Lawrence Wright
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But at that time, the future Israelis would come and buy a lot of land up. And it was threatening to the native population. And there were Arab riots and stuff like that. So things got off to a bad start. And then when Israel declared itself as a nation, the Nakba, the expulsion of nearly 700,000 people, whether they were forced out or just simply not allowed to return to their homes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
That was sort of the one moment, if I were to call history back and say, there's a small change I want to make in the role of human events, and I'd just let them come home and try to work it out. And the age of modern terrorism was born in that moment too because It was the Palestinian diaspora that led to the rise of these terrorist movements coming out of Palestine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And Palestine would be an international city.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And then, I mean, sorry, Jerusalem, Jerusalem would be an international city.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, because the rift over these holy places was very profound. And so what could we do to take that off the table? Well, we make it, it's not an entity belonging to either state. It's one where both can have their capitals.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, even that is, what's left of the Palestinian state is just enclaves, and they're divided by different roads and walls and so on. It's not contiguous with each other. And of course, Gaza's set apart, so it's a different entity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
of Israel were living in Manhattan, in lower Manhattan at the turn of the 20th century. And they wrote a book about the future of Israel. And Ben Zvi in particular had spent a lot of time wandering through the West Bank in these Arab villages and he noticed candles in the windows on Friday night. And he noticed Hebrew in the cemeteries.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And it occurred to him that what we call the Palestinians were really the remnant of the Jews who were not in the diaspora. They just were always there. They didn't come from somewhere else. They were just the original inhabitants who had been Jewish. but over the years converted to Christianity or Islam, where if you converted, you didn't have to pay this tax that was on non-Muslims.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So that was a strong incentive. And, you know, centuries pass, and, you know, they are a different people in some respects. But he was right because genetically, they're very, very similar. They're both descended from the Canaanites. And over time, they may have differed a little bit, but not very much. They're essentially the same people they always have been. I thought...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
When I went to do that one-man show in Tel Aviv, and I had just read that book by Ben Zvi and Ben Gurion, and I thought, well, maybe the Israelis don't know this. Maybe I can help them out just saying, you know, these guys are Jewish, right? And so it's true that they didn't know it, but some people, when I pulled out my solution, said, yeah, we know that. And that threw me off.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I did a little more research, and I came upon this book, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies, by this Cypriot-American psychiatrist named Vamik Volkan. And he had grown up in Cyprus, which was inhabited by Greeks and Turks, who were historic antagonists. And And yet they were very similar people. And you could tell them apart.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They both wore the same white garments, you know, these tunics, white tunics. The Turks would have a green sash and the Greeks would have a blue one. You knew who was who. They had different cigarettes. On this basis, you were able to tell, this is not me. This is the other. In Northern Ireland, the Protestants and the Catholics would paint their doors different colors to signal which they were.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The Hutus and the Tutsis, they were so alike, you had to ask which tribe you're in before we kill you. Wow. in every case you know they were very very similar people and yet oftentimes with civil wars for instance they're bloodier than other kinds of battles so why is that and uh vulcan references this freudian idea of the narcissism of minor differences which is simply that people that are
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
more alike are more likely to be at war with each other than people who are dramatically different. You can accept the difference if it's obvious. But if it's similar, it's the little things that separate you that can be really annoying.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, it's the First Amendment, freedom of religion, along with press and speech. So it's a very powerful concession.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and freud's idea is it's those things that about yourself that you don't like that you see in someone else and and you want to you want to exterminate that that thing that's in the other oh that's interesting you can almost see something like that bubbling up in america with like political differences in people that are the same right or religious differences you know like the you know in in
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Saudi Arabia and Iran have differences, but they're in the same religion, except one is Sunni and the other is Shia. And that has been an ongoing civil war for a long time. And yet to the average American, like when we invaded Afghanistan, one reporter went through the U.S. Senate and asked them, what's the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And not a single senator could tell you, but we're going to go to war. And so those are minor differences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I got a wonderful review the other day in Jerusalem Post, and beyond that I haven't heard. I don't know if it's for sale in Israel, but we'll see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, it's been troubling to me to watch what's going on on the campuses, although it seems to have died down a little bit. They were just replicating the anger and the hatred in the region instead of working for trying to create a solution. But the anti-Semitism, Arabs think that anti-Semitism is a comical charge because they're both Semites. And so it doesn't seem to apply to them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But what we need is friendly help to try to, my feeling is, and anybody who offers a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is naive. And so you have to say, all right, I'm going to be naive for a moment, but you have to go through that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
i think that the israelis and the palestinians have shown that they can't solve the problem that they are in some way addicted to it and so i think the world has to make a stronger case take on more of the challenge and by that well what do i mean i'm not sure uh most of the world has already identified Palestine as a state.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
If you look at a map of the globe, and it's countries that have already accepted Palestine as a state, all of Asia, all of South America, and much of Europe, but it's essentially the G7 countries, you know, France, Germany, Australia, you know, the US, Canada, Mexico acknowledges Palestine as a state. Well, maybe that would be one thing is to unanimously say, this is a country.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, Israel has to declare its borders, which is never done. And, you know, we have to find a way to create two or one. I don't care. I mean, or a confederation. You know, there are other solutions. But the occupation is what is... shattering both societies. And Israel has to stop occupying the country. And they have to find a way to feel secure doing it. So that's the challenge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I think the world can help with forceful diplomacy and vast incentives. And when it gets to be more worth it to stop fighting, then maybe then we can find a way to talk about peace.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It may be true, but, you know, the –
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, there are like 16 million Jews in the world. And they're narrowly divided between the U.S. and Israel. Israel has about a million more Jews than America does. But the next population is France with 400,000. So essentially, when we talk about the Jewish population, we're talking about the U.S. and Israel.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So no wonder we're more interested in Israel than other countries because they're far more – I wish – If another historical thing, I mean, if we had more Jews, if we had, if Roosevelt and Truman had just opened the gates, if you go to any city, you know, go look at the, you know, the hospital wings and the, you know, who's funding the symphony and the ballet. There's so many Jewish names there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And they're just a very small percentage of the world. They're .02 Jewish. 0.2% of the human population, and yet they contribute so much to our society. But it's... You know, now having taken the road to creating a state in the Middle East, Israel has to find its way to being a Middle Eastern country among its neighbors.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I think that that was what frightened Hamas, was this agreement that seemed to be steering towards a conclusion between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And if Israel and Saudi Arabia made peace, All the other Arab countries would fall in line. They're tired of Palestinians and this whole drama. They would just as soon walk away. And also some of the solutions are very threatening.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The idea that the Palestinians would be pushed into Jordan or Lebanon or wherever, Saudi Arabia. They don't want that. They don't want to have that additional problem. So suddenly Hamas, they've been dealt out of the game. And so they've been preparing this attack for a long time. And so that was a trigger.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So does our ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. You know, in the Bible, God gives the promised land to Moses twice. And the first time is a big, bigger parcel. It goes, you know, from like the Red Sea to the Latani River in Lebanon and, you know, all of the West Bank and Jordan, you know, just everywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And then the second time, I guess God has reconsidered a little bit, and it's a smaller entity, mainly Israel and the West Bank, but also some other portions of what are now the countries. And then Moses dies before he's able to come into the promised land. And Joshua is sent in to, God has told him to kill every living thing. Not just people, just kill every living thing. Wipe the tablet clean.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Now, if you're using the Bible or the Torah as your guide, that's a pretty startling model to follow. That's one of the reasons I felt that the genetic identity of these people is important, because If God gave the gift to the Jews, the people that are called Palestinians are the original Jews. And so they should be in on it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But I don't know how many, I mean, I've been in the settlements and there are fervent believers there, but there are also people there that are getting tax breaks. And so, you know, their rent is underwritten. So they have other reasons to be there other than that God gave them that land.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There's a story that I'm really enchanted with, and it's... It's about these nuns that go visit the women on Texas Road. So I'm finishing that up. And then I'm looking for the next... You're on fire. Yeah, well, I'm working all the time. But if I'm not working, I'm in despair. So I have to work. What...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
That's the hardest question. I think the hardest question any writer has to face is what's the story? What story do I want to tell? Because it's not as if there is an absence of stories. You pick up the paper and there's stories all over the page. But what is it that calls to you that stirs something in you and says, I've got to do this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, with the women and the nuns and this sort of thing, the moment I heard the story that, you know, there were nuns going to visit the women on death row, I was enchanted. You know, I just said, this is fascinating to me. And it is a wonderful story. And there were awful parts of it. You know, the heinous crimes that some of these women have committed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
On the other hand, I think of it as being like it's about redemption, and it's a quality that I'm curious about. And so it gave me – it was one of those times when I just went home and started making calls. I knew that was my next story, but it's rare that you have that immediate reaction. And, you know – You also have to take into account how long is this going to take.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Right. And time gets to be more precious the older you get, and there's less of it. So you have to think about, you know, if this is a five-year project, then will I ever do anything else, or will I even finish? You know, those are real existential questions that you're always asking, but you ask with increased urgency as you get older. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But I still felt that there was a great story on the ground to be told. And it was a fabulous story. I was... Despite all the, you know, we're going to get you sort of stuff that comes along with dealing with Scientology, it was always just a great story. And so, you know, you're always grateful as a writer to have that opportunity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I insist that there is a way of getting at what is at least close to truth. And the way I envision it is, first of all, you start a story and if it's going to be, let's say, Looming Tower, big story, how do I start? You start by who's in the story? And so you find out names of people that might be able to talk and you write them down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I use a legal pad and write down the name on one of the 29 lines on the legal pad. And then in a little inch and a half column on the left, I write their telephone number. And then I go talk to them. And when I talk to them, I take a highlighter and sort of run across. So I've checked that one off. But I always ask, who else should I talk to? And those are names I hadn't heard before.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So they go on that list. And then I talk to them. Who else should I talk to? And that's the way that it sinks the root skin into the ground.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Eventually, you run out of names, and that's how you populate the universe of the story. But that's the horizontal axis. It's sort of the trope about journalism is you talk to everybody, but you can't talk to everybody, and not everybody wants to talk to you, but you talk to as many people as you can. And in that case, I talked to 600 people, but it took me five years. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So it was, you know, long time coming. Then some of those hundreds of people are just more knowledgeable, more fun, have better access, you know, and I go back to them again and again. And that's, you know, the first, the horizontal axis is a seeking of consensus.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, if people say it's a religion, how do you contradict that? You know, it's odd because L. Ron Hubbard, the founder, would say it was not a religion. It was a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment. But now it's a religion. And with all the protections that the Constitution awards for that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and the vertical axis is a seeking of understanding and so you're trying to yeah get deeper into a story if you got you know like one of my uh sources in in saudi arabia um was you know bin laden's brother-in-law and he was married to four women as was bin laden at the time you know they had that option and um i wanted to talk to her that was never going to happen
