This is Session 2 of Jan Atack and Dr. James Beverley‘s Getting Clear Conference in 2015 featuring Gerry Armstrong.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. James Beverley: We’re at session two. I’ll just give you a little anecdote where I realized I didn’t know everything.
Jon Atack: Wow!
Dr. James Beverley: I’m with John, and I’m quite proud of my chronology of Hubbard’s life. And I soon realize, when I couldn’t remember certain dates, that he had a better memory than me. And then I said, “But you know, I have this 18 page chronology!”, which I was really proud of. And John told me that his was around 400.
Jon Atack: Mine’s bigger than yours!
Dr. James Beverley: But actually …yeah But actually, I just got my assistant to reformat it so it’s not 400 pages in a normal font size in Word, it’s 500 pages.
Jon Atack: I don’t like to boast but you kn…
Dr. James Beverley: So welcome these two men. Would you?
Jon Atack: Okay, I first met Gerry Armstrong far too long ago, 31 years ago, in 1984. He’d just come from California where he’d just won an incredible judgment, and Scientologists had tried to stop him from breathing, I think this was the idea, wasn’t it?
There’s a thing in the judgment about somebody trying to drive him off the road in a car.
And I was sort of coming out of Scientology – most of the way out. I’d shown somebody the OT3 pack, which for me, is the Rubicon you have to cross. And I had this incredible encounter because one of my friends said, “Oh, can we meet Gerry?”
And I said, “Sure!”
And what I didn’t know was that he was being set up – there were three of them -they were Sea Organization members, and they wanted to confront Gerry about working for the CIA. So I was a little bit embarrassed about having said said that… And Gerry sat there, calmly and casually, while these three rather large guys, kind of oppressively moving towards him, and he said, “Have you ever met a clear?” And after about half an hour, they all sat down listening to him. So I’d like to hear some of Gerry’s own story, particularly as it relates to the biographical archive [of L Ron Hubbard] and how that came about.
But Gerry, you might like to fill in a little bit about how you got in Scientology and some of the remarkable positions you held in Scientology. We are going to be here all week. So to you, Gerry
Gerry Armstrong: Okay. Thank you for inviting me here, and thank you, Dr Beverly likewise, and thank you all for attending.
Before I start. And I did not come really prepared for this particular session to talk about myself at all. I was believed that I was gonna be talking about, L Ron Hubbard, but that’s doing okay, as I’ll talk about both of us.
My wife, Caroline, Caroline Lekteman, who is herself an ex Scientologist, and was very high in the technical aspects of the organization as an auditor. She’s a very smart, very loving, very funny lady. And she’s also a crochet artist, and she made these little cards here for everyone. And originally the plan was that this would be at Tyndale University, and so these are crocheted trilliums. A Trillium is the provincial flower. And we tried to get the card stock, which is as close to Tyndale blue as we could. And they’re in these pretty little envelopes, which are scenes of various kinds, most of them from Canada. And a lot of you people aren’t.
So I asked Rich, there’s a box full of these things, and if you just pass them around through, let them just pass one to the other through the audience. And that would be kind of cool, I think. You can just let them, let the give them the box, Rich. Then I can start to talk.
And if, if there are any Scientologists here watch with the guy beside you, how many they take. Because the Scientologists would probably take the whole box full. That’s their style with this kind of thing. And it’s got my business card in there as well, and it’s got my websites on there.
And this is for you, John.
Jon Atack: Thank you so much! Beautiful.
Audience member: Thank you, Gerry.
Gerry Armstrong: Yeah Caroline!
1970: Gerry Comes From Chilliwack to Vancouver To Get Into Scientology
Okay, well, I got into Scientology in Vancouver. I’m from the town of Chilliwack. By the way, are there Tyndale students here now? Yeah, one, okay, Two?
Dr. James Beverley: They will come at different times times of the day.
Gerry Armstrong: Okay. You people who are Canadians, you would know where Chilliwack is, and that’s where I grew up. And after high school, which I flunked out of, I went logging for four years, and it was when I was logging that I heard about Scientology and got involved. Spent a little bit of time in Vancouver. Did the communication course, as everyone did, did a couple of other basic courses, did the Dianetics auditing course. And then at the beginning of 1971, sold my little bits of belongings and bought a ticket and flew to Los Angeles and joined the Sea Org.
