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adopted the role of an undercover operative, running secret errands for Hubbard and
going to any lengths to keep their location a secret. His wife, Annie, one of the original
Commodore’s Messengers, was a shy blonde, totally devoted to Hubbard.
Hubbard soon decided that the Newport Beach location was compromised, so the three
of them hit the road. Pat drove a Chevrolet pickup with a forty-foot Country Aire trailer,
which mainly contained Hubbard’s wardrobe, and Annie piloted a luxurious Blue Bird
mobile home that John Brousseau had purchased for $120,000 in cash under a false
name. The Blue Bird towed a Nissan pickup that Brousseau had converted into a mobile
kitchen. For most of a year, this cumbersome caravan roamed the Sierras, lighting in
parks along the way. At one point, Hubbard bought a small ranch with a gold mine, but
he didn’t really settle down until 1983, on a horse farm in Creston, California,
population 270, outside San Luis Obispo, near a spread owned by the country singer
Kenny Rogers. He grew a beard and called himself “Jack Farnsworth.”
Hubbard had been used to receiving regular shipments of money, but after he took
ight, the entire structure of the church was reorganized, making such under-the-table
transfers more dicult to disguise. Miscavige ordered that $1 million a week be
transferred to the founder, but now it had to be done in a nominally legal manner. One
scheme was to commission screenplays based on Hubbard’s innumerable movie ideas.
That way, Hubbard could be paid for the “treatment”—about $100,000 for each idea.
Fifty such treatments were prepared. Paul Haggis was one of the writers asked to
participate. He received a message from the old man asking him to write a script called
“Inuencing the Planet.” The script was supposed to demonstrate the range of
Hubbard’s eorts to improve civilization. Haggis co-wrote the script with another
Scientologist, Steve Johnstone. “What they wanted was really quite dreadful,” Haggis
admitted. Hubbard sent him notes on the draft, but apparently the film was never made.
Meanwhile, Miscavige consolidated his position in the church as the essential conduit
to the founder. Miscavige’s title was head of Special Project Ops, a mysterious post, and
he reported only to Pat Broeker. Miscavige was twenty-three years old at the time and
Broeker a decade older. As gatekeepers, they determined what information reached
Hubbard’s ears. Under their regency, some of Hubbard’s most senior executives were
booted out—people who might have been considered competitors to Miscavige and
Broeker in the future management of the church—and replaced by much younger
counterparts.
Miscavige and Broeker would communicate in code on their pagers. At any hour of
the night, John Brousseau, who was Miscavige’s driver, would take him to one of the
several designated pay telephone booths between Los Angeles and Riverside County to
wait for a call revealing the rendezvous point. It was usually a parking lot somewhere.
The drivers of the two men would wait while Miscavige and Broeker talked, sometimes
for hours.
Gale Irwin, who had been on the Apollo when she was sixteen years old and had risen
to being the head of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, began to wonder what was
going on. Hubbard’s dispatches had become increasingly paranoid, and his only line of
communication to the outside world was through these two ambitious young men.