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But he offered to take my questions to her every fourth night when he spent the night with that wife, Bin Laden's sister. Wow. And so she would respond. She would never see a person like me. Right. But she would, through the medium of her husband, who was very helpful to me, she would respond to those questions. And so, you know, those... That was part of the horizontal axis.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I wanted to talk to her, but she could tell me things that other people wouldn't know, like how did bin Laden smell? He wore this sandalwood cologne that a lot of Saudis wear. So those kinds of things, they're access to intimacy that gives plausibility to everything you write.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Thank you. I would like to encourage reporters and journalists or people that might be interested in it to give it a try because no matter who you are, being a journalist will open your eyes to other people and where they're coming from. And it makes you more, it makes you wiser, I think, because you've learned how people differ and why those differences shouldn't be discounted.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And you also have to consider who would you be in that scenario. All this is stuff that, you know, if you're sitting in an office and you're surrounded by people who are very much like you and, you know, have similar concerns and, You're not going to be educated about how the world works. And even if it's just for a couple of years, you know, it's a great way to grow into another person.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Oh, thank you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
yeah well it was um so i'm i know i'm like butcher i'm not that's that's sarge uh i'm trying to remember sarge's last name oh yeah sarge the guy who he asked him to get rid of his body or something right when um when he was in his last days when hubbard was in his last days he was this little horse ranch in southern california uh joining kenny rogers ranch um but um
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
He was in disguise, he was in hiding, and he was very ill. And he, Fouth, Sarge Fouth, he asked Sarge to make him an E-meter that would actually electrocute him. And this is the way he wanted to go out. And he was living on this little blue bus, blue bell bus. I forgot the name of it. And Sarge was wracked with guilt because he had essentially pledged his life in the service of this man.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so he did make him an e-meter that was essentially tied to an automobile battery. that was just enough to give him a real shock but not kill him but he did die uh you know a couple of months later and was it anything related to that or no yeah it i wouldn't want to say that sarge killed him right uh i think that it was a terrible shock it might have affected something um he was
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
he did talk he was used sarge as a kind of confessor uh he talked about how he wasn't gonna return and uh that he was gonna circle this star uh for eternity and uh you know he was um You know, it was interesting at that point, I don't think he was talking to anyone else in any way with the same degree of intimacy and sorrow that he expressed to Sarge. I had heard that Sarge had this information.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I was at this retreat with former Scientologists, and I asked Sarge if he would talk to me. And he was scared and conflicted. It was scary. Of all the people that I talked to, he was the one who actually knew that Scientology had been proved false because the founder had confessed to him. And so it was a very interesting, powerful interview.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I don't remember the quote, but he talked about, you know, he disavowed much of what he had said before, that church doesn't believe that happened, but, you know, I got it on film.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, first of all, let me say that what happened to me and then later Alex Gibney, who directed the documentary, doesn't compare to what happened to our sources. Right. And for me, you know, I had... Tommy Davis was the spokesperson for Scientology when I started the story. And he had pledged that he would take me through Scientology. He was really excited.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It was going to be like the Labor Day weekend. It was a three-day weekend. And so I flew out on Thursday, and then Friday expected to hear from him. This is after the film?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You could have told me that on the phone. Anyway, they finally did come along with three lawyers to talk to me at the New Yorker after we'd sent in our first tranche of queries. They demanded it be in email. So we sent 960 questions, fact-checking questions, and there were more after that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And suddenly, you know, here come this Scientology delegation, and they have brought along – I don't remember how many – Binders it was, but it stretched for seven or eight feet. And longer than this table that we're at, it was an impressive amount of literature, all designed to respond to these questions that we had and what was...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The assumption, I think, was we're going to drown them in information. But you can't drown a reporter in information. It's like pouring water on a fish. What is he going to do with it? He's just going to swim in it. And my editor looked at it and he said, you know what you got here, you smuck, you got a book. I said, I know, they're very kind to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So that happened, the article, there were, you know, constant legal threats. You know, we had, you know, one of their lawyers had been a federal prosecutor. And, you know, there was, you know, they brought some high power into the room.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
we were always aware of the threat that we were going to be sued and it never happened in fact it never happened with um the book it never happened in in the united kingdom where we also sold it and they have these very uh you know aggressive libel laws there and it didn't happen there it didn't happen with the with the series with the television movie so um uh you know it was all empty threats
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But, you know, there was, you know, the private detectives, you know, that was, in my case, kind of a joke. You know, he followed me around, but I rarely go anywhere. But if I had a speech or I'm in a band, sometimes he would come to my gigs, which I was always grateful for. You knew who he was? Yeah, he came and identified himself one time at the,
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
uh at one of my gigs and asked me to sign his book so hi lawrence i'm the uh scientology pi and uh and uh to uh follow you around can we sell my book yeah well they uh they are the other thing that you know they you know the new yorker around valentine's day every year has this anniversary issue we just published our 100th anniversary so we had
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But there's always this Victorian gentleman with the monocle and the butterfly on the cover. And his name is Eustace Tilley. And the Scientologists made up a mock New Yorker with me as Eustace Tilley.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
looking disheveled and just out of the gutter and then out of the top hat i was wearing because paul haggis and uh they passed him out in front of time square office in there you know and uh so it's a treasured artifact in my collection but um that but the harassment that the sources got was very personal and um you know they were followed they were you know they're Garbage was empty.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They were spied on constantly. They were harassed, threatened, and they paid a price. When the movie came out, we put it in theaters for a couple of weeks in Austin, where I live. A woman came out of the theater, and she was so worked up. She drove her car through the front door of the Scientology building in Austin, which is right across from the university. Jesus. And she didn't stop there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
She drove around knocking over shelves and, you know, decks and desks and stuff. Oh, my God. She did a thoroughgoing job, and I had to issue a statement disavowing violence in any form. But they closed it down for a long time. Now it's back and revivified, but... People were upset about what they saw on that talk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They have a lot of money, and they have a lot of lawyers, and they don't have a lot of members, and they don't have the kind of celebrity profile that they enjoyed for so many years. But, of course, they're so secretive about their membership and their budget and everything. It's only estimate. But people report that nobody's in those buildings. And I don't wish harm on Scientology.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I just wish that they would reform their practices where their most ardent members are concerned.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
what do you think uh david miscavige the new leader he has done like two interviews in his life is that right yeah did you ever did you actually try to reach out to him oh yeah or did you just think that's futile the private investigator that uh was trying to get to me um wanted an interview of me and i said oh sure i'll do that if you'll let me talk to miscavige oh
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
oh my God, you know, what are you talking about? And the church was outraged, you know, that I would ask such a thing. And I said, well, you know, the deal's on the table and it's been on the table for decades now. I mean, you know, he's never wanted to open himself up after he had, you know, a colossal fail, you know, when he had that big interview with, was it Ted...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
uh abc i think it was i've forgotten way back in the day right yeah yeah but it was it was merciless and uh he came off really poorly um so uh i think this publicity strategy is don't let anybody talk to him yeah yeah there's something about like just like watching your documentary and watching those
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
basically have six or seven people living in each apartment like shoulder to shoulder on cots which is crazy that that's allowed yeah they're trying to undo that in prisons now so uh it may be the last repository of the
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
confined dormitory they're trying to undo it in prisons yeah there's you know giving more cell space and stuff like that oh yeah you know it's it's a lot of times when the violence occurs in prison it's in those dorms
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, the only other what I would call a cult that I spent time on was the Jonestown cult, Jim Jones. And that was the hardest story and the most wrenching story I ever did.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, but it was, excuse me, my story was apropos of the Branch Davidians. Oh, yeah. And when the Branch Davidian, just before the apocalypse happened, My editor then was Tina Brown, and she asked me to go to Waco and cover it. And I said, Tina, there are more reporters than Branch Davidians in Waco now, and I just don't see joining the pack.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I don't know if you would remember this, but there was a moment before the tanks started poking holes in the building and sending in tear gas and so on. David Koresh sent out a lot of the children. And there were, I don't know, just one or two vans with these kids who went through the military line, the ATF, the FBI, the press, and then out of the property into a world They didn't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And they were leaving behind everybody they knew. And their faces were so forlorn. You know, I just remember, you know, they were passing the news cameras and they just lost little kids. And I thought, well, that must have happened before. And so I started researching. And it turned out that... There were survivors of the Jim Jones suicide massacre. Three of them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, there were more than that, but there were three who were the sons of Jim Jones. Two of them were adopted, and one, Stephen Jones, was his natural son. And they happened to have been in Georgetown, Guyana, playing basketball with the national team and leaving their families in the jungle in Jonestown, in the Guyanan jungles.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so I got in touch with Stephen, and they had never talked about it. It had been 15 years since the Jonestown debacle. But this business in Waco brought it all back for them. So I went to – all three boys lived in the Bay Area. And I had these intense conversations with them. One of them, Tim, he was a big guy. He could curl 100 pounds in either arm.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, I don't have those powers. You see a lot of people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he was, you know, very obviously tough guy. But he hadn't – since Jonestown, he hadn't been able to get on an elevator. He had tried to get on a plane, but he made it turn around, which, you know, it never happens unless Godzilla tells you. Right. But – so he was wounded. And – And he agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it in a public place so he wouldn't cry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he wanted to bring his wife along because he was only going to tell the story once and he wanted her to hear it. So we went to this nice restaurant somewhere around the bay. And after like 10 minutes, he was sobbing and pounding the table, and the waiter made this huge loop away from the table. Everybody in the restaurant was riveted and looking at their food.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The Sea Org, which is their clergy, you know, dresses in naval outfits.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he told a story of he was the one who was chosen to fly back into Jonestown and identify the bodies of 900 people. His wife and children, his parents, his birth parents, his adopted parents, his friends, everybody he knew, his children. He had children he had to identify. And I was never more impressed with the power of belief that it would lead to such a colossal tragedy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so you see a lot of that in Clearwater because that's their base.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, they were. And their attendance at the basketball game was very controversial in the Jonestown community. And these boys, they were young men when I talked to them. They bear a lot of guilt because they feel that had they been there, they might have been able to stop it. But I think that's not true. I mean, I don't think it was stoppable. You know, for months, Jones had been there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
