Norman Starkey, Executor and Trustee of the Estate of L. Ron Hubbard

TRANSCRIPT:

We’re in L. Ron Hubbard’s office and personal library. My name is Norman Starkey. I’m a founding Scientologist, having received my first services in South Africa in 1960. I’m also a founding staff member. I’ve been on staff for fifty-one years. I knew and worked closely with Mr. L. Ron Hubbard for some twenty years. I served him in many capacities. I was one of his Personal Aides and also became the Captain of his 3,300-ton ship that served as his home. On his departure from this life, I was appointed by him to be the Trustee and Executor of his estate.

I first met Mr. David Miscavige in 1977. It was in La Quinta, California, where Mr. Hubbard was located. He had pulled together a team of trained Scientologists to—he was teaching us how to film Scientology training films for the ecclesiastical direction of Scientologists around the world.

Mr. Miscavige was there as the first, initially the video cameraman, and I was appointed as the Producer and Assistant Director. Well, he stood out head and shoulders above everybody else as being competent, capable, fast, swift, responsible. He really knew his tools. And he was very soon promoted to Chief Cameraman.

About a year later, Mr. Miscavige was made the Action Chief. Now, that’s a position very senior in the Church of Scientology, responsible for ecclesiastical direction of Churches of Scientology around the world.

Mr. Hubbard was writing to Mr. Miscavige directly, giving advice and direction on what to do and how to improve the actions which were ongoing at that time. I was his Chief Missionaire, worked very close to him at that time.

There never, ever was any doubt whatsoever that Mr. Hubbard intended Mr. David Miscavige to be the leader of the religion after he had departed this life. I worked very closely with Mr. David Miscavige for forty years. I was with him from 1978, all through the time during which we were in the filmmaking org when Mr. Hubbard was working very closely with us, all through the time when he was in Action and I was his Chief Missionaire.

And then to Author Services where we worked side by side carrying out Mr. Hubbard’s personal affairs. Mr. Miscavige was his personal representative and we were fulfilling Mr. Hubbard’s personal intentions. You can’t get higher than that in the Church of Scientology. The way I see it is that Mr. Hubbard created a blueprint which he gave Mr. Miscavige to fulfill to see that Scientology and Dianetics would always be there and that his legacy of Dianetics and Scientology would be…always be available to all.

Ron Miscavige claims he has some unique insight into Mr. Miscavige’s ascent to the position of leader of the Church. It’s a bald-faced lie. I mean, he has no information whatsoever. He wasn’t there! I am in a unique position of being the only person who worked shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Miscavige for those forty years. All the time when we were in the filmmaking organization, when he was the Action Chief and I was the Chief Missionaire, all through the years we were at Author Services when he was the Chairman of the Board and I was the Executive Director and we were fulfilling L. Ron Hubbard’s directions with regards to his estate planning and the future—I’m the only person in all of Scientology who was there with him for that entire time period.

Ronald Miscavige claims that he has some sort of inside information with regards to the administrative structure of the Church. Totally false. He has no administrative knowledge whatsoever. In fact, he has no administrative training. He couldn’t even add up his own bank balance. And he’s a trumpeter, he worked in the Church band, and he wasn’t there. He has no knowledge whatsoever of Mr. Miscavige’s relationship to Mr. Hubbard or the command directions he was receiving from Mr. Hubbard at the time. He was off selling pots and pans.

Ronald Miscavige was arrested and charged with attempted rape. And as soon as Mr. David Miscavige heard that, he immediately arranged counsel for him in his defense. However, he kept calling Mr. Miscavige, who was involved with a…handling a very serious legal matter. So he asked if I would please receive Mr. Ronald Miscavige’s calls. He needed a shoulder to cry on and he was…spoke to me. So he called me every night at midnight and spoke to me for, sometimes an hour or more, for a couple of weeks. And every time he called me he had expressed his fear and actual terror that he would be raped and that he would commit suicide in jail. It was all mixed up with a bunch of racial slurs too.

To be on the Apollo with L. Ron Hubbard, wow, that’s just incredible. It was the most fabulous years of my life. Mr. Hubbard is such a personable man. He’s—okay, let me give you some examples. He’s always working to raise your competence, to train you, to make you more competent in what you do. He would come up to the bridge and…during a voyage and walk behind the helmsman and see what he was doing and help him to be able to do his job better. He would go up to the flying bridge and go up and talk to the lookout. And... I remember him going up there and saying, “Okay, how many ships there are out there?” And the lookout says, “Well, there’s three.” And L. Ron Hubbard would look out there. His vision was so incredible, he could spot eight vessels out there, and then he would teach the lookout how to look and how to actually spot a vessel on the horizon.

Well, when I first initially arrived I was the Third Mate. Then I became the First Mate, then the Second Mate, then the Supercargo. I was trained in Operations, which is sending out trained people out to organizations to, you know, see how they were doing, help them improve those areas. I became trained also in…in…in doing supervision of technical training on the ship as well. Then I became the Captain of the ship. And I became the Captain only because Mr. Hubbard taught me. I had never been to sea before. I had never sailed a vessel in my life.

