spent the rest of her time studying Scientology and performing administrative work. Her parents stayed back at Gold Base, and Hill says she saw her mother “once for about a half-hour” and her father “three times for at most a half-hour each time” over those four years.

Nicholai Allen, a classmate of Hill’s at the ranch, corroborates her story. “I was seven when my mom took a job at Gold Base,” he says. “She had no idea that she wouldn’t be living with me when she got there - she wasn’t given a choice. Almost immediately I was put to work cleaning bathrooms, harvesting vegetables, and building rock walls.”

One day, when Hill was 16, the local head of the Religious Technology Center, the body in charge of enforcing Church doctrine, told her she needed a “sec check,” or security check - a lengthy inquest using an E-meter. “I was interrogated eight hours a day for six weeks,” she says. “I couldn’t talk to my friends. I had to put on a grubby uniform, and when I wasn’t being interrogated, I had to clean the bathroom. When I slept, there was always someone guarding the room.” She was never told why.

After six weeks, she was flown to L.A. When she arrived, she was told to go to the Office of Special Affairs’ boardroom, where she found Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun, Miscavige’s second-in-command. “[Rinder] said, ‘Your parents are leaving, and you’re going with them.’” The sec check was standard operating procedure for anyone - even a 16-year-old - leaving the Church. “They wanted to know if I had any evil intentions toward my uncle,” Hill says. “They wanted to find out if I was going to speak out.”

To the contrary, Hill chose the Church over her family. “I was brainwashed, so I didn’t want to go,” Hill says. She convinced Rinder, Rathbun, and her parents to let her stay on in L.A. and remain on the staff of the Sea Org.

Hill never attended school again. During her time in the L.A. Sea Org, she says, all of her parents’ letters to her were intercepted, and she was forced to read and answer questions about them in the presence of Rinder. She eventually married a fellow Scientologist named Dallas. In 2005, after a particularly aggressive auditing session in which she was questioned for hours because she criticized her superiors for attempting to take away her cell phone - Hill’s only mode of contact with her parents - she announced that she wanted to leave the Church. “It was after a culmination of a lifetime of things,” she says, that the cell phone issue finally flipped a switch in her head. Dallas, who was more indoctrinated, took some convincing, and the couple put off the decision for a few months. Hill later found out that during that time, Rinder and other people in the Office of Special Affairs were covertly interrogating Dallas. “They were secretly talking to my husband,” she says. “Mike Rinder was telling Dallas bad things about my family, [encouraging him] to reevaluate, and telling him that he wouldn’t be able to talk to his parents. Not to keep Dallas, but just to fuck with me.”

Finally, after Dallas broke down and told Hill about the secret interrogations, the couple agreed to leave. “We went and stayed at a Travelodge,” Hill says. “They showed up the next day with a U-Haul full of our stuff. The guy delivering it told Dallas, ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure your family disconnects from you.’”

“We had no money,” she says. “No credit. I didn’t have a driver’s license. No nothing. I was 22. There are a ton of people like me.”

Hill and her husband now live in San Diego. She declines to talk on the record about her current relationship with her parents, but says of her upbringing, “I wouldn’t even let that happen to my dog.”

“Jenna Miscavige speaking out is probably the most devastating thing to happen to them so far in terms of long-term damage,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Dave Touretzky. “To hear that [David Miscavige’s] own niece left the Church and is accusing him of breaking up her family - that’s huge.”

Asked about Hill’s account of her childhood, Pouw said: “The Church does not comment on how parents choose to educate and raise their children. Children were never forced to engage in manual labor.” According to Pouw, “Facilities provided by the Church for the children of staff at [Gold Base] were nothing short of spectacular. In addition to a boarding school, facilities included swimming pools, basketball courts, football fields, baseball diamonds, and even horse stables. Citrus orchards and organic gardens, maintained by professionally trained gardeners, were also provided.”

“Yeah, there was a stable,” Hill says bitterly in response. “And we were the ones who built the horse corral. We were the ones who hauled the horse shit every week. I rode a horse one time in the six years I was there.”

On the morning of February 10, Lisa McPherson’s birthday, Clearwater is desolate again. A broken car horn wails incessantly somewhere in the distance.

Anonymous begins gathering at about 11 a.m. The Church has hired nine off-duty police officers to provide security at the march; there’s an air of a high-noon showdown in the offing. The assembled Anons are surprisingly diverse. One protester I spoke to gave his name as “Wesley Crusher,” the youngest crew member in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the crowd extends beyond the usual hacker suspects - there’s a schoolteacher, college and high school students, even a few fraternity types. Many are dressed in suits; all have some sort of bandanna or mask covering their faces. By 1 p.m., the appointed time of the march, close to 200 people have collected at a staging area near the library. Someone pulls out a birthday cake for Lisa McPherson, and, in a surprisingly earnest moment for an Internet-based assault force, the crowd sings “Happy Birthday.” Dave, the young, self-appointed leader of the group, urges restraint. “Let’s not burn down any buildings,” he says. “I’ve got to say that ’cause I know some of you all are pyros. Xenu is watching you, so be careful.”

The march turns out to be the largest protest against Scientology in the history of Clearwater. Old-hand anti-cult activists who come down to check it out are impressed. The signs read “Ron’s gone but the con goes on” and “Honk if you hate Scientology.” For the next two hours, a chorus of car horns continually blares.

“I think it’s great to see people protesting,” says one local woman who refuses to give her name. “I work for a company that’s owned by Scientologists. I just got the job for money. I didn’t know it would be creepy and weird.”

Another local couple says they just came downtown for the afternoon, not to protest, and someone took a picture of their license plate as they parked. “We had no idea this was the epicenter of Scientology,” the woman says. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have moved here.”

The surveillance is in full effect as I make my way around downtown; young men in short-sleeve shirts, khakis, and sunglasses seem to emerge out of nowhere to snap your picture each time you walk past a Scientology building. They don’t respond to questions or acknowledge your presence, they just stare at the camera’s screen. I spot one woman walking down the street carrying an L. Ron Hubbard book and ask her what she makes of the crowd chanting “Cult! Cult! Cult!” “I don’t have any thoughts whatsoever,” she replies curtly.

The protest is peaceful, with no arrests or confrontations. According to Karin Pouw, 5,000 Scientologists were inside the Church buildings engaged in religious services without regard to the “terrorists” outside. As the picket line starts to dissolve, I make my way back to my car, down a deserted side street. I am the only one on the sidewalk. A white Japanese car drives past me; as I look over I see a blonde woman snap my picture from the passenger seat. I walk faster. Fumbling for my keys, I spot a brown car pulling out of the supermarket driveway, across from the lot where I’ve parked my car. The driver lifts up a digital camera, snaps a shot of me, and drives away.

According to Anonymous, the protests brought out a total of 6,000 protestors in more than 100 cities worldwide, including more than 500 each in London and Los Angeles. The group insists that the campaign will continue: On March 15, Hubbard’s birthday, Anonymous is organizing mock birthday parties at Scientology centers worldwide. In April, it will launch Operation Reconnection to increase awareness of the disconnection policy. Anonymous member “Sarah” says the group is also organizing a letter-writing campaign designed to take aim at the Church’s nonprofit religious classification. “We’re sending letters to senators and congresspeople requesting that their tax-exempt status be looked at.”

The Church of Scientology is not going away anytime soon. It still has hundreds of millions of dollars. It still has Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, assets that gave the Church, as Miscavige put it at a recent event, “16 daily hours of nonstop … televised coverage and four full miles of press bringing word of LRH technology to 42 million people a week” during the tabloid extravaganza leading up the couple’s 2006 wedding. You may have thought you were reading about Holmes’ Armani dress in Us Weekly, but that’s not what Miscavige saw: “While they may have headlined it wedding of the century,” he said, the coverage really “amounted to an intro lecture” to Hubbard’s teachings.

And Scientology isn’t taking Anonymous’ attacks lying down: A representative told the St. Petersburg Times that the Church would work to identify the protesters that gathered in Clearwater on February 10, because “any of them could be a security risk.” “Sarah” says that one of her cohorts received a text message from an unidentified number bearing the message: “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop lying about Scientology. This is your last warning.” The main website used by Anonymous for planning events has been dogged by denial of service attacks for weeks. And in mid-February, a new video purporting to be from Anonymous appeared on YouTube. It threatened to blow up a Scientology building in Los Angeles. Suspicious it could be a fair game tactic, Anonymous members immediately informed the FBI that it didn’t come from them. YouTube removed the video, along with the original computer-narrated manifesto. (The latter video was eventually restored; the Church denies any role in getting it taken down.)

Still, the genie is out of the bottle. As Bruce Hines, a former OT VII who left the Church, says, “With all this publicity, very few people would go home after work and say, ‘Oh, honey, I just found out about Scientology and I’m going to take this course.’ The response would be, ‘What? Are you crazy?’”

Nearly 300 demonstrators jammed the sidewalks out front on March 15, many of them young computer geeks in plastic Guy Fawkes masks honoring the 16th-century British subversive. Some hid behind party masks and bandanas. They hoisted signs: “Religion is free, Scientology is not,” “They want your money and your sanity,” and, in a reference to a string of mysterious tragedies involving members of Scientology, “How many more must die?”

