Are they based in the church office building?How many people are employed with church security?Does the church provide any public information about their function?What are their powers?Are they just like private investigators?Are they legally allowed to listen to intercepted private telephone conversations and do they have access to a database of vehicle licence plate details
that only police departments have access to?Do they doing anything illegal we do not know about?Are they any apostates who have worked with them that can spill the beans and tell us the secrets?

Save your breath while you still have some. All apostates who know anything about "Church Security" sleep with the fishes. Capisce?

I have an experience with church security. Sorry about the length of this, but it requires some explanation:

Between 2005-2008 we lived in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, during a period of intense political turmoil and military violence, as the Congolese vice-president, who had his own large militia, tried to fight the army over the presidency. In 2006/2007, there were three rounds of shooting in the streets, dead bodies, etc., and the god damned mission president did not take it seriously. In one of the rounds of violence, rebel militia began rounding up foreigners, coming floor by floor through the Vodacom Building, where the LDS church had mission offices on the ground floor, and mission president and wife on the 4th floor. I worked at the US Embassy, and he thought maybe I could do something, so he called me. Chuckling nervously, he asked if I could somehow help them. In a way I did do something: I called the State Dept. Regional Security Officer and told him what was happening. He cursed at me and asked, "Why the fuck didn't they evacuate?" Then he called MONUC (United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and told them some American citizens were in distress and needed evacuation from the Vodacom Building. MONUC dispatched a white UN armored personnel carrier, got the MP and other foreigners from the rebel militia, and drove them off to safety.

After this, the LDS church sent a rep from church security to Kinshasa, and he interviewed the RSO, an LDS co-worker, a couple of other locals, and me regarding the question of safety. My LDS co-worker and I told him that they simply needed to get the missionaries out of the country and run the mission from another location. (The only white missionaries were 6-8 senior missionaries; all the young missionaries were Africans from both Congos and other Francophone countries. They're expendable, after all.)

I traded E-mails with church security after their rep returned to SLC. We decided to go on vacation back to SLC, and I E-mailed the church rep and said I wanted to speak to him about security. He made an appt for me to go to his offices. Not thinking about it, I showed up in a beard and bright Congolese shirt. They had me park under Temple Square, where I was met by about 4 church security guys, who escorted me up to their office. People were really staring, and I think they must have thought that I was somebody that their men had caught. The guys showed me around in the office. They had a sort of situation room set up, with large-screen TVs tuned to CNN and Fox, and whatnot, and at the time they were trying to follow a coup in Thailand and were fretting about the missionaries there.

They met with me and I gave them some pictures of the destruction and dead bodies and stuff, and told them how the missionaries had shown me videos of them standing on the balcony laughing and carrying on during the violence (the first bad round). Five of them are pointing and howling at a man who is taking cover behind a large tree, and you can hear the voice of lone male hold-out saying, "Honey, get off the balcony and inside, because this is dangerous." But they go on filming until there is an explosion in the street that seems to kill the guy (he was only wounded, as it turned out). They ran inside and then an RPG round hit near the mission president's window on the outside. Although it blew out a relatively small corner of the window, it blew in a ton of shrapnel that shredded the bed, the wardrobe, an upholstered chair, and the door jamb, and would certainly have killed anyone in the room. That's when they finally took shelter in the hallway on the floor. The first time they called me, they called me from there, laughing and joking, but concerned. I told them that there was nothing I could do. The overnighted in the hallway, sleeping on the tile floor. It was the next day when the militia broke in and started rounding up foreigners.

I told the church security people that they had to, at the very least, train their people to take this shit seriously. It wasn't a game. The missionaries needed some sort of security schooling before setting foot in the country. I said that they also needed to set them up with a local private security firm (they are mostly ex-South African Army, and much like Blackwater, and are a sort of private army for hire). I agreed that they should get the people out of the country, and run the mission from somewhere else.

