[THS] Robert Parry: The Right's America-Hating Preacher

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050208K.shtml

The Right's America-Hating Preacher
    By Robert Parry
    Consortium News

    Friday 02 May 2008

    One of the advantages that the American Right has achieved from
investing tens of billions of dollars in media - from talk radio and cable TV,
to print and the Internet - is the ability to define what is and what isn't a
"scandal," a powerful factor in determining who wins national elections.

    By comparison, American progressives have short-changed their own
investments in media. The disparity leads to the spectacle of Democratic
presidential candidates submitting to questioning on Fox News while no one
would expect a Republican leader to undergo interrogation from, say, the
DailyKos.

    On another level, this media imbalance has propelled the rantings of the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the category of big news, effectively altering the
course of Campaign 2008 by associating Barack Obama with his ex-pastor's
harsh - and at times over-the-top - criticism of the U.S. government.

    However, it's not news that a viciously anti-American religious figure has
invested billions of dollars in financing the U.S. conservative movement and
put fat wads of cash into the pockets of many prominent Republicans,
including members of President George W. Bush's own family.

    While Sen. Obama has to explain what he knew and when he knew it
about Wright's angry sermons, the Bush Family floats above its financial and
political associations with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean
theocrat who had denounced the United States as "Satan's harvest" and
likened American women to "prostitutes."

    In his angry sermons, Moon has gone further than saying "God-damn
America" - as Wright did - to vowing to sweep aside American democracy
and individualism as he builds a one-world state.

    Once his plan to "swallow entire America" is complete, Moon told his
followers in one sermon, there will be "some individuals who complain
inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."

    But Moon's hatred of America is not deemed news, in part, because
Moon has financed the Washington Times since 1982 to the tune of more
than $3 billion, according to former newspaper insider George Archibald.

    Moon also has lavished many millions of dollars more to pay for
conservative conferences and to bail out key right-wing figures when they
have found themselves in financial distress, including Republican direct-mail
guru Richard Viguerie and the late Jerry Falwell.

    Plus, Moon has paid large speaking fees to former President George
H.W. Bush - estimated in the millions of dollars - and has feted President
George W. Bush's brother Neil at recent events for the Moon-sponsored
Universal Peace Federation.

    In 2004, thankful Republicans even gave Moon use of a room in the
Senate Dirksen Office Building so he could be crowned the "King of Peace"
in a ceremony that Moon's followers hailed as proof the U.S. government
was bowing down to this new Messiah. [See John Gorenfeld's Bad Moon
Rising.]

    Yet, even though Moon has gained influence by funneling huge sums of
mysterious money into the U.S. political process - and to the Bush Family -
he has avoided the intense scrutiny that has fallen on Rev. Wright, who
until recently was a little-known black preacher from Chicago's South Side.

    While the YouTube snippets of several Wright outbursts have become
daily fare on U.S. news programs, Moon's influence on the American Right
and his largesse toward the Bush Family have remained virtual non-stories.
That's been the case even though Moon may represent a key nexus
between international crime and the U.S. political elite.

    When Moon is discussed, he's usually presented as simply the wacky
Unification Church cult leader who somehow parlayed carnation sales by his
followers into a vast global fortune.

    What is almost never referenced are his long-standing ties to organized
crime and international drug smuggling, including the Japanese yakuza
gangs and South American cocaine traffickers. Even first-hand accounts of
Moon's money-laundering from insiders like his former daughter-in-law
Nansook Hong draw no U.S. media attention.

    Who Is Moon?

    Moon was born on Jan. 6, 1920, in a rural, northwestern corner of
Korea, a rugged Asian peninsula then occupied by Japan, a brutal
occupation that would continue through the first 25 years of Moon's life.
Allied forces liberated the peninsula from the Japanese in 1945 and then
divided Korea into two sections, the south controlled by the United States
and the north occupied by Soviet troops.

    In this post-war period, Moon, who had been raised within a Christian
sect, moved to southern Korea and joined a mystical religious group called
Israel Suo-won. The group preached the imminent arrival of a Korean
Messiah and practiced a strange sexual ritual called "pikarume," in which
ministers purified women through sexual intercourse, the so-called "blessing
of the womb."

    As he developed his own theology, Moon returned to the North, to
communist-ruled North Korea, where he soon ran into legal troubles. North
Korean authorities arrested him twice, apparently on morals charges
connected to his sexual rites with young women. Moon's supporters,
however, have tried to portray Moon as the victim of communist repression,
claiming that he was arrested not for sex charges but for espionage.

    Whatever the real story about his detention in North Korea, Moon's luck
soon changed. On Oct. 14, 1950, with war raging on the Korean peninsula,
United Nations troops overran the prison where Moon was held, freeing
Moon and the other inmates. According to Unification Church histories,
Moon then trekked south, carrying on his back an injured prisoner named
Pak Chung Hwa.

    For years, church officials even published a photograph purportedly
showing Pak piggy-backing on Moon across a river. But much of that story
appears to be propaganda. Several church sources have since admitted
that the photo was a hoax, that Moon is not the man in the picture and the
location is not where Moon was.

    Moon's southward journey ended in the South Korean port of Pusan,
where he resumed his missionary work. He later moved to Seoul, South
Korea's capital, where he founded his own church in May 1954. He called it
T'ong-il Kyo, or Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World
Christianity. It became known as the Unification Church.

    At the center of Moon's theology was a new twist to the Old Testament
story about the Fall of Man. Instead of biting into a forbidden apple, Eve
copulated with Satan and then passed on the sin by having sex with Adam.

    Thousands of years later, God sent Jesus to restore man to his original
purity, Moon taught. But Jesus failed because he was betrayed by the Jews
and died before he could father any sinless children.

    Sex, therefore, remained at the center of Moon's theology, the need for
a Messiah to purify the human race through the reversal of the
contamination caused by Satan's seduction of Eve.

    Moon taught that the failure of Jesus to begin this purification process by
fathering children forced God to send a second Messiah, who turned out to
be Moon himself. Moon saw his task as starting this sexual purification
process and thus establishing God's Kingdom on Earth.

    The ultimate goal would be a worldwide theocracy ruled by Moon and
his followers cleansed of Satan's influence. Political power and religious
authority went together, Moon lectured. "We cannot separate the political
field from the religious," Moon said.