Click here for more photos from the protest.

Most were members or supporters of the secretive online phenomenon Anonymous, erstwhile pranksters once branded as “domestic terrorists” and an “Internet hate machine” by a television news program because of their disruption of Web sites and MySpace pages.

Since then, the geeks have found religion. Or, more precisely, Scientology, an organization they see as more secretive and dangerous than their own - and worthy of being brought down.

“The church has a policy called ‘fair game,’ where people who are against the church … can be lied to, tricked, sued and harmed in any way,” says 22-year-old Gareth Cales, a.k.a. David Mudkip, an organizer. He defends members of Anonymous for their clandestine ways, saying Scientology’s own widely documented harassment of critics makes Anonymous’ tactics necessary.

“If they knew our identities, they would come after us,” says a 20-year-old who goes by the online alias Kone, who drove from the San Luis Obispo area to protest in Hollywood on March 15. “Yesterday, one of our people, his cat was killed. He never lets his cats out - they’re his whole life. The cat was missing. There was blood and vomit all over inside his house. He thinks they poisoned it.”

The incident occurred immediately after Scientology posted his friend’s identity online, Kone alleges.

Scientology, surely the only major religion dreamed up by a science-fiction writer, owes its convoluted theology to the late L. Ron Hubbard, the author of such literary masterpieces as Death Quest and Villainy Victorious.

Hubbard would be 97 this month. Official celebrations at Scientology facilities included an event at the big, blue headquarters on Sunset that attracted sparse attendance - security guards seemed to outnumber Scientologists arriving in cars. The organization that Hubbard founded in Los Angeles in 1954 has expanded worldwide, drawing criticism for its bizarre beliefs and its antipathy toward the prying media and former members.

When asked by L.A. Weekly about Anonymous’ emerging movement targeting Scientology, a spokeswoman for the church insisted that questions be e-mailed. We asked, by e-mail: Can someone at the center comment on Anonymous and the protest? How does Scientology respond to claims that some members have been separated from their families due to mind control? What special events are being held to mark Hubbard’s birthday? No one from Scientology replied.

Investigative reporters have been chipping away at Scientology’s Kremlin-like façade for years. One of the more notable of those reporters is 48-year-old author Mark Ebner, who was at the March 15 demonstration, sans mask, riding among the Sunset Boulevard protesters on a motor scooter. Since 1995, Ebner has made a cottage industry of exposing Scientology, even going undercover to join up and write a first-person account for Spy magazine.

“They still follow me around L.A.,” Ebner says of Scientology’s web of member-agents. “It’s almost a joke - they take pictures of me on my street when I come out to get the paper. So I keep writing about them.”

Ebner describes Hubbard as “a fraud” who stole the tenets of his godless philosophy, Dianetics, from Freud, Jung and others, creating “a monster self-help program” that in turn attacks conventional psychology and psychiatry.

In addition to “fair-game” tactics that allegedly allow the church to harm its critics, Ebner says the church practices “disconnection” - severing ties between followers and outsiders who dare to trash it, including spouses, children and parents. One of the saddest sights last Saturday was a middle-aged man standing in the protest crowd, without any mask, holding up a big color poster of a young man who looked much like him. Beneath the photo, this plea was written: “Have you seen Zack?”

Under the church’s practice, the process of purifying the mind can last for years. Scientology embraces a reincarnation theory in which negative subconscious thoughts and memories are said to be rooted in far distant events - even events supposedly experienced by a practicing Scientologist in a life that unfolded eons ago. The tedious task of plucking out all that bad stuff can cost acolytes enough to fill a Brinks truck - hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ebner says. Rather than fork it over, many parishioners choose to work for the organization.

“They sign a billion-year contract,” Ebner says. That’s billion with a “B,” all clearly spelled out and signed. “You’ve got to cover those afterlives.”

Ebner is not a member of the growing masked movement but his salvo in mid-January, when he released a secret videotape of Tom Cruise bizarrely and fervently extolling Scientology, helped to draw the computer nerds in.

Scientology, apparently believing the video was an embarrassment, fought to yank it from Web sites - and temporarily succeeded in getting it pulled from YouTube.

It would be an understatement to say this rubbed the Internet community the wrong way. As protester Kone puts it, “My interest wasn’t the Cruise video itself. It was that Scientology got so freaked out about the video leaking out. I thought, ‘What are they trying to hide?’

“We all started … looking at secret documents that had been leaked” online, Kone continues. “It was quite scary - things you wouldn’t even see in horror movies.”

One of “the atrocities,” he says, was the much-reported story of Florida church member Lisa McPherson, who, despite signs of a mental breakdown, was kept from treatment. After a minor traffic accident, she began taking off her clothes, telling a paramedic, “I need help,” according to published media accounts. But she was whisked away from the hospital and nursed by Scientologists for 17 days, rarely sleeping, defecating on herself, and ultimately dying. A wrongful-death suit was settled in 2004.

Despite what it might claim, Anonymous had never taken on a serious issue. A loose collection of Web aficionados that banded together five or six years ago, the group shared photos online and staged pranks mainly for laughs. At least a few among its ranks committed illegal acts, members now concede.

Last summer, Fox News aired a report saying that Anonymous’ members “attack innocent people like an Internet hate machine,” and that “those who fight back face death threats.” Anonymous responded by posting a rather menacing video online in which a faceless figure intones, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”

After zeroing in on Scientology, Anonymous immediately electronically assaulted the church’s Web site. Then the group found a social conscience. He is Mark Bunker, a 51-year-old TV newsman from San Diego who has operated an anti-Scientology site since 1996. In a video posted online, Bunker urged Anonymous to take the high road by doing something important.

“Scientology doesn’t need to be a martyr,” he says. “[Our attacks don’t] do anything to shut down their Web sites. That’s the kind of thing Scientology does to us. People should be able to see both sides and make up their own minds.” Bunker admits he thought his argument would cause the net heads to “lash out at me. [But] they almost immediately reformed.”

Although Anonymous has no official leadership and some of its members, according to several accounts, almost certainly pursue malicious mischief, Bunker’s video became a rallying point for those wanting to accomplish something positive. Members got the same do-good message from Tory Christman, a 60-year-old ex-Scientologist from Burbank who says she spent 30 years inside before escaping in 2000.

At Saturday’s Sunset Boulevard protest, she wore a multicolored Dr. Seuss–style hat, shaking hands and meeting people among a throng that swelled to 600 - including the crowd on Sunset, a second group protesting at Scientology’s back-entrance gate, and a third group at Hubbard’s “birthday” bash at the Shrine Auditorium.

Far above Sunset, in bright sunshine, an airplane trailed a banner: “Honk if you think Scientology is a cult.”

Christman says it is. She had to leave her husband and all of her friends to escape it. “On a scale of 1 to 10, if 10 is the worst, it’s a 15,” she says. “It’s off the charts.”

The Church of Scientology - which boasts movie stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its followers - has come under attack from opponents who claim its teachings are “sinister”.

Its Mission Of York was set up last year at Matmer House, in Hull Road, making it one of 14 Scientology churches in the UK.

More than 20 local campaigners picketed the building on Saturday as part of a worldwide protest against Scientology.

One protester, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “The church has a strong history of litigation against any of its critics so we wear masks so they cannot identify us.”

No one from the Church of Scientology was available to comment.

They were part of a worldwide mass action against the religion, which they call a “dangerous cult”. The protests were co-ordinated by an internet-based organisation calling itself “Anonymous”.

A woman who wanted to be known only as Kaz spoke for around 30 protesters outside the Scientology office in Ebrington Street, Plymouth, on Saturday.

She claimed the Scientologists charged followers “up to £200,000 for salvation, and we say salvation should be free”.

She said the organisation had recruited stars like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, but had kept its true nature hidden from them so that it could portray itself as “a quaint celebrity cult”.

Daniella Gibbs, 22, used to work in the Ebrington Street office, but left and joined the protesters.

She said she had got involved when she was 18 for a year because she believed she would get training as a counsellor.

She said she left after her working hours were extended to 86 hours a week, and she was encouraged to recruit new members.

A spokeswoman for the Scientologists said at the weekend: “Since January 17, 2008, ‘Anonymous’, a group hiding their identities behind masks and computer anonymity, has targeted the Scientology religion, its churches, leaders and parishioners with hate speech and hate crimes.

“The church has not interacted with these “Anonymous” individuals, nor does it desire to.”

It was conducted Saturday in concurrance with worldwide protests around Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s March 13 birthday.

One Battle Creek man was arrested for wearing a mask and defying a police officer.

Organized by the Internet-based group, Anonymous, protesters gathered across the street from the downtown church with flyers which called it a “cult” and “evil.”

“We have an issue with their bait-and-switch tactics,” said protester Josh Kanger, a 26-year-old student at Western Michigan University from Three Oaks.

Kanger and fellow protester Nick Armstrong, a 20-year-old Kalamazoo college student from Ada, said they are not opposed to Scientology or its beliefs.

