LaRouche: Moonies Are Target
Too Big To Be Missed
by Jeffrey Steinberg
During an Oct. 19 webcast with Democratic candidates, Lyndon LaRouche responded to a question about how to force a purge of the lunatic neo-conservative and Christian Zionist apparatus from the Bush Administration, and, thus, stop the pending U.S. imperial military mis-adventure against Iraq. LaRouche's response undoubtedly shocked most among the 300-plus participants in the Internet broadcast:
"I think, if you wanted to clean up the snake-pit," LaRouche began, "what you'd do is, you'd hit it on the flank.... The place to hit, is the Moonies. The most important, and most significant nut-factor, which is a serious threat to our political order, inside the United States, is the Moonies." Reverend Moon bought up Jerry Falwell, Richard Viguerie, the whole racist far right in the country, LaRouche said, and now Moon is buying up many African-Americans. "You pull that out, and I guarantee you, the biggest factor of loose, religious, and other kinds of nuts, in the United States, will scamper. And the rest of the mess will be cleaned up."
Grovelling for Drug Money
As reported in the Oct. 25 issue of EIR ("Democrats Now Venture to the Dark Side of the Moon"), from the early 1980s onward, the Asian and South American dirty-money and rogue intelligence apparatus centered around the deranged personality of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up the entire so-called "Christian Right" in America. This started with the William F. Buckley Jr.-linked Richard Viguerie, the so-called wizard of direct mail solicitation, who found himself bankrupt, circa 1987.
Col. Bo Hi Pak—the controller of the Moon apparatus, a founder of the South Korean KCIA, and South Korean military attaché in Washington—paid $10 million to Viguerie, via the purchase of a piece of Northern Virginia commercial real estate worth a fraction of the "purchase price."
By 1994, the Moonies had bailed out the self-professed Christian Zionist, Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose "Elmer Gantry" lifestyle had bankrupted his Lynchburg, Virginia Liberty University, and bilked his own followers out of $73 million. The Moonies bought up Falwell's debt for pennies on the dollar, effectively morphing the pudgy televangelist into a grinning prop for Moon's alphabet soup of front groups.
Before the dawn of the 1990s, every significant name on the Christian Right—Pat Robertson, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Gary Bauer, James Dobson, Robert Schuller—had been taken over by Moon and turned into even bigger con artists than they had been before they went grovelling for narco-dollars.
The main question for the Christian Right was, and still is: What was more embarrassing—having to associate with a stark-raving lunatic who proclaimed that Jesus Christ had failed in his mission, and that God had anointed Moon as the actual "King of Kings," the "True Parent" of a new master race; or, knowing that they were being bought off by offshore dirty money, much of it linked to international narco-terrorism?
Moon 'Family Values'
In 1994, the year that Moon bought up Falwell, the U.S. Congress passed a bill establishing "Parents Day" as a new national holiday, designated on the fourth Sunday of July. The leading Congressional sponsor of the Moon-instigated legislation was Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), one of the most fanatical of the House "Clinton-bashers." Long-time Moon functionary Gary Jarmin did the legwork for the legislation push.
While no one could dare protest the idea of "Parents Day," many Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theologians have serious problems with Reverend Moon's particular views on "parenthood." According to Moon, he and his (fourth) wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, are the "True Parents." Moon claims that Jesus Christ failed in his mission, because he was crucified before he had children, and therefore mankind was not freed from the original sin, which, in Moon's world, derived from Eve having had a sexual union with Satan. Jesus came to Moon, this fractured fairy tale continues, and bestowed upon him the task of completing his failed mission—by staging lavish mass-marriage ceremonies, in which Moon's "pretty girls" from Korea and Japan are paired with unsuspecting targets.
