MEMORANDUM Aug. 7, 1992 To: David Harwood Fr: Steve Snider Re: Unification Church and anti-environmental movement. Ron Arnold is sole director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) in Bellevue, Wash. A former member of the Sierra Club in Washington state who says he resigned in disgust, Arnold is the most widely known advocate of the antienvironmental Wise Use Movement. Alan Gottlieb is the founder and president of CDFE. He is a former national director of the Young Americans for Freedom and former treasurer of the American Conservative Union. In 1974, he founded the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Bellevue, Wash, and established himself as one of the most successful direct-mail fundraisers on the American right. Together, the two men share offices and corporate ties in such organizations as CDFE, Citizens Committee for Free Enterprise and Earth Citizens Alliance for Resources and Environment, at the Gottlieb-owned 'Liberty Park' building at 12520 NE 10th Place, Bellevue. The American Freedom Coalition of Washington was formerly located in the same 'Liberty Park' building. However, as of Feb. 20, 1992, AFC Washington moved to an adjacent office complex, essentially across the parking lot from 'Liberty Park.' Previously unreported in the press is the fact that Ron Arnold was president of AFC Washington in 1989, 1990, and 1991. Only this year, when AFC Washington moved out of the 'Liberty Park' building does Ron Arnold's name disappear from the list of officers and directors. In both 1989 and 1990, Alan Gottlieb was on the board of directors of AFC Washington. The Seattle Times in 1989 described Arnold and Gottlieb as two of seven key people in the Unification Church network in the Northwest. The network was reportedly headed by Matthew Morrison, a church member who is regional coordinator for AFC, who at the time rented his office space from Gottlieb in Bellevue, Wash. The same piece identified Arnold as a member of the speaker's bureau of CAUSA, (Confederation of Associations for the Unification of Societies of the Americas), formerly the key political action arm of the Unification Church. The Vancouver Sun reported in a July 13, 1991 story that Arnold is a registered agent for the Seattle branch of the American Freedom Coalition, "a right wing lobby created out of a merger between Christian Voice, a powerful evangelical operation, and CAUSA." Arnold told the newsletter of the Montana AFL-CIO in April that "he and Gottlieb were registered agents for the Washington state chapter of the AFC at one time just to help it get established. Otherwise, Moonie groups have never given money to the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise, Arnold said." In a 1989 Washington Post article, American Freedom Coalition founder and president Robert Grant said the Unification Church has donated a third of his group's $17 million budget since its inception. An October 1990 article in AFC's American Freedom Journal, according to Sierra Magazine, said AFC sponsored four Wise Use conferences the previous summer and had plans for 15 more in 1991. According to PBS' 'Frontline,' a key Moon financier is Ryoichi Sasakawa, a Japanese businessman who was jailed for three years by occupation forces after World War II as a supporter of Japan's wartime government. He is now reportedly a billionaire, much of his money coming from the sale of speedboats. The links between Japan, the Unification Church and resource issues in North America are a source of intrigue and growing curiosity among journalists and investigators, but they have yet to be forged into a chain. Clearly, Japanese commercial interests have a major interest in resource and environmental issues in Canada and the United States. One area where they have expressed their interests is through The Blue Ribbon Coalition, a group that promotes the right of using public land to run motorized off-road vehicles. Ed Wright, editor of the coalition's newsletter, said Kawasaki, Yamaha and Honda are on the coalition's advisory board and he told the Progressive Magazine in October, 1991 that these groups have provided "substantial support." The Blue Ribbon Coalition is credited with the Wise Use movement's major federal legislative achievement to date, lobbying successfully to add $30 million to the 1991 Highway Bill to build off-road vehicle trails. In addition to their support for the Blue Ribbon Coalition's off-road organizing and publicity activities, the third annual 3 Wise Use conference was reportedly sponsored in part by Honda and Kawasaki, who manufacture especially popular off-road vehicles. Mitsubishi-Honshu (Al-Pac) and Daishowa projects in northern Alberta will pulp a total of 2,000 tons-per-day of Canadian timber, even though environmentalists say the existing 500 tonsper-day currently pulped in B.C. causes a staggering negative impact. And in Virginia this spring, Honda allegedly sponsored a retreat with National 4-H leaders to discuss local resolution of land use and environmental issues. The retreat was held in some secrecy and a participant who was contacted would not speak on the record and declined to provide written material that was distributed by Honda to the 4-H leaders and others. A large question remains about the extent of Japanese involvement in North American resource issues and the agents of that involvement. The Canadian Library of Parliament completed an investigation of Wise Use (called 'Share' in Canada) activities in December 1991. The investigators concluded in part: "It has been surmised that the western United States, particularly the Northwest, is a natural target for the extreme right-wing and the Unification Church because there is no greater political debate there than the debate over the fate of natural resources. As yet unproven are claims that the operations of the Unification Church are supported largely by Japanese corporate interests in their efforts to keep public lands in North America open to development." In their 1986 book entitled Inside the League on the Unification Church's World Anti-Communist League, Scott and Jon Lee Anderson write; "One question that all journalists and investigators studying the Unification Church eventually ask themselves is where the money comes from. It is a question that is extremely difficult to answer...Two former high officials in the Unification Church in Japan have disclosed that as much as $800,000,000 was funneled into the United States from Japan over a nine-year period, often by disciples carrying cash in their luggage. They attribute this enormous cash flow to the success of Happy World Inc., a church subsidiary in Japan that markets religious icons; yet it seems doubtful that such an amount could be generated through the selling of miniature pagodas and marble vases. "