Tuesday, March 17, 1992
Rev. Sun Myung Moon may preach that he is the Adam and the Christ reincarnate, but he has been accused in a 447 page Congressional report with bribery, bank fraud, illegal kickbacks and illegal sale of arms. He was also accused of attempting to secretly build nuclear weapons for Korea. A Congressional report also indicated that Rev. Moon's Unification Church was founded by a director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Chong Pil, as a political tool in 1961.
The House report states, "Kim Chong 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 has a membership of 27,000, as a political tool." Kim was among the inner core of Army officers who led the coup that brought President Park Chung Hee to power in 1961. "Members of the church are actively engaged in increasing membership in farming villages. The church apparently has considerable money, because it pays influential people in the villages a substantial sum for joining the church." The Moon organization denies any ties with the Korean government or intelligence community.
In 1977 Congressman Donald Frazer launched an investigation into Moon's background. The House Committee report states that it uncovered evidence that the Moon organization had systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency and foreign agent registration laws. The report indicates that Moon was paid by the Korean CIA to stage demonstrations at the United Nations and run pro-South Korean propaganda efforts. The investigator for the report commented, "We determined that their primary interest, at least in the U.S. at that time, was not religious at all, but was political, it was an attempt to gain power, influence and authority." But after the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan all investigations were halted. Moon was Vice President George Bush's guest at the inauguration and was a major financial contributor to the Washington conservative establishment.
A federal investigation into Moon's finances led to a 1982 trial on charges of conspiracy and filing false tax returns. Moon was sent to the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut. He remained there for 13 months.
Moon has sought to influence the American political agenda by pouring more than a billion dollars into the media. Moon looks upon the media as almost the nervous system for a global empire. After his imprisonment he began a media blitz called The New Birth Project. It's strategy was to show that Moon's prosecution was really racial and religious persecution.
Moon's organization told Martin in 1976 that they would establish a newspaper in New York, then Washington and finally one in San Francisco. The San Francisco publication has not been produced to date.
Tuesday, March 24, 1992The Moon organization has spent an alarming amount of money in the United States in an effort to influence the government. More than $800 million has been spent on the Washington Times, alone. Hundreds of millions more have been spent on the periodicals Insight and World and I. Tens of millions have been spent on the electronic media, and at least $40 million on New York newspapers.
Moon's New York publishing house, Paragon Press, has been the recipient of $10 million. Millions more were spent on the world media associations and conferences, the new right organizations, including the American Freedom Coalition. Moon has purchased millions of dollars in real estate, including the New York Hotel ($100 million), the New Birth Project ($75 million), and commercial fishing ventures ($40 million). Moon recently spent billions of dollars building an automobile plant in China.
But these billions of dollars in investments are not earning sufficient revenue, all of Moon's business ventures are losing money. One of the biggest business losers for the Unification Church is the influential Washington Times. The newspaper is losing as much as $50 million a year. Moon has testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee that his money comes from overseas, but ths could not mean Korea, because most of Moon's investments there are also losing money.
Most of Moon's money comes from Japan. For almost 20 years there have been consistent reports that one of Moon's most important financial supporters and advisors is Ryoichi Sasakawa. In 1969, Moon and Sasakawa, together, formed the Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF), which lobbied the U.S. for a hawkish position in Vietnam. One of Sasakawa's favorite projects for the Moon organization was Win Over Communism (WOC), which was a fund raiser for the Unification Church. Sasakawa. was the WOC's chairman. Sasakawa. is clearly one of the richest men in Japan. Much of his money comes from the Japanese motorboat racing industry. Since it was legalized in Japan, it has become a $14 billion sport. Sasakawa. describes himself as "the world's richest Fascist".
In addition to his riches, according to author Walter Pat Choate, "for more than half a century Sasakawa. has been one of the primary political brokers inside Japan". Choate claims that Sasakawa is part of Japan's attempts to influence America's politics and policies. "Many of Sasakawa's and Moon's operations parallel each other. They operate in the same way, giving away money, a great deal of attention to media and media organizations which operate across national borders, and the maintenance of a very right wing conservative focus," states Choate.
According to Choate, Sasakawa's political activities go back 50 years, when he formed one of the most radical and Fascist parties inside Japan. "He was one of those individual business leaders who was calling for war with the United States in the months preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor," claims Choate. In 1931, Sasakawa. formed the Kokusui Taishuto, a militarist political movement, and according to a U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps report after World War Two, Sasakawa. was "one of the most active Fascist organizers prior to the war." He was later imprisoned for plotting the assassination of a former Premier. In 1939, Sasakawa. even flew to Rome in one of his own aircraft to meet personally with Benito Mussolini to help arrange the Axis alliance between Italy, Germany and Japan. Sasakawa organized Japan's black shirts patterned after Mussolini's.
Ten months before the outbreak of World War Two, Sasakawa. toured the South Pacific in a flying boat. There still exist letters which he wrote to his close friend Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, and it was Sasakawa. who was virtually Yamamoto's only political contact to the far right wing in Japan.