In a posting on the Unification Church website, Rev. Michael Jenkins, who heads the entire Moon organization in America (now called "the Holy Spirit Association/Unification of World Churches USA"), wrote bluntly that "Unless we are cleansed of the original sin, human beings, from the moment of conception, are not in their original state. In order for us to be cleansed of the original sin, we should be reborn. The method of rebirth is to receive the Marriage Blessing with the Reverend Moon as the officiator. That is the best way to be cleansed of the original sin. This cleansing remains to be done for all humankind. Only after having gone through this cleansing can we personally stand before God and grow as original human beings." Later, he added, "Reverend Sun Myung Moon is one anointed to fulfill the mission that Jesus was unable to complete."
On July 4, 2002, the Moon-owned Washington Times ran a full-page ad from one of Reverend Moon's front groups, proclaiming him the Messiah. The ad "quoted" Jesus Christ: "Reverend Sun Myung Moon! Thou art the Second Coming who inaugurated the Completed Testament Age! The 120 people, who have brought light to the history of Christianity, pledge to take part in all that the True Parents do, and resolve to strive toward the ideal, the original garden where there is no original sin, through the guidance, the words of the Completed Testament, and the Unification Principle, of the Savior and Messiah, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon."
In the same blasphemous ad, God was also quoted: "As you, the True Parents, have now succeeded in everything and have raised everything to its true level, you are now the Savior, Messiah and King of Kings of all humanity!!!"
Was it for this insanity, that the Congress established "National Parents Day"?
A Criminal Background
For someone proclaiming himself the true Messiah, the North Korean-born Moon has a rather checkered past. In the post-World War II period, when Moon migrated to southern Korea, he became involved with a mystical sect called Israeli Suo-won, which practiced a strange "purification" ritual, in which women achieved purity by having intercourse with the sect's ministers. In both North and South Korea, Reverend Moon was charged with morals violations, according to an FBI report, obtained by reporter Robert Parry under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Moon landed in a South Korea jail in 1955 for his sexual missionary work.
Moon might have simply wandered around the Korean countryside, dodging the law and practicing "sexual purification" on young girls, but for the intervention of two of the Korean CIA's founders—Kim Jong-Pil and Bo Hi Pak—and their patrons in the radical right wing of Anglo-American intelligence. Those ultra-right-wing Anglo-American intelligence networks were pivotted around William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Carlist, nominally Catholic, fascist apparatus he was building, under the cover of his National Review magazine, and the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) anti-Communist youth movement.
According to a CIA report, dated Feb. 26, 1963, "Kim Jong-Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool."
Kim Jong-Pil was also in charge of rebuilding South Korean ties to Japan, as part of an overall American and British-backed effort to build an Asia-wide anti-Communist apparatus, pivotted on South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and making use of the vast Asian secret society-based organized crime apparatus, which was more than willing to fight the Communists, in return for a license to steal. Among Kim Jong-Pil's best Japanese contacts were two convicted Japanese war criminals, Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa.
Sasakawa was a leading figure in the Yakuza, Japan's organized-crime secret society, which was employed in the post-war period by the CIA to counter the Communists and trade union radicals. According to David Kaplan and Alec Dubro, authors of a respected history of the Yakuza, "Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church."
In June 1964, Kim Jong-Pil, Bo Hi Pak, and Reverend Moon were among the founders of the Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League. APACL created a student front, the Free Asia Youth Alliance (FAYA), which, from its inception, was formally linked to Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, which had established its own international youth federation, the International Youth Freedom Foundation. YAF/IYFF and FAYA signed a "Declaration of Common Purpose" in their first months of existence.
There were two Buckley epigones who were assigned the task of forging the alliance with their Asian partners at the KCIA and the Unification Church: Morris Liebman and Tongsun Park. A Korean-born, but American-educated YAF operative, Tongsun Park worked closely with Col. Bo Hi Pak, when the South Korean spook and Moon Church controller came to Washington, shortly after the launching of APACL, as the South Korean military attaché. The Colonel's primary assignment was to oversee the buildup of Moonie operations in the United States.
Liebman was Buckley's man on the scene in East Asia, shuttling to APACL conferences in Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei, throughout the 1960s. Liebman's cover was that he was a public relations man, working for Harold Orim and Co., a firm that represented the Committee for a Free Asia, the International Rescue Committee (of Leo Cherne), and the Committee of One Million.
