going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

knew that Scientologists had stolen documents and wiretapped meetings in that very
building. Both sides had an incentive to bring the hostilities to an end, however.
Miscavige and Rathbun made their carefully rehearsed presentation. Miscavige recited a
litany of examples in which he felt the IRS had singled out Scientology for unfair
treatment. “Am I lying?” he would turn and ask Rathbun theatrically. Rathbun had a
briefcase stued with documents obtained from the 2,300 Freedom of Information Act
lawsuits the church had led, or the countless public records that the church had combed
through. Among the many internal memos the Scientologists had gathered was one they
called the Final Solution document. It was the minutes of a meeting in 1974 of several
top IRS executives who were trying to dene “religion” in a manner that excluded
Scientology but not other faiths.
Miscavige made it clear that the barrage of lawsuits lodged against the IRS would
come to an immediate halt if the church got what it wanted, which was an unqualied
exemption for all of its activities. When Miscavige nished his presentation, Goldberg
called for a break, but he signaled to Rathbun to hang back. Goldberg asked him
privately if the government settled, would Scientology also turn o the personal attacks
in Freedom magazine?
“Like a faucet,” Rathbun told him.
Goldberg appointed his deputy commissioner, John Burke, who had no history with
the conict, to oversee a lengthy review of Scientology’s nances and practices. That
process went on for two years. During that time, Rathbun and Miscavige commuted to
Washington nearly every week, toting banker’s boxes stued with responses to the
government’s queries. Two hundred Scientologists in Los Angeles and New York were
mobilized to go through the books of the church’s tangled bureaucracy. The odds against
success were high; the courts had repeatedly sided with the IRS’s assertion that the
Church of Scientology was a commercial enterprise. Miscavige and Rathbun were very
much aware that the future of Scientology, if there was one, awaited the result of the
IRS probe. Either the panel would rule against them, in which case the church’s tax
liability for the previous two decades would destroy it, or they would fall under the
gracious protection of the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment, in which
case the Church of Scientology, and all its practices, would be sheltered by the US
Constitution.
Overshadowing this debate was an incident that renewed the public concern about the
dangerousness of totalistic movements. In February 1993, agents for the US Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tried to execute a search warrant on a religious
commune a few miles east of Waco, Texas, that was run by a Christian apocalyptic
group calling themselves the Branch Davidians. The leader, David Koresh, was
stockpiling weapons, practicing polygamy, committing statutory rape, and was said to
be physically abusing children, although that last charge was never proved. Following a
shoot-out that caused the deaths of four government agents and six Branch Davidians,
the FBI began a siege lasting nearly two months and culminating in a catastrophic blaze
—broadcast all over the world—that consumed the entire compound. Seventy-ve
members of the sect died in the nal assault, including twenty-ve children. The Waco