    But in South Korea, Moon found that government continued to be an
obstacle to his religious plans. When he began to concentrate his religious
recruitment on young idealistic college students, especially from an all-girls
Christian school, Moon landed in legal hot water again.

    The South Korean government arrested Moon in 1955 for allegedly
conducting more sexual "purification" rites, according to several U.S.
intelligence reports which are now public. Moon was freed three months
later because none of the young women would testify for fear of public
humiliation, according to an undated FBI summary, released under a
Freedom of Information Act request.

    "During the next two years in the national news media of South Korea,
Rev. Moon was the butt of scandalist humor," the FBI report said.

    Six Marys

    Church officials repeatedly have denied the reports of Moon's sexual
rituals. But the charges received new attention in 1993 with the Japanese
publication of The Tragedy of the Six Marys - a book by the early Moon
disciple, Pak Chung Hwa, whom Moon supposedly carried to South Korea.

    According to Pak's book, Moon taught that Jesus was intended to save
mankind by having sex with six already-married women who would then
have sex with other men who would pass on the purification to other
women until, eventually, all mankind would have pure blood.

    Pak contended that Moon took on this personal duty as the second
Messiah and began having sex with the "six Marys." But Pak alleged that
Moon began to abuse the practice by turning the "six Marys" into a kind of
rotating sex club.
Pak wrote that Moon's first wife divorced him after catching him in a sex
ritual.

    In all, Pak estimated that there were at least 60 "Marys," many of whom
ended up destitute after Moon discarded them.

    According to the testimony of one "Mary," named Yu Shin Hee, she met
Moon in the early 1950s and became a follower along with her husband.
Devoted to the church, her husband abandoned her and her five children,
whom she then put into an orphanage. She, in turn, agreed to become one
of Moon's "six Marys."

    But Yu Shin Hee claimed that Moon tired of her after just one "blood
exchange," a phrase referring to sexual intercourse. Still, she was required
to have sex with other men. Seven years later, a broken woman with no
money, she tried to return to her children, but they also rejected her.

    When Moon impregnated another one of the women, Moon sent her to
Japan where she gave birth to a baby boy, according to Pak's account.
Moon later admitted fathering the child, who died in a train crash at the
age of 13. But Pak wrote that Moon refused to admit responsibility for other
illegitimate children born to the women.

    "By forwarding this teaching, he violated mothers, their daughters, their
sisters," Pak wrote. (After The Tragedy of the Six Marys was published, the
Unification Church denounced the allegations as spurious. Under intense
pressure, the aging Pak Chung Hwa agreed to recant. However, his book's
accounts tracked closely with U.S. intelligence reports of the same period
and interviews with former church leaders.)

    Moon's history of sexual liaisons out of wedlock also was corroborated by
daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, who broke with Moon's so-called True
Family in 1995 over abuse she suffered at the hands of Moon's eldest son,
Hyo Jin Moon, during their 14-year marriage.

    Nansook Hong reported in her 1998 book, In the Shadow of the Moons,
that family members, including Moon himself, acknowledged that he had
"providential" sex with women in his role as the Messiah. Nansook Hong
said she learned about Moon's sexual affairs when her husband, Hyo Jin,
began justifying his affairs as mandated by God, as his father claimed his
affairs were.

    "I went directly to Mrs. Moon with Hyo Jin's claims," Nansook Hong
wrote. "She was both furious and tearful. She had hoped that such pain
would end with her, that it would not be passed on to the next generation,
she told me.

    "No one knows the pain of a straying husband like True Mother, she
assured me. I was stunned. We had all heard rumors for years about Sun
Myung Moon's affairs and the children he sired out of wedlock, but here
was True Mother, confirming the truth of these stories.

    "I told her that Hyo Jin said his sleeping around was 'providential' and
inspired by God, just as Father's affairs were. 'No, Father is the Messiah,
not Hyo Jin. What Father did was in God's plan.'" Later, in a discussion
about the extramarital sex, Moon himself told Nansook Hong that "what
happened in his past was 'providential,'" she wrote.

    As for the sexual purification rituals, Nansook Hong said the rumors had
followed the church for decades, despite the official denials.

    "In the early days of the Unification Church, members met in a small
house with two rooms," Nansook Hong wrote. "It was known as the House
of the Three Doors. It was rumored that at the first door one was made to
take off one's jacket, at the second door one's outer clothing, and at the
third one's undergarments in preparation for sex."

    As for Chung Hwa Pak's Tragedy of the Six Marys, Nansook Hong said
Moon succeeded in persuading his old associate to rejoin the church and
then got him to disavow the memoir. "I've always wondered what the price
was of that retraction," Nansook Hong wrote.

    Madeleine Pretorious, a Unification Church member from South Africa,
also had worked closely with Moon's temperamental son, Hyo Jin, and had
learned from him that the long-denied accounts of Moon's sexual rites with
female initiates were true.

    "When Hyo Jin found out about his father's 'purification' rituals, that took
a lot out of wind out of his sails," Pretorious told me in an interview after
she left the church in the mid-1990s.

    In late 1994, during conversations in Hyo Jin's suite at the New Yorker
Hotel, "he confided a lot of things to me," Pretorious said. Hyo Jin also had
discovered that the Reverend Moon fathered a child out of wedlock in the
early 1970s. Moon arranged for the child to be raised by his longtime
lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, Pretorious said.

    The boy - now a young man - had confronted Hyo Jin, seeking
recognition as Hyo Jin's half-brother. Pretorious said she later corroborated
the story with other church members.

    Intelligence Ties

    The alleged sexual rituals, which involved passing around women, would
become a point of embarrassment later, but the practices apparently
helped the Unification Church in recruiting men in the early days.

    By the late 1950s, Moon had managed to build a small cadre of loyal
followers and was reaching out beyond Korea. By the early 1960s, the
church also was pulling in better educated young men, including some with
connections to South Korea's intelligence services.

    Kim Jong-Pil and three other young English-speaking army officers
became closely associated with Moon's church during this transitional phase
as the institution evolved from an obscure Korean sect into a powerful
international organization.

    Beyond his association with Moon's sect, Kim Jong-Pil was a rising star in
South Korea's intelligence community. In 1961, he founded the KCIA, which
centralized Seoul's internal and external intelligence activities. Another one
of the promising young KCIA officers was Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who also
became a dedicated Moon disciple.

