In the spring of 2007, Mike Rinder was crawling on an industrial carpet until his knees bled, playing ultra-violent musical chairs to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and confessing to crimes that had never happened — run-of-the-mill behaviour for members of the Church of Scientology’s Sea Org in “The Hole”, a kind of dungeon at Gold Base, California — when he was called to London.

His mission was to “handle” a BBC Panorama team intent on discovering whether the “Church” was, as its Hollywood ambassadors Tom Cruise and John Travolta evangelise, a force for good, or, as some ex-members allege, a space alien cult that blackmails and brainwashes, led by its self-appointed leader, David Miscavige. Ex-members say that the Church secretly believes that an evil space alien, Lord Xenu, murdered other space aliens in volcanoes with atom bombs and the remains of their souls trouble humanity; the Church denies this. Its critics further claimed that Miscavige liked hitting people, Rinder included. The Church denies this too, and pretty much everything you are about to read.

Rinder spent the first 52 years of his life believing in the first hypothesis and the rest of his life in the second.

That spring, pale-faced and gaunt from his months in “The Hole”, Rinder, as head of the Church’s own secret police, the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), recruited private detectives, commonly wearing Men in Black chic — black sunglasses, black or dark suits, black or dark ties — to track the BBC...

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