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married in June 1990 and moved to Sea Org berthing near Gold Base. Logan was no
longer the long-haired hippie he had been in those days; he was now middle-aged and
balding, with a black moustache, but he still had those intense, playful eyes and a ready
laugh. His outsized, boisterous personality didn’t always t well in the highly
regimented life he had signed up for. In the summer of 1992, Logan was served with a
“non-enturbulation order,” which meant that he should stop stirring things up. In
October, eight men came to escort him to a detention facility where troublesome sta
members were conned. Logan was told that he had been declared a Suppressive Person
and was going to be booted out of the Sea Org.
Annie had previously conded that she was “nished” with the Sea Org and would
leave if Jim was ready. He didn’t want to go then; he still hoped to rehabilitate himself
in the eyes of the church, but Annie made application to formally route out of the Sea
Org. In a few months, if all went well, they would have a quiet reunion in Nova Scotia,
where they could have children and forget the past. Annie promised him, “They can’t
make me divorce you.” But on October 8, 1992, Logan’s last day in the Sea Org, church
ocials told him that Annie had been ordered to disconnect from him. He was served
with divorce papers, given a freeloader tab for more than $350,000, and then dropped
off at the bus station with a ticket to Bangor, Maine.
Several times after that, Jim and Annie were able to speak secretly. She would
manage to sneak a call to him late at night, or he would have his mother call her. When
Annie couldn’t wait any longer to see him, Jim bought her an open ticket from Ontario,
California—the nearest airport—to Bangor. It would be waiting for her to pick up
whenever she wanted. A few weeks later, Jim got a call from Annie: she was on her
way. It was about ve in the morning in California. She was catching a ight that
stopped in Denver, then went on to Boston, where she would change planes for Bangor.
Jim set out from Nova Scotia for the nine-hour drive to the airport.
Rathbun got the message that Annie had ed the base about an hour and a half after
she left. He was panicked. Annie knew as well as anyone the inside story of the secret
money transfers to Hubbard, the oshore accounts, the shredding of incriminating
documents. She could torpedo the church’s application for tax-exempt status. She also
knew the true circumstances of Hubbard’s last days. She might even reunite with Pat
Broeker, and the two of them could pose a challenge to Miscavige. Rathbun saw Annie
as a potential “doomsday machine.”
According to Gary Morehead, the hulking chief of security at Gold Base at the time, a
“blow drill” went into eect immediately. Morehead had rened the process to a model
of Sea Org eciency. Each year, a minimum of a hundred people attempted to escape
from Gold, but few got away cleanly. Morehead’s security team kept les on members,
containing bank account and credit card numbers, family contacts, even hobbies and
predilections. When one senior executive ed in 1992, for instance, Morehead knew he
was a baseball fan. He caught him a week later in the parking lot of the San Francisco
Giants stadium.
Morehead’s team was aided by the isolation of the base—Gold was in a narrow valley
in the middle of the desert, seven miles from the village of Hemet. There was a single