Addition to Chapter 27

Working in LRH Book Compilations

Print page 235 – This story about working in LRH Book Compilations portrays my transition from Golden Era Productions into Senior Exec Strata, 1993, before I went to Saint Hill for a special project under Miscavige.

I BRACED MYSELF FOR HANDLING the attitude from Jennifer in the Art Department, that would come my way for abandoning my post. Captain Mark Ingber, then the Commanding Officer of CMO International, announced at a base briefing that if someone blows the Int base once, that’s bad enough and they probably shouldn’t be here because the Int base deserves the most ethical staff. If they blow twice, then let them stay gone, don’t bother to waste time and money recovering them because they really don’t want to be here. The dichotomy was that the Int base is at risk when anyone leaves, because those people know too much that, when revealed, could bring irreversible harm to Int base operations. But there were some benefits to making it through the trauma, ethics and corrections, as I had: I was seen as toughened up with a thicker skin, less gullible, more tolerant, tougher.

Miraculously, instead of returning to Cine, I was assigned to a post in a higher org on the base, LRH Book Compilations, a unit supervised by the Senior Executive Strata International (ESI).

The “RComps” offices were on the north side in the Ranchos behind Del Sol. RComps mustered with ESI, headed by Captain Guillaume Lesevre, Executive Director International (ED Int). For the first time, I didn’t mind being moved like a pawn on a chessboard with no say in my job posting. I couldn’t believe my good fortune of getting out of Cine and Gold. My elation perhaps compares to that of an indentured worker, happy to move from a chain gang to work in the master’s kitchen.

I didn’t relish the power game of officer and petty officer ranks and pecking orders at the Int base, which fed directly into people’s egos about being higher in the organizational hierarchy. But ascending the power ladder actually made a difference in my quality of life. Being in any org at the Int base other than Gold meant that I would no longer be addressed in the generality of Gold crew, where “everyone was ineffective” and individuals lacked identities. Gold crew were responsible for taking care of the whole base, so I was no longer one of the lowliest slaves. By the virtue of being posted in a higher org, I would be addressed as “Sir” by Gold crew, even though I wasn’t an officer.

I felt less of a minion than I had in four years. But I also felt like a crab trying to crawl out of a bucket of crabs that kept clawing at me. Numerous Gold crew, especially Cine staff, harassed me about abandoning Cine. Some of them wrote vicious knowledge reports on me, but I wasn’t made to return to Cine. I was told that since my seniors in Cine “couldn’t handle me,” they didn’t deserve me. Jennifer de Mers and Tim Larsen had covered my post for three months, which meant they could make it with one less person to cover their workload.

I was welcomed into RComps by my new senior, Cheryl Sutter. She introduced me to my proofreading partner, Rachel, and I got a friendly tour throughout RComps in the Ranchos. I learned to proofread at a professional level. Printed materials that came out under LRH’s name had to be perfect. I sat at a desk from morning until night with Rachel, proofreading aloud hundreds of pages of LRH books and policy letters in the process of reprinting. I became excellent at my job, catching errors in typesetting, and developed a good reputation for accuracy and quality work. Since I loved to read and study, I enjoyed this job despite its eventual monotony.

Being part of RComps enabled me to attend musters and ESI staff meetings. I never once got in trouble while on this post—there was an absence of chaos in this division compared to the ongoing maelstrom in Cine. I never got assigned a condition for someone else’s screw ups here, wasn’t made to join in on Gold all-hands to chain boxes in manufacturing or stay up all night white gloving all the Lodges because the shoot crew hadn’t done a good job shooting that day. I was actually treated with respect, and applied the condition of my own production. Life was becoming saner.

I don’t remember hearing any particularly shocking stories about alterations of LRH’s writings in the publications side of RComps during my time there. I wouldn’t learn about that until I moved higher up the org board. During my tenure in RComps, the main flaps I heard were that no one was able to revise the LRH Technical Dictionary, and the Translation Unit was supposedly filled with SPs who were purposely mis-translating LRH’s source materials that twisted his meanings.

For the dictionary, the people working on it were supposed to weed out all the “non-LRH” definitions that were included in the current dictionary. They were also supposed to pull the source materials that were to be used to support each definition. And they were also supposed to propose all the terms that should be in the dictionary that were not there. These three tasks appeared to be impossible. For the translations, no one had sufficiently thought through the fact that each language interprets words and meanings differently, especially the vernacular and slang. This applies to translations and re-translations. TU became a circus of people under the gun for “crimes” that only occurred because of ignorant leadership. The list of people accused of stopping Scientology expansion continued to grow.