Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology by Marc Headley

pot, or anything that they did not want to reveal. These were the sort of things that came up in the sec checking on the E-Meter. If you had some deep dark secret that you never wanted to tell someone, it would come out after 50-200 hours of being interrogated on the E-Meter, which to most people would be the equivalent of being hooked up to a lie detector machine and interrogated for hours on end about your innermost thoughts and secrets.
    Some people that were qualified “on paper” were routinely never sent as things came up in security checking that disqualified them. These people were usually posted somewhere in LA or sometimes at the Hollywood Guaranty Building. Sometimes if things came up that were considered severe, they would be kicked out of the Sea Org. The worst case I had heard of was a guy who worked at ABLE Int and previously at Narconon. Prior to working at Narconon, he was a student at Narconon, translation: he was a recovered drug addict. His secret wasn’t safe and it came up, supposedly in a sec checking session, that he used to share needles with a girl that was now HIV+. After he got out of session he was rushed to a local testing facility and sure enough he was HIV+. He was escorted out of the building and the Sea Org within an hour. No one saw him again.
    So Stephanie better not have left anything off of her life history forms! Not that she had been sharing needles with someone or could have done anything that potent, she was 15 years old and she had never gotten in any kind of trouble that I could remember.
    Two of the missionaires came and saw me in my area. I assumed they were there to brief me about Stephanie going onto clearance lines. They introduced themselves and gave me a telex to read. Scientology still used TELEXES in 1990! Yes, they had a whole numbering system and they had to be formatted a certain way and there was actually a course on how to write them! Anyway, they gave me this telex which was a few paragraphs about how International Management was gearing up to do the biggest dissemination in the history of Scientology and a lot of people were needed to move to the headquarters to make this happen. Following the text was a list of 50 people who were named to take part in this dissemination. A few of the people I knew, but for the most part it was a list of people that I had never heard of before. I saw my sister’s name and I was like okay, I gave them back the telex. They asked me how I felt about this and I said that I was happy for my sister and I wished her luck. They looked at each other a bit puzzled and told me to read the list again.
    I didn’t read the entire list after I reached my sister’s name, I had already seen a ton of names that meant nothing to me. But there it was, clear as could be – my damn name! My name was on this list! I couldn’t believe it. I thought that surely someone had screwed up, how the hell did my name end up on this list? I wasn’t officially posted as it was. I had just been removed from a post and I was the local screw off at ABLE. Also, I was only 16 and had no experience doing anything. Why was my name on this list? Then I got to the bottom of the list and read the name of the person who had written the telex and compiled the list: Watchdog Committee Programs. That was my old friend from Delphi – Ali Mintz. She had put my sister and me on the list because she knew us. What a scam! How was I possibly going to get through a security check? Hopefully, I wouldn’t end up on the Rehabilitation Project Force from whatever came up.
    The missionaires could see from the look on my face that I had seen my name. This telex took on a whole different meaning now. I actually re-read the entire thing now that it affected me and was not just some random order that had come down from the glass ceiling. I was in a tricky spot. I can’t refuse a promotion. It is sort of like admitting you have skeletons in the closet, or a myriad of other things, but