uh, training his followers, you know, having these white nights, as they called it, where they would drink what they thought was cyanide and, uh, in a Kool-Aid, you know, that's where the phrase comes from.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But, uh, but, and then they'd be fine. So, uh, but in this particular case, a congressman, Leo Ryan, had just flown down from San Francisco because some of his constituents were worried about relatives that were in Jonestown. and he was killed by some of Jones' followers. Oh, my God. And so, you know, it was too late at that point.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, and oftentimes more, you know, what looks really very much like a military uniform. Yeah, okay. The Sea Org is, you know, when you sign up for it, you know, you sign off for a billion years of service. Right. And because of the idea that you get reincarnated in a billion years in the time span of eternity is just a small sacrifice.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You know, and Jones knew that, you know, trouble was coming his way, and he didn't want to die alone, so he wanted everybody to die with him. He was shot to death, and I guess he refused to take the cyanide, but... Yeah. Who shot him? Uh, it was, I think it was this woman that was one of his mistresses.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, the longing for power is a very human quality and it manifests in different ways. You know, he was a powerful speaker. You know, he had a way of being, you know, extremely powerful. compelling presence. Very dramatic looking man. He was part Cherokee and had very dark complexion and dark eyes and handsome in a rugged way. He also
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
was a conniver and he would fake healings and things like that i think all of this is with the idea of controlling other people i think there's a it's you see it in politics i mean it's not uh it's not just religion you see the longing to exercise control over other people is very powerful and
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
if you have the capacity that he had to be so compelling as he was, then his only goal was to increase his control. And that was why he moved his whole church out of San Francisco. to the jungles of Guyana and they did it overnight. People would wake up and they'd find their spouse gone or their parents had moved away. I mean, it was all secret and done with amazing security.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And they were flown to Guyana, a place that most of them couldn't even put on a map. And then they lived out their final days in this jungle.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It sure is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Actually, I'm doing a story now that you would think is dark, and it is dark. But I'm looking at religion in a different way. There's the story that I wrote in The New Yorker in their 100th anniversary just a couple of months ago. that I'm making into a book now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I was walking with a friend and she was talking about her mother who's in the Catholic prison services and spent time talking to women on the death row in Texas. There are seven women on death row. And she talked about these nuns that came to visit them every month.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There aren't very many young nuns. Right, they're mostly older. The average age for a nun in America is 80. Right. But this is a new order called Sisters of Mary Morningstar that Pope Francis ordained. And they live in Waco, oddly enough, not so far from the remains of the Branch Davidian compound. But...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
i this sort of hero in my book is this catholic deacon named ronnie lastovica who's a cattleman and he lives in in belton texas and you know a real texas figure but you know he's he's a very pious catholic and his bishops said he wanted him to start ministering into the women's prisons there five, I think, in Gatesville. And four of them are women's prisons and one men.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Huntsville has most of the men. So he started interviewing the women who are ministering to the women on death row. And it occurred to him that there were some women who lived very similar lives. So he drove over to Waco and knocked on the door of the convent.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and bear in mind these nuns although they haven't taken a vow of silence essentially they're silent and praying all day long and um and although they're not cloistered they don't they don't go out very much so ronnie knocks on the door and says you know sister there's some there's some women who could use your help and um you know they're living in community but they don't know how and you've got you know ancient monastic traditions about how
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
to live together. And I think you could help them. And... Oh, okay, well, where are they? Well, they're on death row. Oh, we don't get out much. So these women, their average age is mid-30s. And so if there's a future of Catholicism, I think they're going to be a part of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But they were terrified, but they felt obligated because Ronnie had asked, and it seemed like something that they were capable of. So they went to this highly secure prison. And interestingly, The guards were a little scared of the nuns. It's like they answered to a different order. They were on their best behavior and a little odd. And they're all in these gray habits. What a riveting scene.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah. And they walk into the common room where the death row women are all dressed in white. And the weird thing is they immediately embrace each other. And it was true, they have very much in common. They each live in cells, as they're called in the convent. They each arise around 4.30 in the morning and pray, and then they got crafts and stuff. It's just very similar lives.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But one of the nuns said, also, you should understand that we are not beautiful women. We don't use cosmetics. We don't dress in. There's nothing to be afraid of us, you know, because we are so, we are plain. And, you know, the women on death row had, you know, long since gone past the days when they were, you know, vibrant young women. You know, the years have taken a toll on them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So I think they really felt a kinship. And so I'm working on that story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There's one woman on death row who is actually innocent.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And her name is Melissa Lucio. And she was convicted of murdering her two-year-old toddler who, in fact, had fallen down the steps. And that was the reason that she eventually died. She had like a brain hemorrhage. Oh, God. But... She was convicted by this prosecutor in Brownsville, Texas, who was running for Congress. And he was essentially working for the cartel. And he was selling sentences.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And Melissa didn't have any money. So it would look good on his record if he had a death conviction for a child abuse case. And so... He was hiding evidence, eyewitness testimony from her own children who saw the little girl fall down the steps. And that wasn't admitted in the trial. Her defense attorney had just applied for a job with the district attorney.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And his wife was working for the judge, so it was a very comfortable scene in Brownsville. Oh, my God. The prosecutor eventually went to prison himself. He was sentenced for 13 years for fraud and served, I think, five of those years. But Melissa... was finally demonstrated to be innocent because of all these factors.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And once the fact that the eyewitness testimony was allowed in the court, it became very clear that she would never have been convicted. And yet... Even now she's on death row because the Court of Criminal Appeals is twiddling its thumbs, waiting to decide, you know, should we free this woman?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Because of what you say, there's this sense that if the jury spoke and said she's guilty, then, you know, we have to move heaven and earth to actually change that. And there's another woman, Brittany Holberg, who was convicted of murdering this 80-year-old man in Amarillo. She was a prostitute at the time. But it was a gruesome 45-minute struggle between the two of them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And in a capital case, there are several things. You don't get executed just because you murdered somebody. It has to have an additional factor. It has to be a child. It has to be a process of a robbery or a process of escaping from prison. There are like 10 different things. Anyway, a jailhouse snitch.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They put a woman in the cell with Brittany and then she came out and said that Brittany told me she enjoyed killing him and that she was going to do it again and that she stole all this money. So that eventually got to the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas and the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. And her conviction has now been vacated, but it will be challenged by Texas, I'm sure, again.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But in my opinion, you know, When you use a jailhouse snitch who was paid for her testimony, I think that should, you know, retrial at best.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah. You know, I don't have anything against Scientology except for the human rights abuses that we're talking about. And I think John Travolta and Tom Cruise are great stars. I'm grateful for their talents. But I hold them responsible for bringing so many people into Scientology and knowing Scientology.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I compare it more to a peep show, you know, the old times, you know, carnival thing, you know, where you'd have a curtain move by. Right. Right. Right. Feels, feels more. And also it's, um, prurient, you know, but on the other hand, I, You know, I'm opposed to the death penalty. I wasn't until I got into the story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It just wasn't important enough to me, and I'd seen a lot of people in prison that I never wanted to see get out of prison, and I thought I'd save my charitable concerns for other projects. But seeing how justice is administered in Texas – And it's probably no worse off than many states. You just can't know for certain.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But you can put a question to a jury, fairly or unfairly, and different lawyers will get different results. Well, is that justice? Different juries would make a difference. It's an imperfect game. And the process of appeals when there really is a cause to appeal, it's very difficult to undo a conviction.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