The security guys broke for lunch, and they all (about 6 of them) took me to a local Chinese restaurant for lunch. That's when I saw that they were all armed; up to that point I had heard that they were never armed, but the shoulder holsters said differently.

During the next round of violence after we had returned from vacation, the Vodacom Building was shot up real badly--windows blown out, outside walls pock-marked with 30 and 50-calibre rounds, and the grounds littered with shrapnel, unexploded RPG rounds, and the little motors that drop off the RPG rounds when they explode. An errant tank shell had entered the side of the building two floors or so up from the MP's home, and blew up on the inside, leaving a small hole on the outside, but destroying part of the apartment on the inside. DW and I were pinned down for 3 days in the crappy embassy annex with other American and Congolese employees, sleeping on stinky concrete floors and eating from a stash of MREs. This time the missionaries had evacuated to a building owned by the US Govt, where the church also rented an apartment for one of the couples. After the violence, I wanted to get a picture of the damage on the grounds of the Vodacom Building to send to church security, but I was not allowed inside the gate on order of the mission president, who was pissed about the talk I had with the security people, and the trouble he had gotten in.

In the end, not much changed, except that the church began a 2-week pre-Congo security seminar, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, after which the missionaries would fly up to Kinshasa. The MP eventually rotated out, and the new MP (a BYU business professor) came in, and when he met me the first time, he just said, "Oh, you're the guy." Since then, they have built more churches there, and are building or have built a temple only about 200 meters from were we lived. They even opened a new mission in Lubumbashi.

The Mormon church needs the DRC and countries like it for the false sense of progress, because missionaries often baptise a dozen people per month. But the members, the missionaries, and even the local LDS leaders themselves never quite give up their folk beliefs and traditions. They still believe in witchcraft and sorcery, and in the purchasing of fetishes from local sorcerers. Even a ward officer might pay a local medicine man to shrink the penis of his enemy--a particularly favorite curse.

Thank you for that, cludgie. If you feel comfortable answering, what general sort of work do you do?

It is astounding how poorly people from the rich world, especially the United States, underestimate the dangers of unstable politics in the developing world. Everything you say makes sense.

I am retired now, since this time 2017. I retired from the AF in 1995 after 21 years in intelligence. Then I got hired by the gummint--won't say by whom--but worked on and off for them for the next 22 years, but in between had stints for State Department. I've had the privilege of lots of travel, which I wanted to do from the time I was very young. I got to live in Japan, Germany, Italy, Pakistan, and Democratic Republic of Congo. I've gotten to work for short periods in some other places like Phnom Penh, Jakarta, Dubai, etc. I loved travel then, but don't even like to board a plane now. Weird. It was a good run, though.

Sounds fascinating. I have a pretty good idea of who hired you: there aren't that many shops in town, and the travel pattern narrows the range somewhat. The country was fortunate to have you.

Yup. The church has to show the church growing somewhere to generate excitement at home where most the tithing donations come from.

The church is going to paint itself in a corner with all this temple building. It’s gotten pretty ridiculous. Eventually some of these temples will get shot up, hit with RPG’s and taken over. In time some of these temples will become white elephants with little interest in them.

The church leadership live in a bubble believing their own bullshit. They don’t live in the real world.

It makes perfect sense that the people in and the people running Jesus Christ's security force here on earth want to do it up to His standard. Cludgie's description of their hdqtrs situation room is funny: some landline phones, probably a sat-phone or two and everyone with a personal phone and a church phone, plus walkie-talkie sets, doing their best to emulate the CIA and the NSA when they were trying to track Jason Bourne. But all they had was FOX and CNN! I thought that was so cute!

But know that they are trying and know that in Utah and Idaho, they are totally connected with the law enforcement mormon battalion, cops at all levels, city, county & state, and probably some faithful Feebs and ATF who can sneak improper data searches into their regular files, because all such searches are supposed to be related to active cases. Law enforcement overseers at all levels have taken to wagging their fingers at officers/employees who run the license plate of that cute girl they see on their commute, or who works in the next building. The 'cowboys' are still out there, but they have to be more circumspect in this new politically correct era.