Another prominent Japanese war criminal who became an important member and supporter of the Moon organization was Yoshio Kodama. Having become an ultra-nationalist, terrorist leader in Japan at the age of 15, Kodama joined scores of secret societies with names like Blood Brotherhood, Holy War Execution League, Federation of Radical Patriotic Workers, and Capital Rise Asia Academy. He made his living working for those murderous groups. These yakuza armies were bankrolled by and served the interests of wealthy industrials, the police and the Army. They broke up labor unions, "protected" factories and offices, and assassinated opposition leaders. Having participated in a failed plot to assassinate, in one stroke, all the most powerful men in Japan, Kodama ended up in prison for attempted assassination and other terrorist acts.
By 1940, Kodama had set up a strong working relationship with Japan's military intelligence apparatus, and served on many secret missions into Manchuria. The work landed him the lucrative position of supplying the Japanese Navy during World War Two. By one account, it was Sasakawa. who asked Kodama to do this work. He established the Kodama Agency, which according to U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps records, consisted of "systematically looting China of its raw materials". In order to accomplish this supply network, Kodama dealt in heroin, guns, tungsten, gold, salt, iron, owned farms, fisheries, an orphanage, and molybdenum mine, a munitions factory in China, industrial diamonds and radium, which he stole from the hospitals in Shanghai. Eventually he became known as "the man behind the Kempei Tai (secret police). When World War Two ended, Kodama was 34, a brigadier general, Cabinet advisor, and possessed millions of dollars worth of platinum, industrial diamonds, over $175 million in foreign currency, plus liquid assets.
At the end of World War Two, both Sasakawa. and Kodama were classified as Class A war criminals by the American Occupation Forces in Japan. According to American Intelligence, "Sasakawa. appears to be a man potentially dangerous to Japan's political future...He has been squarely behind Japanese military aggression and anti-foreignism for more than 20 years. He is a man of wealth and not too scrupulous about its use...He is not above wearing any new cloak that opportunism may offer." In 1946, an American Army officer attached to the International Military Tribunal in Japan, said of Kodama, "He committed numerous acts of violence in China in acquisition by foul means or fair of commodities and goods belonging to the Chinese," and that "ten years from today, Kodama is going to be a great leader in Japan." The officer's assessment of Kodama was bleak. "His long and fanatic involvement in ultra-nationalistic activities, violence included, and his skill in appealing to youth, make him a man who, if released from internment, would surely be a grave security risk...Persistent rumors as to his black market profits in his Shanghai period, plus his known opportunism, are forceful arguments that he would be as unscrupulous in trade as he was in ultra-nationalism."
But when the Cold War began, U.S. officials in Japan began to fear the Communists more than the Fascists, a pattern too familiar in Europe. Sasakawa., Kodama and other prominent Japanese war criminals were quietly released from prison in 1948, and many went on to play a dominant role in the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, the most important political party in Asia, which has controlled the political destiny of Japan ever since. It has been reported that Kodama's release from Sugamo Prison was the work of the CIA. As a result, many of the very same men in Japan who had worked closely with Nazi Germany a decade before, again assumed the leadership role in Japan.
By 1958, Kodama was one of the most powerful men in the Orient. That same year, he signed a contract with the Lockheed Corporation to help influence the Japanese government to reverse its intention to purchase the Grumman F-111 for the Japanese Air Force. To do this, Kodama used an American agent who had lost his U.S. citizenship by working with the Japanese during World War Two in Manchuria, another intelligence agent who had worked in China, and other associated politicians, including war crimes suspects whom he had met in Sugamo Prison. Among the people who helped him to secure the contract for Lockheed were General Minoru Genda, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, who had recently been appointed commander-in-chief of the new Japanese Air Force. Kodama had helped him in this new appointment. Lockheed received the Japanese contract and General Genda, who was a primary party in the bombing of Pearl Harbor 17 years earlier, received the U.S. Legion of Merit award from the U.S. Air Force.
Moon, Sasakawa. and Kodama first got together in the 1960s to form the Asian People's Anti-Communist League. Created with the help of South Korean intelligence agents and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the League dedicated itself to uniting Fascists throughout Asia and combatting Communism. The League set up and funded Moon's Freedom Center in the United States in 1964. Kodama was chief advisor for the Moon subsidiary, Win Over Communism, an organization which helped to protect his investments in South Korea. In 1966, the League merged with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, another Fascist organization, to form the World Anti-Communist League. Dedicated to fighting Communism and promoting Fascism, and spreading to nearly 100 nations on six continents, the World Anti-Communist League was headed by John Singlaub, one of the key players in the Iran-Contra scandal.
According to Sara Diamond, the League was a "multinational network of Nazi war criminals, Latin American death squad leaders, North American racists and anti-Semites, and Fascist politicians from every continent." The headquarters for the League is in the United States, in the offices of Moon's Freedom Center.
Friday, March 27, 1992
The enormously wealthy Reverend Sun Myung Moon has powerful friends in Washington and he uses his influential newspaper, the Washington Times, to keep these friends supportive of him. Moon has skillfully used the fear of Communism to gain powerful allies and to intimidate threatening foes.
What few do not understand is that Communism is really not an issue with Moon, it is merely a banner which Moon uses to rally a large enough force to exert a powerful influence on society.