Deep Politics Forum

The following links are from Consortium News:[/url]
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon1.html"]Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Hooking Bush
Despite his virulent anti-Americanism, Rev. Sun Myung Moon still relies on friends in Washington to help him expand his political-and-media power base. Moon's latest reach into South America had the helping hand of former U.S. President George Bush. But the Moon-Bush alliance dates back years and could reach into the future, as Bush lines up conservative backing for the expected White House bid of his eldest son. (7/28/97)
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon2.html"]One Mother's Tale: Rev. Moon & a College Freshman
[/URL] Rev. Moon may devote much energy wooing power-brokers, but his theocratic movement continues to waylay unsuspecting young people -- and wreak havoc on their families. (7-28-97)
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon3.html"]Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right
[/URL]Rev. Sun Myung Moon calls America "Satan's harvest" and vows to subjugate its people under a Korea-based theocracy. Normally, this anti-Americanism would not sit well. But Moon has spread around billions of dollars from mysterious sources to Washington conservatives. The money has helped key allies, such as Jerry Falwell and Oliver North. It's the real Asian money scandal -- and the Washington media is missing it. (8/11/97)
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon4.html"]Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Legend & Lies
[/URL]Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times is demanding that other media play up hearings on how Asians bought influence with Democrats. In its outraged stance, the Times calls itself "America's Newspaper." But it conceals its own role as a secret purveyor of Asian money and its control by the Korean-based Unification Church. Left off the masthead are its publisher, Dong Moon Joo, and its founder, Moon himself. (8/25/97)
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon5.html"]Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Generation Next
[/URL]In 1982, Rev. Sun Myung Moon went to jail for tax fraud. Yet, new testimony suggests that Moon's organization did not change its ways. Questionable practices continue, with church money supporting a decadent lifestyle for Moon's family and with bags of cash arriving from overseas for laundering through church-connected firms, such as the Manhattan Center. (9/8/97)
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon6.html"]Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Drug Allies
[/URL]Washington is obsessed with interpretations of arcane fund-raising laws. But a more serious question -- the political influence-buying of Rev. Sun Myung Moon -- remains unasked. The issue is particularly important because of Moon's free-spending ways and his past alliances with anti-communist crime figures connected to the Japanese yakuza of Ryoichi Sasakawa and the U.S. drug mob of Santo Trafficante Jr. (10/13/97)
[URL="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon7.html"]Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Moon's Billions & Washington's Blind Eye
[/URL]Newly released Justice Department files show how the Reagan-Bush administrations cited the Constitution to protect Rev. Sun Myung Moon from investigation as a foreign agent -- while using his organization to spy on American critics of Reagan policies. Moon apparently earned his political protection the old-fashioned way: he bought it with lots of money. (12/22/97)
More Recent Stories on Moon's Political Empire

Sun Myung Moon



Sun Myung Moon Korean name Hangul 문선명 Hanja 文鮮明 Revised Romanization Mun Seon-myeong McCune–Reischauer Mun Sŏnmyŏng Sun Myung Moon (born January 6, 1920) is the Korean founder and leader of the worldwide Unification Church. He is also the founder of many other organizations and projects involved in political, cultural, artistic, mass-media, educational, public service, and other activities. One of the best-known of these is the conservative Washington Times newspaper.[1] He is famous for holding Blessing ceremonies, often referred to as "mass weddings."
Moon has said, and it is believed by Unification Church members, that he is the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ and is fulfilling Jesus' unfinished mission.[2][3] He has been among the most controversial modern religious leaders, both for his religious beliefs and for his social and political activism.[4]
Early biography

Life in Korea

Moon was born in Sangsa-ri (上思里, lit. "high-thought village"), Deogun-myon, Jeongju-gun, North P'yŏng'an Province[5] (now in North Korea; Korea was then under Japanese rule). His father, Kyung-yoo Moon, was a scholar, while his mother, Kyung-gye Kim, was an active woman. They had six sons and seven daughters, of which Sun Myong Moon was the second son. When he was a child, Moon was heavily affected by his elder brother Yong-Su Moon's deep faith. The family went into bankruptcy when the elder brother of Sun Myung's grandfather, Rev. Yunguk Moon, gave most of the money belonging to the family to an independence movement from Japan. [6] In 2009, the Yonhap News Agency reported that Moon had plans to establish a sacred sanctuary at his birthplace.[7]
In the Moon family, there was a tradition in the form of a superstitous belief that held that if the second son was to receive a Western-style education, he would die early. As a result of this, Sun Myung received a Confucian-style education when he was a child and did not receive his first Western-style education until he was 14 years old.[8] The Moon family held traditional Confucianist beliefs, but converted to Christianity and joined the Presbyterian Church when he was around 10 years old. Moon taught Sunday school for the church.[9] On April 17, 1935, when he was 16 (in Korean age reckoning), Moon says he had a vision or revelation of Jesus while praying atop a small mountain. He says that Jesus asked him to complete the unfinished task of establishing God's kingdom on Earth and bring peace to the world. When he was 19 (in Korean age reckoning), Moon criticized Japanese rule over Korea and Japanese education at the graduation ceremony speech, which made himself a focus of police.[10]
Moon's high school years were spent at a boys' boarding school in Seoul, and later in Japan, where he studied electrical engineering. During this time he studied the Bible and developed his own interpretation of it. After the end of World War II he returned to Korea and began preaching his message.[9]
Moon was arrested in 1946 by North Korean officials. The church states that the charges stemmed from the jealousy and resentment of other church pastors after parishioners stopped tithing to their old churches upon joining Moon's congregation. Police beat him and nearly killed him, but a teenage disciple named Won Pil Kim nursed him back to health.
Moon was arrested again and was given a five-year sentence in 1948 to the Hŭngnam labor camp, where prisoners were routinely worked to death on short rations. Moon credits his survival to God's protection over his life and his habit of saving half his meager water ration for washing the toxic chemicals off of his skin after long days of work, bagging and loading chemical fertilizer with his bare hands. After serving 34 months of his sentence, he was released in 1950 when UN troops advanced on the camp and the guards fled.
The beginnings of the Church's official teachings, the Divine Principle, first saw written form as Wolli Wonbon in 1946. (The second, expanded version, Wolli Hesol, or Explanation of the Divine Principle, was not published until 1957; for a more complete account, see Divine Principle.) Sun Myung Moon preached in northern Korea after the end of World War II and was imprisoned by the regime in North Korea in 1946. He was released from prison, along with many other North Koreans, with the advance of American and United Nations forces during the Korean War and built his first church from mud and cardboard boxes as a refugee in Pusan.[11]
In 1954, he founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul (also known as the Unification Church).[12] The Unification Church expanded rapidly in South Korea and by the end of 1955 had 30 church centers throughout the nation. In 1958, Moon sent missionaries to Japan, and in 1959, to the United States of America. In 1975, Moon sent out missionaries to 120 countries around the world.[11]
Marriages and children

In November 1943, Moon married Sun Kil Choi. Their son, Sung Jin Moon, was born in 1946. They divorced in 1953 soon after Moon's release from prison in North Korea. Choi and Sung Jin Moon are now both members of the Unification Church.[13] Sung Jin Moon married in 1973 and now has three children.[14]
Moon was still legally married to Choi when he began a relationship with his second (common law) wife Myung Hee Kim, who gave birth to a son named Hee Jin Moon (who was killed in a train accident). The church does not regard this as infidelity, because Sun Kil Choi had already left her husband by that time. Korean divorce law in the 1950s made legal divorce difficult and drawn out, so much so that when Myung Hee Kim became pregnant she was sent to Japan to avoid legal complications for Moon.[15]
Moon married his third wife, Hak Ja Han,[16] on April 11, 1960, soon after she turned 17 years old, in a ceremony called the Holy Marriage. Han, called Mother or True Mother by followers, and her husband together are referred to as the True Parents by members of the Unification Church.
Hak Ja Han gave birth to 14 children; her second daughter died in infancy. The family is known in the church as the True Family and the children as the True Children. Shortly after their marriage, they presided over a Blessing Ceremony for 36 couples, the first of many such ceremonies.
Nansook Hong, ex-wife of Hyo Jin Moon, Sun Myung Moon's eldest son, said in her 1998 book In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family that both Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han told her about Moon's extramarital affairs (which she said he called "providential affairs"), including one that resulted in the birth of a boy raised by a church leader, named by Sun Myung Moon's daughter Un Jin Moon on the news show 60 Minutes.[17]
Name and titles

Korean name Hangul 문용명 Hanja 文龍明 Revised Romanization Mun Yong-myeong McCune–Reischauer Mun Yongmyŏng In 1953, Moon changed his name from Mun Yong Myong to Mun Son-myong (which he spelled "Moon Sun Myung"). In a speech Moon explained that the hanja for moon (문, 文), his surname, means "word" or "literature" in Korean. The character sun (선, 鮮), composed of "fish" and "lamb" (symbols of Christianity), means "fresh." The character myung (명, 明), composed of "sun" and "moon", (which was part of his given name), means "bright." Together, sun-myung means "make clear." So the full name can be taken to mean "the word made clear." Moon concluded by saying, "My name is prophetic." [18]
In the English-speaking world, Moon is often referred to as Reverend Moon by Unification Church members, the general public, and the media. Unification Church members most often call Moon Father or True Father. He is also sometimes called Father Moon, mostly by some non-members involved with Unificationist projects. Similar titles are used for his wife: Mother, True Mother, or Mother Moon. Dr. Moon has also occasionally been used because Moon received an honorary doctorate from the Shaw Divinity School of Shaw University.
Basic teachings

Main article: Divine Principle
Moon's main teachings are contained in the book Divine Principle (retranslated in 1996 as Discourse on Divine Principle[19]).
1970s

Move to the U.S.

In 1971 Moon moved to the United States, which he had first visited in 1965. He remained a citizen of the Republic of Korea and maintained a residence in South Korea.[20]
Support for Nixon

In 1974 Moon supported President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.[3] Church members prayed and fasted in support of Nixon for three days in front of the United States Capitol, under the motto: "Forgive, Love and Unite." On February 1, 1974 Nixon publicly thanked them for their support and officially received Moon. This brought Moon and the Unification Church into widespread public and media attention in the United States.[21]
Public speeches

In the 1970s Moon, who had seldom spoken to the general public before, gave a series of public speeches to audiences in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The largest were a rally in 1975 against North Korean aggression in Seoul and a speech at an event organized by the Unification Church in Washington D.C. that also featured fireworks and music. The United States Park Police estimated an attendance of 50,000 at this event.[13][22]
United States congressional investigation

Main article: Fraser Committee
In 1977 and 1978, a subcommittee of the United States Congress led by Congressman Donald M. Fraser conducted an investigation of South Korea – United States relations and produced a report that included 81 pages about Moon and what the subcommittee termed "the Moon Organization."[23] The Fraser committee found that the KCIA decided to use the Unification Church as a political tool within the United States and that some Unification Church members worked as volunteers in Congressional offices. Together they founded the Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization which acted as a propaganda campaign for the Republic of Korea.[24] The committee also investigated possible KCIA influence on the Unification Church's campaign in support of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.[25] Robert Boettcher, the staff director of the committee, in his book Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980) reported what he described as financial corruption.[26]
1980s


Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han


U.S. tax case

Main article: Sun Myung Moon tax case
In 1982 Moon was convicted by the U.S. government for filing false federal income tax returns and conspiracy. His conviction was upheld on appeal in a split decision. He was given a prison sentence and spent 18 months in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Many individuals, organizations and religious figures protested the charges, saying that they were unjust and threatened freedom of religion and free speech. Based on this case, reporter Carlton Sherwood wrote the book Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
Support for Ronald Reagan

In 1980 Moon indirectly supported the campaign of Ronald Reagan for President. He asked the church-owned New York newspaper News World to print a headline saying "Reagan Landslide" on the day of the election, before the outcome was known.[27]
Death and "return" of second son

The second son of Hak Ja Han and Moon, Heung-Jin Moon, died on January 2, 1984, from injuries suffered in a car crash in December 1983. Moon ascribed great importance to his son's death, and Heung-Jin Moon is officially regarded to be the "king of the spirits" in heaven, and is now said to be conducting seminars in heaven for departed souls. For several years church members "channeled" his spirit, and in 1987-8 a Zimbabwean member who became known as "the Black Heung Jin Nim" was accepted by Moon and his family as Heung Jin Moon's continuous channel, and toured the world giving speeches, getting confessions, and subjecting some members to beatings. Long-time member Damian Anderson reports seeing him
and describes
Nansook Hong recounts: "No one outside the True Family was immune from the beatings. Soon the mistresses he acquired were so numerous and the beatings he administered so severe that members began to complain. He beat Bo Hi Pak—a man in his sixties—so badly that he was hospitalized for a week in Georgetown Hospital."[29] Washington Post staff writer Michael Isikoff reported that "Later, Pak underwent surgery in South Korea to repair a blood vessel in his skull, according to Times executives."[30]
Founding The Washington Times

Main article: The Washington Times
In Washington, Moon found common ground with strongly anti-Communist leaders of the 1980s, including Reagan. Using Unification Church funds in 1982, Moon, Bo Hi Pak, and other church leaders founded The Washington Times. By 1991, Moon said he spent about $1 billion on the paper[31] (by 2002 roughly $1.7 billion),[32] which he called "the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world".[33]
Opposition to the Soviet Union

In 1976, Moon told church members that one day he would organize "a great rally for God in the Soviet Capital." In 1980 Moon founded the anti-communist organization CAUSA International. In August 1985 the Professors World Peace Academy, an organization founded by Moon, sponsored a conference in Geneva to debate the theme "The situation in the world after the fall of the communist empire." Moon suggested the topic. In August 1987 the Unification Church student association CARP led a reported 300 demonstrators in Berlin calling for communist leaders to bring down the Berlin Wall.[13][34]
1990s

Visit to the Soviet Union

In April 1990 Moon visited the Soviet Union and met with President Mikhail Gorbachev. Moon expressed support for the political and economic transformations under way in the Soviet Union. At the same time the Unification Church was expanding into formerly communist nations.[35] Massimo Introvigne, who has studied the Unification Church and other new religious movements, has said that after the disestablishment of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moon has made anti-communism much less of a priority.[13]
Relationship with George H. W. Bush

In the mid-1990s, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush accepted millions of dollars from Moon's Women’s Federation for World Peace to speak on Moon's behalf around the world, a fact[11] that Moon and the Unification Church have widely publicised, particularly in efforts to improve the image of the Unification Church outside the US. While discussing one of Bush's trips (a 1995 tour of Japan), Bo Hi Pak said:
"Then George and Barbara Bush went to Fukuoka, the capital of Kyushu. The people of Kyushu were flabbergasted at Father and Mother's power to tell a U.S. president what to do and plan his schedule. Incredible. This completely changed the attitude of the Japanese government and media toward the Unification community."[36] Daughter-in-law's book questions role as "True Parent"

When the Moons' eldest son Hyo Jin Moon was 19 years old, Sun Myung Moon picked a 15-year-old wife for him, Nansook Hong, with whom he had five children.[37] In 1998 Hong published a book about her experiences in the Moon family, In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family (ISBN 0-316-34816-3), which the New Yorker Magazine called Moon's "most damaging scandal".[38] The "tell-all memoir"[39] openly challenges Moon and his wife's role in church teachings as "True Parents". According to Hong, and later confirmed by his public confessions and his own statements in a court deposition on November 15, 1996,[40] Hyo Jin Moon had repeated problems with substance abuse, pornography, infidelity, violence and run-ins with the law. A few years later, Hong left the Moon estate with her children, subsequently publishing the book and appearing in several interviews, including 60 Minutes.[41] She told TIME Magazine: "Rev. Moon has been proclaiming that he has established his ideal family, and fulfilled his mission, and when I pinpointed that his family is just as dysfunctional as any other family - or more than most - then I think his theology falls apart."[42] For some Unification Church members, this book was a revealing portrait of the way Sun Myung Moon and his wife had raised their children, and caused a great deal of soul-searching.[43]
Son's death

On October 27, 1999 the Moons' sixth son, Young Jin, fell to his death from the 17th floor of a Reno, Nevada hotel. Police reports and the coroner officially recorded the death as a suicide. Moon has said that he does not believe it was suicide.[44][45]
2000s

In 2000 Moon joined Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in sponsoring the Million Family March in Washington D.C., a follow-up event to the Million Man March held in 1995.[46]
In January 2001 Moon sponsored President George W. Bush's Inaugural Prayer Luncheon for Unity and Renewal.[47]
In 2001 Moon presided over the wedding of now-excommunicated Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo and Maria Sung, a Korean acupuncturist. This attracted worldwide media attention. Milingo later founded the controversial organization Married Priests Now.[48][49]
In 2003 Moon sponsored the first Peace Cup international club football tournament.[50][51][52]
Schengen ban

Between 2002 and 2006, Moon and his wife were banned from entry into Germany and the other 14 Schengen treaty countries, on the grounds that "Reverend Moon and his wife were considered by the federal government to be leaders of a "sect" that endangered the personal and social development of young people". The Netherlands and a few other Schengen states let Moon and his wife enter their countries in 2005.[53]
Coronation by Members of United States Congress

Main article: Sun Myung Moon coronation controversy
In 2004, at a March 23 ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) wore white gloves and carried a pillow holding an ornate crown that was placed on Moon's head.
Moon delivered a long speech in which he stated that he was "sent to Earth . . . to save the world's six billion people. . . . Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."[54]
120-city world speaking tour

On September 12, 2005, at the age of 85, Moon inaugurated the Universal Peace Federation with a 120-city world speaking tour.[55] At each city, Moon delivered his speech titled "God's Ideal Family - the Model for World Peace".
Successor

In April 2008, Moon appointed his youngest son Hyung Jin Moon to be the new leader of the Unification Church and the worldwide Unification Movement, saying, "I hope everyone helps him so that he may fulfill his duty as the successor of the True Parents."[56]
Helicopter crash

On July 19, 2008, Moon, his wife, and 14 others were slightly injured when their Sikorsky S-92 helicopter crashed during an emergency landing and burst into flames in Gapyeong.[57][58] Moon and all 15 others were treated at the nearby church-affiliated Cheongshim Hospital.[59] Experts from the United States National Transportation Safety Board, the United States Federal Aviation Administration, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, and General Electric assisted the South Korean government in its investigation of the crash.[60][61]
Autobiography

In 2009, Moon's autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen (Korean: 평화를 사랑하는 세계인으로)[62], was published by Gimm-Young Publishers in South Korea. An English translation was expected to be published in the United States later that year.[63][64]
Criticism and controversies

Moon is known as the "True Father," his wife as the "True Mother," (together as the "True Parents"), and their children as the "True Children" (collectively as the "True Family").[65] In her 1998 book In the Shadow of the Moons, Nansook Hong, ex-wife of Sun Myung Moon's eldest son Hyo Jin Moon, (who lived with the Moon family for 15 years) says the leader and his family live a "lavish" lifestyle and that Sun Myung Moon is treated like a god.
Journalist Peter Maass, in an article in The New Yorker, wrote:
A little before dawn one day last April, a chauffeur-driven Mercedes sedan entered the grounds of an estate in Tarrytown, New York, and stopped in front of a brick carriage house that had been converted into a meeting room. An elderly passenger in a business suit got out of the car and, with his wife a few steps behind him, walked inside, where some hundred and fifty people were singing hymns. The singing stopped when the couple entered and made their way through the room. The worshippers shuffled aside, bowing their heads. Once the man and his wife were seated, everyone bowed again, this time dropping to their knees and touching their foreheads to the floor. There are, certainly, differing degrees of devotion among Moon's followers; the fact that they bow at the right moment or shout "Mansei!" in unison doesn't mean they believe everything Moon says, or do precisely what he commands. Even on important issues, like Moon's claiming to be the messiah, there are church members whom I met, including a close aide to Moon, who demur. A religious leader whom they respect and whose theology they believe, yes; the messiah, perhaps not.[66] Abuse of money

Critics contrast Moon's "opulent" personal lifestyle with that of church members who are asked to sacrifice both in their careers and in donating most of what little they have.[67] The Moon family situation is described as one of "luxury and privilege"[68] and as "lavish".[69]
Moon owns or sponsors major business enterprises, including The Washington Times, the United Press International, and Pyeonghwa Motors.[70] A small sampling of other operations include computers and religious icons in Japan, seafood in Alaska, weapons and ginseng in Korea, huge tracts of land in South America, a recording studio and travel agency in Manhattan, a horse farm in Texas and a golf course in California.[71]
In a 1992 letter to The New York Times, author Richard Quebedeaux, who had taken part in several Unification Church projects, criticized Moon's financial judgement by saying, "Mr. Moon may well be a good religious leader with high ideals, but he has also shown himself to be a poor businessman."[72]
Theocracy

