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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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