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Open in TheBrain

Rev. Sun Myung Moon

see moonie tag (no cont 7/14); see Wash Times

SEE SEAN ROD OF IRON AR15 MFG

1020 bak/capt

html dispatched

3/22 great episode on rev moon WT, ep2 does death squad gop, ends w. list incl david brooks

Part One: The Moonies Are So Much Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine

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March 8, 2022 • 74 min

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Christopher Wong is joined by Robert Evans to discuss the many crimes of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his family.

FOOTNOTES:

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RS

The Rod of Iron Ministries Reveres Guns, Is Ready to Fight for Trump

no pix lnx

Inside the Bizarre and Dangerous Rod of Iron Ministries

The AR-15 is a divine instrument for enforcing God's will — and that will, says Rod of Iron Ministries' leader, favors Trump

By Tim Dickinson

August 18, 2022

Days after the insurrection at the Capitol — where he’d been close enough to the rioting to get tear-gassed — Pastor Sean Moon posted an incendiary rant to Instagram. Wearing his trademark crown of bullets and speaking to the camera from behind a golden AR-15 assault rifle, Moon declared Jan. 6 had been the “Boston Tea Party of the Second American Revolution.”

Far from condemning the day’s violence, Moon praised the insurrectionists who “took dominion of the Satanic Temple” — that is to say, the U.S. Capitol building — and sent “the most powerful people on the planet scurrying away, like rats, in total fear, total panic, in tunnels.”

“God was victorious that day,” Moon insisted. “The criminals,” the pastor added — referring to America’s elected representatives who refused to back Donald Trump’s coup attempt — “can never take that image out of their mind. Now they realize, ‘Oh crap, if that happens again, the cops may stand down.’”

Moon is the leader of Rod of Iron Ministries, a breakaway militant sect of the Unification Church. The pastor, 42, is the son of the late global religious leader Sun Myung Moon, revered as the second coming of Christ by his followers, known colloquially as the “Moonies.” The younger Moon’s church has gained infamy by glorifying the AR-15 assault rifle as the biblical “rod of iron,” an instrument of God’s justice.

Headquartered outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Rod of Iron Ministries has stirred alarm with ceremonies in which its faithful bring their weapons to church. Moon preaches an end-times theology that’s intertwined with earthly politics. And along with his brother Justin — who, in a nifty twist, owns a gun company that sells assault weapons — Sean Moon has sought to build political power in MAGA world, by cultivating connections to the Trump sons, hosting an annual Freedom Festival that has attracted Steve Bannon to speak, and even forging ties to the NRA board member who put his name at the top of the list of the fake slate of 2020 Electoral College voters from Pennsylvania. Moon calls Teddy Daniels, a Jan. 6 participant who ran as Doug Mastriano’s preferred candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant governor, “our great friend and brother in Christ.”

Moon has often been portrayed as a zany zealot rather than a threatening revolutionary, but the days when a preacher in a bullet crown could be laughed off as an oddity are over. At a time when GOP leaders are increasingly embracing violence as an acceptable — or even necessary — response to losing an election, Moon’s teachings offer another layer of cover, painting the overthrow of government as ordained by God.

The fervor for regime change that Moon uncorked after the assault on the Capitol has not abated. When the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago last week, Moon turned again to Instagram to blast the attorney general and top Justice Department officials as “abominable, deceit-spewing sociopaths,” imploring “Resist these devils, America. God is with us.”

Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon’s childhood was, to put it mildly, far from typical.

He grew up cloistered in his family’s 19-acre church compound in Westchester County, outside of New York City. Because of security threats his family faced, Moon recalls in a 2018 book, he was “not permitted to wander the neighborhoods, hang out with friends, or ride our bikes outside.” His outlet from bitter isolation — home, he writes, “seemed like a prison” — was self-defense training, including Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, of which he’s now a blackbelt, and, eventually, firearms.

Sean’s father, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was the founder and leader of the Unification Church, the conservative global religious movement founded in South Korea. The elder Moon presented himself as a biblical messiah, and famously presided over mass “wedding” events in which believers were purportedly absolved of sin. For the elder Moon, homosexuality was a grave trespass against God, and he compared gay men to “dirty dung-eating dogs.”

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In the United States, the elder Moon overcame legal troubles — he was once sentenced to 18 months in prison for filing false tax returns — and founded the conservative Washington Times, which he used to cultivate political power inside the Beltway, including forging close ties to the Bush family. In a bizarre 2004 ceremony, Moon was coronated inside the Dirksen Senate building, declaring himself God incarnate in front of more than a dozen members of Congress.

When the patriarch died in 2012, it sparked a bitter succession battle for control of the Unification Church and its vast business enterprises. Moon’s wife, Hak Ja Han, known to followers as the “True Mother,” consolidated control. She boxed out her son Sean, who’d trained at Harvard Divinity school and insists he was his father’s handpicked successor.

Feeling betrayed by his mother, whom he now likens to the “Harlot of Babylon,” Sean launched his own sect in 2013. The younger Moon’s church has evolved to fetishize AR-15s, rebranding in 2017 as “Rod of Iron Ministries.” The church burst onto the national consciousness with a 2018 ceremony in which members were invited to bring their assault weapons to church, held just days after the school massacre in Parkland, Florida.

Moon, who wears a crown of polished bullets made for him by a religious follower, preaches that the AR-15 is the biblical “rod of iron” — an instrument of divine power. This bizarro reading of the bible springs from passages like Psalms (“You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery”) and Revelations (“And He shall rule them with a rod of iron.”)

Preaching a last-days theology, Moon prophesies that a heavenly kingdom will soon be established on Earth — and that his heavily armed followers will help rule this land. “The citizens of the Kingdom of God, who will share in Christ’s sovereignty, bear the responsibility to defend their family, neighbors, and nation with their own rod of iron,” Moon writes in his book, Rod of Iron Kingdom.

Moon casts himself (and his progeny) as the monarchs of this future divine realm, which he calls the United States of Cheon Il Guk, shorthanded as CIG. He has even written its constitution, describing CIG as “a sovereign and actual nation [that] does not yet exist in this world, but is the long awaited culmination of the End of Time.” The CIG constitution vaguely resembles the American one, but prominently bans abortion and gay marriage, and installs Moon as king.

Sean Moon speaks at the 3rd Annual Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in October 2021.

Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/AP

When he preaches, Moon is rapid-fire and abrasive — a match for a church that treats assault rifles as instruments of the Lord.

But in conversation he comes across as more tempered. Speaking to Rolling Stone on a Zoom call from his ministry’s new retreat center, bought in 2021, in rural Tennessee, Moon clarified that, while his father was the second coming of Christ, he does not deem himself as God, rather “akin to what normal people would see as the Pope — sort of the representative of Christ.” He says his following is approximately 15,000 families worldwide.

Moon says he’s unconcerned by those who refer to Rod of Iron Ministries as a cult. “It doesn’t bother us. It doesn’t paralyze us,” he says, adding that the Moonies have been decried as a cult for decades. “We’ve been hearing that labelling for the last 50 years,” Moon says. “We’re used to that type of persecution.”

Moon insists CIG will be “a kingdom not of tyranny, but a kingdom of freedom and responsibility.” As he spoke, Moon expounded on some of his church’s beliefs. “We see homosexuality just like beastiality,” he said, describing a strict moral code that also sees “dating and having sex before marriage as a critical sin.”

By definition, establishing the United States of Cheon Il Guk will require an overthrow of the current United States of America. Moon denies that force will be required, rather that “people through self-determination and being led by the Spirit of God will organically institute that in their countries.”

But behind this softer framing lies the same dark message. Pressed, Moon also insists that the “rod of iron” — or the AR-15 — will be the “accoutrement which allows people to always keep their political servants in check.”

Put more plainly, Sean Moon is leader of an apocalyptic, revolutionary, heavily armed, assault-weapon-fetishising religious order that the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as an “anti-LGBTQ cult.”

Political extremism is a profitable endeavor, and the greater Moon family is no exception. In Sean Moon’s church, guns are holy. But for his brother Justin, they’re also business.