they have to know, you know, the depredations that are visited on people in the Sea Org and also the, you know, the childcare thing, the way these families are broken up and so on, these are terrible, terrible things to do to people. And a lot of Scientologists, don't know or don't want to know what's going on inside the Sea Org.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I was in therapy back... This was like in the early 90s. And... I loved my therapists. They were such dear, intelligent people. And because I was an investigative reporter, they said, well, we've been seeing a number of patients, basically young women, who in therapy are having these flashbacks, recovered memories of satanic abuse. And a lot of times they have multiple personality disorder. Huh.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And then they said, and Satanists are responsible for more than 50 murders a year in Austin.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, my first question was, you know, we don't have 50 murders in Austin a year. Oh, wow. You know, whether Satanist or not, that's more than we've ever had. So, but I was intrigued. And then there was a conference of police who were being, the lecturer was about satanic ritual abuse.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And this cop who was going around the country with his, you know, slideshow said that Satanists were responsible for 50,000 murders a year in And once again, it was more than our actual total homicide count. And these are cops. They should be a little more skeptical, but no.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so I went to my editor, Tina Brown, that's a New Yorker, and I was proposed to do an article on multiple personality disorder. And she was, oh, huh? And I said, well, you know, and sometimes in therapy, they recover these memories of satanic abuse. oh, that's so hot, that's so hot. She was so thrilled. Yes, yes, Larry, yes. So I thought, well, how would I approach this?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So the internet was young at that point, but it was very useful, and I could go through and find all these court cases of people who were suing their parents for abuse or their therapists or, you know, just there were hundreds. And there was one case in which a person was convicted of satanic abuse. And he had confessed. And his name was Paul Ingram. He was a deputy sheriff in Olympia, Washington.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I thought, well, if there's anything to this, that'll be it. So I went to Olympia. And what I found was that... Paul's had a family of four and two girls and two boys. And the girls, one of them, Erica, had made the initial outcry. And... And it got into the sheriff's apartment where Paul was a deputy. And so the assistant sheriff arrested him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And they brought in his preacher, an evangelical preacher, who told Paul that God will not let a false memory come into your brain. And then they brought in a psychiatrist who hypnotized him. And Paul had said, I know my girls wouldn't lie, but I don't remember it. So to help him remember, the psychiatrist and the preacher sat there with the deputy and elicited these memories of satanic crimes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There's several different places where the Sea Org tends to headquarter. And most people will say, well, but it's given me something really valuable. And usually that is a sense of being skilled in a particular area or connections. And the most conspicuous thing is the actors that are involved. They don't have another Tom Cruise.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And in the church that they were a part of, it was called the Church of the Four Square Gospel, there was a lot of gossip. You can imagine that something like this was just on everybody's mind. And the preacher had access to the deputies and so on, so there was information coming out. And so that would generate new memories on the part of the daughters.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And then it would be reported back to Paul immediately. you know, what they were saying, and he would come up with memories, but they never had the same memory. There were all these disparate memories, and, you know, girls were talking about these satanic fires, you know, they'd have these campfires, you know, and the girls were...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
impregnated and then later nailed to a table and had the fetus withdrawn from them, you know, and their neighbors had committed homicide and, you know, and it was... Bizarro stuff. But the cops took it seriously. They had helicopters flying around looking for where the fires might have been, digging up the yard. And I asked the undersheriff, did you find any bones? Well, there was, yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
really what was it well it was an elk bone obviously offering this as evidence right and uh so uh but the thing was that paul confessed and he felt like he must have done this and you know when uh the the the questioning was so bizarre because So Paul, you know, he had two friends that were also implicated by the girls. So when Ray or Jim, you know, would come in, what did they do?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, I think they must have raped my wife. Uh, okay. Uh, and, and then, uh, what did you do? Uh, well, I would have gone back to work and it was, it was all in this conditional tense. It must have been this way. I would have done this. He never said I did it in, but he confessed, uh, So he went to prison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And at some point, I was in L.A., and I decided to go to the headquarters of the Church of the Four Square Gospel. It was a church that Amy Semple McPherson created back in the old days of Hollywood. So I was talking to the leader of the church and I said, you know, that first outcry by this girl, Erica, happened, I think, at your summer camp. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. One of our counselors led that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I said, is she here? Yeah, yeah. Paula, come on in the office. So Paula, the evangelist who had been speaking at this church camp said, came in and I asked her about the setting for this church camp and how many girls were there and what was her role and so on. And she said, you know, I would be talking to them and I would say, there's a girl in the room. I can see her in a closet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
She's in a closet and she's so afraid of her father. And she hears the footsteps coming towards the end. Some girl cried out, it was me, it was me. And a lot of hysteria. And so at the end of camp, she says, I was preparing to leave and some of the counselors came over and said, there's a young woman who needs your attention. And so Erica was actually a counselor at this camp.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And we don't know what to do with her. She's on the stage and she's just weeping. And so Paula came over to Erica and she said, and I put my hand on her head and I prayed over her. And I heard God say, you've been abused. And then I said, and it's been happening for a long time. And it's your father. Now, this was a very religious young woman, Erica was.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And she was getting this message from God telling her that her father had been abusing her. There was no evidence. There never was any evidence of it. It was only this transmittal, you know, the hand on the head and the message from God. And it led to the ruination of Paul Ingram's life and suicide. the splintering of his family. But he served years in prison.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Elizabeth Moss is a second-generation Scientologist, so she wasn't drawn into the organization. She was born into it. You know, actors, it's one of the things I learned when I was working on this, is a lot of them, like Tom Cruise, you know, they drop out of high school. He didn't drop out, he finished. But, you know, they go into, they go to Hollywood when they're really young.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And once again, the business of trying to roll back a conviction is extremely difficult, especially one that had been framed as child abuse with a satanic addition to it. Is that them? Yeah, that's the family before it became the victim.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Oh, yeah, I talked to him about it. You know, he, it's hard for him to understand because, you know, it seemed... that he must have done something. He was very guilty, and he's a fervent believer, so he trusted his preacher and the psychiatrist. Wow. I know you have a lot of interest in UFOs and stuff like that, but there was a...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
A study done in Georgia, which would not be allowed nowadays, but a psychiatrist or psychologist had a patient and he told her, I'd like to do a little experiment. And... I'm going to tell you, I'm going to hypnotize you. And I'm going to put some suggestions in your mind. It's not going to be true. It's just, you know, just see. And, you know, so he hypnotized her.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he said, you were late to our session. What happened? Which wasn't true, you know. And she said, well, I was driving along the road and I saw a cow on the side of the road, you know, who was trying to give birth. And she was really struggling. So I thought I could help. So I got out of the car and I went over to help her. And he said, and then a light appeared.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And she said, and then a light appeared overhead and a spaceship came down. And, you know, and she was abducted. And he woke her up and he said, look, this is what you said. Bear in mind, you made it up. I planted it inadvertently in your mind, but just free yourself of this. She couldn't shake the feeling that it was as real to her as any other memory.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I think that's part of what was going on with Paul and to some extent with his children. You know, they're fantasizing, you know, they were charged with the idea that something happened. And that phrase has done a lot of damage, especially in child abuse cases and
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
the old daycare pursuits remember the daycare hysteria you know there was always well maybe they didn't you know fly to mexico and bury a giraffe which was for instance in austin that was one of the daycare stories oh yeah yeah maybe that didn't happen but something happened or these kids wouldn't be so screwed up so the jury would convict them on the something happened charge
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, a friend and Dan's daycare. And it was just a kind of neighborhood daycare. During that time, there were a lot of these daycare cases arising, and some of the parents were concerned. And so a mother asked her daughter,
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
you know had anything gone on and uh in the daycare and i think the daughter gave you know responded to one of the suggestions you know well maybe or something like that it was it was hard so she called a psychologist a local psychologist in Austin who I had interviewed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And she assembled some other family members and they had, back then they would have dolls that they used to illustrate, you know, where did he touch you here and stuff like that. So they, these were the parents and a psychologist interviewing very, very young children. And I I went to about an hour of trial of Fran and Dan. I think they might have been tried separately. I don't remember.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And imagine you get out of high school, I'm going to be an actor, I'm going to be a movie star, I'm going to go to Hollywood. Meantime, your friends are in college. They're studying. They're getting their medical degree or whatever. They're going on with their life. And you're standing in line for a role, one in the background, somebody in a crowd scene or something like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But there's a little girl on the stand sitting in her big sister's lap. And the prosecutor, you know, honey, did Dan hurt you? And she had a, she said, no. Did Dan touch you someplace you didn't know? You honor me, we have a recess. And then it was, yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, and it made me really scared to think that, and I was just, you know, I wasn't on the jury. And they might have heard other more compelling evidence, but they did hear evidence about how these kids were flown to Mexico and they were slaughtering wild animals and then flying back just in time to be picked up by mommy and daddy. I mean, that...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They served years in prison before they were exonerated. Wow. And, you know, it's a really dark mark on our culture that that kind of hysteria is allowed to proliferate. And what year was that happening? I don't remember the exact year, but the daycare cases all took place in the early, in the 90s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, I've talked to him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, I had a letter from Whitley years ago after I did that Remembering Satan piece. And he said... that he wished that I would write about him because he knows that there's something wrong with him. And people think he's the village idiot. But these are, just like I said about that test, these are real memories to me. But I know that they can't be. So please consider writing about me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So I was tied up on something else. And then... Whitley came out with another book about abduction. We have a mutual friend, Jim Konietka, and he and Whitley wrote a best-selling novel together. They went to school together, as a matter of fact, but they called War Day. It was a New York Times bestseller.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You're desperate to break it, and you don't seem to have any choice. And then along comes a person with a brochure handing him out to all these would-be movie stars saying, how to get an agent. Come to the Celebrity Center. We'll show you how. And just like a message from God. Somebody's going to help me get an agent.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
so they were always in contact and jim and i went to see whitley at the bookstore when he was signing books and afterwards i said whether you remember that letter you wrote to me and he said yeah yeah yeah i remember that but you know that was before i found out about the implants so i mean I've always been interested in how it is that people fantasize these things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I don't believe he's deliberately making it up. But there's something wrong. And it intrigued me. But I also felt... I felt he was too fragile to take on. I'm glad I didn't write about him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I don't know. Yeah, that was a long time ago.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, it's reinforcing to make money out of something like that. And so there's a disincentive to walk. But at one point in his life, He wanted to break the spell and he thought that I could help him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
yeah he would to some extent considered himself ordained by Aleister Crowley and and Hubbard ran off with his girlfriend it was annoying to him yeah it was quite a scene on South Orange Avenue and Pasadena back in the day
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
A legitimate high level rocket scientist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Your question presupposes that a really smart person wouldn't go into all of this. But the truth is that a lot of these people, a lot of Scientologists are really smart and very successful personalities. It doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. And I think to some extent there's a lot of fantasizing going on, which is something we've been talking about this last hour. But...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
If Jack Parsons can be accused of, you know, being a cultist, a fanaticist, you know, he's exploring the universe, but he's also sort of exploring, you know, the outer limits of human behavior. And he was very proud of it. I mean, he didn't hide it. You know, he really had this, you know, sort of satanic temple. And people were drawn to it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
or how to get insurance, and these kinds of things that freelancers like actors are desperate for. So once into the celebrity center, they're given a menu of different programs that you can take there. And people like, well, Jerry Seinfeld, he attributes some of his early success to taking, I've forgotten which program it was, but It felt that it gave him more confidence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he legitimized it too by being such a prominent scientist and so on. So I don't know, he wound up killing himself. And that was kind of a sad end to his interesting life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