Instead, they oppose the church’s practice of charging its members fees for information despite having a tax-free, nonprofit status.

“We believe it should be free,” Armstrong said.

Most of the protesters covered their faces and refused to give their last names, claiming fear of Scientologists.

But Michael Delaware, a minister of Scientology for 20 years and an executive staff member of the Battle Creek church, said they had been receiving anonymous phone call threats and hate mail since January.

On Wednesday, security was tightened at the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center after bomb threats were leveled nationally to the Church of Scientology by the group Anonymous.

Delaware said Saturday’s protest made him fear for the safety of his staff and congregation, which has been in Battle Creek seven years and serves more than 1,000 members across Michigan.

He said Scientologists do not require fees for information.

“They say we are violating their first amendment rights,” Delaware said. “They are violating our first amendment right to freedom of religion.”

Battle Creek police received a call at about 2 p.m. from the Battle Creek Church of Scientology because its members were worried about their safety, said Sgt. Jeff Case.

Case then warned the protesters that they violated a Michigan statute (750.396) which does not allow people to wear masks covering all or a part of their faces when assembling to march or protest in a public place. Halloween, masquerade and educational or religious parades are some exceptions to the rule, he said.

Just after 4 p.m. Case returned to find one man who refused to uncover his face.

“He was taunting,” Case said. “He knew we were there.”

The 18-year-old Battle Creek man was arrested “because he did not comply with the order he was given.”

Scores of celeb members have beefed up security after the emergence of shadowy internet group Anonymous.

Last month more than 7,000 Anonymous recruits picketed Scientology bases in 93 cities including London, Manchester and New York.

They were on the streets again yesterday, protesting outside recruitment centres around the world.

The group accuses the church of using cult-like methods such as “brainwashing”.

Now organisers of Anonymous, whose followers wear eerie face masks to hide their identities, plan to step up their campaign with “guerrilla protests” against star Scientologists.

But they fear the so-far peaceful group could easily be infiltrated by those who want to harm celebrities.

A Scientology insider said: “These are creepy people and anyone could be among them – it’s very worrying.”

Last night a member of Anonymous accused star church members of “scaremongering”.

But he warned: “We have made our point outside their buildings and we will now make it outside the mansions where their big star members live and on the red carpets they walk in Hollywood.”

But in its zeal to identify those who threatened the church, Scientology misfired, according to one woman who says she got fingered just because she works at Starbucks, near the church’s headquarters.

Rosalie Fair, 19, said she had simply come to check her work schedule on Feb. 10 when a group of about 200 protesters from the Internet activist group Anonymous demonstrated in downtown Clearwater.

Fair said she has “nothing at all” to do with Anonymous. In fact, she said she went out of her way to avoid the protest because most of her customers are Scientologists and she didn’t want to be mistaken as participating.

A St. Petersburg College student, Fair said she was troubled to learn she was one of 26 people listed as members of Anonymous in a Scientology lawsuit filed this week. It sought a restraining order to keep Anonymous members 500 feet from any Scientology buildings in a second round of planned protests tonight and Saturday.

The lawsuit alleged that Scientology churches around the world have been bombarded with harassing phone calls, obscene e-mails, bomb threats and death threats by members of an amorphous, loosely knit group that calls itself Anonymous.

Fair said she was troubled to see her name falsely associated with those kinds of actions.

“My name is on a list with a whole list of crimes that are very violent things, things I’ve never participated in,” she said.

Scientology spokeswoman Pat Harney said “the information we had is that all the people (listed in the lawsuit) were involved with Anonymous in some way,” but “if we misidentified anyone, of course we apologize for that.”

It points out the difficulty and frustration the church has had in trying to ferret out those responsible for threats they say they are taking very seriously.

“The problem we have is that people are hiding behind Anonymous,” Harney said. “We have thousands of people here we have to protect.”

On Thursday, Scientology officials say they received threats by phone and the Internet surrounding founder L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday, which is today. That led them to ask employees to look for suspicious packages.

An employee found a new, brown suitcase in the alley behind Scientology’s Life Improvement Center at 336 First Ave. N in St. Petersburg.

Police closed several streets, evacuated several buildings and called in the Tampa police bomb squad. But when police opened the suspicious suitcase, it contained no bomb - just clothing, personal items and a Holy Bible.

Harney said the threat was just one example of the wasted manpower in responding to a slew of threats.

“We’re not going to allow this violent stuff to escalate and get out of control,” Harney said.

In a statement given to the St. Petersburg Times this week, purported to be from Anonymous, the group condemned acts or threats of violence that may have occurred and said they were not the work of Anonymous. And they again urged demonstrators this weekend to protest peacefully and legally.

In striking down the church’s petition Thursday, Circuit Judge Douglas Baird noted that the church failed to tie any of the 26 named people to the threats detailed in the suit.

“This court is mindful of the anxiety that may be caused by anonymous threats of violence, or as a series of seemingly unconnected incidents, be they on the Internet or otherwise,” Baird wrote. “However, the jurisdiction of the court must only be exercised to specifically restrain those known individuals that are shown to have some reasonable nexus to the actual threats complained of in the petition.”

A security guard at the Life Improvement Center, 336 1st Avenue N., called police about 12:30 p.m. and reported finding a suitcase in an alley behind the building. He told police he had not seen the suitcase when he checked the alley earlier, according to a news release from the St. Petersburg Police Department.

Scientology officials were already on guard for suspicious packages, spokesman Pat Harney said, because the church has received several phone and Internet threats recently. Today’s message implied that a bomb had been sent to one of the local Scientology buildings, he said.

Police in St. Petersburg closed local streets to traffic and called in a Tampa Police Department bomb squad to examine the suitcase, spokesman Bill Proffitt said.

The squad used a robot to examine the package and eventually blew it up just after 5 p.m. Proffitt said it contained a Bible, clothing and personal items.

One person was arrested at the scene and charged with obstructing a police officer after attempting to walk through an area that police had closed to traffic, according to the news release.

Police reopened the streets about 5:45 p.m.

The report of the suspicious package came this afternoon at about the same time Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge W. Douglas Baird denied an injunction the church sought to stop the Internet-based group Anonymous from protesting outside Scientology’s headquarters in Clearwater this weekend.

Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Linda R. Allan denied a similar request Thursday.

In the case Allan ruled on, the church was using a process usually used by women who are in fear of their abusive husbands or boyfriends. The church wanted all protestors to remain at least 500 feet away from church structures and officials.

Allan noted that the Church of Scientology is a corporation, not a person, and that the process the church’s attorneys were seeking to stop the protesters is by law reserved for a “person who is the victim of repeat violence,” according to a copy of her ruling.

The church’s tact with Judge Baird was slightly different.

The bulk of the second petition was the same as the one Allan reviewed – alluding to threatening anonymous YouTube videos, for instance. But this time Scientology attorneys said the protestors, by standing at the entrances of church buildings, would “chill” church events and services, causing Scientologists not to attend. This, the church said, constituted a violation of church members’ Constitutional rights.

Baird noted there was no evidence the 26 individuals named as members of Anonymous in the church’s petition were responsible for any threats or wrongful acts against the church. And they hadn’t been informed properly of the injunction the church was seeking.

“Under these circumstances, when threats from unknown individuals are received, or when incidents such as the various YouTube or MySpace postings are interpreted as threatening, the matter is more properly one for local law enforcement rather than the constitutionally extreme remedy sought by injunction without notice against these individuals,” his ruling said.

It includes what Scientology claims are video snippets from Anonymous, threatening phone messages and obscene e-mails sent to various Scientology churches.

Scientology also says members of the Internet activist group Anonymous made, or encouraged others to make, 8,139 harassing or threatening phone calls to the church. Anonymous sent 3.6-million “malicious” e-mails to Scientologists, the church contends, committed 10 acts of vandalism at various churches and made 22 bomb threats and eight death threats.

The torrent of alleged harassment and threats was the underpinning of two church lawsuits filed Tuesday and Wednesday in Pinellas Circuit Court, each seeking to bar Anonymous members from coming within 500 feet of Scientology buildings in Clearwater during a planned protest this weekend.

Tuesday’s suit, a petition for an “injunction for protection against repeat violence,” was denied Wednesday afternoon by Circuit Judge Linda Allan, who ruled the relevant Florida statute does not apply to corporations.

Just hours before Allan ruled, the church filed a separate, nearly identical lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order. The second suit seeks protection under a different Florida statute. No decision has been made on that suit.

Both suits claim members of Anonymous “made repeated and explicit threats of attacks, raids, wars and assassinations upon” the Church of Scientology and its members.

The second suit names 26 people, many from Tampa Bay, who Scientology thinks are members of Anonymous, which describes itself as a loosely organized group united against the injustices perpetrated by Scientology.

A church spokesperson would not say how the church got the names, but at an Anonymous-sponsored demonstration in Clearwater on Feb. 10 church security videotaped and photographed protesters, most of whom disguised their faces with fake beards, face paint, scarves and bandannas. An estimated 200 participated.

Matthew Dakan was one. A 28-year-old comic book appraiser from Sarasota, he is named in the lawsuits, but says he isn’t a member of Anonymous.