But Mr. Hubbard’s training taught me and he taught the whole ship. I mean there were some three-hundred-and-fifty people on that ship at one point. They were all trained by Mr. Hubbard in all their functions. He would run drills, he would come up and train us personally on the post. He taught me everything there was. And of course he always taught me the fact that, you know, you needed to study. You need to look up the technology, you need to read about it and study and so forth. He was always forwarding improved competence and get better at what you’re doing.

Mr. Hubbard was training a team of very trusted Scientologists on how to film Scientology training films. And I was the Producer and Assistant Director to Mr. Hubbard. And I first met Mr. Miscavige who was actually the Video In-Charge. He very soon became the Chief Cameraman.

Now, he stood out to me right at the very beginning, head and shoulders above all the others. And when you’ve held positions like being a captain of a ship, you really learn how to see and tell the differences in personnel. You can see who’s very competent, very capable. At that first moment I saw him I thought, wow, this is a man with outstanding capabilities. He was competent, swift, responsible. He knew his tools. Professional. He knew everything about what he was doing far better than anybody else in Cine at all.

In fact, ever since I’ve known him—and I’ve known Mr. Miscavige now for some forty years—he has always known more about whatever he’s doing than anyone else. Because he studies. He learns. He finds out about it. So he’s very capable and competent in doing that.

Mr. Hubbard was…was training us how to do this. He was the first person that he met when he first came there—he’d arrive on the set in the beginning of the day, and the first person he saw was Mr. Miscavige. He used to walk up and say, “Hiya Misc, how ya doin’?” He called him that little nickname, you know, because he had a very great affinity for him. And at the end of the day’s shoot, he was the last person to say goodbye to and he’d walk up to Mr. Miscavige and he’d wish him well and shake his hand. He didn’t do that with anybody else.

Well, a year after he was first assigned as the Chief Cinematographer, Mr. Miscavige was appointed as the Action Chief by Mr. Hubbard. This is a position of very senior authority in the Church, responsible for top ecclesiastical guidance of Churches of Scientology around the world. Mr. Hubbard was writing to Mr. Miscavige at the time, giving him direction on broad strategic planning. He wasn’t sending that to anyone else, but directly to him.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Hubbard was engaged in estate planning and corporate reorganization to see to the future of Scientology. To that end, Authors Services was formed to handle his personal affairs, and Mr. Hubbard appointed Mr. David Miscavige as the Chairman of its Board of Directors. I also served Mr. Miscavige at that time as the Executive Director.

Also in the 1980s, Mr. Hubbard devised a means of recognizing those in whom he placed the highest of confidence. This was a Star of Trust award. It was a gold star with a diamond set in the center. It was accompanied by a card which stated that the person wearing this pin is speaking on behalf of L. Ron Hubbard. Its first recipient was Mr. Miscavige.

Following Authors Services, Religious Technology Center was formed. That’s the organization responsible for holding and safeguarding the trademarks of Dianetics and Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard appointed Mr. David Miscavige as its Trustee. Today, Mr. Miscavige is the Chairman of its Board of Directors.

As Mr. Hubbard moved on in years and started completing his researches, a handful of really unscrupulous individuals came forward and tried to seize power for themselves. They brought about false reports, litigation and various attacks against the Church. But Mr. Miscavige could see through that and he saw where the lies were coming from; whereas the legal department was overwhelmed and thought this would never go away and they would never be able to get rid of this and so forth.

Due to his work, we started getting good rulings in the appellate courts and started getting favorable decisions and recognition for Scientology and all of its humanitarian organizations that it sponsors all throughout the world—thanks to his work and his persistence to see that truth is brought to the fore.

There was a devastating judgment against the Church designed to totally wipe it out. Mr. Miscavige’s genius was the organization of a religious freedom crusade in which people from all over the world gathered to protest against the lies that this apostate was pushing against the Church to bring about such a judgment. Well, that religious persecution was overturned in sixty days when the truth was made known and the judgment was completely overturned.

The Internal Revenue Service had been attacking the Church for years. They amassed the largest criminal investigation against the Church in the history the…of the United States Internal Revenue Service. The files on Mr. Miscavige alone were larger than those accumulated on Martin Luther King. Once again, this was all the result of apostates spreading lies and false reports.

But when vindicated, we were cleared with full religious recognition in America, Australia, Spain and the United Kingdom. This has all come about as a result of Mr. Miscavige’s working hard, his courage, his persistence and being on the front lines dealing directly to bring truth to the false reports and lies spread by the apostates just like what’s happening today.

All religions have been subjected to attacks in their initial stages. Scientology is no different. However, the key point is that one cannot just ignore the false reports and the religious discrimination in which you get subjected to.

But at the same time, you cannot just become embroiled upon that to the detriment of your religious mission. And that is the key brilliance of Mr. David Miscavige, that he has continued to forward the religious mission of Scientology and its expansion, while continuing to deal with the false reports, see that truth be known and that we are vindicated in every one of these attacks.