Spent a couple of weeks, I guess, on the Bolivar, which was a station ship that the sea org had at that time. And then I was flown to the Apollo, which was at that time in Morocco. And so that’s the beginning of 71 and I spent the next four plus years on board until the fall of 1975. And that’s when everyone came ashore, except for those who stayed on board to maintain the ship and ultimately sell it.
We all came ashore in Florida.
And on board, I was first of all, the storesman, and then I became the I was posted to the deck project force over the side of the ship, shipping and painting the ship. And then I was posted as the ship’s driver. And we had a little 500 CC Fiat, which was one of Hubbard’s vehicles, and we would offload it when we went into a port, and I would drive around the people who needed to do the purchasing, or who were flying on missions or picking up recruits or whatever was needed ashore.
That’s when, of course, I met John McLean, who is here, who was external, in external communications, and responsible for air freight and telexes and all that sort of thing. And that’s because Scientology was operated from on board during those years. And Hubbard, of course, was on board along with his family, and he managed us and managed Scientology around the world.
Gerry Armstrong Discusses Murdering John McLean With Stuart Moreau to Eliminate the Threat to Scientology
And I don’t know if Nan [Mclean] brought it with her, but just to give you the idea of the mentality that I had while on board, John blew. “Blowing” in the in the cult is when you suddenly leave without getting approval, and essentially you escape. So John escaped, and he came back here to Toronto. And this was this made him such a dangerous person to us – someone who would expose the operations of the organization – that I recall a conversation that I had where we seriously talked about getting a gun and going and assassinating John McLean.
Jon Atack: Who did you have a conversation with?
Gerry Armstrong: Well, one of the people was a fellow by the name of Stuart Moreau. I believe he was the first mate at the time on board.
So I was the ship’s driver for about a year, and then I was posted as the legal officer, or we called it the ship’s representative. That’s how we told the local people what the position was.
“Oh, talk to the ship’s representative. Oh, that’s me!” And I was on that post for about two and a half years. I was responsible for legal matters, the ship’s documents. I had control of everyone’s passport. When everyone came on board, they submitted their passport, and they could not get off the ship, obviously, because we’re in a foreign country, we held their passports. So they really had to escape.
And there were a number of escapes during that time. And I was also responsible for getting people back. I dealt with customs and immigration, the police, the harbor officials and that sort of thing.
And of course, I dealt a great deal with Hubbard personally, so I would see him on virtually a daily basis. And then I became, for a while, the port captain who has underneath him, the Public Relations Officer, the legal officer, which I had been, and intelligence. And then I was not really good. I did not want to have a public relations post. So I got demoted from that for a brief bit of time.
And then after we sailed from Europe to the Caribbean, I was the intelligence officer on board. So during my last period of time on board, I was Intel, and then briefly when we were in Daytona Beach, I was the Intel, intelligence officer at the Daytona Beach operation, which, again, Hubbard, Hubbard was at.
The sea org was a an incredible experience, in a way. It was terrifying, and I believe that I was in a state of fear virtually the whole time, fear of getting busted from post, fear of letting the Commodore down, fear of doing something that would adversely impact Scientology, and fear of the being labeled a suppressive person. And I had been indoctrinated in the suppressive person doctrine from when I first got involved in Scientology, and that is extremely key for understanding what Scientology is.
L Ron Hubbard’s The Suppressive Person Doctrine and “Apostates”
Hubbard taught that anyone who threatened the organization in any way was what they call a suppressive person, and that equated with being a sociopath, a psychopath, responsible for all the evils of the world. They were not redeemable. They had they deserved no civil rights, and they were enemies of mankind and enemies of Hubbard.
In actuality, what such a person is is simply someone who tells the truth, tells the truth about Scientology operations, tells the truth about Hubbard, tells the truth about Scientology, the philosophy anything about it. If you told the truth, you were labeled as oppressive person, and you became a target.