    With these KCIA officers, however, it was never clear whether the
benefits of the religion were paramount or if they simply recognized the
potential that an international church held as a cover for intelligence
operations.

    In many countries, especially the United States, churches are granted
broad protections against government interference. With missionaries
traveling around the world and with church members attending
international religious conferences, a church also provided an effective
cover for spying, money-laundering or passing on messages to agents.

    In 1962, KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil traveled to San Francisco where he
met with Unification Church members. According to an account later
published by a congressional investigation, Kim Jong-Pil promised discreet
support for Moon's church.

    At the same time of his contacts with associates from the Unification
Church, Kim Jong-Pil was in charge of another sensitive negotiation: talks to
improve bilateral relations with Japan, Korea's historic enemy.

    Those talks put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two other important figures in
the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who
once hailed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "the perfect fascist."

    Kodama and Sasakawa were jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of
World War II, but a few years later, 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
worked with the Italian Mafia in breaking communist-backed unions and
protected German Nazi war criminals if they agreed to help in the emerging
Cold War. Kodama and Sasakawa assisted U.S. intelligence by dispatching
right-wing goon squads to break up demonstrations, according to the book,
Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.

    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.

    Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to
the Unification Church, which 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
Kaplan and 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.

    The church's growth spurt did not escape the notice of U.S. intelligence
officers in the field. One CIA report, dated Feb. 26, 1963, stated that "Kim
Jong-Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK
[Republic of Korea] Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the
church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool."

    Though Moon's church had existed since the mid-1950s, the report
appeared correct in noting Kim Jong-Pil's key role in transforming the
church from a minor Korean sect into a potent international organization.

    New Worlds

    With alliances in place in Tokyo and Seoul, the Unification Church next
took aim at Washington.

    In 1964, Bo Hi Pak, who was emerging as one of Moon's most able
lieutenants, moved to America and started the Korean Cultural and
Freedom Foundation, a front that performed the dual purpose of helping
Moon meet important Americans, while assisting the KCIA in its international
operations.

    Bo Hi Pak named KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil to be the foundation's
"honorary chairman." The foundation also sponsored the KCIA's anti-
communist propaganda outlets, such as Radio of Free Asia, according to
the congressional report on the "Koreagate" scandal.

    Moon's church also 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 former Nazis, overt racialists and Latin
American "death squad" operatives.

    Retired U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a former WACL president, told
me that "the Japanese [WACL] chapter was taken over almost entirely by
Moonies."

    By the 1970s, the U.S. public was aware of Moon and his church, but
much of the attention was negative. Parents complained that the church
brainwashed their children and pressured them to cut off contacts with
their families, while proclaiming Moon their "True Father."

    The totalitarian nature of Moon's church stood out in his staging of mass
marriages, or "blessings," in which he would pair up husbands and wives
who had never met. Moon also regulated the sexual behavior of even his
married followers, a practice that replaced the more personal method of
"blessing the womb" that allegedly had prevailed in the church's early days.

    In 1973, amid American military reversals in Indochina, alarm began to
spread within Seoul's right-wing dictatorship about the strength of the U.S.
commitment to defend South Korea in case of aggression from the
communist North. Those fears led the KCIA, long known for its gross human
rights violations, to begin plotting how to bolster its political friends in the
United States and undermine its enemies.

    Lee Jai Hyon, the chief cultural and information attache at the South
Korean embassy in Washington, later testified before the U.S. Congress that
he sat in on a series of meetings chaired by the KCIA's station chief,
involving senior embassy officials.

    Lee Jai Hyon described six sessions over a five-week period in spring
1973 at which a conspiracy was outlined to "manipulate," "coerce,"
"threaten," "co-opt," "seduce," and "buy off" political and other leaders of
the United States. Lee Jai Hyon said one of the South Koreans participating
in the operation was Moon's top aide Bo Hi Pak.

    At the time, Moon was raising concerns among U.S. immigration
authorities for bringing hundreds of foreign followers to the United States
on tourist visas and then assigning them to mobile fund-raising teams.

    But Moon, who owned property outside New York City while maintaining
a residence in South Korea, somehow managed to secure a "green card"
from the Nixon administration on April 30, 1973. The permit making Moon a
"lawful permanent resident" also granted him more legal rights than would
be available to a foreign visitor.

    "The advantages of using the First Amendment were seen early," wrote
Robert Boettcher, the former staff director of the House Subcommittee on
International Relations, in his 1980 book, Gifts of Deceit. "Before Moon
moved to the United States in 1971, he and his small band of followers
realized the operation would have the most flexibility if it was called a
church. Businesses, political activities, and tax-exempt status could be
protected."

    As Moon stepped up his activities, however, the FBI soon began to
suspect that Moon's activities had a political motive. The FBI summary of its
evidence about Moon's church was marked by a number indicating that the
Unification Church was under a counter-intelligence investigation in the
1970s.

    Although blacked-out portions obscured who was stating some of the
conclusions - an individual source or the FBI - the report described the
church as "an absolutely totalitarian organization" which was part of an
international "conspiracy" that functioned by its own rules.

    "One of the central doctrines of the Moon relig[i]ous aspects is what they
call heavenly deception," the FBI report said. "It basically says that to take
from Satan what rightfully belongs to God, you may do most anything. You
may lie, cheat, steal or kill."

    Making Friends

    Despite the FBI's concerns, Moon began making friends in Washington
the old-fashioned way: by spreading around lots of money. Moon also had
his followers cozy up to government officials.

    According to the FBI summary, Moon designated "300 pretty girls" to
lobby members of Congress. "They were trying to influence United States
senators and congressmen on behalf of South Korea," the FBI document
read.

    "Moon had laid the foundation for political work in this country prior to
1973 [though] his followers became more openly involved in political
activities in that and subsequent years," a congressional investigative report
on the "Koreagate" influence-buying scandal stated in 1978.

    The report added that Moon's organization used his followers' travels to
smuggle large sums of money into the United States in apparent violation of
federal currency laws.

    Moon organized rallies in support of the Vietnam War and in defense of
President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Moon sponsored a
National Prayer and Fast Committee, using the slogan: "forgive, love,
unite." The public rallies earned Moon a face-to-face "thank you" from the
embattled President on Feb. 1, 1974.

