FBI and other reports on Sun Myung Moon

Updated February 29, 2020

1. FBI Report (San Francisco office) on the UC / FFWPU, September 1975

2. “The Moonies: Government Files Trace Church from Sex Cult to Korean CIA”
.    by James Coates   Chicago Tribune, Monday, March 27, 1978

3. “The pull of Sun Moon” by Berkeley Rice   New York Magazine, May 30, 1976 

4. Sun Myung Moon and Takeru Kamiyama jailed in 1984 for US tax crimes  NEW
.   featuring an investigation by Frederick Clarkson

5. The Moon Organization Academic Network by Daniel Junas   Fall 1991

6. “The Moonies – What Rev. Moon teaches the young”
.   by Harry V. Martin and David Caul   Napa Sentinel, March-April 3, 1992 


1. FBI Report on the Official and Unofficial Theology of the UC

See below for a transcript of this document.

FBI Report (San Francisco office) on the UC / FFWPU,
September 1975

A letter from the Church of the Nazarene in Seoul, reproduced on pages 9-11 of this FBI Report gives an interesting summary of the official and the unofficial theology of the Unification Church.

Extract from the FBI report referring to the letter:

[Unknown] further provided a letter containing information about Sun-Myung Moon prepared by the Church of the Nazarene, Korean Mission, Box 63, Young Deung T.O., Seoul, Korea. The letter indicates that Mr. Moon is the founder of the Unification Church which is officially titled “The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity“. Moon was born in Chung Ju, North Korea, in 1920. In his teenage years, Moon is said to have seen frequent visions and to have grown up surrounded by an atmosphere of mysticism. The letter indicates that he has divorced three wives having had one child by each of them. He was accused in 1955 of conducting a group sex orgie for which he served a three-month jail term. Moon founded his organization in 1954 basing it on his supposed religious visions. The letter alleges that actually Moon borrowed his doctrines from those taught at the Monastery of Israel.

The following doctrinal statement with [was] filed with the Korean Government by Moon’s Unification Association:

1) The one creator is the only God and father.

2) The only son, Jesus, is mankind’s savior.

3) The Second Advent of Jesus is in Korea.

4) Mankind shall become one united family centered around the event of the Second Coming.

5) Ultimate salvation rests upon the elimination of Hell and evil while establishing good and the Kingdom of Heaven.

The letter additionally states that the group also secretly observes such other beliefs and practices as the following:

1) Founder Moon is the Second Advent Jesus.

2) A believer receives a spiritual body by participating in a ceremony known as blood cleansing which is for women to have sexual intercourse with Moon and for men to have intercourse with such a woman. This idea of blood cleansing comes from the teaching that Eve committed immorality with the Serpent and she passes on to all of us serpent blood.

3) Secretly observed doctrines are Holy covenant and are of more value than the Bible.

4) Members who have experienced blood cleansing can produce sinless generation [children].

5) Founder Moon is sinless.

The letter indicates that, according to the National Religious Statistics published in 1969, the Unification group has 936 churches and 304,750 members in Korea. Leaders of other religious groups say that these figures are greatly exaggerated. There are no elders or ministers in the Unification Movement. The Unification group operates several business enterprises in Korea. A novel feature of Unification is mass wedding ceremonies which it performs. Once founder Moon joined 777 couples in wedlock. Mr. Moon has bought $100,000 ads in the New York Times newspaper to publicize his movement. Great and sweeping claims are made by the Unification members concerning their strength in Korea. Actually, they are not an important influence in Korean society. One may travel extensively in Korea and never see one of their meeting centers or never meet a follower of Reverend Moon.



2.

Moon church traced from sex cult

Chicago Tribune, Monday, March 27, 1978   Section 1 3

The Moonies: Government Files Trace Church from Sex Cult to Korean CIA
Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s controversial Unification Church: Is it a front?

St Petersburg Independent, Tuesday March 28, 1978

The text is the same in both publications

By JAMES COATES
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON — Once-secret government files released by a House subcommittee trace the so-called “Moonie” church from its origins as a small-time Korean sex cult to a worldwide organization operated by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

The documents, soon to be the subject of public hearings, indicate the Unification (Moonie) Church was used by the Korean government as part of a lobbying effort in the U.S. Congress.

Diplomatic cables said that the church patriarch, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, headed a Korean cult that “interprets the Bible in sexual terms.” The KCIA decided to use Moon in a scheme that grew to include other Koreans bribing congressmen, the documents said.

A U.S. Central intelligence Agency report, marked “unevaluated” and written in February 1963, said that Lt. Col. Bo Hi Pak of the Korean army was working to expand the church into Washington under the direction of Kim Chung-pil, the director of the KCIA.

A cable sent to Washington from the American embassy in Seoul on Aug. 26, 1966, describes an initiation ceremony for the church involving sexual relations. The cable said the church refers to such initiation as “baptizing.”

The author of the cable quoted Thomas Chung, president of the Korean Students’ Association in Washington, as saying: “Colonel Pak was in trouble because he had attempted to initiate into his church (i.e. to have sexual relations with) the wife of a visiting ROK (Korean government) official (either the minister of national defense or the chief of staff).”

The cable continued: “According to Chung, the matter had been hushed up, but only with difficulty, and Pak had nearly lost his job because of it.”

That cable also quotes another intelligence source: “He said that the church interprets the Bible in sexual terms and maintains that religious experience is interrelated with sex. MUN Son-myong (sic), leader of the church, was once arrested because of the sexual practices of the organization.”

Spokesmen for Moon have acknowledged that the religious leader was arrested but maintained he was cleared of the charges.

The 1963 CIA document explained that the Korean intelligence agency planned to open a branch of the Unification Church (also called Tong Il) in Washington with Bo Hi Pak as the real leader.

Pak was to organize the church in America, the CIA report said, through an organization called the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation. The authors of the CIA in-house reports said their sources disclosed in 1963 that the KCIA chief, Kim Chung-p’il, was using the church to advance his own political moves in Korea. The KCIA director was a ringleader in the coup that installed Park Chung Hee as president.’

Summaries of other top-secret U.S. intelligence reports released by Rep. Donald Fraser, D-Minn., indicate that in 1970 President Park Chung Hee launched a plan to use the Unification Church as part of the Korean effort to stop the U.S. from pulling troops out of the country.

One summary said that President Park planned to use Bo Hi Pak to operate lobbying efforts through the church, while the millionaire socialite, Tongsun Park, focused his efforts on entertaining members of Congress and passing out gifts.

In the final months of the Nixon Administration, the Unification Church held vigils outside the White House to oppose impeachment moves. Other Moonies walked the halls of Capitol Hill and urged congressmen to support Nixon and foreign aid for Korea.

Most church members are young unmarried adults who live in dormitories and devote their time to fundraising and other church-related activities in exchange for food, clothing and shelter. Church members and investigators who have infiltrated the church in recent years say that the Moonies live by a strict moral code that forbids sexual activity outside marriage.

However, the State Department reports — based on investigations of the Unification Church in the 1960s — paint a different picture.

At the time of the alleged effort to “baptize” a top official’s wife, Pak was assistant military attache at the Korean embassy in Washington.

Pak has told the House Subcommittee on U.S. Korean Relations that he left the embassy in 1964 to become affiliated with the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation. He is now president of the foundation and acts as interpreter for Moon.

During a lengthy and emotional speech before the House subcommittee, Pak branded as false all charges about his ties with the KCIA. He accused the House and the U.S. press of persecuting members of the Unification faith and trying to “crucify” Moon.

Pak ridiculed assertions that the Moon religion is actually a foreign affairs arm of the Korean Intelligence Agency.

“This subcommittee, in the powerful name of the US Congress, gave unqualified authenticity to a so-called intelligence report, which is trash, total lies, distorted, and vicious in nature,” Pak said.

He said that the Moon church is no more political than Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish congregations in the United States. Those churches, Pak said, actively and lawfully champion political causes as the Unification Church does.

Pak was not questioned about the alleged sexual practices. Fraser announced he will return Pak to the witness stand April 11 for more testimony.


Chicago Tribune, Monday, March 27, 1978   Section 1 3

Suzi Park Thomson denies KCIA link, assails probers
WASHINGTON [UPI] —Suzi Park Thomson, linked in news leaks of congressional testimony with Washington operations of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency [KCIA], says she has become a “prisoner” in her home and wants a chance to challenge the stories in public.
Mrs. Thomson, a Korean-born United States citizen, accused Rep. Donald Fraser [D., Minn.] of “character assassination” and said she has asked to testify under oath in an open hearing before his House International Organizations Subcommittee.
The subcommittee is one of several congressional panels looking into alleged Korean influence-buying operations in Congress. Mrs. Thomson was an aide to House Speaker Carl Albert [D., Okla.] for five years until his retirement in 1976.
She cited Fraser’s release of summaries of intelligence reports suggesting she was “connected” with the KCIA.
“CONNECTED!” she exclaimed scornfully. “Connected how? They should prove what kind of connections.”
Such allegations have deprived her of work on Capitol Hill and of many of the friends she used to entertain in her southwest Washington apartment, she said.
She said she has been “harassed and persecuted” by investigators for two House committees— the House Ethics Committee and Fraser’s panel.
“I’m a prisoner in my own home.” she said. “I can’t go out. I’m harassed by everybody.”


The Unification Church theology of pikareum sex rituals with the 36 wives which is confirmed (on video) by two sons of Sun Myung Moon

Ewha Woman’s University Moon sex scandal as told in the 1955 newspapers

Ewha University professor talks about the 1955 Moon sex scandal

Ewha University sex scandal video report and transcript

Hyung-jin Moon confirms, on video, his father, Sun Myung Moon’s pikareum sex rituals

Change of Blood Lineage through Ritual Sex in the Unification Church by Kirsti L. Nevalainen



3. The pull of Sun Moon

Thousands of young Americans believe he has led them to truth and love. Hundreds of parents have formed a national organization to get back their children.

New York Times Magazine    May 30, 1976    Berkeley Rice

This Tuesday evening, God willing, and perhaps helping, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon will join such illustrious ancestors as Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, Johnny Unitas, Pope Paul VI, and Billy Graham as a featured performer at Yankee Stadium.  Over the past few weeks New Yorkers have grown accustomed to Moon’s face smiling at them from thousands of leaflets handed out by cheerful young “Moonies.”  The leaflets, posters, and radio and TV ads invite everyone to attend Moon’s Bicentennial God Bless America Festival.  Moon hopes to draw 200,000 people to the stadium (even though it will hold only 50,000).  Those who get in will be treated to a rousing revival meeting, with classical fan dances by the Korean Folk Ballet, inspiring songs by Moon’s New Hope singers, and a lengthy, energetic speech in Korean by Moon.  The leaders of Moon’s Unification Church say the rally will promote the spiritual significance of the Bicentennial, and help “restore confidence in the American dream.”  But it will also celebrate the Second Coming of the millionaire-evangelist who proclaims himself the new Messiah.
In a country whose young tripped out radical politics or drugs in the 60’s, religious cults seem to be the opiate of the 70’s.  Several are prospering but Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church is by far the hottest – and most controversial.  It now has 30,000 followers, 5,000 members, has fund raising and recruiting centers at 100 American cities and college campuses and takes in more than $10 million a year in donations and sales from solicitations.
To many anguished parents who have lost their children to him, however, this new Messiah is a spiritual fraud, a devil who enslaves young Americans by means of brainwashing and mind control.  Parents have tried to rescue or kidnap their sons and daughters from his communes, but often the kids can’t be found, or refuse to come home.