If Dr. Beverley is here, that is one of the reasons why I am critical of a lot of the new religious movement scholars who claim that apostates, that is people who leave one of these new religions like Scientology, and speak out, that is, tell the truth, are not to be listened to. So in a way, they tie into and support the suppressive person doctrine of Scientology.
Suppressive persons are the very people who should be listened to, because they’re the people who are telling the truth.
So after Daytona Beach. I was, again, briefly demoted. I was even though I can’t type, I became the typist and typed these directives from Hubbard having to do with the setting up of the flag land base, which is in Clearwater, Florida. Hubbard ran that whole operation.
Now, of course, the Scientologists admit that he ran the whole thing. But back then, his involvement, of course, was hidden, and anyone who said that he was running Scientology or running the setup in Clearwater was attacked. Then I was assigned to Hubbard’s external communications Bureau and was responsible for his telexes, for his, all of his written communication. It came via me. And this was in a an apartment complex that we had in Dunedin, Florida.
After that, I was sent on a mission to set up the a staging I guess we call it a staging area, which was in another apartment complex in Culver City, California. And that was a time when Hubbard was intending to move to California, and they were involved at that time in the purchase of the properties in LaQinta California where he ultimately moved sometime, I guess in the end of 1976.
Gerry Gets Assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force for the First Time
But at this time, I got in an argument with Mary Sue Hubbard’s communicator Nicky Merwin, and told her to essentially get lost. And so Hubbard had the US guardians office, a couple of their personnel, pick me up and take me to what is now Celebrity Center. But at that time was the Fifield Manor, which was the Guardians office operation, and I was locked up for a couple of weeks on the fifth or sixth floor. I forget which of that building and kept under under guard. And then I was flown to Clearwater, and along with my wife, at the time, I should talk a bit about Terry assigned to the RPF.
So Terry and I were the founding members of the Clearwater RPF. There was not an RPF at that time.
Jon Atack: Just to interject for those who are not the cognoscenti of Scientology, that’s the rehabilitation project force, which is a labor camp, basically where people are humiliated and forced to work impossible hours and, you know, basically treated as scum, right?
Gerry Armstrong: Terry was L Ron Hubbard’s senior messenger. She was in charge of all the messengers, and had been with Hubbard for several years. At that time, the messengers were mainly young teenage girls, and Hubbard was surrounded by these young girls who held his ashtray, lit his cigarettes, dressed him in the morning and ran his messages for him and helped him run Scientology.
So we had a big double wedding on board, and Hubbard gave away the brides. And I just mentioned one silly little anecdote again to demonstrate kind of the our mentality and Hubbard’s mentality, and that was when at the party after the marriage, we gave him the gifts!
So Terry and I were assigned to the RPF. I was there for 17 months. During most of it, I was the RPF boson, so I had underneath me up to 80 people who were assigned, through time, through that that period, to the RPF. If you were an RPF member, you had to wear a black boiler suit, and this was in Clearwater Florida, and we slept in an unventilated room, on on the floor, on little, thin, little mattresses. Occasionally, some of us had little cots, you know, folding cots, and then when it expanded too much, then we slept in the, I think, the third or fourth floor of the parking garage at the Fort Harrison.
You had to run everywhere. You ate whatever was left after the crew ate. You had to address everyone in the regular crew as ‘Sir’, and you could not talk to them unless they talked to you. And you were subjected to a program of endless security checks. Security checks are when you are put on the electrometer and you are interrogated as to your crimes, your critical thoughts, anything you’ve done which was ever embarrassing, anything for which you could be prosecuted.
And this goes back into past lives, and what I began to know by that time was that whatever you said in Scientology, in their auditing process, was written down, recorded and could be used against you. Anyone who wanted to leave had to sign a confession of his crimes which were extracted from his auditing.
The Church of Scientology’s Use of Auditing Files for Blackmail
Auditing is presented as this therapeutic process. That is simply not the case. It is a sick means of control. And the use of those materials, your innermost thoughts, which are divulged in this process, I think, is easily one of Scientology’s most egregious crimes against its parishioners, its followers.