By crossing the streams of end-times Christianity and Second Amendment fundamentalism, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Rod Iron Ministries is making itself a powerful draw for MAGA politicians eager to communicate with the most based of the GOP base.

Sean Moon’s gun-promoting church, in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, is closely tied to his brother’s gun business, the Kahr Firearms Group, headquartered in nearby Greeley. (Both towns are exurban to Scranton.)

Kahr Arms Groups owns several gun brands including Thompson, and the company makes street-legal Tommy Guns as well as AR-15s. While the NRA touts Kahr as “a Premier NRA Industry Ally,” the company actively partners with the even-more-hardcore Gun Owners of America, and fights gun-control legislation in Congress as part of GOA’s “No Compromise Alliance.”

Sean Moon describes his brother as “a member of our church,” adding that “like any other member, he contributes what he feels in his heart … to the organization.” I asked Moon whether adopting the Rod of Iron branding for his church had anything to do with boosting his brother’s business. “No,” the pastor retorted. “Of course not.”

To honor the leader of the MAGA movement, Justin Moon’s firearms company has launched several lines of weapons emblazoned with Trump’s likeness and slogans.

Like their father, the Moon brothers have sought to cultivate ties with powerful figures of the American right, and the modern GOP is proving a fertile ground.

When Justin Moon’s company opened a firearms emporium called the Tommy Gun Warehouse in 2016, Sean gave the blessing, and Eric Trump gave the keynote speech. The brothers have also both sought photo ops with Don Trump Jr., who features prominently on Sean Moon’s Instagram account, as well as Justin’s.

To honor the dear leader of the MAGA movement, Justin Moon’s firearms company has launched several lines of weapons emblazoned with Trump’s likeness and slogans, including the POTUS 1911 pistol, the Commander in Chief AR-15, and the Trump Thompson Tommy Gun, chambered in .45 for the 45th president.

In 2019, the Moon brothers together launched the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, “a non-denominational event to celebrate our Second Amendment.” Its 2021 lineup included former Trump adviser Steve Bannon; Richard Mack, originator of a bogus theory that sheriffs can decide what’s constitutional; former NRATV star Dana Loesh; and John Lott, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime.....

same one as cspan booktv?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/this-is-american-fascism-a-disturbing-event-will-bring-together-gun-nuts-trumpians-and-doomsday-christianists-report/

AH

Freedom Festival is a far-right event held in Greenley, Pennsylvania and organized by a combination of Moonies and gun manufacturers. The speakers at this year's event will include former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, and according to Daily Beast reporter Jose Pagliery, their presence at Freedom Festival underscores the ever-increasing radicalization of the Republican Party.

"Few Americans are even aware that the gun company Kahr and a rural Pennsylvania doomsday church — both run by the same ultra-rich Korean family — hold an annual 'Freedom Festival'that attracts gun enthusiasts and the type of people who attach 'Don't Tread on Me' flags to the back of their trucks," Pagliery explains in an article published on October 8. "But in the wake of the failed January 6 insurrection, the event'samalgamation of sovereign citizens and alt-truthers has taken on a new meaning. And now, it's even got an all-star lineup."

Ryan Busse, a former gun industry executive, warns that the presence of a former NRA spokesperson at Freedom Festival is "legitimizing" extremism.

Busse told the Beast, "It's going to send a message across the country that this is normal, that this is OK. This is American fascism being developed right before our eyes. This is like 1936 Germany in a symposium."

Busse went on to say, "The one that concerns me the most is Dana Loesch. She's treated by gun consumers like royalty, and here she is legitimizing this insanity. That scares me."

Pagliery notes thatKahr Firearms Group,which manufactures semi-automatic weapons, is run by a family of Moonies. Founded by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon during the 1950s, the Moonies are a Christianist cult known for conspiracy theories, End Times themes and a far-right ideology.

"While Sun Myung Moon became a prominent figure in the American conservative movement — founding the Washington Times newspaper — one of his sons, Justin Moon, founded the Kahr gun company in 1995," Pagliery explains. "And another son, Hyung Jin Sean Moon, inherited an offshoot of the church that goes by the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary and warns about 'the End of Times.' With the patriarch now deceased, his sons have largely merged their worlds."

Pagliery continues,"The reverend son now refers to his church with a more militant name — Rod of Iron Ministries— an allusion to his unification of disparate ideas: faith and guns. And churchgoers wear metal crowns on their heads, signifying individuals' ultimate sovereign authority over themselves. They also carry semi-automatic rifles like AR-15s and AK-47s, fashioning their guns like pious medieval knights would a sword."

The Moonies are not white supremacists; Rev. Sun Myung Moon was Korean. But according to J.J. MacNab of George Washington University's Program on Extremism, that doesn't make them any less dangerous.

MacNab told the Beast, "They've never really gotten the attention I think they should, because they're not a White supremacy group. Anybody that's pushing such a hearty mix of guns and religion are problematic to me. And the doomsday element is there. It's effectively talking about death."

Busse finds Freedom Festival's combination of religious extremism, guns, conspiracy theories and Trumpism to be incredibly toxic.

The former NRA member told the Beast, "It's what I fear: anything that will gin up people to buy more guns, hate people more, and vote for people like Trump. It's all of that on steroids. Doesn't the Klan meet in the dark out back behind uncle's barn? This is right out in the open."

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just well paid gig?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-address%e2%80%8b%e2%80%8bed%e2%80%8b-followers-of-sun-myung-moon-and-sean-feucht-on-9-11/

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yikes omg

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/heavily-armed-apocalyptic-religious-sect-with-ties-to-team-trump-buys-texas-compound-to-prepare-for-war-with-deep-state/

note crusader images

A pro-Trump, pro-gun religious sect run by Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon has bought a nearly $1 million property in Texas as a place for its “patriots” to prepare for coming war with the “deep state,” Vice’s Tess Owen reported Thursday. The sect’s name—“Rod of Iron” ministries—and their habit of brandishing assault weapons as part of their worship servicereflect its leaders’ interpretation of a passage from the biblical book of Revelation that says Jesus will dash his enemies to pieces with a rod of iron.

Moon is the son of the late Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the politically engaged Unification Church who created the right-wing Washington Times newspaper. Sean Moon’s brother owns a gun-manufacturing business.

The purchase of the compound and its state purpose bring to mind the 1993 siege of a fringe religious compound in Waco, Texas, that ended in a fire that killed scores of people. Moon himself invoked that incident in an Instagram video posted Thursday. Moon wore a crown made of bullets and a vest declaring himself part of the “Black Robed Regiment” while repeating false right-wing claims that David Chipman, Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, had posed for a photo in the ruins of that compound, which he called an example of federal tyranny.

“America is existentially at crisis right now,” Moon said on the video. “We have left God. We’ve become part of this licentious, decrepit, degraded moral culture. We have strayed from God’s principles. … That will bring a country to destruction, and God will allow it to be judged, just like he did with the Israelites.”

Rod of Iron supporter in biker jacket at Jericho March/Stop the Steal event; leader Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon visible in background. Photo: A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch.

As Right Wing Watch noted last fall, Trump adviser Steve Bannon addressed a festival organized by Rod of Iron where he warned that “the left” would try to steal Pennsylvania and the presidency from former President Donald Trump by using mail-in ballots. Vice reported that Christian nationalist Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, positioning himself for a run for governor, was “recently billed as a special guest” at another Rod of Iron event.

The rhetoric and teaching of church leader Hyung Jim “Sean” Moon, who was at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, “have grown even more radical and militaristic” recently, according to Vice. Vice reports:

“The internationalist Marxist globalistsare trying to start a civil war here, so that they can bring in the U.N. troops and Chi-Com Chinese military to come in and destroy and kill all gun owners, Christians, and any opposition, i.e., Trump supporters,” Moon said matter-of-factly in a recent sermon. “We are in the death of America right now, and that’s why, of course, God is allowing for our expansion.”

On January 3, his church sent out a notice to members. “Some federal agents operate as a criminal cartel and are in the process of stealing this presidential election,” the notice read. “We need to prepare and train for the fight.”