An “Idealist”
The Moon phenomenon, “his Moonies and the controversy they have caused are exemplified by the struggle of Mr. and Mrs. Elton Helander, of Guilford, Conn., who have been fighting the church since their daughter Wendy joined it two years ago at age 18.  Until then Wendy had led a well-rounded and unremarkable life.  She was pretty, healthy and bright enough to complete high school in three and a half years, with time to spare for cheerleading, skiing and sewing.  “She had so much to offer,” says her mother, “and her morals were so good.  She was dead against drugs and sex and anything like that.”  As a college freshman, she seemed a bit “confused” to her mother, perhaps because she became interested in such exotic notions as meditation and eastern philosophy.  Wendy later described herself that fall as an idealist, troubled by the suffering and violence in the world, and searching for a “meaningful life.”
Approached by Moon’s campus recruiters, Wendy attended a Unification weekend in Maine, where the members “radiated so much love, so much warmth” that she soon decided her search had ended.  She called her mother breathlessly to ask if she had heard the “good news.”
“What good news?” asked Mrs. Helander.
“That there is a new Messiah on this Earth,” said Wendy.
When she came home at Christmas, her mother found her troubled.  “She cried a good deal of the time, and yet she was telling me how happy she was.”  About that time, Wendy gave away many of her cherished possessions to fellow members of what she began calling “the Family.”  She dropped out of college, joining the church as a full-time member.
“I never had any questions,” she said later.  “It all made sense.”  It did not make sense to her parents, and eventually they abducted her from a church center and had her “deprogrammed” by Ted Patrick, a man who specializes in such treatment, to cure her of Moon’s spell.  It didn’t work.  She left home soon after taking only a toothbrush, and returned to the fold.  “I think the poor kid was afraid,” said her mother.  “They had her mind all along.”
The Helanders brought suit against the Unification Church, which refused even to produce Wendy in court, because of the “trauma” she would suffer.  At the trial, her lawyer argued that Wendy had not been brainwashed and was not under the church’s control.  “Her big crime,” he told the court, “has been believing what she chooses to believe.”  Both sides produced members or ex-members who testified about the independence or lack of it.  Both sides produced psychiatrists who argued about the state of Wendy’s mind.  The judge finally dismissed the case, ruling that the parents had not proved the church had exercised “control or restraint over her person.”
The trial left no one happy, Mrs. Helander said.  “Our daughter is not our daughter any more.”  Wendy said she still loved her parents, but no longer trusted them.  She was right.  Last fall, while visiting Wendy at a church training center, her parents took her for a walk near a back road.  A car pulled up, and Wendy was shoved in and driven away.  She was held captive for about three months, moved frequently to avoid detection, and continually deprogrammed.  However, one of those who worked on her was a Moonie plant.  With his help they both escaped and returned to the church.
The Helanders have not seen or heard from Wendy since, and the affair has left them emotionally and financially devastated.  “We were such a quiet, happy family before this happened,” says Mrs. Helander, “but it’s ruined our lives.”  They have spent close to $40,000 on legal fees, deprogramming and other costs, and are heavily in debt.  Yet they have not given up hope: “All we want for our daughter is her freedom.  We’ve got to save her mind.”  Wendy doesn’t want to be saved, but still hopes for an eventual reconciliation if they “are ready to accept the fact that this is where I want to be.”
In cases like Wendy’s, it is not easy to tell the good guys from the bad.  Do good guys kidnap?  Or, bad guys rescue?  Or, do both do both?  Both sides claim to have truth, justice and love on their side.  Whoever’s right, thousands of young Americans like Wendy have left their homes, schools and jobs to join Moon’s crusade.  Hundreds of parents like the Helanders have formed a national organization to fight the church and free their children from its control.  And the church, in turn, has counter attacked, trying to achieve respectability through community good will and political influence.
To improve its image, Sun Myung Moon’s church hired Burson-Marstellar, the same P.R. firm that has done work for Exxon and General Motors.  (The relationship ended, in part, because the firm began to worry about how the account might affect its own image).  And they make great efforts to win friends in Washington.  Groups of Moonies walk the halls of Capitol Hill offering tea and flowers to Congressmen and trying to engage them in chats about God and His purpose in America.  With bipartisan agility Moon has had his picture taken (and used repeatedly in church publications) with such senators as Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Strom Thurmond and James Buckley.  With the enthusiastic support of Representative Richard Ichord, former chairman of the Internal Security Committee, Moon recently presented a speech on “God’s Plan for America ” in the House Caucus Room.  (Perhaps the Congressmen should listen.  Moon once told a group of trainees: “If the United States continues its corruption, and we find among the Senators and Congressmen no one useful for our purposes, we can make senators and Congressmen out of our members.)
The church operates a political affiliate in Washington called Freedom Leadership Foundation, which lobbies for United States military and economic support for South Korea; hence, some critics suspect that Moon’s movement is directed or subsidized by the South Korean C.I.A., a charge the church denies.  It is interesting however, that two of Moon’s closest aides are former Korean Army colonels who served as military attaches in the South Korean Embassy in Washington.  Indeed, a House committee plans hearings next month on possible attempts by South Korea to influence American politics through the Moon movement.
Because of complaints about the Unification Church’s interest in politics, and its emphasis on fund raising, various Federal, state and local government agencies have begun questioning its claims as a religious movement.  The Internal Revenue Service has not taken action against it – on complaints about its $10 million income tax exemption – but the U.S. Immigration Service has – ordering the deportation of 600 Moonies, mostly from Japan, for illegal soliciting.  Their visas had been granted for “religious education and training.”  But the Immigration official in charge of the case subsequently found little evidence of formal religious education: “As nearly as we can determine their “training” consists of soliciting funds and selling some items.”
As part of its campaign to gain respectability, the church has spawned several quasi academic front organizations ostensibly devoted to the search for world peace and freedom.  Though they are said to be independent, these groups generally share the leadership of Sun Myung Moon and other church officials.  One group, the International Cultural Foundation, held its annual conference on “the unity of the sciences” last fall at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, drawing several hundred scientists and scholars, including a few Nobel laureates.  While anti-Moon parents picketed outside with placards comparing Moon to Hitler and Mussolini, the scholars debated “the standard of values in society.”  The letters of invitation – offering to pay all expenses, plus $3,000 for co-chairmen – failed to mention that the affair was sponsored by the Unification Church or that Sun Myung Moon would give the opening address.  When they learned of Moon’s involvement, many of those invited – Buckminister Fuller, Norman Cousins and several others who had agreed to serve as advisers for the conference – withdrew.
Yet, obviously, not everyone feels this way about Sun Myung Moon.  Many parents either approve of or don’t mind their children’s joining his cult.  Some figure its better than drugs, or drifting aimlessly around the country.  Others look with favor upon it as a Christian youth movement.
While church members accept Moon’s theology as revealed truth, nonmembers generally find it a mind boggling mixture of Pentecostal Christianity, Eastern mysticism, anti-communism, pop psychology and Meta physics.  According to “Divine Principle,” Moon’s book of revelations, God intended Adam and Eve to marry and have perfect children, thereby establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.  But Satan, embodied in the snake, seduced Eve, who in turn passed her impurity on to Adam, bringing about the Fall of Man.  God then sent Jesus to redeem mankind from sin, but Jesus also bungled His mission, and died before He could marry and father a new race of perfect children.  The time has now come for a second Christ who will finally fulfill God’s original plan.  The Unification Church coyly refuses to identify the new Messiah, but like Moon, he just happens to have been born in Korea in 1920.  As told by Moon, and embellished in successive accounts by his disciples, the story of his life presents impressive qualifications for the position of Messiah.  “From childhood I was clairvoyant,” he once told a group of followers.  “I could see through people, see their spirits.”  When he was 12, he began praying for extraordinary things,” and must have caught God’s attention.  At 16, while he was praying on a mountainside on Easter morning, Jesus appeared to him in a vision and called upon him to carry out His unfinished task.
After further visionary chats with Moses, Buddha and assorted biblical luminaries, Moon began preaching his own version of Messianic Christianity.  In 1954, self ordained, he founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.  As his cult grew, Moon ran afoul of the civil and religious authorities, a pattern that continues to plague him in this country.  He was excommunicated by his own Presbyterian Church, and arrested various times by the police – for anti-communist activities, according to Moon; on morals charges, according to his Korean critics, involving “purification” rites with female initiates.
Moon’s church has thrived under the military dictatorship of South Korea’s Gen. Park Chung Hee.  While the Park regime has suppressed, jailed or exiled hundreds of critics, particularly among the clergy, it has formed a friendly association with the Unification Church.  Moon preaches anti-communism and holds mass-rallies in support of the government; Park extends various forms of official support, sending senior civil servants and military officers to Unification “leadership seminars,” for example.  A man of many parts, Moon has managed to divert enough attention from spiritual affairs to build an industrial conglomerate in Korea with sales of $15 million a year, drawing in part on the voluntary labor of his Korean followers.  Moon’s factories turn out heavy machinery, titanium, paint, pharmaceuticals, marble vases, shotguns and ginseng tea.
Since moving to the United States in 1973, the short, stocky, moonfaced evangelist, now 56, has settled with his wife, eight children and a staff of 35 Moonies in a 25 room mansion overlooking the Hudson River in Irvington, NY.  When not looking after his religious and corporate affairs, he spends a good deal of time fishing on his 50 foot cabin cruiser, New Hope.  Church officials bristle at criticism of Moon’s luxuries.  “Why must a religious leader be an ascetic?” asks one.  “Look at the Pope,” says another.  “Followers of many religions honor their spiritual leader with physical comforts worthy of the dignity of his position.  I trust Reverend Moon’s relationship with God, so I don’t object to his life style.”
Though Moon takes little part in the church’s day-to-day operations and meets only occasionally with its leaders, he supposedly approves all major decisions himself.  “What he says goes!” says a nonmember who has dealt with the movement’s top officials.
At his rare public appearances, Moon is usually introduced by Unification’s president, Neil Salonen, 31, a smooth speaker who tells audiences this country is going to hell because of all the crime, suicide, alcoholism, divorce, sex, drug abuse, college radicals and communists.  He says God has sent the Rev. Mr. Moon to the United States to solve these problems and to immobilize an ideological army of young people to unite the world in a new age of faith.”
Because Moon addresses his American followers only in Korean, outsiders can’t appreciate his charisma.  His speeches often run two hours or longer and are full of hellfire and Korean brimstone punctuated with kicks, karate chops, laughter and tears.  (One reporter calls the performance a “kung fu tantrum.”  Through his translator, a former South Korean Army colonel named Bo Hi Pak, Moon tells his audiences of the approaching apocalypse, and offers them one last chance for salvation: “You can be the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven if you meet the coming Messiah.  He is your hope and the only hope of America and of this world.”
Last fall, I observed Moon at a sunrise service at Belvedere, the church’s magnificent $800,000 estate in Tarrytown, NY.  By 6 a.m., Moon was talking to about 500 young members who had come up by church buses from New York City.  Shivering in the predawn chill, they listened, seemingly captivated.  When Moon laughed, they smiled.  When he yelled, they stared back in awed silence.  When he finished, an associate led the audience in a 15 minute prayer in which he asked repeatedly if they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the church.  To each question, they responded in unison, “Yes, Father.”  I thought they meant God.
After the service, Moon marched up to the top of the hill overlooking the Hudson, circled by a phalanx of husky bodyguards and followed by the members.  There he stood on what members call “the Holy Rock.”  With the rising sun just shining on his head – a setting and timing obviously choreographed with considerable care – everyone sang a church hymn called “Shining Fatherland.”  Moon then gave a 10 minute prayer in Korean, during which I caught the phrase “Yankee Stadium” several times.
Later, as Moon talked with church officials inside the mansion, I noticed a Korean identified as Colonel Han – “He used to be with the embassy in Washington” – giving orders with military crispness.  Another fellow, in a blue uniform turned out to be Spiro captain of Moon’s yacht.  As Moon prepared to leave, his party moved with the precision of Secret Servicemen escorting the President.  Moon’s bodyguards communicated by means of tiny wrist transmitters and earphones, saluting him as he climbed into his black limousine.  As he sped away, they jumped into another limousine and followed.
When I returned to the Holy Rock, I found about 20 Moonies kneeling around it, praying aloud, some sobbing with fervor.  Some jerked spasmodically, in spiritual transport, crying out, “Father, oh Father, please help us…”  By then, I was no longer sure whether they were praying to God or “Father” Moon.
To understand such devotion, one must follow the process by which the Unification Church recruits and trains its members.  Wherever the clean-cut, smiling Moonies can find them – on city streets or college campuses – they engage young Americans in discussions of the state of the country or of their souls.  Many Americans are anxious to talk.  As one church official told me: There are a lot of lonely people walking around.”
The discussions always end with an invitation to a lecture or retreat.  Recruits get a daily dose of six to eight hours of mind-numbing theology based on Moon’s “Divine Principle.”  By the final lecture, they learn that God has sent Sun Myung Moon to save the world in general, and them in particular.
The rest of the days are filled with group activities: discussions, calisthenics, meals, sports, lots of singing and praying, generally starting at dawn and lasting well past midnight.  In the evenings, the Moonies give testimony of how they have found peace, purpose, love and joy in the Family.  Never left alone, recruits are encouraged to pour out their hearts to their new friends, who offer continuous attention and comfort.  The weekend ends with a hard-sell pitch for commitment to the next stage in the conversion process, a week-long seminar devoted to more of the same.  About one in four makes the step.
In the Northeast, the church’s training headquarters is situated in upstate New York, in Barrytown, in a 250-acre former Christian Brothers monastery purchased the compound.  The Moonie commune offers a welcome refuge: no drugs, no drinks, no sex, no money, no problems, no choices, and no decisions.  From the team leader’s cheerful “Rise and shine” at 5:30 a.m. to the last group songs and prayers at midnight, Moonies rarely have to think for themselves.  Full of fervor, they follow orders and perform their assigned chores with gusto.
Those who observe Moonies closely often notice a glassy, spaced out looks which, combined with their everlasting smiles, makes them resemble tripped-out freaks and gives rise to rumors that the church drugs them.  Although some of the glassiness is probably due to a lack of sleep, many Moonies really are on a high – but they are tripping out on faith and devotion, not drugs.
Most parents find that hard to believe.  They also have trouble understanding the church’s puritan attitudes toward sex, which govern every minute of its member’s lives.  During a tour of Barrytown with Michael Warder, a 30 year old Stanford graduate who serves as director of training, I asked why all activities there and at local church centers were so carefully segregated by sex.  “That way, everyone feels more comfortable in their study and in their search for the truth,” Warder replied.  “As soon as they’re mixed together you find the boys and girls begin thinking about other things.  We feel there’s too much permissive sex and promiscuity today.”
Even if they were in favor of sex, the Moonies would scarcely have time for it.  They put in grueling dawn to dusk days recruiting and fund raising.  They peddle candles, peanuts, and dried flowers.  Some work in pairs at street corners or shopping plazas; others go out in teams selling door to door in suburbs.  They rarely mention the church or Sun Myung Moon.  They are polite, but persistent.  When asked what they’re raising money for, they give vague or misleading answers like “Christian youth work” or “drug abuse program.”
Fund raising leaders send their troops off in the morning with songs, prayers and pep talks, encouraging competition among one another and with other teams.  Stoked up like Marine recruits for a bayonet drill, the Moonies hustle for the Lord with a fervor no profit motive could inspire.  Those who fail to meet a respectable daily quota often spend the evening praying for God’s help the following day.  The average Moonie takes in about $50 to $200 a day; the more successful can make up to $500.  Every penny is turned in to the team leader who then turns it over to the church.
Many Moonies are ready for such commitment, and need little pressure: “I’ve been looking for something like this for years,” one told me.  “It answers all the questions I was asking.”  An ex-Moonie who had spent eight months in the movement said: “I’ll tell you what attracted me.  I saw people who looked happy at a time when I felt lonely and desperate.  I had no idea what to do with my life, and they had a purpose.”
About half of those who complete the week-long seminar join the movement.  Some join as “followers,” remaining at their jobs or at school, and working evenings or weekends on church projects.  Some contribute part of their salaries.  Those who join as full-time members either move into a local center, or stay on at Barrytown for increasingly intense seminars lasting from three weeks to four months.
During their first few months in the movement, new members often get phone calls or letters from distraught parents and friends, urging them to drop out or at least to come home and talk it all over.  One who refused told his parents, “At least I believe in something.”  Those who waver are often told their parents or others who oppose the church are acting on behalf of Satan.  An evening of intense prayer and guidance generally brings such wayward sheep back to the fold.  A few do drop out, but only after strenuous objections from their group leaders.
Once they move in, new members often give what possessions they have to the church.  They no longer need money anyway.  The church takes care of all their daily needs, from toothpaste to trousers.  Directors of the large centers sometimes buy up cheap lots of nearly identical clothing for their resident members, thereby increasing the degree to which Moonies tend to look as though they were cloned rather than recruited.
Except for the Spartan food, clothing and shelter provided for its members, the church invests most of its funds in real estate.  It owns property in many states, including more than $15 million worth in New York alone.  Earlier this month, Unification agreed to pay more than $5 million for the 42-story 2,000 room New Yorker to be used for its world headquarters.  As an investor in real estate, the church has a significant advantage over commercial competitors; its religious status exempts it from property taxes; and most of the repairs, renovations and maintenance on the buildings are performed (critics call it “slave labor”) by willing Moonies.
The New York City Tax Commission is questioning the Unification Church ’s right to its tax exemption, and other challenges are being made to its legitimacy as a religious movement.  The New York State Board of Regents has held up recognition of the church’s new seminary at Barrytown.  The New York City Council of Churches has rejected Unification’s request for membership, in part because of Moon’s role as the new Messiah, and his claim that Christ failed in his mission.  “They call themselves a church,” says one council leader, “but they do not act like one, particularly in the matter of individual freedom and he alleged incarceration of young people.”