According to the New York Times, "outside investigators and onetime insiders … give a picture of a theocratic powerhouse that is pouring foreign fortunes into conservative causes in the United States."[73] Moon's position on the First Amendment's Establishment Clause are unclear. He has frequently relied on First Amendment protections in various legal matters relating to himself or the Unification Church, but he also teaches that religion and politics are inseparable entities. Critics have characterized his call for unity between religion and politics contrary to the principle of separation of church and state.[74]
Church role in munitions manufacturing

Church-related businesses engaged in munitions manufacturing in South Korea during the 1960s, as reported by the Fraser Committee a United States Congressional committee which investigated the Unification Church and its relationship with the government of South Korea in 1978. According to the same report, Unification Church owned Tongil Group, then South Korea's 35th largest industrial conglomerate[75], which was involved in weapons manufacture and "is an important defense contractor in Korea. It is involved in the production of M-16 rifles, antiaircraft guns, and other weapons." In fact, as South Korea is technically still at war with North Korea, all large manufacturers are required by law to accept military contracts, as Tongil Group was obligated to do under mandatory South Korean law.
Moon's fourth son, Kook Jin "Justin" Moon founded Kahr Arms, a small-arms company based in Blauvelt, New York with a factory in Worcester, Massachusetts.[76][77]
According to the Washington Post, "Some former members and gun industry critics perceive a contradiction between the church's teachings and its corporate involvement in marketing weapons promoted for their concealability and lethality."[78]
Comments on homosexuality

In 1997 gay rights advocates criticized Moon based on comments he made in a speech to church members, in which he said: "What is the meaning of lesbians and homosexuals? That is the place where all different kinds of dung collect. We have to end that behavior. When this kind of dirty relationship is taking place between human beings, God cannot be happy," and referred to homosexuals as "dung-eating dogs."[79][80] He also said in 2007 that "free sex and homosexuality both are the madness of the lowest of the human race," and that God detests such behavior, while Satan lauds it.[81]
Jews and the Holocaust

Main article: Unification Church antisemitism controversy
Other controversies arose over Moon's statements about the Holocaust being (in part) "indemnity" (restitution) paid by the Jews, a consequence of Jewish leaders not supporting Jesus, which contributed to his murder by the Roman government.[82][83]
Allegations of sex rituals

In the early years of the Unification Church in South Korea, opponents of the church made unproven claims that Moon led his congregation as a sex cult. The church has vehemently rejected the claims, and a former member, South Korean pastor Sa Hun Shim, was convicted of criminal libel for publishing the allegation, in 1989, when a Seoul court held that this persistent rumor was without basis.[84]
In 1955, Moon himself had been arrested and acquitted of charges that the church calls trumped-up.[85] And in 1960, in what Moon calls the "climax of persecution,"[86] fourteen students and two professors were dismissed from Ehwa Women's University in Seoul on the grounds that their participation in the faith was immoral.[87]
Rumors of polyamory made it into early U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and FBI reports monitoring the church. The intelligence cables claimed Moon conducted sex rituals among six married female disciples (the "Six Marys") to prepare the way for the virgin who would marry Moon and become the "True Mother." Conservative journalist Carlton Sherwood has argued that the claims were invented by Christian missionaries. An FBI field report alleged that Moon's rites involved "having a nude women in a darkened room with MUN[sic] while he recited a long prayer and caressed their bodies. . . . At these meetings, MUN prepared special food and drink, and gathered his nude congregation into a darkened room where they all prayed for twenty-four hours."[88]
In 1993, a wartime friend of Moon, Chung Hwa Pak, revived the allegations in his book "Tragedy of the Six Marys," released in Japan as "Roku Maria no Higeki." But he subsequently rejoined the church and recanted, publishing a 1995 confession, "The Apostate," in which he said he had lied about Moon out of jealousy. [89] Moon's estranged daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, has said that she believes the sex claims are true, writing: "I've always wondered what the price was of that retraction." [90]
References

1. ^ AROUND THE NATION; Sun Myung Moon Paper Appears in Washington from The New York Times
   
2. ^ Moon At Twilight: Amid scandal, the Unification Church has a strange new mission, Peter Maass New Yorker Magazine, September 14, 1998. "Moon sees the essence of his own mission as completing the one given to Jesus--establishing a "true family" untouched by Satan while teaching all people to lead a God-centered life under his spiritual leadership."..."Although Moon often predicts in his sermons that a breakthrough is near, Moffitt realizes that Moon may not come to be seen as the messiah in his lifetime."
   
3. ^ a b Unifying or Dividing? Sun Myung Moon and the Origins of the Unification Church, by George D. Chryssides, University of Wolverhampton, U.K. A paper presented at the CESNUR 2003 Conference, Vilnius, Lithuania.
   
4. ^ Sun Myung Moon in Congressional Record (1976) from Wikisource
   
5. ^ Reverend Sun Myung Moon brthplace, Wikimapia
   
6. ^ "The traditions and family environment of the Moon clan from Nampyeong". True Parents' Life Course, Volume 1. Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, Historical Committee. Seonghwa Publications. 1999. pp. 29-45. (Publication in Korean): Nampyeong Mun ssi gamun-eui jeontong-gwa gajeong-hwan'gyeong. Chambumonim Saeng'ae-Nojeong 1-gweon. Segye Pyeonghwa Tongil Gajeong Yeonhap, Yeoksa Pyeonchan Uiwonhoe. Seonghwa Chulpansa. 1999. pp. 29-45. 남평문씨 가문의 전통과 가정환경 《참부모님 생애노정 1권》. 세계평화통일가정연합 역사편찬위원회. 성화출판사. 1999. pp. 29-45.
   
7. ^ Pyeonghwa Motors upbeat about N. Korea's market potential, Yonhap News Agency, July 22, 2009
   
8. ^ "The first education and entrance to the Christian faith". True Parents' Life Course, Volume 1. Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, Historical Committee. Seonghwa Publications. 1999. pp. 29–45. (Publication in Korean): Chogi Hakseup-gwa Shinang Ip-mun. Chambumonim Saeng'ae-Nojeong 1-gweon. Segye Pyeonghwa Tongil Gajeong Yeonhap, Yeoksa Pyeonchan Uiwonhoe. Seonghwa Chulpansa. 1999. pp. 29-45. 초기학습과 신앙입문 《참부모님 생애노정 1권》. 세계평화통일가정연합 역사편찬위원회. 성화출판사. 1999.
   
9. ^ a b Unification Church: Mass Moonie Marriage in the US, BBC News, Saturday, November 29, 1997.
   
10. ^ "The first education and entrance to the Christian faith". True Parents' Life Course, Volume 1. Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, Historical Committee. Seonghwa Publications. 1999. pp. 29-45. (Publication in Korean): Chogi Hakseup-gwa Shinang Ip-mun. Chambumonim Saeng'ae-Nojeong 1-gweon. Segye Pyeonghwa Tongil Gajeong Yeonhap, Yeoksa Pyeonchan Uiwonhoe. Seonghwa Chulpansa. 1999. pp. 29-45. 초기학습과 신앙입문 《참부모님 생애노정 1권》. 세계평화통일가정연합 역사편찬위원회. 성화출판사. 1999.
    
11. ^ a b c Introvigne, 2000
    
12. ^ excerpt The Unification Church Studies in Contemporary Religion, Massimo Introvigne, 2000, Signature Books, Salt Lake City, Utah, ISBN 1-56085-145-7
    
13. ^ a b c d The Unification Church: Studies in Contemporary Religion Massimo Introvigne, Signature Books, ISBN 1-56085-145-7
    
14. ^ Sung Jin Nim's Family Kathryn Coman, 2008
    
15. ^ Hee Jin Moon and Myung Hee Kim, Unification Sermons and Talks, Dan Fefferman, December 25, 1998.
    
16. ^ Normally, in relaying Moon's biography to members, his second wife, (common-law wife) Myung Hee Kim, is counted as the second wife and Hak Ja Han is counted as the third wife.
    
17. ^ Nansook Hong interviews on local and national news, including 60 Minutes, where Moon's illegitimate son mentioned by name (without being asked to name him) by his daughter Un Jin Moon.
    
18. ^ "Reverend Sun Myung Moon Speaks on The Necessity for the Day of Victory of Love". January 15, 1984. http://www.unification.net/1984/840115.html. Retrieved 2006-08-09.
    
19. ^ Exposition of the Divine Principle, HSA-UWC, 1996,which was codified by Hyo-Won Eu, who was President of the Korean Church in the early days.
    
20. ^ "Image of Moon's arrival" (JPG). http://www.tparents.org/Library/Moon/Pho...F-1965.jpg. Retrieved 2006-04-29.
    
21. ^ Intovigne, 2000
    
22. ^ "Moon Festival Draws 50,000 to Monument", Washington Post, September 19, 1976.
    
23. ^ Investigation of Korean-American Relations; Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives.
    
24. ^ Spiritual warfare: the politics of the Christian right, Sara Diamond, 1989, Pluto Press, Page 58
    
25. ^ Ex-aide of Moon Faces Citation for Contempt, Associated Press, Eugene Register-Guard, August 5, 1977
    
26. ^ Boettcher, Robert (1980). Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. pp. 168-177, 339-341, 345-348. ISBN 0030445760.
    
27. ^ ‘Messiah’ by Bo Hi Pak
    
28. ^ Anderson was particularly upset that top church officials and their assistants prevented people by force from leaving. Black Heung Jin Nim in DC by Damian Anderson.
    
29. ^ Hong, Nansook. (1998). In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family. Little, Brown. (ISBN 0-316-34816-3)
    
30. ^ Theological Uproar in Unification Church; Rev. Moon Recognizes Zimbabwean as His Reincarnated Son by Michael Isikoff, Washington Post staff writer. Accessed Saturday, August 19, 2006.
    
31. ^ "Literally nine hundred million to one billion dollars has been spent to activate and run the Washington Times" -Sun Myung Moon, "True Family and True Universe centering on True Love", Founder's Address, 15th Anniversary of The Washington Times, June 16, 1997, Washington, DC.
    
32. ^ "As of this year, Moon and his businesses have plowed about $1.7 billion into subsidizing the Times, say current and former employees." "Moon Speech Raises Old Ghosts as the Times Turns 20", by Frank Ahrens, Washington Post, May 23, 2002.
    
33. ^ Chinni, Dante (2002). "The Other Paper: The Washington Times's role". Columbia Journalism Review. http://www.cjr.org/issues/2002/5/wash-chinni.asp. Retrieved 2006-04-29.
    
34. ^ "Protest Groups Clash Near Wall", The Associated Press, August 8, 1987.
    
35. ^ EVOLUTION IN EUROPE; New Flock for Moon Church: The Changing Soviet Student from The New York Times
    
36. ^ Truth is My Sword, Volume II by Bo Hi Pak, Chapter 60: Give and Take of Love. New York, NY.
    
37. ^ In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family (ISBN 0-316-34816-3).
    
38. ^ Moon At Twilight: Amid scandal, the Unification Church has a strange new mission, Peter Maass New Yorker Magazine, September 14, 1998.
    
39. ^ Moon At Twilight: Amid scandal, the Unification Church has a strange new mission, Peter Maass New Yorker Magazine, September 14, 1998
    
40. ^ Boston Globe December 20, 1997
    
41. ^ Nansook Hong interviews on local and national news, including 60 Minutes, where Moon's illegitimate son was confirmed by name by his daughter Un Jin Moon.
    
42. ^ Life with the Moons: A conversation with Nansook Hong, former daughter-in-law of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, TIME Magazine, October 13, 1998.
    
43. ^ In a review of the book, Marcia Rudin writes that due to Nansook Hong's position within the Moon family, her story cannot simply be dismissed by cult apologists as an atrocity tale. Rudin went on to state that: "The compelling credibility of this book demands that Nansook's story be paid attention to. Many Unification Church members are paying it attention, for, according to Nansook and others, the first-hand testimony delivered through this book has already caused many Unification Church members to leave the group." Book Review, Marcia Rudin, Cultic Studies Journal, Volume 16, Number 1, 1999.
    
44. ^ LAS VEGAS RJ:NEWS: Moon's son dies in fall from hotel
    
45. ^ [url=http://www.apologeticsindex.org/an991111.html#18]Apologetics re...

Historical Background

Rev. Moon turning over Unification Church to sons
'Moonies' mull future without founder
Moonie peace group to hold biggest UK event
Sun Myung Moon released from hospital
Cult chief in helicopter crash horror
FBI File
Son of Moonies founder takes over as church leader
Founder's son takes on SKorea Unification Church leadership
Cult to pay woman huge compensation over forced donations for ancestors
Protesters disrupt ex-gay speaker at Georgia State
Unification Church agrees to pay woman 230 million yen
Schismatic sect arises in Zambia, with ties to Milingo
Sun Myung Moon adherents try to get into Russian education system, historian of cults says
Judges clear religious leader Moon to enter Germany
Controversial excommunicated archbishop surfaces in Seoul
Solicitors arrested in city
Moonies make a comeback
Rev. Moon and the black clergy
Honduran cardinal rejects award from Unification Church
Moon's church protests unflattering coverage
Church denies pressuring followers to break with non-believers
Zambia: Archbishop Milingo Outlines His New Mission
Despite controversy, Moon and his church moving into mainstream
A Moon Swoon
Moonstruck
Fijians escape New Zealand cult - report
Unification Church head Rev Moon to visit
Throw out the Moonies' messiah, demand MPs
Dark side of Moonies
Moonies' leader allowed into UK
Demands for money sowed seeds of doubt in convert
Moon Banned to Enter Bulgaria
Unification Seminary aims to triple enrollment -- at least
Unification Church revising plan for new house of worship
SOCCER: Spurs defend Peace Cup involvement
Mount Baker graduate ready for 2-year mission trip
Moonies alarm local Muslims
Unificationist group back for second go at charter
Cult leader detained on fraud charges
[URL="http://www.rickross.com/reference/unif/unif221.html"] A Onetime Moonie Helps Free Cultists
From Mental Bonds - Without Force [/URL]
Canadian recalls decade spent within the Unification Church
Royal pastor worried about door-to-door 'fraud'
U.S. presidents endorse Sun Myung Moon from 'spirit world'
High Level Endorsements
Unification Church plans house of worship in Tarrytown
Presidential Body Demands Tough Action Against 'Subversive Cult
Environmental documents for school nearly complete
Rev. Moon's Napa resort sold to developer
Moonies case dismissed
In the Name of God - Video
Escape from the Moonies - Video
Council delays approval of Unification Church dorms
Archbishop's sect sex lure
Church-backed school before planners
Moon pitches Kona school
1,000 Help Spiff Up District Schools
Mystery of Life Solved
Decisions Differ on Religious Ad
Has Rev. Moon lost his mind, or does he have a hotline to heaven?
Moonies Recruit Christian Clergy for Mass "Blessing"
350 quit being 'Moonies'
Saga Over Married Archbishop Ends
Rev. Moon Reaching Out To African-American Ministers
Ballet From the Heart of Seoul
Universal Ballet's Really Big Show
Moonies ordered to pay 29 mil. yen for mind control
Moonies ordered to compensate for illegal enticement
Moon's light dims
Rev. Sun Myung Moon draws crowd to Minneapolis church
Local pastors welcome Moon
Rev. Moon's Unification Message Coming to Utah
Children of a Lesser God
Koreas Unification Church dipping its toe into South Pacific
Moonies target Irish students for conference
Moon-related funds filter to evangelicals.
Moon and his ballet stars
Bayou La Batre residents embrace church they once called a cult
Moon's church from inside and out
Moonies pay out in carrot-juice fiasco
Rev. Sun Myung Moon celebrates 80th birthday with 3,000
Growing Up With The Moonies
Moon arms factory
Church's Pistol Firm Exploits a Niche
Moonie parents?
Korean financial crisis hits Rev. Moon's empire
What in God's name is going on?
Cult branches spread worldwide
The Dysfunctional Messiah?
Leader moonstruck over America
Venezuela Restricts Unification Church
Joint Declaration Concerning the Moon Organization
Once-Generous Japanese become disenchanted with Moon's Church
France: "Do The Moonies Still Exist?"
Rev. Moon to serve jail time
"The Moonies"
Organizations Controlled by and/or Associated with Moon
Sun Myung Moon in United States Congressional Record 1976
Marshall Islands

Moonies Give Tonga Patrol Boats, Buddhists Give King Award
Reverend Moon's Pacific Rising
Marshall Islands President Note Comments on Rev. Moon
Rev. Sun Myung Moon Continues to Build Pacific Links
Marshall Islands Senator Debrum Explains No Confidence Vote Against President Note
Who Brought Rev. Moon to RMI?
Rev. Sun Myung Moon Pledges Millions to Pacific Countries
South Korean cult leader pledges 10m dollars for task force in Marshall Islands
Moon Businesses

Police accuse cult-linked personal seal retailer of manipulative sales techniques
North Korea in the Slow Lane
Money, Guns, & God
Top U.S. Sushi Company Linked to Whaling
Shark-Smuggling Bust Nets $1 Million for Habitat Protection
Moonies pay $500,000 to avoid shark prosecution
The minister, the sharks and $1.2m
Pastor gets prison for shark smuggling
Murder and the gun maker
UK pastor behind worldwide shark smuggling racket
Moon fish in hot water
The Moonies and the Sharks
Sushi and Rev. Moon
US operator acquires S-92s to boost tourism
Norfolk boat yard set adrift
Drama boom brings 'blessings' to Korean church
Cult leader detained on fraud charges
Insight cuts back as Wash. Times starts re-evaluation
Noticias to Close; Moonies Axing 86
Old stone house may come down
Southern Investor Revving up Business in NK
Rev. Moon sizes up Yeosu as retreat
Boat Builder Moves to New 47,000-SF Bldg.
Pyonghwa Motors, Unification Church Do a Deal
Unification Church Group to Begin Tours to North Korean Capital
Rev. Moon son made gun
Pyonghwa Builds NK Auto Plant
Setting Up Shop in N. Korea
Moonies make bid for QPR
Kodiak, Alaska, Fish-Processing Plant Hauls In Big Fine
Looking for a Miracle
As firms court N. Korea, money isn't only motive
The Rise of the House of Kahr
Unification Church launches auto venture in North Korea
Moons face 2nd hearing over fish
Unification Church to build North Korea car plant
S. Korean Business Vies for N. Korea
South, North Korea join forces in Peace Motors
Uproar after Moonies buy town
Rev. Moon charged with overfishing
Double trouble for Moon empire
Rev. Moon to auction off Texas ranch
Ranch brings $6.5 million
Listing of Moon related businesses
Rev. Moon's Family Values?

