The Armstrong Op

Over the past few months, Caroline and I have been assembling documents concerning the “Armstrong Operation,” and wanted everyone to know about the site, and be able to assist in the op’s sane resolution. Possibly, some people have known all about this for years; and, of course, controlling Scientologists – Miscavige, Rathbun, Rinder, et al. – and a slew of Scientology attorneys and other agents have known much more than I do from much earlier. US Federal Government personnel in different departments have known all about it almost as long. Certainly I know my own actions in the op — with the recognition that even the best of memories fade, in a long war, and in any life. But it is the Scientologists’ op, not mine, and only very recently have I put together some key pieces. There is more to discover, naturally, and the Scientologists have conspired to conceal and lie about the op’s facts and evidence. I am making the materials I have available to help in this discovery process.

The Armstrong Op is central to the Scientology v. Armstrong war, which is in its thirty-third year. The war started the moment L. Ron Hubbard, or his emissary on duty, received a report of my leaving his cult, and ordered that I be treated or handled as a traitor, enemy, threat, target, victim, “Suppressive Person,” or “SP” So, December 1981. The Scientologists could have done something other than declare war on me, but they didn’t. They could have ended their war at any time, even before Hubbard died in 1986, but they haven’t.

The earliest war document I possess, which its author in the Guardian’s Office titled the “Gerry Armstrong Project,” is dated February 17, 1982.¹ Orders and reports from the Scientologists relating to their war on me predate this project order, but they have never produced them to me. Their war continues, and the threat from the Scientologists and their collaborators to me and people acting in concert with me is ongoing. I have many Scientology v. Armstrong documents that postdate the project order, although these are but a fraction of what the Scientologists have generated. The “Gerry Armstrong Project” introduced what became the “Armstrong Operation.” The “trusted GAS” (Guardian Activities Scientologist), at Step 15, the writer whose “potential existing line” to me the Scientology intelligence operators would pursue was Dan Sherman.

The day after issuing this project order, the Scientologists published a “Suppressive Person Declare” on me, essentially a directive to cult members at a certain, broad organizational level to treat or handle me as a traitor, enemy, threat, etc.² This does not mean that other people the Scientologists “declare” will have wars waged on them or ops run on them à la Armstrong. The Scientologists’ intention toward their “enemies,” the SP class, will be roughly the same: the overt or covert but always complex and continuous determination to harm or destroy them. At this point, the Scientologists are restrained in what harm and destruction they can do to their targets by the enormous, unrefuted exposure over decades of their antisocial intentions and actions toward good and decent citizens, and by the Scientologists’ fear of further exposure, prosecution or other reprisals.

Their war on me is a significant piece of the history of exposure that restrains them — as much as they have been restrained. And what Scientology v. Armstrong has been proven to be in present time — a criminal conspiracy — embodies the future exposure and repercussions they fear and await. The war is Scientologists’ continuing compliance with the endless evil intention to harm or destroy someone. (I have heard of only one instance when a Scientologist refused to comply with an order to attack me in some way.) The war represents what could happen to any citizens the Scientologists determine to harm or destroy. The Scientologists have the money and other means to harm or destroy to their meat body hearts’ content. They have the continuous motivation. They have a global intelligence gathering apparatus, and a network of covert and overt agents, analysts and operators finding or manufacturing opportunities.

What has become known as the “Armstrong Op” is not the only operation the Scientologists have run on me. They have prosecuted their war on multiple channels and fronts, and have conducted multiple covert and overt programs or campaigns to harm or destroy me over the years. The Armstrong Op, however, was pivotal when the Scientologists first revealed it, and is still pivotal today in their ongoing war. The op is largely known about because of their own actions disseminating and using a set of videos they made of me in November 1984. I was meeting with their operatives David Kluge and Mike Rinder in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. The videotaping was illegal, and the scheme to entrap me, the operation, and their whole war, constitute a continuing crime. I have spoken and written about the op ever since the Scientologists started speaking and writing about it. ³ They first disclosed their scheme to secretly video me and use the product in the Julie Christofferson v. Scientology trial in Portland, Oregon in 1985, which is another important event in their war on me, and in the Scientologists’ broader and longer history. Their clear postulate for making public the evidence of their own covert and unlawful actions against me was that it would achieve their goal of destroying me. They came close.