Calling himself an Anonymous “sympathizer,” Dakan said he doesn’t know any members of group, but participated in the Feb. 10 protest after seeing information about it on Anonymous Web sites. He also said, “I personally have a problem with Scientology, I think it’s very bad.”

Dakan said he gave his name to someone who identified himself as a reporter and later saw someone photographing his license plate.

As for the allegations of threatened violence, Dakan said he didn’t see anything like that at the Feb. 10 protest.

“They sort of went out of their way not to cause any trouble,” he said of Anonymous protesters.

On Wednesday, the St. Petersburg Times received a phone call and e-mail with a statement purported to be from Anonymous. It said, in part:

“Anonymous would like to condemn any acts of violence, and all threats of violence that may have occurred. They are not the work of Anonymous and Anonymous does not support them in any form.”

Anonymous plans two protests in Clearwater this weekend. The first is Friday night at Eckerd Hall, where Scientologists will gather to celebrate founder L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday. Saturday protestors plan to demonstrate near church properties downtown.

Two parking lots were cleared, the center’s Champion Street entrance was closed and blinds were drawn in all windows at the building at 74 N. Washington Ave.

Employees were told the security level was raised and they were encouraged to curtail outside activities near the building.

“We learned of potential for increased law enforcement activity in that area,” Ken MacNevin, a Federal Center spokesman said this morning.

Battle Creek police said the increased security was because of a national threat to the Church of Scientology made by a group called Anonymous. The alleged threat was posted in February on YouTube, a Web-based video sharing network, announcing attacks against the national church would happen today.

The Church of Scientology has an office at 66 E. Michigan Ave. and owns the former Hart Hotel at 31 N. Washington Ave., about a block from the Federal Center.

Police were notified today about the threat and members of the Battle Creek Police Department Bomb Squad, using a Michigan State Police dog trained to detect explosives, inspected both buildings but did not find anything.

MacNevin said Wednesday afternoon the Federal Center would “continue some things during the time they are appropriate and that relates to the information we receive,” but he would not be specific.

Several people who claimed to be either members of Anonymous or agree with their views told the Enquirer the group is non-violent and they believe the threats were made by the church.

“I think it is a fake threat by the Scientologists to discredit their critics,” said Tony Meman, 27, of Lansing.

Mike Delaware, minister of the Battle Creek church, said while the local office has had prank phone calls since January, they had no problems today.

He also rejected the idea the church had anything to do with the bomb threats, referring to a video placed by the church on YouTube. It is available at www.youtube.com/user/anonymousfacts.

The petition was filed just before the close of court Tuesday afternoon, and the St. Petersburg Times could not obtain a copy of the petition.

Pat Harney, a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology in Clearwater, confirmed the church had filed a request for a temporary restraining order, but on the advice of counsel, she refused to provide a copy of the lawsuit or discuss who it seeks to restrain.

Anonymous, which describes itself as a loosely affiliated group united against the injustices perpetrated by Scientology, coalesced in January after a video of Scientologist Tom Cruise was leaked to YouTube and then promptly removed because of threats from Scientology attorneys.

Members of Anonymous claimed this was an affront to the freedom of the Internet. A video message from Anonymous taunting the leaders of Scientology received more than 2-million views on YouTube.

On Feb. 10, some 200 people participated in an Anonymous-organized demonstration against Scientology in downtown Clearwater. Similar protests were held in cities around the world.

In Clearwater, church security videotaped and photographed protesters, most of whom disguised their faces with fake beards, face paint, scarves and bandannas.

While Anonymous Web sites ask members to protest peacefully and state they mean no harm to Scientology’s members, Harney said, “we have evidence to the contrary.”

Before the lawsuit was filed Tuesday, Harney said the church has documented threats made by members of Anonymous, and provided those threats to Clearwater police. “Of course, we are concerned about the safety of our group,” Harney said.

Representatives of Anonymous could not be reached for comment.

This weekend’s protests by Anonymous - dubbed “Party Hard” - were timed to coincide with Scientology’s annual celebration of founder L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday on Thursday.

According to Web sites affiliated with Anonymous, members of the group plan to protest in 50 cities worldwide. In Clearwater, they will gather Friday evening outside Ruth Eckerd Hall, where Scientology will hold its annual gala event.

A larger protest is planned Saturday in downtown Clearwater, where the church’s international religious headquarters are located. “We are taking every security measure we can,” Harney said. “We are not taking this lightly.”

Ron’s been worm food for more than a score of years now, so it probably won’t matter to him that the best birthday party being held in his name will take place a couple of days late. On Saturday, March 15, the surprisingly upstart, leaderless movement known as “Anonymous” will be holding its second worldwide anti-Scientology protests at Hubbard sites in more than a dozen countries.

The grassroots, Internet-based group seemed to materialize out of thin air just a few weeks ago, and it’s difficult to tell whether the surprising success of its February 10 rallies - which were held from Oslo to Sydney - will spark even more rallies beyond this weekend. The February protests featured a lot of twentysomethings, for the most part, carrying anti-Scientology signs, and wearing masks to protect their anonymity (Guy Fawkes masks were popular) in places like New York, Boston, London, and Toronto. This time, they say, they’re bringing cake and candles.

Anonymous has actually been around for a while, wreaking havoc like a bunch of drunken teenagers on numerous Internet locations since 2006. And at first, it approached Scientology the same way, like reckless hackers and pinheads. But thanks in part to the calm words of someone I used to write about when I covered Scientology in Los Angeles, Mark Bunker (now known as ‘Wise Beard Man’ to the protesters), Anonymous quickly grew up and started taking a more Gandhi-inspired approach to opposing Hubbard’s weird cult.

This recent targeting of Scientology sprung up after several years of the worst press Hubbard’s followers had ever endured. From the time Tom Cruise appeared to lose his mind leaping all over Oprah Winfrey’s couch in 2005, to his knockout nine-minute video not meant for public consumption that appeared in January, Cruise and Scientology have been reeling from one PR disaster to the next.

And now it seems as if everybody and his brother is writing about Scientology, ridiculing Hubbard, making fun of “Xenu” and “e-meters” and “going clear,” and laughing at John Travolta and Kirstie Alley and Leah Rimini and Cruise.

A decade ago, I hardly would have believed it. Not that I’m complaining. I much prefer it this way. Back then, I was one of a small number of journalists who tried to communicate to the larger public what was alarming and nonsensical and simply inane about Scientology and its status as a “church.” Other, braver, journalists had been doing the same for decades. There was Paulette Cooper, for example, who occasionally sent me encouraging e-mails when my stories came out, and who had suffered like no other (you can look it up). I’m not claiming that my colleagues and I did the kind of pioneering research that Paulette and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. But still, just ten years ago, it was a very different environment.

Even then, you didn’t look into the secrets of the church without having at least some second thoughts about what it might mean to take on Hubbard’s dim minions. But it felt worthwhile. When you got past the typical American reluctance to criticize or even discuss the particulars of another’s religion, listeners at cocktail parties would be mesmerized to hear that only 10 percent of Scientology’s adherents, for example, have been let in on the church’s origin story. As I put it in a story back in the day:

Imagine the Roman Catholic church withholding the contents of the Book of Genesis from 90 percent of its 900 million worldwide adherents. That’s 810 million Catholics kept in the dark about “Let there be light,” Adam and Eve, and the rest of the Christian origin saga. And imagine that the Catholic church called Genesis a “trade secret” that could only be revealed to Catholics who had spent years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, obtaining the correct level of experience to be allowed to read their own religion’s version of how the universe started and where people came from.

That’s what, for me, separated Scientology from the rest, what put the lie to claims (sometimes from mushy-headed religion professors) that Hubbard’s was a legitimate “church.” What other “religion” wanted $100,000 and several years of dedication before a member learned its most basic beliefs? And Scientology can’t afford to be more forthcoming: Who would join if they knew they were going to spend that kind of money (and shun other family members and completely build their lives around Scientology) in order to rid their bodies of invisible space-alien parasites? No wonder such details aren’t mentioned during the most basic Scientology come-on, the free “personality test” you get in the subway.

So yes, I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s shindig for the commodore. Hubbard was an attention whore, so he might not really disapprove. And while I’m counting heads at the local rally, I’ll probably feel some nostalgia for an earlier time, when there were much fewer of us trying to get at the truth.

Back in 1999 I was working for a newspaper in Los Angeles that no longer exists. Scientology was a wonderful subject for an eager reporter: It was nefarious as hell, operating more like the mafia than a religion, and at the same time breathtakingly stupid: Besides its core beliefs about a galactic overlord and disembodied aliens inhabiting the human body, adherents are convinced that Ron’s talking cure will lead them to become clairvoyants able to leave their bodies at will, which, as Cruise pointed out, makes them excellent first responders to auto accidents. And believe me, there’s far weirder stuff that was committed to paper by a burnt-out, pill-popping pulp fiction writer with a messiah complex named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, who had demanded that his followers sign billion-year contracts so that they’d continue to serve him lifetime after lifetime (Hubbard’s own lifetime ended in 1986).