Son of Unification Church founder dies
Parents support of abstinence-only
CBS "60 Minutes" report about Moon family
Home-Alone Shock
Some Black Clergy Fired Over Moon Connection
Controversial Message: Moon speaks at church
Reproduction rhetoric eclipses Moon's expected violence talk
Serve God by having babies, Moon urges
Unification's Moon Offers Social Message: 'Time for America to awaken,' he tells SLC crowd
Life as Moonchild Far From Blessed
Lasting love
[URL="http://www.rickross.com/reference/unif/unif85.html"] Group founded by Sun Myung Moon preaches
sexual abstinence in China [/URL]
Moon sect intends to infiltrate youth organizations
Abstinence advocacy group kicked out of Chicago schools
Schools Hit `Cult' Sex-Ed Class
Coroner's Report
Record of Death Narrative
Moon's son dies in fall from hotel
Body of Rev. Moon's son to be taken to Korea
Son of Unification church leader dies
Past returns to haunt 'Parent of the Year'
Longmont dad denies ties to 'happy hookers'
Parent award returned by cult member
Honor Thy Parents
What is the truth behind Parents Day?
The Dark Side of the Moon Family
A Scion Falls Short of Sinless
Celibacy program is dropped, As source is tied to Church
Family takes son from Moon group
Rev. Moon and Marriage

Rev. Moon to preside over mass wedding of 40,000
Unification Church pres sees smaller mass weddings
Tales of women 'marriage migrants'
Italian priest denies Communion to excommunicated Bishop Milingo
My Big Fat Moonie Wedding
Two sides of Moon marriages
Archbishop says Sun Myung Moon behind fight for married priests
Profile: Zambia's controversial archbishop
Never met but made for each other
Bishop Milingo back to Catholic church fold
500 followers of Moon rise and shout, 'We do'
Archbishop's Book Confesses All on Moon Marriage
Moonies ordered to compensate for three forced marriages
Clergy's children take up task of keeping marriages strong
Unification Church weds 3,500 couples in S.Korea
Archbishop´s "Wife" Was Already Married, Report Says
Cardinal says Moon put pressure on Milingo and wife
Vatican releases Milingo's letter to refute his wife's claim it's fake
Pope meets disgraced archbishop
Milingo Rejects Invitation to Avoid Excommunication
Pope to Bishop: Leave your wife or leave the church
'I'll have no more inquisitions'
He's Caused Deep Injury to the Church Communion
Together, Sort Of
As the Moon Turns . . .
A Member of The Wedding
Vatican banishes archbishop over Moon marriage
Catholic Archbishop Marries Physician
Could It Be Love?
Moon Over Imani
Hell Hath No Fury . . .
Moon pushes marriage as vital
Moonies free to go - BI
500 Attend Sex Rally in S. Korea
Rev. Moon Marries 20,000 People
Some 450,000 couples marry in mass ceremony
40,000 to marry in Moonie wedding fest in Seoul
Moon-Lit Matchmakers Nibble At Apple
Unification Church to Host Joint Wedding of 20,000 Couples in Feb.
One missing from Moonstruck mass
Unification Church weds thousands in S.Korea
Rev. Moon calls for new UN-backed religious body for world peace
Moon unites 28,000 couples at $70 each
Whitney Houston a no-show at Moon's mass wedding ceremony
Moon Church Plans 'Blessing '97'
Joint Declaration Concerning the Moon Organization
The Washington Times

Ex-Washington Post Reporter to Lead a Rival
The Washington Times, Hunting For a Bionic Editor in Chief
Bush Sr. To Celebrate Rev. Sun Myung Moon-Again
Tension of the Times
Moonies pushing for changes at Washington Times
News World Layoffs To Idle 86 Workers
Job Bias Case Tests Religious Privacy Rights
Moon Speech Raises Old Ghosts as the Times Turns 20
Moon Eclipses Birthday Bash For Times
Moon, guests celebrate 20th anniversary of The Washington Times
UPI's de Borchgrave becoming editor at large
Hearst Hires Helen Thomas
Washington Times Owner Buys UPI
St. Charles Shelter Turns Down Award
Double trouble for Moon empire
Five resign from Washington Times
University of Bridgeport

Bright Side of the Moon
Prep school at UB independent, universal
College accused of having gay bias
Packed UB hall hears Moon
Church leader holding private event at UB
Finance picks up at UB
UB re-accredited; new programs OK, too
Moon church offers to boost UB funding
UB working toward fiscal self-sufficiency Financial independence won't cut ties to Unification Church
Rev. Moon and Celebrities

Whitney Houston a no-show at Moon's mass wedding ceremony
Conferees put premium on preserving family
Bill Cosby, Presidents Ford and Bush and Others Speak at Conferences Connected to Moon
Celebrities Involved with Moon
Rev. Moon's Political Influence

Foreign Office aide attended peace summit run by Moonies
FBI File
Bush's Younger Brother Visits Paraguay
Glitz and blitz at New York Ritz for huge Lankan delegation
Former Byelorussian parliamentary speaker denies being member of banned sect
Arizona Rep. Anderson weighs run for Mitchell's congressional seat
A Desire to Feed the World and Inspire Self-Sufficiency
State Department Official Picked to Run U.N. Food Program
UN to appoint former Moonie as head of World Food Programme
U.S. Candidate for UN's World Food Program May Get Lame Duck Appointment, Despite Korean Issues
Moonies sign up official backing
$1 million Moonie mystery
Sun Myung, Boris and Neil Bush
Moon praises RP officials for interfaith initiative
Controversial cult guru denounces UN, proposes alternative forum
Visiting Rev. Moon promotes spiritual 'U.N.'
Moonies knee-deep in faith-based funding
Moon's groups lure lawmakers to symposiums and conferences
Warner Helped the Rev. Moon
Moonstruck
Rev. Moon cultivates black allies
The Money-Mooners Meet on Capitol Hill
A Capital Coronation
Lawmakers say they didn't mean to hear Rev. Moon
Senators duped by Moonie event
Whose peace is it?
Argument turns physical after Jefferson GOP event
Town gets 500 acres in open space
Bad Moon on the Rise
Oberg resigns from Ephrata council
Longtime Moonie for Dubya's team?
'Moonies' launch political party in S Korea
Moon 's church preparing to launch a political party
Kavindele Gets Moonies Invitation to Seoul
Solomons PM on mystery Korean trip
The Corps, the Corps, the Corps
Challenges of Development
Religious Right Joins Rev. Moon At Pro-Bush Inaugural Luncheon
Moon Tries to Connect With Black Pastors
Rev. Moon's event raises local hackles
The Bush-Kim-Moon Triangle of Money
Why is TV news ignoring the relationship between Moon and the Bush family?
Evangelicals unaware inaugural event was sponsored by Unification leader
George W. Bush and The Moonies
Farrakhan, Moon Make an Odd or Perfect Couple
Moonies seek recruits in Lithuanian Parliament
Group of shadowy power-players with mind set on one-world control
Brig. Ali clarifies Rev. Moon visit
Rev. Moon, North Korea & the Bushes
Parents Day shows links of Moon's church to GOP
Indonesian President a Champion of Pluralism in Strained Nation
Is Al Haig a Rev. Moon "soul mate"?
The stars come out for a Moon dance
Moonies join hands across the border
Kim Jong-il sends birthday gift to Rev. Moon
Alexander Haig and Rev. Moon are "soul mate[s]"?
Looking for George W.'s Moon link
Aka supports Rev. Moon
Moonie parents?
Religious tolerance essential to America
Anderson, in fact, is fronting for a dangerous cult
Religious views play role in shaping political agendas
Anderson's ties with Rev. Moon in question
Conferees put premium on preserving family
Bill Cosby, Presidents Ford and Bush and Others Speak at Conferences Connected to Moon
Kemp's Moonlighting
Group linked to Moonies sponsoring Bush speeches
Organizations Controlled by and/or Associated with Moon
The Moon Organization: 1978 Congressional Report
Brazil and Rev. Moon

Brazil landless raid Reverend Moon cattle ranch
Over the Moon: how football wins recruits for sect leader in Brazil
Moonies accused of involvement in drugs
Brazil seals off farm belonging to Rev. Moon
Brazilian government may expropriate "moonie" lands
Brazil to confiscate land owned by Moon followers
Brazilians turn heat on Moonies' swamp heaven
Brazil orders arrest of Moon sect leaders
Land-buying sows suspicion
Federal authorities raid offices linked to Sun Myung Moon
Buying Brazil
Brazil probes Moonie land purchases
Rev. Moon fined for crimes against the environment
Letter to US Senator about Moon enclave in Brazil
Court orders evacuation of the Rev. Moon's Brazilian ranch
Brazil Green lawmaker campaigns against Rev. Moon
Rev. Sun Myung Moon sets up soccer team in Brazil
Rev. Moon's followers turn Brazil swamp into paradise
Moon sees a 'new Garden of Eden' in Brazil
Rev. Moon Can Stay on Brazil Ranch
Moon Beams Into Brazil
Paraguay

Bush's Younger Brother Visits Paraguay
Rev. Moon offers land donation to avoid parcel's expropriation
Paraguay to expropriate some Moon holdings
Promised land
Paraguayan Senate votes to expropriate Moon holdings
Paraguayan peasants protest against Moon
http://www.rickross.com/groups/moonie.html