Deprogramming
Under the leadership of Rabbi Maurice Davis of White Plains, the national organization that has been formed of parents who have lost their children tries to locate them through the network of ex-members.  If the parents wish, the organization puts them in touch with professional deprogrammers like Ted Patrick, who may try to rescue the children for fees that can run several thousand dollars.  The deprogramming can be more brutal than any brainwashing the church may practice.  Rabbi Davis warns parents that such attempts may be illegal and dangerous.  “And if it doesn’t work,” he tells them, “you may lose your child.”  But for those like Wendy Helander’s parents, who feel they’ve already lost their children, the warning seems meaningless.
Rabbi Davis and others who have studied the movement say that what happens to the young Moonies follows the classic pattern of brainwashing: They are isolated from past and outside contacts; worn down physically, mentally and emotionally; surrounded with new instant comrades and a new authority figure; and finally programmed with new beliefs and pressured into total commitment.  “I am your brain,” Moon has told them.  “What I wish must be your wish.”
But while total conversion to the church may require or cause the suspension of one’s critical faculties, and while one may well question the independence of a true converts mind, no one has proven the church holds its members against their will.
Perhaps the Unification Church has been criticized unfairly for doing much of what established religions have been doing for years.  For example, suppose I described a church that has amassed great wealth and property in this country through charitable donations and profitable investments; a church whose leader lives in splendor while young novitiates live in ascetic communes, cut off from family and friends, leading lives of absolute devotion to the church and absolute obedience to its authority.  Would this description not fit the Catholic Church as well as that of Sun Myung Moon?
Unification’s leaders distinguish their movement from other cults by stressing their concern about crime, drugs, alcohol and other social ills.  But none of the recruits I saw looked like ex-junkies, and most come from middle class homes rather than crime-ridden ghettos.  For all its talk about social problems, the church runs no programs aimed at solving them, and devotes almost no effort to helping nonmembers.  Most of its resources are directed inward, producing more money and more members, who in turn will recruit more members and raise more money.  When I asked one church official how this would benefit society, he replied, “We can change the world by changing men’s hearts.”  When I countered that such a policy would solve society’s problems only if everyone joined the movement, he smiled.
Obviously not everyone is joining the Unification Church.  Through a process of self-selection, Moon’s movement seems to attract only those youths already seeking some form of commitment.  Many have been drifting from cults to communes for years, sampling the spiritual fare like diners at a smorgasbord.  The church may be capitalizing on their loneliness, but it can hardly be blamed for their vulnerability.
While critics describe the movement as authoritarian, the church leaders prefer to call their approach “loving and parental.”  I think both descriptions may be accurate.  To thousands of young Americans threatened or frustrated by the prospect of adulthood, Moon’s family offers the security of perennial childhood.  To lonely young people drifting through cold, impersonal cities and schools, it offers instant friendship and communion, a sense of belonging.  To those troubled by drugs, sex or materialism, the church offers a drugless, sexless world of ascetic Puritanism.
To those hungering for truth and meaning in a complex world, it offers purpose and direction.  In exchange for their labor and devotion, Moon gives them a life of love, joy and inner peace, with no hassles, no doubts, and no decisions.  Critics call that exploitation, but the Moonies consider it a bargain.



4. Sun Myung Moon and Takeru Kamiyama jailed in 1984 for US tax crimes

Guilty Father: Moon did not pay his taxes

TIME    May 31, 1982

Soon after Sun Myung Moon opened an account at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1973, the Korean evangelist came by to make a deposit accompanied by two women carrying large purses stuffed with an assortment of bills. It took clerks an hour to count the currency, which totaled $100,000. A Chase banker recalled the women saying that the money came from street sales of flowers by members of Moon’s Unification Church. The Moonies, who refer to their leader as “Father,” and who regard him as a manifestation of God, were zealous collectors of funds, and deposits to his Chase accounts were frequent—perhaps too frequent. In a New York City federal court last week, a jury of ten women and two men decided, after four days of deliberation, that Moon was guilty of conspiring to avoid taxes on $162,000 in personal income for the years 1973 through 1975. He faces up to 14 years in prison, $25,000 in fines and a possible deportation hearing by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Moon, 62, was convicted of failing to report as personal income $112,000 of interest on $1.6 million in his Chase accounts, as well as $50,000 worth of stock in Tong Il Enterprises, a profit-making import company that Moon controlled. Convicted with him was his top financial aide, Takeru Kamiyama, 40, who was charged with helping the evangelist prepare false tax returns to conceal the income, attempting to block the subsequent Government investigation by submitting phony backdated documents, and lying to a grand jury.

Throughout the trial, which lasted more than six weeks, the evangelist’s attorney, Charles Stillman, insisted that the cash and stocks, although held by Moon, actually belonged to his Unification Church and were therefore not subject to taxation.

One key witness for the prosecution was Michael Warder, 35, a former church executive who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He testified that on several occasions Kamiyama had turned down his requests to use funds from the Chase accounts for church purposes with the explanation that the bank deposits were “Father’s money … not accessible.”

Moon accepted the verdict impassively, but officials of his church denounced the judgment as “unjustified persecution.” The evangelist’s attorneys plan to appeal the conviction.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100323055426/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,925417,00.html


Christianity & Crisis October 28, 1985

Moon unbound
‘Father,’ theocracy, and other people’s money

by Fred Clarkson
(a contributing editor of Interchange Report, quarterly journal of trends in conservative politics.)

Last May the Rev. Ken Sudo told leaders of the Unification church in an internal newsletter: “Father went into Danbury [prison] as the leader of the Unification church, but when he comes out, he must be the leader of the Free World.”

When “father”—Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon—came out of jail last summer after 13 months incarceration, we were greeted with the nationally televised spectacle of such diverse religious leaders as Joseph Lowery and Jerry Falwell celebrating his release and denouncing his imprisonment.

Before and since his release, a series of full-page advertisements (see below) has appeared in key newspapers arguing that Moon was falsely charged, unfairly tried, and selectively punished. Others facing similar charges have been treated more leniently by the government, say the ads.

Moon has been cast as a religious martyr. Through the case, the Moon organization has forged an array of friends and sympathizers who indeed believe Moon to be the victim of government persecution.

When Moon appealed his conviction, more than 40 widely differing groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council of Churches, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the National Association of Evangelicals joined to ask the Supreme Court to review the case. Their reasons varied. But all felt important constitutional issues were at stake. The courts disagreed and the Supreme Court has declined to review.

Most of these organizations argued on narrow legal points and took great pains to distance themselves from Moon’s theology. But the Moon organization has skillfully and deceptively used this limited support to legitimize a largely Moon-organized-and-financed movement for “religious freedom” in the United States.

The media have not been very helpful. In few places has it been pointed out clearly that Moon went to jail for much more than “tax evasion.” He was also convicted on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. In all, Moon and his codefendant Takeru Kamiyama were indicted and convicted on 13 counts.

As summarized by the Court of Appeals, the two were convicted on “count one” of “conspiracy to file false federal income tax returns, to obstruct justice, and to make false statements to a federal grand jury.” Moon was convicted—“counts two, three, and four”—of filing false tax returns for 1973-1975. Kamiyama was charged —“counts five and six”—and convicted of “aiding and abetting the filing of the false 1974 and 1975 returns” and—on “counts seven through thirteen”—with “obstruction of justice through submission of false documents to the grand jury, submitting false documents to the Department of Justice, and five counts of perjury.”