No, I don't know about that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Um, are you religious? No, I was religious as a teenager. And the Methodists, so I was as religious as you get to be in the Methodist church. But I was in Young Life and some of these Christian organizations. Mm-hmm. and left it aside somewhere along in college, but have always been interested and attracted to religious ideas without actually being able to allow myself to believe in them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So I can associate ideas. I mean, you know, I think Jesus is a fascinating historical character and I think a wonderful model. And so was he conceived by immaculate conception or, you know, did he go to heaven? I don't know. In some ways, those things don't matter to me. I think what Jesus would mean to me now is that I'd like to incorporate more of his behavior into my own.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I think that's something admirable. And I feel that way about, you know, I don't know that much about Buddhism, but I'm intrigued by the lessons that people draw from those religious teachings.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, there was this one moment. I wouldn't say it was the moment my life changed, but it was a moment. In Young Life, we had these two leaders who were sexual magnets, Roy and Johnny. Roy was – he played in the Rose Bowl. He had a Rose Bowl on his finger. He was a center. As you would expect, an impressive piece of meat.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And his wife, Johnny, was an airline stewardess and just as hot as she could be. So for a lot of teenage kids, these are – appealing Roy role models and um the um and of course their marriage didn't last as I understand it and um he ran off with one of the high school students is what the rumor was um but
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There was a moment when he was preparing us for the challenges of college and all the existentialists that awaited us. So I was supposed to play one of these snooty intellectuals who believed that – It was the watchmaker analogy. He created the watch and wound it up and then left us to our own devices. And so I made a very compelling case for that. And he said, now refute yourself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I couldn't do that, you know, it just, because the way to refute that is simply through belief. And I realized that I couldn't find my way there. And that was a, you know, I had talked myself out of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, it's the headquarters. Back when L. Ron Hubbard had taken to the high seas to avoid subpoenas and finally decided to come back to America, and he sent a delegation around looking for the right place, and they settled on Clearwater. And they wouldn't tell anybody at the time what they were. They were some sort of vaguely Christian organization, just let the word out. But when...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, I don't think it's... I mean... It might be tied to the era that we live in. I think it's also the culture we're in. I've spent a lot of time in other countries where you don't have the diversity of belief. You can only believe one thing. You can believe it more or less, but there's this one thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And a lot of actors have been through and never got very deeply in it, but did taste it. And most of them will tell you that it did them some good.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and it's islam or it's buddhism or you know it's whatever but in america you can believe anything and if like l ron hubbard if you don't find something you just make it up you know you create your own religion and it's a we're i think a dynamic religious culture in our country more than any other country it's kind of it seems like a kind of a double-edged sword right because america there's no really like unifying identity to what it is to be an american
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, you know, take into account you're younger than I am, and I always had an idea of being an American. And as imperfect an identity as that is, it was always... something that was dear to me. And as a reporter going into other countries where you didn't have the freedom to speak, you didn't have the freedom to think clearly on your own.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And you lived your life, if not in fear, then at least you lived it at a lower level than you might've had, had you had your freedom. And I often think that maybe other countries have a clearer idea about America than we do ourselves. And there's a sense in which Every country has a foot in America in some way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It's like I think we understand so little about the world, and it's like we're surrounded by this mirror glass where we just see ourselves. But outside, they see who we are. And oftentimes, I mean, I think invariably, you go into a country – and they'll have an uncle in America. There's somebody they know in America, someone they're related to usually.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They know a lot about what's going on with that person and they compare the life that they're living in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Thailand or wherever to the life their relative is living in Des Moines or Los Angeles and something. So there's a constant point of comparison which is America.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
that is a very powerful and very precious thing to have but we we abuse it and we treat you know treat the rest of the world so poorly that it you know I think people want to be I think people want the love and attention of America I remember one This was back in the 80s, and I went to Nicaragua. The Sandinistas were in the middle of this revolution.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
One time when I was in college, I was living in an apartment with my girlfriend at the time. And downstairs there was a little Scientology org. it was tiny you know and um i i had heard of it you know but this was back in the middle 60s long time ago and so scientology was totally new and they they showed me the um i forgot the name of the little lie detector
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And it was the most anti-American country I'd ever been in at that point. And it was very impoverished. But I went to a baseball game with the mistress of one of the comandantes was my escort. She was a good number, I'll tell you. Yeah. I bet. We had our bags checked, and they pulled out this big pistol out of her purse, and I thought, well, I'm going to really bathe myself here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so we sat up in the stands above the Comandantes, and I looked down there, and they were all – They had their hands to their mouths, and it looked like they were praying. And I asked the escort, can I get you a Coke? No alcohol served here. And sure. So I went up and I ordered two Cokes. And the country was so poor, they couldn't afford paper cups. So they...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
poured the liquid into sandwich bags little plastic you know sandwich bags so they weren't praying they were manipulating the liquid in the bag into their mouths and so As it happened, just a couple of weeks before I went to Managua, the Baltimore Orioles had come.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The Baltimore Orioles at that time had three Nicaraguan players, including their ace pitcher, Dennis Martinez, and the legendary manager of the team, Earl Weaver, said, well, let's just go to Nicaragua and show off a little bit. So... They flew the team, and they had an exhibition game. Nobody could stop talking about it. They hated America, but they loved the Baltimore Royals.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, it was the most important thing that had happened since the Revolution. Wow. And I think we forget the immense amount of power that we have over other cultures, although I think we're squandering it so badly these days that its value is disappearing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
somehow strengthen us as a country on the world stage if we were more cohesively involved in a unifying religion well i don't think that we will be involved in a unifying religion we're fortunate that it's not as divisive as it is you know like in israel and in the middle east yeah um the uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
my impression of palantir is that i just read carp's book the technological republic i think it's called and you know the main goal is you know he feels that the the community the silicon valley community has been created in america but they don't feel allegiance to america and um i i think there's some merit in that and also you know it's been charged with
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Palantir has with helping the Defense Department. But on the other hand, when your adversaries are Russia and China, you want to keep ahead of the algorithms. So I'm not one that says, what's interesting to me is they're developing very powerful tools. But people with varying ideologies can use them for different purposes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
We're entering an era where technology awards such unprecedented amount of power to small groups and even singular individuals. I wrote about terrorism after 9-11. Guys who were using suicide bombers and stuff like that. Bin Laden wanted to get a nuclear bomb, but he never could.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You know, nowadays, you know, the amount of power that al-Qaeda or any group like that could assemble easily is just terrifying to consider. I remember the day that I awakened to the drone thing was, you know, been more than 10 years, I guess, but somebody flew a drone over the White House fence. And I thought, oh, my God, it's that easy. You know, and it is that easy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I was intrigued, but I was also a little suspicious. But anyway, they were a good neighbor. I'd sometimes go downstairs and, you know, hi, how are you doing? But that was my... only introduction into Scientology before I actually decided to write about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, of course, you know, there are all these anti-drone efforts right now the Defense Department has been working on. But swarms of drones, which are being trained, like, to fly through a forest the way a flock of birds would do. Right. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It's really...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, it's – so, you know, Silicon Valley is – you know, government itself is losing its role in our society and it's being replaced by private industry. Right. For good or ill. And you'll see – Good or ill. Oh, okay. You'll see both in massive amounts because – There's a lot of fervor in Silicon Valley and in private investment in general.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And even the Defense Department, I was talking to one of the guys who procures weapons. And what they do now, rather than imagining a weapon, you know, and then going out and bidding a contract. They go from shop to shop where people are developing algorithms and saying, you know, what do you have? And it's kind of like shopping. You know, maybe we could use that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You know, there's not a design in effect. It's all, you know, it's like vintage clothes shopping, you know, in my thinking. And and it's a good idea to keep on top of what's the latest. But on the other hand, it seems to be that there's no idea about what they actually need or want.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Right. And there's little question that'll happen. I mean, in a globalized world where the market is – you know you see you know the evasion of sanctions everywhere you know i mean russia's getting pretty much all it needs even though it's sanctioned you know other countries are providing and um it's uh you know once you develop these tools there's little available to keep them in the box
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, I've written about a lot of religions over my long career, and I'm always intrigued by the fact that reporters tend to pay a lot of attention to politics. But my observation is that you can be, you can have really strong political beliefs that don't affect your behavior at all. And I'm sure everybody knows those people. But if you have strong religious beliefs,
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, it was... You know, when the planes hit, it took out the phones in Manhattan. So I texted my editor. At that time, I was, you know... maybe thinking about leaving journalism and going into the movie business. So I... My relationship with the magazine was a little tentative, and I wrote Remnick, David Remnick, the editor, and I said, put me to work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so that afternoon, the phones came back on. We had a conference call, and there were maybe a dozen New Yorker writers. We were scattered around. Everybody was on a story or something, you know, so... I mean, Jane Mayer, I remember, he was in Washington, and Jeff Goldberg. And you could hear the ambulances headed towards the Pentagon and stuff like that. And I...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I was in Austin. It was very frustrating because you couldn't fly anywhere. You know, planes were grounded. And so I couldn't go to New York. I couldn't go get into the story. So I started searching on the Internet and also asking friends. You know, is there somebody I can talk to? And I interviewed some Muslims in Dallas-Fort Worth and so on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But a friend had met this young man at a film conference. He was a reporter. And... He was working for an investment magazine called Waters. And he was supposed to have an interview on top of the World Trade Center in the windows on the World Restaurant on the 101st floor. But for the first time in his life, he slept through a subway stop.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So he got off the subway and rushed back in the opposite direction, got to the World Trade Center. Back then, you know, the World Trade Center had a bank of elevators. There were more than 100. and you had to go up a flight of stairs, an escalator.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah. So he went up, got on the elevator, and he was late. He was a young man, so he didn't have a watch. He just had his iPhone. So he looked at his iPhone, and it was like 8.01. And the... elevator operator held the door for this woman who was walking across the lobby. And, you know, his reporter really was, you know, let's go, let's go. And she stepped onto the elevator.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