    In late 1975, the CIA intercepted a secret South Korean document
entitled "1976 Plan for Operations in the United States." In the name of
"strengthening the execution of the U.S. security commitment to the ROK
[South Korea]," it called for influencing U.S. public opinion by penetrating
American media, government and academia.

    Thousands of dollars were earmarked for "special manipulation" of
congressmen; their staffs were to be infiltrated with paid "collaborators"; an
"intelligence network" was to be put into the White House; money was
targeted for "manipulation" of officials at the Pentagon, State Department
and CIA; some U.S. journalists were to be spied on, while others would be
paid; a "black newspaper" would be started in New York; contacts with
American scholars would be coordinated "with Psychological Warfare
Bureau"; and "an organizational network of anti-communist fronts" would
be created.

    Several months later, in summer 1976, Moon returned to the United
States and delivered a flattering pro-U.S. speech at a red-white-and-blue
flag-draped rally at the Washington Monument.

    "The United States of America, transcending race and nationality, is
already a model of the unified world," Moon declared on Sept. 18, 1976.
Calling America "the chosen nation of God," Moon said, "I not only respect
America, but truly love this nation."

    While professing his love for America in public, Moon shared with his
followers a very different sentiment in private. He despised American
concepts of individuality and democracy, believing that he was destined to
rule through a one-world theocracy that would eradicate all personal
freedoms.

    "Here's a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where
all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be
abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-
world theocracy," Steve Hassan, a former church leader, told me. "Yet he's
wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he's
benign."
In 1976, Moon's search for growing influence in the United States seemed
to be following the KCIA script.

    Moon started a small-circulation newspaper in New York City that
featured a column by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Moon promoted the
anti-communist cause through front groups which held lavish conferences
and paid speaking fees to academics, journalists and political leaders.

    In 1976, Moon, Bo Hi Pak and other church members deepened their
investments in the U.S. capital, buying stock in the Washington-based
Diplomat National Bank. Simultaneously, South Korean agent Tongsun Park
was investing heavily in the same bank.

    But the South Korean scheme backfired in the late 1970s with the
explosion of the "Koreagate" scandal. Rep.Donald Fraser, a Democrat from
Minnesota, led a congressional probe which tracked Tongsun Park's
influence-buying campaign and exposed the KCIA links to the Unification
Church.

    The "Koreagate" investigation revealed a sophisticated intelligence
project run out of Seoul that used the urbane Park as well as the mystical
Moon to cultivate U.S. politicians as influential friends of South Korea - and
conversely to undermine politicians who were viewed as enemies.

    Though it's clear the church did collaborate with the KCIA during the
1960s and 1970s, it's less clear whether Moon was using the KCIA or it was
using him. Most likely, the relationship was symbiotic, each using the other
to advance their overlapping but different interests.

    The alliance with the KCIA gave Moon political protection and business
opportunities, while the KCIA got a cover for promoting South Korean
interests inside the United States, the country responsible for South Korea's
defense.
The "Koreagate" investigation traced the church's chief sources of money to
bank accounts in Japan, but could follow the cash no further. In the years
since, the sources of Moon's money have remained cloaked in secrecy.

    In the mid-1990s when I inquired about the vast fortune that the
Unification Church has poured into its American operations, the church's
chief spokesman refused to divulge dollar amounts for any of Moon's
activities.

    "Each year the church retains an independent accounting firm to do a
national audit and produce an annual financial statement," wrote the
church's legal representative Peter D. Ross. "While this statement is used in
routine financial transactions by the church, [it] is not my policy to make it
otherwise available."

    In 1978, Fraser got a taste of the negative side of Moon's propaganda
clout as the South Korean religious leader's new U.S. conservative allies
mounted a strong defense against the "Koreagate" allegations.

    In pro-Moon publications, Fraser and his staff were pilloried as leftists.
Anti-Moon witnesses were assailed as unstable liars. Minor bookkeeping
problems inside the investigation, such as Fraser's salary advances to some
staff members, were seized upon to justify demands for an ethics probe of
the congressman.

    One of those letters, dated June 30, 1978, was written by John T.
"Terry" Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee
(NCPAC). Dolan's group was pioneering the strategy of "independent" TV
attack ads against liberal Democrats. In turn, Moon's CAUSA International
helped Dolan by contributing $500,000 to a Dolan group, known as the
Conservative Alliance or CALL. [Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1984]

    With support from Dolan and other conservatives, Moon weathered the
"Koreagate" political storm. Facing right-wing challenges to his patriotism,
Fraser lost a Senate bid in 1978 and left Congress.

    Though Moon had helped defeat his chief congressional critic, the
evidence unearthed by Fraser became the foundation of a tax-fraud
conviction of Moon in 1982 and his sentencing to two years in federal
prison.

    A Media Empire

    Despite his felony conviction, Moon pressed ahead with his boldest bid
for political influence. In 1982, Moon launched the Washington Times.

    The Times was just what the Reagan administration wanted, a reliable
voice for its version of events that would push the message into the public
debate.

    Though Moon would have to subsidize his publications with hundreds of
millions of dollars from his seemingly bottomless pool of cash, the
newspaper - over the next two decades - would change the parameters of
how the U.S. press corps works and would affect the course of U.S.
presidential campaigns.

    Where all that money came from, however, would remain one of
Washington's least examined secrets.

    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 Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio 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. 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 facade," 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 major Allies - the
United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - the surviving fascists got
a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War, helping both
Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international
communism.

    Some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, but
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.

    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 Nixon's "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.

    By the time the French Connection was severed, however, 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.

    Enter Rev. Moon

    During this time of transition, Sun Myung Moon brought his evangelical
message to South America. His first visit to Argentina had 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."

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

    In Bolivia, right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a
contingent of young European neo-fascists collaborating 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." [An English
translation of Hermann's article was published in Covert Action Information
Bulletin, Winter 1986]

    A month after the Cocaine 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.

    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. Barbie was returned to France to face a life
sentence for war crimes. He died in 1992.

    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. An invited guest to the Reagan-Bush
Inauguration, Moon made his organization useful to President Reagan, Vice
President Bush and other leading Republicans.