“It’s obviously better if we can use our rights tofreedom of speech, assembly, to seek redress of grievances,” it continued. “Otherwise we will have to fight physically, with many dying.”

Three days later, when Trump fans gathered in Washington, D.C., Moon posted a video to Instagram from outside the Capitol, amid the insurrectionist mob, running from clouds of tear gas with his wife and brother.

Since then, Moon has warned his followers that the Biden administration intends to force Trump supporters into re-education camps. One of those followers attacked police officers in Westchester, New York, last month; investigators found he was in possession of a list of people “to kill,” Vice reported.

As Right Wing Watch reported in October, Moon has plans, and even a written Constitution, for the future “United States of Cheon Il Guk.” The constitution’s preamble states, “Cheon Il Guk, The Kingdom of God (and/or Heaven), a sovereign and actual nation does not yet exist in this world, but is the long awaited culmination of the End of Time as prophesied in the Biblical Scripture.” The preamble ends with Moon asserting a kingly and messianic role he says he inherited from his father, Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon:

Now as I, Hyung Jin Moon, take my rightful place as King of the Second Kingship of the Kingdom of God, Cheon Il Guk, as the Crowned Successor and Representative Body of the Cosmic True Parents of Heaven and Earth and full Inheritor of the Kingship of God, with all the authority endowed in me by my Father, Sun Myung Moon—The True Father, Messiah, Lord at the Second Advent and King of Kings, hereby declare the following Immutable and Unchangeable, “Constitution of Cheon Il Guk,” that shall NEVER be abridged or added-to, in their enumerations.

[vid]

tags: Doug Mastriano Hyung Jin "Sean" Moon Hyung Jin Moon Sean Moon Steve Bannon Disinformation Election 2020 End Times Stop the Steal Rod of Iron Ministries

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/steve-bannon-tells-messianic-gun-toting-conspiracy-theorists-that-the-left-wants-to-steal-pennsylvania-from-trump/

former White House adviser Steve Bannon made a virtual appearance:{earlier this month at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival​ in Pennsylvania, The Trace’s Champe Barton reported Thursday. The Rod of Iron rally ​was organized by two sons of the late Sun Myung Moon, a messianic Korean religious leader who founded and bankrolled the right-wing Washington Times newspaper. Bannon }delivered:{ a}:message:{ seemingly meant to incite the several thousand attendees:  }:

“What the left intends to do — and you’re seeing it in Pennsylvania right now,” Bannon told the crowd. “Use the courts, use social media, use the mainstream media to try to make sure Trump is not declared the winner that night.” He said falsely that “uncertifiable” mail-in ballots would be used to “steal the presidency” away from Trump. “Look we’re going to win this thing,” he said. “Pennsylvania is the key that picks the lock for a second Trump term.”

The group is continuing to promote Trump. A group of South Korean and Japanese members of the Moons’ Rod of Iron Ministries—based in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, about 25 miles south of Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton—showed up outside an early-voting location in Wilkes-Barre on Thursday. Researcher Erin Gallagher called attention to Rod of Iron’s Pennsylvania activities in a Twitter thread Friday. 

Tom Dunkel profiled Rod of Iron Ministries and the affiliated Sanctuary Churchfor the Washington Post Magazine in 2018, complete with photos of worshipers reverently carrying assault rifles. Pastor Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, who says the 9/11 attacks were a “false flag,” had decided that a passage in the New Testament book of Revelation referring to the returning Christ ruling the Earth with “a rod of iron” was a reference to an AR-15. Pastor Sean’s sermon denounced the Democratic Party, George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Pope Francis—who he called “a socialist, communist devil.”

​Shortly before the 2016 election, Pastor Sean’s brother Kook-Jin “Justin” Moon ​called Hillary Clinton the “Fallen Eve” and Donald Trump an “Adam-type figure.” In Dunkel’s story, Justin sounds like a QAnon believer, saying there are “a lot of pedophiles in the Democratic Party” and they “realize that Trump is coming to get them. Literally. Round them up and put them in prison and execute them.”  

Rod of Iron Ministries offers training to “equip 2nd Amendment Christians with the tools and training that enable Patriots to grow closer to God while defending America’s founding principles.” The two brothers happen to own a gun manufacturer.

According to the ministry’s website, Sean hosts a three-hour YouTube broadcast six days a week offering “spiritual guidance and political and social commentary from a biblical viewpoint.”  

The website also includes a link to “The Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk.” 

The preamble to the constitution explains that “Cheon Il Guk, The Kingdom of God (and/or Heaven), a sovereign and actual nation does not yet exist in this world, but is the long awaited culmination of the End of Time as prophesied in the Biblical Scripture.” It continues: 

This Constitution is not an ecclesiastical Constitution of a church or religious body, but is a Constitution for a real and sovereign, future nation, being the literal fruit of God’s Providence. All history longs and awaits this future Kingdom of God.

At the end of the preamble, Hyung Jin Moon​ asserts a kingly and messianic role inherited from his father: 

Now as I, Hyung Jin Moon, take my rightful place as King of the Second Kingship of the Kingdom of God, Cheon Il Guk, as the Crowned Successor and Representative Body of the Cosmic True Parents of Heaven and Earth and full Inheritor of the Kingship of God, with all the authority endowed in me by my Father, Sun Myung Moon—The True Father, Messiah, Lord at the Second Advent and King of Kings, hereby declare the following Immutable and Unchangeable, “Constitution of Cheon Il Guk,” that shall NEVER be abridged or added-to, in their enumerations.” 

The “Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk” borrows the structure of the U.S. Constitution, adapting the Bill of Rights, before the inclusion of sections explaining the authority of the king and the first “principle” focused on maintaining a “pure lineage” of God: 

The Constitution of the United States of Cheon Il Guk

We the People of the United States of Cheon Il Guk (CIG), in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish in Heavenly Father’s name this Constitution for the United States of CIG. 

Principle I: Maintain the Pure Lineage of God 

The division of the sexes being ordained by God where man is the subject partner and woman is the object partner, congress shall pass no law that contradicts this divine edict. Faithful marriage between a man and a woman being the ideal of God’s creation, the government of CIG will pass no law which interferes with or contradicts this Divine Law. The fruit of faithful marriage being the conception of children, congress shall pass no law which permits the injury to all persons born or unborn. Sexual abstinence before marriage being the ideal condition for newlyweds, congress shall pass no law supporting or giving aid to alternative life styles. 

Tags: Donald TrumpHyung Jin "Sean" MoonKook-Jin "Justin" MoonStephen K. BannonSteve BannonElection 2020Rod of Iron Ministries

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/22/nyregion/look-life-after-mass-marriage-for-2075-couples-give-take-200-10-years-together.html?src=pm&pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all  eh

http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/k:{_moonstruck:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.htm

==

WT est 1982  chris matthews scoffed at 1st, recently went on junket; 1996 doles goes to event; son preston harvard

3rd flr of WT bldg top floor pseudo diplomatic corps to maintain ties to Korea; 

fox news 1.0

king of america doc vid http://videosift.com/video/Bad-Moon-Rising-Short-documentary-on-Rev-Moon-1820

huge bicentennial rallies (ppl dressed as FF)

BC commie spy/dupe;

az? militiamen

bought UPI?! helen thomas quit

 King of the Sea

True World Foods (sushi) labor violations?

madison inst? john cooper dir cf http://www.jamesmadison.org/wp-content/uploads/JMI25MomentsAnnualReport4.pdf

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Madison_Institute

b2 appt moonie to UN food pgm head; 250K for inaug ball

iapprovethismessiah.com

crowned king of peace, endorsed by dead pres; 

David Brooks got start at WT?

invest story on gay prostitute ring linked to WH (by pruden) outed craig spence who comitted suicide; rev refers to it as intel org; put up ~ www gornefeld.com david payer admin journalism hall of fame

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/202534-1  video 1 hr

crowned as messiah by members of congress who bowed; charlie black, john warner said duped;3b$ since 1992 to WT;  beat staffers?  ; hamburgers satanic b/c US is; messages from spriti world.info;

smears: dukakis mentally ill picked up by RR "i wd not pick on an invalid"; madrassa BO; clinton murders video;japan widows swindled out of savings,b1 helps w/ PR backlash

jesus failed by not marrying, dying, so rev here to finish job; got JC married; tear down the cross tour; afterschool abstinence pgms w/ fed $; 790K$ (vid)  

Free teens house in NJ;  1.8 mil$ from?

