The CIA, Narcotraffickers, GLADIO, and CONDOR Pt. 4
Tax Dollars at Work
The Moon Cult, The CIA, Narcotics.
Contents
Contents:
Part 3
Part 4
My podcast which is currently also dealing with Condor can be found at: https://anchor.fm/timber-sycamore/episodes/2-02-Operation-Condor-The-Rise-of-the-Chicago-Boys--Austerity--and-Neoliberalism-e1qduo0
Sun-Myung Moon
Sun-Myung Moon, Problem Child
In following the only biographer I could find on Moon that was both thorough and impartial I will maintain the hyphenation of Moon’s name as Sun-Myung. The point is made that his name is often listed as Sun, but that this is incorrect in Korean. He was born in a household in a town bearing his surname, unofficially, the official name bears some dispute, which we’ll leave to his biographers. Seven out of the ten major households were all closely related to him, but all ten were of the Moon family. During Japanese takeover their rice was taken to Jeongju, most of the farmers from 1910 on would eat millet, only getting meat on special days (holidays, birthdays, etc.), and would live a difficult but manageable life.
Unlike the more distinguished villages they would have their village named by its inhabitants, even its formal name meant less, Sangsa-ri. In comparison they would have Knowing-the-Tao and Giving-Pure-Water Villages nearby, but most were named after the families that lived here. Stories abound about Jong Ui an ancestor of Sun Myung who was called the Virtuous Jewel in his own time, these shouldn’t be taken at face value. According to these stories his grandfather was the one who identified him as being special, and he would speak about himself in the same kinds of parables that he became notorious for in other aspects of his teaching, often referencing father or grandfather and their kindness.
Moon’s time in Korea for his early years was certainly tumultuous as his family, all devout christians viciously opposed the Japanese domination of the Korean peninsula, and in 1919 religious leadership would declare Korea independent. The Elder from his uncle’s church Lee Myong Nyong would be one of those arrested in the charges that they were plotting to kill the Japanese Governor. Ironically, this uprising may have been the match which set a fire to the Korean revolution, it was after all the first time that a unified Korea struck out against an oppressor. His uncle Yoon Kook was already a devout anti-communist vowing to never follow them as he left his home.
He was known as a devious child, difficult, prone to throwing tantrums, and very abrasive. At the time this was the reputation that boys from the northern parts of Korea held. Once in a fight the young Sun-Myung had waited for some time while pinned under another boy who was older. Upon his release he grabbed the boy by his ears and bashed his head off the ground repeatedly, continuing until the adults stepped in. This wouldn’t be the end of his mischief, but all of this only served to prepare for his next phase of life, the grand conversion.
Sun-Myung Moon, Convert
A series of disasters would befall the Moon family, two children developed severe mental illness, another would have its ear eaten by a dog, then the dog would have a cauldron dropped on it. The whole thing reads eerily like a serialized pulp novel of the life of Sun-Myung Moon, a kind of Dante’s Inferno where his descent is mirrored only in his rising heights. Sun-Myung’s father who was the oldest son bore the responsibility for Confucian ancestral rites and under the influence of the local Presbyterian church decide to forsake these handing them off to his younger brother. No more ancestor worship, and the lessons of Confucianism that Sun-Myung had apparently always taken less seriously than some of his peers.
This conversion would have been one of many that year and went in the presbyterian leadership mostly unnoticed. Watching his growth we see him attend a school by a prominent Christian nationalist, where he would learn Korean script, geography, history, and mathematics. His time at this school would include six mile walks in either direction. He would eventually attend a school where he learned Japanese, “to know his enemy,” allegedly, again in a very over the top story. Allegedly, April 7, 1935, Jesus Christ himself appears to him. Over the next several years his relationship to Christ would change, often in ways that seem to be alternating between heretical and strange.
he would enter into a relationship that was built in a position of mistrust, a relationship where he, by his own admission, analyzed the revelations of saints and apostles who would meet him. Ultimately he would say that, “I came to know the situation and heart of Jesus more than anyone." Which would under any circumstances be an audacious claim, but for a man who allegedly spoke to apostles, importantly, people who knew Christ personally, it seems almost insane.
His relationship to his god becomes near identical to the relationship that his own parents would have to their own children. The silent outrage he felt against the loss of his siblings, the madness that inflicted itself on his family, and ultimately the injustice that he was acutely aware had been committed by the Japanese against the Korean people became his view of God. A god disheartened by the relationship of his own children abandoning him and infuriated by the refusal of men to follow his wishes. His experiences here come to define him, much as anything else, claiming that he had achieved oneness and unification with God.