Wading into this stuff was too much fun. And at that time, my New Times Los Angeles colleague Ron Russell and I had little competition. Scientology was centered in Los Angeles (its other headquarters is in Florida), but after the Los Angeles Times had done a major, multi-part exposé in 1989, the paper had given up covering the cult almost completely. Other publications were aware that after Time magazine took its own shot in 1990, calling Scientology a “ruthless global scam,” the church had filed a libel lawsuit asking for hundreds of millions of dollars, and nine years later the case was still unresolved (it was ultimately dismissed). With the Time suit still pending, most publications were wary of Scientology’s litigious reputation. Other than Richard Leiby, a Washington Post reporter who was doing excellent work, Russell and I practically had the Scientology investigative field to ourselves for a few years.

Russell, for example, wrote a mind-blowing piece about how Scientology officials took advantage of a brain-damaged man, convincing the poor sucker to invest some of the millions he’d received for his injury in a non-existent ostrich-egg business. (I shit you not.)

My favorite experience was writing about a woman named Tory Christman (Tory Bezazian then), a 30-year Scientologist who had rather spectacularly defected from the church in the middle of a Usenet slugfest after secretly reaching out to one of the cult’s biggest detractors, the operator of Xenu.net. That story, “Sympathy for the Devil,” lives on in cyberspace, even though the newspaper I wrote it for no longer does.

In another story, we put the lie to the church’s claim that it no longer practices “fair game” - L. Ron’s famous edict that his troops should engage in dirty tricks to bury its perceived enemies. In “Double Crossed,” we detailed one of the most hellacious cases of fair game in recent years, the smearing of attorney Graham Berry with the use of a coerced, false affidavit claiming that Berry was a pederast who went after boys as young as 12. When the man who made that false affidavit, Robert Cipriano, was sued by Berry in a defamation suit, the church, in order to keep him from recanting his false claims, offered to represent him in the lawsuit for free, donated thousands to Cipriano’s nonprofit projects, and even got him a house, a car, and a job at Earthlink (which had been founded by Scientologists). You can see the story here.

Berry’s experience, as well as that of others (Google “Keith Henson,” kids), made it plain that if you opposed Scientology, you had to be very careful not to give the church a way to claim victim status.

Which is exactly what Anonymous didn’t do.

After the Cruise video, meant only for other delusional Scientologists and not the rest of the world, showed up in January on the Internet, the church went into attack mode, trying to shut down every copy. (Gawker’s Nick Denton has done the world a service by keeping the video up and flipping Scientology the bird. See it here.)

That in turn inspired Anonymous, which has a thing about Internet censorship. But the nameless group of geeks initially took a hacker’s approach, hitting Scientology sites with various tactics to shut them down. For longtime critics like Mark Bunker, it was a nightmare. So he took to YouTube with a video of himself, explaining in a sort of open letter that Anonymous was ruining the work that he and others have been doing for decades. By pranking and vandalizing Scientology sites, Anonymous was only giving the church the ability to claim that it was being victimized. The moral high ground, in other words, had been lost.

Bunker’s simple video - a bearded older guy sitting in front of his computer and talking into a web cam - seemed to have a major effect, resulting in the peaceful protests of February 10.

Will the Anonymous phenomenon continue to grow? And how, given its past, will Anonymous be able to police its own, so that some of its “members” don’t revert to reckless antics? Scientology, no doubt, will continue to claim that it’s a victim of religious bigots. It always has.

But at the least, it’s good to see so many people a little more aware of what Hubbardism is all about, even if it means I’ll have to come up with something else as cocktail party patter. Hell, everyone seems to know about Xenu by now.

Marc Headley reveals how the cult-like faith has totally engulfed the movie heartthrob’s life.

He says it’s disciples SECRETLY VETTED Hollywood beauties at “casting sessions” to find him a suitable wife before he married actress Katie Holmes.

They drew up a wish list of possible actress brides topped by JENNIFER GARNER, JESSICA ALBA and SCARLETT JOHANSSON.

Then they asked candidtes questions about their beliefs during “auditions” for a film they said would star Cruise. It was never made.

In the religion children are regularly hooked up to a LIE DETECTOR made from SOUP CANS and ELECTRODES to test their commitment to the church.

Headley, 34, quit the faith after becoming disillusioned with it’s bizarre practises. He says of the 45-year-old Top Gun star, now second-in-command of the church: “Tom is on a mission… to turn EVERYONE into a Scientologist.

Order

He claims the wacky sect - led by Cruise’s best friend David Miscavige - even wanted the actor to convert his friends the BECKHAMS as it trawled Hollywood for famous new recruits.

But Headley’s most shattering revelation is how Scientologists set about find Cruise a bride after he lost out in love with second wife Nicole Kidman and then girlfriend Penelope Cruz.

“He was into Scientology in the early Nineties,” says Headley who was a member of the church for 15 years. “But Nicole weaned him off it during the 10 years they were married.

“He was back in the church when he met Penelope but although she went through a lot of Scientology instruction she wouldn’t give up on Buddhism. So it had to end.

“After that he started complaining to his best buddy David about his luck with girls. So Miscavige assigned a high-ranking official with the order: find a wife for Tom Cruise.”

At the time Headley was a proucer at promotional Scientology films company Golden Era and was involved in recording audition tapes.

“The official put out a casting call to female actresses, including Scientologists, saying “There’s an upcoming Tom Cruise movie you might get a part in. Come for an audition.” But in the end no movie was made. They had to be single, they had to be pretty and in their 20s. First they rounded up Scientologist actresses like Erica Christense, Erica Howard and Sofia Milos. But they were all rejected.

“They they had to look outside the herd, so to speak. They went for Jennifer Garner, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Alba in that order.

“They came up with the same plan. Jennifer and Jessica didn’t bite but Scarlett took the bait and came in for an audition. When she arrived at the audition address and found out it was the Scientology Center in Hollywood she freaked out and didn’t do a tape.”

Scores more acrtresses were sounded out - then Batman Begins star Katie Holmes - 17 years Cruise’s junior - was spotted in an interview saying she’d like to marry him.

“So they worked the audition routine on Katie, got her to LA and introduced her to Tom,” says Headley. “The moment he meets her, he’s enthralled and he told Miscavige later, ‘I knew immediately she was the one’. Katie came to the audition in a car that was a mess - food wrap pers and soda cans all over the floor. So Tom had the car cleaned up. He took her for a ride on his motorcucle that day and then they flew off for dinner somehwere in his private jet.

“He gave her a book about Scientology and pretty soon they were holed up for two weeks at his place.”

Headley came into close contact with Cruise after meeting him in 1990 just after the star made Days of Thunder.

“The thin that took me back was he grabs your shoulder and shakes your hand at the same time. He’s so intense,” says Headley.

“I was given the top-secret job of looking after Tom. He was pretty much just getting started on all the steps you have to take to become very bottom of what is called the Bridge To Total Freedom.

“He had done very little auditing where you site down with a person and you get counselling. So he practised it with me.”

Headley explained that auditing is Scientology-speak for LIE DETECTING. The bizarre practice originally involving soup cans was dreamed up by the religion’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard whose basic doctrine insisted that the spirits of ALIENS from outer space are trapped in our bodies and are the cause of our problems.

“During auditing you sit down with a person while holding metal electrodes shaped like soup cans in each hand,” says Headley.

“The cans are hooked up to an electro-psychometer and when the other person asks you a question about your faith your answer generates a charge which indicates whether you are lying. It works like a polygraph.

Harsh

Headley says Cruise’s adopted children Connor, 13, and Isabella, 15, have been brought up as Scientologists - as will Suri, his year-old daughter with Katie who was baptised into the church.

“When Suri gets to around five she’ll start schooling, which is another term for indoctrination using all of L. Ron Hubbard’s teaching methods,” says Headley.

“And at six or seven she’s going to start getting audited. She’ll be hooked up to the E-meter and asked whether she’s been bad or if she’s been hiding anything from Tom and Katie. It’s basically an interrogation.” Headley claims if Cruise’s children stepped out of line they’d be in for some tough treatment under Scientology rules.

“Kids have been sent to soup kitchens before to serve homeless people and hand out books about the religion. It’s called Making Amends. It’s a way of punishment.

“The courses children study are written by Scientologists. The most important is the PTS/SP - Potential Trouble Source/Suppressive Person. It’s basically how to deal wth someone who is against Scientology. They are conditioned to disregard anything negative about it.”

Other star Scientologists include John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. But Cruise is the church’s biggest catch - and the sect hopes he’ll attract other superstars too. “Tom’s a good friend of of the Beckhams,” says Headley.

“The church leader David Miscavige has literally hundreds of pitcures of him with Beckham and Victoria and all the kids. They’d love to get them into the religion.”

Headley says the church even prepared to welcome David to it’s Gold Base HQ in Hemet, California, by relaying their soccer pitch.

“There was talk about introducing David to Miscavige. They redid the field with the best turf you could get - just to impress him,” he says. But Beckham never came.

