'Tom Cruise's Church of Hate Tried to Destroy Me'

The voice at the end of the line was trembling.

"Is that Mr. Bracchi?"

"Yes, it is," I replied.

The caller could not have been more relieved. I was supposed to be dead. Someone had started a rumor that I had been killed in a fire. The same people who had tried to obtain my exdirectory phone number, handed out pamphlets attacking me and dispatched an American private detective -- an ex-Los Angeles police officer -- to Britain to frighten and smear the source who had helped me expose their activities.

Almost daily, threatening letters arrived by fax and post at the newspaper where I used to work. Messages were left on the answer machine at the home of the managing director. Strangers turned up in his village asking questions about him. And the culprits behind this campaign of intimidation? Step forward the Church of Scientology.

This week the Mail exposed disturbing apparent links between the "church" and the City of London Police. Our report was followed by a Panorama program in which reporter John Sweeney was seen losing his temper with a scientologist, claiming afterwards that he had been driven over the edge by a concerted campaign of harassment by the group. I, more than anyone, could understand why.

Sweeney spent six months investigating this so-called religion. I had spent more than a year doing so when stories of my "unfortunate demise" began circulating. By the time you read this article, the Church of Scientology will no doubt be unleashing its attack dogs -- sorry, officials from the Office of Special Affairs -- on me again.

The founder of the "religion," science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard issued directives on how "to handle the press," including tips on how to get a reporter "fired and discredited." Well, they have tried and failed with me once already. My first report, "The Secrets of Saint Hill," was published more than ten years ago. Saint Hill is the castle in East Grinstead, West Sussex, where Scientology's U.K. headquarters is based. The backlash was swift. The first principle of Scientology, you see, is "Shoot the messenger."

Critics who had contributed to the articles were also targeted. Some of them found Eugene Ingram, who had been branded an "insidious individual" in a court case in the United States, on their doorstep. He "visited" the 77-year-old mother of one of my sources as well as his parents' former home in Staffordshire and his wife's family. Ingram knew, of course, that the man's relatives would not "dish the dirt" on my source. That was not the point. He just wanted to let me, and everyone else who had helped me, know that he was in town. In the parlance of Scientology, this is called a "noisy investigation." It has only one purpose: to intimidate.

The real victims of Scientology, of course, are not journalists but the parents who have lost sons or daughters to these deluded fanatics. Their harrowing stories, of which there are more below, help explain why, in Britain, Scientology is recognized neither as a church nor a charity. It is, in fact, a cult. Scientologists do not like that word, so let me repeat it -- CULT.

Hubbard, the man who created Scientology in 1952, has an unusual CV for a religious and spiritual leader. As well as being a writer, he was a congenital liar: quite simply a "charlatan." That was the view of a High Court judge in 1984, who said Hubbard's theories were "corrupt, sinister and dangerous." If nothing else, the movement's survival is proof that with money -- Scientology is worth billions worldwide -- you can make some people, even intelligent people, believe almost anything. Stars such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta have given Scientology a profile and show business gloss it simply does not deserve. Indeed, those who are not familiar with its tactics and history regard Scientologists, who are convinced we are all descended from a race of aliens called thetans, as weird, not wicked.