He revisits the story of Christ, becomes convinced that Christ was limited, trapped in trying to purify the spirit, but failing to purify the body. He sees the future of a Christ that never was as the future of a man who would have children, a wife, and marry. After this battle he begins to believe that he has a struggle against satan, a kind of parallel of Christ in the desert; or as mentioned earlier, we have seen the rising action from hell, and now we must enter the kingdom of heaven, or so it seems. 1
The Unification Church
The Unification Church, Ideology
Now that we’ve taken Moon and the Moonies mostly at their word it’s time to delve into what this strange pseudo-Christ truly believed. In mid-March of 1978 a headline would appear, ““Moon’s Church Founded by Korean CIA Chief as Political Tool, Panel Says.” This was not the last expose to be written about Moon’s church but it was certainly a significant one and coincided with the emergence of the Fraser Report.
The overt activities of the Unification Church are complicated because the overt and covert become intimately intertwined in a web of chaotic destruction. A combination of Moon’s personal misogyny along with the thought of the Japanese yakuza he found as his backers functionally defined the relationship of women to the church itself. Women were in many ways inherently treated as the obvious lesser, on the one hand was the belief and view that women were impure because of Eve, in a call back to the kind of ideas that were expounded on in Male Fantasies. The luciferian seed as it's referred to in Moon's work is the cause of original sin, it's the cause of all corruption and evil. By its very existence women are made impure. In this case, however, it is also a call to sex, simultaneously the accusation is that women are whores, but also within it is the statement that women can only see purification by having sex with our dear and holy Reverend Moon.2
This serves as an outcropping of a few things that all become the source of a huge number of the positions that will occupy the church. First and foremost is the conceptualization of humanity as a kind of filthy and debased thing. There is underlying all of this a belief that those who are engaged in the business of living are in many or all ways beneath the observance of the Moon Church. In an effort to corrupt Marxism, a significant turn was made within the Unification Church vs other organized religions. They offered to people not just spiritual freedom, but what has historically been the realm of Marxists, that is, to have freedom and be liberated on the Earth as it is now. The only way to get this salvation is to impoverish yourself. But more on that in a minute.
The central theme of Unification theology and practice is the concept and experience of “true family”-religious community. I think that most of the members with whom I talked are in the Family because they have found a radically communitarian life-style that is more fulflling than anything they have experienced in mainline American culture. The essential power of the movement’s cohesiveness is not to be found in the logic of the Divine Principle but, rather, in the experience of warm, chaste, unselfish, morally principled, and ordered fraternity.3
This idea is defined by liberation in a very limited sense, for Koreans, it meant liberation and unification of the nation, freedom from the "communist threat", but absolutely not freedom from (ironically) Japan, America, and constant occupation. The former two of these certainly have a slap of irony when we consider the intimate involvement of people like Sasagawa and Kodama. The nationalist undertones of the Unification Church shouldn’t be ignored but they also are secondary to much else that comes with it. It is quite simple to say that Moon saw a world that was very different from the one we live in. In this world, namely, a one world theocratic government with him at the head. In this world Korean is the mandatory and international lingua franca.4
This nationalism is of course anti-communist, it is after all born from two notorious right wing Yakuza fixers, and two of the most devoutly anti-communist intelligence organizations in the world. Kodama and Sasagawa are both World Anti-Communist League members, and the idea for the whole of the Unification Church comes from Sasagawa. That they would, “harness Christianity against communism.”5 They would act as the heads of Shokyo Rengo, a combination Yakuza group, WACL member, and of course, Moon organization.6 There is a concept which is only ever explained in the broadest and most ludicrous brush by Moon of "Automatic Theocracy," which as far as I can tell is some sort of techno-fascist theocratic monarch, where of course Moon is the king. He makes sure to mention, "we can not separate the political and the religious. Separation of these is what Satan likes the most."7
The Moon Cult predates CONDOR, and as a result some of its objectives are, likewise, the objectives of the CIA in the 50s and 60s. It becomes more clear when we look at the countries that he sees a great need for control by the moon organization, but in his own words, “If we can manipulate seven nations at least, then we can get hold of the whole world: the US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and Soviet Union.”8 What would a religious leader be doing in the vast majority of the countries that were actively involved in GLADIO programs? We'll see that more clearly when we get to our next section. For now, suffice to know that his opposition is to democracy which is, "fertile breeding grounds for communism."9
Moon's true goal seems to be to implement predestination via boredom. But all of these calls of unity are slightly overwhelmed whenever we hear what this truly is, only ever a socialism for the volk, as always. Moon tells us, again in his own words, "every people or every organization that goes against the Unification Church will gradually come down or drastically come down and die. Many people will die—those who go against our movement."