The newspaper ad reprinted below argues that George Bush and Geraldine Ferraro faced only civil fines when they were found to have paid insufficient income taxes, while Moon was criminally prosecuted and jailed for 13 months. How else to explain this but religious and racial intolerance, selective prosecution, and a double standard? (See below ad.)

JUSTICE? You be the judge

Case #1
GERALDINE FERRARO
(Former Congresswoman/Vice Presidential Candidate)

● Charged with violating FEC regulations and failure to pay $29,709 in back taxes.
● Claimed it was an error made by her lawyer and accountant.
PENALTY
● No criminal proceedings
● Ordered to pay $53,459 in back taxes, including interest
● No prison sentence

Case #2
GEORGE BUSH
(Vice President of the United States)

● Charged with failure to pay $129,000 in back taxes on sale of his Texas home, $15,000 in taxes on campaign funds, plus $54,000 in interest.
● Claimed he was singled out by the IRS for unfair treatment.
PENALTY
● No criminal proceedings
● Ordered to pay $198,000 in back taxes, including interest
● No prison sentence

Case #3
E. F. HUTTON & CO.
(Major brokerage house)

● Charged with defrauding banks of over $8,000,000
● Pleaded guilty.
PENALTY
● No criminal proceedings against any individual
● Fined $2,000,000
● No prison sentences

Case #4
SUN MYUNG MOON
(Founder of the Unification Church)

● Charged with failure to pay taxes on interest income from church funds and stock held in a church business which, according to the Justice Department’s own estimate, would have totaled $7,300 plus interest.
● Pleaded not guilty.
● Claimed money in question belonged to Unification Church and that he held it in trust as Catholic Bishops and many Baptist ministers do for their congregations.
● Criminally indicted (even though three Justice Department career attorneys claimed, independently of each other, that there was no case).
● Denied bench trial even though the trial judge admitted that a non-jury trial would probably have been fairer.
PENALTY
● Criminal proceedings
● Fined $25,000
● Sentenced to 18 months in a federal prison
(no civil recourse was ever given to Reverend Moon, even though this was his first tax return as a non-English-speaking immigrant to the U.S.).


<cartoon text>
Justice? You be the judge

Justice Department Entrance Exam:
Question: Which one do we throw the book we at?
A. Geraldine Ferraro owes $53,459 in back taxes
B. George Bush owes $198,000 in back taxes
C. E.F. Hutton & Co. defrauds banks of $8million
D. Rev. Sun Myung Moon owes $7,300 in back taxes

If you chose “D,” the religious guy, CONGRATULATIONS you’ve made the team!


The U.S. Government spent several million dollars and six years to finally bring Reverend Moon to “justice.’’

JUSTICE? You be the judge
Sponsored by: COMMITTEE TO DEFEND THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
325 Pennsylvania Ave., S.E., Washington, D.C., 20003
The growing trend of government intolerance and abuse of religion must stop.
Please send me more information and let me know what I can do. …

<end of ad>


The answer? Unlike Moon, no evidence shows that Bush and Ferraro intended criminally to defraud the United States. The ads also suggest that the whole matter was unfair because this was Moon’s first time to file taxes in the U.S. He did not speak English. The Court of Appeals in rejecting that same argument noted: “Not only are both defendants sophisticated businessmen, but they had at their disposal a small army of tax attorneys and accountants whose advice, unfortunately, was not sufficiently heeded.” Indeed, Moon evaded taxes on about $160,000 through an elaborate criminal conspiracy.

In early 1973, tax lawyers and accountants told Moon’s representatives to keep his assets separate from those of the church. Ignoring this advice, Kamiyama prepared Moon’s taxes under Moon’s personal supervision. Ledgers were forged and backdated to make it appear that certain of Moon’s assets belong to the church. The prosecution proved that the paper used to falsify the 1973 records was not manufactured until 1974. The public accounting firm that prepared Moon’s 1974 and 1975 returns was provided with false information and backdated documents.

The personal income at issue was the interest on $1.7 million dollars in bank accounts and $50,000 in stock from a company controlled by Moon. The money was proven to be Moon’s. He used it for such personal purposes as sending his children to private school, buying $1,500 gold watches, investing in an Arizona iron mine, and purchasing stock in a Washington, D.C. bank.

Nevertheless, 40 groups raising a variety of issues filed 16 friend of the court briefs, requesting Supreme Court review of the case. Among these were the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in a joint brief, the National Council of Churches, Presbyterian Church (USA), American Baptist Churches in the USA, African Methodist Episcopal Church, National Association of Evangelicals, and the Christian Legal Society.

Trusts and deceptions
Two main questions were raised by these and other groups. Did the government intervene excessively in internal church affairs that might reasonably be considered beyond legitimate government interest; and should Moon and Kamiyama have received a “bench trial” by a single judge, as they requested, or a jury trial, as requested by the government and ordered by the judge?

The SCLC, the NCC, and others argue that the donors of the funds in question intended the money as a trust. Moon as the leader of the church was authorized to decide what was a religious use of the money. The views of the government or the jury was a substitution of their views for those of the church. Thus, some feel, other churches that use trust funds may be in jeopardy.

The courts, however, found “no proof that Moon actually held the subject funds in trust.” A key point in this argument is the notion of the intent of the donors. The SCLC, NCC, and others accept them as believing church members. The argument breaks down here long before it reaches the threshold of a constitutional issue. No evidence demonstrates where most of the money (cash deposits) came from.

About 10 percent of the sums in affected bank accounts were attributed to donations from church members. However, the papers used to document these transactions were shown to be backdated forgeries. The Justice Department’s Solicitor General Rex E. Lee wrote in his brief to the Supreme Court in opposition to the request for review that “The government frankly does not know where the funds came from, but is disinclined to accept the explanation that petitioners’ [Moon and Kamiyama] fabricated documents and perjured grand jury testimony purported to establish.”

Lee further observed that given the “massive and undisputed effort to deceive the tax authorities by document fabrications, false explanations, and perjury,” “informal financial arrangements maintained in good faith are not in jeopardy.” Lee also noted that of the religious groups supporting Moon, none “manifests an awareness of the evidence” in the case.

Then there is the “Messiah defense.” Moon’s defense team (including Laurence Tribe of Harvard) argued that his followers believe he is “potentially the new Messiah.” Moon is therefore the “embodiment” of the church and thus exempt from taxes. The courts insisted, however, that even Messiahs are not exempt from taxes. They have a status as an individual distinct from the church. Freedom of religion, moreover, is “subordinate to the criminal laws of the country.”

The SCLC accepted without question the assumption that church members contributed the money, even though it acknowledged that “the most important consideration in determining whether Reverend Moon owned the disputed assets personally or in trust…is the intent of the donors.”

The SCLC also accepted the Messiah defense on its face. It argued that the jury should have been instructed about how Moon is viewed as the embodiment of his donors’ faith. A trust is thus implied “regardless of whether the donors had used the correct legal terminology.” SCLC President Joseph Lowery, an outspoken public critic of the courts’ handling of the Moon case, has written that “The fact that Reverend Moon is being punished for carrying out the mandate of his church in the administration of funds entrusted him by his followers poses a clear and present danger to every religious group in the nation.”

The Washington Post, on the other hand, editorialized that “Freedom of religion is not threatened by this conviction. Nor are other church leaders in jeopardy so long as they do not participate in conspiracies to conceal personal assets, forge documents, or defraud the government.”

A second primary issue is whether Moon should have received a bench trial rather than a jury trial. Moon’s attorneys argued that the defendants could not get a fair trial because people were inevitably biased toward the Unification Church. The trial judge ruled, however, “I have reasonable faith in the lack of bias in this jury… I think we have gotten a jury which is, if not totally free from bias, by and large capable of putting aside the bias they have and deciding the case on the merits of the charges.”

The Court of Appeals upheld this view, and the Supreme Court found no cause for review. The ACLU, its New York Civil Liberties Union affiliate, and the SCLC argued that it would have been fairer if the court had acceded to the bench trial. Reasonable people differ on the point. The courts believe evidence supported the verdict.

The appeal to ‘religious freedom’
Moon, in a Senate hearing last year, denounced the government in ways currently being echoed by the “religious freedom movement.” Citing the history of religious and racial persecution in the U.S., Moon announced, “In this way, government will continue to abuse innocent people. I feel that a movement must be created to stop these injustices once and for all. ” Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-Az.) chastised Moon for his testimony. “You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have the freedoms of America, when the jury trial turns out the way you want it, and condemn the whole system when it turns out in a way that does not favor you.”

Meanwhile, the movement Moon desired has been created, much of it organized and financed by the Moon organization. New York attorney Herbert Rosedale charges that “the Unification Church seeks to win by a deluge of distortion what it could not win in judicial proceedings.” The organized outcry is also part of a broader Moon public relations campaign—this year 300,000 video tapes, featuring six hours of lectures on Moon theology, were sent to North American clergy.

Jeremiah Gutman, president of the New York Civil Liberties Union, has been an outspoken Moon defender. His law firm has represented Moon for many years, and Gutman personally represented him in the early stages of this case. This has not deterred Gutman from speaking on behalf of the ACLU on the Moon case in public, while rarely acknowledging his ties to Moon.

When Moon was honored with a doctorate from Shaw Divinity School in May, Unification Church members received a public relations packet with a cover letter from church President Mose Durst urging them to use it “in your public outreach work…(including) your ministers, especially those that are Baptist, as Shaw is traditionally affiliated with the Baptists.” Unmentioned was $60,000 in Unification church contributions to Shaw. Shaw Executive Vice-President Joseph Paige is a Regional Advisory Board member of Moon’s political unit, CAUSA. Paige and Shaw Trustee, the Rev. Oscar McLaughlin, are also advisers of the Coalition for Religious Freedom (CRF), the main advocate of the notion that Moon was unjustly prosecuted. The Coalition has received $500,000 from Moon sources, according to Christianity Today magazine.

Moonie evangelists have been largely redeployed into CAUSA outreach (see sidebar below) for more than a year. Some 10,000 people have been recruited to attend all-expense-paid CAUSA indoctrination conferences this year. Most have been clergy. Considerable mutual recruiting also goes on between CAUSA and the Coalition for Religious Freedom.

Leadership overlaps. CRF Executive Director Don Sills, for example, has spoken frequently at CAUSA events. CRF conferences in California were largely organized and staffed by Unification Church members, while attendees were urged by CAUSA Regional Coordinator Patrick Hickey to join CAUSA.

The Committee to Defend the U.S. Constitution, the group placing the newspaper ads which portrayed Moon as a “Victim of Government Conspiracy,” claims to be unconnected to Moon. The Committee is headed by Warren Richardson, the first executive director of CAUSA USA; attorney and business agent for Moon’s Washington Times newspaper; and director of the Coalition for Religious Freedom until August 1984, when Sills took over. The Coalition’s Washington, D.C. office is directly across the hall from Richardson’s office.

The CRF claims that the Moon prosecution is part of a broader attack by government on religion. “This is largely the result of the ungodly secular humanist philosophy that has contaminated our schools, the media, and the various levels of government.” The CAUSA 1985 Lecture Manual goes so far as to say that “In the United States, an intermediary stage prior to communism may be secular humanism.”

It must be stressed that some of those who support the “religious freedom movement” spurred by the Moon organization do not agree with these notions. This is certainly true of many organizations who addressed narrow aspects of constitutional concerns raised by the case.