http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/mo...ript.shtml
This is a transcript of a January 21, 1992 broadcast, "Frontline: The Ressurection Of Reverend Moon." Eric Nadler, reporter. Written and produced by Rory O'Connor. Copyright ©1991 WGBH Educational Foundation. Used with permission.
Rory O'Connor is CEO of Globalvision New Media, producers of MediaChannel.
For information on purchasing this program contact Rory O'Connor at roc@globalvision.org.
Watch a 3-minute clip of excerpts from the program:
Slow Connection | Fast Connection
[size=12]To play the video, you'll need to download RealPlayer 8 Basic (free). [/SIZE]
(Soundtrack) Rally: "USA, USA, USA!"
Narrator: On February 9, 1991, in Rapid City, South Dakota, more than a thousand people rallied in support of U.S. troops fighting in the Persian Gulf.
Narrator: The rally was sponsored in part by a group of local veterans. Dianne Petersen was the rally's principal organizer.
Petersen: "I'm a vet myself and I have, I had a sister over there and I really just wanted to do something in support of the troops...So I organized what I called the Little Yellow Ribbon Walk...
Petersen walking in parade: "It's great, many more than I expected."
Petersen: "And I was approached by the American Freedom Coalition, who told me they had a rally planned for the same day and wanted to merge with me."
Narrator: The American Freedom Coalition was a group few people in Rapid City had heard of--and one citizen, Marv Kammerer, was curious.
Kammerer: "About the same time I noticed a billboard on the east side of Rapid City that said Support Our Troops, Join the Freedom March, and on that same sign was the American Freedom Coalition...You know when people buy billboards, it takes money, and local groups, don't spend that kind of money...I get to thinking, 'What is this?' I ask my Congressmen and Senators and they don't tell me. They don't give me the information. So I go to the library and I find some interesting things. The American Freedom Coalition is an extension of the Unification Church — Moonies for short."
Mazzio: "And to find out the Unification Church is behind it, that sort of, you know, sort of threw me. Um, I say to myself, 'What are they trying to gain from this?' Because everybody's heard of the Unification Church. We've all heard of the Reverend Moon. What's he got behind it?"
Petersen: "I felt a little bit abused because.... I felt I was used, my influence with the veteran's organizations was probably a little bit used."
Kammerer: "The vets did not know who they were associated with — and that is their own damn fault. One has to be very careful when people start waving the flag, finding out really what is behind it and what are their motives. We have a weakness in this country to almost give away the bank, if someone waves a flag high enough and long enough. Especially if he packs a Bible."
Narrator: The day before the Rapid City rally, the 18th annual Conservative Political Action Conference was underway in Washington. Part cocktail party, part political bazaar, part serious examination of the issues, its sponsors included pillars of the American right, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Conservative Union. There was also the American Freedom Coalition.
Narrator: Robert Grant, president of the American Freedom Coalition, spoke at a conference banquet. In his remarks, Grant announced that the AFC was sponsoring pro-Desert Storm rallies not just in South Dakota, but in all fifty states.
Grant: "With Governors and Congressmen and Senators and veterans organizations working together to send a message across the seas to Saddam Hussein and the men and women of Desert Storm."
Rev. Jackie Roberts: "Once again, let's say God bless America! (People answer 'God Bless America') C'mon — God bless America!"
Narrator: The American Freedom Coalition's Desert Storm rallies are only the latest effort by Sun Myung Moon to influence American public opinion. Moon's Unification Movement has long supported the projection of American military power overseas.
(Soundtrack) Song: "With a mission to fly and a job to be done. He's missing his wife, and his children."
Narrator: Moon has also consistently promoted a conservative political agenda in the United States. His efforts have not gone unnoticed at the White House. Douglas Wead was a Special Assistant to President Bush responsible for liaison with conservative groups.
Wead: "I'd say right now there are probably two groups among conservative organizations that really have an infrastructure, that have grassroots clout — Concerned Women of America would and the American Freedom Coalition would."
Narrator: During the 1988 election, the AFC printed and distributed 30 million pieces of political literature, including these glossy voter scorecards.
Wead: "I think the scorecards and some of the independent literature published had an enormous effect. In fact, we had huge notebooks filled with published materials from a wide variety of organizations. The best was probably the AFC's. It was by far the slickest and the finest produced material. And when that doesn't cost you anything, and it is not charged against the campaign and is widely distributed to mailing lists across the country, that has a very important impact."
Narrator: The AFC's activities have prompted renewed questions about Sun Myung Moon's involvement in American politics. The AFC calls itself a grassroots organization committed to supporting conservative causes. AFC leaders deny that their group is an "appendage" of Moon's movement, and they are sensitive about the issue. When we asked Robert Grant to discuss AFC ties to Moon, he refused. In a letter to FRONTLINE, Grant stated "I see no point in speaking with you either on camera or off camera."
And when Frontline reporter Eric Nadler visited AFC headquarters, no one would talk.
Nadler: We were just hoping that someone could speak to us.
Receptionist: Not at this time
Nadler: Not at any time, apparently.
Receptionist: Thank you.
Nadler: Have a nice day
Narrator: We had hoped to ask Robert Grant about allegations that the AFC is violating federal law; namely, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Just before World War Two, Congress passed the act, concerned that Japanese and German interests in the U.S. were influencing American public opinion. The act states that any organization involved in political activities and controlled or directed by a foreign principal must register with the Justice Department. It must also report on its activities and provide detailed accounts of its foreign sources of funding.
Narrator: Is the American Freedom Coalition a foreign agent? In 1989, Robert Grant wrote in the Washington Post that more than $5 million — one third of the AFC's money — came from "business interests of the Unification Church." Church officials say that their money comes from overseas — primarily from Japan.
Narrator: Media analyst Brent Bozell is a member of the AFC national policy board.
Bozell: "If it were to come out that what the AFC is doing is being done at the direction of Reverend Moon, it would lose its fifty chapters overnight. That allegation has been out there since the day that AFC was formed and it hasn't stuck because nobody has come up with the smoking gun that he's done it."
Narrator: But Moon's influence over the AFC is underscored by this 1988 letter FRONTLINE obtained from a source who once worked within the Moon Organization. AFC President Robert Grant, writing to Reverend Moon, thanks him for investing heavily and "helping to bring the AFC into being." Grant concludes by telling Moon, "Without your leadership, vision and the support of your devoted followers, the AFC would not exist."
Narrator: The last time most Americans paid attention to Sun Myung Moon was nearly a decade ago. These are the images many still retain of Moon and the "Moonies," as his followers once called themselves: mass weddings of complete strangers chosen as mates by Moon; flower-peddling in the street; and repeated allegations of mind control and brainwashing.
Parent before Congress: "Who can parents turn to when they realize their children have been innocently enslaved by Moon?"
Young woman at press conference: "Within one weekend I was totally, my mind was totally coerced into leaving home, into leaving my parents, into dropping out of school, into being, thinking that I was working for God."
Narrator: A federal investigation into Moon's finances led to a 1982 trial on charges of conspiracy and filing false tax returns.
Moon/Pak "I must tell you that I am innocent."
Narrator: As a convicted felon, Moon was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. During his 13 months in prison, he faded from public consciousness.
(Soundtrack) Moon: "Distinguished leaders, religious leaders..."
Narrator: But Moon has been quietly gaining strength in the United States ever since. He still hints that he is the Messiah — most recently, before five hundred religious leaders in San Francisco in August,1990.
Narrator: While Moon remains a controversial spiritual leader, his Church in America has a surprisingly small following, estimated to be no more than five thousand members.
Narrator: His Movement, once labelled a cult, is now more accurately described as a conglomerate. From media operations in the nation's capital... To substantial real estate holdings throughout the United States... And from large commercial fishing operations... To advanced high-tech and computer industries, a Fifth Avenue publishing house, and literally dozens of other businesses, foundations, associations, institutes, and political and cultural groups... Moon and his money have become a force to be reckoned with.
Whelan: "All we know is they are spending a great, great deal in this country."
Narrator: James Whelan was the editor and publisher of a Moon-financed newspaper, the Washington Times.
Whelan: "Probably more on influence and the obtaining of influence, of power, than of any organization I know of in this country, and that includes the AFL-CIO, that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that includes General Motors, that includes anybody."
Narrator: How and why did Sun Myung Moon amass such power and influence? The search for answers begins here in Korea, nearly six thousand miles from America's shores...
(Soundtrack) CONGREGATION SINGING
Narrator: The Unification faith is a new religion. It traces its origins back to Easter Sunday, 1936, when Jesus Christ supposedly appeared and asked the sixteen-year-old Moon to complete God's work on Earth. Moon's evangelical mission eventually landed him in a North Korean labor camp, where he claims he was tortured repeatedly. Moon escaped, and according to Church lore, he marched south for weeks, carrying a wounded follower on his back. In 1951, in this shack made of U.S. Army ration boxes, Moon established his first church.
Narrator: After the Korean War ended, several young military officers, including one named Bo Hi Pak, converted to the new Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. As the fifties ended, Moon and his missionaries left Korea to spread their faith. Their earliest success came in Japan.
Narrator: There the Church made political alliances and quickly established itself as much more than a religious movement.
Junas: "1960 really represents the founding moment of the Moon organization as a political entity..."
Narrator: Daniel Junas is the author of Moon Rising, a forthcoming history of the Unification Movement.
Junas: "But now grafted onto that you began to have a whole set of political operations, and this is where Moon really developed his theocratic ideology, where politics would be married to religion."
Narrator: 1960 was a pivotal moment in U.S.-Asian relations. The Japanese and American governments signed a treaty allowing the Americans to maintain military bases in Japan and providing the Japanese access to America's capital and technology.
Eisenhower: "The signing today of the treaty of mutual cooperation and security between Japan and the United States is truly a historic occasion."
Narrator: The pact also allowed American forces in Japan to be equipped with nuclear weapons.
(Soundtrack) Newsreel Track: "In Japan, left-wing political and labor organizations step up the tempo of their protests against the Japanese-American security pact."
Narrator: Thousands stormed the gates of the Japanese Parliament, enraged at the military concessions to the Americans.
Narrator: Japanese business and political leaders moved to quell the unrest, as brigades of right-wing students staged counter-demonstrations. Sun Myung Moon's Japanese followers soon took to the streets as political activities on behalf of conservative business interests became central to the Unification Movement.
Narrator: When Moon's missionaries came to America in the Sixties, their activities centered on Capitol Hill and college campuses.
Junas: "When Moon came to the United States, his organization would play much the same role in American society that it was already playing in Japan and South Korea. During the Viet Nam war, Moon worked to build a right-wing student movement as a counterweight to the left-wing student movement that was objecting to American military involvement in Viet Nam."
Narrator: And in America, as he had in Japan, Moon began to move among the political elite: From Dwight Eisenhower ...to Strom Thurmond...to Richard Nixon...Moon has gladhanded and corresponded with an astonishing array of political figures.
Narrator: Moon sought to influence the American political agenda by pouring more than a billion dollars into media.
Warder: "Moon looked on the media as almost the nervous system for a global empire."
Narrator: In the 1970's, Michael Warder became one of the most important Americans in the Unification movement. Warder says he had close contact with Moon for six years.
Warder: "Moon was the brain, and the media are to be, or were to be, the communications vehicle for his body politic surrounding the globe."
Narrator: Warder was responsible for managing "News World," Moon's daily newspaper in New York City.
Warder: "Moon wanted total control of the media, so there would be no independent media with journalistic integrity. It would be a media totally loyal to Moon."
Narrator: In 1977, Minnesota Democrat Donald Fraser launched the so-called "Koreagate" investigation, in part a probe into Moon's relationship to the Korean CIA and the buying of political influence on Capitol Hill. Using its own media, Moon's organization struck back, in an all-out effort to discredit Fraser.
"Truth Is My Sword" film track: "Mr. Fraser follows a far-leftist political line and is a well-known opponent of the Korean government. For him, Koreagate was a golden opportunity."
Narrator: One of Moon's media weapons was this film, Truth Is My Sword. Moon's aide Bo Hi Pak led the charge.
(Film Track) Bo Hi Pak: "What if you are an agent of influence for Moscow here on the Hill? If these things are true, then the government of the United States itself is in grave danger. America's very survival and the security of the free world are at stake."
Warder: "Moon wanted a whole series of articles going after poor Congressman Fraser, who was heading up the congressional investigations there. And so we would assign reporters to try and dig up all the dirt we could find on Congressman Fraser, and of course I would say to Moon, I said, 'On one hand, we're supposed to be doing this — but on the other hand, we're competing with the New York Times. And so there's matters of credibility here.' And he would, you know, bluster and get angry at these kinds of things and say, 'Just do what I'm ordering you to do and don't ask so many questions,' and that sort of thing. And of course Colonel Pak would reinforce these messages from Moon."
(Film track) Bo Hi Pak: "I can not help but believe that you are being used as instrument of the devil. You, yes you, an instrument of the devil. I said it. Who else would want to destroy man of God but the Devil?"
Fraser: "I didn't appreciate the accusations they were making against me. They were absolutely false. I think they knew they were false."
Narrator: Donald Fraser is now the Mayor of Minneapolis.
Fraser: "...and the fact they would make them in a public forum like that — I was really totally turned off and disgusted."
(Film track) "So history might remember Donald Fraser, if it remembers him at all..."
Warder: "The Fraser subcommittee investigation in fact in a strange way helped the Movement, because for members it became this cosmic struggle of good against evil, of God against Satan."
(Film track) "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thank you Mister Chairman."
Warder: "From the standpoint of the members, it was Jesus taking on the Roman empire. It was big. It was cosmic."
Narrator: The Fraser Committee's final report said Moon was the "key figure" in an "international network of organizations engaged in economic and political" activities. The Committee uncovered evidence that the Moon Organization "had systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency, and Foreign Agents Registration Act laws." It also detailed how the Korean CIA paid Moon to stage demonstrations at the United Nations and run a pro-South Korean propaganda effort.
Narrator: Michael Hershman was the Fraser Committee's chief investigator.
Hershman: "We determined that their primary interest, at least in the United States at that time, was not religious at all, but was political. It was an attempt to gain power and influence and authority."
Narrator: The Fraser Committee recommended that the White House form a task force to continue to investigate Moon. That never happened. By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, the idea of investigating Sun Myung Moon's political activities was a dead issue.
Narrator: Ronald Reagan's Presidency was hailed as the beginning of a conservative revolution. Activists from all over the United States came to the nation's capitol.
Narrator: Ironically, with the revolution seemingly won, traditional sources of money for conservative politics — such as direct mail fundraising — began to dry up. But Moon, a VIP guest at the inauguration, soon became a major funder of Washington's new conservative establishment.
Narrator: Brent Bozell was one of the young Reagan Revolutionaries.
Bozell: "When the Moonies entered the political scene in the early Nineteen Eighties...one school of thought said that they were a good organization, and that because of their anti-communist commitment, conservatives ought to work with them. "
Narrator: David Finzer was another conservative activist who came to Washington in the early eighties. Finzer says he took more than four hundred thousand dollars from the Moon organization. He recalls one project the money paid for.
Finzer: "When the Left would run an anti-South Africa campaign, we'd run an anti-Soviet campaign. We'd say, 'Okay, you want to disinvest from South Africa? Fine. Let's also disinvest from the Soviet Union.' And it was, it was a successful, it was a pretty successful campaign. We did some neat stuff — they'd build shanty towns, we'd build gulags around them..."
Narrator: Moon's most expensive political project was a newspaper — the Washington Times.
Whelan: "Washington is the most important single city in the world. If you can achieve influence, if you can achieve visibility, if you can achieve a measure of respect in Washington, then you fairly automatically are going to achieve these things in the rest of the world. There is no better agency, or entity or instrument that I know of for achieving power here or almost anywhere else — than a newspaper."
Narrator: The Washington Times had an immediate impact. The President of the United States, seen here with Times President Bo Hi Pak, said it was the first paper he read in the morning.
Weyrich: "Moon had money and he was willing to spend it."
Narrator: Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Moral Majority, refuses to take Moon's money. But he hails Moon's newspaper as an antidote to its liberal competitor, The Washington Post.
Weyrich: "The Washington Post became very arrogant and they just decided that they would determine what was news and what wasn't news and they wouldn't cover a lot of things that went on. And the Washington Times has forced the Post to cover a lot of things that they wouldn't cover if the Times wasn't in existence."
CNN Crossfire Open: "From Washington..."
Narrator: Soon Washington Times columnists found even greater exposure — on television.
CNN Crossfire Open: "On the right, Pat Buchanan..."
Bozell: "If the Washington Times did not carry the conservative columnists that they carry — like a Pat Buchanan, like a Bill Rusher, like a Mona Charen — I wonder if the television community would be aware of them and would tap them to use them in television."
Narrator: By 1984, despite his paper's growing influence, James Whelan was unhappy.
Whelan: "When we started the paper there was never any question that it would in any fashion project the views or the agenda of Sun Myung Moon or the Unification Church — all to the contrary. We said, 'Look, we are going to put a high wall in place. It is going to be a sturdy wall. And it will divide us from you.'"
Narrator: But Whelan's wall of editorial independence was often breached.
Whelan: "Moon himself gave direct instructions to the editors...Who in fact calls the shots? Ultimately Moon calls the shots....
Whelan (at press conference): "The Washington Times has become a Moonie newspaper."
Narrator: Whelan resigned. Times spokesmen said the dispute was really over money. Whelan was later replaced by former Newsweek editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, seen here in a Moon-sponsored film.
Deborchgrave: "When I was in Europe recently, I was delighted to hear the Washington Times quoted every hour on the hour on the Voice of America and on the BBC — two worldwide radio networks that happen to reach hundreds of millions of people."
Narrator: De Borchgrave has consistently denied taking orders from Moon. But the man who ran the editorial pages under de Borchgrave tells a different story — William Cheshire.
Chesire: "I protested to de Borchgrave. I went up to his office when I saw this happening, I told him this was unethical, improper, unprofessional, and it ought to stop. Also, it was dumb."
Narrator: Cheshire and four others resigned after de Borchgrave ordered an aboutface on an editorial critical of the South Korean government.
Chesire: "I said, 'Arnaud, we have a problem.' He said, 'What's the problem?' I said. 'The problem is you've conferred with the owners of this newspaper, come back downstairs and demanded a reversal of editorial policy on their say so."
Narrator: Questions about foreign control of the Washington Times have persisted for years. Other journalists, including Lars Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, have called for a Justice Department investigation to determine if the Times violates the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Nelson: "The Justice Department doesn't seem to want to know, and I've never gotten a clear answer from them as to why they don't want to know."
Nadler: "What have they told you?"
Nelson: "They've said, 'Hmmm, that's an interesting point.' They say, 'Hmmm, we'll think about that.' And they never get back to me."
Chesire: "The real question is why the Justice Department has such an absence of curiosity."
Narrator: Washington Times officials repeatedly refused to comment to Frontline — even when we showed up with our camera to press for some answers.
Nadler: "I've got a film crew here and I'm looking to see if there's anyone that I can interview at the Washington Times for this story we're doing."
Narrator: The answer was no, and when we visited another Moon-funded publication, The World and I, the reception grew even colder.
Security Guard #1: "Yes sir, you all are on private property, you've been told that, you will wait here, the Metropolitan Police will come here."
Security Guard #2: "I'm going to ask you to leave the property."
Nadler: "OK, who are you, sir? Are you with the Metropolitan Police Department or with the security?"
SG #2: "I'm with the security department."
Nadler: "Of the Washington Times Corporation?"
SG #2: "Of the Washington Times, that's correct, and I'd like you to leave right now please."
Nadler: "OK, I'll leave. Why are the police here, by the way?"
Narrator: Later, the Times sent this statement, which said that "the complete editorial independence of the Washington Times is well-known, and envied, throughout the newspaper industry."
Narrator: The Times gained respect and influence throughout the Reagan years, lending editorial support to causes favored by the Administration.
Reagan: "Freedom fighters will huddle close to their radios hoping to catch word that the administration in America will remain their friend."
Narrator: The contra forces battling the Sandinista government in Nicaragua received editorial support and money from the Washington Times. Here's how it worked:
Narrator: In March 1985, Oliver North wrote this top secret memo proposing the formation of a private foundation called the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund.
Narrator: Its purpose was to circumvent a Congressional ban on aid to the Contras. Less than two months later, the Washington Times announced the birth of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund in a front-page editorial.
Narrator: Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave insisted he was "surprised" at the coincidence between his paper's initiative and North's secret project. The Washington Times contributed the first $100,000 to the Freedom Fund.
(Soundtrack) Oliver North: "The worst outcome we could have would be the consolidation of a communist client state in Nicaragua."
Narrator: When Oliver North was questioned by Congress about his role in funding the contras, The American Freedom Coalition rushed to his defense. The AFC produced this video, "Oliver North: Fight for Freedom," which it broadcast more than 600 times on over 100 television stations.
Narrator: The program asked for donations. Tax records reveal that the video raised more than $3.2 million for the AFC.
Heston: "It only takes 30 minutes for a missile to get here from the Soviet Union. How far do you think you can get in 30 minutes?
Narrator: Another project of the Reagan Administration was the Strategic Defense Initiative — SDI, or "Star Wars." It also received support from the Washington Times and the American Freedom Coalition.
"If you really value life, if you want your children and your grandchildren to get out from under the threat of nuclear annihilation, then please, please demonstrate your support for SDI."
Narrator: This pro-Star Wars video was paid for and distributed by the AFC.
(Soundtrack) "We can't stop it? We can't stop one damn missile? All I can do is watch a million people die, or start blowing up the whole world? They are my only choices?"
Graham: "Reverend Moon's organization has been very supportive of the Strategic Defense Initiative."
Narrator: Former Defense and Central Intelligence official Daniel Graham, who sits on the AFC national policy board, co-produced the video.
Graham: "It's called 'One Incoming,' and it includes a scenario that I got Tom Clancy to write for us, and I got Charlton Heston to do the voiceover."
(Soundtrack) Heston: "And for America, our choice will remain nuclear vengeance or nothing — until SDI is deployed."
Graham: "It cost a lot of money to produce it — $200,000 — and Grant said he could raise the $200,000. Now Grant is supported substantially by the Reverend Moon — and I'm sure that's where the money came from to produce that movie."
Narrator: According to Graham, the film has been seen on four hundred television stations.
Narrator: Besides paying for his own media, Moon sought to influence other press outlets. One vehicle was the World Media Association.
Pak: " And the founder is Reverend Moon, who is deeply concerned for the world media, particularly in the battle against communism all over the world; who sees that the role of the media is so vital and so important for the salvation of our civilization."
Narrator: The World Media Association sponsors all-expense-paid conferences and junkets for journalists all over the world. As Bo Hi Pak told public station KQED in 1984, the Unification Movement used the association as a weapon for a larger crusade.
Pak: "But is a total war. Basically war of ideas. War of mind, the battlefield is the human mind. This is where the battle is fought. So in this war the entire thing will be mobilized, political means, social means, economical means and propagandistic means, and basically trying to take over the other person's mind. That is what the third world war is all about — the war of ideology."
Narrator: While waging its global war of ideas, the Unification Movement was also fighting another battle — to overcome the stigma of Moon's 1982 conviction for tax evasion. To clear his name, Moon launched a campaign termed the "New Birth Project." Its strategy was to show that Moon's prosecution was really racial and religious persecution.
(Soundtrack) Moon/Pak: "I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church."
Durst: "It's a powerful state trying to break one religion-and what happens to Rev. Moon — watch out — will happen to many other religious figures."
Pak: "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen!"
Narrator: Church leaders charged the media were part of the problem.
Durst: "We don't like it. We don't like to be abused by any newspaper, we don't like to be abused by the media and we're not going to take it."
Narrator: But an adroit use of the media was part of the Unification plan. Moon bought full-page ads in leading newspapers, and sent videotapes explaining his theology to other religious leaders — at a cost of more than four million dollars. Press conferences outside Moon's prison helped spread the word.
Rev. Don Sills: "Today we have witnessed a travesty of the judicial system of our United States. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon has been unjustly convicted."
Rev. Joseph Paige: "Reverend Moon, like myself, is a minority here in this country. And we don't have the popular views of the mainline churches, we are about liberation."
Narrator: The New Birth Project worked, and Moon was "born again" as a martyr to bigotry. After he left prison, he was celebrated by more than 1700 clergy at this "God and Freedom Banquet" in Washington.
Durst: "Ironically — and perhaps historically — there is something similar here to other religious movements — from this persecution has come the greatest support and acceptance of the Unification movement. "
Narrator: Part of the New Birth Project employed familiar Moon tactics. In July, 1985, a front organization was formed called the Committee to Defend the United States Constitution. Moon insider David Finzer was asked to join the board.
Finzer: "We executed all of the documents, and I understand the corporation was incorporated the very next day. Now that was the last I heard of the Committee to Defend the United States Constitution for about two years."
Narrator: Finzer now claims that he didn't learn until much later that the Committee to Defend the United States Constitution was a front group.
Finzer: "All of the money was spent for publications or advertising or events that supported Reverend Moon. We found a magazine that was put out under the Committee's name. There was my name listed as one of the directors that I had never seen before. We found a check to the printer for $174,000, printed for that...The real purpose was not, I can tell you what it was not . It was not to support religious liberty. What it was, was to support and sanitize Reverend Moon's name, to give the appearance of independent support instead of wholly-owned, bought support, to make him some kind of a First Amendment hero."
Narrator: Moon ultimately went to the top in his effort to clear his name — seeking a presidential pardon for his crimes.
Narrator: The point man was Max Hugel, a former Reagan campaign official and one-time deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in charge of covert operations.
Hugel: "It is so important to have a superb intelligence agency."
Narrator: Hugel was forced to leave the agency in the wake of a stock scandal.
(Soundtrack) PRESS CONFERENCE: Reporter off camera: "Can you tell us why you're not choosing to stay on and fight?"
Narrator: Hugel later went into business with Jonathan Park, the son of Bo Hi Pak.
ATLANTIC VIDEO DEMO REEL: Announcer: "Through two huge sound locks are the best outfitted teleproduction studios in the region." Narrator: Hugel worked with Park to expand Moon's electronic media empire, while also brokering contacts between Bo Hi Pak and Vice President George Bush.
Narrator: In this April, 1988 memo to Unification Church member Marc Lee, Hugel offers to arrange for Pak to have his picture taken with the Vice President — at a cost of $50,000. Hugel also promises to try to get Bush to write to Pak. Two months later, Bush did write to Pak, and told him, "I hope we can meet again soon." Did they discuss a pardon during their meeting? Neither President Bush nor Bo Hi Pak would comment to FRONTLINE.
Narrator: Later in 1988, Hugel also recruited the law firm of one of Ronald Reagan's best friends to assist in Moon's pardon effort — former Senator Paul Laxalt.
(Soundtrack) Ronald Reagan: "The friend who understands you creates you, a wise man once said. Paul created because he always understood and for that I am and shall always be grateful." Narrator: Laxalt's law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. According to billings submitted by the lawyers, Laxalt was directly involved in the pardon effort. This petition for executive clemency was delivered to the Justice Department, accompanied by letters from Senator Orrin Hatch, publisher William Rusher, civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy endorsing the pardon.
Narrator: The Washington Times also became involved in the pardon campaign. First, Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote a "letter from the editor."
Cheshire: "It was not really a letter to the editor, it was a letter to President Reagan urging President Reagan to grant Reverend Moon a presidential pardon."
Narrator: Later, the Times ran this article examining Reagan's record on pardons. After it appeared, Laxalt's partner, Paul Perito, became alarmed. Perito warned Bo Hi Pak that "if a case can be made...that the Church allegedly controls and dictates the activities of organizations such as the Washington Times...this will affect our credibility and could materially damage our prodigious efforts."
(Soundtrack) Off-Camera Female Reporter: "Any last thoughts for us, President and Mrs. Reagan, on your way out.?"
Narrator: Ronald Reagan never pardoned Sun Myung Moon. Moon's pardon application is still pending before the Bush Administration. Max Hugel, Paul Laxalt, and Paul Perito all refused to comment. Ronald Reagan also declined to comment.
Narrator: Is the New Birth Project continuing? In June,1991, Inquisition, a new, purportedly independent investigation of Moon's 1982 tax fraud prosecution, was released by a Washington publisher, Regnery-Gateway. Its author, Carlton Sherwood, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who once worked for the Washington Times.
Narrator: Inquisition has a curious history. It was printed once before, by an obscure publishing house called Andromeda. The phone number listed for Andromeda in a leading publishing directory is the home phone of former Reagan National Security Council official Roger Fontaine — an ex-reporter at the Washington Times. When we called, Fontaine's wife Judy answered and said she knew nothing about Andromeda. Then she told us that the company was bankrupt and that Inquisition was published by Regnery-Gateway.
Narrator: Alfred Regnery is the head of Regnery-Gateway.
Regnery: "It is not unlike a lot of other books we have published. It is a story that deals with the First Amendment, which is something that is very dear to publishers, of course."
Narrator: Alfred Regnery was told by Carlton Sherwood that the Moon Organization would purchase one hundred thousand copies of Inquisition — at least according to former Washington Times editor James Whelan, another Regnery-Gateway author. But Alfred Regnery denies it.
Regnery: "I never said that to Jim, and I've never had any conversation with what's his name-Bo?"
Narrator: "Bo Hi Pak."
Regnery: "I'm not even sure who he is."
Narrator: One week after talking to Regnery, FRONTLINE obtained a copy of a letter addressed to Sun Myung Moon. The letter was written by James Gavin, a Moon aide. Gavin tells Moon he reviewed the "overall tone and factual contents" of Inquisition before publication and suggested revisions. Gavin adds that the author "Mr. Sherwood has assured me that all this will be done when the manuscript is sent to the publisher." Gavin concludes by telling Moon, "When all of our suggestions have been incorporated, the book will be complete and in my opinion will make a significant impact.... In addition to silencing our critics now, the book should be invaluable in persuading others of our legitimacy for many years to come."
Narrator: Although he refused an on-camera interview, Carlton Sherwood told Frontline that the Unification Movement exerted no editorial control over his book.
Narrator: When we visited Gavin's office in McLean, Virginia, our request for an interview was refused.
Narrator: Many questions about the Unification Movement remain unanswered. But none is more pressing — or perplexing — than this: Where does all the money come from? The Moon Organization has spent an astonishing amount in the United States:
-more than $800 million on the Washington Times;
-hundreds of millions on national periodicals;
-tens of millions on electronic media;
-at least $40 million on New York newspapers;
-more than $10 million on a New York publishing house;
-millions on World Media Association junkets and conferences;
-millions more on New Right organizations, including the American Freedom Coalition;
-well over $100 million on real estate, including the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan;
-at least $40 million on commercial fishing operations;
-and at least $75 million on the New Birth Project...
It all adds up to more than a billion dollars.
Narrator: But most of Moon's operations in America are losing money. Virginia Commonwealth University professor David Bromley:
Bromley: "Most of the Unificationist Movement's businesses, as far as I can tell, have lost substantial sums of money. Again, the best example is the Washington Times, which may have lost as much as fifty million dollars a year — a major loser."
Narrator: So where does the money come from? Moon himself told the Senate Judiciary Committee in June, 1984: the money comes from overseas.
Moon: "Several hundred million dollars have been poured into America, because this nation will decide the destiny of the world, these contributions are primarily coming from overseas."
Narrator: But from where overseas? Not from Korea. According to The Far Eastern Economic Review, many of the Church's businesses in Korea "are performing poorly or need to make major new investments." .
Narrator: For nearly two decades, it has been reported that one major Moon patron is Ryoichi Sasakawa, one of the richest men in Japan.
Narrator: Sasakawa's money comes from his monopoly on the motorboat racing industry. Legalized gambling on the sport is a fourteen billion dollar a year industry in Japan.
Choate: "For more than a half century, Ryoichi Sasakawa has been one of the primary political brokers inside Japan."
Narrator: Author Pat Choate, whose book, Agents of Influence, examines Japan's campaign to shape America's policy and politics...
Choate: "When Reverend Moon expanded his operations inside Japan, he asked Sasakawa to be one of the principal advisers to his Church inside Japan. Many of their operations — the Sasakawa operations, the Moon operations — seem to parallel each other. They operate in many of the same ways — giving away money, a great deal of attention to media and media organizations, the establishment of think tanks and other policy organizations that operate across national borders, and the maintenance of a very right wing conservative focus."
(Soundtrack) NEWSREEL - MUSSOLINI ADDRESSING CROWD
Narrator: Sasakawa's right-wing associations go back more than fifty years. In 1939, he flew to Italy to meet Benito Mussolini, whom he called "the perfect fascist."
Choate: "He formed one of the most radical of the fascist parties inside Japan. He was one of those individual business leaders that was calling for war with the United States."
Narrator: Immediately after the war, Sasakawa was arrested and imprisoned by the U.S. Army as a war criminal. Sasakawa was sent to prison with two other suspected war criminals-Yoshio Kodama and Nobusuke Kishi. Kodama went on to become a leader of the "yakuza", or organized crime syndicate of Japan. Kishi went on to become Japan's Prime Minister. All three men reportedly played key roles in the early days of the Moon organization.
Junas: "Kishi had emerged as the front man for the Moon Organization in Japan. And Sasakawa served as an adviser...He was a behind-the-scenes powerbroker who was manipulating the Moon organization. Moon, in his own speeches, refers to his Japanese friend who is quite wealthy — Mr. Sasakawa."
Narrator: In 1967, Moon and Sasakawa are reported to have formed the Japanese chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, which funded anti-Communist insurgencies worldwide. Thousands cheered Moon at this 1970 rally in Tokyo.
Narrator: Today Sasakawa denies providing any financial or political assistance to Moon. Sasakawa told Frontline that he only met Moon once — 25 years ago. Yet Moon in a 1973 speech claimed he was "very close" to Sasakawa and Bo Hi Pak called Sasakawa, Moon's "chief ally in the battle against communism."
Choate: "If they are using substantial amounts of the Japanese money, they are not only running a Korean agenda, but they're also serving as political mercenaries for the Japanese. And it should be a matter of great concern."
DESERT STORM RALLY FOOTAGE: "Support our troops, support our troops, support our troops!"
Narrator: Moon has been operating in the United States for thirty years. Whether Americans know it or not, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is a force in their political lives.
WOMAN SINGS: "God bless America, my home, sweet home."
Narrator: But some Americans are suspicious of Moon and question whether his political activities are in the interest of America.
Weyrich: "Here is what disturbs me. It is the lack of knowledge of the people who are being taken in by this activity of who is behind it, where the funding is coming from, and what are their ultimate objectives."
Choate: "This should be the ultimate congressional investigation — to lay all of this out before the American people and bring it into the sunshine and stop it."
Narrator: Since 1978, Congress has demonstrated little interest in investigating Moon. And when we visited the Justice Department, officials there had nothing to say.
Scene-Eric Nadler at Justice Dept.
"We'd like you to come down and answer the question, 'Why the Justice Department isn't investigating the Washington Times under the Foreign Agents Registration Act... No comment is your answer.'"
Narrator: We asked the White House to comment on the Unification Movement's activities in America. We asked specifically about Bo Hi Pak's 1988 meeting with Mr. Bush at his home, about the President's knowledge of the campaign to obtain a pardon for Sun Myung Moon, about the help that the American Freedom Coalition gave his election campaign, and whether the President thought his Justice Department should investigate the Washington Times for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The White House declined to comment.
Narrator: Finally, Reverend Moon also refused to talk to FRONTLINE. But in this Church-sponsored film, Reverend Moon in America, he had this to say:
"Now whether positively or negatively, America knows me — and it happened quickly. At least I have America's attention. Because of that, I will be able to tell the people the truth of God, the new revelation. The worst treatment America could give me is to ignore me. Now I can preach the truth. "
THE END
http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/mo...ript.shtml