Earlier, I mentioned a kind of connection between Sun-Myung Moon and a certain style of socio-economic thought. Calling it either of these things may in fact be quite generous to the Moonies themselves. There is a kind of aspirational left-fascism within Moon’s more overt rightwing fascism. For every time he tells his followers that they must “implement personal austerity”10 there is likewise a promise of future wealth. If the Christian God was a totalitarian dedicated to providing for people's needs with no joy, art, or beauty but maintaining capitalist relations of purchase, he may in fact be Moon's god. The promised world with a planned economy is not the socialist one as it explicitly entails buying in a predetermined way. Moon's true goal seems to be to implement predestination via boredom. But all of these calls of unity are slightly overwhelmed whenever we hear what this truly is, only ever a socialism for the volk, as always. Moon tells us, again in his own words, "every people or every organization that goes against the Unification Church will gradually come down or drastically come down and die. Many people will die—those who go against our movement."11
In a sense it becomes reminiscent of the work of Oswald Spengler, Socialism or Prussianism, and in it we find much of the same kind of anti-human rhetoric. Purification of the body through labor, the uber-national, the vitalistic rhetoric which does have a certain basis in religion (the body of Christ), and ultimately, the same kind of conservative anti-communism. To echo Ishay Landa’s discussion of Spengler, Unificationism is, “working a whole lot, for the absolute minimum, but — and this is a vital aspect — being happy about it.”
The Unification Church, Structure
Understanding the covert portions of the Moon Cult is like sifting deeper and deeper into a sewer, you know you will find nothing good, but somehow it’s always worse than you expect. The formal structure of the church should be mentioned here because it has three sections in a kind of parody of the communist party’s vanguard structure. I’m going to disagree with the Fraser Reports analysis though I agree with 2/3 of their estimations. They say that the first group is recruitment organs, I would argue that recruitment organs are simply part of the second group.
. This is where the first goal is established, to, “have our effect on the institutions of society.” Remember, this is the nerve center for a vast privatized intelligence agency, it has so much overlap with the KCIA's goals that, "there is no difference at all."
The first is the church itself, all formal leadership is housed within the church and its various organs. It is through this that all of the other ones have to flow, without the combined millenarianism & anti-communism of the Moon Cult there can be no rational way to explain the web of businesses, cultural organizations, and intelligence agents that swirl around the church. This is where the first goal is established, to, “have our effect on the institutions of society.”12 Remember, this is the nerve center for a vast privatized intelligence agency, it has so much overlap with the KCIA's goals that, "there is no difference at all."13
It has previously been pointed out that many apocalyptic groups actively recruit highly educated, very efficient members.14 With the backing of the KCIA the Moon Cult was no exception, and was in many ways acting as a kind of above ground parallel to the P2 organization. Done away with the pretense of secrecy, the Moon Cult was every bit as much an organization ruled under an iron fist and intending a fascist takeover as P2. They simply had the luxury of not having to exist in the shadows. The Church is the tax haven, shelter, and legitimizing wing of a terror network.
Section two of the moon organization is the practical wing of the church, this is all of the cultural organizations, political and anti-communist organs, businesses, and high profile real estate investments. Ultimately within this is where all of the operational force of the Unification Church exists, it’s this section that we’ll be focusing on in just a moment.
The third wing of the Moon Cult is the internal development wing, this is primarily logistical in nature. This encompasses the staff at their various businesses who may or may not actually be involved with the church, it’s supply chains, and it’s internal infrastructure that allows it to maintain itself. This portion of it is overseen in thousands of offices and operates just like any other large multinational. It is in fact likely identical to the Mormon Church’s though less developed than some of the old religious institutions. It may be important, but it is almost entirely extraneous to what we are looking at, except for one specific issue, supply chains.
The Unification Church, Covert
The Covert actions of the uc are largely carried out through front organizations and we have to understand the uc as it really is, not as it either presents itself or as it seeks to be presented in the public. As Gramsci would say, we do not judge men or nations by their self estimations. So, we can not judge the uc by the way that it has come to understand itself.
If we take them at face value they are peace loving hippie types with a slavish devotion to their cult leader. If we decide that we are going to interrogate them the network of businesses that they operate begins to look like a small scale Iran-Contra all by itself. Now, with their strong ties to Yakuza as well as the heroin traffickers within the KMT, Lao Royal Family, and Vietnamese capitalists, we have to assume that this can’t be coincidental. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes it’s only a thin layer of cigars covering up keys of heroin being brought in to fund terrorist organizations. So when we discuss the organizations that comprise the Moon Cult for our purposes they will fall into two broad categories that allow their use for covert operations. These two are infrastructural and operational, infrastructure will primarily focus on finances and supply chains. Operations will focus on either converting finances into real world impact or making an impact directly to achieve goals. .