The one thing church security has going for it, in the Morridor, is that enough of the public is supportive of the church so that if and when they get caught doing something illegal, their ability to get away with it was comparable to Jesus being allowed to ignore 'stay off the grass' signs.

Church Security has no government police powers. But their 'operators' have all mostly been members of organizations with such powers and they know how to play the game. And in the Morridor, they can pretty much count on the support of their police buddies, when it comes to interpreting harassment and detention laws in their favor.

Take the case of the last afossil to be excommunicated, Richard L. Lyman. In 1943, while an afossil, and his 'main' wife called to be the General President of the Relief Society, the first presidency was told that Lyman had a 'mistress' and were given her name and address. J. Reuben Clark called the SLC chief of police and as a result of that call, a couple of patrol cars went out to the lady's address, broke into the house and found them in bed. Probably a bit melodramatic, but that's the essence of it. That was church security back then: call the chief of police. (Lyman and the other woman, wife #2, had secretly exchanged wedding vows around 1925 and one presumes that wife #1 knew about it.)

The church is an organization of crusty old men and they use, to the best of their ability, the talents of younger men who are sucking up to them, to perpetuate their existence, for themselves and for their posterity They will attempt to do and will try to get away with whatever they can, knowing that the people who will judge them are basically there to rubber-stamp anything the church 'needs' to do.

It's grown men playing kick-the-can in the early evening in the summer. It's a game.

Just you dock Terr feel

Interesting thread.

Thanks for your post, Cludgie--I had no idea that you had these experiences! It was not too long! It's mind-boggling how naive and bungling those Mormon yokels can be! I'm grateful that I never allowed them to risk my children's lives.

From the beginning of the Africa mission campaign, I have been suspicious. Africa is very far away, and conveniently disconnected from the internet and other communication. It is isolated enough, that the Mormon cult can invent any stories they want, and no one is around to disprove their lies. Really--how do we know they convert that many Africans in a day? People aren't stupid, and maybe the Africans convert to get food for their family. I would do that, in their situation. I know missionaries who have been over there, and they were always having mass weddings. They asked for wedding dresses, along with hygiene kits. The mass weddings also involved a wedding feast. I don't know much about it--but does anyone, really? The locals don't know English, and the missionaries can't learn all the different dialects, and I wonder if they know anything about Mormonism at all, or what baptism even means. Oh well, Mormons use EVERYBODY and not just the Africans. The Mormons have taken money from innocent little children for years, so why not starving adults?

Mormon "security" is made up of thugs who do whatever it takes to keep The Truth from getting out.

Oh, Rubicon is correct, that these thugs get away with whatever they want to do. I remember a brawl outside the SLC temple, and some of it was televised, and we could see that the Mormons (Big guys in suits, that stood out) were beating on the peaceful protesters--but the Mormon KSL and Deseret News reported that the Mormons did not harm anyone, but merely "broke up" the fighting. The cult paid some damages outside of court. Covering up lawsuits is also something Mormons are good at, in the state that they run.

My own example of a Mormon cover-up, happened when, my cousin's daughter was violently raped on her mission in San Diego, at Imperial Beach. The lady missionaries lived in a Mormon-owned ghetto apartment, in a horrible neighborhood, and someone raped her in the hallway. The cult told my cousin that his daughter had been "mugged." My cousin found out that some other lady missionaries had been "mugged" in the same building, before my cousin's daughter arrived, but he couldn't find out how many girls, or any of their names. The missionaries and their parents were not WARNED about this! The mission was shut down, a few months later, but too late for these girls!

"Mormon Security" does not mean preventing crime, it is about protecting the church from liability. But, when has the cult ever put its individual members in higher priority than--money and good publicity--for example?