In 1966, APACL became a core component of the larger World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which was a front for the same Anglo-American ultra-right-wing dirty spook networks that had picked up the dregs of the wartime Nazi and Fascist apparatus, for use as "resistance" networks, in the event of a Communist takeover of any country in the "Free World."
In Italy, the Fascist-tainted underground operation was code-named "Gladio," and it took on a life of its own, fuelling a corrupt parallel intelligence apparatus, dominated by the wartime Fascists and royalists. By the late 1960s, the CIA was attempting, to no avail, to shut down Gladio and other, now out-of-control paramilitary cells, which were engaging in "strategy of tension" terror attacks against continental Europe and elsewhere.
The Mooning of America
Around the same time that he was dispatched to Washington to run the Unification Church deployments on American soil, Col. Bo Hi Pak founded the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, a group which the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations found to be a KCIA front. In Washington, the South Korean colonel knew where to turn for help, in establishing an elaborate string of front groups, phony fundraising operations, and other covers. He hired Buckleyite Richard Viguerie as his chief "fundraiser."
The Moon organization, the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, and other South Korean influence-peddling outfits went hog-wild in Washington, D.C. during the 1970s. At one point, Moon was accused of running a 300-woman prostitution ring, infiltrating Congressional offices, in league with "Republic of Korea lobbyist" and Buckley protégé Tongsun Park. Through the Washington, D.C.-headquartered Diplomat National Bank, Moon and Park spread vast sums of money all over Capitol Hill and K Street. It was a recipe that Moon would repeat over and over again.
In the late 1970s, Rep. Donald Fraser (D-Minn.) ran a Congressional probe of the "Koreagate" influence-peddling scandal. Moon survived the scandal by spreading even more cash around Washington, creating more front-groups, and particularly spreading money around the emerging Buckley-dominated New Right. Fraser lost his re-election campaign in 1980, which greatly assisted in the coverup of Moon's operations (although zealous Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York—in spite of protests from the Reagan White House and main Justice Department—successfully prosecuted Moon in 1982 on tax evasion charges, and packed him off to prison for 18 months, leaving Colonel Pak behind to run the show, on a vastly expanded scale).
Among the early New Right recipients of Moon largesse was Joseph Churba, a childhood friend of Jewish Defense League founder Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was one of the key liaisons between the Likudnik right wing in Israel and the emerging neo-conservative crowd in Washington.
Churba and Kahane had founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the mid-1960s as another one of the WACL-linked right-wing front groups, initially dispatched onto the campuses of New York City to beat up anti-Vietnam War protesters. At the inception of the group, Kahane and Churba worked with two other Columbia University students, the son of labor counterinsurgent Irving Brown, and Roy Godson. Godson's father, Joe Godson, ran a string of Anglo-American anti-Communist labor front groups out of London for years.
The Godson-Brown links to the first Churba-Kahane foray into right-wing politics raise interesting questions about whether the early JDL was one of the many covert projects associated with the late James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence director. Angleton was the U.S. intelligence community paymaster and handler of "ex"-Communist Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown's closest ally inside the American labor movement's international department. Angleton also had the exclusive CIA "franchise" for dealing with the Israeli intelligence services.
Kahane and Churba were part of the Betar youth movement of the Jabotinsky fascist apparatus (Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a founder of Israel's Likud party, was a professed admirer of Hitler and Mussolini). They were the hooligans, deployed by the only slightly more respectable Betar fronts, the American Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the American Center for Russian Jewry. All three groups stalked Soviet diplomats who were assigned to the United Nations, and staged noisy protests over the plight of Soviet "Refuseniks." The JDL's earliest terrorist operations included the planting of pipe-bombs under the cars of Soviet diplomats. The Betar operations were cited by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.) as having been pivotal to Congress's 1972 passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, placing economic and political sanctions on the Soviet Union, linked to the treatment of Soviet Jews.