Rev. Moon and the United Nations






By Harold Paine and Birgit Gratzer

WEED
November 2001


1. Introduction

The organization of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is seeking a major role in the NGO community at the United Nations. Three Moon groups have been granted formal NGO status and others have applied. The Moon organization has used the UN for conferences and for publicity events. Moon has held a mass-wedding in a UN conference room. A new Moon-sponsored "umbrella group," known as the World Association of NGOs (WANGO), proposes itself as an authentic voice of the NGO community.
The Moon organization (1) commands considerable financial resources. It has held lavish conferences, with participants from many countries. A number of government missions have lent their support. Dozens of well-known scholars, NGO representatives, politicians and diplomats have unwittingly taken part.
At a time when many are asking questions about who NGOs represent and what role they should have in global governance, we must carefully examine this newcomer, especially since it lays claim to broad international legitimacy. (2)
The Moon organization, as we shall show, is a strange admixture of religion, politics and business. It has confounded tax and oversight authorities by doing much of its financial transactions in cash and by using the mantle of religious freedom to shield itself from scrutiny. (3)
Before turning to details about Moon activities at the UN, we will review general information from public sources about the Moon organization and its operating methods. We draw on many major media, books and journal articles, a report of the US Congress and extensive web-based information, as well as Moon publications and web sites. In the subsequent report about the Moon organization at the UN, we also draw on a number of interviews as well as primary documents.
We are indebted to a number of colleagues who generously helped with research assistance and editorial suggestions. We appreciate the strong encouragement we have received for this project from many in the UN community and we are grateful for the support of WEED.

I. The Moon Organization

2. Beginnings
Sun Myung Moon founded his group in South Korea in the early 1950s (4) as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. The Moon organization has always claimed to be a religious movement, in spite of its intense political activity, its extensive businesses interests and its large web of social and cultural groups. Moon entitles himself "Reverend" and claims a messianic calling and a world mission. (5)
The Holy Spirit Association (or Unification Church, as it would later be called) won many converts in Korea, Japan, and, later, the United States, but it never grew into a major movement. Despite its relatively small size today (estimates suggest about 180,000 members worldwide and less than 5,000 in the United States) (6) it has attracted considerable attention because of its unusual religious, organizational and financial practices and its legal embarrassments.
3. A Congressional Investigation & A Jail Term
The Moon organization stepped up its work in the United States in the late 1960s. In 1972, the leader moved his headquarters to the US. Controversy soon followed, as the organization used cult-like recruitment practices and as the Rev. Moon held prayer breakfasts and rallies in support of President Nixon during the Watergate scandal. (7) Moon later raised alarms when it was discovered that he had dispatched young females to make friends with members of Congress and their staff. (8) In 1973, Moon obtained a permanent residence permit (Green Card), which gave him more secure immigration status. (9) But problems and exposés continued. In 1978, a committee of the United States Congress carried out an extensive investigation of the organization's role in a Washington influence-buying scandal known as Koreagate.
A lengthy Congressional report documented the Moon organization's deceptive use of many front groups. (10) The report provides information about the Moon organization's illegal efforts to gain control of a US bank, its activities in the field of arms manufacture and trade, and its connections to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. (11) The report also tells how "Moon used the names and pictures of prominent Americans, Japanese, Koreans and others to create an image of power and respectability for himself and his movement." (12)
The report says that the Moon organization "systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency and Foreign Agents Registration Act as well as state and local laws relating to charity fraud." (13) The organization was said to "move large amounts of cash across international boundaries," using methods that were "frequently illegal or questionable under U.S. law as well as those of other nations." (14) The organization was said to be paying employees in cash or via "loans" to escape taxes. (15)
The report says that the "overriding religious goal" of Moon and his organization is "to establish a worldwide theocracy,' that is, a world order which would abolish separation of church and state and be governed by the immediate direction of God." (16)
Federal investigations of the Moon organization continued. In 1982, a federal court sentenced Sun Myung Moon to 18 months in prison and fined him $25,000 for tax evasion, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Moon insisted that his actions were protected by freedom of religion (First Amendment of the US Constitution). After losing appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, Moon was sent to Danbury Federal Prison in July 1984. (17)
4. A Maze of Groups of All Kinds
The Moon organization operates a maze of foundations, social and cultural groups, campus groups, religious groups, advocacy associations and other NGO-like entities. A recent list includes the names of over 1,000 different non-profit organizations under the Moon umbrella. (18) Most of these groups have benign and hard-to-remember titles such as the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), the major Moon group for organizing college and university students. (19) Key groups include the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the Women's Federation for World Peace, the World Culture and Sports Festival, the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, and the Youth Federation for World Peace. Other groups include the World Media Conference, the Professors' World Peace Academy, the Assembly of the World's Religions, and the International Leadership Seminars. (20)
Every year, the Moon organization creates new international groups, launched at grandiose conferences. In February 1999, Rev. Moon launched the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, allegedly in the presence of "more than 30 former heads of state," while in 2000 the leader announced with fanfare the founding of the World Association of NGOs and the Federation for Cosmic Peace and Unification. (21) In some cases, the Moon organization takes over existing organizations by bailing them out of financial difficulties and providing a hefty new source of funding. (22)
Moon organizations often fade into obscurity as funds and priorities change. The American Freedom Coalition, a conservative group that built support for Col. Oliver North during the Iran-contra investigations had a peak budget in the millions in the 1980s. In 1997 a reporter found it "dormant" -- its phone unanswered and its office unmanned. Similarly, the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, so much in the news in the 1970s, now is totally defunct.
This shifting maze of groups tends to deceive all but the best-informed and to draw many unsuspecting members of the public into the Moon orbit. In fact, deceptive practices, referred to by some scholars as "heavenly deception," are promoted within the Moon organization if they serve the ends of the movement. (23) A number of UN officials, scholars and other prominent people have told us that they would not have accepted invitations to Moon conferences had they known in advance about the Moon connection. The many groups also give Moon political leverage and power, by making the organization seem far larger and more popular than it really is.
The 1978 Congressional report concluded that "The UC [Unification Church] and numerous other religious and secular organizations headed by Sun Myung Moon constitute essentially one international organization. This organization depends heavily upon the interchangeability of its components and upon its ability to move personnel and financial assets freely across international boundaries and between businesses and nonprofit organizations." (24)
Twenty-three years later, the Congressional report's judgment still appears to be correct. The groups tend to have interlocking leadership and staff posts. For example, Dr. Neil Salonen, President of the Moon-controlled University of Bridgeport, also serves as Secretary General of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP). (25) Rev. Chung Hwan Kwak serves simultaneously as Board Chairman of the IIFWP, as Chairman of the World Association of NGOs and as Chairman of the World Culture and Sports Festival. (26) Karen Judd Smith serves both as Secretary General of the Women's Federation for World Peace and as Director, Office of Program Development, IIFWP. (27) Dong Moon Joo, President of the Youth Federation for World Peace also serves as President of the Washington Times and many other media properties and sits as a member of the Board of the University of Bridgeport. (28) Sometimes, Moon sources list contradictory titles for the same individual, suggesting that titles and organizational relations are very fluid.
The Moon non-profits have a history of secretive and irresponsible use of funds. In 1975, the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, one of the main Moon-connected non-profits, lost its tax-exempt status when a New York State audit found that only 2.1% of the $1.2 million raised by the organization's children's relief fund was spent for designated purposes. (29) A 1998 financial filing by the Youth Federation for World Peace, another Moon-connected organization, revealed expenditures of only $11,729 for a world-wide enterprise, suggesting that most of the transactions are taking place in cash, beyond the scrutiny of oversight authorities. (30) Many former insiders have reported bags of cash moving from one Moon entity to another without records or proper accounting practices (see below).
The Moon organization takes a leading role in other more sinister networks, such as Causa, the American Security Council, the World Anti-Communist League and various of their affiliates. (31) Studies have revealed links between the League and Latin American right-wing militia leaders such as Roberto D'Aubuission of El Salvador and Adolfo Calero of Nicaragua as well as leaders of the European far-right such as St. C. de Berkelaar, president of an organization of Dutch former SS officers. (32) In addition to a very active role in Central America, the League has supported Jonas Savimbi's rebel group Unita in Angola and campaigned against sanctions on apartheid South Africa. (33) Osami Kuboki, head of the Unification Church in Japan, was co-founder and chair of Shokyo Rengo, the Japanese branch of the League, and an executive board member of the world organization for many years. The League's world headquarters, located in Seoul, symbolizes the very strong overall Moon influence. (34)
5. Media and Cultural Properties
In the mid-1970s, Moon founded News World, a New York City newspaper. Then in May 1982, during the early period of Ronald Reagan's US presidency, he founded the Washington Times, a conservative daily that is the second most important newspaper in the US capital. (35) The paper has always been highly ideological and it has fueled the prejudices of conservative members of Congress and their counterparts in conservative think-tanks and the executive branch. More than any other institution in Washington, it promotes hostility towards the United Nations.
The Washington Times regularly warns its readers that the UN wants to set up a standing army, that it is planning a global tax, that its membership overflows with dictatorships and "America-haters," that it tramples on religion and the family and that it fosters sexual license and depravity. (36) The paper described a recent UN conference as a "left-wing hootnanny" and a recent article on the UN was entitled "Biting the Hand that Feeds It." (37) The paper builds its UN news stories on quotes from Senator Jesse Helms, Senator Trent Lott, and other conservatives hostile towards the UN and multilateral cooperation.
The Washington Times runs at a large loss, currently estimated at $50-100 million per year. (38) In 1992, at the tenth anniversary celebration of the paper, Moon said that he had "invested" "close to $1 billion" in the paper in the first 12 years. (39) Moon has said he wanted to make the newspaper "an instrument to save America and the world." (40)
In mid-1996, Moon launched a conservative weekly newspaper for the Spanish-speaking market in Latin America called Tiempos del Mundo. This big and very expensive multi-country venture is estimated to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars for the start-up and annual losses. (41) The paper's web site proclaims that it seeks to "strengthen the family" and it announces that the paper is printed and distributed in 15 Latin countries as well as the United States and Canada, joining a "hemispheric" section of 64 pages to a national edition. (42) According to a Latin American source, the paper has not yet found a significant readership. (43) The Moon organization controls Tiempos del Mundothrough its media arm, News World Communications (named after the defunct New York paper). News World also owns the Washington Times and a daily newspaper in Uruguay, Ultimas Noticias.(44)
In May 2000, News World Communications acquired control of the US news wire service United Press International, better known as UPI.(45) News World also controls Insight Magazine, The World and I, and Middle East Times (Cyprus). (46) The Moon organization also controls a monthly publication, Our Canada, and daily newspapers in Japan (Sekai Nippo) and Korea (Segye Ilbo), as well as video production facilities in New York, Washington and Tokyo and the Paragon House publisher. (47) Universal One television station in Tokyo is a Moon property as well. (48) And Moon owns a controlling interest in the cable Nostalgia Channel. (49)
The Moon organization controls many cultural, performance and even scientific groups, including the International Cultural Foundation, Universal Ballet Company, the Little Angels Art School, and the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. In addition to Sung Wha University in Korea and the Unification Theological Seminary in New York, the Moon organization has recently acquired the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, not far from New York City. The University was about to declare bankruptcy in the mid-1990s when the Moon organization bailed it out, with total Moon donations reaching $92 million. The University governing body, now controlled by the Moon organization, bestowed an honorary degree on the Reverend.(50)
6. Business Enterprises
The Moon organization has large business holdings in many countries, including real estate, manufacturing, shipbuilding, hotels, casinos, banks and more. As the Washington Post recently wrote: "This vast and bewildering multinational could be called Moon Inc." (51) Fishing and seafood are an important line of holdings, which include fishing fleets in Gloucester, Massachusetts and Kodiak, Alaska. A published list of Moon companies includes hundreds of separate corporate entities with 148 names listed for New York State alone. (52) All companies are apparently held by Unification Church International, a holding company, headed by Dong Moon Joo. (53) UCI controls many companies through one or more intermediary corporations, such as Virginia-based One-Up Enterprises. True Family Trust, based in Liechtenstein, is said to play an important role in the Moon family's financial operations. (54)
Pyongwha Automobile Company is one of many Korea-based Moon businesses. Varadero Tsako Shipyard of Uruguay, Saeilo Machinery Company of Japan, and United Trade Industries of the Netherlands are also parts of the conglomerate. (55) Il Hwa, a big Korean company specializing in ginseng products, is said to be on of the most profitable Moon enterprises. (56) New York City properties include the New Yorker Hotel(57) and the Manhattan Center recording studio. One-Up Enterprises apparently holds many of the US-based Moon properties. (58) One-Up refuses to release financial information or details about its holdings, according to the Boston Globe, but it apparently owns News World Communications. (59)
One piece of the Moon corporate puzzle, Kahr Arms, manufactures weapons at a factory in Worcester, Massachusetts. Justin Moon, son of Sun Myung Moon, serves as the Chief Executive Officer. (60) The Kahr website says that the younger Moon designed the ultra-compact Kahr semi-automatic pistol, a popular product which is "designed for concealed carry." (61) In 1999 Kahr expanded by buying additional weapons lines from Numrich Arms, including both handguns and the famous Thomson submachine gun known as the "Tommy Gun," a weapon best-known for its use by gangsters in the 1920s but still selling in modernized versions.
Kahr Arms is a part of Saeilo USA whose operations include a machine tool and machining company with facilities in four states. (62) The corporate parent, Saeilo Inc., a large international group headquartered in Blauvelt, N.Y., is believed to be owned by One Up Enterprises(63) The Moon organization also manufactures arms such as M-16 automatic rifles in other countries, including Korea and Japan, and it has acted as a dealer for arms exports and imports to and from Korea, the United States, Japan and elsewhere. (64) Tongil [or Tong Il] Heavy Industries of Korea, a branch of Saeilo, says on its web site that it manufactures anti-aircraft canon, heavy machine guns, mine launchers, decoy systems and parts for armored vehicles. (65) The mine launcher is designed for land mines, a type of weapon now almost universally condemned.
In the 1980s, during the time of the military dictatorship in Uruguay, the Moon organization took control of that country's third-largest bank, Banco de Credito, benefiting from generous government subsidies. In 1996, bank workers reported that Moon staff and followers deposited at least $50 million in cash in the bank, leading to suspicions of money laundering. (66) Two years later, after the Moon deposits had been withdrawn, Moon officers are accused of having stripped the bank of its assets through unsecured loans totaling at least $125 million to Moon companies. The Central Bank stepped in on September 18, 1998. (67) In spite of this scandal, the Moon organization continues to own the bank and other large properties in Uruguay, including the Victoria Plaza, a five-star hotel and casino located on the capital's main square, opposite the presidential palace, (68) and it is said to be building another casino in a tourist resort near the Argentine border. Its large Uruguayan holdings also include the Corporation Rioplatense de Hoteles and Hotel Horacio Quiroga, as well as a newspaper and a shipyard. (69)
Reportedly, Moon companies do much of their business in cash and they transfer cash with lax accounting standards between Moon businesses, political bodies, religious entities, NGO-like front groups and the personal accounts of Moon family members. (70) Often, it seems, this cash crosses borders hidden in suitcases, clothing or even paper bags. 71 "Rev. Moon sent bags of cash, big fat bags, stacks and stacks of hundreds, from Korea and Japan," a former high-ranking employee told the Washington Post.(72) Moon daughter-in-law Nansook Hong writes: "I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the family estate] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table." (73) When challenged, the Moon organization has invoked freedom of religion to shield its financial irregularities from oversight and scrutiny.
7. Family, Gender, Reproduction and Sexuality
The Moon organization emphasizes a highly conservative and patriarchal social philosophy, in which Rev. Moon teaches women to be subservient to men and to be guided by "The Father" – himself. (74)
During an August 4, 1996 speech, Moon expounded to a group of women on their proper role: "Does woman contain the seed of life? Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent." (75)
Moon has often criticized women in the United States for acting as men's equals. In a speech in 1996, he said US women "have inherited the line of prostitutes," saying "they practice free sex just because they enjoy it." (76) Many Moon affiliates focus on "family" issues and insist on the centrality of the patriarchal family as the moral basis of society. Moon teachings oppose women's choice in reproduction. In this respect, they are quite close to the teachings of conservative Catholic and Protestant "Family Values" groups. (77)
Moon is harshly critical of homosexuals. In a sermon quoted by the Washington Post, he compared gays to "dirty, dung-eating dogs." (78) In a very recent sermon, he called for a "quarantine" of those with AIDS. (79)
8. Funding Conservative Movements and Candidates
In 1984, the Washington Post reported that "the church is using its vast financial resources to foster a budding alliance with the New Right." (80) Moon's ties to the international Right, his opposition to labor unions (81) and his extremely conservative views on gender and sexuality provide strong bonds to the right wing in US politics.
The Moon organization provides millions of dollars for conservative political organizations and candidates. The organization was deeply involved in the anti-communist crusades in Central America during the Reagan years and it paid large sums for "educational" trips for journalists and Congressional staffers. (82) More recently, the organization helped rescue the Rev. Jerry Fallwell and his Liberty University from financial embarrassment and bankruptcy by buying up defaulted loans for $3.5 million. (83) The organization has close financial ties to conservative direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie and to other right-wing direct-mail enterprises. (84) Ties to the White House after Nixon continued into the administrations of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder. (85)
Through video and print-media attacks on the Clinton administration, and very large direct mailings costing many millions of dollars, the Moon organization has given material and visible support to Republican Party election campaigns in recent years. (86) Many insiders consider Moon to be a key backroom figure in the US right, to whom an increasing number of conservative politicians are indebted. What they're doing is buying people," said conservative Washington columnist Armstrong Williams to the Washington Post.(87) Though right-wing US politicians are embarrassed by Moon's occasional invectives against "Satanic America," his ties to North Korea and his claims to be the Messiah, they are enthusiastic about his fierce conservatism, his "pro-family" rhetoric, and (above all) his cash. (88)
9. The Bush Connection
By paying large sums to celebrities and politicians for event appearances, the Moon organization creates an atmosphere of respectability in spite of its tarnished record. The organization often invites former heads of state and government and its recent guest lists have included such figures as former British Prime Minister Edward Heath. (89)
Former President George Bush is the world's best-known Moon-booster, for reasons that appear to mix ideology and cash. Bush has been reported to receive very large fees for his speeches at Moon events in many countries. In September 1995, Bush and his wife Barbara gave many speeches in Asia for the Moon-controlled Women's Federation for World Peace, including six events in Japan and further events in two other countries. (90) Also in 1995, he gave five speeches at Women's Federation events in Washington. (91) On May 23, 1996, Bush gave the keynote speech at a big conference in Washington DC sponsored by the Moon-controlled Youth Federation for World Peace and during the summer of the same year, he spoke at another conference in Washington sponsored by the Moon-controlled Family Federation for World Peace. (92) On November 23,1996, Bush spoke at the launch of the Moon-run Tiempos del Mundo newspaper in Buenos Aires. (93)
Bush is reported to have accepted very large sums for these appearances – more than $1 million total for the '95-'96 series and possibly as much as $10 million. (94) The Bush-Moon partnership goes back to the Bush presidency (1989-92) and even before. A Frontline television special in 1992 reported that the Moon organizations sent out thirty million pieces of mail in support of the Bush 1988 campaign. (95) The Washington Times Foundation reportedly gave a $1 million contribution to the Bush Presidential Library. (96)
The Moon organization was also involved in the election campaign of George Bush the younger in 2000 and the Washington Times adopted an extremely aggressive approach towards the Clinton administration. Moon ties to the new administration were on display when Moon was honored at a "Prayer Breakfast" on January 19, 2001, at the Hyatt Hotel in Washington during the inauguration events. (97)
10. Where Does All the Money Come From?
Though the Moon world headquarters is located in New York, (98) the source of its financing remains shrouded in mystery. It seems clear that Unification members alone could not provide enough income to operate the organization. Judging from the many new investments, the Washington Times losses, the costs of other media like Tiempos del Mundo, the lavish events and fees paid to big name speakers, and the grand lifestyle of Rev. Moon and his family, the organization must need an annual income (excluding turnover of business properties) of at least $2-300 million and perhaps much more. (99)
Because of its religious status, its secrecy and its tendency to deal in cash, no one has been able to offer a definitive account of the sources of Moon's funding. An investigation by the Washington Post in 1984 concluded that tens of millions of dollars per year were coming from door-to-door sales programs by church members in Japan, (100) and later evidence reveals fraudulent practices to take large sums from gullible old people in Japan. (101) In addition, the many Moon businesses undoubtedly generate a substantial profit, particularly those in Asia. Some suggest that the organization profits from illicit sources such as money laundering. (102) Others point to financial skullduggery such as the asset stripping of the Uruguayan bank. (103) Some think that funds come from intelligence agencies(104) or from wealthy right-wing backers. The Los Angeles Times, in an article in 1992, said that the money trail may lead to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a major Japanese crime figure and billionaire with a far-right background. (105)
11. How Big and How Powerful?
It is tempting to conclude that the Moon organization enjoys gigantic influence and that its manipulations and conspiratorial influence are all pervasive. We do not propose any such far-fetched interpretation. The Moon organization is one among many conservative religious and political movements. Its resources, while large and deployed very strategically, are nonetheless far from unlimited. Its religious and political ideology, favoring a global theocracy under the leadership of the Rev. Moon, has never found a mass following and its efforts to gain influence sometimes appear desperate or even comical – such as Moon having himself crowned "Emperor of the Universe" in 1985(106) or his proposal more recently that he be named UN Secretary General "In Perpetuity." (107) The Rev. Moon is a long way short of persuading the world that he is the Messiah and that he should be offered the mantle of world leadership!
Yet, compared to most NGOs, the Moon organization is large and rich. It has connections to politicians in high places and to ultra-right networks. It commands considerable media resources. These factors, joined to a policy of deception, give it a considerable capacity for mischief.