The Church has seen unprecedented expansion. Today we have all the materials of Dianetics and Scientology at our fingertips. We’ve never had this before. Not only the materials, but the materials in exact, pristine form. The amount of work Mr. Miscavige did to bring this about is staggering.

Over the years Mr. Hubbard has recorded thousands of lectures. These are the fundamental basics of the spiritual technologies of Dianetics and Scientology. The problem is that over the years, these recorded tapes deteriorate and become brittle, and they were not archivally preserved.

Mr. Hubbard wanted them to be preserved and also made available to all Scientologists. Mr. Miscavige is the first one who ever carried that out. First of all, he devised machines that you could actually put these tapes onto that you could capture the information without destroying the tapes themselves.

Then Mr. Hubbard gave specific direction on how to archivally not only preserve them, but to…to enhance their quality so that they were the highest audible quality, so they could be then discerned and very clearly understood by everyone. So that was accomplished over a period of twenty-five years with Mr. Miscavige being the quality control director, listening to every single tape that was then mixed and put onto archival tape.

Now came the actual genius which was to—how…how would you make these available to everyone? Well, the technology didn’t exist at the time, of how to make these things economically available to everyone. Well, as the technology advanced and—Mr. Miscavige then worked out exactly how to put these onto compact disc and put them into a form where we could produce these on-demand within the Church of Scientology, red…vastly reducing the costs so they would become available to everyone; transcripts available for them all and also translated into fifteen languages. So after fifty years, now, in the last ten years, we have every single one of L. Ron Hubbard’s lectures made available to everyone.

All of the books that Mr. Miscavige spent thousands and thousands of hours, working up to eighteen hours a day on—he took every single book that Mr. Hubbard had ever written and went through it page by page comparing it to Mr. Hubbard’s original handwritten notes. Went back and found even the first printers’ proofs to see what was marked on them.

He listened to—many of those books, actually Mr. Hubbard had tape-recorded. He listened to those tape recordings. Why? To make sure, one, that Mr. Hubbard’s words were exactly duplicated. Two, to make sure that the punctuation within those was exactly perfect, right down to the exact commas. Every one of those books has been duplicated exactly the way the Founder originally gave them. We have our scriptures in pristine format, thanks to Mr. Miscavige.

And then there are all Mr. Hubbard’s written works. I mean all of his books, to be translated into all the languages of Earth. How do you do that without having to have huge outlays of finance? Well, Mr. Miscavige’s brilliance was to set up publishing houses unlike anything on Earth, with massive on-demand printing facilities so that in any language, these books could be ama…available at a moment’s notice.

L. Ron Hubbard has written exactly how his technology should be delivered. He actually outlined what is called an Ideal Organization, and it’s specific steps that any organization would be able to perform and things that it would have, that is ideal. Well, lesser past executives looked upon these requirements and Mr. Hubbard’s intentions as being something that was overwhelming, too difficult to do, didn’t know how to actually bring it about.

But Mr. Miscavige, when he took responsibility for Scientology as the…our leader, saw that Mr. Hubbard had written down exactly what should be put there and knew that if Mr. Hubbard said that, it could be done. And he did that. And he has followed through every one of those steps and brought about Ideal Organizations throughout the planet. We now have fifty of them around the world and we open up a new one almost every month.

Our Church’s spiritual cathedral was designed and planned under Mr. David Miscavige’s close supervision. Our Founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had directed very specific services that needed to be delivered in this cathedral. And these services required various equipment, trained personnel, facilities, spaces. All this had to be worked out. Nobody had ever done that. Mr. Miscavige is the only one who took L. Ron Hubbard’s directions and worked out exactly how those could be put into…into these spaces and designed the facilities so that those services could be delivered.

I’ve seen him go out of his way to help someone who has lost a loved one, maybe lost a wife or lost a husband or lost a father or parent or a family member. Well, Mr. Miscavige is the first person to make sure that person actually received counseling so they could address that loss, to see that they were then given a chance to perhaps visit the beach or go out or go to another location so that they could then, you know, just be a little bit more happier about their life. I’ve seen him give flowers and so forth to people. He never forgets somebody’s birthday.

I mean, this is the man who is a genius. He can accomplish anything. I’ve…I’ve seen him come up against the…the most astounding thing—oh my God, how’s he…how’s he going to handle that? But he resolved every single problem and every single thing that’s been thrown at Scientology. But at the same time, no matter how busy, he’s got a thousand things to go and deal with, but you have a concern—and I’ve experienced this myself personally and I’ve seen this with other people as well—he will actually make you feel comfortable. He will help you to actually resolve that problem.

Mr. Miscavige is loved dearly. He’s admired. He is revered by all Scientologists. And I’ve spoken to Scientologists from every single walk of life, from the deckhand to an engineer, to the highest executives, to who are the most competent artists, actors, business people in the top fortune 500. They love him and they revere him, and they love him and revere him for very good reasons. He has led us to victory in all of those attacks against Scientology. He has protected the religion. He has done exactly what the Founder has said to do, and Scientology has seen the greatest expansion it has ever seen in its entire history. It is today classified as the fastest-growing religion on planet Earth. Thank God we have Mr. David Miscavige at the helm.

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