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ROB LOREI: Good afternoon, welcome to Radio Activity, I’m Robert Lorei. The Church of Scientology, which has its spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, is locked in a battle with critics and ex-members who say the church is a dangerous cult, bent on accumulating money and power and eventually taking over the planet. The church says it is a victim of a campaign of religious intolerance and that its members are harassed by the critics. Scientology was started by a science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, in the 1950s and is largely based on his approach to psychology, a system he called Dianetics. In recent years there have been many lawsuits against the church and countersuits against church critics. When Scientology member Lisa McPherson died mysteriously four years ago while in church custody in Clearwater, the critics blamed the church for her death. Criminal charges and a lawsuit are now pending against Scientology. Today we’ll meet a former member of Scientology who worked with L. Ron Hubbard. Gerry Armstrong was a member of the organization for 12 years before he quit in 1981. Today on Radio Activity, an insight into why Scientology critics are so fearful of the church. Well, Gerry, welcome to WMNF, thanks for coming by.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: You bet.
ROB LOREI: Uh, tell me, uh, how long were you in the Church of Scientology?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Uh, 12 and a half years.
ROB LOREI: How did you get started?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: In Vancouver. I was--Vancouver, Canada. Just a friend had been in Toronto, returned to the little town I was living in, Chilliwack, British Columbia, and told me about all the fabulous things of Scientology.
ROB LOREI: What kind of fabulous things did you hear?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: That they had the, essentially the solution to the human condition, were able to, through their technology, auditing technology, make people smarter, um, get rid of human aberration and increase people’s abilities to levels and states which had never been seen on planet Earth before.
ROB LOREI: Did it work for you? Did it--did it match those promises?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: No. It in fact doesn’t do anything. That’s the essence of Scientology is that it is illusory and the so-called gains which people get are gains which people could get anywhere.
ROB LOREI: What were you doing in 1975 when you first entered the Church of Scientology?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: 1969.
ROB LOREI: I’m sorry. What were you doing in 1969 when you first entered the Church of Scientology?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Well, after I got out of high school, which was in about 1964, I logged on the west coast of British Columbia for four years, and, uh, then almost immediately stopped logging and got a job in Vancouver and joined the organization there. It was a franchise, it’s called Scientology Little Mountain.
ROB LOREI: It’s a franchise?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Scientology has organizations, which they call churches, and franchises, which they now call missions. In those days they were simply called franchises, and they paid a percentage of their income to Scientology headquarters in order to operate as a Scientology franchise.
ROB LOREI: Where did they get their income from?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: From people like myself who came in to do courses, be audited. Auditing is their psychotherapy.
ROB LOREI: Um-hmm. Well, so, in order to, to learn about Scientology, um, you had to pay money.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Right.
ROB LOREI: Was there anything that was ever given for, for free? Did you ever learn any of the church doctrines for free?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: I don’t think that anything in, in there is for free. Books you must buy, auditing you have to buy. After a while, the beginning of 1971, I joined the Sea Organization.
ROB LOREI: What’s that?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: That’s the group of extremely dedicated Scientologists who all sign a billion-year contract.
ROB LOREI: A billion-year contract.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Right, yeah. And work for peanuts. I started out getting $10 a week and then by the time I left the organization I was getting perhaps $20, $25 a week.
ROB LOREI: Why were you willing to work for so little?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Because of those promises, the promises of Scientology, the promises that--the promise that it is the only workable technology, that it is the only hope for mankind, that through it these greater abilities can be gained.
ROB LOREI: Did, did your parents or your family say anything about your entry into the church at this time, back in 1969?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: They were opposed to it, um, my mother, certainly, um, but I was an adult at the time and so didn’t pay much attention.
ROB LOREI: Were you raised in a, in a religious tradition?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Yeah, I was raised, up until the age of revolt [Rob Lorei starts chuckling], I was raised as an Anglican, in the Christian tradition, so I had a Christian understanding which I brought to Scientology. Scientology was represented to me as completely non-religious, and it was a science, demonstrably true and did--did not incorporate faith or belief and required no faith or belief.
ROB LOREI: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because certainly now Scientology says it’s a religion. Has it changed its position? Has it changed from declaring itself a, a science to declaring itself a religion over the years?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: The--yeah, from the beginning when it was a psychotherapy and sold itself as a psychotherapy. Somewhere along the line, it actually in the early ‘50s, um, Hubbard decided to incorporate as a church, and he had it as, as a church from there on. However, to those people who are being recruited into the organization, the promises are made on, on a scientific basis, not on a religious basis.