Infrastructure
The UC began spreading its wings to cover as much ground as possible, both literally in terms of real estate, and also figuratively, in terms of the variety and locations of the churches holdings. Essential to this are the following: shipping, ship building, and air transport, banking and finance manipulation, and media and intellectual domination. Each of these of course feeds the other, every new front business becomes a new way to launder money, each new bank account adds to a complex web of manipulation, any investigations can be opposed by their media and intelligentsia allies.
The development of trade routes is for lack of a better term, a meme about both intelligence and crime. Bill Donovan ran an imports-exports business, mobsters were well known within imports-exports circles. The post-OSS imports-exports businesses were almost universally a smuggling cover for intelligence and drug traffickers. The Moon Cult is no exception to this rule. Civil Air Transport Chennault’s successor to the Flying Tiger’s, his personal military. His wife would also sit on the board of the World Anti-Communist League, and eventually CAT would become the much better known Air America.
These operations are mirrored in the work of the Moon Cult who seem to have vertically integrated fishing, exporting, importing, and retailing certain products, most notoriously sushi. But, this same kind of vertical integration when viewed from the perspective of as we shall see, someone with heavy ties to narcotrafficking and who owns a submarine company takes on a slightly more sinister edge. When you’re doing the manufacture, delivery, and R&D for arms you only have one step left. You have to create the conditions that sell weapons, in the case of CONDOR, that meant running narcoterror up, making sure that the anti-communists were armed and funded, and making sure that they could pay.
Making sure they could pay is the hard part, some of these were notoriously unreliable right wing terror death squads that had all of the compassion and kindness that you expect from the allies of Klaus Barbie. So, you have to pressure governments to back them, then they get money and guns, you get to sell your wares, and you all get what your real goal is. Killing popular revolutionaries, destroying left wing governments, and a pile of corpses to stand on as you implement austerity budgets.
All of this sounds like it would take a huge amount of man power, a huge amount of loyalty, and a huge media network. Conveniently for the UC, they certainly had all of these things. Over a hundred tv stations, the Washington Times, and others that tended to be slightly more niche all paved the way for them to be able to run a puff piece on Oliver North as Iran-Contra broke. It allowed them to run hit pieces against Kerry during the Fraser Committee, and it ultimately meant they could bury journalists who dared to challenge them.
In conjunction with this you fund think tanks, colleges, and make sure that you have a team of paid “experts” who will come to your shows. This way you can have Dr. Dipshit #3 Ph.D. from WarCrimesUniversity tell everyone that you in fact did nothing wrong, and here’s the very very biased statistical analysis that proves that. No one has to know that his degree is in Theology and that you run the university he got his degree from, the one he teaches at, and the think tank where he’s an expert, remember any journalist dumb enough to ask questions can be destroyed. You have a counterespionage company under your banner and wouldn’t it be a shame if it turned out he had some embarrassing dirt? And anyway, let Tongsun Park serve as a warning to anyone who would even consider ratting you out.
As for the coup de grace, because they know all of the men who worked with Michael Hand in his OSS days in Kunming they have access to the Nugan Hand Bank as a financial fixer. They also invested 30 million dollars in the third largest bank in Uruguay during the CONDOR government there while buying up land in Honduras adjacent to where the contras were trained. By having huge investments in a bank associated with Uruguayan organized crime combined with Nugan Hand your money is now effectively invisible. So if you skim a million or four so that Klaus Barbie can wage the cocaine coup and you get some “moon” rocks to push for the cia out of the deal but you cause untold suffering? I’m sorry but that’s the price of doing business, baby.
Operations
To discuss the full list of ties that the uc has to intelligence would be to bore everyone involved with a story that goes on seemingly forever. But, between the interpreter for Jong-Pil Kim, head of the KCIA, Bud Han, Steve Kim, and Bo Hi Pak would all be moonie sympathetic if not outright members. And with Jong-Pil Kim’s unique talent for coordination of silent but sweeping conspiracies, it would be hard to discount his role in shaping the UC.
During its early days Sasagawa and Kodama had already built their reputations, one, Kodama, was running a secret underground bank. Sasagawa meanwhile was responsible for running the Japan Shipbuilding Association. While this is partially an infrastructural issue we’ll now address the use of this for operations. Shipping, specifically shipping that can be done discreetly, say, under a diplomatic passport, is incredibly valuable. Amongst the people who would praise the UC was the son of General MacArthur, at the time, ambassador to Japan. Douglas MacArthur II would go down in history as the man who provoked the Anpo Struggle, or the Hagerty Incident, depending on which side of it you sat on.
