Democrats Now Venture To The Dark
Side of the Moon

by Jeffrey Steinberg and Scott Thompson

``When you defecate, do you use a mask? This is no
laughing matter, this is serious. When you were kids, did
you ever taste the cooties from your nose?... Why didn't
you feel they were dirty? Because that's a part of your
body. The Reverend Moon has discovered something that no
one else had thought about.''

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, at the Nov. 23, 1996 opening
ceremony of Tiempos del Mundo newspaper in Buenos Aires,
attended by former President George Bush.

On Jan. 9, 1994, the Reverend Jerry Falwell traveled
secretly to Seoul, South Korea. Falwell, then the head of
the Moral Majority and the proprietor of the ``Clinton
Chronicles'' series of scurrilous videos, attacking the
President, was accompanied by his direct mail handler, Dan
Riber, and Ronald Godwin, the former executive director of
the Moral Majority, who had recently left that post to
become the Vice President of the Unification Church-owned
Washington Times Corp. The secret Seoul meeting was with
the Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon and some
of his key operatives; and it resulted, within a few
years, in the Moonies' takeover of the Falwell operation,
through a bailout of Falwell, who was, at the time of the
Seoul pilgrimage, already on the verge of bankruptcy.
Falwell was facing $73 million in debt, accrued by his
Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. With the aid of
the Moonies, Falwell would shed that debt and, in the
process, bilk his loyal supporters out of most of that
money.

Just as organized crime's favorite ploy is to capture
control over prominent, but vulnerable politicians or
businessmen by ``buying up their markers'' at Las Vegas or
Atlantic City casinos, Moon's favorite ploy, throughout
the 1990s, was to buy up right-wing politicos and wanna-be
Elmer Gantrys, at the point they hit the financial skids.
Moon had already established a track record for using his
nearly bottomless pool of Asian and Ibero-American offshore
cash, to ``buy up the markers'' of prominent figures in
the Christian Right, starting with Richard Viguerie, the
Buckleyite direct mail guru, who found himself in deep
financial kimche in the late 1980s.

In 1982, the Moon organization had hired Viguerie to
do direct mail solicitations for the just-launched
Washington Times newspaper (which has lost an estimated
$100 million a year, from its inception). According to an
Oct. 15, 1989 {Washington Post} account, a company owned
by Moon controller and bagman Col. Bo Hi Pak, of the
Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), bought a piece
of Fairfax County, Virginia commercial real estate from
Viguerie for $10 million--far more than the property was
actually worth, at the point that Viguerie was about to go
broke. The Moon money saved the day for the Radical
Right's legendary direct mail-meister.

- History of Grovelling in Lynchburg -

The Falwell bailout by Moon was a far more complex
deal. It was first exposed by investigative journalist
Bob Parry in a 1997 series, titled ``The Dark
Side of the Moon,'' which were published on the Internet
by the Consortium for Investigative Journalism (CIJ,
www.consortiumnews.com).

During the 1980s, Falwell accumulated $73 million in
debt, largely in the form of bonds, sold by a Texas
company, Church & Institutional Facilities Development
Corp., which marketed the commercial paper to finance
Falwell's operations and the expansion of Liberty
University. All told, 2,500 fans of Falwell's Moral
Majority and Old Time Gospel Hour TV show, ponied up
their hard-earned money to purchase the bonds. Falwell
burned through the money, and, by the end of the 1980s,
when the political might of the Christian Right began to
decline, Falwell found himself on the verge of financial
ruin. At first, according to a U.S. Senate source
familiar with the case, Falwell was able to fend off his
creditors, by turning to such Christian fundamentalist deep
pockets as the Arthur DeMoss Foundation.

According to court records on file in Bedford County,
Virginia, by the Summer of 1993, two Virginia associates
of Falwell, Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas, began devoting
most of their time and energy to finding a bigger
``financial angel'' to bail out Liberty University and
Falwell's other front operations. Reber and Thomas were
the sole proprietor of the non-profit Christian Heritage
Foundation of Forest, Virginia, and they also ran a small
outfit, Direct Mail Communications, which they founded in
1989, located in a strip mall in the same rural town.

Just months after DMC had been created by Reber and
Thomas, it was purchased by one of the Moon fronts, Mail
America, for $2.5 million, a hefty sum for a company that
was only a months old, with no track record of making
money. What DMC had was the line into Falwell, handling
direct-mail solicitations for Falwell's entire empire;
but, according to court records, the firm was never even
compensated for the postage costs. Was Moon, then, already
subsidizing Falwell's operations in the early 1990s? What
is confirmed by the court documents, obtained by Bob
Parry, is that in the Summer of 1993, Reber, Ronald
Godwin, the architect of the Moon buyout of DMC, Falwell,
and Dong Moon Joo, the publisher of the {Washington
Times}, met in Lynchburg, Va. to discuss Falwell's
financial dilemma. The Summer 1993 meeting led to
Falwell's January 1994 trip to Seoul.

Clearly, a bailout deal was hatched during the
South Korea session. On July 26, 1994, Falwell made his
first appearance at a Moonie event, sitting next to
Reverend Moon at the head table of a gala affair for the Youth
Federation for World Peace. It would be the first of many
grovelling appearances that the pudgy televangelist would
make before Moon-manufactured organizations.