    Domestic Spying

    An early concern of the Reagan administration was the possibility that a
popular movement - similar to the anti-Vietnam War protests - would
undermine the hard-line policies that the new U.S. government considered
indispensable for stopping the spread of Soviet influence in Central
America.

    Staunch anticommunists in the administration also suspected that some
groups opposed to U.S. intervention in the region could be discredited for
holding suspect political loyalties. Though Moon's organization itself had
been exposed by the "Koreagate" investigation as a foreign intelligence
operation, the administration still turned to it to help probe the loyalty of
Americans.

    Starting in 1981, the FBI cooperated with one of Moon's front groups
during a five-year nationwide investigation of the Committee in Solidarity
with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a domestic organization critical of
Reagan's policies in Central America.

    According to FBI documents obtained by Boston Globe reporter Ross
Gelbspan, the FBI collected reports from Moon's Collegiate Association for
the Research of Principles (CARP), which was spying on CISPES supporters.
The reports came from CARP members at 10 university campuses around
the United States and included commentaries on the purported political
beliefs of Reagan's critics. [Boston Globe, April 20, 1988]

    One CARP report called a CISPES supporter "well-educated in Marxism"
while other CARP reports attached "clippings culled from communist-
inspired front groups." The Globe investigation reported that Frank Varelli,
who worked for the FBI from 1981 to 1984 coordinating the CISPES probe,
said an FBI agent paid members of the Moon organization at Southern
Methodist University while the Moon activists were raiding and disrupting
CISPES rallies.

    "Every week, an agent I worked with used to go to SMU to pay the
Moonies," Varelli said in an interview. Because of the CARP harassment,
CISPES closed its SMU chapter.

    While Moon's organization was helping to spy on American citizens, the
case against Moon as a suspected intelligence agent for South Korea was
petering out. It's still not clear why.

    "I don't think there was any doubt that the Moon newspaper took a
virulently pro-South Korea position," Oliver "Buck" Revell, then a senior FBI
official in the national security area, told me. "But whether there was
something illegal about it..." His voice trailed off. As for the internal security
investigation of Moon, Revell added only: "It led its full life."

    Cash Source

    Where Moon gets his cash has been a long-time mystery that few
American conservatives have been eager 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. "Others feel that, despite the disclosures of Koreagate, the
Church has simply continued to do the Korean government's international
bidding and is receiving official funds to do so."

    While Moon's representatives have refused to detail how they've
sustained their far-flung activities - including many businesses that insiders
say lose money - 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 Sasakawa and other 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 which was permeated with drug smugglers.

    Moon's organization also used its political clout in Washington to
intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to
investigate those criminal activities. In the mid-1980s, for instance, when
journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of
contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under attacks from Moon's
Washington 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-Bush administration efforts to get at the
truth.

    "Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe," said one 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." [Washington Times, Jan.
21, 1987]

    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." [Drug, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy - the Kerry Report -
December 1988]

    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, 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.

    Drug Evidence

    The evidence shows that there was much more to the contra-drug issue
than either the Reagan-Bush administration or Moon's organization wanted
the American people to know in the 1980s.

    The evidence - assembled over the years by investigators at the CIA, the
Justice Department and other federal agencies - indicates that Bolivia's
Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug
smugglers that tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan's
favorite covert operation, the contra war. [For details, see Robert Parry, Lost
History, or for a summary of the contra-drug evidence, see
Consortiumnews.com's "Gary Webb's Death: American Tragedy."]

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

    The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the
Panamanian 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.

    The drug traffickers' strategy also worked. 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 administration.

    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 knock down 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 the CIA inspector general found no additional information about
that deal in CIA files.

    Also, by keeping the names censored when the documents 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.

    Red Flags

    As Moon continued to expand his influence in American politics, some
Republicans began to raise red flags.

    In 1983, the GOP's moderate Ripon Society charged that the New Right
had entered "an alliance of expediency" with Moon's church. Ripon's
chairman, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, released a study which alleged that the
College Republican National Committee "solicited and received" money from
Moon's Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused Reed Irvine's
Accuracy in Media of benefiting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied
by Moon.

    Leach said the Unification Church has "infiltrated the New Right and the
party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as
well." Leach's news conference was disrupted when then-college GOP
leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now a
prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the highest
levels of George W. Bush's administration.)

    Despite periodic fretting over Moon's influence, American conservatives
continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance. When White House aide
Oliver North was scratching for support for the Nicaraguan contras, for
instance, the Washington Times established a contra fund-raising operation.
By the mid-1980s, Moon's Unification Church had carved out a niche as an
acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers, Moon
boasted that "without knowing it, even President Reagan is being guided by
Father [Moon]."

    Yet, Moon also made clear that his longer-range goal was destroying the
U.S. Constitution and America's democratic form of government.

    "History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies,
the American population and government will bow down to him," Moon
said, speaking of himself in the third person. "That is Father's tactic, the
natural subjugation of the American government and population."

    In September 1987, conservative columnist Andrew Ferguson cited some
of Moon's anti-American sentiments as cause for concern, despite his
appealing anticommunism.

    "There is little else in Unificationism that American conservatives will find
compelling," except, of course, the money, Ferguson wrote in the American
Spectator. "They're the best in town as far as putting their money with their
mouth is," Ferguson quoted one Washington-based conservative as saying.
Though Moon's money sources remained shrouded in secrecy, his cash
undeniably gave the Right an edge over its political adversaries.

    After the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in fall 1986, the Washington
Times and other Moon-related organizations rushed to the battlements to
defend Reagan's White House and Oliver North.

    Ronald S. Godwin, who was a link between Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral
Majority and Moon's Washington Times, raised funds for North through a
group called the Interamerican Partnership, which was a forerunner to
North's own Freedom Alliance. [See Common Cause Magazine, Fall 1993]

    Another Moon-connected group, the American Freedom Coalition, went
to bat for North. According to Andrew Leigh, who worked for a Moon front
called Global Image Associates, the American Freedom Coalition broadcast a
pro-North video, "Ollie North: Fight for Freedom," more than 600 times on
more than 100 TV stations.