Hubbard was still running Scientology, and all its ops, and the Scientology v. Armstrong war involved him personally. Neither he nor any other Scientology executive would ever have issued an unevaluated order or program, even if it was misevaluated, reactive, criminal or disastrous. Hubbard and his underlings had to have evaluated that there would be little or no blowback from using the fruits of the illegal setup and videotaping. They evaluated I would be destroyed with their charges and their “evidence.” I was not destroyed, and there would be blowback, which hasn’t ended. Hubbard directed his Scientologists to handle it by themselves doing even more charging, and constantly attacking. Now, of course, they are Miscavige’s Scientologists.

Hubbard might have been given false data. He could have been told, for example, that the Scientologists had an authorization from the LAPD to make their videos. The truth was that they had paid a corrupt officer something like $10,000 to sign “authorizations,” which were no authorizations at all but denounced by the Chief of Police. Hubbard had a duty, however, to find out what the truth was, the facts were, on which he was basing his evaluations and programs before he ordered his underlings to take aggressive or criminal actions against me or anyone. Throughout his Scientology years, he had insisted that everyone around him lie about key issues, and he was very aware of his own lying. He should have expected that reports about the key issue of a declared enemy, who had exposed him as a pathological liar, would contain false information. In any event, whether based on his juniors’ false reports or not, he charged ahead, had his underlings and his collaborators charge, and they’ve been charging ever since.

Since the Christofferson trial, the Scientologists have used the videos and transcripts, altered them, lied about and spun them, and testified falsely about them in legal proceedings. They have used these materials to black PR me around the world, and criminally frame me. They even used them to extract millions of dollars from their pigeoned public. They have run a continuous global campaign to distort or rewrite the videos’ context, content and meaning. Their black propaganda is gross and subtle, infantile and diabolic. The Scientologists generate, disseminate and exploit it as professionally as they can. Their scripture says their black propaganda is intended not only to blacken me so that the public won’t listen to what I say about the context, content and meaning, but to reduce my image to beast level so the public wouldn’t even wince if I was obliterated.

Almost all of what I have been able to document over the years being the Scientologists’ victim in their op is available or identified online. It is a small part of the op documents or other related evidence that the Scientologists possess or have generated over the op’s many years. That is why I have asked individuals such as Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, who personally participated in the op under Scientology corporate orders and using corporate resources and protection, to come forward and tell the truth about their participation. I ask Rinder and Rathbun because they claim to now be telling the truth about such things, but I have also asked Scientologists or Exscientologists universally to come forward with information they have that could help end this criminal operation. Rathbun and Rinder have not come forward but continue to support the Miscavige Scientologists in the op. Their refusal to help in this situation is explained in part by their knowledge that they have been participating in a criminal conspiracy.

Rathbun published a version of the Armstrong Op in 2013 in Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior, and made the book required reading on courses he offers.⁴ Although he admits to certain facts that other Scientologists have not divulged earlier, his version forwards the long time, standard PR and attack line of the Hubbard and Miscavige regimers. Rathbun claims in his book, that he along with then head cult PI Eugene Ingram “concocted” the “rather elaborate game plan” to entrap me that was key to the Armstrong Op. His account in Memoirs contains lies and spin, and his concoction story could also be a lie. One of the operatives Rathbun ran, to meet with me, lie to me in the meetings, illegally videotape me, and lie about me and frame me after the meetings, is Mike Rinder. In his book, Rathbun identifies Rinder as the editor, and I believe he is telling the truth about that. Rathbun and Rinder have refused to correct the lies and black PR they generated about me in Memoirs; just as avowed Miscavige regimers have refused to correct the lies and black PR they have generated about me for decades.

Following the Christofferson trial, the Scientologists organized a program to bamboozle US Government personnel and agencies into agreeing that the Scientologists’ Armstrong Op to entrap and frame me was a plan by other US personnel and agencies to disrupt or destroy the cultists’ religion and their religious freedom. I only learned of this program a couple of years ago. By court order, the Scientologists should have produced all the documents relating to the program, in both Armstrong I, which settled in 1986, and in Armstrong II – IV, which were wrongly decided by summary judgment in 1995. The Scientologists and their attorneys, however, withheld these documents, and even withheld the existence of this perverse and actually criminal program. The statement by FBI Director William Webster is important not only for his conclusions, but because the Scientologists, knowing their bamboozle program had failed, did not pause in their intention and actions to harm or destroy me. They just kept doing more charging.⁵

