By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in the Kansai Time Out, October 2008.
Reverend Moon’s Unification Church is probably best known for its mass weddings of strangers. Less well-known, however, is the Korean cult’s political significance. For almost half a century, the Moonies have in fact played a crucial role in one of the world’s defining struggles – the right’s covert war against democracy.
Born in 1920 in Japanese-occupied Korea, Sun Myung Moon has long been associated with the Japanese right-wing. In the early 1960s, Moon was introduced to alleged war criminals, yakuza bosses, and LDP power brokers Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa by Kim Jong Pil, the founder of the Korean CIA (KCIA), and one of Moon’s earliest backers. It was an auspicious meeting for Moon. With Sasakawa’s blessing, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Buddhist sect later converted to the Unification Church.
But what attracted spooks and gangsters to Moon’s cult? The answer to that question is to be found in the worldwide post-war covert alliances forged by U.S. intelligence with right-wing underworld figures, such as Kodama and Sasakawa, ostensibly to oppose the threat of communism. In the name of fighting the Cold War, all kinds of criminal activity were tacitly tolerated, if not actively encouraged. The scourge of the Japanese left, Kodama, for example, was not only an important CIA asset but was believed to have been Asia’s leading drug trafficker. Moon, as we shall see, has played an invaluable role in this web’s clandestine activities.
In 1966, the Asian People’s anti-Communist League, founded by the pro-American client governments of South Korea and Taiwan, expanded into the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Moon was one of the five key Asian leaders who made WACL possible, according to Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson’s Inside the League. The others were Kodama, Sasakawa, Taiwanese dictator Chiang Kai-shek and South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee. The Andersons believe that U.S. covert funding was behind WACL, which brought together the conservative political overworld with the underworld of “Nazi collaborators, Japanese war criminals, Latin death squad leaders, disciples of Moon’s Unification Church, and fugitive Italian terrorists.”
This unholy alliance was especially active in Latin America, where the desire of the poor for social change was viewed anxiously by the right. To avert the spectre of communism, the reactionaries took preemptive action. From the mid-1960s on, Brazilians, Chileans, Uruguayans and Argentinians all saw their democratically elected governments replaced by more corporate-friendly military regimes, backed by native elites and Washington.
In 1980, the leftist government of Bolivia too was overthrown, with the help of agents of the Argentinian military junta and Bolivia’s druglords. The latter were so central to the coup – and were arguably its prime beneficiaries – that it became known as the Cocaine Coup. The Moon network also played a pivotal role. Most of the coup-plotters were representatives of WACL, or members of CAUSA, another of Moon’s anti-communist organizations. A Moon representative helped finance preparations for the coup. And Moon’s right-hand man and former KCIA officer, Bo Hi Pak, was one of the first to visit La Paz to congratulate the new narco-regime, whose Interior Minister promised to “flood America’s borders with cocaine.” A promise that was kept, according to former DEA officer and author of The Big White Lie, Michael Levine. “This was the beginning of the cocaine and crack ‘plague,’” he writes, adding that “the whole thing was CIA-inspired and supported.”
At the same time as the Soviet threat was receding, the Reagan-Bush administration began to exploit the threat of narcoterrorism to justify continued interventions against leftist regimes in Latin America. But in its covert war against the Sandanista government in Nicaragua, it was not America’s enemies but its allies who were the major drug traffickers and terrorists. “The Argentinians were mounting a continental WACL strategy of right-wing hegemony based on drug alliances,” write Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in Cocaine Politics. “In 1980, as part of this continental strategy, WACL played a key role in forming the initial core Contra group.” Before long, the Learjets that brought arms to sustain the Contras’ campaign of terror were loaded with cocaine for their return flights to the United States.