So during my time in the sea org, I amassed, I guess, several feet of these records. And of course, the organization has them now, had them then, and this is key to why do people stay? Why do these movie stars stay? Because Scientology has all their secrets, all their crimes, all of their sexual thoughts, their sexual relationships, throughout all of their history, which will everyone in there, except for the very new you, soon learn that those things that they have them, they will be used against you, and that is a huge factor in how they control their personnel.
For someone to speak out, you have to be willing for them to expose everything that they know about you, which they have done. After getting out of the RPF, I spent a few days I was assigned the job of editing and proofreading Hubbard’s science fiction book, Revolt in the Stars.
The FBI Raid and OT3
In 1977 the FBI had raided Scientology’s intelligence bureaus in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and Hubbard had fled and gone into hiding in Nevada. And while he was in hiding, which was his habit, because he would do this again, he wrote science fiction, and that’s when he wrote revolt in the stars, which is actually the story of OT three.
OT three, everyone will learn, is the story of the intergalactic tyrant Xenu. And we are all products of this incident of 75 million years ago, when Xenu brought all the bandits and the artists and the good people to planet Earth, which is then called Teegeeack, and they were flown in DC8s, I don’t know whay this is so nuts and brought to to planet Earth and deposited in volcanoes….
Jon Atack: It’s all true, by the way,
Gerry Armstrong: Deposited in volcanos, and then they had hydrogen bombs dropped on them, and they were blown up, and then they were implanted, implanted with the programming which we all have today. The Human Condition, according to Hubbard, is as a result of this implanting 75 million years ago,
Jon Atack: Where also, becourse, Jesus was implanted as an invention. Though Scientology scene this week are complaining, saying to Jim Beverley, that Scientology is completely compatible with Christianity,
Gerry Armstrong: Right, in the same way Satanism is
Anyway, Hubbard. Hubbard teaches that these are super secret documents, this level super secret. And anyone who comes across it reads this material, discovers the material before they’ve done all the processing necessary for them to confront this thing, they will free wheel, get pneumonia and die.
Jon Atack: Within two days.
Gerry Armstrong: And here I was not clear he had presented to me in far more graphic detail than is what is in OT three this it was a manuscript for a novel and the screenplay, so I had to proofread and edit this.
Jon Atack: Did you die?
Gerry Armstrong: No, I thought this is great. But a couple of years later, then they decided that I’d been in the sea org long enough, and I had to be clear. So they declared me Clear. And I did OT one, and OT two, and then I’m on to OT three.
And I opened it up, and I realized, “Wow! Holy Crowley! I have, you know, I know this material already!”
So anyway, I did OT three during my final two years inside the cult. And that’s as far as I got.
As far as levels are concerned. OT three is concerned with the auditing and getting rid of these beings. They call them body thetans, which infest us, but also comprise our bodies. Hubbard says that they are, that they actually composed the physical body. It’s composed of these 1000s or billions of BTs that jumped on us at some point at birth or thereafter. He doesn’t explain that really closely, but and then you were supposed to get rid of them.
On OT3, Gerry Falls in Love With His Body Thetans, Causing Cognitive Dissonance
In the process of getting rid of them, that was key to my getting out actually, because I began to experience a love for my BTs. And I realized that that the getting rid of, you know, casting somebody out of your space is really one of the evils that we can do to somebody. So we were doing this kind of mental process, you know, you put your attention on your BT body thetan on your kneecap, and then you intend it to look go through this implanting and the volcano and the and the DC8 trip and all that. And then they are supposed to leave, and then you are supposed to be free from overwhelm, and you get rid of the all the problems that are supposedly, you know, that are bugging you and keeping you from being all powerful.
Jon Atack: There is a bit of a problem with this, if your body is actually composed of them, because, of course, you will lose parts of your body in the process, right?
Gerry Armstrong: Well, he actually says that, you know that your your body becomes kind of transparent at some at some point,
Jon Atack: I have seen that.
Gerry Armstrong: but that’s why – it’s transparent.
Okay, so out of the RPF, I did that and and then I was flown to I did that in Clearwater, I went to California. I was briefly in Los Angeles and then joined the new base which was being was set up at that time in La Quinta, California. So in the California desert, la quinta and the Sea Organization had a number of properties in La Quinta and Indio.