He has an amazing memory. And he looked down and he saw as she stepped on that she had a rose tattoo on her ankle. And that made an impression, and then the plane hit. And so the doors to the elevator accordioned, and he walked out. And was it an earthquake? Nobody had any idea. But there were... Pieces of plaster and stuff lying on the floor of the lobby.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And some, he said, were like the size of a shoebox and some were the size like of an office desk. So it was a weird landscape. And remember, he had to go up that flight of stairs or escalator. But he saw outside a patio there. And he thought he was going out into the world. And so he stepped out into the patio.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They tend to govern your life. And I think it's a mistake to avoid that subject. A lot of reporters think it's impolite, prying into what people believe, and yet they'll readily ask, are you a Trump supporter or something like that. But they won't ask, are you a Mormon? Or, you know, it's just it seems impolite and also pathetic. You know, reporters typically are very skeptical.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, it was mezzanine or whatever. And he stepped out and he said there were hundreds of shoes. And what looked like luggage, but he realized they were human torsos. And so his story about getting home, walking home to Queens, became the bookend of the black issue of The New Yorker. And I had been interviewing him and giving my wife the tape and to type up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, it was, you know, weeping and, you know, it was really... A difficult time. And one of my editors said, you know, you've got enough, don't worry about it. And I thought, no, are you kidding? This is it. This is the story. And then that night, David Remnick called and said, I want everything you can get from this because this is the bookend of the story, which I knew it had to be.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So after that, I was looking for a way to write about the story in a larger way. But how do you take a catastrophe like that, some vast human tragedy, and make... Shrink it down in some way to make it relatable.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I've always had this idea of what I call the donkey, which sounds like a deprecating term, but a donkey is a beast of burden, and it can carry a lot of information on his back, and it can take the reader into a world he's never been. So I'm looking for that person. And on the Washington Post site, I think I was looking at obits that were streaming online.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
On the Washington Post site, I found this obituary for John O'Neill, who had been head of counterterrorism at the FBI in New York and had the warrant on bin Laden. But he had been washed out of the FBI when he took some classified information out of the office to a retirement conference as it happened. So he took a job as a head of security at the World Trade Center.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So I thought instead of getting Bin Laden, Bin Laden got him. And I didn't know if he was a hero or a goat, you know, but he was a hell of a donkey. And so that's how I got started on The Looming Tower. My other donkeys were Ayman El-Zawafri, the number two guy, and Bin Laden himself, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi intelligence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And through these interweaving biographies, I could tell the story of 9-11. Wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and how as far as like approaching a story like this i imagine you had to find a lot of sources within the fbi and the intelligence community right yeah what was that like i i was real fortunate it took a while for me to understand why i was so fortunate that the fbi i had written a movie called the siege right that came out in 1998 and uh with denzel washington and bruce willis and you know a number of other fine actors and um
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And Denzel's job was the same as John O'Neill's. And that was odd to me. And then the movie was about what would happen if terrorism came to America as it had in London or Paris. What if it came to New York? That was the premise. And then it came out in 1998. And so it was three years before 9-11. But it was eerie in many respects that these parallels were in the movie.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so I felt, having imagined the scenario, that I wanted to find out what really happened. And that's what led me on that odyssey to ride the Looming Tower.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Oh, yeah. Well, to get back to your question, I had to talk to the FBI.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And when I was writing the movie, I didn't get very much cooperation. Right. but suddenly it seemed the gates were opening. And one guy I really wanted to interview was named Ali Soufan. Ali, when I wrote the movie, I knew, I had heard about this Lebanese American FBI agent who spoke Arabic and very few, I think seven in the whole industry, whole bureau spoke Arabic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So he was an incredibly valuable source and asset. And he was made available to me. And that was a good sign. And then other agents that I was interested in were made available. And then finally I figured out what was going on. The CIA was trying to blame the FBI for 9-11. And so I became part of their defense. And so practically anybody I wanted to talk to in the Bureau, I was able to talk to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And religion is one of those areas that we tend to tend to put some distance between us. So. Because I was interested in religion and had been very religious when I was a teenager, Scientology was always on my scope. But I needed an excuse to write about it. I thought about when John Travolta's son died, if you remember that. He was very ill.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And the CIA... I talked to people in the CIA, but they weren't nearly as forthcoming. And then a lot of my questions had to do with the fact that two of the hijackers came to America in January of 2000, like 19 months before 9-11. And the CIA knew they were in America and didn't tell the FBI. And so they were trying to shove responsibility off of them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and put it onto the bureau, and the bureau was not perfect. But they didn't know that Al Qaeda was in America until the CIA came and told them in late August of 2001, a month before the actual tragedy. So they didn't have the time to go out and find Al Qaeda. The reason I'm convinced that the CIA ever came to tell the FBI is that they lost them. You know, they didn't know where they were.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so now they maybe had been planning in cahoots with the Saudi intelligence to turn these guys. That's the theory of a lot of FBI guys. But they couldn't turn them if they had disappeared. And so they didn't see them again until they showed up on TV again.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There was always a conflict in the mission of these two bureaus. But that was compounded by personal animosity. And one of the leaders of the bin Laden unit in the CIA testified before Congress that one good thing happened on 9-11. John O'Neill was killed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
that's the level of their hatred and it got in the way you know i mean america could have withstood uh you know an attack of some sort but 9 11 was a trauma deep wound in the country and and it's i still think that the cia bears a lot of moral responsibility for that
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and so john o'neill and well mainly i think ali soufan they they pretty much snuffed the whole thing out right well you know ali was a you know unique individual yeah you know he had super young he was very young he was the youngest case agent you know i mean he was in his 20s when he made the was caged the case agent for 9 11. And he's the guy that identified the hijackers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
He didn't torture anybody. He was a very clever interrogator. For instance, he had a little snippet of some taped conversation between two of these Al-Qaeda guys. And so that's all he had in this one interrogation. And he got a shopping cart with a bunch of similar-shaped cassettes to make it look like he had this library
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he walked into this interrogation and he just picked randomly, supposedly, this one tape and popped it in and played this bit. And the suspect's eyes are like, oh my God, they overheard my telephone calls. I mean, what else do they know? And so he just spilled the beans. There was no more beans. There was one bean.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But it was just, it was clever interrogation of a little trickery involved, but no torture. And he's a guy that, pulled the fbi out of guantanamo and said we don't torture people and he was going to arrest the cia operatives that were doing the torture you know that was he was prevented from doing that but he's a man of the kind of principles that we'd like for the country to stand for yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Not personally, but... Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, at that time, there were a couple of things going on. Bin Laden was sort of laying low, and he spent, I think, four years in Sudan. He wasn't active. He was mainly, Al-Qaeda had become a kind of agricultural institution. He was developing all these seeds that he was very proud of, and he may have owned more land in Sudan than any other individual. And they played soccer and stuff like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It was apparently some kind of environmental toxin that affected him. And there was a Scientology treatment that was employed. I don't know if the boy could have been saved otherwise, but anyway, he died. And I thought, well, maybe he will leave the church, and that would give me an excuse to talk to him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So it wasn't – he was anti-American. He was making noise. But at this point, the king was trying to reconcile with him. And he sent Jamal Khashoggi. Jamal Khashoggi, yeah. It was bin Laden's – and although not a follower, but he was a friend of his and had spent time in Afghanistan with bin Laden during the Mujahideen days. And Jamal was a reporter, and he was a friend of mine. Oh, really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so the way Jamal explained it to me, he'd spent three days in Khartoum. And bin Laden was always very close to the point of pronouncing terrorism because he was homesick. But finally, he wouldn't cross that line. So Jamal went home empty-handed, and at that point, the Sudanese decided to expel him and rob him of practically everything that he had, all of his possessions.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I went to Sudan three times, tracking that story down. The first time I went, I had been working closely with the Sudanese intelligence because someone had referred me. And so they would drive me around and show me where bin Laden lived and the mosque and where the soccer fields were and all this sort of stuff. But I said, look, I need to talk to somebody, somebody in al-Qaeda. And so...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
One day I was in my room in what they called cheerfully the Hilton. And I'd have to flash back a little bit. The first time I flew to Saudi Arabia,
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
i i had a job there i'm mentoring these young reporters and at this saudi gazette um i when i got off the plane i was in terrible pain my back was really killing me and i you know for the three months i was there the first time um i couldn't raise my toes i was just you know a terrible sciatic pain so the next time i went back to saudi arabia i took one of those
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
exercise balls that you know you sit on when your back is back then you didn't have the pump so you had to blow it up you know and then unblow it and so I flew to Khartoum with my exercise ball and so there was a knock at the door and the Sudanese intelligence officer was there and he had this this guy with him And he wouldn't tell me who he was. So come on in.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I offered the guy, the mysterious guy, the desk chair. And the intelligence agent lay down on my bed and went soundlessly. So it left me with this guy that I quickly discerned was an al-Qaeda member. and uh and so i sat down on the ball and he was over there and i started asking him questions and he knew everything and i thought jesus who is this guy and uh so
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I flew back to America, and I researched him, and I triangulated, and I came up with Muhammad Loy Boyazid. His Qaeda name was Abu Ridda al-Suri, and he was the guy who took the notes when Al-Qaeda was founded. It's in his handwriting. And I thought, holy shit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
i was talking to the guy that has been in al-qaeda from the moment it started and i didn't know that so i flew back to khartoum and he wouldn't see me and that was disappointing and so finally he agreed if i came again he would talk to me and so i flew back i said uh loay you know
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I mentioned it to my editor at the New Yorker, and he said it was too tabloid, which I thought, you know... Yeah, but it's still very interesting. And so then Paul Haggis dropped out of the church. And Paul Haggis was a two-time Academy Award-winning writer and director. He had been in the church for more than two decades. And he dropped out very quietly. He wasn't talking about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
it's a lot of trouble coming to a cartoon why didn't you see me last time you said well i didn't know how seriously to take you when we met the first time you were sitting on a balloon so that's how i got into al-qaeda wow it was um You know, when bin Laden left Sudan, you know, there's a case to be made. We should have just left him alone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yes, in that sense. We didn't directly give money to him, but we were fighting the same cause. And so in that sense, we were allies. But there was a myth that we were underwriting him. That never was true. Nor would he even want it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah. I mean, he got plenty of money from Saudi Arabia. He didn't need ours. Yeah. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
