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In January 1995, Japan’s KYODO news-service uncovered documents establishing that the one-time fascist war criminal suspect was earmarked as an informer by U.S. military intelligence two months prior to his unexplained release: Declassified documents link Kodama’s release to the CIA. During World War II, the Kodama Agency, according to U.S. Army counterintelligence records, consisted of “systematically looting China of its raw materials” and dealing in heroin, guns, tungsten, gold, industrial diamonds and radium.
Both Sasakawa and Kodama’s CIA ties are a reoccurring theme in their relationship with the Moonies. In 1977, Congressman Donald Fraser launched an investigation into Moon’s background. The 444-page Congressional report alleged Moonie involvement with bribery, bank fraud, illegal kickbacks and arms sales. The report revealed that Moon’s 20,000-member Unification Church was a creation of Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) Director Kim Chong Phil as a political tool to influence U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. CIA was the agency primarily responsible for the founding of the KCIA.
The Moon organizations have denied any links with the Korean government or intelligence community.
Moon, who is Korean, and his two Japanese buddies, Sasakawa and Kodama, first joined together in the 1960s to form the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League with the aid of KCIA agents, alleged Japanese organized crime money and financial support from Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The League concentrated on uniting fascists, right-wing, and anti-Communist forces throughout Asia.
In 1964, League funds set up Moon’s Freedom Center in the United States. Kodama served as Chief Advisor to the Moon subsidiary Win Over Communism, an organization that served to protect Moon’s South Korean investments. Sasakawa acted as Win Over Communism’s chair.
In 1966, the League merged with the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, another group with strong fascist ties, to form the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Later, in the 1980s, the retired US Major General John Singlaub emerged as a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal through his chairmanship of the WACL. Singlaub enlisted paramilitary groups, foreign governments and right-wing Americans to support the Contra cause in Nicaragua.
Moon’s Freedom Center served as the headquarters for the League in the United States. During the Iran-Contra hearings, the League was described as “a multi-national network of Nazi war criminals, Latin American death squad leaders, North American racists and anti-Semites and fascist politicians from every continent.”
Working with the KCIA, Moon made his first trip to the US in 1965 and obtained an audience with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike, along with former President Harry S. Truman, lent their names to the letterhead of the Moon-created Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation. In 1969, Moon and Sasakawa jointly formed the Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF), a pro-Vietnam War organization that lobbied the US government.
In the 1970s, Moon earned notoriety in the Koreagate scandal after female followers of the Unification Church were accused of entertaining and keeping confidential files on several US congressmen whom they “lobbied” at a Washington Hilton I-Intel suite rented by the Moonies. The US Senate held hearings concerning Moon’s “programmatic bribery of US officials, journalists and others as part of an operation by the Korean CIA to influence the course of US foreign policy.”
The Fraser report noted that Moon was paid by the KCIA to stage demonstrations at the United Nations and run pro-South Korean propaganda campaigns. The Congressional investigator for the Fraser report said, “We determine that their [Moonies’] primary interest, at least in the US at that time, was not religious at all but was political, it was attempt to gain power, influence and authority.”
After Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in 1980, Moon’s political influence increased dramatically. Vice President George Bush, a former CIA director, invited Moon as his guest to the Reagan inauguration. Bush and Moon shared unsavory links to South American underworld figures. In 1980, according to the investigatory magazine IF, the Moon organization collaborated with a right-wing military coup in Bolivia that established the region's first narco-state.
Moon’s credentials soared in conservative circles in 1982 with the inception of the Washington Times. Vice President Bush immediately saw the value of building an alliance with the politically powerful Moon organization, an alliance that Moon claims made Bush president. One ex-Moonie’s website claims that during the 1988 Bush Dukakis battle, Reverend Moon threatened his followers that he'd move all of them out of the US if the evil Dukakis won.
Also in 1982, Moon was convicted of income tax evasion and spent more than a year in jail.
During the Gulf War, the Moonie-sponsored American Freedom Coalition organized “support the troop” rallies. The Frontline documentary identified the Washington Times as the most costly piece in Moon’s propaganda arsenal, with losses estimated as high as $800 million. Still, Sasakawa’s virtual monopoly over the Japanese speedboat gambling industry allowed the money to continue flowing to Moon’s US coffers.
The Bush-Moonie connection caused considerable controversy in September 1995, when the former president announced he would be spending nearly a week in Japan on behalf of a Moonie front organization, the Women’s Federation for World Peace, founded and led by Moon's wife. Then-President Bush downplayed accusations of brain-washing and coercion against the Moonies. The New York Times noted that Bush’s presence “is seen by some as lending the group [Moonies] legitimacy.”
Longtime Moonie member S. P. Simonds wrote an editorial for the Portland Press Herald noting the Bushes “didn’t need the reported million dollars paid by Moon and were well aware of the Church's history.”
Bush shared the podium with Moon’s wife and addressed a crowd of 50,000 in the Tokyo dome. Bush told the true believers, Reverend and Mrs. Moon are engaged in the most important activities going on [in] the world today.”
The following year Moon bankrolled a series of “family values” conferences from Oakland to Washington, DC. The San Francisco Chronicle reported, “In Washington, Moon opened his checkbook to such Republican Party mainstays as former Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush, GOP presidential candidate Jack Kemp and Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed.”
Purdue University Professor of Sociology Anson Shupe, a longtime Moon watcher, said, “The man accused of being the biggest brainwasher in America has moved into mainstream Republican Americana.”
Moon claimed at these family values conferences that he was the “only one who knows all the secrets of God.” One of them, according to the Chronicle, is that “the husband is the owner of his wife’s sexual organs and vice-versa.”
“President Ford, President Bush, who attended the Inaugural World Convention of the Family Federation for World Peace and all you distinguished guests are famous, but there’s something that you do not know,” the Chronicle quoted Moon as saying. “Is there anyone here who dislikes sexual organs?... Until now you may not have thought it virtuous to value the sexual organs, but from now, you must value them.”
In November 1996, President Bush arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, amid controversy over a newly created Spanish-language Moon weekly newspaper called Tiempos del Mundo. Bush smoothed things over as the principal speaker at the paper’s opening dinner on November 23.
The former president then traveled with Moon to neighboring Uruguay to help him open a Montevideo seminary to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of the Unification Church across Latin America. The young Japanese seminarians were later accused of laundering $80 million through an Uruguayan bank, according to the St. Petersburg Times.
The Times also reported that when Reverend Jerry Falwell’s university faced bankruptcy, Moon’s group bailed it out with millions of dollars in loans and grants.
The New York Times noted in 1997 that Moon “has been reaching out to conservative Christians in this country in the last few years by emphasizing shared goals like support for sexual abstinence outside of marriage and opposition to homosexuality.” Moon also appeals to the Second Amendment crowd. In March 1999, the Washington Post reported that the messiah owned the lucrative Kahr Arms Company through Saeilo, Inc.
It’s the shadowy network around the Moonies that the elder Bush could have called in to bail out his son's campaign in South Carolina. Make no mistake, George W. of Texas is little more than a frontman for the restoration of his father’s unsavory connections, who hide behind the veil of national security to avoid accountability.
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Dutifully, the Washington Times - a paper owned by self-proclaimed messiah and cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon - ran a headline stating, “Bush scoffs at assertion he moved too far right.” The bizarre and almost unbelievable relationship between the Bush family and the 80-year-old Moon is the dirty little secret of George W.’s campaign for President.