And there was, I guess, 101 50 of us there. And we started shooting movies. When Hubbard was in Nevada. He’d written a number of these training movies, and so the whole crew was involved in some aspects of shooting movies. I was initially the props in charge. I became the sets in charge. So I was building sets, and then I became the services officer, or services in charge. I became the assistant producer, and I acted in several of his movies. I was the location scout for a while.
Gerry Gets Assigned to the RPF Again, This Time for the Crime of “Joking and Degrading”
We did that for a while, and then I was one day, and this is when he was sick. He apparently had some kind of a problem in embolism, perhaps. But we were assigned to do movie drills, and I did a voiceover for this little short thing we were doing of somebody setting up a light. They were doing what he called gaffer grills. So they were setting up a light and setting down a light. And I did this voiceover. It was sort of corny that we were doing a film of somebody setting up and down a light. So I did it with this Barnum and Bailey. He called Barnum and Bailey beingness. So I was like a ring announcer, ladies and gentlemen kind of thing. And I thought it was I thought it was fine. I thought it was actually complimentary of him, but the messengers took it back to him, and he decided that we that we were mocking his movie making and ridiculing it. And so I was again assigned to the RPF, along with five other people on for the crime of joking and degrading.
And that is because joking about Hubbard, about Scientology, about those sacred subjects, was taboo and punishable within the organization. So I spent the next eight months in the RPF again. And it is, as John says, it’s a re education camp. So you are re-implanted, you are reprogrammed, and it really is to break the independent will of an individual, which it does fairly successfully.
But I got onto the RPF again, and now we are, we are at Gilman Hot Springs, because the La Quinta property was blown. Hubbard’s cover was blown. What we were doing there was blown. And so we moved to Gilman hot Springs and set up another operation. And at that point, after getting out of the RPF, or the day I graduated from the RPF, my wife, at the time, Terry, came to me and said that essentially, she had been ordered. She’d had to get rid of me or she could no longer be in the CMO, the commoners messenger organization.
So she decided on the Commerce Messenger, and that was the end of our marriage.
So I got a Mexican divorce, and life went on.
Gerry is Assigned to be Responsible for LRH’s Biographical Archives
And I was assigned to Hubbard’s household unit. So he had twice assigned me to the RPF, and yet he had decided, for whatever reason, that I was trustworthy enough. I had gone through his punishment, and yet I was still dedicated. So I worked in his household unit. And it was during my work in his household unit at Gilman hot springs that there was a raid threat. Now, obviously there had been raid threats in the past, and during those times, people scurry around, gather up anything which is incriminating and destroy documents, destroy evidence.
This, of course, followed after the 1977 FBI raid, where the FBI took away 10s or hundreds of 1000s of pages of documents which indicated a great deal of criminality was going on, and for which 11 of Scientology’s top intelligence personnel, including Mary Sue Hubbard, were prosecuted and ultimately imprisoned.
So at the time of this raid threat, one of my juniors, who was called the LRH Gear in charge, she took care of his gear, his personal belongings, came to me with this box of very old material, and said, “What should I do with this?” And I looked at it, and I realized that this was not really anything which was incriminating.
What we were looking for and destroying was any evidence that Hubbard had been to the property intended to live at, The Property, ran Scientology, or directed Scientology, finances – all of which he did. So these were very old materials, and I think some of the first things that I saw were Hubbard’s Boy Scout book, correspondence between him and his grandfather, and correspondence in his family that even predated his birth.
So I said, “No, don’t destroy these. These have historical value, to say nothing of collector’s value.”
And so I went, went with her to where this stuff was stored, and ultimately took some 20 or 21 boxes of these very old materials out of there. And I transferred them then to the Hubbard Public Relations Bureau, where I thought that they could form the basis for a library, an archive, and could be used for public relations purposes. Because having been on the ship and having to deal with attacks against Hubbard throughout my whole sea org career, I knew that what the basic attacks on him was.
So here was correspondence between him and his wife, his first wife. So I thought, this is valuable. We will be able to disprove all of these nasty things that journalists and so on are saying about him. So by then, the beginning of 1980, January 1980 I wrote a petition to Hubbard, and petitioned to be able to gather up these materials and set up a new position the L Ron Hubbard, Personal Public Relations Officer, Archivist slash researcher.