I’ve communicated many times about discovering online in January 1997 some of the materials the Scientologists provided to the IRS about me in their submissions on which the 1993 tax exemption for their various US entities is based. ⁶ The realization of the implications of these materials stunned me. The Scientologists were already fair gaming me in the legal and extralegal arenas. I immediately took steps to get out of the US to the hopefully greater safety of British Columbia, where I could get unstunned and where something could be done about it. The Scientologists had also withheld these IRS submission materials, despite court orders in Armstrong II to IV to produce exactly this type of materials. I cannot now identify precisely what excerpts I read in 1997, but I recall that they contained the Scientologists’ statement about conclusively proving my state of mind to be one sordid, sado-masochistic nightmare.

Church of Scientology v. Gerald Armstrong:

We have included some background information here and an epilogue to the decision in question. That is because the Service has continuously thrust the Armstrong case at us, demanding an explanation. The Armstrong case decision was so inflammatory and intemperate that it was used to stigmatize the Church in the legal arena and make other outrageous decisions possible. As we shall demonstrate below, all this decision ever involved was Armstrong’s state of mind, which subsequently obtained evidence proved conclusively to be one sordid, sado-masochistic nightmare. Furthermore, Armstrong’s state of mind horror stories have fallen on deaf ears in recent litigation. Relying on Armstrong or the Armstrong decision is wholly unjustified.⁷

Some years later, while in BC, someone led me to more online materials from the Scientologists’ submission to the IRS, and more statements about me. Again, I cannot now be certain what precisely those statements were, but I recall they included the Scientologists’ asseveration that they truly believe I am psychotic — as opposed to the Scientologists’ other victims who, the Scientologists say, are solely motivated by greed.

Our consistent view has been that the civil litigants are solely motivated by greed. The exception is Armstrong who we truly believe to be psychotic. During the 1980’s, the IRS used every single civil litigant against Scientology as an IRS witness. The government, however, has no business in taking sides in a religious or civil dispute. It is indeed ironic to note that once the Flynn civil litigation in the 80’s was settled, with the exception of Armstrong, we hear no more of their “horror stories” from these paragons of virtue claiming to be interested only in “principle” and “what is right.”

The Scientologists do not say in their submission to the IRS that the reason their other victims are not heard from is not because they were motivated by greed, but because the Scientologists had shuddered them into silence with unlawful contracts and threats of their enforcement. I am heard from, not because I’m psychotic as the Scientologists and their collaborators black PR me, but because I know that such contracts are unlawful, and in fact are elements in the Scientologists’ criminal conspiracy.

In June 2009, the Tampa Bay Times published a special report, the “Truth Rundown,” which included a video interview of Rathbun giving his account of how the Scientologists obtained their 1993 IRS tax exemption.⁸ In August 2009, I wrote Rathbun to request his help to correct the lies and black PR on me that he had included in the submissions to the IRS, which he both prepared and presented.

I’m writing you politely to request your help to correct the black PR on me included in Scientology’s submissions or other statements to the IRS. The IRS’s grant of tax exemption to Scientology and its separate pieces is based in clear part on that black PR.

The specific black PR on me that I’m asking for your help with is contained in a set of Scientology’s answers to the IRS’s questions in the period before it granted tax exemption. In your video with the SP Times, you confirmed your involvement in events with the IRS before these answers were prepared and in writing and presenting the answers:

[…]

Immediately, and regardless of your becoming a wog or not, however, I’m asking most politely for your help to correct the black PR on me, which you know to be black PR in Scientology’s submissions to the IRS. That can be started, as a Scientologist who knows what evidence, facts and black PR are, although I’d admit that you could be even more honest and consequently more helpful as a wog. If you don’t know what to do, please contact me and I’ll tell you. If you do know what to do, then there’s the matter of you doing it, and I would remind you courteously that you haven’t. A key lie to me, and possibly to you Scientologists as well, and perhaps the easiest lie to correct, and the stupidest not to correct, is the lie that I’m psychotic. Please tell the truth.⁹