Through MacArthur II they would gain access to contacts within all of American leadership. Meeting with Bush Sr,15 Nixon, Reagan, and Ford. Kodama’s secret bank would provide the cover for money moving that would be essential to the purchasing and use of mercenaries by the UC for combatting communism. Kodama would say during his imprisonment that he heard, “the dull march of thousands of communists feet marching towards the Bolshevization of Japan.” Later on in the journal entry he would rhetorically ask himself, “Who will fight with them to the last?”16
It may be that Kodama, Cline, Singlaub, and Sasagawa’s anti-communism is unrelated to the formulation of the operational wing of the UC, that is possible. But it also would have meant that the entirety of the UC being developed under the auspices of the WACL was simply a coincidence. The entirety of the situation is that there is a church which provides legitimate cover for intelligence operations.
Amongst the operational holdings of the UC are CAUSA, Global Communications Counter Espionage Consulting, Victory Over Communism (headed by Sasagawa, also sometimes called Win Over Communism), Kahr (as well as Magnum Research, the company that produces Desert Eagles), and of course both the Japanese and Korean sections of the WACL. By using these front organizations, in conjunction with their well established infrastructure it has provided for the US the ability to act internationally, under the guise of a tax haven, and with the legitimacy of a religion.
To clarify, per former Freedom League member Linda Athenian17 the role of these organizations was essential. FLF acted as a political wing within America to lobby for UC church needs, all UC members were FLF members, and the UC itself would determine policy. This kind of cover allowed for the masquerade of the church as non-political, except in as much as it was anti-communist, which is almost considered to be non-political in the Post-Fukuyama era. Perhaps the most notorious of the crimes they committed, and to return us to Sections one and Two of this series for a moment, collaboration with the Cocaine Coup, which saw Klaus Barbie as a center piece. It has been widely reported that CAUSA provided four million dollars for the coup efforts.1819 Around this time the Sasagawa connection becomes more significant than ever as Marine Corps International becomes a central part of the UC plans.
His first military contractor Tong-Il was founded under his auspices and with the profits he began The Foundation for the Extermination of Communism. Bleak nomenclature from a man who is seemingly so dedicated to peace that he owns several arms companies. So, at home, BJ Pak was learning that the Little Angels could be used to smuggle about 58,000 dollars in cash to various locations as they passed through customs.20 This allowed for enough money to be moved to grease palms casually, open doors that otherwise wouldn't be opened. Afterall, as Moon would eventually state in 2011, "no one, even UN, America cannot stop True Parents' will." The reason for this is a combination of intelligence agency, gang affiliated fixers, and political terrorists.
During these years the UC would begin to make its maritime businesses increasingly significant and accompany this with the development of submarines and airports. Aside from Moon’s idiotic rambling about the purpose being to unify the world, there’s something more sinister when we look at the country of choice, Honduras, as part of a trend. In Honduras, Bolivia, and Uruguay the moon church associates very closely with the right wing terror-narcotrafficker set. If this were any other situation, indeed, if it were a private civilian who was tied to a murderer’s row of drug traffickers, they would be investigated near constantly. Instead? Mostly silence.
For a company that is capable of providing military vehicles, military weapons, its own shipping routes, and has access to both submarines and air support there’s a concerning pattern of behavior that we see emerge in their ties to narco cartels. From spying on Reagan’s enemies to running counter espionage organizations, the Moonies have developed for themselves a multi-faceted role. Servants of the RoK, Yakuza, and the US their seemingly divided loyalties will soon begin to make more sense. Strange that the well connected within media UC doesn’t find more negative reports. Next time we’ll discuss a similar organization in Europe and Argentina, Propaganda Due, and puppet master Licio Gelli.
This entire section is borrowed from the very fair, but overly credulous biography of the Young Moon by Michael Breen called, “Sun-Myung Moon, the Early Years: 1920-1953
Inside the League
The Moon Family by Leo Sandon
Fraser Report p.314
The Darkest Side of Politics pt 2
Inside the League/Lobster 21
Master Speaks may 17,1973
Master Speaks June 9,1974
New Hope News March 10,1974
Inside the League
Master Speaks February 14 1974
New Age Frontiers January 1971
Lee’s Testimony before the Fraser Committee.
Apocalyptic Millenarian Groups: Assessing the Threat of BioTerrorism
WTimes, Bushes hail reverend Moon- Parry
Spooks: The Haunting of America by Jim Hougan
Fraser Committee Testimony
Lobster 21
Robert Parry’s Darkside of Reverend Moon
Inside the League