    Leigh quoted one coalition official as saying that AFC received $5 million
to $6 million from business interests associated with Moon. AFC also
bragged that it helped put George H.W. Bush into the White House in 1988
by distributing 30 million pieces of political literature. [Washington Post, Oct.
15, 1989]

    When Vice President Bush was struggling in his 1988 presidential
campaign against Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael
Dukakis, Moon's Washington Times came to the rescue again publishing a
slanted story about Dukakis's mental health.

    Times reporter Gene Grabowski had interviewed a Dukakis relative and
asked whether Dukakis had ever sought psychiatric help during a low
period in his life. "It's possible, but I doubt it," the relative responded.

    Grabowski's editors, however, snipped out the phrase "but I doubt it"
while keeping the phrase "it's possible" and then spotlighting the story
under a headline, "Dukakis Kin Hints at Sessions."

    Dukakis's supposedly questionable mental health became an important
theme for the Republicans. President Reagan personally underscored the
message by referring to Dukakis as a "cripple," which forced more
mainstream publications to reprise the suspicions about the psychiatric
treatment.

    The story spread doubts among the electorate about Dukakis's fitness for
office. For his part, Grabowski, a former Associated Press reporter, resigned
in protest of the distortion, but by then the damage to Dukakis was done.

    Weird Behavior

    But even as Moon consolidated his influence in Washington during the
12-year Reagan-Bush reign, Moon's weird behavior was splitting the church
leadership and making some American conservatives nervous.

    In 1989, published reports disclosed that Moon had declared that one of
his sons, Heung Jin Moon who died in a car crash in 1984, had come back
to life in the body of a church member from Zimbabwe.

    The muscular African - known inside the church as the "black Heung Jin"
- then compelled church leaders to stand before him and engage in
humiliating self-criticisms, sometimes making them sing songs.

    During one of these rituals in December 1988, the Zimbabwean severely
beat longtime Moon lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, who was then publisher of the
Washington Times. Pak reportedly suffered brain damage and impaired
speech from the assault, which church sources told me had been
sanctioned by Moon after Pak had fallen out of favor. Afterwards, Pak was
transferred back to Asia.

    Commenting on the beating of Pak, former Washington Times editor
William P. Cheshire wrote, "Where the Moonies are concerned, it seems
clear, we are dealing with something besides just an exotic cult. The Pak
beating smacks strongly of Jonestown [the site of a mass murder-suicide by
a religious cult].

    "And with Moon lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on
newspapers, magazines and political-action groups in this country and
abroad, such occult and aggressive practices give rise to secular
apprehensions. If the 'reincarnation' doesn't rock those conservative shops
that have been taking money from Moon, not even fire-breathing dragons
would disturb them." [San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 1989]

    But Moon's organization had proved itself too valuable to be cast aside,
regardless of the strange behavior and the questionable sources of money.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Washington Times was the daily
billboard where conservatives placed their messages to each other and to
the outside world.

    In 1991, when conservative commentator Wesley Pruden was named the
new editor of the Washington Times, President George H.W. Bush invited
Pruden to a private White House lunch. The purpose, Bush explained, was
"just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where
we read it every day." [Washington Times, May 17, 1992]

    Government documents also showed that the Reagan-Bush team was
shielding Moon's operation from investigations at the same time Moon's
newspaper was doing the same for the administration.

    According to Justice Department documents released under the Freedom
of Information Act, federal authorities were rebuffing hundreds of requests
- many from common citizens - for examination of Moon's foreign ties and
money sources.

    Typical of the responses was a May 18, 1989, letter from Assistant
Attorney General Carol T. Crawford rejecting the possibility that Moon's
organization be required to divulge its foreign-funded propaganda under
the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

    "With respect to FARA, the Department is faced with First Amendment
considerations involving the free exercise of religion," Crawford said. "As
you know, the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom is not
limited to the traditional, well-established religions."

    A 1992 PBS documentary about Moon's political empire and its free-
spending habits started another flurry of citizen demands for an
investigation, according to the Justice Department files.

    One letter from a private citizen to the Justice Department stated, "I
write in consternation and disgust at the apparent support, or at least the
sheltering, of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a foreign agent ... who has
subverted the American political system for the past 20 years. ... Did
Reagan and/or Bush receive financial support from Moon or his agents
during any of their election campaigns in violation of federal law?"

    Another letter complained that "apparently Moon gave the Bush and
Reagan campaigns millions of dollars in support and helped fund the
[Nicaraguan] contras as well as sponsoring rallys [sic] in 50 states to
support the Persian Gulf war. No wonder the Justice Department turns a
blind eye?"

    "I feel it is necessary to find out who is financing the operation and why
other countries are trying to direct the policies of the United States," wrote
another citizen. "If even one-half of the allegations are true, Moon and his
assistants belong in jail rather than being welcomed and supported at the
highest level of Washington."

    As public demands mounted for Moon and his front groups to register as
foreign agents, the Justice Department added a new argument to its
reasons to say no. In an Aug. 19, 1992, letter, Assistant Attorney General
Robert S. Mueller dismissed a suggestion that the Moon-backed American
Freedom Council should register under FARA because Moon, a South
Korean citizen, had obtained U.S. resident-alien status - or a "green card."

    Mueller, who is now FBI director, wrote that "in the absence of a foreign
principal, there is no requirement for registration. ... The Reverend Sun
Myung Moon enjoys the status of permanent resident alien in the United
States and therefore does not fall within FARA's definition of foreign
principal. It follows that the Act is not applicable to the [American Freedom]
Council because of its association with Reverend Moon."

    Ironically, Mueller, who went out of his way to find reasons not to
investigate Moon, touts in his official FBI biography his background
investigating and prosecuting "major financial fraud, terrorist and public
corruption cases, as well as narcotics conspiracies and international money
launderers."

    Hidden Money

    Some prominent figures on the American Right went to great lengths to
conceal their financial connections to Moon, making sure his assistance
passed through several hands before it got to their pockets.

    For instance, on Jan. 28, 1995, a beaming Rev. Jerry Falwell told his Old
Time Gospel Hour congregation news that seemed heaven sent. The rotund
televangelist hailed two Virginia businessmen as financial saviors of debt-
ridden Liberty University, the fundamentalist Christian school that Falwell
had made the crown jewel of his Religious Right empire.

    "They had to borrow money, hock their houses, hock everything," said
Falwell. "Thank God for friends like Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas."
Falwell's congregation rose as one to applaud. The star of the moment was
Daniel Reber, who was standing behind Falwell.