DHC 300K$ to fix boats in LA  Holy Spirit Association Unification of World Chritisanity   [world res inst for the study of technology machine to talk to dead] ; soda, hvy industry (incl arms); tried to link w/ Japanese hard right; 

at height of watergate, moon astroturfed support; rev met w/ rmn; 

wants to replace/take over UN, claims support in 160 countries

doug adams: somebody's else's problem is the ultimate cloaking device

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Moon-Rising-Washington-Religious/dp/0979482232#reader_0979482232

cf max blumenthal in Nation on pruden

Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created th…

by John Gorenfeld

interview: http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/4143-reverend-moon--source-of--rightwing-funding-and-the-washington-times--comes-to-life-in-bad-moon-rising

John Gorenfeld: The Unification Church is a political and religious and business movement founded in Korea in the 1950s that grew under a dictatorship that came to power in South Korea, where it was favored for having these fanatical anti-communist rallies. That really endeared Reverend Moon to the hard right in Japan and South Korea, where they were trying to rally students against communism.

That, in turn, was responsible for Reverend Moon becoming an intriguing figure to American hard right politicians of the Seventies, who looked at this guy that was trying to gain entry into the United States and said, you know, this guy survived torture in a North Korean prison camp. He could be the inspirational figure. Sure, we'll let him in. Senator Strom Thurmondhelped him out with his immigration problems. And he came.

He really was allowed to address a session of Congress in 1976, 1977 -- this was recorded in The New York Times -- I can't remember the year exactly. We all know Reverend Moon as this kind of cult leader. But one of the major discoveries of the book that's so fascinating is that before he was able to become such a sensation in American culture, he was already smiled upon by anti-communist politicians in Washington, D.C. They felt we should allow this guy to come in and rally people against communism. And he really took advantage of a variety of unsuspecting U.S. politicians.

I should probably point out, though, in regard to the coronation on Capitol Hill, that it was essentially set up by a religious right lobbyist, Gary Jarmin. And Representative Danny Davis, who's a liberal Democrat from your part of the world, from Illinois, did bring a crown to Reverend Moon's wife and put it on her head. A lot of the people involved in letting this thing happen on Capitol Hill were really important figures in the development of the religious right. It's sort of astonishing how many lobbyists and religious right operatives who claim to be these heroes of Christianity have worked so closely and become so entwined over the years with Reverend Moon, whose central message is that Jesus Christ was a failure, and that Moon had to be sent by God to make up for Jesus' bungling God's mission. In fact, Reverend Moon is, as he says, better than God and better than Jesus. Anyway, the coronation was a ceremony to replace Jesus set up by conservatives. They gave their help for years, and Reverend Moon made huge contributions....

John Gorenfeld: Reverend Moon has had close ties to Republican administrations since Reagan, when he was a guest at the Inaugural. He has actually traveled to different countries with George Bush, Senior. This was reported in Reuters and by major newspapers that were trying to figure out why, in the mid-1990s during the Clinton years, why George H.W. Bush apparently thought it was worthwhile to go to Argentina and Japan, and take millions of dollars in support of Reverend Moon, publisher of the conservative newspaper.

Bush said he was doing it for the money. Bush went to Japan in support of Mrs. Moon, who had started this sort of phony women's federation for world peace, and was giving these speeches about her husband. At the time, one of the things was that the Reverend Moon church was struggling in Japan, which was trying to kick it out of the country, and had been swindling all these old people into giving it money. The premise was that if you gave Moon all this cash, you could save your dead husband from hell. They were ripping off all these widows and saying unless you give us a million yen, your husband will be doomed.

And this is some of the money that funds the mysterious newspaper that they operate in Washington, D.C. But the relationship between the Bush family tree and the conservatives and Reverend Moon is really interesting. They show their gratitude for this reliable, loyal conservative voice in the capitol that wasn't there when there was only The Washington Post.

BuzzFlash:How much money has he put into The Washington Times? And what do you feel was his motivation for starting it? And how long ago was it started?

John Gorenfeld: It was 1982. Reverend Moon's motivation was he wanted to cultivate a position of influence for himself,to protect himself from prosecution. He went away for tax evasionin the Eighties, and the government at one point was trying to deport him. And Reverend Moon's motivation for starting The Washington Times was to go from being this fringe figure that was considered a menace to American youth, to reinventing himself and suddenly being the guy that publishes the President's favorite newspaper.

In fact, just a few years after The Washington Times began publishing, Reagan said it was the newspaper he read every day, and it was his favorite, because it was so much friendlier to him than wasThe Washington Post. So it'sa cynical partnership where the conservatives would rather you not pay attention to the guy printing their newspaper. They obviously don't buy into his belief, but they take his money, which comes to between $2 and $3 billion, depending on different estimates that are out there. For this money-losing newspaper that's widely quoted on Fox News, and on conservative radio.

I think liberals really underestimate the reach of The Washington Times. Its circulation isn't that big, but if you're someone who listens to conservative radio, Christian talk radio, watches Fox, they're continually quoting the hard right reporting from The Washington Times. It's just shoddy and unreliable. They come up with stories saying Saddam Hussein actually did have weapons of mass destruction, but they were smuggled across the border at the last minute by Russian agents to Syria. Stories like that start in The Washington Times. ESCALATOR

In the case of theMinutemen, there was a study that showed that The Washington Times was responsible for basically taking a small group of fringe border-watchers who were obsessed with stopping Mexicans from crossing the border, and really driving coverage across the United States. They had wildly exaggerated reports claiming that this gigantic movement of thousands of people with their own air force was going to come and secure the border, when in fact it really wasn't that.

BuzzFlash: Okay, he has this newspaper. Right-wingers, Republicans, owe him favors because he's subsidizing it. Hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars over the years, to get out the message that the Republicans and the right wing want to get out. But are there other ways that they owe favors to him? As a foreign national, I assume he can't contribute to campaigns.

John Gorenfeld: Right. Reverend Moon doesn't contribute directly to campaigns, but to the political scaffolding behind campaigns. He gives money to people like RichardViguerie, who's the direct mail king of the right.

John Gorenfeld: People who are really important operatives in building up the right. Sort of think Moveon.org, only on the right -- the sort of campaign organizations that have been so effective in building up the modern-day conservative revolution that has taken over the Republican Party.

And also one important role Moon has played is bailing out people from debt. In the mid-1990s, Jerry Falwell got heavily into debt around the time that he was spending a lot of money on the Clinton Chronicles -- you remember that? The videotape charging Bill Clinton with a string of dead bodies essentially. And Jerry Falwell, who had painted Reverend Moon as the plague, and had said that he preys on young people -- he turned around and took $3.5 million from the church. That kind of connection tends to be discovered by investigative journalists probing tax forms and things. It's not out in the open like regular campaign contributions. They've funneled money to a wide variety of right-wing campaigners and their organizations.

BuzzFlash: Okay, so The Washington Times is sort of a go-to outlet, along with Fox News, owned by Murdoch, The New York Post, owned by Murdoch, and Drudge, and Rush Limbaugh -- these are kind of the go-to places when the right wing and the Republicans want to get their message out. Although, of course, The Washington Times has a little bit more of an imprimatur than Drudge, but not by much. What sort of circulation does it have?

John Gorenfeld: The circulation is not very impressive, though. But what is impressive is the rate that it gets quoted. That is what demonstrates the importance of The Washington Times. You know, another newspaper started, The Washington Examiner, owned by a hard-right owner, but still a pretty respectable newspaper in that the coverage is measured and balanced, and it's the number-two paper in Washington, D.C. Yet the number-three paper now,The Washington Times, is still far more quoted thanThe Examiner because it's used to float whatever story that the right wants to get out.