When Cruise visits the HQ he’s given the “white glove treatment” normally reserved for the “return” of founder Hubbard. “When Tom was coming, everyone working there would stay up all night long cleaning,” says Headley.

“The whole place had to be white-gloved, which means someone touching every surface of every room in white gloves to check there is no dirt left on them. That’s the same treatment they have for Hubbard’s mansion - all ready for him coming back to life.”

Hubbard died in 1986 aged 74, from a stroke. “But Tom and all hard-core Scientologists like him truly believe that he’ll return soon.”

According to Hadley, Cruise gets almost as much VIP treatment as Hubbard would. “If you’re a staff memeber and you run into him, if you don’t address him as Mr Cruise or Sir, you’re in trouble,” he saus. “He’s so intense about it all.”

Headley recalls how one of Cruise’s assistants tried to tell him to calm down after he went berserk on the Oprah Winfrey show with Katie.

Cruise jumped up and down on her couch ranting: “There are some people who just don’t like to see other people happy. But you know what? If they don’t like it, fuck them.”

“His assistant Michael Doven said to him, ‘Dude, you need to chill out on this Scientology thing’,” says Headley. “David Miscavige told me, ‘Do you know how hardcore Tom is? He completely blew his top and told Michael he didn’t work for him any more because he was an off-purpose Scientologist’.”

Now headley is off-purpose for good. “Tom used to be a happy-go-lucky guy when I first met him,” says Headley. “Now he’s manic and one hunder per cent dedicated to a church that even helped him choose his wife.”

What Scientologist founder L. Ron Hubbard believed

Xenu, an alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling DC-8 airliners and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to this day. Hubbard called these alien souls Body Thetans and he believed they cause ill-effects to human beings.

The Scientology critic had lost his battle to stay in Canada.

He arrived in Canada in 2002 to avoid being jailed in the U.S. over his anti-Scientology activities, which included picketing various sites and posting some Scientology information on the Internet.

An engineer, Henson lived and worked in Brantford for three years.

When a deportation order was signed in 2005, he left for the border a day earlier than authorities planned - a move that caused him to forfeit his $10,000 bond.

Henson had earlier been convicted of criminal threats and, after his eventual arrest in Arizona, he was sent to California and given a six-month sentence.

After serving four months of that sentence - much of it in solitary confinement - Henson is a free man and newly in possession of a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada that assures him his application is still under consideration.

In fact, says the letter, the application for permanent residence in Canada - which Henson applied for on compassionate and humanitarian grounds - has been forwarded to Niagara Falls, where a single decision-maker will now assess it.

“I don’t understand it,” Henson said from his Arizona home this week.

“Canadian bureaucracy aside, three years seems like an unusual time.”

Aside from the time it took to consider his plea, Henson said it’s ironic that the same government that “decided to kick me out of the country” now says it’s still deciding on his application.

If, for some reason, the government eventually approves his claim, Henson said he wouldn’t be adverse to returning to Canada.

“It’s a little late since I’ve already been in jail and (solitary confinement) but, yeah, if they decided in my favour, I would probably come back to Canada, maybe to go to Vancouver.”

Meanwhile, Henson is remaining mum about Scientology.

As a condition of his probation, he is forbidden to do anything that bothers a Scientologist.

“If I say anything that annoys a Scientologist I go back to jail.”

In fact, his three-year probation, available through the Riverside, Calif., court web pages, orders him to avoid any negative contact with any Scientologist, not to come within 1,000 feet of a Scientologist and not to annoy or harass any member of the group.

Henson is living quietly in his Arizona home. If he goes outside, it’s behind a six-foot fence.

“I still fear for my life. My problem is that I haven’t been paranoid enough in the past.”

There’s been a tremendous upsurge in activity against Scientology in the last two months with a group called Anonymous leading protests, even in Canada.

When asked if he’s behind Anonymous, Henson responds with a firm “no.”

“I did not know that they might be tied into the Scientology church,” said Patry, who represents the Pierrefonds-Dollard riding. “As a former physician, when I started looking into this, I just wanted to try to find out what type of treatment the drug addicts are getting.”

Some anonymous e-mails of complaint were sent to The Chronicle’s inbox about two weeks ago, after the newspaper’s website ran an article about Patry signing a promotional banner, pledging to a life without drugs. The banner campaign was spearheaded by Narconon Trois Rivières, an organization that runs a drug rehabilitation centre in Trois Rivières and preaches drug prevention to schoolchildren.

Globally, the Narconon network has run into problems in several countries in the past. In 1988 in Madrid, Spain, 11 members of the Church of Scientology were arrested, according to the St. Petersburg Times, and a local judge decried how Narconon swindled its clients and lured them toward Scientology. In 2003, the state of Oklahoma in the United States narrowly voted down a resolution honouring the work of Narconon Arrowhead, reported the Tulsa World. Last year, the United Kingdom’s prison systems ombudsman recommended Narconon not to be allowed in jails due to its connection to Scientology, reported the Sunday Times.

Jean Larivière, a local Scientologist and spokesperson for its church in Montreal, said the trials in Spain ended with victory for the Scientologists. They were also officially recognized as a religion in that country in late 2007. Though personally unaware of situations in Oklahoma and the United Kingdom, he said Narconon runs into trouble due to opposition from doctors and psychiatrists. He called Narconon a completely separate, secular organization from Scientology. “Narconon uses a very specific, very minor part of the writings (of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard),” he said.

According to Larivière, medical and psychiatric institutions oppose groups that use non-medicinal approaches to cure drug addicts. “Narconon is at the forefront of these groups,” he said. That is why it constantly finds itself targeted by the aforementioned institutions, who use the group’s origin as a “scarecrow,” said Larivière.

However, one sociologist does see a connection between the church and the anti-drug group.

“Scientology tries to get politicians to endorse Narconon,” said Dr. Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta who has studied the religion for years. “The pattern is long-standing,” he added.

“I will not respond to that at all,” Patry said about Scientology targeting politicians. “I’m a Catholic,” he added. “There are Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews and all kinds of religions in my riding.”

Larivière dismissed Kent’s charges, accusing him of being biased in his research and cherry-picking facts that suit an anti-Scientology agenda.

Some other politicians have signed the banner. Jean Patrick Laflamme, a political attaché to ADQ MNA Hubert Benoît in Montmorency, said Benoît did not know of any ties between Narconon and Scientology when he undertook that action. No politician would knowingly support an organization linked to Scientology, he added.

According to Carole Arvisais, community relations director for Narconon Trois Rivières, their program is open to any alcohol or drug addicts 18 years of age or older. Over the course of four or five months, patients go “cold turkey,” replacing their drug intake with vitamins and proteins. They then begin to undertake three to four hour sauna sessions to sweat out drug toxins that get stuck in body fat tissues, she said while at Patry’s riding office last month. Patients come to Narconon Trois Rivières from all over Canada and different countries.

“It sounds pretty pseudo-scientific,” said Joseph Rochford, an assistant professor at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University who had not heard of Narconon before being contacted for this story. “It’s going to depend a lot on what drug people are taking,” he said. “Some drugs are lypophillic,” he added, which means they are susceptible to get absorbed into body fat. However, alcohol does not have this property, he said. He advocated for a blend of medicinal treatment and social and psychological follow-ups for drug addicts.

Narconon boasts of a 70 per cent success rate.

“The average (in the field) is under 50 per cent,” Rochford said.

Founded by American science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s, Scientology teaches its adepts that humans are immortal beings that have not fully realized their potential. Scientologists start off with a very basic level of knowledge of its scriptures and it has been reported they may only progress further by paying money to learn more. A church exists in Montreal on Papineau Avenue, and there are about 1,000 local members.

In small letters on the back of a promotional pamphlet aimed at children called ‘10 choses que tes amis ne savent peut-être pas sur les drogues,’ (10 things your friends might not know about drugs), Narconon Trois Rivières acknowledges it does use methodology based on Hubbard’s work. “When a person thinks about something,” one page in the pamphlet reads, “he sees an image in his mind (…) the mind registers 25 images per second and classifies them to solve all problems in life.”

“I think you can find similar stuff to that (in Scientology scriptures),” said Larivière, but he maintained that the excerpt sounded quite secular to him.

A glossary at the Church of Scientology’s official website defines mental image pictures as “three-dimensional pictures which are continuously made by the mind, moment by moment, containing colour, sound and smell, as well as other perceptions. They also include the conclusions or speculations of the individual.”

Narconon Trois Rivières did not return several telephone requests for follow-up interviews or a press release addressing issues raised in this article.

For example, last month, Pierrefonds-Dollard MP Bernard Patry invited The Chronicle to his office one Friday afternoon to report on his signing of a banner promoting the anti-drug association Narconon Trois Rivières, which bases its teachings on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, which boasts some famous members like movie stars John Travolta and Tom Cruise. The Chronicle’s original story on Patry’s banner-signing went online a couple of weeks ago (but didn’t make it to print). That story didn’t make any mention of Hubbard or Scientology. However, the newspaper then received several e-mails from people who read the online article stating their concern about the methods used by Narconon (which has chapters around the world) and its link to Hubbard and the religion he founded.