Meanwhile, the Moon organization’s efforts to mobilize the religious community continue. It appears that the movement intends to get legislation introduced and to make “religious freedom” an electoral issue. But as the facts of the Moon case—and Moon’s views and hidden agenda—become better known, it remains to be seen whether this nascent coalition can hold together. □

Sidebar:
‘Godism’ from the horse’s mouth
SUN MYUNG Moon is the new Messiah, according to Moonist doctrine not proclaimed in public. The Korean-born evangelist is to bend America to “God’s will,” leading to a final war over Soviet communism that will bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Moon is best known as a controversial leader of a religious cult that allegedly uses deception and brainwashing to gain and keep recruits. When parents and friends conspire with “deprogrammers” to snap their loved ones out of it, a different controversy arises.
Much less well known are the political activities and extremism of the Unification Church and its satellite organizations.
Moon asserted in a 1973 speech that he will impose an “automatic theocracy to rule the world.” The principal vehicle Moon is using in this quest is CAUSA, his political organization. CAUSA, originally an acronym for Confederation of the Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas, now promotes a theocratic ideology called “Unificationism” or “Godism,” a comprehensive world view that can unify the world’s religions against communism. Democracy would not likely survive in this atmosphere. “The more democratic a society is,” Moon asserted in a speech reprinted in CAUSA magazine last year, “the more serious the collapse of its traditional value system appears to be. This shows that democracy has failed to provide solutions to problems facing our society and the world.”
CAUSA, founded in 1980, has distinguished itself through its collaboration with some of the most repugnant military dictatorships in the world, including Chile, Paraguay, and the former military regimes of Bolivia and Argentina.
A CAUSAesque glimpse of Moon’s Kingdom of Heaven on Earth may have been provided by CAUSA head Bo Hi Pak, who has said of the notorious Paraguayan dictator, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner: “I believe he’s a special man, chosen by God to run his country. ” Anti-Semitism is a chilling aspect of the Moonist world view. The Divine Principle, the main theological work of Unificationism, contains 125 anti-Semitic references, according to the American Jewish Committee. Moon himself has said: “By killing one man, Jesus, the Jewish people had to suffer 2,000 years. During the Second World War six million people were slaughtered to cleanse all the sins of the Jewish people for the killing of Jesus.”



Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharias:


Rev. Moon was not persecuted by the IRS: he and his accountant evaded personal taxes and lied to the grand jury, which places them under the same laws as any other American citizen. It is noteworthy that Moon could have received a fourteen-year sentence, so his eighteen-month sentence shows the mercy of the jurors, not persecution.”

from “Kingdom of the Cults” Chapter 12: The Unification Church


Nansook Hong:
“The [tax] trial began on April 1, 1982. …

Father [Sun Myung Moon] demonstrated contempt for civil law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers…

There was no question inside the church that the Reverend Moon used his religious tax exemption as a tool for financial gain in the business world. … No matter what the lawyers said in court, no one internally disputed that the Reverend Moon commingled church and business funds. No one had any problem with it. How often had I heard church advisers discuss funneling church funds into his business enterprises and political causes because his religious, business, and political goals are the same: world dominance for the Unification Church. It was U.S. tax laws that were wrong, not Sun Myung Moon. Man’s law was secondary to the Messiah’s mission.”

from “In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family”


Moon is sentenced to 18-month term
By Arnold H. Lubasch
New York Times   July 17, 1982

… Mr. Moon, who would be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the sentence, was also fined the maximum of $25,000 plus the costs of prosecution. And he could face deportation proceedings.

The maximum sentence for Mr. Moon could have been five years for conspiracy and three years on each of three tax charges involved in his failure to report $150,000 in income from bank accounts and securities.

“I have treated him as I would treat anyone else,” Judge Goettel said. He also expressed his “sincere belief that the jury treated the case that way.

“The judge imposed a six-month sentence and a $5,000 fine on a codefendant, Takeru Kamiyama, one of Mr. Moon’s top aides. Mr. Kamiyama was convicted of the conspiracy charge, of assisting in the tax fraud and of lying to the grand jury. …

Jo Ann Harris and Martin Flumenbaum, the chief prosecutors, urged the judge to treat Mr. Moon the same as “any high-ranking business executive” convicted of having used his organization to avoid personal income taxes.

In the crowded courtroom, filled with somber supporters of Mr. Moon, Judge Goettel declared that “general deterrence” called for a prison term. He said it would be unfair to free someone who could afford top lawyers when “poor people who get caught” go to jail for relatively minor crimes.

If Mr. Moon received a suspended sentence, the judge went on, millions of people would believe that “the rich and the powerful go free.”

Judge Goettel said he had received “several thousand letters” in Mr. Moon’s behalf, some from scientists, political leaders and officials of other churches expressing “fear that freedom of religion was being threatened.”

Judge Discounts Fears
“I think these fears are totally unwarranted in this case,” he continued, saying the letters indicated a misunderstanding of the issues. He added, “It is the crime that dictates the sentence more than anything else.”

The case was not limited to tax-fraud charges involving the failure to report income from bank accounts and securities, Judge Goettel said. He stressed that Mr. Moon had also been convicted of a conspiracy involving false documents, perjured testimony and obstruction of justice.

If the failure to report the income had been the only charge, a suspended sentence could be appropriate for Mr. Moon under the circumstances, the judge said. He suggested that the “the cover-up scheme” was more serious than the original offense.

Full story:

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/17/nyregion/moon-is-sentenced-to-18-month-term.html


Newsweek   August 6, 1984
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, 64, checked into his residence for the next 18 months – the federal prison in Danbury, Conn. – to find that he not only had 50 room mates but a new job as well. The convicted tax evader and leader of the Unification Church (which claims more than 2 million followers worldwide) was bunked in the facility’s low-security “camp” area and promptly assigned to KP duty. “He’s doing menial kitchen work, like loading dishwashers, mopping floors and washing tables,” says warden Dennis Luther, who explained that the new inmate’s employment options were limited because he doesn’t speak English. “I’m not worried about conversions,” added the warden. “We don’t allow inmates to be coerced into anything by anybody, whether they’re Protestant, Catholic or whatever.”


New York Times   July 5, 1985

Sun Myung Moon’s scheduled full release from Federal custody is August 20.

On July 4, Mr. Moon reported to Phoenix House, a halfway house in Brooklyn involved in treating drug abuse, where he is to spend nights, except for possible single-night and weekend passes, for the next 46 days as a condition of his release. During the day, Mr. Moon, who is 65 years old, will be free to resume his church duties. …

Mose Durst said, “We feel liberated from the burden of the unjust imprisonment of an innocent man of God. We are sorrowful because our nation, which we love and honor and who celebrates her 209th anniversary this very day, still finds it so difficult to put her most profound ideals into practice.”

Full story:

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/05/nyregion/moon-released-after-11-months-in-a-us-prison.html


When we heard how Father [Sun Myung Moon] was keeping church money in his name, the USA Headquarters warned him that in the USA the government often used the tax laws to imprison enemies that hadn’t broken any other laws. USA Headquarters advised Father not to put the money in his name, and explained the safe and proper way to bank the funds.

Father asked if what he was doing was illegal. The answer was: No, it’s not illegal, but can be twisted by the government to persecute Father and the church. Father decided to keep the money in his name.

USA Headquarters hired accounting consultants to advise the church about how to handle the funds. They told Father the same thing as our Headquarters staff had. Father’s response was the same, is it illegal. The answer was the same, “No, but…” Father decided to keep the money in his name.

At the time I didn’t know about this, so when I was asked to do Father’s taxes, I told him that he needed to have it done professionally, because in the USA, tax laws are used to put people in prison when there was no other way to imprison people. The answer came back, via David Kim, that it cost too much to do it professionally. (At the time I thought that the cost was for the accountant. Later I realized that it was to save about $5,000 dollars in taxes.) I still wouldn’t do it, so Joe Tully was recruited.

My opinion is that David Kim was advising Father and that Father was taking his advice. At the time David Kim was Father’s chief advisor in the USA. After David Kim’s advice proved faulty he was put out to pasture doing minor missions and finally sent to UTS.

My experience has been that Father trusted early followers who had proven their loyalty more than younger members, especially when the older members were Korean.

I believe that Father was afraid that the money would somehow be stolen by someone if it was in the name of the Church rather than his name. This has happened in Korea.


At one point Kamiyama got in trouble with Moon and was exiled to Japan to lecture Divine Principle. … Kamiyama got getting dangerously close to full insurrection by pushing his version of Divine Principle – “Our Course” onto all his department staff.

Next, he was exiled to Pantanal and I’m sure that wasn’t a walk in the park, either. I suspect Kamiyama has been raked over the coals. Interestingly, he is featured in that piece on Pantanal on the Catholic site, “The Tablet” December 16, 2000:

“They gave me an aerial photo of the place, without my asking, and showed me their accounts, again without my asking. The relevance of this is that the Moonies have been accused of money laundering, drug-trafficking and arms-trading. Such allegations may be a hysterical over-reaction. On the other hand, what on earth are the Moonies doing with huge tracts of land in the middle of nowhere?

All the money for this project comes from voluntary donations, said Takeru Kamiyama, who is in charge of Puerto Leda, and he showed me the list of offerings for that year, mostly in the range of $5,000 dollars and some more than $50,000 dollars. The total came to more than $1 million. Will it be enough for what he wants to do here? When I need more I can ask for more; that is not a problem. He told me it all came from Japanese Moonie missionaries or church leaders. That’s strange, I said, how do missionaries come to earn so much money to donate in a single year to a single project? He said they asked their wives and children to contribute, and some had businesses, and of course they all had their salaries. So the church pays them salaries, which they pay back in the form of donations, he said.

The land at Puerto Leda amounts to 80,000 hectares, but of course the aerial photo only showed the immediate vicinity of the river, where the Moonies (13 Japanese, only one of whom spoke Spanish) were now constructing a living base…

… From the outside balcony, my hosts pointed out some crocodiles swimming in the river, black dots from where we were. It was all very impressive, this taming of the wilderness, and the Moonies were beginning to relax. I understand that Reverend Moon has been imprisoned in the United States, I ventured. He knows all about that, said Mr Sano of his colleague, Mr Kamiyama. He was in prison with him.

How interesting, I said. You must be very close to Reverend Moon. Were you his only colleague to be imprisoned with him? Yes, he said, and before I came here I was president of the Church in Japan.

I was impressed. You are obviously a very important person in the movement, I said. (Later a Moonie pastor from Guyana confirmed to me that Mr Kamiyama was one of the most senior Church members in the world, but now taking a much more humble position. …)

I asked many questions about that fascinating moment in the Reverend Moon’s history. It was one of six imprisonments, they told me, in various countries, and the excuse for this pure political persecution, they told me, had been that Mr Kamiyama had brought $2 million into the United States and opened an account in the name of Reverend Moon. I should have put in the name of the Church. It was a small mistake, he said. As a result Reverend Moon was accused of evading $7,000 in taxes. Mr Kamiyama confided: I don’t like politicians. They are very complicated. They change their minds very quickly.”

I heard about that directly from Tom Boutte, the USA UC controller, who was privy to the affair. He told me that Kamiyama rejected Neil Salonen’s advice to open the account in the church’s name to avoid legal problems later. Kamiyama insisted Japanese members would be happier sending money “to Father”. Boutte said in his view, Kamiyama had no respect for American law and custom, and that’s why Moon ended up in Danbury prison. I believe it. And I further believe Moon knew it, too. He was mighty pissed off with Kamiyama.


Frederick Sontag – Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church (1977)
“As this book went to the publisher, these fears were confirmed by the arrest of the church’s leaders in Korea on charges of income-tax evasion.”
 (page 199)

April 1978 newspaper report:

“Founder of Unification Church better known in Korea as owner of weapons factories”

From Peter Hazelhurst in Seoul and Diana Patt in Washington

“… While there is no absolute proof of Mr Bo Hi Pak’s connexion with the KCIA in the past, most government servants and army officers are committed to cooperate with the agency.

In 1974 the Korean Government shunned ties with the Unification Church after a furore erupted in the United States over Mr Moon’s hold over young American converts.

As proof of the Korean Government displeasure, the Il-hwa Ginseng Company was raided for tax evasion in February, 1977.

Observers in the United States who believe there is still a strong link between the Government and the Unification Church argue that although corporate officers of Mr Moon’s ginseng tea company had been prosecuted for illegal transfer of funds to a tax-exempt organization, the fines in Korea were not substantial enough to be punitive.”


Tax evasion at Il-hwa Ginseng Company.
At least one executive was jailed for that crime; probably Moon should have gone to jail, but a member took the rap for him. It may have been Nansook Hong’s father, Sung-pyo Hong; he was the founder of Il-hwa. He and his wife were among the 36 couples. They both later left the UC, as did Nansook and her brother.


Guilty Moon. Law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. It failed.


▲ Sun Myung Moon and Takeru Kamiyama in Danbury prison.

Moon used money in his attempt to fight the facts that resulted in the two men being jailed. Here is what he did:

Extract from transcript of PBS
 Frontline: The Resurrection of Reverend Moon

Broadcast January 21, 1992
Eric Nadler, reporter. Written and produced by Rory O’Connor.