Its companion magazine, sort of their version of Parade, is *:{**Insight**:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:*magazine. And Insight was responsible for being the first publication to print the claim that Barack Obama had been educated in a hard-line, Islamic madrassa. And the amazing thing is, when you look at how all these stories play out, things that appear in The Washington Times get tremendous play all over the conservative blogosphere.

BuzzFlash: The Washington Times is sort of a like The Drudge Report, basically accomplishing the same goals.

John Gorenfeld: Yes. The thing is that even The Drudge Report can't link to itself. It has to link to somebody's story. And so The Washington Times is usually this sort of fake originator of supposedly respectable reporting that the other stations can now say, well, it's reported in The Washington Times.

Here's a great example. There was a story around the time that the Iraq war was starting that there was a human shield protester named Ken Joseph. The idea was that Ken Joseph was determined to use his body, and sacrifice himself if necessary, to stop the bombing of Iraq. He goes over to Iraq -- according to The Washington Times -- and to his surprise, he meets these Iraqis who say that they want the war, and they want it now, and if the bombing doesn't start, then they're going to commit suicide. He writes about how he was amazed, and he realized that the Iraqis want the shock and awe to start.

And lo and behold, after the story appeared in The Washington Times, it was all over, from Fox News to the White House website. Jeff Gannon, the White House prostitute-slash-reporter, talked about it. He had all these people in the conservative blogosphere talking about how they like these stories that match their view of reality. They were saying, look, these protesters are really starting to get it. They're starting to understand that it is going to improve the lives of the Iraqi people for this war to start.

So its reach is just tremendous, and the circulation is not the major factor.

BuzzFlash: It does have influence. They tend to place very significant pro-Republican, pro-right-wing headlines above the fold. And as we point out in our Media Putz of the Week column, they recently placed two pictures, which are called in press parlance "hangdog pictures," of Clinton and Obama above the fold. This was something that would be displayed in the news vending machines in Washington, D.C. for everyone who was walking around Washington to see.

John Gorenfeld: The newspaper is also hand delivered to thousands of people on Capitol Hill, so inside-the-Beltway, it's almost considered a message board.

BuzzFlash: Does everyone in Congress get it free?

John Gorenfeld: I'm not sure. I'd have to check that.

BuzzFlash: You mentioned Insight magazine, which is a very frequent source of mud-slinging on the part of the right wing. What is the relationship of Insight to The Washington Times?

John Gorenfeld: Insight magazine is published by the same parent company, News World Communications, and is sometimes distributed with The Washington Times. Insightis a source of scurrilous, by-line-free information. It provides a lot of baseless and bizarre scoops that the right-wing world will capitalize on. Not as important as The Washington Times, by any stretch. But again, what's so strange about these publications like The Washington Times and Insight, especially considering what we've heard in the last few years in terms of thewar on Christmas, and these conservatives who are supposedly so offended by heretical liberals, is that both The Washington Times and Insight will not only distribute these sort of right-wing talking points, but they'll include plugs for Reverend Moon's openly blasphemous activities and rallies. The Washington Times has printed stories playing up the idea that Reverend Moon's clerics are rallying at the United Nations to imply that they want to lobby the United Nations, and give Reverend Moon some sort of special role inside the United Nations. The Washington Times' editors say, oh, we're not influenced by Reverend Moon. So it must be that they freely decide to print these promos for Moon's crackpot activities.

BuzzFlash: Well, as we've long argued about the corporate media -- basically, he is The Washington Times. You know who you work for. You know what the purpose of the publication is.

John Gorenfeld: You're so right. You're not going to cross General Electric if they own your media company, and these people clearly aren't going to upset the Reverend.

The media will always cite what the editors say about the newspaper as proof of its independence. But nobody ever reprints what Reverend Moon, the owner himself, says about the newspaper. You'll have the editors saying we really admire our owner's commitment to editorial independence. And then Reverend Moon will show up at these bizarre events where he will just rant and rave about how The Washington Times is his instrument for prophesy and for spreading God's word.

A wonderful videotape will be on my website when it launches in a few days, of a 1997 anniversary party for The Washington Times. All these sober, respectable conservatives are there. Senator Orrin Hatchis there, who's been close to Moon over the years, and he gives a speech about liberals who don't understand capitalism and so forth. The editor, Wesley Pruden, sort of a neo-confederate, raging right-winger, gets up and talks about how Reverend Moon is this person who respects objectivity. Then Reverend Moon himself gets up and everybody in the audience looks sort of uncomfortable and embarrassed, because Moon starts ranting about how The Washington Times was established to save the world. At one point, my favorite moment, he says that you journalists must do your part to eradicate free sex. Free sex is his term for promiscuity or basically any sex outside of his weddings. He says free sex is centered on Satan, and his tongue rolls out a little bit. And it's just remarkable.

What's most amazing to me is we hear about Rupert Murdoch, and we hear about, to a lesser extent, George Soros, who was represented in the 2004 election as this outrageous billionaire behind the scenes meddling in our politics. And for some reason, Reverend Moon has never become an iconic part of our media culture. And my mission was to try to figure out why.

It's like he's kitchy. He makes speeches that are much more outrageous than Don Imus's about women's sexual organs, and about wiping out gay people, and about pulverizing Christianity. And he's this notorious figure from the past. Yet almost nobody knows that he owns The Washington Times. People who remember him from the old days say, What? Get out of here! Reverend Moon owns The Washington Times. Are you serious?

And people under forty say, the Moonies -- who is that? So the book is about this incredible disappearing act that they've been able to pull off taking one of the most notorious people from the Seventies, putting him in charge of the newspaper, and still being able to get away with positioning themselves, the conservatives, as the people who are defending American tradition, and the family, and Christianity. It's just an incredible public relations feed.

BuzzFlash: Reverend Moon seems to be, at least in the United States nowadays, a somewhat lower-profile figure than he was twenty years ago. He's a behind-the-scenes guy.

John Gorenfeld: This is interesting. It's not for want of trying. He went away to prison in 1984, and then he came out and started this new PR blitz to rebrand himself a victim of religious and racial persecution. Since that time, he's definitely taken on a lower profile. He looks to influence people in more subtle ways in terms of trying to get high-profile celebrity endorsements and high-profile political endorsements, rather than the sort of very visible recruitment of young college-age kids that there was in the Seventies and Eighties, that got him so much bad press.

The trouble is he's constantly doing things like demanding to be recognized worldwide as the messiah and taking out full-page newspaper ads where he claims that dead U.S. presidents have endorsed him as the messiah. But he somehow has continued to be under the radar.

But conservatives try to keep this guy in the closet. You don't hear them saying, when they write history books about how they built the modern-day conservative movement, thank goodness Reverend Moon came along. He came through with the money for The Washington Times. They'll talk about building a direct-mail empire, and they'll talk about how they had to develop their own alternative media to challenge the liberal establishment. But Moon always goes missing as the guy who provided over $2 billion, massive amounts of money, to build what we know now as the modern-day conservative movement.

There were articles in the 1980s in mainstream papers where people said that the conservative movement was largely kept in business in some sectors, when they were running into hard times, by bailout from the Unification Church, for which money was no object. They were willing to spend anything in order to endear themselves to the right in Washington, D.C. There was this sort of shamelessness in conservatives turning a blind eye to some of the horrific stuff that was going on within the Moon organization, while they were taking their money. 

BuzzFlash: You've explained a lot about his role in right-wing politics in the United States, particularly through The Washington Times. But what are his goals with all this? What does he get out of it?

John Gorenfeld: What Reverend Moon gets from his alliance with the American right is his high visibility when he chooses to market himself abroad. And, first, it's allowed him not to be deported from the United States as a foreign agent -- as an illegal alien. But what his alliance with the right has provided him with is this enormous amount of credibility when he comes to people in South Korea or in the Philippines, or even in North Korea, as I talk about, and says: Look, I'm a major player. You really should do business with me. There's an endless supply of photographs of Reverend Moon with George H.W. Bush, with Jerry Falwell, with a variety of influential people.As Jack Abramoff figured out, those photographs can be worth really a lot in opening up doors. It's allowed Reverend Moon's organization to survive in places like Japan, where they were able to call upon George H.W. Bush to allow them to keep their operation there, which was facing serious trouble for all this bad publicity for ripping off old people.