Rathbun never responded to my request, and has never corrected or even publicly addressed his false statements in his submissions to the IRS. I have also written him several times requesting that he tell the truth about his participation in other antisocial or criminal activities against me for the Miscavige regime. He has refused. He helped perpetrate still ongoing injustices, indeed crimes, and he has refused to help remedy them, by telling the simple truth. As he demonstrates in his Memoirs, however, Rathbun still helps the Scientologists in their determination to harm or destroy me. In February this year, I was led to an online copy of a letter Toronto Scientology attorney Clayton Ruby wrote dated November 6, 1992 to help the Scientologists get their 1993 IRS tax exemption. Ruby lied about me and defamed me in his letter and I wrote him on February 16 to demand he correct his lies and repair the damage he had done.¹⁰ I sent him two other letters asking him to correct his lies about the Armstrong Op and me.¹¹ I also blogged a note about Ruby’s 1992 libel and Rathbun’s hiring Ruby after the Ontario Provincial Police’s raid on the cult in Toronto in 1983.¹² Ruby has not responded.

The discovery of Ruby’s 1992 letter led to my finding the Armstrong Op video transcript versions that the Scientologists also submitted to the IRS in 1992 to get their tax exemption. Doubtlessly, I still have only a fraction of the lies and perversions about me the Scientologists and their collaborators have submitted to the IRS, and other government agencies and personnel in the US, and around the world. What Caroline and I have assembled, however, is sufficient to demonstrate a criminal conspiracy, which makes its own resolution clear.

Finding these transcripts led me back to Rathbun’s 2009 Tampa Bay Times video interview about the IRS. He says that before Miscavige and he visited IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg in 1991, the Scientologists had “a lot of expensive attorneys from D.C. and Washington” who had been “attempting at different levels to start negotiations.” Rathbun says that his surprise visit with Miscavige to Goldberg “opened the door [ ] to get negotiations going.” In this context, “negotiate” means to confer to reach an agreement or to arrange or settle by discussion and mutual agreement.

Rathbun says that after the surprise visit or door opening, the negotiation “went on for at least two years.” He says that he and primarily Miscavige “were literally commuting to Washington D.C. almost every week.” Rathbun says they would “see the IRS, present the answers to [the IRS’s] set of questions, get another set of questions, go back to L.A., get the information together [ ] Boom! Next Sunday, back on a plane, back to D.C., another meeting [ ] That went on for two years.”

Rathbun says that Goldberg opened up the door for the Scientologists to make a case for tax exemption. Rathbun says Goldberg opened that door by creating “a team that didn’t really have a long track record on this.” “This” here has to be understanding and standing up to the Scientologists’ lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior against citizens and even against the US Government. Rathbun says that Goldberg brought in IRS personnel to deal with the Scientologists who were “fresh, who [ ] knew exempt organizations but didn’t have a long history with Scientology.”

Rathbun black PRs the IRS personnel who had a track record and a long history with the Scientologists as “some real haters, some real Scientology haters within.” He says they “had an attitude of, no matter what you said, they were going to [ ] deny the exemption.” Rathbun is lying, and his reason for lying is obvious. The IRS personnel with track records and a knowledge of history, and, I suppose, consciences, hated the Scientologists’ lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior against citizens and Government. These knowledgeable IRS personnel might have especially hated, just as many knowledgeable non-IRS people hate, lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior being directed and justified by “religion.”

With knowledgeable, incorrupt track record IRS personnel, the Scientologists would have had to tell the truth in their submissions to “make a case for exemption.” And, of course, if they told the truth, the Scientologists could never obtain an exemption. Goldberg, according to Rathbun, got rid of the knowledgeable, track record personnel, and replaced them with a team of agents, supposedly selected for their ignorance, but definitely selected for their corruptness, who would then allow, and in fact require, that the Scientologists continue to lie to make the case for exemption. The Scientologists had to provide statements, facts and answers to the Goldberg team’s questions that were acceptable to the Goldberg team. The Scientologists and the Government conspirators reached an agreement on what would be acceptable by negotiations over two years. By law, what the Scientologists submitted had to be true. The Government conspirators had to have required that in vital areas what the Scientologists submitted be false. Even though Rathbun only admits to the “Goldberg team,” the term “Government conspirators” is proper because the various decisions, from the first door opening, involved other US Government departments and personnel beyond the IRS.