Narrator: Moon ultimately went to the top in his effort to clear his name seeking a presidential pardon for his crimes.
Narrator: The point man was Max Hugel, a former Reagan campaign official and one-time deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in charge of covert operations.
Hugel: “It is so important to have a superb intelligence agency.”
Narrator: Hugel was forced to leave the agency in the wake of a stock scandal.

(Soundtrack) PRESS CONFERENCE: Reporter off camera: “Can you tell us why you’re not choosing to stay on and fight?”

Narrator: Hugel later went into business with Jonathan Park, the son of Bo Hi Pak.

ATLANTIC VIDEO DEMO REEL: Announcer: “Through two huge sound locks are the best outfitted tele-production studios in the region.”
Narrator: Hugel worked with Park to expand Moon’s electronic media empire, while also brokering contacts between Bo Hi Pak and Vice President George Bush.
Narrator: In this April, 1988 memo to Unification Church member Marc Lee, Hugel offers to arrange for Pak to have his picture taken with the Vice President at a cost of $50,000. Hugel also promises to try to get Bush to write to Pak. Two months later, Bush did write to Pak, and told him, “I hope we can meet again soon.” Did they discuss a pardon during their meeting? Neither President Bush nor Bo Hi Pak would comment to FRONTLINE.
Narrator: Later in 1988, Hugel also recruited the law firm of one of Ronald Reagan’s best friends to assist in Moon’s pardon effort, former Senator Paul Laxalt.

(Soundtrack) Ronald Reagan: “The friend who understands you creates you, a wise man once said. Paul created because he always understood and for that I am and shall always be grateful.”

NarratorLaxalt’s law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. According to billings submitted by the lawyers, Laxalt was directly involved in the pardon effort. This petition for executive clemency was delivered to the Justice Department, accompanied by letters from Senator Orrin Hatch, publisher William Rusher, and civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy endorsing the pardon.

NarratorThe Washington Times also became involved in the pardon campaign. First, Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote a “letter from the editor.”

Cheshire: “It was not really a letter to the editor, it was a letter to President Reagan urging President Reagan to grant Reverend Moon a presidential pardon.”
Narrator: Later, The Times ran this article examining Reagan’s record on pardons. After it appeared, Laxalt’s partner, Paul Perito, became alarmed. Perito warned Bo Hi Pak that “if a case can be made…that the Church allegedly controls and dictates the activities of organizations such as The Washington Times…this will affect our credibility and could materially damage our prodigious efforts.”

(Soundtrack) Off-Camera Female Reporter: “Any last thoughts for us, President and Mrs. Reagan, on your way out?”

Narrator: Ronald Reagan never pardoned Sun Myung Moon. Moon’s pardon application is still pending before the Bush Administration. Max Hugel, Paul Laxalt, and Paul Perito all refused to comment. Ronald Reagan also declined to comment.

VIDEO: The Resurrection of Reverend Moon


From Ronald Reagan’s Diary:

Monday December 24, 1984
“Senator Orrin Hatch is after me to grant clemency to the Rev. Moon. I’ve explored this & find I just can’t. I have, however, taken action to see if I can grant him a furlough over New Years. It seems that day is the holiest in that religion.”

Orrin Hatch was a well-known Mormon.

Ronald Reagan Diaries: http://wonkette.com/263737/reagan-diary-lets-bust-rev-moon-out-of-prison-for-new-years


Moon did get a furlough from prison in March of 1985, before his final release – and what did he do with that time? He crowned himself “Emperor of the Universe!”

Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe

Nansook Hong interviewed for the documentary: “Moon crowned himself as the Emperor of the Universe. It was quite odd. Pictures were forbidden. Nobody could take pictures, because it had to be an absolute secret. At that point he became God, in his eyes.”


June 6, 2010
UTS Professor Oh Yong-taek spoke about the time of Danbury.

Tim Elder translated:
“Particularly when Father was in Danbury in 1985, on March 16th by the lunar calendar, Father was given a temporary furlough out of Danbury. And he came out of Danbury briefly, it was a very brief time. Father and Mother met, they then put on robes at that point and they put on crowns and they held a coronation ceremony at that point.”


Moon admitted his guilt in court in 1955; started two year jail sentence

In 1955 Moon asked his disciples to raise money to get him out of jail and to purchase a FAKE “certificate of innocence.” He was unable to use the same tactics in the United States in the 1980s.


‘Emperor of the Universe’ information in Japanese:

これが『統一教会』の秘部だ  –  世界日報事件で『追放』された側の告発

副島嘉和
そえじまよしかず  
(「インフォメ一ション」編集発行人)

井上博明
いのうえひろあき
  (「インフォメ一ション」営業担当)


Where did Moon get all that money from?

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members

A huge FFWPU scam in Japan is revealed

FFWPU / UC of Japan used members for profit, not religious purposes

Suicide of Moon money mule in Uruguay



5. The Moon Organization Academic Network (1991)

Covert Action Information Bulletin  Number 38 – Fall 1991
pages 22-27

https://covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CAIB38-1991-3.pdf

Rev. Moon Goes to College

by Daniel Junas

Daniel Junas is a researcher living In Seattle, Washington.

“The policy-makers in the background are the professors. Even though they represent the cultural field, more than anything we need scholars in the scientific fields, in the political, cultural, and economic fields.”1 Rev. Moon


On Labor Day weekend in 1984, 240 academics from 46 countries gathered in Washington D.C. under the auspices of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS), a front organization of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The Washington Post portrayed this remarkable scholarly conference as part of an expensive effort by Moon to cleanse his tainted image.2 Ever since Moon achieved notoriety in the 1970s, the media have tended to portray him as a kooky cult leader whose aspirations for political power are not to be taken seriously.

By interpreting the conference and the Moon Organization’s3 efforts to court academia simply as a PR ploy, the Post (which, is the journalistic rival of the Moon-funded Washington Times) underestimated the sophistication of Moon’s strategy. Since its inception, Moon has provided an important link between academia, intelligence agencies, and the political Right. Gaining legitimacy and influence within the academic establishment and having access to its resources have long been central to Moon’s mission.

In 1954, when the Rev. Moon founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul, he immediately began proselytizing on college campuses.4 His first political mission in Japan was in 1960 during the massive student-led protests objecting to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. From that point, with the backing of certain elements of the Japanese Right, Moon worked to build a right-wing student movement. For the next decade and a half, the Moon Organization used this network to respond to similar threats to U.S. foreign policy objectives emanating from student-led protests in South Korea and the United States.

Moon’s academic operations reflect both his extensive Japanese backing and his alliance with the US. foreign policy establishment, including a longstanding and complex relationship with the CIA and its South Korean offspring, the KCIA. The International Cultural Foundation (ICF), the umbrella for Moon’s various academic fronts, was founded in Japan in 1968. The ICF’s political arm, the Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA) was founded five years later, and one of its first projects was a study of Japanese national goals. But PWPA also provided Moon, in collaboration with ex-CIA official Ray Cline, with a vehicle to extend Moon operations into Africa, and to exhort African academics to support the U.S. intelligence community.

The Moon Organization must be seen, therefore, not as an independent entity, but as an extension of the national security state and as a mechanism for linking its proponents around the world. Moon’s academic connections are inextricably linked to this agenda, and despite the religions trappings, Moon on campus is the political and moral equivalent of the CIA on campus.


Japanese protest U.S.-Japan treaty. Banner reads: Reject the Road to War! Down With Japanese Imperialism! Let’s Fight Together! 1988.


Japanese Origins

In 1955, one year after its founding in South Korea, Moon’s church was rocked by a sex scandal, prompting Moon to seek powerful allies.5 Moon began recruiting South Korean military officers, who later provided important links between the Moon Organization and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Meanwhile, in 1958, Moon’s first missionary travelled to Japan, where he later made contact with Ryoichi Sasakawa, a powerful “godfather” of the Japanese Right.6 Before World War II, Sasakawa had been a prominent fascist organizer; after the war, he was imprisoned by the U.S. Occupation authorities as a suspected Class A war criminal. While in Sugamo Prison, he struck an alliance with two other war crimes suspects—his old comrade-in-arms Yoshio Kodama, and Nobutsuke Kishi, who served in Prime Minister Tojo’s wartime cabinet.

In December 1948, this trio was released without trial, leading many to believe that a deal had been struck with the U.S. Occupation authorities.7 Indeed, soon after his release, Kodama went to work for U.S. intelligence and in 1958 he was placed on the CIA’s payroll.8

When Kishi was elected Prime Minister in 1957, his top priority was negotiating a revised Security Treaty with the U.S. Approved by the Japanese Diet under duress in 1951 at the end of the Occupation, this agreement seriously undermined Japanese sovereignty. Kishi, a close ally of the U.S., sought to remove only the most blatantly objectionable provisions, such as permitting the U.S. to intervene in domestic disturbances at the invitation of the Japanese government. He anticipated stiff resistance to the agreement, however, from the communist-dominated Japanese student movement, which, along with a majority of the Japanese people, objected to the suspected presence of nuclear weapons at U.S. bases in Japan, and to the rearmament of Japan then taking place under the political cover of the treaty. In preparation, Kishi called on his ally Kodama to assemble a repressive force consisting of rightists and yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicates.

In 1960, when Kishi rammed the treaty through the Diet, enormous street demonstrations erupted. Despite Kishi’s preparations, President Eisenhower was forced to cancel a visit to Tokyo commemorating the passage of the treaty and Kishi stepped down as Prime Minister.10 The treaty, however, remained and sealed an economic as well as military alliance.

Building the Student Right

The treaty struggle, which marked a watershed in the U.S.-Japan relationship, represents the true founding moment of the Moon Organization as a political entity. Moon’s first missionary had founded the Japanese Unification Church—known as Genri Undo—on the eve of the treaty struggle, and by some accounts, Moon himself served as a go-between competing right-wing factions during preparations for the demonstrations.11 In 1960, Moon also adopted anti-communism,12 as he adjusted his ideology to suit the political needs of his new Japanese allies.

In the wake of the treaty struggle, Kishi and Sasakawa were working together to organize numerous student organizations.13 These efforts followed the outlines of a comprehensive strategy devised by right-wing academic Juitsu Kitaoka to build a right-wing student movement and rid Japanese campuses of Marxist influences.14 Genri Undo became an essential part of this strategy. A decisive moment came in late 1962, when Osami Kuboki, a leader in Kishi/Sasakawa student fronts, apparently engineered the conversion of 50 leaders of a Buddhist sect to Genri Undo.15


1. “Investigation of Korean-American Relations, Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations” (hereafter IKAR), U.S. House of Representatives, October 31, 1978; Appendix, Vol. II, p.1049.

2. Isikoff, Michael, Washington Post, “Moon Spends Millions to Boost image,” September 17, 1984, p. A1.

3. “Although there is no entity named the ‘Moon Organization,’” according to the investigation by IKAR, “the numerous churches, businesses, committees, foundations, and other groups associated with Sun Myung Moon, emerged as parts of what is essentially one worldwide organization under the centralized organization and control of Moon… The subcommittee came to view them as one unit and refers to them in the aggregate as the Moon Organization.” IKAR. op. cit., p. 313.

4. IKAR Appendix, Volume II; op. cit., p. 1293.

5. op. cit., IKAR, Appendix,  p. 1170.

6. John Roberts, “Happiness Ginseng from Earth-Conquering Moonies,” Far Eastern Economic Review, June 23, 1978, pp. 57-60.

7. This pattern was a familiar one in the wake of World War II. Placing its highest priority on eliminating anti-fascist resistance movements—often dominated by left and communist elements—U.S. postwar planners threw their support behind the same fascist leaders they had so recently fought. In Italy, Germany and France, as well as in Japan, war criminals, fascists, nazis, and collaborators were recruited to battle the “international communist menace” and support U.S. interests.

8. The single best source on the postwar careers of Sasakawa, Kodama, and Kishi is David E. Kaplan and Alec Dobro, Yakuza (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 63-69 and 78-83.

9. Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 201-2. See also: George R. Packard, III, Protest in Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1966).

