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Moon immediately set out to win the hearts and minds of the Washington establishment. Friendly links were rapidly established with the various components of the Moral Majority – especially the Mormons: when Moon was jailed for tax evasion his most energetic defenders were Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Congressman George Hansen (Idaho), both Mormons. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority leader, joined in the Moonie chorus that Moon’s imprisonment was a violation of religious liberty. Congressmen and Senators were bombarded with offers of free hospitality at the Washington Hilton. Moonies were soon to be found lobbying away and offering their services in the corridors of power: some of the Moonie ‘sisters’ even gained permanent jobs on Capitol Hill, notably Susan Bergman, who became an assistant to the House Speaker, Carl Albert. Before long various Moonie front organisations had won the willing patronage of numerous conservative Congressmen and Senators – including Robert Michel, the Republican Minority Leader, Barber Conable (now head of the World Bank) and Jesse Helms. The real high point came, however, when President Nixon, warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together.

Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie newspaper, Rising Tide, played a key role in these years in rallying the disparate elements of the American Right into the great crusade which was to culminate in Reagan’s election in 1980. Rising Tide was warmly greeted by Barry Goldwater and its columns featured articles by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the Moonie milieu with his Accuracy in Media movement: among AIM’s patrons were William Simon, the former Treasury Secretary, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate and Reagan confidant, Claire Booth Luce, Jimmy Goldsmith and Richard Mellon-Scaife. Moon now felt confident enough to take on the hated New York Times by launching the New York News World and, in 1982, to take similar aim at the Washington Post by launching the Moonie Washington Times. The Washington Times alone loses $50 million a year and is the final destination of a large chunk of Moonie funds.

At this point disaster struck, in the shape of the Congressional Sub-Committee on Korean-American Relations, chaired by the liberal Minnesota Congressman, Donald Fraser. The Moonies have never fully recovered from the ‘Koreagate’ revelations that followed. Day after day the media regaled the public with the details of KCIA attempts to bribe Congressmen, intimidate Koreans living in the US, and use the Moonies cover for a wide range of interference in US political life. Two former KCIA directors were named as unindicted conspirators and the fall-out suddenly robbed Moon of much of the respectability he had so expensively achieved. The fact that the Moonies were able to help secure Fraser’s speedy exit from elective office was small compensation for the fact that even in Seoul the Moonies were now becoming something of an embarrassment. Suddenly the Little Angels could no longer get visas and large tax bills were presented to Moonie companies. Within the US, Moon’s own tax problems grew, culminating in a jail sentence for tax evasion [and document forgery – New York Times ]. Meanwhile a great clamour grew from anguished parents who accused the Moonies of ‘stealing’ their children, brain-washing them and turning them against their families. Several Moonies defected and told blood-curdling tales of the sect’s inner life. Perhaps most important of all, the Moonies’ cover was well and truly broken: the full list of front organisations (Causa, CARP, the KCFF, etc.) was exposed. Henceforth anyone who collaborated with the Moonies would have to do so knowingly.

But the machine held. The vast majority of Moonie activists remained fanatically loyal to ‘the New Messiah’. Some parents mounted dramatic missions to recapture their children; more didn’t, or failed. The Seoul regime slapped Moon’s wrist – but no more. Moon’s commercial empire remained intact and continued to churn out huge profits. These in turn guaranteed that Moon was able to remain a valuable asset to those whom he had befriended. The result has been a remarkable comeback. The key was Reagan’s election in 1980. Moon threw his immense resources into an all-out effort behind Reagan – who appeared on election night proudly brandishing the Moonie News World headlining his victory. Moon was invited as a VIP to Reagan’s inauguration. At last he had what he wanted: no mere Nixon in the crippled death-throes of his Presidency, but a strong, new and grateful friend in the White House with eight years ahead of him.

The Washington Times, under Bo Hi Pak’s guiding hand, rapidly became the focus of this new and unparalleled Moonie influence. William Simon, who had been one of Reagan’s chief fund-raisers in 1980, Jim Watts, Reagan’s Interior Secretary, and the Presidential counsellor, Claire Booth Luce, all agreed to accept honorific positions with the Times, which rapidly became the preferred house magazine of the Reagan Administration. The President himself has frequently counselled campaign audiences to read the Moonie paper and on being re-elected in 1984 accorded the first exclusive interview of his second term to it. Bo Hi Pak has been entertained in the White House by the President and in 1984 was awarded honorific ‘Eagle’ status by the Republican Party for his large donations to its cause. The paper itself took the hardest of hard-line positions on every issue: it is anti-détente, anti-arms control, pro-Contra, pro-South Africa. At the end of 1984 Reagan recruited one of the paper’s chief editorialists, Pat Buchanan, to become his main speech-writer. Buchanan was responsible for such egregious Reagan dicta as the assertion that the SS men buried at Bitburg were as much victims of Nazism as the Jews. Soon Buchanan ranked second only to Don Regan among the White House staff: even Moon could hardly have dreamt that he would achieve so much so soon.

The announced ambition of Bo Hi Pak is to make the Washington Times one of the ten great newspapers of the world with editions in every major language. This ambition suffered a setback when the paper’s editor, James Whelan, parted on bitter terms, alleging that all power on the paper was still concentrated among a handful of ex-KCIA Moonies. His replacement as editor was Arnaud de Borchgrave, a journalist long known for his extreme right-wing views and his sympathetic relationship with several Western intelligence services. De Borchgrave (who claims to be 16th in line of descent to the Belgian throne) had been named by the New York Times as one of the group of Western journalists to have received large cash sums from the Shah of Iran, and had had to leave his job on Newsweek when it was discovered that he was keeping files on his fellow journalists. (Like his close associate, Robert Moss, a former Thatcher speech-writer, de Borchgrave is obsessed with the infiltration of the Western press by alleged Soviet moles and has personally briefed President Reagan on the subject.) As early as 1982 de Borchgrave and the French conservative journalist, Jean-François Revel, now an Encounter columnist, had been star invitees at Moonie media conferences. Even at the salary he demanded ($300,000 a year) de Borchgrave was a natural choice.

