It's always easier to read negative press on Scientology than positive. In my teens I read a collection of essays and articles chronicling William S. Burroughs' time in the group entitled Naked Scientology. When I did some further research I found there wasn't much positive information on the group outside official 'church' publications like Dianetics. Now, with the internet, the information coming from Scientology is more plentiful but no more in-depth. One would assume that anybody holding the answer to the salvation of humanity would want to share it openly. Not if you're making millions by carefully guarding the secret and releasing it slowly for a price though. As a result, most of the comprehensive information on Scientology comes from its detractors, and one could spend nearly a lifetime reading the information gathered by the organization's critics.

First Contact

"Can you tell me… what's your connection to Scientology?" The phone line crackled. I assumed I was being recorded. I leaned over and adjusted my recording levels to clearly capture the faint voice while I considered the question. He clarified, "You are not doing this or contacting me for Scientology or any representative of Scientology?"

Is this raging paranoia? I had originally been put in contact with ex-Scientologist Gerry Armstrong by Andreas Heldal-Lund, webmaster of the Operation Clambake site. Heldal-Lund's site recounts attempts by Scientology and its agents to paint him as a terrorist, sexual deviant and to contact his employers in an attempt to get him fired.

If these are, in fact, the tactics used against someone who was never even a member of Scientology, how much more aggressive must the actions be against someone who betrayed the church? That's what I called Gerry Armstrong, who spent twelve and a half years as a Scientologist, to find out.

From his current home in Chilliwack, British Columbia he gave me a history of his involvement in Scientology starting in the early seventies. "I was always a cerebral kind of kid," he relates, "I was 22 at the time and the promises it made to me solved the human condition."

Those promises included increased mental abilities and freedom from disease or even death. The legacy of the free-thinking sixties had created a great thirst for the apex of human potential. In L. Ron Hubbard, many thought they'd found a fellow seeker offering them a strong, logical system that they themselves could test. "You're told immediately, in these days, that it's a religion. That's different than when I got involved. They claimed that it was a science."

Once a member of the Church of Scientology, the bridge between science and religion was the cult of personality centred on a pulp science-fiction writer. "A key to it was L. Ron Hubbard himself." Somehow he was able to make people believe, "that he had cured himself of war wounds, that he was a military and naval hero, that he was a scientist and a physicist and a civil engineer, that he was twice pronounced dead and rose again."

In the Navy

"I started off taking a communications course that virtually everyone takes when they get involved, then moved on to studying to be a Dianetic auditor." Auditing is described as a process by which a subject can find out what is adversely affecting his life through their electrical responses to a series of questions. "Then in 1971 I flew to Los Angeles and joined the Sea Organization and signed my billion year contract."

Everyone from tabloids to cartoons exposes Scientology's more sensational aspects. The belief in intergalactic wars and the purported alien overlord Xenu have become common knowledge now. Less frequently discussed are aspects such as the Sea Org, Scientology's elite pseudo-navy.

Onboard the Sea Org's 352 foot flagship, Apollo, Armstrong visited exotic ports like Casablanca and Tangiers while working his way up the ranks from dishwasher to public relations officer, then intelligence officer. Yes, intelligence officer. In addition to the pseudo-navy Scientology has, or some would say is, an intelligence organization.

"I did a number of missions from the ship to set up various ports." This involved going into a port under cover to make arrangements for the ship to enter and set up the essentials L. Ron & Co. would need before they arrived - all without attracting the attention of the wogs. (The term wog is an old racist British acronym for Worthy Oriental Gentleman, referring to immigrants from India and other Asian countries with mocking disdain. It was a favourite term of Hubbard's to describe those not initiated into Scientology.)

"During the whole time I was on board, from early 1971 into the fall of 1975, we operated under the cover of Operation and Transport Corporation (OTC), a Panamanian 'business management' company. We never admitted to being Scientology, and it was a huge security breach to have any Scientology books, symbols, insignia, etc. visible to any wogs (customs, port guards, longshoremen, visitors, etc.), or to use Scientology terms in conversations ashore.

"Each mission involved contracting with a shipping agent and a chandler; visiting the port authorities, customs, immigration, police and other local government officials; giving them OTC brochures and the OTC 'shore story;' handling any rumors or 'black PR' that preceded the ship (we were thought to be the CIA, or known, despite our cover efforts, to be Scientology); arranging a telex hookup; setting up gigs for the 'Apollo Troupe,' which was a group of Sea Org musicians and singers the organization used for port PR purposes; contacting the local newspapers, also with the OTC story; and generally poking around like any good intelligence operative would to determine if it was safe for our undoubtedly bizarre ship and crew to visit that country and port." Perhaps it was Hubbard's obsession with intelligence gathering that allowed Scientology stay one step ahead of its enemies and survive to this day without being torn apart by its totalitarian mindset. Armstrong's descriptions of what it was like on the inside really do make it seem like a rogue intelligence agency, tied to no nation, answering to no-one but the leaders of Scientology.

The ship, Apollo, and her crew of about four-hundred were Hubbard's control hub for the Church of Scientology in the early-seventies. "People were brought on board from around the world to receive auditing and training and then shipped back off to their respective organizations."

