The Impact on Some Scientologists Who Saw the RPF in Operation 
RPF=rehabilitation project force, (a form of brainwashing and,or torture)
Three very revealing accounts exist by people who were Scientologists and had brief but disturbing encounters with RPF inmates. Their accounts provide some indications of the cumulative impact the brainwashing and confinement efforts had on the people who experienced them. One account was from former member Joe Cisar, who:
stumbled into the RPF's RPF one time in the tunnels below the Cedars complex in L.A. There w[ere] about a dozen people who apparently had been sleeping in these tiny rooms. (There were a couple of blankets on the floor.) Both men and women [were down there]. A man was cutting a woman's pant leg with a knife while she was wearing the pants, and he had sliced her foot. Blood was running down her ankle onto her foot and was puddling on the floor. She looked up at me and gave me… what I would consider to be an insane smile and said, 'I caused my foot to be in the way of his knife.' Two or three of the people who were crouching and laying about on the floor looked up at me as if it were some kind of wonderful joke. I backed out the way I came in. One of Scientology's big promotion schemes is to tell people that they need to be 'at cause.' These people weren't at cause over anything[. T]hey had degenerated back to the Middle Ages.
That's what I knew about RPF when the Scientology ethics officer told me to report down there for indefinite duty. I told her [that] they could get met down there, but I'd put several of them in the hospital first, and reminded her that I was a Viet Nam veteran. I was one of the few Sea Org members who had managed to hang onto [his or her] car, and I left that night (cisar, 1997: 3).
One wonders what would have happened to Cisar had he not seen the conditions of these inmates prior to his own RPF assignment.
A second glimpse into L.A.'s RPF comes in the story of former member Moira Hutchinson, who did kitchen duty in order to finance her studies at the Cedars complex. Consequently, she saw the RPF inmates come in for meals, about which she wrote:
They would come in to eat after everyone else had left. I found this deeply disturbing. Everyone was dressed in dark blue overalls[. T]hey did not walk['] they shuffled with their heads always bowed low, and no one would utter a word.
I became pretty close with an officer in the ASHO [American Saint Hill Organization] whose husband was on the RPF. I remember her telling me, very excitedly, that she was to be allowed to share her half-hour meal breaks with her husband. When she told me this, she had not seen him for a year (Hutchinson, 1997: 6).
Although brief, this account is in keeping with what others have said about the RPF program. She even claims that, under false circumstances, she was sent to the East Grinstead facility in England and "was kept there for a whole week so that I could complete a program very similar to the RPF where I had to write down all of my transgressions committed against the church and carry out menial physical duties" (Hutchinson, 1997: 2, see 5).
The third dramatic glimpse into RPF life came from Ann Bailey, who was involved in moving Scientology into its newly acquired former hospital (called the Cedars Sinai complex) in the summer of 1978. After the move, which taxed her physical endurance, she found herself assigned to guard the secret, upper level doctrinal (Operating Thetan or OT) documents that were in a room without a door. They were in the former hospital's old morgue, and she sat there for hours amidst the lingering "smell of death and chemicals and dissection" (Bailey, n.d.: 60). Then:
[s]uddenly during the third hours I was aware of shadows in the corridor beyond me. [T]hey were people. Slowly I realized that an entire group of people lived and worked down there. I was so tired [that] it took me time to realize who they were. Then it hit me. [The were t]he Cedars RPF. They lived and worked down in this stinkhole.This was their Org. Then I really found out what had happened to them. Filthy, tired, skeletons appeared before me and started begging to see the OT folders. I thought I looked bad, but I looked beautiful compared to them. They crowded around me pushing and shoving, then the mood turned ugly. They started hitting each other to get into the room behind me. I realized what had happened. They had been totally broken. They were animals, not humans. I saw four of my friends, one a Class Nine OT, fighting to get by me. They were punching each other in the face, pulling hair, kicking. And way down in this cellar no one could hear them, no one cared.
Someone suddenly hit me hard. I realized [that] they were turning their anger on me[. T]hey would beat me up to get the folders. I guess in periods of deep stress we all go a little insane — [s]urvival of the fittest. From somewhere in my tired brain, strength came. I stood up with all my TR's [i.e., Scientology communication drills] as in as they had ever been, [and] all my training on control of groups came back. 'Friends,' I said, 'Believe me, I am your friend. By some strange fate I am not with you on the RPF. But believe me if you don't get out of here right now, I know [that] you will be punished. Go now before it's too late.' And they ran away into the dark. When I sat down I was trembling all over. Because the real intent of my message had been for them to get out of the hospital. Leave Cedars. But I don't think any of them got the message (Bailey, n.d.: 61-62).
She was out of Sea Org in a week.
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