Introduction to:
Moon Rising: The History and Politics of the Unification Church
Daniel Junas
PO Box 20656
Seattle, WA 98102
(206) 937-7032

Note: This text is not for citation

First impressions, it is often said, are lasting impressions. And the first
impression Sun Myung Moon made on the American public was that of a charismatic
but kooky leader of an authoritarian Oriental cult-or, more luridly, a manipulative
"puppet master" who brainwashed his followers and sent them out into the street to sell
flowers.
This impression was a direct consequence of the way the news media chose to
frame Moon and his Unification Church. The choice was a natural one. Moon first
caught the public's attention in the 1970s, when--in the wake of the political, social and
cultural upheavals of the 1960s-cults of various stripes were becoming a prominent
feature of the American scene. Moon seemed to be yet one more cult leader.
This description was not necessarily inaccurate. Moon, like other cult leaders,
did use sophisticated mind control techniques to recruit and maintain control over his
followers. But from the beginning there was evidence that this frame of reference was
not adequate to explain the Unification Church and its ultimate purpose as an
organization. It is often forgotten, for instance, that Moon made his grand entrance
onto the American scene during the Watergate scandal as a public supporter of
Richard Nixon, just as that controversial figure was about to be driven from the stage of
American politics. Although Moon's support for Nixon suggested that Moon had
political as well as religious motives, backing the first American President ever to be
forced from office may have only reinforced the public perception of Moon as a kook.
An alternative frame of reference was provided by a Congressional
investigation of the Koreagate scandal, which was conducted from 1976 to 1978 by a
subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, headed by Rep. Donald Fraser
(D-MN). The so-called Fraser Committee revealed that the Korean government,
particularly the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was engaged in an extensive
pattern of illegal activities to influence the American political system. The Fraser
Committee also investigated the Moon Organization (as the Koreagate investigators
preferred to call it) as part of this pattern, and found that it had at times worked to
promote South Korea's interests, often in cooperation with officials of the South Korean
government.
Less attention was paid to the Fraser Committee's finding that among Moon's
goals was "the establishment of a worldwide government in which the separation of
church and state would be abolished and which would be governed by Moon and his
followers." Moon, in other words, was seeking the creation of a global, transnational,
theocratic (i.e. God-ruled) state. What is more, the Fraser committee found that the
Moon Organization had massive funds at its disposal to pursue this goal.
Unfortunately, however, the Fraser Committee never uncovered the source of those
funds. And however well-funded he might be, Moon's pursuit of such a grandiose,
messianic ambition was hard to take seriously; to the extent that it was noted by the
American public, it probably reinforced the dominant image of Moon as a kooky cult
leader. Meanwhile the distinct minority of Americans who took Moon at all seriously as
a political force tended to assume, as a result of the Koreagate investigation, that Moon
was, if not the creature, at least an agent of the South Korean government.
In the 1980s these two predominant impressions of the Moon Organization were
partially superseded by a third one-the idea (often expressed to the author in one form
or another) that "Moon is gone." It was perhaps easy and convenient to expect that

