A Special Report: The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ

By Robert Parry
Created Dec 27 2006 - 7:13am

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 [1] 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 [2]]

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 [3]."]

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 [4].

"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 [5]."]

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 attach