ROB LOREI: You mentioned Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard was the founder of the church; you knew L. Ron Hubbard, correct?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Yeah, I was on the Apollo, which was the flagship of the Sea Organization, from 1971 through 1975, and most of that time Hubbard was on board. And then I was with him, uh, in Daytona Beach and then in Dunedin and then in Culver City and then in La Quinta, California.
ROB LOREI: Why was he on the boat?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: I would say that he was fleeing and spent really his whole life fleeing from one thing or another. But Scientology had run into tremendous difficulties in England, where he had, previous to taking to the sea, he had Scientology’s headquarters. But it was a place from which he operated all of Scientology from on board and he--the policy was one of remaining Fabian, so as a ship, you could move around, and if you got in any trouble, move to another country. You could, in a matter of minutes, be in international waters. So it was a way by which he could move personnel around and operate, um, outside of, of any national jurisdiction. We were on board the ship, not Scientology, but Operation and Transport Corporation, Ltd., a Panamanian company, which we pretended to be. The ports that we visited, uh, in Morocco and in Spain and in Portugal and then later on in the Caribbean, uh, we were not allowed to say that we were Scientology. So he had--he was both outside of any national jurisdiction, being a Panamanian registered vessel, plus we were operating in countries where we could, um, be something other than what we were. We had a cover, an intelligence cover, the whole time.
ROB LOREI: How many people were on the boat?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: About 400.
ROB LOREI: And what was your role?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: I--when I first came on board, I did menial things like the dishes, wash the dishes, and did stores-man job for a month or so, and then I became the driver of a small car that we had on board, and then my second, third--and third year, I was the legal officer on board the ship, called the ship’s representative, and I dealt with immigration, customs and the police and the port authorities wherever we went, and, um, the ship’s agent and the chandler and that, that sort of thing, supplier for the vessel. And then I became the public relations officer and the port captain and so dealt again with the same set of people but from a public relations, rather than a legal, position. And then I became, in my final year on board, I was the intelligence officer. We were in the Caribbean at the time, so my last--all through the Caribbean, I was the Intel Officer.
ROB LOREI: Why did the Church of Scientology--why did L. Ron Hubbard need an intelligence officer?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Scientology is actually at its core an intelligence organization.
ROB LOREI: What do you mean by that?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: It’s senior to every aspect of Scientology. It’s senior to its finances, it’s senior to its personnel, senior to auditing, senior to its religiosity--is intelligence.. That’s what is important to Scientology. And it has a massive intelligence gathering apparatus. The Guardian’s Office was its intelligence, um, program, its intelligence apparatus before its present intelligence operation, the Office of Special Affairs.
ROB LOREI: Well, how do they gather intelligence?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: They gather it overtly and covertly, legally and illegally. Eleven Guardian’s Office personnel were sent to federal prison for illegal intelligence gathering operations against the U.S. government.
ROB LOREI: It’s sometimes said by ex-members of Scientology that during the auditing process, you confess everything that you’ve ever done, everything that you might be ashamed of, and that, um, Scientology is supposed to keep those files of what you confess secret. Um, are those files ever used in the intelligence operations?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: They are available to intelligence personnel and used by intelligence personnel routinely.
ROB LOREI: Did you ever use an auditing file?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Uh, there were people who were my responsibility whose, uh, auditing files were culled, so excerpts were taken, information was taken from auditing files, and people who sought to leave the organization were required to sign lists of these crimes which they’d confessed in their auditing before they could leave. People that I was responsible for were locked up and guarded and held until they signed their lists of crimes. It was very routine inside the organization, and the only reason that they did this was to retain control, have some blackmail-able material, over the person who’s leaving.
ROB LOREI: Were people that tried to leave ever blackmailed to your knowledge?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: I don’t have, uh, an awareness--I don’t know of anyone who was specifically blackmailed. But Scientology has used my own information against me.
ROB LOREI: How so? How do they do that?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: They’ve done it, um, both inside--that is, information taken from a preclear folder, an auditing file, is circulated inside in order to destroy someone’s reputation; and I have seen references from documents which I have been able to get through litigation through just, the discovery process in litigation, been able to see that. And then additionally, they culled excerpts from my preclear auditing files and presented them directly to the judge in one of the cases I was involved in.
ROB LOREI: Um-hmm. Let me get back for a moment to your role in the last year on the ship as the Intelligence Officer. What kind of things did you do, you personally? What kind of things did you supervise or carry out as the Intelligence Officer on the ship?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Because we were always moving, the level of intelligence was very limited. We were not in a position to infiltrate government offices in the ports that we were visiting, nor was it the sort of thing which was required. So--so mine was mainly a security, uh, gathering information for security purposes. And that concerned--our biggest threat was from people on the ship itself, our own crew who might defect, our own crew who might leave the organization. So that was where the, my emphasis was during that year.