Patry told The Chronicle last week he believes Narconon’s results speak for themselves. He did acknowledge he had never heard about any possible connection between Narconon and Scientology until questioned by the newspaper. While Patry and some other politicians have signed on to support Narconon, it seems they should have done more background research on this initiative. In the end, they may still have supported it, but at least they would have avoided any potential controversies.

This same check-everything-carefully rule can be applied to all people in their daily lives, as they try to avoid becoming victims of fraud and identity theft.

March is Fraud Prevention Month and it seems about one million adult Canadians have fallen victim to mass marketing fraud, highlighting the need for more consumer education and vigilance, according to the Competition Bureau of Canada. An Environics survey assessed 12 types of mass marketing fraud (MMF) targeting Canadians: it found 58 per cent of Canadians reported they had been targeted; those targeted reported receiving 16 fraudulent contacts; and the total amount Canadians have lost is at least $450 million.

So, the message is clear, consumers and would-be endorsers should be aware of who is asking and what you are signing.

“We were born. We grew up. We escaped.”

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. “L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology,” read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called “Scientologie,” which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard’s Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church’s well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church’s side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

No corner of the Web, it appears, is safe for Scientology. Blogger and lawyer Scott Pilutik recently posted a story noting that Scientology was yanking down EBay auctions for used e-meters, the device the church uses for spiritual counseling. EBay allows brand owners - Louis Vuitton or Rolex, say - to remove items they believe infringe on their trademark or patent rights. Basically, fakes. But, Pilutik said, the used e-meters being taken down were genuine. Reselling them was no different than putting a for-sale sign on your old Chevy.

“What’s actually going on here,” he wrote, is that the church is “knowingly alleging intellectual property violations that clearly don’t exist.” Within a day Pilutik’s blog had gotten over 45,000 visitors - so much traffic that his site crashed completely.

Facing a steady stream of negative publicity and a growing number of critical voices, Scientology has found itself on the defensive.

The church has referred to Anonymous as a group of “cyber-terrorists” and, in a statement, said the group’s aims were “reminiscent of Al Qaeda spreading anti-American hatred and calling for U.S. destruction.”

“These people are posing extremely serious death threats to our people,” said church spokeswoman Karin Pouw in a phone interview. “We are talking about religious hatred and bigotry.”

A recent video posted to YouTube contained a threat to bomb a Southern California Scientology building. An FBI spokeswoman said an investigation was in progress but that no suspects had been identified.

Reporters have long had to tread carefully when writing about Scientology, fearful that lawsuits and other kinds of retaliation would follow any story that Scientology did not like. But that may be changing.

“Before this Internet onslaught,” said Douglas Frantz, a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine who covered Scientology for the New York Times in the 1990s (and is a former editor at the L.A. Times), “they were always able to go after their critics and do a good job of being able to discredit or intimidate them.”

Angry former church members also perceive a kind of safety in numbers afforded by the Internet, and more are coming forward to share their stories.

“People have been scared out of their minds to speak out about Scientology,” said Hill, Miscavige’s niece, in an interview. “Nobody should have to be that scared to speak out about a church.”

Wiseman echoed the sentiment, adding that the Anonymous campaign had influenced her decision to reveal her identity last week. “The Internet is listening. If something happens to me, all of these people will know.”

The current wave of anti-Scientology activity began in January, when a video of Tom Cruise extolling the religion’s tech-based approach to enlightenment was leaked onto YouTube, where users holding it up to ridicule copied and recopied it; several sites posted it without hesitation.

It wasn’t long before Nick Denton, who as publisher of the blog syndicate Gawker Media had put the video online first, received a legal threat from a law firm representing Scientology, alleging copyright infringement. But Denton refused to take the video down.

“It was an awesome news story,” Denton wrote in an e-mail. “If we didn’t race to post it up, some other site would have. That, rather than litigation by Scientology, was the fear going through my mind.”

The church’s whack-a-mole campaign with the Cruise video became a rallying cry for Anonymous, which saw efforts to remove the videos from YouTube as an unwanted incursion into the domain of digital culture, where information and media, copyrighted or no, are often exchanged freely.

In a YouTube video of its own, Anonymous declared open war on the church. Early on, the group also staged cyber-attacks on Scientology websites.

But on Feb. 10, thousands of masked Anonymous members picketed at Scientology locations around the globe, chanting slogans and handing out fliers. No violent incidents were reported. The protests generated yet another wave of online media - videos, photos, news stories, blog posts - little of it in praise of Scientology.

The result of all this attention has been that just about any story critical of Scientology - even those that have been publicly accessible for years - can gain immediate Web currency. On Digg.com, a popular “social news” aggregator that features popular stories from around the Web, dozens of Scientology stories have ascended to the site’s most-viewed list in the last several weeks. A successful Digg story can drive tens of thousands of views to the originating site, as was the case with Pilutik’s post about e-meters.

In addition, the clamor generated by Anonymous has raised the profile of the small but vehement anti-Scientology community that existed before Anonymous, and even made for some cross-pollination between the two camps.

Scientology’s longtime detractors, such as those at Operation Clambake (xenu.net) and Scientology Lies, claim it is not a religion at all but a business that charges its parishioners ever more onerous fees for access to revealed truths. Other online forums, such as the Ex-Scientologist Message Board and ExScientologyKids, have become places for former members to congregate, share stories and offer support

Ironically, it is the church’s aversion to negative publicity - and the legal strategy it has long used to prevent it, that has aroused more online ire than any other issue.

The website ChillingEffects.com has posted dozens of cease-and-desist letters sent by Scientology’s lawyers to various website and Internet service providers requesting that copyrighted material be removed.

But in the diffuse and often Byzantine world of the Web, some precision legal strikes are more likely to backfire than hit their target. Scientology’s use of copyright law appears to be an increasingly losing battle on the Web, said Andrew Bridges, a San Francisco-based intellectual property attorney. “The big question is: Is the copyright serving the purpose of promoting science and the useful arts, or is the purpose essentially the stifling of criticism?”

Still, according to Scientology spokeswoman Pouw, the church views the Internet as a positive tool. It is, Pouw said, “concentrating on using the Internet as a resource for promoting its message and mission in this world, not as a ground for litigation.”

But now that goal will have to exist alongside a seemingly steady stream of online attacks. And while anonymous political activity, such as postering around a town, is nothing new, Bridges noted, the speed of the Web is what is giving Scientology trouble.

“What’s different is that more people can see the stuff faster than Scientology can go around and get it taken down.”

The Mission Impossible actor, who is a dedicated follower of Scientology, is reportedly fearful that deposed galactic ruler ‘Xenu’ is plotting an evil revenge attack on Earth.

According to American magazine Star, a source said: “Tom is planning to build a US$10 million bunker under his Telluride estate.”

“It’s a self-contained underground shelter with a high tech air purifying shelter.”

The facility is said to have enough room for ten people - including wife Katie Holmes, 17-month-old daughter Suri and his adopted children Isabella, 14, and Connor, 12.

A spokesperson for the actor has denied the reports, saying: “This is completely untrue. He is not building on his property at all.”

The 45-year-old is currently filming World War II movie Rubicon (formerly known as Valkyrie) in Germany, where he is regularly joined on set by Katie and Suri.

Tom plays German hero Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg in the wartime thriller surrounding a failed plot by high-ranking military officers to blow up Hitler and has come under attack for his decision to do so as well as his religious beliefs.

The controversial film depicts the ill-fated plan to blow up the dictator on July 20, 1944, which he survived, with the plotters subsequently paying with their lives.

While the public sees smiling celebrities attributing their health and happiness to the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, Woodcraft speaks of cramped quarters and meager rations. Of hard labor and harassment. Of pledging service that extends beyond this life and into the next.

Unlike those famous faces, she was literally born into the church, in London. Her mother was already a member, and even at a tender age, Woodcraft learned things that struck her as odd. When she had an accident - say, hit her head on a door, for instance - she was taught to perform a “contact assist,” gently repeating the motion that led to her injury while standing exactly where it happened.

“My mom, if I would hurt myself, she would make me do this, Woodcraft said, “and she’d make me do it in public.”

For awhile, the occasional bout of embarrassment was the only red flag in an otherwise normal childhood.

Then, when Woodcraft’s grandfather died, her grieving mom flew to the states to seek counciling at Scientology’s “spiritual headquarters,” the Flag Service Organization in Clearwater, Fla.

“While she was there,” Woodcraft said, “she was recruited to join Sea Org.”

Established in 1968 by Hubbard himself, The Sea Organization is a sect of Scientology dedicated to the study of past life recollections and, as Woodcraft puts it, “saving the world.” A truly epic commitment, members are expected to sign a billion-year contract, one that requires them to report back for duty over the course of several lifetimes.

Woodcraft’s mother soon sent for her children, and just like that, a family of five was plucked from a comfortable life in a nice house and thrust into an impoverished existence in a roach-infested hotel room.

Getting out

According to Atlanta Scientologist Deb Danos, “no way” is anyone who wants to leave the church pressured to stay.

But Woodcraft says she was once in charge of doing just that - keeping potential quitters in the fold.