 Moon, like most cult leaders, would find his movement withering under the harsh glare
of negative publicity he received in the 1970s, which was then compounded by Moon's
1982 conviction for tax fraud and related charges. Since media coverage of the Moon
Organization declined dramatically (although not altogether) in the 1980s, to the casual
observer that expectation seemed to have been fulfilled.
As more careful observers have noted, however, and as this book documents,
throughout the 1980s the Moon Organization most certainly did not disappear. By the
end of the Reagan-Bush era the Moon Organization's had:
‘ recruited and indoctrinated a cadre of tens of thousands of followers, in
virtually every comer of the globe, who believe that they are a special elite
destined to rule the world under Moon's direction.
‘ obtained funding sources that gave the Moon Organization an annual budget
measured in hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, including a
conservatively estimated $80 million a year directed from Japan to the United
States.
‘ established an international labyrinth of businesses and non-profit
organizations which enable the Moon Organization to hide the source of their
funding and launder money all over the world.
‘ recruited hundreds of academics representing 100 or more nations into such
Moon backed academic organizations as the International Conference for the
Unity of the Sciences and the Professors World Peace Academy.
‘ recruited an similar worldwide group of religious leaders and scholars into
various Moon-sponsored organizations and projects.
‘ obtained position of influence among the U.S. right wing, accomplished in large
part by granting millions of dollars to conservative and New Right Organizations.
‘ forged a close working relationship with the Reagan and Bush Administrations,
beginning with Moon receiving a seat of honor at Ronald Reagan's 1981
inaugural.
‘ established the Washington Times, the second daily newspaper in the nation's
capital and the newspaper of record for U.S. conservatives, as well as several
other newspapers around the world.
‘ created CAUSA, a transnational anti-communist political organization which
originated in Latin America but spread all over the non-communist world and
which supported provided both material and political support for the U.S.backed Nicaraguan contras.
‘ established a 50-state political network in the United States, which, among
other causes, helped launch the burgeoning anti-environmental Wise Use
Movement.
‘ founded the Global Economic Action Institute, which has recruited
representatives of business and international policy elites from all over the
world, but particularly from Japan, the United States and Germany.

 ‘ with the Cold War drawing to a close, arranged meetings between Moon and
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and Moon and North Korean leader Kim II
Sung, and initiated construction of a $1 billion automobile plant in the People's
Republic of China (the project was later suspended for unknown reasons).
Not only is Moon not "gone," but his Organization has actually grown quite
powerful. Neither can this global machine be understood as simply another religious
organization; nor are its putative connections to the government of South Korea
adequate to explain the scope of its operations. What is needed is a new frame of
reference and a new model for understanding the Moon Organization.
This book provides just such a frame of reference and model, revolving around
two central theses. First, despite its superficial resemblance to a church, the Moon
Organization is best understood as an intelligence agency, i.e. as an organization
which gathers intelligence on a wide variety of subjects, and which, more importantly,
conducts covert operations within the United States and around the world. Second,
despite Moon's Korean origins, the historical precursors for the Moon Organization, as
well as its principal sources of funding, can both be found in Japan.
The reader will not find evidence for these assertions in interviews with former
Unification Church members or other insiders. Although former church members can
provide useful information on the inner workings of the Moon Organization (particularly
on its use of mind control techniques), they suffer from the same perceptual handicap
as everyone else--they tend to think of the Moon Organization primarily as a cult or
religious organization because they lack an alternative frame of reference. Nor will the
reader find any "smoking guns," which expose in a single undeniable revelation the
essential nature of the Moon Organization. What the reader will find is a mosaic of
details, a composite drawn from a variety of sources, including the report and exhibits
of the Fraser Committee, various newspaper and magazine articles, books about the
Unification Church and related subjects, and both official publications and leaked
documents from the Moon Organization itself.
Many pieces of this mosaic are missing or have been deliberately obscured.
But much of the information needed to understand both the nature and origins of the
Moon Organization has actually been a matter of public record since the time of the
Koreagate scandal. The Fraser Committee's staff investigators had actually received
many leads pointing towards Japan, and they had been urged by members of the
Japanese Diet as well as Japanese journalists "not to limit (their) investigation to
bilateral relations between the United States and South Korea." The Committee even
received explicit testimony from Moon's right-hand man, Bo Hi Pak, that he received his
funding from an unnamed man in Japan. Meanwhile, contemporaneous journalistic
accounts in the New York Times and Far Eastern Economic Review tied Moon to three
Japanese power brokers--two behind-the-scenes operators, Ryoichi Sasakawa and
Yoshio Kodama, and their prominent ally, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.
Unfortunately, however, the Koreagate investigators "determined that to investigate
Japan's relations with the United States or South Korea would exceed (the
committee's) mandate." Thus although the Fraser Committee disclosed a great deal of
important information about the Moon Organization, by placing the Moon Organization
within the frame of U.S.-South Korean relations-rather than U.S.-Japanese relations-it
perpetrated an incomplete and therefore misleading history of the Moon Organization.
It is impossible to understand the nature and purpose of the Moon Organization
without knowing its hidden prehistory and early history, placing the development of the
Moon Organization within its proper political and economic context. These matters are
the subject of the first section of the book, Sources. Chapter 2 (Japanese Ancestors)
describes the Moon Organization's Japanese precursors--the semi-secret
ultranationalist societies that helped goad the Japanese people into World War II—and
gives the background of the three Japanese power brokers who would make the Moon

