[Mike Rinder and Christie Collbran]

Yesterday, former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder posted a chilling account by his wife Christie Collbran about a Scientology spy who worked to become a part of their lives.

Christie wrote that beginning in January 2012, a woman named Heather living on their street in Tarpon Springs, Florida began approaching her about spending time together. When Mike and Christie moved the next month to another nearby town, Heather, an unemployed single mom, somehow had the money to move into an expensive home not far from their new place.

Heather was so persistent about wanting to become a part of their lives, Mike and Christie eventually figured out that she was working to gather intelligence on them for the Church of Scientology. The woman, who identified herself as Heather McAdoo, ended up apologizing to Mike and Christie, and admitted that she had been working for her then boyfriend, Scientology spy Dwayne Powell.

It’s a great tale, and Christie tells it in all its creepy detail. And we’re very well acquainted with Dwayne Powell here in the Bunker. It was Dwayne and his son Daniel Powell who were arrested and questioned by the West Allis, Wisconsin police and admitted to following Scientology leader David Miscavige’s father, Ron Miscavige, in a spying operation. (You can hear tapes of those interviews here.)

And now, we wanted to let you in on another interesting development that’s been going on for a little while. Several weeks ago, we were approached by another woman who was recruited by Dwayne Powell to work as a Scientology spy, and who kept an eye on Mike Rinder and Christie Collbran, off and on, for three full years.


This woman — for now we’re going to refer to her as Jane — has been working with us to spill a lot of secrets about the work of Dwayne Powell and the Church of Scientology, and we expect that she may be going on the record soon.

But because of Christie Collbran’s remarkable account that was put online yesterday, we thought we would give you a small preview of what Jane has been telling us, since it is so closely related to Christie’s story.

Jane preceded Heather as Dwayne Powell’s operative to keep tabs on Mike and Christie. Like Heather, she was Dwayne’s girlfriend, and she even had a child with him. But unlike Heather, she wasn’t tasked with becoming friends with Mike and Christie. Instead, Jane’s job was to gather their trash and identify people who visited their home.

“We had to pay the trash people to keep Mike’s trash off to the side. And I had to go through it. My job was to save any receipts, any alcohol bottles, any paperwork. Anything that would tell us something about them. What they were doing, and what they were buying,” Jane says.

She also gathered the trash for another former Scientologist who lived in the area, Haydn James, but she says what the church wanted most of all was information on Rinder.

“Mike was the number one that they always wanted. And the trash people got fired because they weren’t supposed to do that,” she says.

Jane ended her surveillance of Mike and Christie in August 2011, a few months before Heather took over and then reached out to Christie in January 2012. And later in 2012, Rinder actually filmed his trash being taken away by Scientology operatives — but by then Jane had moved away.

She tells us she met Dwayne Powell at a Florida community college that was a recruiting site for Scientology operatives — even the faculty was involved, she says — and we’ll be going into more detail about that later.

She came out of school in 2008 and began her work for the church, and besides keeping tabs on Rinder, she was also assigned to infiltrate the Anonymous movement, which was holding large rallies and protests that year.

“I went on raids with the Anons,” she says. “I would go to the protests. At one point I was filming them with one of their own cameras.”

When Anonymous held its pirate-themed “Sea Arrrrgh” rally in Clearwater in June 2008, Jane was in the crowd, chanting along with the other protesters.

“I even rode around with one of the top Anons in Clearwater in their car, holding a sign out the window.”

Like Heather McAdoo, Jane became disillusioned about her work with Dwayne Powell on behalf of the church. We are working with her to bring you some really interesting details about the Clearwater operations being run against Anonymous and former church members.

For example, during that period, 2008-2011, Jane says that the Scientology private eye operation just in Clearwater involved five rented houses, a dozen rented cars, and five full-time agents working at any one time.

It must have cost a fortune.

“The most amazing thing about this is that all of this bullshit is paid for with tax-exempt money,” Mike Rinder said when we told him about what Jane had told us. “Not only the immorality of it, but tax payers are supporting this. They’re subsidizing it.”



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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 9, 2018 at 07:00

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Our book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2017 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Undergound Bunker (2012-2017), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward

UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