2 According to the church, “The Sea Org policy on children changed in 1986. The Executive Director International, Mr. Guillaume Lesevre, issued the change in policy which provided that Sea Org members could no longer have children and remain in the Sea Org.”
3 The church denies that there is such a thing as the blow drill. The church produced an affidavit by Morehead, executed Mar. 31, 1997, in which he says: “I have seen people leave and they were free to do so. I am now doing so myself.… I am aware of stories of individuals claiming to have been held against their will, but I know for myself and from my security position that the stories are completely false.” Morehead repudiates the statement, saying, “In March of 1997 at that specific moment I would have signed anything.”
4 Cruise, through his attorney, says he has no recollection of meeting Marc Headley. Bruce Hines, who was there to make sure the process was done correctly, witnessed the sessions and clearly remembers Cruise auditing Headley.
5 Cruise’s attorney remarks, “So far as I know, Mr. Cruise has always paid for any services he received.”
7
The Future Is Ours
Now that he was firmly in control of the church, Miscavige sought to restore the image of Scientology. The 1980s had been a devastating period for the church’s reputation, with Hubbard’s disappearance and eventual death, the high-profile lawsuits, and the avalanche of embarrassing publicity. Miscavige hired Hill & Knowlton, the oldest and largest public relations firm in the world, to oversee a national campaign. The legendarily slick worldwide chairman of Hill & Knowlton, Robert Keith Gray, specialized in rehabilitating disgraced dictators, arms dealers, and governments with appalling human-rights records. As representatives of the government of Kuwait, Hill & Knowlton had been partly responsible for selling the Persian Gulf War to the American people. One of the company’s tactics was to provide the testimony of a fifteen-year-old girl, “Nayirah,” to a human-rights committee in the US House of Representatives in October 1990. Nayirah described herself as an ordinary Kuwaiti who had volunteered in a hospital. She tearfully told the House members of watching Iraqi soldiers storm into the prenatal unit. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die,” she said. The incident could never be confirmed, and the girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and had never volunteered at the hospital. The propaganda operation was, at the time, the most expensive and sophisticated public relations campaign ever run in the United States by a foreign government.
Gray had also worked closely with the Reagan campaign. He regaled the Scientologists with his ability to take a “mindless actor” and turn him into the “Teflon President.” Hill & Knowlton went to work for the church, putting out phony news stories, often in the form of video news releases made to look like actual reports rather than advertisements. The church began supporting high-profile causes, such as Ted Turner’s Goodwill Games, thereby associating itself with other well-known corporate sponsors, such as Sony and Pepsi. There were full-page ads in newsmagazines touting the church’s philosophy, and cable television ads promoting Scientology books and Dianetics seminars.