 Organization into a de facto intelligence agency. Chapter 3 (Creation) traces the
founding of the Moon Organization to a key moment in U.S.-Japanese relations-the
massive demonstrations in 1960 in Japan over the revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
Chapter 3 (Both Bank Men) places the growth of the Moon Organization in the 1960s
within the broader context of U.S.-Japanese relations and the Vietnam War. And
Chapter 4 (Theocracy) lays out the strategy for gaining power in the United States and
around the world that Moon pursued when he arrived in the United States in late 1971
shortly after another crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations.
This first section, which follows a more or less chronological narrative,
concludes in the mid-1970s. In 1975 Moon engineered a massive, worldwide
expansion, after which the Moon Organization grew increasingly complex and,
therefore, difficult to compress into an intelligible chronological narrative. Therefore the
second section of the book, Assets, analyzes the Moon Organization into its
component parts, describing both the means and the strategy Moon has been using to
amass power. Chapter 6 (Heavenly Deception) examines the doctrines and practices
of the Unification Church in relation to Moon's political goals, particularly the
development of Church members as a unique transnational cadre who serve to
implement Moon's global designs. Chapter 7 (Money Laundry) sketches Moon's
transnational business empire, which functions as a global money laundry, enabling the
Moon Organization to transfer vast sums of money across national borders while hiding
its ultimate source or sources. Chapters 8 through 11 (Academic Intrigue, Infiltrating
the Churches, The Road to Washington and Propaganda War) detail the Moon
Organization's pursuit of an overarching strategic goal: infiltrating and gaining influence
in each of four key sectors of society: academia, religion, politics, and the media.
The third section, Covert Operations returns to a partially chronological
structure, describing in turn a series of overlapping and complementary covert
operations that the Moon Organization pursued in the 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter
12 (Anti-Communist Crusade) describes the Moon Organization's alliance with the
Reagan Administration in pursuit of a hard-line, anti-communist foreign policy through
its transnational political front, CAUSA. Chapter 13 (God's Economy) presents a
parallel operation, the Global Economic Action Institute, which made alliances with
transnational corporations and elite, international policy-makers. Chapter 14 (Shadow
Party) examines the Moon Organization's efforts to establish the American Freedom
Coalition as a grass-roots political network in the United States and as the forerunner
for a third political party. And Chapter 15 (The Left Bank) tells the remarkable story of
Moon's more recent penetration into the former communist and communist world.
These covert operations were by no means secret. It needs to be understood,
however, that a covert operation is not necessarily secret; rather it is, by definition,
simply an operation whose true sponsors can plausibly deny responsibility for their
actions. The Moon Organization provides plausible deniability for its sponsors by
making it appear that its various operations are undertaken on behalf of Moon and his
ostensibly religious goals. So although Moon's name is invoked frequently in these
pages, the reader should be reminded that Moon is not the ultimate sponsor of these
covert operations. He is a figurehead, or in intelligence parlance, a cutout.
For although in many respects the image of Moon as a puppet master rings
true, Moon himself comes with strings attached. To understand the Moon Organization,
we must expand our frame of reference and pose a zen koan: "Who pulls the puppet
master's strings?"
As we shall see, the strings attached to Moon lead behind the scenes to a black
curtain. And that black curtain is in Japan.