III. Moon's Arrival at the United Nations

12. First Steps at the UN
Though long hostile towards the United Nations and absent from the UN scene, the Rev. Moon started to build a presence at the UN in the early 1990s. This coincided with a similar policy change by other conservative organizations, though no other would match the resources that the Moon organization would eventually muster.
In 1993, the Moon-related International Religious Foundation (IRF) gained status with the UN Department of Public Information. On September 7, 1993, Hak Ja Han Moon, the wife of the Rev. Moon, spoke at the UN at an NGO-sponsored conference, in what may have been the first appearance by a senior Moon on the UN premises. The Women's Federation for World Peace (WFWP), a major Moon group, won consultative status with ECOSOC in 1997. Taj Hamad, soon to be a key Moon figure at the UN, took over the post of main representative of the IRF in 1997, opening an office at 866 UN Plaza at about this time. In 1998, the Family Federation for World Peace gained DPI status and Hamad became its main representative as well.
Hamad moved to knit friendships with members of the NGO community and many describe him as friendly and persuasive. By mid-1998, he won election to a two-year term as Secretary of the NGO/DPI Executive Committee, the official umbrella group of NGOs in association with the UN Department of Public Information. Within weeks of taking office, Hamad offered fellow committee members invitations to an all-expense-paid conference in Korea, sponsored by the Family Federation for World Peace. Many accepted for the February 1999 event, pleased at the opportunity for such a trip.
Shortly after the Korea conference, according to sources within the Committee, Hamad tried to increase his power and responsibilities, but did not succeed. Several committee members describe him as short-tempered and difficult. In October 1999, halfway through his term as Secretary, Hamad refused to prepare further minutes of the meetings. He then became embroiled in a divisive election campaign for the post of Vice-Chair. Committee members called in an attorney to advise about the lack of minutes and other problems. Committee meetings grew rancorous, as Hamad and other members traded accusations.
On November 22, 1999, in a separate development, the Moon-run Women's Federation for World Peace held a big one-day conference at United Nations headquarters, jointly sponsored by the UN and featuring a "Bridge of Peace" and a banquet. Among listed participants at that conference were Dorota Gyrecz of the UN Division for the Advancement of Women and Alfatih Hamad, Deputy Director of the New York office of UNESCO. A number of other UN officials, including those of high rank and those with special responsibility for NGOs, attended this and other meetings. Like so many others, they did not know that they were participating in a Moon event and they would later feel deceived.(108) By such appearances, however deceptive, the Moon organization made it seem like its fortunes at the UN were rising.
But in the NGO/DPI Executive Committee, normally tolerant NGO representatives were moving towards a divisive election confrontation. The Nominating Committee, headed by a Hamad ally, came into conflict with many other committee members. Ballots were drawn up and then challenged, leading to a temporary crisis. Eventually, in July, the Committee settled the issue and sent out a ballot. Hamad was defeated by another candidate. His term and his reach for power ended abruptly.
13. WANGO's Bid for Primacy
Just as Hamad's election hopes waned, the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (WANGO) stepped forward. It bid to be a major player in the UN NGO community soon after its founding, just prior to the UN's historic Millennium Summit. It announced itself as an "umbrella" group for NGOs worldwide. And its name bore a striking resemblance to CONGO, the Conference of NGOs in Consultative Status with the UN, a longstanding NGO umbrella organization, which WANGO seemed to be challenging for preeminence. WANGO's Executive Director was a familiar figure – Taj Hamad. (109)
The Secretary General of the new organization was a well-known African, Wally N'Dow from Gambia. N'Dow had served as Secretary General of the Second UN World Conference on Human Settlements in June 1996 and as Officer in Charge of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements (Habitat), based in Nairobi, from January 1994 to October 1997. (110)
It became increasingly clear that WANGO was not an independent NGO initiative. Not only was Taj Hamad WANGO's Executive Director, but high-level Moon associate Rev. Chung Hwan Kwak was listed as WANGO's Board Chairman. (111) Moon money, it was rumored, provided WANGO's funding. Virtually all WANGO's initial activities were jointly organized with the Moon-affiliated IIFWP.
In a speech delivered at WANGO's first conference in the fall of 2000, N'Dow made the Moon relationship abundantly clear. According to the published text, he said: "Without the inspiration, support and the backing that Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon himself has provided, his idea which has been burning in our hearts, of having a global umbrella, a new tent for NGOs and civil society, may not have been realized at this time." N'Dow's statement leaves no doubt that "the idea" for WANGO as well as "backing" came from Rev. Moon. (112)
WANGO had no official UN-NGO status, either with the Department of Public Information or with ECOSOC. WANGO gained its entrée to the UN through relations with delegations (from the first, Indonesia was a major sponsor), through staff passes held under other NGO auspices (113) and through connections to the three accredited Moon NGOs.
But why would the Rev. Moon, with a long-standing hostility towards the UN, seek to become a major player in the UN-NGO scene? There are two plausible reasons. First, Moon is following a trend of conservative, largely religious NGOs, which though hostile to the UN have recently created a new conservative NGO bloc at the organization, intervening actively in global meetings and conferences. (114) Second, the Moon presence at the UN allows the much-tainted Moon machine to gain the cachet of UN connection and implicit UN support, a means to increase the overall credibility of the organization with the general public and to attract unwary new adherents.
Rev. Moon chose a very high-profile event to announce the launching of WANGO, a conference held in part at UN headquarters during August 17-20, immediately prior to the UN's Millennium Summit. That conference, entitled "Assembly 2000 - Renewing the United Nations and Building a Culture of Peace: Toward a New Model of Global Cooperation in Addressing Critical Issues" attracted many big-name participants including (according to Conference documents) former Conservative UK prime minister Edward Heath, former Costa Rican President Oscar Arrias, former US Senator and presidential candidate Robert Dole, former president of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda, former president of Uruguay Luis Alberto Lacalle, Bruce Russett, director of the UN Studies program at Yale University, and Noel Brown, former director of the United Nations Environmental Program. The Rev. Moon himself participated and gave a speech on "Renewing the United Nations to build lasting peace." (115)
WANGO got off the ground quickly. It organized its first event, jointly with IIFWP, in New York at United Nations Headquarters and the New York Hilton Hotel from October 20-22. Entitled "The Millennium Declaration of the United Nations: A Response from Civil Society," the conference brought several hundred NGOs from all over the world. WANGO and IIFWP gained access to a UN conference room for one day of meetings through support of the Mission of Indonesia. (116)
According to the Unification Church web site, Moon was soon speaking about the importance of WANGO, during his tour to Latin America in late November and early December. The site quotes him as saying,
"Kwak [Chairman of IIFWP and WANGO] is going around the world to establish forty nations as pillars through WANGO HDH (Hoon Dok Hae) conferences … I am launching worldwide education through WANGO. It will provide the foundation for the ideal world by educating people so that they can build families beyond national boundaries…"(117)
Moon also said that "our movement and the UN are completely connected" and he told listeners that important events are jointly organized by the UN and the Moon forces. As his own web site records, he said that:
"Right after the International Conference on World Peace [in August], 360 scholars stayed for a HDH conference sponsored by IIFWP and the UN. So our movement and the UN are completely connected... WANGO means "path of the king." It will do HDH conferences in 191 countries by the end of this year. There are many NGOs, but we are at the top because we organized them. We try to harmonize and unify the UN and the NGOs, to create one unified organization. It is the most special one." (118)
In a statement at his New York area residence on December 10, Moon reiterated his claim that by year's end, WANGO would hold 191 conferences under the leadership of his indefatigable aide, the Rev. Chung Hwan Kwak. That claim appears greatly exaggerated. On the same occasion, Moon stated that the WANGO name held special significance. "WANGO sounds in Korean like "the king starts marching." In English, it sounds like "we won the battle and starting going forward now" ("won-go")."(119) By all appearances, Moon had lifted WANGO to top priority in his planning, funding and public relations efforts.
WANGO's second event in New York was the 7th World Culture and Sports Festival (WCSF), from January 26 - 30, 2001. WANGO and IIFWP organized the event jointly. WANGO alone invited some 200 NGO representatives as its guests. This event, like the previous one, was held both at the UN and in a luxury midtown hotel, the New York Hilton. Again the Indonesian mission to the UN acted as the lead sponsor. Other sponsors were the missions of Comoros, Iran, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. (120)
WANGO flew in large numbers of NGO representatives from many countries, picking up the tab for hotel bills, banquets and other meals. Six hundred participants attended, according to the organizers. More than a dozen big-name speakers addressed the conferences. Among them (according to the organizers' reports) were Assoumani Azali, President of the Comoros; Makarim Wibisono, Indonesian ambassador to the UN; Dan Quayle, former Vice President of the United States; Solo Dowuona-Hammond, President of the Olof Palme Peace Foundation; Nicholas N. Kittrie, Chairman of the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute for Justice and Peace; Clovis Maksoud, Executive Director of the Center for the Global South; Lech Walesa, former President of Poland; and Hamilton Greene, Former Prime Minister of Guyana. (121) The Festival ended on January 29 with a gala birthday party at the Manhattan Center for the "True Parents" – Rev. and Mrs. Moon. (122)
During the day-long Festival events at the United Nations on Saturday, January 27, the Rev. Moon gave a "Founder's Address." As invited Festival guests were having lunch in the Delegates' Dining Room, the Rev. Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han Moon conducted one of their famous mass-weddings (or, as they call it, "a blessing of couples"). Dressed in special regalia, they blessed a large number of couples in the UN conference room, an event that (according to a Moon web site) was linked by satellite to hundreds of other locations around the world. (123) UN officials have said that the UN had no knowledge of the plans for this ceremony and that they viewed it as a deception and a serious breach of the rules for use of UN facilities. A video of the event can be found on one of the Moon web sites. (124)
WANGO named a UK national, Ian Hall, to be its worldwide "Roving Ambassador." It is not clear whether Hall was put on salary, but he traveled on behalf of WANGO, met with NGO leaders and officials, and insisted that he be called "His Excellency," in the manner of a national ambassador, to the astonishment and amusement of many observers.
In January and February, WANGO-IIFWP jointly organized events in London and Washington DC. The London meeting reportedly assembled 400 NGOs from many lands. In Washington there were two events, on February 23-25 and February 26-28, called "International Leadership Seminars," each of which assembled more than 200. The IIFWP web site later announced that participants attended from 120 countries and that "Dr. Wally N'Dow, Secretary General of WANGO, spoke with passion and eloquence of a vision for a global, transnational movement among members of civil society." (125) These events must have cost well over $2 million for airfares, ground transportation, hotel costs and restaurant bills. N'Dow and Hamad worked closely together to plan and execute these conferences.
14. Wally N'Dow's Role
Wally N'Dow, WANGO Secretary General, is reportedly on a three-year contract. But it is not clear with whom he is on contract, since we do not know how WANGO is organized and who makes the decisions or signs the checks.
N'Dow has been dogged by negative reports about his past leadership shortcomings and especially about serious financial irregularities. In 1996, when he was in charge of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements (Habitat), the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services identified "serious management problems and significant shortcomings in the management of the Center's programs and human and financial resources." (126) The report called attention to the overpayment of one staff member in the amount of $120,000 and noted that the Center paid a subsidy for an apartment in New York of a staff member living in Nairobi. (127) Though no names were mentioned in the report, N'Dow as chief executive was clearly implicated. The report concluded that "the Center's present work environment did not facilitate efficiency and effectiveness." (128) The General Assembly, in an unusual step, expressed its "deep concern" over the "serious irregular financial practices" of the Nairobi-based UNCHS. (129)
Facing rising concerns in the NGO community and the UN Secretariat about WANGO's Moon connections, N'Dow dropped his public encomiums of the Rev. Moon and by early spring of 2001 began to emphasize the separation between WANGO and its Moon backers.
[Box: An Interview with Wally N'Dow]
In March 2001, N'Dow gave an interview to a New York-based NGO, of which we have obtained a summary. According to the report, N'Dow was at first extremely agitated, asking what right the interviewer had to inquire about WANGO. Eventually, he agreed to answer a few questions. When asked how policy in WANGO was set, he replied: "Our policy is set with hundreds of NGO partners all over the world." But when asked to name one or two such partners, he replied that to name them would be "premature." He insisted, however, that it is "a very diverse group, from many countries."
N'Dow went on to state flatly that "there is absolutely no connection between WANGO and the Reverend Moon or his organizations." When asked about the important funding from Moon, he replied that it was "just seed money" and that it "came from the Rev. Moon personally and not from the Unification Church." He refused to give any specific information about WANGO's budget. And he insisted that he had never even met the Rev. Moon.
N'Dow said grandly that "we have strong support in Washington" and that "high-level officials have taken part in our events." When asked for an example, he named Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft. But when pressed for details, he admitted that Ashcroft had participated in a prayer breakfast, not with N'Dow or WANGO, but rather with the Rev. Moon.
About half way through the interview, a woman appeared and joined the conversation . She offered her card, which identified her as Karen Judd Smith, Secretary General of the Women's Federation for World Peace International. (130) She openly avowed that hers was a Moon-related group. By contrast with N'Dow, Smith appeared calm and confident. She immediately began to take an active part in the discussion. When the interviewer asked N'Dow questions about whether WANGO is independently incorporated, whether it has tax-exempt status, and whether it has filed as a charity with the State Attorney General, N'Dow looked quizzically at Smith. She offered most of the answers at this point, though her responses were studiously vague. It was instructive that the head of another organization seemed to know more about WANGO's financial and organizational structure than WANGO's own Secretary General. This suggested that WANGO is run mainly by Moon staffers and not by N'Dow himself.
[end of box]

IV Other Recent Moon Developments at the UN

15. Latest Events
The Moon organization has kept up its drive to gain status rights at the UN for its associated groups. The most recent campaign sought to win ECOSOC accreditation for the Youth Federation for World Peace (YFWP). But as this application moved through the accreditation process in 1999, governments noticed curious anomalies – this world organization reported that it had a total expenditure of only $11,729 (1998) and it said it had held several world conferences prior to its listed date of establishment. Governments suspected a Moon connection, so they gave the file especially close scrutiny. Members of the ECOSOC Committee on NGOs objected that the organization was represented by a lawyer, rather than by staff or board leaders. The Committee eventually decided that it had heard enough. In January 17, 2001, just ten days prior to the Moon conference and mass wedding at UN headquarters, the committee decided to close the case and deny accreditation. (131)
In spite of Ahmad's election defeat, widespread NGO skepticism about WANGO and the governments' rejection of the YFWP accreditation, the Moon organization continued its efforts to gain prominence at the UN. In early April, through the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International, it again sought to organize a conference at the UN as part of a three-day event titled "Serving the Nations, Serving the World." The Indonesian Mission, acting again as principal sponsor, sent a conference space request to the Secretariat for Saturday, May 26. A number of other delegations were also associated with this event as co-sponsors – Bangladesh, Iran, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
But the Secretariat was keen to avoid a repeat of the January embarrassment. UN officials correctly guessed that a mass wedding might again be in the offing. They delayed responding to the Indonesian request, while they carefully studied the issue. Finally, sometime in mid-May, a high official sent an unequivocal message -- in light of the January episode the UN would not agree to this event on UN premises.
When the conference eventually took place, outside the UN, the Rev. Moon held a high-profile mass wedding, as predicted, on the very day that the UN rooms had been requested. The wedding ceremony drew heavy coverage in the media. Among those married was a maverick Catholic Archbishop who wed a Korean woman selected as his partner by Rev. Moon. Had this bizarre event taken place at the UN, the world organization would have been dragged into another compromising situation. This time, though, the Moon deception did not work and UN officials vowed they would not be deceived again.

V Conclusion

16. Summary
We have reviewed the strange history and practices of the Moon organization and its initiatives at the UN. Its activities are often surprising and disturbing. We can summarize the concerns raised in this paper in five main points:
1) Illegality. Moon activities have been judged illegal by a court of law in the United States, leading to the Rev. Moon's imprisonment for tax evasion, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The Congressional report suggested that the Moon organization had committed other criminal acts such as tax evasion, money laundering, and evasion of currency controls. Many subsequent media articles suggest that these illegal activities continue.
2) Highly Objectionable Activities and Positions. The Moon organization manufactures and trades weapons, promotes a view of women as inferior, and maintains close contacts with far-right movements. It has had close relations with intelligence agencies, notably the KCIA, and it has served as an important funder of right-wing causes. It has abused its non-profit and religious status through extensive business activities in wholly-owned companies.
3) Deception and Serious Lack of Tranparency. The Moon organization's many front organizations blur relationships with the Rev. Moon and offers a range of faces to the public. Many of those who become involved with these organizations never know the real nature of the Moon operation. Moon organizations keep their finances secret, and they lure NGO partners and participants by offers of fancy banquets, travel costs to conferences, speakers' fees and other enticements. Moon organizations claim partnerships with the UN that do not exist. The mass wedding held in the UN conference room in January would never have been permitted if the Moon sponsors had honestly announced their intentions. It seems fair to conclude that the Moon organization is deliberately deceptive and that it attempts to hoodwink the unsuspecting public. It misrepresents its activities and operates under false pretenses. It very seriously lacks transparency.
4) Not a Non-Governmental Organization. The Moon organization appears to be more a business empire and a political movement than a religion. Least of all is it a non-governmental organization. Though NGOs worldwide are necessarily very diverse and do not conform to a simple model, the Moon organization stretches credibility as an NGO. Its vast business and media holdings suggest that it is primarily a for-profit corporation, as the US Internal Revenue Service ruled for a number of years. Furthermore, any single Moon group does not operate independently but rather acts as part of a network of dozens, even hundreds, of associations and groups, run covertly in a unified manner. Accepting such a strange animal as a genuine non-governmental organization undermines the NGO movement and its fundamental role and legitimacy. Further, organizations that claim associative or consultative NGO status at the UN, must act in accord with the Charter of the United Nations and the basic principles of the organization. The Moon organization clearly does not meet this criterion.
5) HostilityTowards the UN. The Moon organization speaks with many voices, but the organization's key media organs, in particular the heavily-subsidized Washington Times, offer the public extremely negative and hostile interpretations of the United Nations and its work. The Rev. Moon's right-wing views lead many Moon affiliates to campaign against UN principles and practice in fields such as population, human development, human rights, and disarmament.

