In 1954, Moon founded his South Korean-based church around the notion that he is a new messiah sent to earth to correct the mistakes of Jesus Christ. Part of Moon's service to the world was to have sexual intercourse with many women who would then spread Moon's "blessing" by having sex with other men. In later years, Moon conveyed his "blessing" less directly, by matching couples in mass weddings and regulating their sexual activities.
In the early days of his church, Moon's bizarre sexual rituals caused him some embarrassing legal problems, but the practice of passing around women did help the Unification Church recruit young men, including some with connections to South Korea's intelligence services.
Kim Jong-Pil, a rising star in South Korea's intelligence community, became closely associated with Moon's church during this phase. In the early 1960s, Kim Jong-Pil also founded the KCIA, which centralized Seoul's internal and external intelligence activities, and he was responsible for bilateral talks with Japan, Korea's historic enemy.
That put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who once hailed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "the perfect fascist."
Kodama and Sasakawa were jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II, but a few years later, both were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials who wanted their help in throttling disruptions by leftist students and labor unions.
The Yakuza Connection
Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, while they also grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate, according to the book, Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.
Kim Jong-Pil's contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to the Unification Church, which had made only a few converts in Japan. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Kaplan and Dubro.
"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.
The church's growth spurt did not escape the notice of U.S. intelligence officers in the field. One CIA report, dated Feb. 26, 1963, stated that "Kim Jong-Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool."
Moon's church was active in the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with former Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American "death squad" operatives.
Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.
The five were Taiwan's dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea's dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, and Moon, "an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of "Heavenly Deception,'" the Andersons wrote.
WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that "would further Moon's global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new faà §ade," the Andersons wrote.
Retired U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a former WACL president, told me that "the Japanese [WACL] chapter was taken over almost entirely by Moonies."
A History of Nazi Extremism
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