When that happened, there were practically no roads. And there's a ridge of mountains that is right above the western shore of Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea. And Jeddah, for instance, where I was stationed, was in that level ground below the level, between the sea and the desert above Jeddah. this high palisade. It was a real challenge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The American companies walked away from the deal, but the only way to get from, Jeddah to Riyadh was some sort of camel trail or early aviation. So Mohammed bin Laden, the father, took on the challenge. And he went up, got up on top of this mountain palisade, and he pushed a goat over the edge. and followed him down, marking the path that the goat took. That's amazing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Then that became the route of this very twisty-turny highway that united the country. So he became a national hero. And he more or less was responsible for the renovation of the mosque in Mecca. And, you know, he was highly valued, famous character. He died in an air crash. But, you know, he left behind this image.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I think there were 56, I think so. And so there were, you know, one of my best sources was Jamal Khalifa, his brother-in-law, but that's not an exclusive term when you have that many brothers and sisters. And he was great. It was an eye-opening experience.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah, that's in August of 2001.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It was episodic, the information. It wasn't pulled together. There was suspicion. Like in Arizona, there was an industrious guy who found out about these Saudis who were in a flight school, but they didn't feel like they needed to learn how to land. And it was a similar story with a guy named Massawi who was – Very flagrant and aggressive about getting to fly. He wanted to fly Boeing planes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It was suspicious enough that the local FBI chief reported it. But was there ever the moment where somebody said, I'm getting a lot of reports of these guys who are Saudis who are trying to learn how to fly and not land?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But I thought... You know, most of my readers would look at Scientology with kind of a sneer on their face. You know, it's like, I would never believe that crap. You know, you'd never get me in it. And what was interesting to me about Scientology, it was deeply appealing to a lot of people. And for the Hollywood types... I didn't see that it was giving them any advantage.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
That never happened?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
These two hijackers that I told you about earlier, who they arrived in, they flew in from Malaysia. there'd been a big meeting of CAIDA operatives. And from that meeting, they came to America. And also from that meeting, there were some guys who would then go blow up the USS Cole. So it was a high level meeting a terrorist in Kuala Lumpur.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And two of these guys, Midhar and al-Hazmi, flew into LAX on January the 5th, I think. And then on January 15th, the CIA found out about them. So early on, and they were told by Saudi intelligence. I interviewed Prince Turki al-Faisal, who said that he told the chief of station in Riyadh about these two al-Qaeda guys.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So the CIA found out about it, not through their own detection, but then... Was the CIA working with Saudi intelligence? Well, that's what I believe. I think that, I mean, they were closely tied, but... And Turkey, you know, went to school for a while with Bill Clinton. I've forgotten exactly what the... Anyway, he was... He was very close. Saudi intelligence and U.S.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
intelligence worked together closely, but not as closely as they should have. And when the CIA found out about this, by that time, these two hijackers, shortly after they arrived, they were greeted in a restaurant by... a fellow Saudi who had just come from the Saudi embassy or consulate in LA and lo and behold surprise you're from my country and he sits down and
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
tells him, well, you must move to San Diego. I will help set you up. And he does do that. And they moved down to San Diego. And it's at that point that the CIA is beginning to take an interest in them. We don't know, you know, they won't, To date, they haven't really divulged what they did. And I don't want this to die. I want to see this information come out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There's still stuff that's redacted about it. And the 22 pages or whatever it was that the victim's family is finally forced out of the CIA.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
it didn't cover all the material but it did expose some very interesting stuff like the the tests you know they would the saudis would be on airplanes and they would you know in one case for instance walk up and open the cockpit door oh i'm sorry you know i thought it was a bathroom and uh you know it got so suspicious that the plane was grounded and they were interrogated and they
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They said, oh, no, we're Saudis. You know, we're very prominent. Prince Bandar, who was the head of the ambassador to the U.S. is a friend of ours. As a matter of fact, Bandar's wife was sending money to the people that were to the hijackers. So really, let me try to get this straight. She was sending money.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I'm afraid to get too deep into the well there because I'm not exactly, money from her was given to the operative who was working with the hijackers or to them, the hijackers themselves. But I forget exactly how that worked. But on these test runs, you know, they were clearly planning the operation as it was going to go down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It was like the opposite. It was like a public relations martyrdom. People thought, what's wrong with Tom Cruise that he's in Scientology or any of the other stars? And so what is it that would take someone as talented and interesting as Travolta or Cruise or any of the others? What would it take to have them enlist in this and adopt these beliefs that seem so weird.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, where would we sit on the airplane and sort of how do you, How hard is it to get into the cockpit? Well, not hard as it turned out. And all of that came out in those pages that had been suppressed for no reason except to protect the dignity of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. My thinking about this is that I don't think that the Saudi king wanted to attack America.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I think that when Prince Turkey divulged the presence of two Saudis to the CIA, he... he was doing us a great favor. I'm sure that he thought that America would take care of this problem. I also think that the CIA decided, let's let the Saudis handle this. They can follow them and then they have their means, they can turn them, and maybe that's out of our capacity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
people in Clearwater found out, they were pretty upset, you know, and he was buying up a lot of the real estate downtown, which is still a part of the church catalog. It's a fascinating story. I mean, I was... You know, Scientology had kind of put this electric fence of legal threats and reputational threats around their story. And so the other writers had taken wax at it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So for that reason, they were just going to lightly monitor the situation and expect that the Saudis would take care of the problem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I haven't changed my view. And the first time I really ran into the denier thing, my friend Linklater, Rick Linklater, was having a party to open up one of his movies, and I've forgotten which one it was. But he invited Alex Jones, who was a kind of non-entity in Austin at the time. He had been on – we used to have this community TV station, so anybody wanted to get on would do – it was crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Madeline Murray O'Hare, the atheist, had her show on it. And so Alex got a spot on it, and he was – he could talk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
really wildly and you know uh expressively yeah and so uh Rick used him in a couple of his pictures as a kind of raving maniac who was sitting in the back of a cab um sprouting all these conspiracy theories so the looming Tower had just come out and I was you know I was at the party and and Rick he was a mischievous fellow you know he comes over and says Larry, I wanted you to meet somebody.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And Alex, this is Larry Wright. And I thought you guys might talk about 9-11. So Jones starts off on what happened. I said, gosh, that's not true at all.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was, you know. way off base and uh and i told him what did happen and he he turned around and walked away um you know i but after that whenever i make a speech about you know the looming tower uh there would always be people in the audience that would you know what about this what about that and You know, what about the World Trade Center 7?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Or, you know, why didn't this structure fall? You know, it must have been dynamite in it. If you look at it, it's clearly an explosion. I mean, the thing is, it was a horrible tragedy, and it happened, and it was hard to believe that it happened. So, therefore, people wonder why. You know, there must be some explanation for this, because this is...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
something that surely one man in a cave couldn't have pulled this off. And the truth is one man in a cave did pull it off.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so when Paul dropped out, I was working on something else. I finally decided, well, I'm going to ask anyway. So I found the number for his business manager. And I said, hello, this is Lawrence Wright with The New Yorker. And I would like to talk to your client about his decision to leave the Church of Scientology. Are you kidding? Get the fuck off my phone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I'd like for that to be fully... The only thing that we... are missing here is the truth. And I believe it's pretty clear what happened, but I think the evidence that the CIA was in cahoots with the Saudi intelligence is not something that's been admitted But why not just go ahead and say it because that's what I think really did happen. But instead, they're stuck with no answer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
They can't tell you why they waited a year and a half to tell the fbi which had the authority of over terrorism in america that's what the whole plot of the siege was my movie yeah uh was a rift between the cia and the fbi right over who is going to control terrorism and then it became a you know it came true in real life
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
when i when i talk to younger people about that question i i recount um when i was in high school i took a date to the airport in dallas and um it was a cheap date you know and uh and you know we were young enough that you know this still was interesting to go to an airport and um So we walked out on the tarmac and climbed into this 707 or something. We sat in the first class seats.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And imagine the plane had just arrived from Paris. And the stewardess, as we called them then, came and offered us a treat. And so we sat there having a little party in the plane. And then we walked into the FAA tower. Yeah, come on in, kids, and watch them land the planes. That was America. That was the freedom we had before 9-11. And I'm fearful that that America is gone.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And it's gone from our memory. And younger people don't realize what we've lost. But if we've lost it and without the idea that we want to steer back to it, then we'll never get back to it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, actually a long time because I, I, it originated as a screenplay. that never got made. I think all my novels started out as screenplays, but the, you know, the, Then I did a one-man show, which I called The Human Scale. I did it in New York and in Tel Aviv.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And what drew me to the story was I had gone to Gaza after, this was 2009, a young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped by Hamas. And the Israelis never found him. He was finally traded for a thousand Palestinian prisoners. And I was fascinated by that comparison. How does one life equal a thousand? That's what the human scale is all about. So I did that show.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And click, you know, that was the entire conversation. But the next day I got Paul's email address and I wrote him a letter and said, well, I spoke to your business manager and he said, this wasn't the best time. But if there's ever a time where you'd like to discuss your, as I said, intellectual and spiritual development, I'd be honored to do that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It was interesting doing it in New York. There was a lot of anger. It's a sensitive subject when you talk about the Middle East. And we had a sandwich board outside the theater and somebody kicked it all the way down the street. In Tel Aviv, it wasn't anger, but there was a lot of grief. And so it brought up feelings. And I knew I was stirring something very deep. And...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Some years passed, but the story lingered. And I thought, is there some way I can write about this? Because I've spent so much of my career in the region. I lived for two years in Cairo when I was a young man teaching at the American University and been back and forth to Israel and Syria and just everywhere in the Middle East and to Israel many times.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
always looking at people you know trying to understand why this conflict is so durable i mean i am the same age as israel which right that's crazy yeah it's a young country right but So this conflict has been going on my entire life. And this is a life that has been lived through... I've seen apartheid disappear. I've seen the Soviet Union dissolve. I've seen a black man elected president.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