In January 1995, Reber and Thomas bought half of
Falwell's Liberty University debt--for pennies on the
dollar. The total that the duo shelled out was $2.5
million. The purchase of the Falwell debt came shortly
after Reber and Thomas' Christian Heritage Foundation
received a contribution of $3.5 million from Moon's
Women's Federation for World Peace. Federation vice
president Susan Fefferman confirmed, in a Parry interview,
that the $3.5 million had gone to ``Mr. Falwell's people''
for the benefit of Liberty University.

One of the attorneys in a Bedford County court case
that evolved out of the DMC-centered financial
shenanigans, had a different take on the ``bailout.'' Doug
Hudman told Parry that most of the bondholders, who lost
their shirts, were ``moms and pops cashing in their IRA
[individual retirement account] money because their local
minister and Falwell's letters said they'd be doing God's
work. The true victims are the ... believers who think
their money was going to a good cause. All it was doing
was going to fund Mr. Falwell's continued indebtedness.
It's kind of sickening.''

Worse: Falwell's bailout by the Moonies consolidated
a nearly total takeover of the already-demented Christian
Zionist Right by the Moonies and their controllers.

By 1986, the list of Christian Right prominents who
were adorning the head tables of Moon-front affairs
included Falwell, Ralph Reed, Beverly and Tim LaHaye, Gary
Bauer, Paul Crouch, and Robert Schuller. Moon's collection
also included some prominent elected officials, who became
virtually addicted to Moon's reported six-figure honoraria
checks. Thus, former President George H.W. Bush found
himself standing next to Reverend Moon, addressing a crowd in
Buenos Aires in November 1996, for the opening of the
South American version of Moon's {Washington Times}.
Former President Gerald Ford had already become one of the
regulars on the Moon-front circuit.

Among the members of Congress who also lent their
names to Moonie fronts are: Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) and
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who were poster boys for
Moon's Faith-Based Initiative for Family and Community
Revival, a group that many on both the Right and the Left
regard as the gatekeeper to President George W. Bush's
``Faith-Based Initiative'' pots of gold. Another Moon
front, the Empowerment Leadership Roundtable, headed by
longtime Moon hireling and former aide to Housing and
Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, David Caprara,
prominently featured Santorum and Sen. Joseph Lieberman
(D-Conn.)

When the Moonies ran a demonstration in front of the
U.S. Supreme Court, demanding that George Bush be declared
the victor over Al Gore in the November 2000 elections,
even Pat Robertson sent his personal emissary, Billy
McCormack, to read a statement of endorsement from
``Diamond Pat.''

- Dipping for Narco-Dollars? -

The White House National Office of Drug Control
Policy has been running a series of TV ads, warning kids
that the money they spend for illegal drugs could be going
into the pockets of terrorists who are out to destroy the
United States. The same could, perhaps be said for
Reverend Moon.

While the House International Relations Committee conducted
an exhaustive study of the Moonies' role in the ``Koreagate''
influence-buying scandal in the late 1970s, and found that the
``church'' had been established as a front for the KCIA and had
been linked to the Japanese Yakuza organized-crime apparatus,
no such study was done in the 1980s heyday of Iran-Contra, of
Moon's involvement with some of Ibero-America's most
vicious narco-terrorists.

On July 17, 1980, the ``Cocaine Colonels Coup'' took
place in Bolivia, placing General Garci@aaa Meza and Col. Luis
Arce-Gómez in power. The money behind the coup came,
principally, from the world's then-leading cocaine
trafficker, Roberto Suárez, Colonel Gómez's cousin.

Within weeks of the coup, Col. Bo Hi Pak, the real
ruler of the Moon empire, arrived in Bolivia's capital, La
Paz, to bless the new regime. Soon, the photo of Pak and
General García Meza was adorning the pages of every
Moon publication around the world. According to Parry,
Moon's World Anti-Communist League (WACL) front had poured
$4 million into the cocaine coup--money that would be
repaid many times over, before the putschists were ousted
from power. Another Moon front, CAUSA, which became a
principal conduit of suspect funds to the Lt. Col. Oliver
North-led Iran-Contra ``Enterprise,'' set up shop in La
Paz, under the control of Thomas Ward, a Moon functionary,
who was frequently seen in the company of Nazi butcher
Klaus Barbie, who ran the ``Cocaine Colonels''
intelligence organ.

While most of the Cocaine Colonels wound up in jail
as drug traffickers, Moon's operation in Bolivia escaped
scrutiny, and the Korean guru seemed to have early warning
of the regime's collapse. Moon had moved his South American
operations to Uruguay and Honduras, two other major hubs
of Contra hot-money flows, before the colonels fell.

Beginning in 2000, through another string of front
groups, Moon began the same ``buy up the markers''
operations, targetting the Democratic Party, the remnants
of the civil rights movement, and the growing Islamic
community in the United States. At one recent Midwest
Islamic event, Moon's church boss in America, Rev. Michael
Jenkins, delivered a donation to a prominent imam who had
just completed a sermon {denouncing Reverend Falwell} for
his vicious smear against the Prophet Mohammed, whom
Falwell labeled ``a terrorist.'' Reverend Jenkins, true to
Moonie form, didn't even blush at the attacks against
Moon's favorite fundamentalist.