So it's really this back-scratching between Reverend Moon and the Republican Party that's allowed his church to avoid fading away as it very well may have, if not for the respect that they've conferred on him, or the illusion of respect. There's incredible prestige in being able to say, hey, I'm the guy who publishes the President's favorite newspaper. I'm not some fringe character. You should do business with me. He's able to go to other countries and say that he has the ear of George Bush Senior, and that's really worth a lot.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Unification_Church

Frederick Clarkson reported in Salon that Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church played a key role in supporting the Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan's Million Family March in Washington D.C. "Moon's role in the Million Family March is the fruit of a three-year personal relationship that began when Farrakhan helped officiate at one of Moon's marriage ceremonies at Washington's RFK Stadium in 1997," he wrote.

Contents[hide]

Moongate

On March, 23 2004 an event was held at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in which Rev. Moon and his wife were crowned as the messiahs of the world. This event was captured on video, and later published on the Unification Church's own website, before being taken down. A number of very public politicians who were seen later excused their presence saying they did not understand who or what was really going to take place when they received and accepted the invitation to the event. [1]

A partial list of Congressional members in attendance:

Take over of University of Bridgeport

In the early 90's, in a controversial move, University of Bridgeport trustee's, facing a large financial shortfall, agreed to a financing deal with the Moon controlled organization, Professors World Peace Academy. The was considered quite controversial and led to Bridgeport's law school moving to Quinnipac, and its accredidation to come under fire.[2]

Unification Church controlled orgnizations

Unification Church influenced organizations

Articles and Resources

Related SourceWatch Articles

References

External resources

External articles

Categories: Religion | War/peace | Politics (U.S.) | United States

: blinded

tried to join rel and pol

had biz in japan and korea, and had japanese $ guy who'd funded jap fascist party  p 24

paper lost 50 mil/yr

newspaper in Tokyo), *Insight Magazine*, The Middle East Times (Cairo), Tiempos del Mundo and the World Media Conference. [5]. In 2000, News World Communications bought the floundering United Press International.

http://en.:{wikipedia.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon

In 1971, Moon moved to the United States, which he had first visited in 1965. He remained a citizen of the Republic of Korea and maintained a residence in South Korea.[^^22]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-21)

[edit] Support for Nixon

In 1974 Moon supported President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.[^^3]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-cesnur.org-2) Church members prayed and fasted in support of Nixon for three days in front of the United States Capitol, under the motto: "Forgive, Love and Unite." On February 1, 1974 Nixon publicly thanked them for their support and officially received Moon. This brought Moon and the Unification Church into widespread public and media attention in the United States.[^^23]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-22)

^...^

In 1977 and 1978, a subcommittee of the United States Congress led by Congressman Donald M. Fraser conducted an investigation of South Korea – United States relations and produced a report that included 81 pages about Moon and what the subcommittee termed "the Moon Organization."[^^25]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-24) The Fraser committee found that the KCIA decided to use the Unification Church as a political tool within the United States and that some Unification Church members worked as volunteers in Congressional offices. Together they founded the Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization which acted as a propaganda campaign for the Republic of Korea.[^^26]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-25) The committee also investigated possible KCIA influence on the Unification Church's campaign in support of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.[^^27]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-26) Robert Boettcher, the staff director of the committee, in his book *Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal* (published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980) reported what he described as financial corruption.[^^28]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-27)

....

Ronald Reagan

In 1980, Moon asked the church-owned New York newspaper News World to print a headline saying "Reagan Landslide" on the day of the election, before the outcome was known.[^^29]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-28)

^...^

Founding The Washington Times

Main article: The Washington Times

In Washington, Moon found common ground with strongly anti-Communist leaders of the 1980s, including Reagan. Using Unification Church funds in 1982, Moon, Bo Hi Pak, and other church leaders founded The Washington Times. By 1991, Moon said he spent about $1 billion on the paper[^^38]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-37) (by 2002 roughly $1.7 billion),[^^39]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-38) which he called "the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world".[^^40]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-39)

[edit] 1990s

[edit] Visit to the Soviet Union

In April 1990 Moon visited the Soviet Union and met with President Mikhail Gorbachev. Moon expressed support for the political and economic transformations under way in the Soviet Union. At the same time the Unification Church was expanding into formerly communist nations.[^^41]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-40) Massimo Introvigne, who has studied the Unification Church and other new religious movements, has said that after the disestablishment of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moon has made anti-communism much less of a priority.[^^14]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-sigbooks-13)

[edit] Relationship with George H. W. Bush

In the mid-1990s, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush accepted millions of dollars from Moon's Women’s Federation for World Peace to speak on Moon's behalf around the world, a fact[^^12]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-autogenerated2-11) that Moon and the Unification Church have widely publicised, particularly in efforts to improve the image of the Unification Church outside the US. While discussing one of Bush's trips (a 1995 tour of Japan), Bo Hi Pak said:

"Then George and Barbara Bush went to Fukuoka, the capital of Kyushu. The people of Kyushu were flabbergasted at Father and Mother's power to advise a U.S. president. Incredible. This completely changed the attitude of the Japanese government and media toward the Unification community."[^^42]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-41)

...

Coronation

The following members of Congress were confirmed to have attended the ceremony:

The following members of Congress were not at the event, but were listed as Congressional Co-Chairs or members of the Host Committee on the event invitation (though many claim no knowledge of their positions):

Rangel Proclamation

While he did not personally attend the ceremony, on April 16, 2004, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y) signed a statement written on official congressional stationary that recognized Moon and his wife as "True Parents" and "King of Peace." [14]

In 2004, at a March 23 ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in Washington D.C. Moon crowned himself with what was called the "Crown of Peace." [^^58]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-babington-57) [^^59]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-NYT-58) Law makers who attended included Senator Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), Representatives Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Elijah Cummings (D-:{Md:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.) , as well as former Representative Walter Fauntroy (D-D.C.) . Key organizers of the event included George Augustus Stallings, Jr., a controversial former Roman Catholic priest who had been married by Moon, and Michael Jenkins, the president of the American Unification Church at that time.[^^58]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-babington-57)

Moon delivered a long speech in which he stated that he was

sent to Earth . . . to save the world's six billion people.... Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.[^^58]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-babington-57)

On June 27, 2004 the *New York Times* editorial board criticized the ceremony and the participation of congressional members.[^^59]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-NYT-58) The Associated Press reported that "Many of the congressional members in attendance have said they felt misled into making an appearance that later was used to promote Moon's Unification Church."[^^60]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-59) Some stated that they didn't expect a coronation but thought the awards dinner was only to honor activists from their home states as Ambassadors for Peace.[^^61]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon#cite_note-60)

^----^

Political leanings

The political views of The Washington Times are often described as conservative.[^^25]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-24)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-25)26]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-25)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-26)27]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-26) The Washington Post reported: "the Times was established by Moon to combat communism and be a conservative alternative to what he perceived as the liberal bias of The Washington Post."[^^6]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-Washington_Post-5) In 1994 Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, a conservative media watchdog group, said: "The Washington Times is one of the few newspapers in the country that provides some balance."