********************* The Moon organization could not have achieved its high-profile presence at the United Nations without the support of several government delegations. Through the support of the Indonesian mission, the Moon organization was able to obtain major conference facilities at UN headquarters on at least three occasions within a six-month period. A number of other missions have also lent support to Moon functions. According to IIFWP sources, the missions of The Arab League, Banglad...

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=jhfQ...q=&f=false

Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built and American Empire [B]By John Gorenfeld, Barry W. Lynn[/B]

http://www.shootthemessengernyc.com/inde..._part_1_2/
John Gorenfeld, author of a new book on the Rev. Moon and the Republicans who love him, interviewed by Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050110.html

How Rev. Moon's 'Snakes' Infested US

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
May 1, 2010

As an investigative journalist, I’m not much for catchy political metaphors, but the revelation that snakes and rodents are infesting the Washington Times building as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s newspaper sinks into a financial swamp does have some poetic justice about it.

After all, for 28 years, the right-wing Washington Times has sent disinformation slithering through the U.S. political system while creating a nest for propagandists who have befouled American democracy with irrationality and dirty tricks.

Indeed, one could say that Moon's newspaper pioneered the modern style of deceptive “journalism” that is the daily fare on Fox News, angry talk radio and right-wing blogs.

The immediate cause of the Washington Times’ financial collapse is said to be the bitter succession fight among children of the 90-year-old Unification Church founder who is no longer capable of maintaining personal control over his global religious-political-business empire.

That empire has now split into competing factions, with one of Moon’s children, Justin Moon, who is in charge of the Asian operations, deciding to slash the church’s massive subsidy to the Washington Times headed by another son, Preston Moon.

Nicholas Chiaia, one of the two remaining members of the newspaper’s board of directors, told the Washington Post that the Washington Times is up for sale. “We recently entered into discussions with a number of parties interested in either purchasing or partnering with the Washington Times,” he said.

Meanwhile, staffers who have survived a series of draconian layoffs report that snakes and mice have slipped into the newspaper’s building because the owners can’t afford exterminators to combat the infestations.

“There was a three-foot-long black snake in the main conference room the other day,” said reporter Julia Duin. “We have snakes in the newsroom.”

So, although some deep-pocket conservative might step up and save the American Right’s flagship newspaper, it appears that the Washington Times’ extraordinary run as a foreign-controlled and suspiciously funded propaganda vehicle may soon be over.

A Curious Case

It has long been amazing that Official Washington has been so blasé about the curious case of the Washington Times, where a Korean theocrat – known for brainwashing his followers and for maintaining close ties with international drug cartels and foreign intelligence agencies – has been allowed to spend billions of unregulated dollars to influence U.S. political decision-making.

The fact that Moon wrapped himself in “conservative” political garb – and was quick to denounce any investigations of his organization as “religious bigotry” – helped fend off inquiries into exactly where his money was coming from.

But what proved most important was how Moon made himself useful to Ronald Reagan, the Bush Family and other Republican heavy-hitters – often by putting into play propaganda smearing their political enemies. These Republicans, in turn, helped protect Moon, at least since the late 1970s.

During the Carter administration, the congressional “Korea-gate” probe into South Korean influence-buying in Washington revealed Moon’s foreign intelligence ties and some of his criminal activities, leading to his conviction on tax fraud charges in 1982.

In that same year, however, Moon took steps to insulate himself from further inquiries, most notably by launching the Washington Times. Since then, Moon’s empire – from its local fundraising scams to its international money-laundering – has escaped any serious government examination.

It didn’t even matter when Church insiders, including Moon’s former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, provided first-hand evidence of systematic criminality. In an era dominated by Republican control of the federal government, U.S. authorities never seemed to put two and two together.

Though Moon’s operations in both Asia and South America were linked to major crime syndicates including the Japanese yakuza and Latin American cocaine cartels, federal prosecutors and congressional committees chose to look the other way.

That way Moon was allowed to continue pouring an estimated $100 million a year into his newspaper and other pro-Republican media outlets. Additional millions went to fund right-wing political conferences; to pay speaking fees to world leaders, including George H.W. Bush; and to bail other Republican political allies out of financial troubles.

When I was investigating Moon’s activities in the mid-1990s, I interviewed former church insiders who explained how Moon’s U.S. business operations, such as restaurants and real estate deals, served to launder overseas money that his followers would first sneak past U.S. Customs, a practice confirmed by Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law.

In her 1998 memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, Nansook Hong alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.

“The Unification Church was a cash operation,” Nansook Hong wrote. “I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.

“The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet.”

Personal Confession

Mrs. Moon even pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.

Mrs. Moon had received “stacks of money” and divvied it up among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote.

“I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills,” she recalled. “I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ... I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws.”

U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.

Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers” who smuggled the money in from overseas, Nansook Hong wrote.

Despite Nansook Hong’s revelations, which corroborated longstanding claims by other Moon insiders, no known criminal investigation ensued.

There is also the question of where the mysterious money originated. Some Moon watchers believe much of the cash came from scams of superstitious Japanese widows who were sold miniature pagodas and other ornaments dedicated to their dead husbands.

Yet, while the Japanese scams might explain part of Moon’s fortune, others who have looked into Moon’s operation suspect that a major source of money derived from Moon’s close relationships with underworld figures in Asia and South America.

Those ties date back several decades to negotiations conducted by one of Moon’s early South Korean supporters, Kim Jong-Pil, who founded the Korean CIA and headed up sensitive negotiations on improving bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul.

The negotiations put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had been jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II. A few years later, however, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.

The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in Cold War battles with European communists.

Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Far-Right Extremism

Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to Moon, who had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Yakuza, a book by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.

"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.

Moon's church was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with ex-Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American “death squads.”

Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.

The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Sasakawa and Kodama, and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons wrote.

WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, according to the Andersons.

The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that “would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade,” the Andersons wrote.

Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.

Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the Allies, the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War. They helped both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.

Though some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, others managed to make their escapes along “rat lines” to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.

Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.

In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.

Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.

French Connection

Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States.

Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.

Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also “took on assignments for Argentina’s terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance,” Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.

During President Richard Nixon’s original “war on drugs,” U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.

However, by the time the French Connection was severed, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America’s military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.

Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA’s training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations.

Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.

During this time of transition, Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires, but he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.

Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.

“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.

“As an international money laundry, … the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”

Cocaine Coup

In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when a right-wing alliance of Bolivian military officers and drug dealers organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup. Moon’s WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.

Right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a contingent of young European neo-fascists as they collaborated with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.

The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.

One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.

After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”

According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.

Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the border.

“The paramilitary units – conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS – sold themselves to the cocaine barons,” German journalist Kai Hermann wrote. “The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.”

A month after the coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.

As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.

On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.

In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, “God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.” According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an “armed church” of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.

Moon’s Escape

But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.

“The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann reported.

The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too.
Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.

Ex-Gestapo official Barbie, known as the “butcher of Lyon,” was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1991.

But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington.

Yet, where Moon got his cash remained one of Washington’s deepest mysteries – and one that few U.S. conservatives wanted to solve.

“Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking,” wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson.

While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities, Moon’s spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.

In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, “I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love.” [Clarin, July 7, 1996]

Without doubt, however, Moon’s organization has had a long record of association with organized crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with leaders of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia, Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contra movement, both permeated with drug smugglers. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

On the Offensive

Moon’s organization also used the Washington Times and its political clout in the nation's capital to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to investigate Moon-connected criminal activities.

In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking, they came under attack from the Times.

An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: “Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”

When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra-drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt.

“Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,” announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.

But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan administration efforts to get at the truth.

“Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe,” said a Jan. 21, 1987, Times article that opened with the assertion: “Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said.”

Despite the attacks, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units – both in Costa Rica and Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade.

“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989.

“In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”

Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.
“Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report said. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period.

“Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”

The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.

In short, Vice President Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.

If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.

By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President – and bought some cover for Moon’s drug-connected right-wing allies, too.

Mounting Evidence

The resistance of the Reagan and the first Bush administrations prevented anything like a complete story of the contra-drug scandal from emerging in a timely fashion.

However, the evidence – eventually assembled by investigators at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies – now indicates that Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug smugglers who tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war.

Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, sharing some of their drug profits with the contras as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.

Based on official investigations, we now know that the contra-connected smugglers included Bolivians, the Medellin cartel, Panama’s government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.

In some cases, U.S. intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice of contra-connected drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would embarrass the contras and their patrons in the Reagan-Bush administrations.

For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations stated, “There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”

The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.

The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force, the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens. But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.

“In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further,” CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary to label the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as “misinformation.”

The CIA’s Latin American Division, however, responded on Nov. 18, 1982, that several contra officials had gone to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters, presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal. But CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz – when he investigated in the mid-to-late 1990s – found no additional information about that deal in CIA files.

Also, by keeping the names of the participants censored when the documents finally were released in 1998, the CIA prevented outside investigators from examining whether the “U.S. religious organization” had any affiliation with Moon’s network of quasi-religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.

Studied Disinterest

Over the past quarter century – as Moon invested heavily in prominent Republicans – this pattern of government disinterest in his illicit operations remained one consistency. That disinterest wasn’t even shaken when disenchanted Moon insiders went public with confessions of their own first-hand involvement in criminal conspiracies.

Besides Nansook Hong’s account of money-laundering, other disaffected Moon disciples told similar stories.

For instance, Maria Madelene Pretorious, a former Unification Church member who worked at Moon’s Manhattan Center, a New York City music venue and recording studio, testified at a court hearing in Massachusetts that in December of 1993 or January of 1994, one of Moon’s sons, Hyo Jin Moon, returned from a trip to Korea “with $600,000 in cash which he had received from his father. ...

“Myself along with three or four other members that worked at Manhattan Center saw the cash in bags, shopping bags.”

In an interview with me in the mid-1990s, Pretorious said Asian church members would bring cash into the United States where it would be circulated through Moon’s business entities as a way to launder it.

At the center of this financial operation, Pretorious said, was One-Up Corp., a Delaware-registered holding company that owned many Moon enterprises including the Manhattan Center and New World Communications, the parent company of the Washington Times.

“Once that cash is at the Manhattan Center, it has to be accounted for,” Pretorious said. “The way that’s done is to launder the cash. Manhattan Center gives cash to a business called Happy World which owns restaurants. ... Happy World needs to pay illegal aliens. ... Happy World pays some back to the Manhattan Center for ‘services rendered.’ The rest goes to One-Up and then comes back to Manhattan Center as an investment.”

In 1996, the Uruguayan bank employees union blew the whistle on another Moon money-laundering scheme, in which some 4,200 female Japanese followers allegedly walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Montevideo and deposited as much as $25,000 each.

The money from the women went into the account of an anonymous association called Cami II, which was controlled by Moon’s Unification Church. In one day, Cami II received $19 million and, by the time the parade of women ended, the total had swelled to about $80 million.

It was not clear where the money originated, nor how many other times Moon’s organization has used this tactic – known as “smurfing” – to transfer untraceable cash into Uruguay.

Authorities did not push the money-laundering investigation, apparently out of deference to Moon’s political clout and fear of disrupting Uruguay’s banking industry. However, other critics condemned Moon’s operations.

“The first thing we ought to do is clarify to the people [of Uruguay] that Moon’s sect is a type of modern pirate that came to the country to perform obscure money operations, such as money laundering,” said Jorge Zabalza, who was a leader of the Movimiento de Participacion Popular. “This sect is a kind of religious mob that is trying to get public support to pursue its business.”

While Moon’s criminal enterprises may have been operating at one level, Moon’s political influence-buying was functioning at another, as he spread around billions of dollars to the top echelons of Washington power.

For instance, when the New Right’s direct-mail whiz Richard Viguerie fell on hard times in the late 1980s, Moon had a corporation run by his lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak, buy one of Viguerie’s properties for $10 million. [See OrangeCounty Register, Dec. 21, 1987; Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1989]

Moon also used the Washington Times and its affiliated publications to create seemingly legitimate conduits to funnel money to individuals and companies. In another example of Moon’s helpful largesse, the Washington Times hired Viguerie to conduct a pricy direct-mail subscription drive.

Falwell’s Savior

Another case of saving a right-wing icon occurred when the Rev. Jerry Falwell was facing financial ruin over the debts piling up at Liberty University.

But the fundamentalist Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, got a last-minute bail-out in the mid-1990s ostensibly from two Virginia businessmen, Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas, who used their non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation to snap up a large chunk of Liberty’s debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value.

Falwell rejoiced and called the moment “the greatest single day of financial advantage” in the school’s history, even though it was accomplished at the disadvantage of many small true-believing investors who had bought the church construction bonds through a Texas company.

But Falwell’s secret benefactor behind the debt purchase was Sun Myung Moon, who was kept in the background partly because of his controversial Biblical interpretations that hold Jesus to have been a failure and because of Moon’s alleged brainwashing of thousands of young Americans, often shattering their bonds with their biological families.

Moon had used his tax-exempt Women’s Federation for World Peace to funnel $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that purchased the school’s debt. I stumbled onto this Moon-Falwell connection by examining the Internal Revenue Service filings of Moon’s front groups.

The Women Federation’s vice president Susan Fefferman confirmed that the $3.5 million grant had gone to “Mr. Falwell’s people” for the benefit of Liberty University. [For more on Moon’s funding of the Right, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Moon also used the Women’s Federation to pay substantial speaking fees to former President George H.W. Bush, who gave talks at Moon-sponsored events. In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in Asia for the Women’s Federation. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo, Bush said “what really counts is faith, family and friends.”

In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. The former President addressed the Moon-connected Family Federation for World Peace in Washington, an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of his contract after learning of Moon’s connection. Bush had no such qualms. [Washington Post, July 30, 1996]

In fall 1996, Moon needed the ex-President’s help once more. Moon was trying to replicate his Washington Times influence in South America by opening a regional newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo. But South American journalists were recounting unsavory chapters of Moon’s history, including his links to South Korea’s intelligence service and various neo-fascist groups.

Some newspaper articles noted that in the early 1980s, Moon had used friendships with the military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay – which had been responsible for tens of thousands of political murders – to invest in those two countries. There also were allegations of Moon’s links to the region’s major drug traffickers.

Moon’s disciples fumed about the critical stories and accused the Argentine news media of trying to sabotage Moon’s plans for an inaugural gala in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23, 1996. “The local press was trying to undermine the event,” complained the church’s internal newsletter, Unification News.

Given the controversy, Argentina’s elected president, Carlos Menem, decided to reject Moon’s invitation to attend.

Trump Card

But Moon had a trump card: the endorsement of an ex-President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Agreeing to speak at the newspaper’s launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane, arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22. Bush stayed at Menem’s official residence, the Olivos.

As the headliner at the newspaper’s inaugural gala, Bush saved the day, Moon’s followers gushed. “Mr. Bush’s presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige,” wrote the Unification News. “Father [Moon] and Mother [Mrs. Moon] sat with several of the True Children [Moon’s offspring] just a few feet from the podium” where Bush spoke.

“I want to salute Reverend Moon,” Bush declared. “A lot of my friends in South America don’t know about the Washington Times, but it is an independent voice. The editors of the Washington Times tell me that never once has the man with the vision [Moon] interfered with the running of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C.”

Bush’s speech was so effusive that it surprised even Moon’s followers.
“Once again, heaven turned a disappointment into a victory,” the Unification News exulted. “Everyone was delighted to hear his compliments. We knew he would give an appropriate and ‘nice’ speech, but praise in Father’s presence was more than we expected. ... It was vindication. We could just hear a sigh of relief from Heaven.”

While Bush’s assertion about Moon’s Washington Times as a voice of “sanity” may be a matter of opinion, Bush’s vouching for its editorial independence simply wasn’t true. Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation of the news by Moon and his subordinates.

The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984, confessing that “I have blood on my hands” for helping Moon’s church achieve greater legitimacy.
But Bush’s boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America.

“The day after,” the Unification News observed, “the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized that the event had the support of a U.S. President.” With Bush’s help, Moon had gained another beachhead for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire.

After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know Moon. “Bush told me he came and charged money to do it,” Menem said. [La Nacion, Nov. 26, 1996]

But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By fall 1996, Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least a decade and a half. The ex-President also had been earning huge speaking fees as a front man for Moon for more than a year.

Throughout these public appearances for Moon, Bush’s office refused to divulge how much Moon-affiliated organizations have paid the ex-President. But estimates of Bush’s fee for the Buenos Aires appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000.

Sources close to the Unification Church told me that the total spending on Bush ran into the millions, with one source telling me that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million from Moon’s organization.

The senior George Bush may have had a political motive, too. By 1996, sources close to Bush were saying the ex-President was working hard to enlist well-to-do conservatives and their money behind the presidential candidacy of his son, George W. Bush. Moon was one of the deepest pockets in right-wing circles.

Moon’s pattern of putting into Bush family causes continued into George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2006, Moon again used money-laundering techniques to funnel a donation to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.

The Houston Chronicle reported that Moon’s Washington Times Foundation gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which in turn acted as a conduit for donations to the library. The Chronicle obtained indirect confirmation that Moon’s money was passing through the Houston foundation to the Bush library from Bush family spokesman Jim McGrath.

“President Bush has been very grateful for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation, and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington,” McGrath said.

But Moon has earned the deepest gratitude of the Bush Family and the Republican Party via his multi-billion-dollar investment in the Washington Times, a powerful propaganda organ that helped the GOP build its political dominance over the past quarter century.

Over those years, the Times has targeted American politicians of the Center and Left with journalistic attacks – sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonated through the broader right-wing echo chamber and often into the mainstream media.

In 2000, the Washington Times was at the center of the assault on Al Gore’s candidacy – highlighting apocryphal quotes by Gore and using them to depict him as either "Lyin' Al" or delusional. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore vs. the Media.”]

Aiming at Obama

The intervention by Moon’s media outlets into U.S. presidential politics continued into Campaign 2008 when Moon’s online magazine Insight tried to sabotage Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign before it even got started.

The Insight article cited opposition research supposedly dug up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that Obama had attended a fundamentalist Muslim “madrassa” while a child and had sought to conceal his allegiance to Islam.

“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” a source supposedly close to Clinton’s background investigation of Obama told Insight. “The idea is to show Obama as deceptive.”

Insight used no named sources for the allegations, nor did the magazine check out the facts about the school.

After Moon’s online magazine published the “madrassa” story, it quickly spread to the wider audiences of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, and then into the mainstream press. To further the subliminal link between Obama and Islamic terrorism, the New York Post ran its story under the headline “‘Osama’ Mud Flies at Obama.”

“The allegations are completely false,” said Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. “To publish this sort of trash without any documentation is surprising, but for Fox to repeat something so false, not once, but many times is appallingly irresponsible.”

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson termed the Insight article “an obvious right-wing hit job by a Moonie publication that was designed to attack Senator Clinton and Senator Obama at the same time.” [Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2007]

When CNN checked out the Insight article on Jan. 22, 2007, the story collapsed. The Indonesian school that Obama attended as a child turned out not to be some radical “madrassa” where an extreme form of Islam would be taught, but a well-kept public school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jakarta.

The boys and girls wore school uniforms and were taught a typical school curriculum today as they were 39 years ago when Obama was a student there, while living with his mother in Indonesia, reported CNN correspondent John Vause.

While most of the school’s students are Muslim – Indonesia is a Muslim country, after all – Vause reported that the religious views of other students are respected and that Christian children at the school are taught that Jesus is the son of God.

Though this Moon-financed propaganda may have been debunked, the subliminal doubt was planted about whether Obama might be a secret agent of radical Islam, a theme that has continued to resonate within the right-wing media and the Tea Party movement.

Now, however, it appears that the days of Moon’s news outlets initiating or circulating smears against political enemies may finally be nearing an end. What ultimately has caused the decline of Moon’s money machine – besides the infighting of Moon’s children – remains a mystery, at least to outsiders.

It’s possible that Moon’s lucrative connections to the netherworld of right-wing extremism, drugs and money simply were dependent on his personal relationships – and as they died off, so did his ability to access those financial channels.

It’s possible, too, that the value of Moon’s propaganda operation has been eclipsed by less problematic right-wing media moguls and self-made talk-show hosts who are now rich themselves.