One of de Borchgrave’s major coups was to launch the Nicaragua Freedom Fund in 1985 when Congress turned down funding for the Contras. Accusing Congress of treason to America, the Washington Times launched a large-scale private funding operation for the Contras, with dramatic ads signed by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Midge Decter, Michael Novak, Charlton Heston (who raised funds in Europe for the cause) and the usual right-wing backers. Bo Hi Pak led off the campaign – backed by Reagan ‘with all my heart’ – with a $100,000 contribution. Such gestures win the Moonies hearts and minds in Washington, as well as in the Central American jungles: few sights could better symbolise the extent to which Koreagate had been glossed over than that of Bo Hi Pak, Moon’s faithful number two, dining at the table of honour with the White House Chief of Staff, Don Regan, or welcoming Ronald and Nancy Reagan as guests of honour at Moonie-sponsored pro-Contra receptions – at a time when Moon himself was still in jail for tax evasion. De Borchgrave, for his part, is a familiar of such key Reaganauts as Ed Meese and the former National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane, while McFarlane’s predecessor-but-one, Richard Allen – another star invitee at Moonie conferences – took a $100,000 fee to prospect the possibilities of an Asian edition of the Washington Times. Above all, de Borchgrave has privileged access to Reagan himself: he is, after all, the editor of the President’s favourite newspaper. Thus, immediately prior to his first summit with Gorbachev, it was de Borchgrave whom Reagan sought out for his advice on how best to confront the Soviets. His advice: ‘Don’t give an inch on SDI.’

Moon’s ambitions are not confined to America: ‘If we can manipulate at least seven nations, we’ll control the whole world ... In the camp of God, Korea, Japan, America, England, France, Germany and Italy are the nations on which I count in order to conquer the world.’ In fact, the bulk of the sect’s followers are in Korea, Japan and the US, but it is active in Africa and Europe, and especially in Latin America. To list the Moonies’ favoured contacts is to compile a sort of international Who’s Who of the Right. Bo Hi Pak has links with the Paraguayan dictator, General Stroessner (whom he has pronounced ‘a special man, elected by God to rule his country’ – which is just as well, for no one else has had the chance of electing him). The Moonies have strong links with the Bolivian military, too – indeed, Boyer cites material to suggest that the Moonies collaborated there with Klaus Barbie to organise the 1980 coup d’état. In Chile, the links are with Pinochet, accorded the signal honour of being compared with Moon himself as a ‘pillar of the struggle against international Communism’; in Argentina, with ultra-conservative Catholic bishops concerned to combat liberation theology and ‘the Marxist Alfonsin’ (the Moonies have bought up several Argentinian newspapers to further this cause); in Central America with a host of right-wing dictators, and the Contras. Boyer reports that Moonie insignia, tee-shirts and even converts are now a familiar sight in Contra and Miskito refugee camps.

Boyer is naturally fascinated with Moonie activities in France and details at length the long list of contacts with extreme French conservatives – the names of Jean-François Revel and Olivier Giscard d’Estaing (the ex-President’s brother) occur over and over again. But the Moonies’ closest and most intriguing links are with Le Pen’s Front National. Pierre Ceyrac, nephew of the former head of the French employers’ organisation and one of the most prominent Moonies in France, was accorded a leading place on the FN list in the 1986 elections. But, according to Boyer, the most striking example of a Moonie in politics is Gustave Pordéa, the ex-Rumanian diplomat who sits for the FN in the European Parliament. Boyer pours scorn on the Sunday Times allegations that Pordéa is a Rumanian Communist agent and suggests that, in effect, the Sunday Times reporter was an innocent taken for a ride by dissident elements within the FN. Certainly, Boyer is able to produce lengthy chapter and verse for Pordéa’s membership of the Moonies over a period of seven years. And there is no doubt that links between Le Pen and the Moonies go back a long way and that relations are close: in November 1986 Le Pen made a special trip to visit the Moonie leader in Japan. ... Similarly, the record of Moon, Bo Hi Pak and the Moonies in general is familiar enough: what on earth was the Pope playing at when he accorded an audience to Bo Hi Pak and other Moonie leaders (even being photographed with them) in December 1985? ...

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ENGLISH

Moon’s activities in Central & South America https://tragedyofthesixmarys.com/moon-in-south-america/

Contents

1. Introduction 2. ‘Illegal Aliens Joining Moonies’ – The Pittsburg Press 3. Moon’s ‘Cause’ Takes Aim At Communism in the Americas – Washington Post 4. Moon in Latin America: Building the Bases of a World Organisation – Guardian by Jean-François Boyer and Alejandro Alem

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FRENCH

« L’empire Moon » par Jean-François Boyer https://tragedyofthesixmarys.com/lempire-moon-jf-boyer/

3. Les Moon sont entrés dans Paris – CARP 1990 https://tragedyofthesixmarys.com/temoignages/

L’Express – 31 août 1990    p. 58-59

▲ Gil Cornevaux, secrétaire général de la mairie de Vélizy, négociant avec Patrick Jouan et Pierre Ceyrac, député européen du FN. Hyo Jin Moon, fils du révérend, qui présidait les « olympiades », à Vélizy.

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SPANISH

‘El Imperio Moon’ por Jean-François Boyer https://tragedyofthesixmarys.com/el-imperio-moon-por-boyer/