ROB LOREI: How often did people try to leave the ship or defect or leave Scientology?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: It was very, very regular. There were--at any given time, there was probably someone who was a security threat, who was locked up and kept guarded and whose--who would be writing up his list of crimes in anticipation of, of being offloaded. It was very common; it was common in every Scientology organization I’ve been a part of.
ROB LOREI: Well, why did people want to leave?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: The conditions are abusive. It does not deliver on its promises. So there’s an inherent fraud in Scientology which people wake up to at some point. But I think that the--that the biggest motivation, the thing which drives people away, is really the abuse which is heaped on, on people inside.
ROB LOREI: Um-hmm. For a time, you were in, uh, what’s called the Rehabilitation Project Force. What is--what’s that group?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Yeah, it’s the--it’s Scientology’s prison system, its gulag, to which anyone could be sent for really any infraction. For the most part, the vast majority are Sea Org personnel. There have been instances in which someone other than, than Sea Org personnel were assigned but it really is for Sea Org staff members. You can be assigned for a, a meter read, reading, a particular motion of the needle on the e-meter; a rock slam can get you assigned to the RPF. Um, down stats can get you assigned. If there’s a--if you have a, um, a flirtatious relationship with the wrong person can get you assigned. I was assigned my first time because I swore at Mary Sue Hubbard’s secretary, her communicator, Nicky Merwin, who was being pretty witchy. And, um, so that, uh--on that occasion I was--on Hubbard’s order, I was taken and locked up in the Guardian’s Office in Los Angeles in the Intelligence Bureau of the Guardian’s Office; this was in 1976.
ROB LOREI: How could they lock you up? What do they--what do they do?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Well, uh, I was taken to a room, put in the room, and a guard was placed outside the door.
ROB LOREI: Did you object?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: No.
ROB LOREI: Why not?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: I think that, you know, the short, short form is that I was brainwashed. But in order--you know, what makes the Scientologist a Scientologist is obeying orders. If you do what you’re told, you’ll remain a Scientologist. So to remain a Scientologist you have to do what you’re told. I was told to go into the room, and I did what I was told. So it wasn’t until years later that I had enough common sense to rebel and in fact to end up escaping.
ROB LOREI: Um, what would the guard have done had, had you tried to leave the room?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Prevented me.
ROB LOREI: Physically?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Physically.
ROB LOREI: Was the guard armed?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Not to my knowledge. But we were in the Intelligence Bureau. In an instant he could have had 20, 30 people there.
ROB LOREI: Um-hmm. Did you ever see anybody physically restrained?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen people lifted up bodily and taken away and locked up.
ROB LOREI: Um, how did they treat you while you were behind that locked door?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Well, I was taken out each day, and this was only--this was about a two-week period. So I was taken out each day and taken to, uh, UCLA Library to do research for the Guardian’s Office. This was just to keep me busy during this time that I’m being locked up and being interrogated and writing up my crimes, and, uh, they want to make sure that my will is sufficiently broken.
ROB LOREI: Hmm. You say you were so brainwashed that you didn’t have the will to escape.
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Right.
ROB LOREI: How--how did they brainwash you? Just by simply telling you that we have the answer and if you stick with us we’ll give you all the answers to all the questions you’ve ever had about life?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: That’s--that’s what brings someone in. After that, it’s just a matter of following orders until you really have no control, no will of your own, and anyone who demonstrated a will or willfulness was silenced immediately, put in the RPF, locked up, neutralized, whatever is necessary. There was no counterintention to the organization’s intention, so I think that it is such complete domination, every aspect of, of someone’s life. Inside, it was who you--who you could marry, how much toilet paper you could have, what you ate, and ultimately what you thought. You learned that, according to Scientology and according to Hubbard, a critical thought about the organization or about Hubbard was evidence of a crime. So you learned to not even bring into consciousness a critical thought; otherwise you, you will suppress that thought because you dare not be a criminal. The ramifications are so grotesque.
ROB LOREI: Does the RPF just simply operate or does it just simply operate in California where you were held, or does it operate everywhere that there is Scientology?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: It operates at the major bases of Scientology--
ROB LOREI: So, for instance, in Clearwater?
GERRY ARMSTRONG: Right. In fact, my first assignment--I, I said I was locked up for a couple of weeks. Then I was ordered by Hubbard to the RPF in Clearwater, and I was the founding father of the Clearwater RPF; my wife and I were the first people assigned.
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