    Reber and Thomas earned Falwell's public gratitude by excusing the
Lynchburg, Virginia, school of about one-half of its $73 million debt. In the
late 1980s, that flood of red ink had forced Falwell to abandon his Moral
Majority political organization and the debt nearly drowned Liberty
University in bankruptcy.

    Reber and Thomas came to Falwell's rescue in the nick of time. Their
non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation of Forest, Virginia, snapped up a
big chunk of Liberty's debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value.
Thousands of small religious investors who had bought church construction
bonds through a Texas company were the big losers.

    But Falwell was joyous. He told local reporters that the moment was "the
greatest single day of financial advantage" in the school's history.

    Left unmentioned in the happy sermon was the identity of the bigger
guardian angel who had appeared at the propitious moment to protect
Falwell's financial interests. Falwell's secret benefactor was Sun Myung
Moon, the self-proclaimed South Korean messiah who is controversial with
many fundamentalist Christians because of his strange Biblical
interpretations and his alleged brainwashing of thousands of young
Americans, often shattering their bonds with their biological families.

    Covertly, Moon had helped bail out Liberty University through one of his
front groups which funneled $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian
Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that had purchased the school's debt.

    I discovered this Moon-Falwell connection while looking for something
else: how much Moon's Women's Federation for World Peace had paid
former President George H.W. Bush for a series of speeches in Asia in 1995.
I obtained the federation's Internal Revenue Service records but discovered
that Bush's undisclosed speaking fee was buried in a line item of $13.6
million for conference expenses.

    There was, however, another listing for a $3.5 million "educational" grant
to the Christian Heritage Foundation. A call to the Virginia corporate records
office confirmed that the foundation was the one run by Reber and
Thomas.

    In a subsequent interview, 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. "It was Dan Reber," she said.
But she could not recall much else about the grant, even though it was by
far the largest single grant awarded by the federation that year.

    For details on the grant, Fefferman referred me to Keith Cooperrider, the
federation's treasurer. Cooperrider was also the chief financial officer of
Moon's Washington Times and a longtime Unification Church functionary.
Cooperrider did not return calls seeking comment. Falwell and Reber also
failed to respond to my calls, though Falwell later defended his acceptance
of the money by saying it had no influence on his ministry.

    "If the American Atheists Society or Saddam Hussein himself ever sent
an unrestricted gift to any of my ministries," Falwell said, "be assured I will
operate on Billy Sunday's philosophy: The Devil's had it long enough, and
quickly cash the check." [See "Moon-Related Funds Filter to Evangelicals,"
Christianity Today, posted on Web, Feb. 9, 1998]

    But the public record also reveals that Falwell solicited Moon's help in
bailing out Liberty University. In a lawsuit filed in the Circuit Court of
Bedford County - a community in southwestern Virginia - two of Reber's
former business associates alleged that Reber and Falwell flew to South
Korea on Jan. 9, 1994, on a seven-day "secret trip" to meet "with
representatives of the Unification Church."

    The court document states that Reber and Falwell were accompanied to
South Korea by Ronald S. Godwin, who had been executive director of
Falwell's Moral Majority before signing on as vice president of Moon's
Washington Times.

    According to Bedford County court records, Reber, Falwell and Godwin
also had discussions at Liberty University in 1993 with Dong Moon Joo, one
of Moon's right-hand men and president of the Washington Times.

    Though Reber was queried about the purposes of the Moon-connected
meetings in the court papers, he settled the business dispute before
responding to interrogatories or submitting to a deposition. He denied any
legal wrongdoing.

    Anti-American Tirades

    By the mid-1990s, Sun Myung Moon represented a potential
embarrassment to the American Right because Moon had grown harshly
anti-American after his political ally, George H.W. Bush, was ousted from
office.

    The conservatives were lucky that few American news outlets were
interested in the increasingly bizarre utterances from the South Korean
benefactor of U.S. conservative causes.

    In earlier years, though privately disdaining America's concept of
individual liberty, Moon publicly stressed his love for the United States. On
Sept. 18, 1976, for instance, Moon staged a red-white-and-blue flag-draped
rally at the Washington Monument, declaring that "I not only respect
America, but truly love this nation."

    Even years later, Unification Church recruiters would show that video to
young Americans. One recruit, college freshman John Stacey, was
impressed with the patriotic images after he was shown the video by the
Moon front, Collegiate Association for Research of Principles (CARP).

    "American flags were everywhere," recalled Stacey, a thin young man
from central New Jersey. "The first video they showed me was Reverend
Moon praising America and praising Christianity." In 1992, Stacey
considered himself a patriotic American and a faithful Christian.

    Stacey soon joined the Unification Church and rose to become a Pacific
Northwest leader in CARP. "They liked to hang me up because I'm young
and I'm American," Stacey told me. "It's a good image for the church. They
try to create the all-American look."

    But Stacey gradually discovered a different reality. At a 1995 leadership
conference at a church compound in Anchorage, Alaska, Stacey met face-
to-face with Moon who was sitting on a throne-like chair while a group of
American followers, many middle-aged converts from the 1970s, sat at his
feet like children.

    "Reverend Moon looked at me straight in the eye and said, 'America is
Satanic. America is so Satanic that even hamburgers should be considered
evil, because they come from America,'" Stacey said. "Hamburgers! My
father was a butcher, so that bothered me. ... I started feeling that I was
betraying my country."

    Moon's criticism of Jesus also unsettled Stacey. "In the church, it's very
anti-Jesus," Stacey said. "Jesus failed miserably. He died a lonely death.
Reverend Moon is the hero that comes and saves pathetic Jesus. Reverend
Moon is better than God. ... That's why I left the Moonies. Because it
started to feel like idolatry. He's promoting idolatry."

    After years in the sunlight of acceptance from the Reagan-Bush
administrations, Moon's entered years of eclipse as his influence faded
during the Clinton administration. His animosity toward the United States
grew.
"America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are
individualists," Moon preached in Tarrytown, N.Y., on March 5, 1995. "You
must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan."

    In a speech to his followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the
church's eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by
the liquidation of American individualism and the establishment of Moon's
theocratic rule.

    "Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme
individualism are foolish people," Moon declared. "The world will reject
Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of
love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some
individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be
digested."