Rathbun says in his Tampa Bay Times interview that Goldberg’s getting rid of the team with the track record and bringing in a team without a long history with Scientology was “so positive and unique.” This is because it let the Scientologists get away with lying, indeed required them to lie. From the Scientologists’ viewpoint, that is as positive as it gets. Before then, having to deal with the track record IRS team, for years the Scientologists had not been able to get away with lying for their exemption; so finally being able to get away with their lying was unique. When Goldberg got rid of the incorrupt track record team, the Scientologists had to lie to give the Government conspirators both the basis for the exemption and the justification for actions the Government conspirators took to make it possible for the Scientologists to lie and have their lies accepted and work. The Scientologists’ submissions to the IRS that resulted in the exemption contain black PR about the knowledgeable IRS personnel that Goldberg took off the Scientology case or cases.

In the Times interview, Rathbun provides what he says were the Scientologists’ purposes for all their efforts to obtain IRS tax exemption: to facilitate getting away with the torts and crimes their victims were alleging in legal proceedings; and to keep, and keep making, money.

[I]t was always perceived that the IRS was the most important thing to handle because if you have tax exemption you have [ ] religious recognition, you’re treated differently in courts, you know, there’s [ ] some level of almost immunity, First Amendment immunity, to a lot of the type of allegations that were being made.

So, the IRS was the big thing to handle. [W]hen I was involved in that in the late ’80s, we had calculated that they, the IRS, considered that the churches had upward of a billion dollars in liability.

And the total reserves of the church were [ ] a fraction of that. Maybe in the 200 million range. So, literally, they could have wiped Scientology out five times through.

So [ ] between having got rid of a lot of the civil suits in the mid ’80’s and ’93, when we ultimately got exemption, I mean the number one mission was to obtain [ ] tax exemption from the IRS and [ ] that was the bulk of what my attention was on and what I worked on.

The Scientologists considered their attitude, intention and actions against the IRS personnel who opposed their tax exemption demands over many years, war. The Scientologists even organized a monstrous “The War Is Over” celebration when the IRS granted the exemption in 1993. The Scientologists also considered they were at war with the Suppressive Person class, who were not IRS or Government agents from other departments, but citizens in many walks of life. These are people, the Scientologists declare, who impede or threaten them in their push to have their lies accepted and to get away with other antisocial or criminal behavior. The way ordinary citizens impede or threaten the Scientologists, naturally, is telling the truth about their lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior. In his scripture, Hubbard called the Scientologists’ “battle tactics,” how they were to treat or handle the SPs who they think threaten or impede them, “Fair Game,” or War.

In the Times interview, Rathbun only provides a couple of generalities about his actions and battle tactics against the IRS personnel who knew the Scientologists’ history of lies and other antisocial and criminal activities and impeded them in their seizure of tax exemption.

[I]n the late [ ] ’80s [ ] and going into the early ’90s [ ] I was tasked with [ ] implementing [ ] strategies to try to overwhelm the IRS like they were attempting to overwhelm us. And it was sort of like a “fight fire with fire” situation.

[W]e brought [ ] Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, um, in numerous different jurisdictions. We had [ ] litigation strategies to [ ] counteract their strategies to deny certain churches exemption and that sort of thing. But [ ] it was a huge battlefield. It was nation-wide. It was literally twenty-seven hundred suits at one point.

And I was very much involved in coordinating and coming up with strategies and then executing a lot of that between the late ’80s and the early ’90s.

In a March 9, 1997 New York Times article, writer Douglas Frantz reported some more detail about the Scientologists’ war with the IRS, the “negotiations” with Goldberg’s new IRS team, and the war’s settlement conditions.¹³

The “type of allegations that were being made” against the Scientologists, for which they sought and obtained the “First Amendment immunity” that came with IRS tax exemption, were the type of allegations made by the class of people who sued the Scientology entities, and whose cases the Scientologists identify in their submissions to the IRS. These types of allegations were what the Goldberg IRS team had to have asked about in relation to the issue of the Scientologists’ violations of public policy in the service of their Scientology seniors.

Obviously the IRS accepted the negotiated statements that justify its grant of tax exemption. Obviously too, the IRS would not have granted the tax exemption without the negotiated statements. There are many pages I’ve now found of black PR on Flynn and me that the IRS solicited, and knew to be false. The IRS did not contact me at any time to verify, refute, clarify or contextualize the Scientologists’ claims about me. Hubbard’s death took care of the inurement problem the Scientologists had with the IRS. But a criminal conspiracy does not take care of their public policy problem. It confirms that the tax exemption is unmerited and unlawful.