But if the American public learned the sordid truth about the Contras lauded by the Reagan administration as “freedom fighters,” it could have been detrimental to the operation. Moon, however, provided an effective firewall. His organization used its influence in Washington to intimidate or discredit the few government officials and journalists who dared to investigate this component of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Central to Moon’s disinformation effort was The Washington Times newspaper which he bought in 1982. Little more than a right-wing propaganda organ, the Times once carried front-page editorials soliciting donations for a Freedom Fund to support the Contras. More recently, the paper has also been of great service to neoconservative hawks with its gung-ho support for the “war on terror” – the latest pretext for massive military spending and foreign interventions.
Swaying public opinion to the right hasn’t been cheap though. It’s estimated that Moon has pumped up to $3 billion into the Times over the past 25 years, prompting curiosity about his seemingly bottomless pool of cash.
Moon’s suspect cash has lavishly sponsored many on the right, but none more so than the Bush family. Former CIA director George H.W. Bush, and his wife, Barbara, have spoken at numerous Moon events around the world, earning huge speaking fees. At the launch of Moon’s South American newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo, Bush’s speech praised Moon as “the man with the vision,” for which he’s said to have been paid as much as $500,000. Bush’s shilling for Moon over the years is reckoned to have earned him up to $10 million, as well as staunch support for both his and his son’s presidencies. Neither Bush seem perturbed, however, by the anti-American and anti-democratic stance of Moon, whose stated goals include the “subjugation of the American government and population.”
Such largesse to those in power may explain why Moon appears to enjoy protection from federal investigation in recent years. Moon’s shady activities haven’t always evaded scrutiny, however. In the 1970s, a U.S. Congressional investigation found that Moon’s organisation was involved in the KCIA influence-peddling operation which became known as Koreagate. As part of a conspiracy to influence Congress, the media, and academia, it seems that Japanese followers of Moon were used to smuggle cash into the country. “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,” Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, reveals in an 1998 exposé, In the Shadow of the Moons. But the source of Moon’s money remained obscure. “The ‘Koreagate’ investigation traced the church’s chief sources of money to bank accounts in Japan,” Robert Parry writes in Secrecy and Privilege, “but could follow the cash no further.”
There have been similar reports of suspicious behaviour from South America. In 1996, in what appeared to be a money-laundering scheme known as “smurfing,” 4,200 Japanese female members of the Unification Church walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Uruguay, and deposited as much as $25,000 each. By the time the extraordinary procession had ended, there was $80 million in a Moon account.
Moon’s mysterious millions have also been a major force behind the rise of the Christian Right, despite the Korean’s religious teachings being fundamentally at odds with the stated beliefs of his Christian allies. Moon, above all, proclaims himself the Messiah sent by God to complete the mission of Jesus, whom he teaches, failed to purify humanity by not producing sinless offspring. But Moon’s heretical beliefs don’t seem to have unduly bothered evangelists like Jerry Falwell and Tim La Haye who received millions from Moon. Despite the lure of Moon’s money, one would expect genuine Christians to distance themselves from someone who says that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for killing Christ. But perhaps what Wayne Madsen says about George W. Bush, in his “Exposé: The ‘Christian’ Mafia,” applies equally to Moon and his friends on the Christian Right: “Bush only pays lip service to Jesus while advancing a Dominionist (“fascist”) plan for global control.”
Yet another anomaly in Moon’s myriad associations is his relationship with North Korea. Despite his professed anti-communism, Moon has given millions of dollars to North Korea’s leaders, including a $3 million “birthday present” to current dictator, Kim Jong Il. Although ostensibly connected to business investments in his native land, these gifts may have been diverted to finance the cash-strapped regime’s nuclear weapons programme. Considering Moon’s ties to the Japanese right-wing, it may seem implausible that he would knowingly help arm their archenemies. But then again, threatening neighbours can be quite useful to nationalists bent on remilitarization – not to mention profitable for corporations that produce armaments.
What seems less likely is that Reverend Moon, who is now 87, will ever achieve his goal of a world theocracy under his divine rule. Nevertheless, Moon and his right-wing cronies have already done a lot to undermine democracy around the world. And in the all too likely event of a global economic or environmental collapse, other false messiahs – offering salvation in return for total obedience – may have even greater success.