Churba graduated from the JDL to U.S. Air Force Intelligence during the mid-1970s, at one point heading up the Middle East intelligence desk. But after he attacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. George Brown, for disparaging comments about Israel, he had his security clearances stripped and left the government. After a brief stint as a consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1981-82, Churba was again bounced from the government, when his patron, National Security Adviser Richard Allen, was forced to resign, under a cloud of scandal. From 1983 until his death in 1996, Churba was a Moonie.
Under Executive Order 12333, the Reagan-Bush Administration created a gigantic loophole, allowing private organizations to be "deputized" as assets of U.S. covert intelligence. Col. Bo Hi Pak launched the Confederation of the Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas (CAUSA) as one of the most important and filthiest fronts for the secret war in Central America. CAUSA created an in-house think-tank for Churba, called the International Security Council, which put the Moonies into bed with the entire Likud-Betar Israeli intelligence apparatus.
The North Side of the Moon
The Iran-Contra "secret parallel government" operation afforded the Moonies the opportunity to do what they do best: launder vast sums of cash from undisclosed offshore enterprises into the hands of rogue anti-Communist spooks. The largest recipient of Moonie largesse was Lt. Col. Oliver North. Moon's and Bo Hi Pak's CAUSA International became a prime source of funding for North personally, and for the Iran-Contra gang more broadly.
Ronald Godwin, the vice president of the Washington Times Corp. and the former director of Falwell's Moral Majority, set up a Moon front, Interamerican Partnership, which was one of the first fronts to funnel cash into North's "Enterprise." Another Moon-sponsored group, the American Freedom Coalition, produced a North promo video, "Ollie North: Fight for Freedom," and paid to air it 600 times on over 100 TV stations, according to Bob Parry. The AFC, according to one eyewitness report, received $5-6 million from Moon to boost the North covert wars in Central America.
The American Freedom Coalition was a prototypical Moon front, drawing in everything filthy on the American ultra-right, along with a few bought-off old civil rights figures, including Rev. Ralph Abernathy. AFC's board of directors included Sen. Jesse Helms's (R-N.C.) two chief fundraisers, Tom Ellis and Carter Wren; Churba; Buckley nephew L. Brent Bozell III; Lt. Gen. Danny Graham (ret.); Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, a WACL superstar; Richard Viguerie; and Mormon Church official and former FBI Agent Cleon Skousen.
As reported in last week's EIR, at least one source of dirty money to fuel the Moonie operations in America, during the early 1980s, was the "Cocaine Colonels" regime in Bolivia. A reported $4 million cash payment, passed through CAUSA, had helped bankroll the military coup, carried out on behalf of the world's then-leading cocaine trafficker, Roberto Suárez. Wartime French Nazi collaborator Klaus Barbie had run the Colonels' secret police apparatus, along with Stefano Della Chiaie, one of the leading Gladio terrorists in Italy, who had been responsible for the bombing of the Bologna train station. Della Chiaie fled to the Bolivia safe haven, and he, along with Barbie, was frequently seen in the company of Moonie official Thomas Ward, the head of CAUSA-Bolivia.
Showdown in Brazil
The Clinton years were not good times in America for the Moon crowd, which bankrolled a non-stop propaganda campaign against the President, through Falwell, Robertson, and the other Christian Zionist flunkies who had been seduced by Moon cash and sex. At one point, according to news accounts, Moon considered moving his entire Western Hemisphere operations to Brazil, where the Moon apparatus had bought vast tracts of land.
Now, the Brazilian government is taking concerted action against the Moonies, charging them with tax evasion and money laundering. On May 6, 2002, Brazilian Federal police raided the offices of the Moon organization in several separate locations in São Paulo, and in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
One trigger for the probe, according to recent news accounts in the Brazilian press, was the massive purchase of land by the Moonies along the Brazilian border with Bolivia and Paraguay. Since 1997, Moon has bought up large areas of land in Mato Grosso do Sul, and hundreds of thousands of acres, including an entire town, in Paraguay, a country notorious as a contraband and money-laundering center for drug cartels and other criminal organizations.