Though Moon played a key early role in building the right-wing echo chamber, other wealthy individuals, from media titan Rupert Murdoch to newly minted multi-millionaires like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, can carry on quite well without the help of a Korean theocrat who thinks he’s the new Messiah.

Still, even the passing of Moon’s Washington Times will not mean that the snakes and other vermin that Moon let loose in the American political system will soon disappear. In fact, they may be more prevalent than ever.



Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Rise & Fall of The Washington Times: The Ex-Nazis, Cocaine Smugglers & Cultists Who Created a Right-Wing Propaganda Organ, And Brought It Crashing Down


For 28 years, the Washington Times has sent disinformation slithering through the U.S. political system, befouling our democracy. Those days might be over.
May 6, 2010 |




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As an investigative journalist, I’m not much for catchy political metaphors, but the revelation that snakes and rodents are infesting the Washington Times building as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s newspaper sinks into a financial swamp does have some poetic justice about it.
After all, for 28 years, the right-wing Washington Times has sent disinformation slithering through the U.S. political system while creating a nest for propagandists who have befouled American democracy with irrationality and dirty tricks.
Indeed, one could say that Moon's newspaper pioneered the modern style of deceptive “journalism” that is the daily fare on Fox News, angry talk radio and right-wing blogs.
The immediate cause of the Washington Times’ financial collapse is said to be the bitter succession fight among children of the 90-year-old Unification Church founder who is no longer capable of maintaining personal control over his global religious-political-business empire.
That empire has now split into competing factions, with one of Moon’s children, Justin Moon, who is in charge of the Asian operations, deciding to slash the church’s massive subsidy to the Washington Times headed by another son, Preston Moon.
Nicholas Chiaia, one of the two remaining members of the newspaper’s board of directors, told the Washington Post that the Washington Times is up for sale. “We recently entered into discussions with a number of parties interested in either purchasing or partnering with the Washington Times,” he said.
Meanwhile, staffers who have survived a series of draconian layoffs report that snakes and mice have slipped into the newspaper’s building because the owners can’t afford exterminators to combat the infestations.
“There was a three-foot-long black snake in the main conference room the other day,” said reporter Julia Duin. “We have snakes in the newsroom.”
So, although some deep-pocket conservative might step up and save the American Right’s flagship newspaper, it appears that the Washington Times’ extraordinary run as a foreign-controlled and suspiciously funded propaganda vehicle may soon be over.
A Curious Case
It has long been amazing that Official Washington has been so blasé about the curious case of the Washington Times, where a Korean theocrat – known for brainwashing his followers and for maintaining close ties with international drug cartels and foreign intelligence agencies – has been allowed to spend billions of unregulated dollars to influence U.S. political decision-making.
The fact that Moon wrapped himself in “conservative” political garb – and was quick to denounce any investigations of his organization as “religious bigotry” – helped fend off inquiries into exactly where his money was coming from.
But what proved most important was how Moon made himself useful to Ronald Reagan, the Bush Family and other Republican heavy-hitters – often by putting into play propaganda smearing their political enemies. These Republicans, in turn, helped protect Moon, at least since the late 1970s.
During the Carter administration, the congressional “Korea-gate” probe into South Korean influence-buying in Washington revealed Moon’s foreign intelligence ties and some of his criminal activities, leading to his conviction on tax fraud charges in 1982.
In that same year, however, Moon took steps to insulate himself from further inquiries, most notably by launching the Washington Times. Since then, Moon’s empire – from its local fundraising scams to its international money-laundering – has escaped any serious government examination.
It didn’t even matter when Church insiders, including Moon’s former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, provided first-hand evidence of systematic criminality. In an era dominated by Republican control of the federal government, U.S. authorities never seemed to put two and two together.
Though Moon’s operations in both Asia and South America were linked to major crime syndicates including the Japanese yakuza and Latin American cocaine cartels, federal prosecutors and congressional committees chose to look the other way.
That way Moon was allowed to continue pouring an estimated $100 million a year into his newspaper and other pro-Republican media outlets. Additional millions went to fund right-wing political conferences; to pay speaking fees to world leaders, including George H.W. Bush; and to bail other Republican political allies out of financial troubles.
When I was investigating Moon’s activities in the mid-1990s, I interviewed former church insiders who explained how Moon’s U.S. business operations, such as restaurants and real estate deals, served to launder overseas money that his followers would first sneak past U.S. Customs, a practice confirmed by Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law.
In her 1998 memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, Nansook Hong alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.
“The Unification Church was a cash operation,” Nansook Hong wrote. “I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.
“The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet.”
Personal Confession
Mrs. Moon even pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.
Mrs. Moon had received “stacks of money” and divvied it up among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote.
“I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills,” she recalled. “I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ... I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws.”
U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.
Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers” who smuggled the money in from overseas, Nansook Hong wrote.
Despite Nansook Hong’s revelations, which corroborated longstanding claims by other Moon insiders, no known criminal investigation ensued.
There is also the question of where the mysterious money originated. Some Moon watchers believe much of the cash came from scams of superstitious Japanese widows who were sold miniature pagodas and other ornaments dedicated to their dead husbands.
Yet, while the Japanese scams might explain part of Moon’s fortune, others who have looked into Moon’s operation suspect that a major source of money derived from Moon’s close relationships with underworld figures in Asia and South America.
Those ties date back several decades to negotiations conducted by one of Moon’s early South Korean supporters, Kim Jong-Pil, who founded the Korean CIA and headed up sensitive negotiations on improving bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul.
The negotiations put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had been jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II. A few years later, however, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.
The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in Cold War battles with European communists.
Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Far-Right Extremism
Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to Moon, who had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Yakuza, a book by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.
"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.
Moon's church was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with ex-Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American “death squads.”
Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.
The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Sasakawa and Kodama, and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons wrote.
WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, according to the Andersons.
The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that “would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade,” the Andersons wrote.
Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.
Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.
In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the Allies, the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War. They helped both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.
Though some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, others managed to make their escapes along “rat lines” to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.
Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.
In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.
Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.
French Connection
Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States.
Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.

Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also “took on assignments for Argentina’s terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance,” Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.
During President Richard Nixon’s original “war on drugs,” U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.
However, by the time the French Connection was severed, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America’s military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.
Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA’s training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations.
Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.
During this time of transition, Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires, but he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.
Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.
“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.
“As an international money laundry, … the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”
Cocaine Coup
In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when a right-wing alliance of Bolivian military officers and drug dealers organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup. Moon’s WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.
Right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a contingent of young European neo-fascists as they collaborated with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.
The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.
One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.
After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”
According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.
Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the border.
“The paramilitary units – conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS – sold themselves to the cocaine barons,” German journalist Kai Hermann wrote. “The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.”
A month after the coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.
As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.
On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.
In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, “God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.” According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an “armed church” of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.
Moon’s Escape
But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.
“The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann reported.

The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too.
Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.
Ex-Gestapo official Barbie, known as the “butcher of Lyon,” was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1991.

But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington.
Yet, where Moon got his cash remained one of Washington’s deepest mysteries – and one that few U.S. conservatives wanted to solve.
“Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking,” wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson.
While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities, Moon’s spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.
In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, “I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love.” [Clarin, July 7, 1996]
Without doubt, however, Moon’s organization has had a long record of association with organized crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with leaders of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia, Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contra movement, both permeated with drug smugglers. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
On the Offensive
Moon’s organization also used the Washington Times and its political clout in the nation's capital to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to investigate Moon-connected criminal activities.
In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking, they came under attack from the Times.
An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: “Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”

When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra-drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt.
“Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,” announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.
But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan administration efforts to get at the truth.
“Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe,” said a Jan. 21, 1987, Times article that opened with the assertion: “Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said.”
Despite the attacks, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units – both in Costa Rica and Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade.
“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989.
“In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”
Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.
“Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report said. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period.
“Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”
The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.
In short, Vice President Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.
If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.
By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President – and bought some cover for Moon’s drug-connected right-wing allies, too.
Mounting Evidence
The resistance of the Reagan and the first Bush administrations prevented anything like a complete story of the contra-drug scandal from emerging in a timely fashion.
However, the evidence – eventually assembled by investigators at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies – now indicates that Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug smugglers who tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war.
Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, sharing some of their drug profits with the contras as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.
Based on official investigations, we now know that the contra-connected smugglers included Bolivians, the Medellin cartel, Panama’s government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.
In some cases, U.S. intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice of contra-connected drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would embarrass the contras and their patrons in the Reagan-Bush administrations.
For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations stated, “There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”
The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.
The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force, the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens. But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.
“In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further,” CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary to label the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as “misinformation.”
The CIA’s Latin American Division, however, responded on Nov. 18, 1982, that several contra officials had gone to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters, presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal. But CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz – when he investigated in the mid-to-late 1990s – found no additional information about that deal in CIA files.
Also, by keeping the names of the participants censored when the documents finally were released in 1998, the CIA prevented outside investigators from examining whether the “U.S. religious organization” had any affiliation with Moon’s network of quasi-religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.
Studied Disinterest
Over the past quarter century – as Moon invested heavily in prominent Republicans – this pattern of government disinterest in his illicit operations remained one consistency. That disinterest wasn’t even shaken when disenchanted Moon insiders went public with confessions of their own first-hand involvement in criminal conspiracies.
Besides Nansook Hong’s account of money-laundering, other disaffected Moon disciples told similar stories.
For instance, Maria Madelene Pretorious, a former Unification Church member who worked at Moon’s Manhattan Center, a New York City music venue and recording studio, testified at a court hearing in Massachusetts that in December of 1993 or January of 1994, one of Moon’s sons, Hyo Jin Moon, returned from a trip to Korea “with $600,000 in cash which he had received from his father. ...
“Myself along with three or four other members that worked at Manhattan Center saw the cash in bags, shopping bags.”
In an interview with me in the mid-1990s, Pretorious said Asian church members would bring cash into the United States where it would be circulated through Moon’s business entities as a way to launder it.
At the center of this financial operation, Pretorious said, was One-Up Corp., a Delaware-registered holding company that owned many Moon enterprises including the Manhattan Center and New World Communications, the parent company of the Washington Times.

“Once that cash is at the Manhattan Center, it has to be accounted for,” Pretorious said. “The way that’s done is to launder the cash. Manhattan Center gives cash to a business called Happy World which owns restaurants. ... Happy World needs to pay illegal aliens. ... Happy World pays some back to the Manhattan Center for ‘services rendered.’ The rest goes to One-Up and then comes back to Manhattan Center as an investment.”
In 1996, the Uruguayan bank employees union blew the whistle on another Moon money-laundering scheme, in which some 4,200 female Japanese followers allegedly walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Montevideo and deposited as much as $25,000 each.
The money from the women went into the account of an anonymous association called Cami II, which was controlled by Moon’s Unification Church. In one day, Cami II received $19 million and, by the time the parade of women ended, the total had swelled to about $80 million.
It was not clear where the money originated, nor how many other times Moon’s organization has used this tactic – known as “smurfing” – to transfer untraceable cash into Uruguay.
Authorities did not push the money-laundering investigation, apparently out of deference to Moon’s political clout and fear of disrupting Uruguay’s banking industry. However, other critics condemned Moon’s operations.
“The first thing we ought to do is clarify to the people [of Uruguay] that Moon’s sect is a type of modern pirate that came to the country to perform obscure money operations, such as money laundering,” said Jorge Zabalza, who was a leader of the Movimiento de Participacion Popular. “This sect is a kind of religious mob that is trying to get public support to pursue its business.”
While Moon’s criminal enterprises may have been operating at one level, Moon’s political influence-buying was functioning at another, as he spread around billions of dollars to the top echelons of Washington power.
For instance, when the New Right’s direct-mail whiz Richard Viguerie fell on hard times in the late 1980s, Moon had a corporation run by his lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak, buy one of Viguerie’s properties for $10 million. [See OrangeCounty Register, Dec. 21, 1987; Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1989]
Moon also used the Washington Times and its affiliated publications to create seemingly legitimate conduits to funnel money to individuals and companies. In another example of Moon’s helpful largesse, the Washington Times hired Viguerie to conduct a pricy direct-mail subscription drive.
Falwell’s Savior
Another case of saving a right-wing icon occurred when the Rev. Jerry Falwell was facing financial ruin over the debts piling up at Liberty University.
But the fundamentalist Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, got a last-minute bail-out in the mid-1990s ostensibly from two Virginia businessmen, Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas, who used their non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation to snap up a large chunk of Liberty’s debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value.
Falwell rejoiced and called the moment “the greatest single day of financial advantage” in the school’s history, even though it was accomplished at the disadvantage of many small true-believing investors who had bought the church construction bonds through a Texas company.
But Falwell’s secret benefactor behind the debt purchase was Sun Myung Moon, who was kept in the background partly because of his controversial Biblical interpretations that hold Jesus to have been a failure and because of Moon’s alleged brainwashing of thousands of young Americans, often shattering their bonds with their biological families.
Moon had used his tax-exempt Women’s Federation for World Peace to funnel $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that purchased the school’s debt. I stumbled onto this Moon-Falwell connection by examining the Internal Revenue Service filings of Moon’s front groups.
The Women Federation’s vice president Susan Fefferman confirmed that the $3.5 million grant had gone to “Mr. Falwell’s people” for the benefit of Liberty University. [For more on Moon’s funding of the Right, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Moon also used the Women’s Federation to pay substantial speaking fees to former President George H.W. Bush, who gave talks at Moon-sponsored events. In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in Asia for the Women’s Federation. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo, Bush said “what really counts is faith, family and friends.”
In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. The former President addressed the Moon-connected Family Federation for World Peace in Washington, an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of his contract after learning of Moon’s connection. Bush had no such qualms. [Washington Post, July 30, 1996]
In fall 1996, Moon needed the ex-President’s help once more. Moon was trying to replicate his Washington Times influence in South America by opening a regional newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo. But South American journalists were recounting unsavory chapters of Moon’s history, including his links to South Korea’s intelligence service and various neo-fascist groups.
Some newspaper articles noted that in the early 1980s, Moon had used friendships with the military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay – which had been responsible for tens of thousands of political murders – to invest in those two countries. There also were allegations of Moon’s links to the region’s major drug traffickers.
Moon’s disciples fumed about the critical stories and accused the Argentine news media of trying to sabotage Moon’s plans for an inaugural gala in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23, 1996. “The local press was trying to undermine the event,” complained the church’s internal newsletter, Unification News.

Given the controversy, Argentina’s elected president, Carlos Menem, decided to reject Moon’s invitation to attend.
Trump Card
But Moon had a trump card: the endorsement of an ex-President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Agreeing to speak at the newspaper’s launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane, arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22. Bush stayed at Menem’s official residence, the Olivos.
As the headliner at the newspaper’s inaugural gala, Bush saved the day, Moon’s followers gushed. “Mr. Bush’s presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige,” wrote the Unification News. “Father [Moon] and Mother [Mrs. Moon] sat with several of the True Children [Moon’s offspring] just a few feet from the podium” where Bush spoke.
“I want to salute Reverend Moon,” Bush declared. “A lot of my friends in South America don’t know about the Washington Times, but it is an independent voice. The editors of the Washington Times tell me that never once has the man with the vision [Moon] interfered with the running of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C.”
Bush’s speech was so effusive that it surprised even Moon’s followers.
“Once again, heaven turned a disappointment into a victory,” the Unification News exulted. “Everyone was delighted to hear his compliments. We knew he would give an appropriate and ‘nice’ speech, but praise in Father’s presence was more than we expected. ... It was vindication. We could just hear a sigh of relief from Heaven.”
While Bush’s assertion about Moon’s Washington Times as a voice of “sanity” may be a matter of opinion, Bush’s vouching for its editorial independence simply wasn’t true. Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation of the news by Moon and his subordinates.
The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984, confessing that “I have blood on my hands” for helping Moon’s church achieve greater legitimacy.
But Bush’s boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America.
“The day after,” the Unification News observed, “the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized that the event had the support of a U.S. President.” With Bush’s help, Moon had gained another beachhead for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire.
After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know Moon. “Bush told me he came and charged money to do it,” Menem said. [La Nacion, Nov. 26, 1996]
But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By fall 1996, Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least a decade and a half. The ex-President also had been earning huge speaking fees as a front man for Moon for more than a year.

Throughout these public appearances for Moon, Bush’s office refused to divulge how much Moon-affiliated organizations have paid the ex-President. But estimates of Bush’s fee for the Buenos Aires appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000.
Sources close to the Unification Church told me that the total spending on Bush ran into the millions, with one source telling me that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million from Moon’s organization.

The senior George Bush may have had a political motive, too. By 1996, sources close to Bush were saying the ex-President was working hard to enlist well-to-do conservatives and their money behind the presidential candidacy of his son, George W. Bush. Moon was one of the deepest pockets in right-wing circles.
Moon’s pattern of putting into Bush family causes continued into George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2006, Moon again used money-laundering techniques to funnel a donation to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.
The Houston Chronicle reported that Moon’s Washington Times Foundation gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which in turn acted as a conduit for donations to the library. The Chronicle obtained indirect confirmation that Moon’s money was passing through the Houston foundation to the Bush library from Bush family spokesman Jim McGrath.
“President Bush has been very grateful for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation, and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington,” McGrath said.
But Moon has earned the deepest gratitude of the Bush Family and the Republican Party via his multi-billion-dollar investment in the Washington Times, a powerful propaganda organ that helped the GOP build its political dominance over the past quarter century.
Over those years, the Times has targeted American politicians of the Center and Left with journalistic attacks – sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonated through the broader right-wing echo chamber and often into the mainstream media.
In 2000, the Washington Times was at the center of the assault on Al Gore’s candidacy – highlighting apocryphal quotes by Gore and using them to depict him as either "Lyin' Al" or delusional. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore vs. the Media.”]
Aiming at Obama
The intervention by Moon’s media outlets into U.S. presidential politics continued into Campaign 2008 when Moon’s online magazine Insight tried to sabotage Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign before it even got started.
The Insight article cited opposition research supposedly dug up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that Obama had attended a fundamentalist Muslim “madrassa” while a child and had sought to conceal his allegiance to Islam.
“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” a source supposedly close to Clinton’s background investigation of Obama told Insight. “The idea is to show Obama as deceptive.”
Insight used no named sources for the allegations, nor did the magazine check out the facts about the school.
After Moon’s online magazine published the “madrassa” story, it quickly spread to the wider audiences of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, and then into the mainstream press. To further the subliminal link between Obama and Islamic terrorism, the New York Post ran its story under the headline “‘Osama’ Mud Flies at Obama.”
“The allegations are completely false,” said Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. “To publish this sort of trash without any documentation is surprising, but for Fox to repeat something so false, not once, but many times is appallingly irresponsible.”
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson termed the Insight article “an obvious right-wing hit job by a Moonie publication that was designed to attack Senator Clinton and Senator Obama at the same time.” [Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2007]
When CNN checked out the Insight article on Jan. 22, 2007, the story collapsed. The Indonesian school that Obama attended as a child turned out not to be some radical “madrassa” where an extreme form of Islam would be taught, but a well-kept public school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jakarta.
The boys and girls wore school uniforms and were taught a typical school curriculum today as they were 39 years ago when Obama was a student there, while living with his mother in Indonesia, reported CNN correspondent John Vause.
While most of the school’s students are Muslim – Indonesia is a Muslim country, after all – Vause reported that the religious views of other students are respected and that Christian children at the school are taught that Jesus is the son of God.
Though this Moon-financed propaganda may have been debunked, the subliminal doubt was planted about whether Obama might be a secret agent of radical Islam, a theme that has continued to resonate within the right-wing media and the Tea Party movement.
Now, however, it appears that the days of Moon’s news outlets initiating or circulating smears against political enemies may finally be nearing an end. What ultimately has caused the decline of Moon’s money machine – besides the infighting of Moon’s children – remains a mystery, at least to outsiders.
It’s possible that Moon’s lucrative connections to the netherworld of right-wing extremism, drugs and money simply were dependent on his personal relationships – and as they died off, so did his ability to access those financial channels.
It’s possible, too, that the value of Moon’s propaganda operation has been eclipsed by less problematic right-wing media moguls and self-made talk-show hosts who are now rich themselves.
Though Moon played a key early role in building the right-wing echo chamber, other wealthy individuals, from media titan Rupert Murdoch to newly minted multi-millionaires like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, can carry on quite well without the help of a Korean theocrat who thinks he’s the new Messiah.
Still, even the passing of Moon’s Washington Times will not mean that the snakes and other vermin that Moon let loose in the American political system will soon disappear. In fact, they may be more prevalent than ever.
http://www.alternet.org/story/146770/ris...age=entire