"Scientology was run around the world from onboard. Hubbard, of course, ran the whole thing. He was the Commodore and he ran it via his messengers who were, the majority of them, young girls. They ran his messages and kept track of all his personal belongings, got him up, put him to bed, dressed him, that sort of thing." Well, you can't really run a cult without surrounding yourself with young girls now, can you? International waters would also allow the old seaman considerable advantages regarding taxes, not to mention immunity from the laws of any given country.

In 1975 Scientology landed, setting up headquarters in Florida, but it wasn't long before they ran afoul of the locals. "Scientology entered into Clearwater Florida under false pretenses. It claimed to be United Churches of Florida. At the same time it set up a rather alarming security apparatus with security personnel running around. It began to attack the mayor and anyone in the media who questioned what these hundreds of people were doing in downtown Clearwater.

"There was a lot of investigation going on by local media and local government as to what this new presence in town was. It wasn't long before the media found out that it was not United Churches of Florida but Scientology, which enjoyed kind of an unsavory reputation at the time."

Hubbard apparently fled Florida. Eventually he landed in California. Gerry Armstrong continued to work in the Hubbard household. Eventually he landed in hot water.

In addition to having a pseudo-navy and pseudo-CIA, Armstrong related stories of the organization's penal system, the Rehabilitation Project Force or RPF (I swear they come up with these names just so that they can shorten them). It was a place where the willfully disobedient could be sent for reprogramming. Armstrong spent months in the RPF on two separate occasions. Once for telling Hubbard's wife's secretary off and once because Hubbard thought Armstrong had made a joke about one of his movies. Inside he was subjected to intense 'auditing' where the subject is grilled for hours on end, confessing every sin, whether an action or merely a thought. Diet and sleep were severely restricted, speech was confined only to answering the auditor's questions and the detainee was subjected to the most demeaning labour available. If that didn't work there was an even more arduous detention system within the RPF!

L. Ron Hubris

After being in Hubbard's doghouse twice, one would assume that Armstrong was banished from the inner circle and exiled to the fringes of the organization where he could pose no threat. But not only was he allowed to continue working closely with Hubbard, he was given the chance to work on the man's life story.

"During the course of a raid threat from law enforcement an archive of Hubbard's personal materials was discovered. With that discovery I petitioned him to do the research for his biography and he granted the petition."

There is a reason Scientology is so tight with information about itself. Assigning Gerry Armstrong to research L. Ron Hubbard was unknowingly asking him to critically examine everything he'd been told over the previous decade. He says he learned that Hubbard's military career was grossly exaggerated at best and that claims that he was a scientist were groundless.

"In the course of doing that, I pretty well deprogrammed myself and debunked the man. Because of that and the shock of finding out that he lied about virtually every aspect of his life, that brought me and my then wife to leave the organization and they have considered me a major enemy ever since."

He makes it perfectly clear that you don't simply walk away from the Church of Scientology at that level though, not without consequences.

"They sued me in August of 1982 and they've now sued me six times. They have attempted to have me prosecuted on false criminal charges, I don't know, another half dozen times. They've published a mountain of black propaganda around the world." Other claims Armstrong makes include agents hitting him with a car, terrorizing him on the highways of California and Germany.

It's hard not to see the portrait painted by Mr. Armstrong as some Orwellian dystopia. "Husband reports on wife and wife reports on husband and children report on their parents and parents report on their children."

The days leading up to him and his ex-wife leaving the organization sound like something out of a cold-war spy movie with radios turned up to cover voices and walls that have ears. Considering the culture of paranoia he lived in for so long, it's impossible to know how much was true. It is clear that the courts have often found his attempts to protect himself to be a reasonable response to the threats he's faced. It's also true that the business that Scientology does brings in untold millions of dollars every year. If Armstrong's actions threaten belief in the group, and as such those millions, how far would they go to protect their investment?

Childhood's End

It's been well over two decades since Gerry Armstrong disassociated himself from Scientology. He talked briefly about having 'sprung' a few other members, but he is definitely an outsider now; a pariah among that fanatical sect. "They are simply not allowed to communicate with someone like me. I am automatically the enemy."

So what does he find best debunks the organization to a Scientologist? Ironically, it's Hubbard's personal writings about himself.

My overall impression of Scientology is that of a child's fantasy run amok. A long running game of the young imagination, filled with war and spies and a great alien conspiracy. With the tremendous resources of his followers, Hubbard and company got to play out their fantasy world for many years. With Hubbard's death in 1986 the great imagination of the group was gone. Scientology may have lost its childhood sense of wonder. Now it lives in an adult world which relies on celebrity and glossy ceremony. That is not to suggest that I feel Hubbard era Scientology would have been any sort of golden age. It seems like it was absurd and undeveloped in conception and temperament. Rather, modern Scientology may have moved from the immersive experience of the childhood imagination to the shallow soap-opera of early adulthood. While Scientology obviously still has great financial resources, does it have the imaginative power, and the personality to survive for years to come?

- Jason Gracey

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