The Times was read every day by President Ronald Reagan during his terms in office.[^^28]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-27) In 1997 he said:

The American people know the truth. You, my friends at The Washington Times, have told it to them. It wasn't always the popular thing to do. But you were a loud and powerful voice. Like me, you arrived in Washington at the beginning of the most momentous decade of the century. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. And—oh, yes—we won the Cold War.[^^29]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-28)

Commentator Paul Weyrich has called the Times an antidote to its liberal competitor:

The Washington Post became very arrogant and they just decided that they would determine what was news and what wasn't news and they wouldn't cover a lot of things that went on. And the Washington Times has forced the Post to cover a lot of things that they wouldn't cover if the Times wasn't in existence.[^^30]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-29)

In 1999 the Times was criticized by the Daily Howler for misquoting vice-president Al Gore.[^^31]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-dailyhowler.com-30) In 2000 the Howler criticized the Times again, this time for making unsubstantiated allegations about Gore's campaign fundraising.[^^32]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-31) In 2004 the Howler criticized a Times' front page story which made fun of Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry's vacationing in France.[^^33]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-32)

Conservative-turned-liberal writer David Brock, who worked for the Times' sister publication *Insight on the News*, said in his 2002 book *Blinded by the Right* that the news writers at the Times were encouraged and rewarded for giving news stories a conservative slant. In his 2004 book *The Republican Noise Machine*, Brock wrote "the Washington Times was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil."[^^34]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-33)

In his 2003 book, *Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right*, comedian, author, and later senator Al Franken devoted a chapter to criticizing the Times after executive editor Wesley Pruden re-wrote a reporter's story—without the reporter's knowledge—about Franken's performance at a White House party. According to Franken, the rewrite was made to appear as if Franken had received a negative reception, which he says was not the case.[^^35]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-lll-34)

The Washington Times has been accused of promoting racist views. Max Blumenthal in *The Nation* claimed that Times editor Fran Coombs had made a number of racist and sexist comments and was being sued by his colleagues for his remarks.[^^36]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-35). The Southern Poverty Law Center in its Spring 2005 report criticized the wife of Fran Coombs, for writing articles in what the report claimed as white nationalist websites such as the Occidental Quarterly.[^^37]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-36).

The Times has generally opposed gay and transgender rights.[^^38]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-MetroWeekly-Homosexual-37) In 2010, the Times published an editorial opposing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because of its legal protections for transgender people.[^^39]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-WashingtonTimes-ENDA-38)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-Advocate-ENDA-39)40]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-Advocate-ENDA-39)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-GLAAD-ENDA-40)41]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-GLAAD-ENDA-40) The editorial criticized transgender people and said that gender identity is a choice, not an innate characteristic.[^^39]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-WashingtonTimes-ENDA-38)

In 2002, the Times published a story accusing the National Educational Association (NEA), the largest teachers' union in the United States, of promoting teaching students that the policies of the United States government were partly to blame for the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.[^^42]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-Salon.com_2002-09-05-41) This was denied by the NEA and by other commentators.[^^43]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-The_Boston_Globe.2C_2002-09-02-42)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-43)44]

In 2007, *Mother Jones* said that the Times had become "essential reading for political news junkies" soon after its founding, and quoted James Gavin, special assistant to Bo Hi Pak:

We're trying to combat communism and we're trying to uphold traditional Judeo-Christian values. The Washington Times is standing up for those values and fighting anything that would tear them down. Causa is doing the same thing, by explaining what the enemy is trying to do.[^^45]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-44)

In a 2008 essay published in *Harper's Magazine*, historian Thomas Frank linked the Times to the modern American conservative movement, saying:

There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.[^^46]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-45)

In 2009 the *New York Times* reported:

With its conservative editorial bent, the paper also became a crucial training ground for many rising conservative journalists and a must-read for those in the movement. A veritable who’s who of conservatives — Tony Blankley, Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Larry Kudlow, John Podhoretz and Tony Snow — has churned out copy for its pages.[^^47]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#cite_note-nyt1212009-46)

Recent changes

hmmn

http://realsunmyungmoon.blogspot.com/

honorsFallwell

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3944/is_200003/ai_n8887990/

Haig attended (and Dennis K)

daut-in-law book: odd sex, violent, bastard son, 

http://www.nndb.com/people/745/000022679/

2003 salon

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/09/24/moon/print.html

 bad moon

blog

http://realsunmyungmoon.blogspot.com/2007/10/click-here-to-go-to-main-page-of-this.html

Robert Parry, "Money, Media & the Mess in America, consortiumnews.com, January 28, 2005.

Dirty Money

Another aspect of the conservative media corruption can be found in where some of the right-wing money originates.

The evidence is clear, for instance, that the wealth of one major conservative media tycoon – Rev. Sun Myung Moon – traces back to money illicitly laundered into the United States and possibly even to operatives connected to organized crime.

In the late 1970s, a congressional investigation, headed by Rep. Donald Fraser, discovered that Moon was a South Korean intelligence operative whose operations were financed from secretive bank accounts in Japan. Investigators also uncovered Moon’s close ties to the Japanese yakuza crime syndicate which runs drugs, gambling and prostitution rings in Asia.

Moon also associated with right-wing South American leaders implicated in cocaine trafficking. In 1980, Moon’s organization aided Bolivia’s “Cocaine Coup” conspirators who overthrew a left-of-center government and seized dictatorial power. The violent coup installed drug-tainted military officers at the head of Bolivia’s government, giving the putsch the nickname the “Cocaine Coup.”

U.S. government evidence about Moon’s money-laundering activities led to his conviction for tax fraud in 1982. But in that same year, flush with seemingly unlimited supplies of cash, Moon established the Washington Times as a reliable booster of Reagan-Bush policies.

Since then, the theocrat, who considers himself the new Messiah, has become a political untouchable in Washington. Both President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush made special pronouncements about how valuable they considered Moon’s newspaper.

After leaving office, George H.W. Bush gave paid speeches on behalf of Moon’s front groups. Though the exact amount of Moon’s payments to Bush has never been revealed, one former Unification Church official told me the Moon organization had budgeted $10 million for the ex-president. 

For details on Moon’s background and his ties to the Bush family, see Parry’s *[Secrecy & Privilege*.]

exerpt;

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]

...

Iran contra

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

...

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...

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, AFC broadcast a pro-North video, “Ollie North: Fight for Freedom,” more than 600 times on more than 100 TV stations.

Leigh quoted one AFC 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 Governor 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 suspected 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

...

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.

excerpt:

Moon’s multi-billion-dollar political investments, in turn, have shielded him from sustained scrutiny since 1978 when he was identified by the congressional “Koreagate” investigation as part of a covert Korean influence-buying scheme. As a result of those findings about his finances, he was convicted in 1982 of tax fraud.

The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)

 December 27, 2006

The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.

George Archibald, who describes himself “as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group” and author of a commemorative book on the Times’ first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper.

In an Internet essay on recent turmoil inside the Times, Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag for the newspaper’s first 24 years at “more than $3 billion of cash.”

At the newspaper’s tenth anniversary, Moon announced that he had spent $1 billion on the Times – or $100 million a year – but newspaper officials and some Moon followers have since tried to low-ball Moon’s subsidies in public comments by claiming they had declined to about $35 million a year.

The figure from Archibald and other defectors from Moon’s operation is about three times higher than the $35 million annual figure.

The apparent goal of downplaying Moon’s subsidy has been to quiet concerns that Moon was funneling vast sums of illicit money into the United States to influence the American political process in ways favorable to right-wing leaders – and possibly criminal cartels – around the world.

Though best known as the founder of the Unification Church, Moon, now 86, has long worked with right-wing political forces linked to organized crime and international drug smuggling, including the Japanese yakuza gangs and South American cocaine traffickers.

Moon insiders, including his former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, also have described Moon’s system for laundering cash into the United States and then funneling much of it into his businesses and influence-buying apparatus, led by the Washington Times.

The Times, in turn, has targeted American politicians of the center and left with journalistic attacks – sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonate through the broader right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media.

Washington Times articles are routinely cited by C-SPAN, for instance, without explanations to viewers that the newspaper is financed by an ultra-right religious cult leader, a convicted tax fraud and a publicly identified money-launderer. Most American listeners just think they’re getting straightforward news.

The Times also has led attacks on investigators who threatened to expose crimes committed by Republican and right-wing operatives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Times targeted Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who recounted in his memoir Firewall the importance of the Times in protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s legal flanks.

When journalistic and congressional investigations began uncovering evidence of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contra rebels, the Washington Times counter-attacked, too, although in that case the Moon organization may have had a direct interest in containing the probes that could have exposed its relationship with South American drug lords.