“I can say firsthand that the pressure brought upon people to not leave is immense, psychologically and physically,” she said, speaking specifically of Sea Org.

If you wanted out of The Sea Organization, she said, you were immediately assigned hard labor, and put under a security watch. Interrogations using an E-Meter, a sort of Scientology-crafted lie-detector, soon followed.

You’re called “a degraded being,” she said, and asked what crime you’re hiding that would make you want to renege on your contract.

Of course, once you’ve endured all their intimidation tactics (which can take years, Woodcraft said), you’re free to go - if you haven’t already changed your mind. But those who don’t play by the rules are instantly branded a “suppressive person,” forbidden from any sort of contact with family or friends still involved with Scientology.

“If you leave without permission, you’ll be cut off from everyone,” Woodcraft said.

‘An ax to grind’?

Danos said she believes that anyone who leaves Scientology and goes on to publicly criticize the church has some sort of ulterior motive.

“These people who are the most noisy have a very specific ax to grind,” she said.

According to Danos, Scientologists pride themselves on “absolute and utter truth and integrity,” and people who abandon the group do so because they have skeletons in their closet they didn’t want the church to expose.

Woodcraft, who has not only left the organization but now runs an anti-Scientology Web site (www.exscientology kids.com) along with two other escapees, called the deflection of criticism an attempt at damage control.

“To me,” she said, “that’s a pretty transparent attempt to stop people from speaking out.”

According to Woodcraft, disillusioned parishioners are told that if they’re not responding well to the teachings, the problem lies with them, not the church. And for a long time after she made it out, Woodcraft felt that guilt.

“I didn’t leave saying, ‘I hate Scientology,’” she said, “I left saying, ‘I’m a horrible person.’”

Calling anyone a liar simply for reporting the church’s alleged misdeeds is “like blaming the abused,” Woodcraft added, pointing out that she and the other women who run the site all grew up in Scientology from birth, “so how many skeletons could we have in our closet? … It’s a ridiculous accusation.”

The cost of salvation

The church has been accused of being directly responsible for the financial ruin of some of its most fervently faithful, but Danos said getting started in Scientology is “extremely inexpensive.”

“You can go in and do something for 30 bucks,” she said. “The first book is 10 bucks.”

Woodcraft, though, warns that things get exponentially pricier once you reach the religion’s highest echelons, or if you try to quit.

“If you leave,” she said, “they send a bill for everything you’ve done.”

Woodcraft’s, which she still has a copy of, was $89,000. Modest compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars she said some people end up dropping just to rise up the ranks.

Danos said that by the time anyone gets to the point where they have to pay more for Hubbard’s teachings, “well, they’re either on board or they’re not on board. … Nobody who’s doing that is complaining about it.”

Every religion has to make money somehow, she added.

“If somebody goes around giving away Bibles,” Danos said, “somebody has to pay for that. Instead of taking up collections, we’re structured in a different way. We don’t meet on Sunday and pass around a hat. We have a very different, very set method of deriving funds. It’s very much a ‘this is what you get for your money’ kind of thing.”

But according to Woodcraft, what people really get for all that money isn’t the answers to life’s questions - it’s silly stories about “aliens invading our bodies.”

“The wellbeing of the children in the establishment was under threat because the education process was based on the principles of Scientology,” the municipality said.

The kindergarten opened last summer and had 18 children looked after by two adults.

The Church of Scientology became the subject of intense debate in Germany last year when Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise, one of its most famous followers, was chosen to play the role of a resistance hero in a film about a failed plot to kill Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Cruise was deemed by many Germans to be unsuitable for the part because of his beliefs. In January, German historian Guido Knopp compared a speech the actor made to fellow Scientologists with a call to war by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

The comparison drew a furious response from the Church of Scientology, which has been described in Germany as a sect that exploits its members financially.

It has been under surveillance in some German states for more than 10 years and regional ministers agreed in December to investigate the possibility of banning it.

A court in southern Germany earlier this month threw out a bid by the Church of Scientology to stop intelligence services watching it.

It ruled that there were clear indications that the movement “seeks to establish a social order that runs counter to the constitution”.

The name on the door in the Sendling district of Munich sounded innocent enough: “Kinderhäusl” (Little House for Kids). Child-drawn art hung in the windows. On a normal day, the sounds of children playing would have come from inside.

But the little house, which had been open as a day-care center since the summer of 2007, was shut down Monday by Munich officials, who say its teaching methods are illegal. An estimated 20 children will now have to find new day-care.

“The well-being of the children in the establishment was under threat,” the Munich Education Department declared, “because the education process was based on the principles of Scientology.” The organization’s principles threaten a child’s right to free growth and development, the statement continued.

The German government has been locked for years in legal battles with the Church of Scientology, which it considers a cult and a threat to its democratic system. The idea of a day-care center run by Scientologists would have raised official hackles, and in fact the Kinderhäusl’s troubles started early.

“A few weeks after the center opened we received a letter from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution,” Eva-Maria Volland from Munich’s Education Department told SPIEGEL ONLINE. All members of the Kinderhäusl’s board were Scientologists, according to the letter, and the children were being raised according to the cult’s ideology.

Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution was set up after World War II to pursue any group which the government deemed a specific threat to its democratic system. Neo-Nazis as well as radical Muslim groups have been watched and shut down by the office.

A regional court in Germany recently ruled that Scientologists had enough “ambitions against the free, democratic basic order” for the agency to go on watching them.

“There are concrete indications that Scientology’s activities are to implement Scientology’s program in Germany,” the court in North Rhine-Westphalia ruled on Feb. 12, “and to expand more and more Scientology’s principles in government, economy and society.” Scientologists have consistently claimed that they do nothing against German law and say the government persecutes them.

The Education Department in Munich sent inspectors to the day-care center last winter; then state officials asked the center for an explanation of their work. Scientologists organized protests against this pressure, but on Monday the Education Department announced that the Kinderhäusl’s license to operate had been revoked.

Nicola Cramer, who sits on the day-care center’s board and whose own child attended the Kinderhäusl, called the decision a “government discrimination campaign” against a “religious community,” saying the center was “neutral in its world-view” and open to children from any creed. “We will appeal this decision,” she said.

Another Grand Rapids physician, Dr. Ann Auburn, calls it a hoax.

Auburn founded a Michigan chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a group created by the Church of Scientology - to expose what it calls the “pseudoscience” and “scientific fraud” of psychiatry.

Auburn concedes many doctors don’t share her view of psychiatry.

“Most of the time, I get a few raised eyebrows,” she said. “It’s so indoctrinated in our training.”

“It’s continually promoting things that don’t work,” said Auburn, president of the Kent County Osteopathic Association. “That’s why it’s a hoax: They’re putting people on drugs for things they haven’t properly diagnosed.”

The group is planning a “Fight for Kids Event” March 29 at the Wealthy Theatre to campaign against “today’s widespread practice of drugging of children with heavy, mind-altering, psychiatric drugs,” according to a flier.

Mutchler, president of the Western Michigan chapter of the Michigan Psychiatric Society, had not heard about the event, but she has encountered pickets at conventions and once en route to a meeting in Atlanta listened to an anti-psychiatry rant by a cab driver who was a Scientologist.

“I had no idea people thought we did harm,” she said. “All I can do is go back to the research we have that shows it’s solid science.”

Auburn studied nutrition at Michigan State University and incorporates it into her holistic family practice. She doesn’t deny people sometimes suffer mental breakdowns, but insists they can be treated with changes in behavior and proper nutrition.

“To call a mental problem a disease, it just doesn’t exist,” Auburn said. “The problem is once you label a person with that, they’re doomed. They’re going to get a drug.”

But Mutchler said some mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated with psychotropic drugs, “much like diabetes when you don’t have enough insulin.”

Using neuro imaging, doctors are able to see how psychotropic drugs affect various areas of the brain, she said.

Mark Reinstein, president of the Mental Health Association in Michigan, said there is room for debate over whether psychotropic drugs are overprescribed but, for some patients, he insisted, they work.

“I have personally experienced depression,” he said. “I was just miserable. I couldn’t sleep. I was getting close to being unable to function. It doesn’t happen in every case, but the medication worked great for me.”

Auburn said she would prefer the connection between the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and the Church of Scientology not be mentioned. The church has drawn attention recently for its stand against psychiatry, particularly by one prominent Scientologist, actor Tom Cruise.

Founded in 1954 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, the church has been controversial because of its unconventional beliefs and its aggressive defense against critics. The commission’s literature is stridently critical of psychiatry, calling it “junk science.” One pamphlet refers to “the hoax of learning disorders.”

Another calls the use of drugs such as Ritalin “strategic child mind control” and claims the screening of children for mental illness has “Nazi roots.”

Mutchler shook her head when shown those pamphlets.

“We work very hard to help people,” she said, “and I feel sad that they are hearing things that would negate what we’re trying to do. I’m concerned for the children who don’t get help, the adults who don’t get help.”

Auburn is a national officer of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and a member of the Church of Scientology.

“I would have been involved in this group, even if I wasn’t a Scientologist,” she said.