Official investigations into the Moon land-grab began in mid-2001. In November 2001, the state legislature of Mato Grosso do Sul held hearings on the Moon land "investments." The head of the Brazilian Army's Western Command, Sergio Conforto, testified at those hearings, that the purchase of contiguous land on both sides of the Paraguayan and Bolivian border "gives the impression that they wish to join the two areas."
On Feb. 4, 2002, a judge had ordered that bank secrecy protection be lifted on all bank accounts of Moon's Association for the Unification of Families and World Peace. The Public Prosecutors Office is charging the group with posing a threat to the national security of Brazil.
A Paradox for Mr. Rumsfeld
By all public accounts, the Moon apparatus spends billions of dollars—perhaps tens of billions of dollars—a year on its worldwide front operations. Estimates of Moon's annual losses at the Washington Times Corp. alone, with its string of money-losing publications, range from $30-100 million. A recently compiled, single-spaced list of Moon's front organizations in the United States alone runs to 27 pages.
There are no credible reports of where the Moon empire gets its dough. There are many credible reports, linking the groups to the very "asteroid" intelligence networks that dominate the international crime scene, facilitate the world's biggest drug-trafficking operations, and protect the offshore banks that launder the estimated $1 trillion annual black market trade in illegal weapons and drugs.
There is one more question that ought to be rumbling between the ears of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other Bush Administration officials who are contemplating the promised wars against the alleged "axis of evil" troika of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. They count on the Moonie press to propagandize for the imperial march, even as the majority of American citizens recoil in horror at the idea of the United States imitating the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in fast-forward.
As investigative reporter Robert Parry reported in a Jan. 31, 2001 article, "Rev. Moon, the Bushes & Donald Rumsfeld" (www.consortiumnews.com), on Feb. 2, 1994, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a classified report (later declassified and released under the FOIA), detailing a week-long series of face-to-face meetings that took place in Pyongyang, North Korea from Nov. 30 to Dec. 8, 1991, between Reverend Moon and North Korean leader Kim Il-sung.
"These talks took place secretly, without the knowledge of the South Korean government," the DIA report noted. "In the original deal with Kim [Il-sung], Moon paid several tens of million dollars as a down-payment into an overseas account," added a second DIA report, dated Aug. 14, 1994.
A third declassified DIA document, dated Sept. 9, 1994, detailed the transaction: "In 1993, the Unification Church sold a piece of property located in Pennsylvania. The profit on the sale, approximately $3 million, was sent through a bank in China to the Hong Kong branch of the KS [South Korean] company 'Samsung Group.' The money was later presented to Kim Jong Il as a birthday present."
The flurry of 1994 DIA memos was triggered by the death of Kim Il-sung that year, and the sudden appearance of Col. Bo Hi Pak in Pyongyang. The Colonel's mission, according to the DIA documents, was to assure that the "deal" was still on to open the North to a series of Moon businesses. "If necessary, Moon authorized Pak to deposit a second payment for Kim Jong Il," one of the DIA reports noted. Among the "business deals" on the table were a resort complex in Pyongyang, and a "Holy Land" at the site of Moon's birthplace.
"There was an agreement regarding economic cooperation for the reconstruction of KN's [North Korea's] economy which included establishment of a joint venture to develop tourism at Kimkangsan, KN; investment in the Tumangang River Development; and investment to construct the light industry base at Wonsan, KN. It is believed that during their meeting Moon donated 450 billion yen to KN," according to another DIA report. At the time of the 1991 original Moon visit to Pyongyang, and the negotiating of the deal, Parry reported, the Japanese yen was trading at 130 to the dollar, meaning that Moon's investment in North Korea was in the range of $3.5 billion.
According to a 1998 Congressional commission on missile technology proliferation, chaired by Rumsfeld, during the period of the Moon-North Korea transactions, Pyongyang was engaged in a crash program to build a new generation of missiles, which the neo-conservatives today proclaim as the greatest threat to the stability of North Asia.
(See first article in series, Oct. 25 EIR.)
(See Editorial, ``Moongate Eclipses Chinagate, Koreagate.'')