10. Kaplan and Dubro, op. cit., pp. 83-7.

11. Roberts op. cit.

12. IKAR Appendix, Volume II; op. cit., p. 1030.

13. Hayahi Masayuki, “OISCA,” AMPO, Vol. 19, No.1, p. 2, et seq.

14. Ivan I. Morris, Nationalism and the Right Wing in Japan: A Study of Post-War Trends (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 285-88

15. Jeffrey M. Bale, “‘Privatizing’ Covert Action: The Case of the Unification Church,” Lobster (Hull, UK), #21.



▲ Sen. Strum Thurmond (R-S.C.), left, Juanita Castro (Fidel Castro’s sister), and Ryoichi Sasakawa, then-president of the World Anti-Communist League, after a WACL rally In Tokyo.

Also in 1962 Moon’s primary student front, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), was founded.16 Kitaoka subsequently became a key official in Moon’s Japanese operations, while Kishi became a front man and Sasakawa a behind-the-scenes patron.17 Despite Moon’s Korean origins and his links to the South Korean military and intelligence, he essentially became a tool of his Japanese backers.18

Since these figures were closely allied with the United States, it seems likely—despite lack of hard evidence—that the CIA had a hand in developing the Unification Church. Kodama, who was also active in right-wing student politics, was both a CIA asset and an ally of Kishi and Sasakawa. Dampening the influence of the Japanese Left was part of the CIA’s mission in Japan at that time. Then Japan-based CIA officer Donald Gregg was part of these efforts.19

Further evidence that Moon was linked to the CIA can be found in South Korea. In 1961, a CIA-backed coup brought to power that nation’s first pro-Japanese government since the end of World War II.20 The architect of the coup, Kim Jong-Pil, established the CIA-founded21 Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) shortly thereafter. Kim also turned to the Japanese as a source of political funds. Kodama provided a back channel and Kishi masterminded the negotiations, which aimed to normalize relations between former enemies Korea and Japan.22 At the same time, Kim was also establishing close ties with the Unification Church.23

When, at the urging of the U.S., Japan and South Korea finally normalized relations in 1965, student-led protests erupted in South Korea. The following year the South Korean chapter of CARP was founded.24

The new relationship between South Korea and Japan was also closely linked to the then-escalating Vietnam War. President Johnson had persuaded South Korea to provide troops to the war effort, while Japan began assuming part of the U.S.’s foreign aid burden for South Korea, leading to the creation of a strategic U.S.-Japan-South Korea triangle.25

This arrangement dovetailed with Kishi’s agenda. As eminence grise of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he controlled Japan’s foreign aid programs, and he used his leverage to make South Korea his economic “territory.”26 At the same time, the Vietnam War proved extremely lucrative to Kishi’s corporate allies, who helped supply the war effort.27

Once again, however, this strategy was threatened by a student-led protest movement, this time in the US. And once again, the Moon Organization sought to build a right-wing student movement as a counterweight to the Left.

Counteracting the Student Left

Although Moon had begun sending his missionaries to the U.S. and a smattering of other locales in 1959, their influence and numbers were very limited. In 1965, however, he prepared for expansion by touring the world and dedicating holy grounds throughout the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia. At the same time, Moon was undertaking an alliance with the nascent World Anti-Communist League—an international conglomeration of hardline conservatives, fascists and anti-semites—enabling him to establish links with rightists in the U.S. and around the world.28 WACL grew out of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, which had been founded by Taiwan and South Korea in 1954. Two key behind-the-scenes players in WACL were Moon’s patron Sasakawa, and Ray Cline, who was CIA chief of station in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962 when plans were laid for WACL, and who was later associated with the Moon Organization as well.


16. Op. cit., IKAR, Appendix, Vol. II, p. 1297.

17. Roberts, op. cit.

18. For a more detailed investigation see: Daniel Junas, “Rising Moon: The Unification Church’s Japan Connection” (Institute for Global Security Studies, Seattle, 1989).

19. Gregg served in Japan from 1953-63. Steve McGuire, CounterSpy, December 1976, p. 34. He was Vice President George Bush’s national security adviser and an important player in the Iran-contra affair. Now U.S. ambassador to South Korea, he is under investigation by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh for his alleged role in the 1980 “October Surprise.”

20. From before World War I to 1945, Japan had occupied Korea and imposed brutal military dictatorship during which even speaking the Korean language was a capital crime. Enmity of Koreans for Japan ran deep, as did Japanese prejudice against Koreans. U.S. political, economic, and military domination of the region, as well as the convergence of interests among elites, was even stronger than the animosity.

21. “It was the U.S. CIA which helped to set up the KCIA, thereby providing to the diffuse authoritarianism of the Rhee regime (1948-1960) an organizational weapon which has kept Park in power through 18 years of Korean dissent and upheaval.” (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, June 1977, Vol. 9, Number II, p. 2.)

22. Joungwon Kim, Divided Korea: Politics of Development, 1945-1972 (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1975), p. 241; Takano Hajime, “Kishi: Scavenger in the Shadows, Kingpin of the Japanese Right,” AMPO. Vol. 1, p. 18.

23. IKAR, op. cit., pp. 354-5.

24. IKAR, op. cit., Appendix, Vol. II, p. 1297.

25. IKAR, op. cit., p. 26.

26. Hajime, op. cit., p. 17.

27. Jon Halliday and Gavan McCormack, Japanese Imperialism Today(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 107-8, and Hajime, op. cit.

28. On Sasakawa and WACL, see: Roberts, op. cit.; also Roberts, “Ryoichi Sasakawa: Nippon’s right-wing muscleman,” Insight, April 1978, p. 8, et seq. On Cline and WACL, see: Jon Lee Anderson and Scott Anderson, Inside the League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 55.


Yoshio Kodama, early Moon ally

The Moon Organization‘s involvement with WACL was closely linked to its student and academic operations. Kitaoka was a member of the Japanese delegation at WACL’s founding conference in Taiwan.29 Also in 1967, a secret meeting was held to plan the Japanese chapter of WACL, the International Federation for Victory Over Communism (IFVOC). The participants included Kodama, Sasakawa, Moon and Kuboki, who became a key official of the IFVOC and the International Cultural Foundation (ICF) (the umbrella for Moon’s various academic fronts), which were both founded in Japan in 1968.30

A similar leadership pattern prevailed in the U.S., where the IFVOC was known as the Freedom Leadership Foundation (FLF). When the U.S. WACL chapter, the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF), was founded in 1970, FLF leader Neil Salonen held a seat on the board, and when ICF was incorporated in New York in 1973, Salonen became its president.31

The FLF had been formed in August 1969, the month after President Nixon announced his Nixon Doctrine.32 Student-led protests—along with the financial cost of the war—had forced Nixon to retrench the United States’s commitment to Asia. According to his new policy, Asians would have to fight their own wars, although the U.S. would continue to provide material support. FLF’s response was to lobby for the hawk position on Vietnam, and to work to undermine the student anti-war movement on college campuses.


“Father [Moon] said that college campuses are a major battlefield, and if we win there we will definitely win America.”


Such efforts were welcomed by the Nixon White House, which by 1970 was providing money to Moon operatives from a secret slush fund to support student activities.33 FLF continued building a right-wing student movement throughout the early 1970s, when Moon was also encouraging his followers to make friends in the FBI and CIA.34

In the 1970s Moon’s designs were frustrated by the storm of negative publicity that battered his cult. But when the Reagan administration came to power, both WACL and the Moon Organization became partners in the aggressive foreign and military policy known as the Reagan Doctrine, which sought to roll back the Soviet empire, and support such anti-communist “freedom fighters” as the Nicaraguan contras35 and UNITA in Angola.

Meanwhile, the U.S. branch of CARP, which Moon had founded in 1973, moved swiftly to counteract the student Left. In the early 1980s, CARP conducted a smear campaign against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, accusing it of “Marxist ties.”36 More importantly, CARP aided the FBI’s illegal investigation of CISPES by spying on the solidarity organization and providing information on CISPES’ campus activities to the Bureau.37 In 1980, Moon also created his transnational political front, CAUSA.

Creating the New World Culture

Counteracting the student left is only one side of Moon’s academic intrigue. The other is gaining access to professors and their research, winning them over to Moon’s political agenda, and using them to influence policy. The patina of legitimacy provided by these academic connections also provides a useful by-product to the Moon Organization.

One of the earliest and most important ICF fronts was the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS), which has sponsored lavish, all-expense-paid academic conferences annually since 1972.38 These conferences, however, are not simply benign gatherings devoted to interdisciplinary discussions. Nor are the lavish grants and awards Moon dispenses to favored academics, or the opportunity to be published by his Paragon House press, merely impartial efforts to advance knowledge and promote international cooperation.39 Moon is using these academics in pursuit of his ultimate goal: the creation of a global, transnational, theocratic state to be controlled by Moon and his devotees.


29. “Proceedings: The First Conference of the World Anti-Communist League,” September 25-29, 1967, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China, p. 4.

30. Anderson and Anderson, op. cit., p. 69; IKAR op. cit., p. 321.

31. Anderson and Anderson,op. cit., p. 85; IKAR, ibid.

32. IKAR op. cit., Appendix, Vol. II, p. 1296.

33. Allen Tate Wood, Moonstruck (New York: William Morrow, 1979), p. 81 et seq.

34. Allen Tate Wood, “Ex-Members Against Moon,” Press Conference, Washington, D.C., November 15, 1979, p. 3.

35. CAUSA, created in 1980, was Moon’s main vehicle for political and material support for the contras. (See CAIB, Number 22, pp. 31-33)

36. Leaflet, undated, CARP, Seattle, Washington.

37. Washington Post, Associated Press, “Moon Group Told FBI About Activists,” April 23, 1988.

38. Russ Bellant, “Rev. Moon’s Search for Scholars,” Texas Observer, January 24, 1986, pp. 11-12.

39. Karl Pribram, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, who is on the board of both Paragon House and PWPA received a $50,000 grant to study “the relationship between modern warfare and the establishment of social dominance hierarchies.” Eugene Wigner, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics, was given an ICF Founder’s (i.e. Rev. Moon’s) Award of $200,000.


In a 1973 speech to his closest followers,40 Moon laid out the special role he envisioned for academics. ICUS, he said, was to develop a philosophy, based on his own religious teachings, known as “Unification Thought,” which would “win over any ideology or ism in the world.”41 Speaking to the 14th annual ICUS conference in 1985 in Houston, Moon himself asked the attending scientists and philosophers to “create the new world culture which must be established at any cost.”42 The professors “were charged… with finding a new basis to ‘guide’ cultural transformation, [as well as developing] ways for ICUS to increase its campus influence.”43 When an ICUS official was asked how the Houston conference’s work would be taken advantage of, he said “we have our spies in each of the committees.”44 The Moon Organization apparently uses ICUS to cast a wide net, and then determines which academics it wishes to court.

At a July 1990 symposium in Tokyo, for instance, lectures on Unification Thought were presented to six chairmen and former chairmen of ICUS committees, as well as to other scholars who attended previous symposia.45

Moon’s Academy

While ICUS concerns itself with scientific, philosophical and cultural issues, the Professors World Peace Academy is the division of ICF most directly connected to the Moon Organization’s political objectives. As Moon made clear to his own followers, he sought to use professors “to direct the world policies toward the same goals.”46

Like the IFVOC and CARP, PWPA was grounded in the U.S.-Japan-South Korea triangle. Initiated in Seoul, one of its first ventures was its “National Goals project for the study of Japan’s strategy in the 1980s.”47 At the same time, PWPA was also making plans for the United States. In May 1974 an internal Moon Organization publication reported:

Father [Moon] wants to mobilize 20 or 30 of the Korean professors to influence American academia, both professors and students. Because of this, Father stressed the importance of building up CARP … to serve as the foundation for their work when they arrive. Father said that college campuses are a major battlefield, and if we win there we will definitely win America.48

The U.S. Division of PWPA was established in 1979 and was headed by Morton Kaplan, a professor of International Relations and director of the conservative Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Kaplan, who has called Moon the greatest religious figure of all time,49 also chaired ICUS’s Change and Development Committee, and four ICUS meetings, from 1980 to 1983.50 Kaplan is also associated with Moon’s D.C.-based think tank, the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy.51

One of PWPA’s projects was forging a relationship with the government of South Africa, which was the topic of PWPA’s first U.S. conference in May 1979 held in New York. Then in June 1981 in Athens, Greece, Morton Kaplan moderated a small, private conference convened by PWPA for South African government officials and representatives of all South African racial groups –excluding, of course, the then-outlawed African National Congress. According to a U.S. State Department cable, South Africans attending the session included the Chief Constitutional Planner in the office of the Prime Minister, other government representatives, officials of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha, and various social and political leaders. A public controversy erupted in Athens when the Unification Church’s sponsorship of the conference was revealed. One of the participants said afterward that, “it was extremely unfortunate that the publicity surrounding the Moonie connection had cast a shadow on what had been extremely useful and productive conversations on South Africa’s future constitutional arrangements.”52

At the same time PWPA was establishing a secret relationship with South Africa, it was also cultivating African academics. In November 1981 the Moon Organization flew academics from 20 African nations, along with several African academics living in the U.S., to an ICUS conference in South Korea. During this same period, PWPA also founded its African branch. Since PWPA sought to attract a large African following, it downplayed its ties to South Africa.53 PWPA apparently felt no compunction, however, about revealing its support for U.S. foreign policy. Addressing the U.S. PWPA gathering in 1981, former CIA official Ray Cline said, “I’m annoyed at you, academics—you have to give more support to the intelligence community.” 54

When some of the Africans present said it would taint their credibility in Africa to be associated with the CIA, Cline replied that “it’s only people who are not allied with the U.S. who talk like that.”55

Cline currently serves on the Executive Advisory Board of The World & I, a telephone-book sized glossy magazine published by Moon’s News World Communications. The magazine’s Editor and Publisher is Morton Kaplan, and its Advisory Boards are composed of over 100 scholars from nearly as many nations, including national representatives of Professors World Peace Academy chapters, U.S. members include Richard Rubenstein (Florida State University), Nicholas Kittrie (American University), S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia), Lee Congdon (James Madison University), and Baroness Garnett Stackelberg (unaffiliated).