We went through Vietnam, Iraq 1, Iraq 2, Afghanistan. All that's part of the history now. But this just keeps going on and on and on. So why is that? And I thought... Well, maybe I can do it as a novel instead of, you know, try to get inside the brains of these people, my characters, and see the world from their perspective.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And my feeling, I will always believe that peace is possible, but it's not possible if you're unwilling to see the world through the eyes of your adversary. Right. And that's what's happened in this case is that there's a loss of human feeling for your adversary. And so I decided to create characters that would be interesting and appealing, but would be totally opposite sides.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And so the main characters, Yossi Bengal is the deputy chief of police in Hebron. Hebron itself is a character because it's, It's the most violent, hateful environment I'd ever been in. And when I was there in February of 23, I was a source of peacenik, about the only peacenik in Hebron.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Issa Amro was taking me through the old town, the old city of Hebron, which is mostly closed down by the Israeli police. And he was assaulted right in front of me. I mean, this big young soldier, they're all young, they're just out of high school, these soldiers, and policing another population. But apropos, let me say this, there was no provocation. There was no provocation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Issa was taking us on this tour. It was me and Barbara Dubeluker. I think her name is a Belgian photographer. We were going through and seeing this shopping street. It was called... I remember when I went to Hebron the first time in 1997, this shopping street was very alive, but there was a settlement just above it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And 20 minutes later, I get a call, a text, you know, very flattered. Let's have lunch on Tuesday. And he was in New York, so I flew up and we had lunch. And then he wanted to smoke a cigarette. And so we went out on the field. And I said, well, you know, this is going to be apropos of your decision to leave the church. And his eyes got wide, but he continued to talk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And these little settler kids were throwing rocks down at the girls who were just coming out of school in their little school uniforms.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and then one threw a rock at me and i was really pissed off i really wanted to throw that rock back i had a pretty good arm back there but i looked up and i saw this israeli soldier with his m16 who was protecting the kids who were throwing the rocks so cut to you know x number of years later i'm walking down that same street it's now totally deserted And all the shops are closed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It has this mausoleum feeling. And then suddenly this soldier appeared. He had confronted me and Barbara earlier, but then he reappeared when Issa, who was not allowed to walk on that street because he is a Muslim, he rejoined us. And the soldier came. he was so angry at Issa for no reason.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And Issa reminded me, I started my career at the Race Relations Reporter and covering the civil rights movement. And he reminded me of the freedom bus riders and the sit-in people who knew they were gonna get hurt. And I just always admired that kind of courage. I just didn't have it myself, but Issa was one of those people. And so he says, call your commander. You're not doing the right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You know, he knew all the rules, you know, and it just pissed off the soldier even more, but he did call his commander. And he said that we have some liberals here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Some liberals. And I said, wait, I'm from Texas. I was trying to cool things off. um but at some point he grabs his son takes him over to a bench and forces him down and stands in front of him with his crotch right in front of his face and his m4 dangling you know bumping into isa's legs and um
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Finally, the soldiers just exploded, and he grabbed Isa by the neck, and he's modest size, but he lifted him up, and he hurled him to the ground, his head missing a curve by like a quarter of an inch, and then wound up and kicked him so hard that he nearly fell over. Other soldiers were around, and I was trying to calm the waters and say, you know, this is going south really quickly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And they were afraid of him, of this violent soldier. And what struck me, and so many things did, but one was, we were witnesses. We're standing right there. We're Westerners. And Barbara's saying, you know, he felt so enraged and so empowered. And he was circling around. There was one other guy who was trying to keep him from finishing up the job.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And there had been a Palestinian assassinated by an Israeli soldier not far away who died. The guy was lying on the ground unconscious when the soldier shot him in the head. Oh, my God. So, you know, I thought that was going to be the conclusion of this. But fortunately, we got Asa away. But it – It caused me to go back and rewrite my novel.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And it was like nine months later, so deep into this story, he finally admitted it had never occurred to him. It'd be about Scientology. He was just so flattered the New Yorker was going to do a profile of him. So I felt... I totally understood and felt a little sad that that happened. But on the other hand, he was a very courageous source.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And I realized that it was taking me into deeper water than I thought it was. And then along comes... And the draft that I had turned in ended in a war, but it was a war like the one that I'd seen before when I was in Gaza in 2009. And it was devastating for Gaza, but it wasn't obliterated. And so I had to go back and rewrite it again. This time, I was faced with this situation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
You know, this is such a deep wound. And how, can I ignore it? Can I set it earlier in time? Should I set it in the future? And I thought, there's really no other alternative but to go right through it and have October 7th be the destination of this novel. And so Yossi Ben-Gal is investigating the murder of his chief of police. It's a heinous crime, and we think it's Hamas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But into town comes a Palestinian named Tony Malek, who's American, and he comes in at the wrong time. And he's arrested, and they think he's probably the guy who killed the chief. But then they discover he's actually an FBI agent. And he had an appointment with the chief of police earlier that morning. So these two guys, Yossi and Malik, are very similar in many ways. And they have the same job.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But they're torn apart by... History, ethnicity, religion, these are the forces that are pulling them apart. In short, they hate each other. But they have to, to solve the crime, they have to work together. And this is, in some ways, a buddy movie, but it's set...
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
you see the world through their eyes and the eyes of other characters like the the the figure that is loosely based on issa you know is a pet bee snake who's trying to bring peace to the region and then there's a yosi's daughter sarah who loves her father but is so ambivalent about where Israel is going.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
She's in the marches that have been going on in Tel Aviv and elsewhere for the last couple of years, so she's a part of that contingent. So each of these characters represents a perspective, but I hope that they are fully imagined human beings.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
See, this evolved over a long period of time. Yeah, right. So I've been to Israel five times, I think. Oh, wow. And then West Bank three or four times.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he went through a lot of shit, as did many of the sources that I spoke to. And I spoke to hundreds. And it's a difficult decision. When, you know, you're facing an organization that's quite famous for its retribution. Yeah. To decide that it's so important to talk to a reporter that you'll feel, you know, you'll face that. And, of course, the more that you talk to, the more we'll talk to you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Oh, yeah, and they were very helpful, especially one who was in Shin Bet. And it helped me because one of my characters is in Shinbit, and that's the domestic intelligence. And yeah, I... There are American operatives with Arab background who have been very helpful to me, corresponding to my Palestinian-American FBI agent. I've been very fortunate with my sources.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It wouldn't be the book that it is if I hadn't had the friendly advice of people on the inside.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
I have no question about it. And, you know, that what the Israelis do is monitor and control. And they have a vast population to monitor and control. And they feel, I mean, both sides feel like this is an existential question. Although it's not. You know, Arabs and Jews live together very peacefully in Brooklyn.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
There's just no reason for this except that this compounding series of traumas that build on each other. And there's a mythology that each nurses is that we're going to win, we're going to push them into the sea, or we're going to drive them over to, you know, into Saudi Arabia and Jordan and somewhere, just clear the West Bank, and then we'll have it all to ourselves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
That's never going to happen. It goes back to my question about why it's so durable. First of all, the enemies of peace. Whenever something comes up and looks like peace, like the Oslo Accords or something like that, then you have suicide bombers suddenly appear, and then you have Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated, and so suddenly everything goes to shit. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Every time, both sides, they fall for it. They get enraged, and they go back to war. But it's all one war. It's all the same war that's been going on since I was born. There are periods of calm where they just rearm. But essentially, it's the same old war. And so with all the amazing intelligence that Mossad has and its capability in Shin Bet,
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and their ability to try to control this very restive group of people, they know that there is not a military solution. In fact, one after another, the heads of Mossad have been public. There's even a movie, a very insightful movie, where they're saying, we're doing the wrong thing. We need to make peace with these people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So it's generally known that there's not a military, there's not going to be like World War II and there's, you know, the war is over and somebody won.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
It's going to be something entirely different. It's just, it's, but it continues to be exactly the same thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
The IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, says that Hamas is back to full strength, 40,000 warriors. after all the slaughter, you know, what they've done is create a mighty recruitment theme. And that's always been the case. It's not different anymore. You know, it's not different now. It's just gonna, imagine if you are a young Palestinian man and you watched your family be killed and dispossessed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
See, that's why I think, you know, when you put that question on either side, What would you do if you were an Israeli or what would you do if you were a Palestinian? It's a question that nobody wants to answer because they know the answer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Right. And there's strength in numbers. Yeah. I think that played a role in the access that I finally got.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
But it's also part of being human to try to find a way to restore justice and peace. And that's what's absent right now. It's all retaliation. And it will be as long as we can see until people actually arise and demand peace. Peace has a price. And one is to sacrifice that longing to kill and revenge.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And, you know, I wrote a play and then a movie and then a book, I mean, about Camp David, which was the Carter-Bagan-Sadat Summit in 1978. Carter came into office, and the first day in office, he told his vice president, my top goal is to bring peace to the Middle East. Walter Mondale is the vice president. He told me he panicked. Is that what he's about?
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Because it was like the ultimate, you can't do that. But Carter brought in the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who had been an assassin. and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, who was a terrorist. And Carter was a one-term Georgia governor. And they sit behind trees in Camp David for 13 days. Imagine three world leaders totally cut off.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
and they come up with a peace agreement that has endured since they signed the paper in 1979 not a single violation so it's possible but if you look at you then what happened to the peacemakers carter lost the election yeah he was not re-elected in fact he lost the jewish vote first time for a democratic nominee in modern history um Menachem Begin thought, oh, I can do anything now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And he invaded Lebanon for what he thought was going to be two weeks. And they were in Lebanon for 18 years. And he was hated. He was in isolation in his house. There were kids... For years, you know, they were just like the chants about, hey, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill a day? It was that kind of atmosphere. So he died in seclusion and in disgrace. And then Sadat was assassinated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
So that's what happened to the people who made peace. And I think that's been a lesson to the aspiring peacemakers. There's a lot of personal risk here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Yeah. You know, it gave them enormous amount of leeway.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Well, in the early days of the Zionist movement, you know, first of all, they wondered, you know, where should we go? And, you know, there were Kenya was one of the – or Uganda, you know, at the time. And South America. But always there was the idea of the Holy Land.
Danny Jones Podcast
#302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
And that's in the first Zionist conference in Bern, Switzerland in the 1890s, you know, it was decided that's where we're going to go. There were mixed thoughts. Weissman was the optimist. Ben-Gurion privately felt that the Arabs would never accept them. And it's not as if they did a lot to try to help make them acceptable.