Moongate:
Bigger Than Chinagate, Koreagate
Following the 1996 Presidential elections, the Radical Right in America launched a wild campaign against President Bill Clinton, charging him with having been "bought off" by Beijing, via clandestine campaign contributions from corporate fronts for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Nothing much came of the wildly exaggerated "Chinagate" allegations, save a handful of Federal prosecutions of foreign influence peddlers, trying to buy a night at the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House.
However, some of the very Radical Rightists who led the charge against President Clinton and promoted the "Chinagate" scandal, including the not-so-reverend Jerry Falwell, are emerging as the biggest recipients of illegal money from Reverend Moon and his offshore dirty money empire. "Moongate" is a scandal that dwarfs all previous foreign campaign and foreign payola scandals combined. By EIR's best estimates, the Moonies pass billions of dollars a year into a far-flung apparatus of right-wing organizations, churches, political action committees, and Republican politicos, including former President George Bush.
Just how significant a contaminant this Moon money represents for the American political process is a matter that warrants the immediate attention of Congress and the Executive branch, particularly Federal law enforcement. In the late 1970s, to its credit, the House of Representatives conducted a massive probe of South Korean influence peddling, known as "Koreagate." The Moonies were at the very center of that operation, providing a veritable harem of some 300 prostitutes, who swarmed over Capitol Hill. A KCIA (Korean CIA) and Moonie bank, Diplomat National Bank of Washington, was a small-scale conduit of Moonie offshore cash into the "Koreagate" operation.
Today, the Moonies operate on a vastly larger scale. By some published accounts, offshore Moonie enterprises, including a growing operation in some of Ibero-America's biggest drug-money-laundering centers, subsidize the Washington Times Corp. to the tune of $30-100 million a year. Defense Intelligence Agency documents, recently declassified, show that Moon and his controller, Col. Bo Hi Pak, funneled $3.5 billion into North Korea during 1991-94.
In May 2002, law enforcement authorities in Brazil raided the Moonies' headquarters in São Paulo, and other offices across Brazil, charging the group with money laundering and tax evasion. Other officials, citing the Moonies' recent purchase of vast tracts of land on all sides of the Brazil/Paraguay/Bolivia borders, charged that the group posed a threat to Brazilian national security.
What are the Moonies up to, creating a cross-border territory in one of the most narcotics-infested regions of the globe? A team of American law enforcement officials would do well to visit their Brazilian counterparts, and determine the implications for the United States of the tax evasion and money-laundering allegations in South America.
One of the most visible of the recent Moonie operations was the buy-off of Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose $73 million in debt to his supporters was "disappeared," through what one retired Federal law enforcement official considered a criminal transaction.
In recent years, unsuspecting U.S.-based Muslim clerics have been targetted by the Moonies for cooptation, through lavish gifts and the promise of "ecumenical" support against the would-be promoters of a new Crusade. Nowhere in these discussions with leading Muslim- and Arab-Americans do the Moonies acknowledge that they are also the main financiers and controllers of the entire so-called "Christian Zionist Right" in America—typified by Falwell, Gary Bauer, Tim and Beverley LaHaye, and "Diamond Pat" Robertson.
The flood of Moonie money, from very dubious, predominantly offshore sources, into the right wing, and, now, into the Islamic and African-American political leadership institutions in America, is a matter too big to ignore. It is time for the Congress and the Justice Department to take a long overdue look into the multi billion-dollar Moon pipeline of cash.