And I did that, and then he approved the petition.
My last communication to him was in February 1980 and at that point he really dropped out of sight and went into hiding. And at that point, we were instructed that we could no longer admit to any line of communication to him, and that was because the federal government was looking for him.
Individual litigants, probably the Maclean’s, were looking to take his deposition. Paulette, Paulette Cooper, and other other people. Tanya Burden, who was a very young, young girl, a messenger, who’d been on board and then in Clearwater, she’d be an RPF, she had left and was speaking out against Hubbard. So she had brought an action. And Larry Wollersheim, I think, had filed a lawsuit by that time.
So there was a whole bunch of litigants who knew that Hubbard ran the organization and were looking to get, get him in a deposition, or had made, made him a defendant in these lawsuits. So he took off, went into hiding, and we thereafter could not admit to any line of communication to him.
So over the next approximately two years, I had possession of his archive, and I traveled around the US and to the UK, obtaining more documents, interviewing family members. There’s a couple of the DeWolfs here. I interviewed his son, L Ron Hubbard Jr, and I interviewed a couple of his then living aunt and living uncle. I think one was in Brandon, Manitoba at that time.
Gerry Gets a Car in the Sea Org in Pursuit of a Nobel Prize for L Ron Hubbard
So and I was able to get a my own vehicle, which was amazing for within the sea org. And I got it on the basis of getting Hubbard a Nobel Prize. Because he issued an order that unlimited Scientology funds were allocated to get him a Nobel Prize. The basis for the Nobel Prize, was his creation of the what is now called a Purification Rundown, I think at that time, we called it the sweat out program, and it is a part of the the narconon program as well.
Jon Atack: We will be having a toxicologist talking about the effects of this on Wednesday. I think it’s Wednesday, Thursday.
Gerry Armstrong: Right. So I had a number of responsibilities at that time, and one of them in connection with the Nobel Prize. I was able, with these unlimited funds, to get this little car, which I was then able to use for driving around. We contracted in October 1980 with a writer by the name of Omar garrison. And Garrison had during the prior decade, written three books for Scientology, all of which were pro Scientology.
And the people that handled him, his contacts within the organization were the top geo personnel, David Gaiman, who was the deputy guardian for public relations, and Jane Kember, who was the Guardian worldwide. These were his contacts, and through them, he had written a sort of a proposal, what he called points of how he would approach his idea for a Hubbard biography. And based on that, we contracted with him, and I provided him a mass of documents, whatever I could lay my hands on over the next year or so.
And with Omar Garrison, we traveled up the up the coast to where Hubbard lived in Port Orchard and near Bellingham, I forget the name of the property right now, and interviewed various people, and then we traveled to Helena, Montana and a number of places, did genealogy research, at the Mormon genealogy archive in Utah.
And largely because of my traveling with Omar (there’s a good title) I plus reading Hubbard’s material, I was able to largely deprogram myself. So I was able to determine that the guy had lied about virtually every aspect of his life.
Traveling With Omar
And Omar and I then, you know, I found that it was safe to talk to him because it was unsafe to talk to anyone else. I could not raise, the what I was finding, the contradictions that I was discovering you could not talk about such a thing, or I would have been removed from the post RPFed, or declared a suppressive person. So suppressive person, and all hell would have broken loose.
So Omar was this God-send to me: I’m able to talk to him freely, and we can joke about L Ron Hubbard, you know, we Omar had a name for him. It was “Johnny Good Bugger”. That was because there was some evidence in Hubbard’s files that he had been into buggery as a, you know, sorry, as a youth.
And the hero of his book Battlefield Earth was Johnny Goodboy Tyler, so Hubbard calling, or Omar called him Johnny Goodbugger, and and, and Hubbard and scientology had published all of these about the author sections and and these glowing stories about about Hubbard and so, and they continued to publish them. And so I would get a new one of these, and Omar would get it. “Oh, great more truths!” because usually labeled enough the truth about L Ron Hubbard….
Dr. James Beverley: Gerry on that note about truth. Let’s stop. It’s just a little past 1220 And we don’t want to if we start getting behind, we’ll, you know.