    During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women.
"American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the
subject position," he said. "However, woman's shape is like that of a
receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex
shape symbolizes giving. ... Since man contains the seed of life, he should
plant it in the deepest place. 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."

    Though Moon had downplayed his provocative sexual beliefs since
coming to America, sometimes the old themes popped up. After Moon
spoke in Minneapolis on Oct. 26, 1996, a reporter for the Unification News,
an internal newsletter, commented that "what the audience heard was not
the usual things that one would expect to hear from a minister. Reverend
Moon's talk included a very frank discussion of the purpose, role and true
value of the sexual organs." [See Unification News, December 1996]

    On May 1, 1997, Moon told a group of followers that "the country that
represents Satan's harvest is America." Moon also declared that "Satan
created this kind of Hell on Earth," the United States. He again denounced
American women as having "inherited the line of prostitutes. ... American
women are even worse because they practice free sex just because they
enjoy it."

    Lashing out at the United States again, Moon decried American tolerance
of homosexuals, whom he likened to "dirty dung-eating dogs." For
Americans who "truly love such dogs," Moon said, "they also become like
dung-eating dogs and produce that quality of life." [Washington Post, Nov.
23-24, 1997]

    Bush to the Rescue

    In fall 1996, another of Sun Myung Moon's forays into the high-priced
world of media and politics was in trouble. South American journalists were
writing scathingly about his plan to open a regional newspaper that Moon
hoped would give him the same influence in Latin America that the
Washington Times had in the United States.

    As publication day ticked closer for Moon's Tiempos del Mundo, leading
South American newspapers recounted unsavory chapters of Moon's
history, including his links with South Korea's fearsome intelligence service
and with violent anticommunist organizations that bordered on neo-fascist.

    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 president, Carlos Menem, rejected
Moon's invitation. But Moon had a trump card to play in his bid for South
American respectability: 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, though Bush's presence didn't change Menem's mind
about attending the gala.

    Still, as the biggest VIP at the 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 before about 900 of
Moon's guests at the Sheraton Hotel.

    "I want to salute Reverend Moon, who is the founder of the Washington
Times and also of Tiempos del Mundo," 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 interfered with the running of the paper,
a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C. I am convinced
that Tiempos del Mundo is going to do the same thing" in Latin America.

    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 newspaper as a voice of "sanity"
may be a matter of opinion, Bush's vouching for the Washington Times'
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.

    In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in
Asia for the Women's Federation for World Peace, a group led by Moon's
wife, Hak Ja Han Moon. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon
supporters in Tokyo, Bush insisted that "what really counts is faith, family
and friends."

    Mrs. Moon followed the ex-President to the podium and announced that
"it has to be Reverend Moon to save the United States, which is in decline
because of the destruction of the family and moral decay."[Washington
Post, Sept. 15, 1995]

    In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. Bush
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]

    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
have put the total Bush-Moon package in the millions, with one source
telling me that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million total from Moon's
organization.

    The senior George Bush may have had a political motive as well. 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.

    Fishing for Influence

    In a sermon on Jan. 2, 1996, Moon was unusually blunt about how he
expected the church's wealth to buy influence among the powerful in South
America, just as it did in Washington.

    "Father has been practicing the philosophy of fishing here," Moon said,
through an interpreter who spoke of Moon in the third person. "He [Moon]
gave the bait to Uruguay and then the bigger fish of Argentina, Brazil and
Paraguay kept their mouths open, waiting for a bigger bait silently. The
bigger the fish, the bigger the mouth. Therefore, Father is able to hook
them more easily."

    As part of his business strategy, Moon explained that he would dot the
continent with small airstrips and construct bases for submarines which
could evade Coast Guard patrols. His airfield project would allow tourists to
visit "hidden, untouched, small places" throughout South America, he said.

    "Therefore, they need small airplanes and small landing strips in the
remote countryside," Moon said. "In the near future, we will have many
small airports throughout the world." Moon wanted the submarines because
"there are so many restrictions due to national boundaries worldwide. If you
have a submarine, you don't have to be bound in that way."

    (As strange as Moon's submarine project might sound, a cable from the
U.S. Embassy in Japan, dated Feb. 18, 1994, cited press reports that a
Moon-connected Japanese company, Toen Shoji, had bought 40 Russian
submarines. The subs were supposedly bound for North Korea where they
were to be dismantled and melted down as scrap.)

    Moon also recognized the importance of media in protecting his curious
operations, which sounded a lot like an invitation to drug traffickers.

    He boasted to his followers that with his vast array of political and media
assets, he will dominate the new Information Age. "That is why Father has
been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also
newspaper organizations - in order to make propaganda," Moon said.

    With his background and prominence, Moon and his organization would
seem a natural attraction for U.S. government scrutiny. But Moon may have
purchased insurance against any intrusive investigation by buying so many
powerful American politicians that Washington's power centers can no more
afford the scrutiny than he can.

    In the 1990s, Moon remembered to keep up some of his important
friendships in the United States. In 1997, his Washington Times Foundation
made a $1 million-plus donation to George H.W. Bush's presidential library
in Texas. [Washington Post, Nov. 24, 1997]

    Moon got a pass even when there was first-hand evidence of his money-
laundering.

    In Nansook Moon's 1998 memoirs, In the Shadow of the Moons, Moon's
ex-daughter-in-law - writing under her maiden name 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."

    Mrs. Moon 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.

    In the Shadow of the Moons raised anew the question of whether
Moon's money laundering - from mysterious sources in both Asia and South
America - has made him a conduit for illicit foreign money influencing the
U.S. government and American politics.

    Moon's spokesmen have denied that he launders drug money or moves
money from other criminal enterprises. They attribute his wealth to
donations and business profits, but have refused to open Moon's records for
public inspection.

    Still, Nansook Hong's first-hand allegations and other allegations of
money-laundering in Uruguay might reasonably have prompted more
questions in the United States about how Moon could continue lavishing
billions of dollars on U.S. conservative publications and causes.

    But those follow-up questions were never asked. Moon apparently had
hooked too many large-mouthed fish in the United States.

    Moon's successful fishing in political/media waters also seems to have
protected him and his anti-Americanism from the kind of ugly public
attention that has inundated Jeremiah Wright.

    --------

    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.