Penetrating the Communist World

One of the apparent purposes of PWPA is to provide the leaders of the Moon Organization with information and analysis about international political developments. Thus while the Moon Organization was an active partner in the Reagan Doctrine, seeking to roll back the Soviet empire, PWPA was preparing for the ultimate success of this policy. In August 1985, just five months after Gorbachev had taken power, PWPA held a conference in Geneva, Switzerland on “The Fall of the Soviet Empire: Prospects for Transition to a Post-Soviet World.”57

When change swept through Eastern Europe in 1989, the Moon Organization moved with alacrity. Rev. Chung-Hwan Kwak, a top Moon aide and an ICF official, travelled through Eastern Europe in October 1989 to make contacts among professors and religious leaders.58 He also organized an Introductory Seminar on the Unification Movement, which was held in December 1989 in Poland and attracted 49 scholars and religious leaders from Poland, the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany.59

PWPA soon established a foothold in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. PWPA chapters were officially registered in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the U.S.S.R.; a PWPA office was opened in Hungary; and PWPA meetings were held in all those countries and in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.60 In September 1990, PWPA held an international meeting in Poland on “The Historical Dimension of Transformation in Eastern Europe.”61 At the same time, the Unification Church began bringing Soviet students to the U.S. under the auspices of both its International Leadership Conference and CARP.62

Given Moon’s vigorous support for the Reagan Doctrine, it appears likely that these operations reflect a second stage in the implementation of that Doctrine. Now that political, social, cultural, and economic changes are sweeping through the formerly communist bloc nations, the Moon Organization is clearly using its academic fronts to influence the direction of those changes, just as it did previously in Japan, South Korea, the United States, Africa and elsewhere. And given the Moon Organization’s longstanding alliance with the CIA, it also appears likely that these operations are being undertaken in conjunction with the Agency. Moon’s reach, stretched with the help of his allies in the national security state, is becoming global.


40. IKAR, op. cit., p. 387.

41. IKAR, op. cit., Appendix, Vol. II, p. 1047.

42. Bellant, op. cit., p. 11.

43. Ibid.

44. Op. cit., p. 12.

45. Paul J. Perry, “ICUS Professors Discuss Unification Thought,” Unification News, September 1990, p. 17.

46. IKAR, op. cit., Appendix, Vol. II, p. 1049.

47. International Cultural Foundation brochure, undated, c. 1975. op. cit., Roberts, p. 59.

48. IKAR, op. cit., Appendix, Vol. II, p. 1291.

49. Bellant, op. cit., p. 11. Salonen became PWPA-USA head this summer.

50. Department of State Telegram, R 1013422, August 1980, From Secretary of State to: American Consulate, Johannesburg, Subject: Professors World Peace Academy.

51. Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy brochure, undated, c. 1983-84.

52. Department of State Telegram, R151510Z, June 1981, from: American Embassy, Pretoria, to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., Subject: South Africa, Unification Church Connection Alleged to Athens Conference on South African Politics.

53. “Moonies over Africa,” Africa Now, January 1983, p. 64, et seq.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Masthead, The World & I, April 1991, p. 3.

57. Orbis, Spring 1989, pp. 305-6; Book Review of The Soviet Union and the Challenge of the Future, Alexander Stromas and Morton A. Kaplan (no author listed for review).

58. Gordon L. Anderson, “Teaching Unificationism in Poland,” Unification News, January 1990, p. 5.

59. Ibid.

60. Gordon L. Anderson, “Bringing Unificationism to Eastern Europe, Unification News, April 1990; p. 14; Gordon L. Anderson, “PWPA Opens a Chapter in Moscow,” Unification News, May 1990, p. 6s.

61. Gordon L. Anderson, “Building Unity in Eastern Europe,” Unification News, February 1991, p. 12.

62. Jack Corley, “Soviet Student International Leadership Conference,” Unification News, October 1990, p. 12; Felicity Barringer,“New Flock for Moon Church: The Changing Soviet Student,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1990 p. 1.

“The CARP movement is attracting thousands of students from all over the country,” crowed the July 1991 Unification News. “The CARP staff members are working day and night just to keep up with the demand for lectures and information. The same is true of the Unification Church leaders and the PWPA office.” (pp. 23, 35.)


Introduction to:
Moon Rising: The History and Politics of the Unification Church
by Daniel Junas



6.

THE MOONIES

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul         Napa Sentinel     March-April 3, 1992

1. Introduction
2. How they recruit the young people
3. What Rev. Moon teaches the young
4. Seeking to influence the media
5. Who is behind the movement
6. Influential friends in high places
7. Young girl wins back her will

 

3. What Rev. Moon teaches the young

To best understand the Moonies, one must look at their doctrine. The Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon warns Christians that they will be swept away. In his Divine Principle, the foundation of his teachings, Rev. Moon claims that Christians today will be like the priests and rabbis of Jesus’ day, the “first to persecute the Messiah”. He says that Christians will cling to their archaic beliefs and will be blind to the truths of the new age. “Innumerable Christians of today are dashing on the way which they think will lead them to the Kingdom of Heaven. Nevertheless, the road is apt to lead them into hell.” He says, Christians must accept the revelations within the Divine Principle and the Lord of the Second Advent or be damned.

Moon leaves no room in his philosophy for doubt about where he and Korea stand in the eyes of God. Moon claims he is the new Messiah and Korea is God’s chosen nation. “This is the culmination of God’s 6000 year quest to restore man from the fall of Adam.” Moon tells his followers and captives that God revealed this to him when he was a young man. He states, “God said, ‘You are the son I have been seeking, the one who can begin my eternal history’.”

Moon’s Divine Principle teaches that man can be restored to original goodness by restoring Adam, Eve, and three archangels. “Adam’s fall resulted from Eve’s being seduced by the archangel Lucifer, who was jealous because God gave Eve to Adam instead of to him.” He claims that [the positions of] Adam, Eve and the archangels are occupied by persons, nations and movements identified by Moon. “Ultimately, Adam must dominate after successfully going through three stages: formation, growth, and perfection. If Eve or an archangel is at a higher stage than Adam, they must help restore Adam to perfection so he can assume his rightful role in the unified system of things.

Moon sees himself as the Perfect Adam, so he must be obeyed without question. He claims that Jesus was the most important Adam between the original one and Moon, attaining spiritual perfection but a “flawed” Messiah. Moon is the reincarnation of Jesus only more perfect.

Moon teaches his followers and captives that Jesus’ mission was foredoomed by John the Baptist, who spent his time baptizing people instead of becoming Jesus’ obedient disciple for influencing the politics of the Herod regime, and even killing the enemies of Christ. Though Christian beliefs portrays the Virgin birth, Moon teaches that Jesus was a child of adultery, not immaculate conception. “Mary was impregnated by Zachariah (John the Baptist’s father). Jesus had an unhappy home life because Joseph was jealous of Zachariah and resented Jesus.”

Moon also states, “When Jesus grew up he failed as a leader because he was unable to love his disciples enough to motivate them to kill for him or die in his place.” Moon says that his love is not weak, like he portrays Jesus. “Since Jesus was incapable of perfect love, owing to his unwholesome upbringing, he was also unable to marry as intended by God,” Moon said. “The reason why Jesus died was because he couldn’t have a bride. Because there was no preparation of a bride to receive Jesus, that was the cause of his death.”

Moon sees Christian churches as furthering Satan’s power. “Israel was God’s chosen nation, but the Jews, falling prey to Satan’s power, rejected Jesus. God punished them with centuries of suffering, and finally cleansed them by killing six million in World War II. But the Jews had missed their chance. God had to find a new Messiah and a new Adam nation because it is God’s principle not to use the same people and the same territory twice,” Moon teaches. “Korea was ideally suited for several reasons. It is a peninsula, physically resembling the male sex organ. Like the Italian peninsula, cultures of islands and continents can mingle there to form a unified civilization corresponding to the Roman Empire.”

Moon says that Japan is in the position of Eve. “Being only an island country, it cannot be Adam. It yearns for male-like peninsular Korea on the mainland.” Moon says the Japanese generally are effeminate people who want to be dominated by stronger, manly powers. “But as Eve prevailed over Adam in the Fall, Japan prevailed over Korea in the colonial period. And like Eve in the Fall, Japan became a Satanic power.”

The United States is viewed by Moon as an archangel country. “The archangel America helped the Adam country Korea by sending Christian missionaries, rescuing it from Japanese rule, and stopping the advance of Satan’s Adam, Communist North Korea. America is too arrogant and individualistic, however. It cannot remain the world’s leader, because God has destined America to serve Korea,” Moon teaches. Moon states that the battlefield for the showdown between God and Satan would be Korea. “God’s chosen people would triumph through suffering. America, Japan, and all other nations could be restored by helping Korea’s anti-Communist cause. Only in Korea could the civilizations of East and West be unified. In the end, even North Korea’s Kim Il Sung could be restored if he answered the call to follow the Divine Principle.

Moon was born in North Korea in 1920. He was raised by a Presbyterian in a middle-class family, was a good student, and studied engineering at a [Technical High School associated with Waseda] university in Japan during World War II. He was married in [1945] and divorced in [January 1957]. He was arrested twice by the Communist government [in August 1946 and on February 22,1948] in North Korea for [disturbing the morals of society and] activities as an evangelist and was sentenced to five years in prison [for bigamy] in [April 1948]. He was released [by the prison guards as the] U.S. forces [approached] during the Korean War. He founded his church in 1954.

Moon was reported to be a ritual womanizer. Reportedly, young girls underwent sexual initiation into his cult; he would thus purge them of the Satanic spirits that inhabited Eve and lead them to the Divine Principle. He was jailed for three months in 1955 [during the Ewha Woman’s University sex scandal] South Korean authorities on charges of draft evasion [in court on September 20, Moon admitted to judge Kang that he had falsely raised his age to avoid military service], forgery, pseudo-religion and false imprisonment of a [22-year old female] university coed compelled to adopt his religion. [He was sentenced to two years in jail, but after three months he was suddenly released at night and later declared innocent.]

Moon teaches that lying is necessary when one is doing God’s work, whether selling flowers in the street or testifying under oath. “The truth is what the Son of God says it is. At the Garden of Eden, evil triumphed by deceiving goodness. To restore original perfection, goodness must now deceive evil. Even God lies very often.”

Link to full article:
http://dmc.members.sonic.net/sentinel/1earth4.html



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Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe

Sun Myung Moon and the United Nations

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United States Congressional investigation of Moon’s organization

Gifts of Deceit – Robert Boettcher

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The Resurrection of Reverend Moon

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The six ‘wives’ of Sun Myung Moon

FFWPU human trafficking is despicable