Buying Influence

Besides the estimated $3 billion-plus invested in the Washington Times, Moon has spread money around to influential right-wingers, often coming to their rescue when they are facing financial ruin as happened with Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell in the mid-1990s. [See below.]

Moon also has paid lucrative speaking fees to political figures, such as former President George H.W. Bush who has appeared at Moon-organized functions in the United States, Asia and South America. At the launch of Moon’s South American newspaper in 1996, Bush hailed Moon as “the man with the vision.”

Moon has key defenders, too, in the U.S. Congress, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2004, Moon was given space in the Senate’s Dirksen building for a coronation of himself as “savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.” See [The Hill, June 22, 2004]

Though primarily allied with the Republican Right, Moon has tossed money to some African-American ministers to gain favor with a key Democratic constituency.

Moon’s multi-billion-dollar political investments, in turn, have shielded him from sustained scrutiny since 1978 when he was identified by the congressional “Koreagate” investigation as part of a covert Korean influence-buying scheme. As a result of those findings about his finances, he was convicted in 1982 of tax fraud.

Ironically, however, as Moon implemented the influence-buying blueprint exposed by the “Koreagate” probe – investing in U.S. media, politicians and academia – he became an untouchable. He founded the Washington Times in 1982 and quickly put it into the service of Republican power.

President Ronald Reagan hailed Moon’s publication as his “favorite newspaper”; it even helped raise money for the Nicaraguan contras; and President George H.W. Bush invited its editor Wesley Pruden to the White House in 1991 “just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.”

Washington Times defenders argue that the newspaper is independent of Moon’s religion and doesn’t proselytize for his faith.

But the argument misses the point because Moon’s organization is only a religious entity on one level. More substantively, it is an international conglomerate with investments in fishing, restaurants, gun manufacturing, tourism, banks, real estate and media.

Since its finances often operate on the shady side of the law, Moon’s organization requires, most of all, political influence for protection.

Similarly, Moon’s operation is not really “conservative” in the normal sense of the word. While it has worked with everyone from right-of-center Republicans to neo-fascist organizations, it also has joined forces with the reclusive communist leaders of North Korea when that was to Moon’s advantage. See Consortiumnews.com’s “[Moon, North Korea & the Bushes.”]

Power Struggle

Veteran Washington Times journalist Archibald as well as other Times employees who recently spoke to The Nation magazine have described a bitter internal struggle at the newspaper.

Times president “Douglas” Dong Moon Joo is standing by Pruden and other right-wing editors who have run the Times for years, while other influential Moon operatives believe it’s time to abandon the newspaper’s hard-right positions.

“A nasty succession battle is now heating up at the paper, punctuated by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct, that have implications far beyond its fractious newsroom,” wrote Max Blumenthal in The Nation.

“According to several reliable inside sources, Preston Moon, the youngest son of Korean Unification Church leader and Times financier Sun Myung Moon, has initiated a search committee to find a replacement for editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden – a replacement who is not Pruden’s handpicked successor, managing editor Francis Coombs.

“Preston Moon wants to wrest control of the paper from Pruden and Coombs, according to a Times senior staffer, in order to shift the paper away from their brand of conservatism, which is characterized by extreme racial animus and connections to nativist and neo-Confederate organizations. A Harvard MBA, Preston Moon is said to be seeking to install an editorial regime with more widely palatable politics.”

Archibald’s essay describes Pruden as “an unreconstructed Confederate from Little Rock, Arkansas, who still believes the South and slavery were right and Lincoln was wrong in saving the Union.”

Pruden’s father, Wesley Pruden Sr., was a Baptist minister and chaplain to Little Rock’s segregationist Capital Citizens Council, which spearheaded the opposition to President Dwight Eisenhower’s order in 1957 to integrate the city’s Central High School.

In the 1990s, Pruden’s Washington Times continued to tap into those old segregationist ties, such as “Justice” Jim Johnson, to get salacious allegations about President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. The mainstream press soon followed, setting the stage for the Republican congressional sweep in 1994 and Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.

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

By then, however, the Washington Times had the help of a rapidly expanding right-wing media as well as mainstream journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post who had come to realize the career advantage of tilting their reporting to the right.

Arguably one of the measures of the Washington Times’ success was how the major U.S. news organizations increasingly seemed to march to the same drummer, even when not under direct pressure to do so.

Over the past half dozen years, it has often been hard to distinguish between the fawning coverage of George W. Bush from the Washington Times and from the Washington Post. Both major Washington dailies bought into Bush’s false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with almost no skepticism.

Currently, the Washington Times seems inclined to continue serving as a leading defender of Republican power and thus of President Bush. Calling itself “America’s Newspaper,” the Moon-financed Times also has championed the cause of anti-immigration activists, another hot-button issue on the Right.

But the Times and other right-wing news outlets risk a credibility crisis as more and more Americans turn away from the Bush presidency and are turned off by the right-wing rhetoric demonizing citizens who have objected to Bush’s policies.

Nevertheless, history will surely record that Moon’s $3 billion-plus investment succeeded in buying a remarkable degree of Washington influence – and legal protection – for his dubious political/business/religious empire.

The extraordinary rise of Sun Myung Moon also tells a cynical story about how “respectability” is just one more Washington commodity that can be purchased with enough money.

Known for crowning himself at lavish ceremonies and ranting for hours in Korean about the proper use of sex organs, Sun Myung Moon may have the distinction of being the most unusual person ever to gain substantial influence in the U.S. capital. He has proved that in Washington, money talks.

When Moon became a major benefactor of the American conservative movement starting in the latter half of the 1970s, it was a time when the conservatives desperately needed money to build what they called their counter-establishment.

From a mysterious and seemingly bottomless slush fund, Moon ladled out cash to sponsor lavish conferences, to finance political interest groups and to publish the Washington Times.

Despite his strange goals – including the need to replace democracy and individuality with his own personal theocratic rule over the most intimate details of every person’s life – Moon lured into his circle some of the most prominent political figures of the modern era, including George H.W. Bush who grasped Moon’s value as a deep pocket for the conservative movement and for the Bush family.

Moon began building his political influence in Washington at a time when he was best known to Americans as the leader of the Unification Church, called the “Moonies.” Moon was blamed by thousands of American parents for brain-washing their children and transforming them into automatons who gave up their previous lives to devote nearly every waking hour in the service of Rev. Moon.

Gradually, however, Moon’s money gained him access to the nation’s ruling elite. The worst of the negative press coverage subsided. But few Americans, even those who took his money, knew much about his life and his true allegiances.

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, an 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 all 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 Nansook Hong, one of Moon’s daughters-in-law who broke with the 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 memoirs. “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, also a 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 protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in the intensifying Cold War battles with European communists.

Kodama and Sasakawa obliged U.S. intelligence by dispatching right-wing goon squads to break up demonstrations, according to the authoritative 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 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 friends in the United States and undermine its enemies.

Lee Jai Hyon, the chief cultural and information attaché 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.

Intercepted Message

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 questions about 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 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 façade,” the Andersons wrote.

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

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

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the 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.

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 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.”

Part Two: Mysterious Cash

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122706.html

 defends moon:  At times, Moon's penetration of conservative ranks has raised red flags among Republicans. 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, R-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 benefitting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.

Leach said the Unification Church has "infiltrated the New Right and the party it [the New Right] wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well." Leach's news conference was broken up when then-college GOP leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now head of Americans for Tax Reform and a prominent ally of House Speaker Newt Gingrich.)

For its part, The Washington Times dismissed Leach's charges as "flummeries" and mocked the Ripon Society as a "discredited and insignificant left-wing offshoot of the Republican Party." [WP, Jan. 6, 1983]

Despite periodic fretting over Moon's influence, conservatives continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance. When President Reagan and Oliver North were scratching for support for the Nicaraguan contras, The Washington Times established a contra fund-raising operation. Moon's international group, CAUSA, also dispatched operatives to Central America to assist the contras. robt parry wapost

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon3.html