Former KCFF Bookkeeper, Sophia Kim, Convicted of Tax Crimes in 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
Sophia Kim, also known as Sookyeong Kim Sebold, a former resident of McLean, was convicted of embezzling more than $800,000 from the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) and failing to report the income on her tax returns.
Neil H. MacBride, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Tax Division Kathryn Keneally; Rick A. Raven, special agent in charge of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation’s Washington, D.C., Field Office, made the announcement.
Sebold was convicted of one count of filing a false 2005 tax return, which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison, and one count of tax evasion for the year 2005, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for March 1, 2013, before United States District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema.
Evidence at trial established that Sebold worked for the KCFF, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting cultural exchange through the sponsorship of the Universal Ballet Company (UBC) and other performing art events. UBC was founded by the Unification Church International (UCI) and Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and KCFF was funded primarily by UCI.
The evidence at trial proved that in 2005, Sebold embezzled more than $400,000 from KCFF’s bank accounts for her own benefit and used these funds for day trading, gambling and other personal expenses. She did not report these funds on her 2005 individual income tax return, resulting in her failure to pay more than $130,000 in taxes. In addition, the evidence at trial established that Sebold had also embezzled funds from KCFF in 2002, 2003, and 2004, for a total of more than $800,000 in unreported income.
Sophia Kim served a 24-month federal prison sentence for her 2013 criminal conviction.
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Notes
1. Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation was established in the 1964 and incorporated in District of Columbia.
2. In the mid-1960s, Col. [Bo Hi] Pak moved decisively in this new direction. In March 1964, he was the “moving force” behind the creation of the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) which sponsored the Little Angels’ performances in the United States, beginning in 1965. In late 1964, he resigned from the Korean army and his diplomatic post to engage in this activity full-time. The following year he persuaded Miss [Young-Oon] Kim to relocate from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., allowing her to take primary responsibility for church activities. Then, in 1966, he played a central role in establishing Radio of Free Asia (ROFA) as a second major project sponsored by KCFF. In effect, Col. Pak became a free-lance ambassador of goodwill, foundation director, and an activist in the struggle against atheistic communism.
3. Another witness [at the 1978 Fraser Committee investigation of the UC], Robert Roland, (230) described his friendship with Pak Bo Hi when Pak was a military attache at the Korean Embassy in Washington in the early 1960s. According to Roland, Pak was then engaged in intelligence liaison work and was also proselytizing for Moon and the UC. Pak told Roland of his plans to use the KCFF and one of its projects, the Little Angels, to advance Moon’s cause, as well as to help the Korean Government. (231)
4. United States Congressional investigation of the Unification Church
INVESTIGATION OF KOREAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS
Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations (1978)
United States House of Representatives
Conclusions and Recommendations
Also known as the Fraser Report after the Subcommittee’s chairman, Donald M. Fraser.Printed October 31, 1978, (excerpt from Part C: Investigative Findings, pp. 387-392).
The subcommittee findings regarding the Moon Organization may be summarized as follows:
shamanxx said: I know Sophia’s ex, Michael Sebold, who told me of his former wife’s gambling addiction. After their divorce and the sale of their home, she blew about $30,000 in one Atlantic City weekend. So – no surprise. She needs jail time.
Fraser Committee staff director Robert Boettcher writes about Moon’s history. In his early climb to power, says Boettcher, Moon wanted to have loyal cultists inside the Korean government, where “they could sway powerful persons and become influential themselves.”
Moon wanted his followers to portray the Unification Church as a “useful political tool for the government” while hiding Moon’s power goals. Moon’s early followers included army officers close to Kim Jong Pil, the founding director of the Korean CIA.
Kim Jong Pil knew that Moon had ambitions to build influence in Korea and in other countries. He gave Moon slack, because he decided Moon might be of use to the Korean government. [Kim and Moon played golf together.]
One early Moon follower, Bo Hi Pak, was assigned to the Embassy in Washington in 1961. Boettcher says Pak’s home on North Utah Street in Arlington, Virginia, was a Moonie recruiting center. Pak established the Unification Church in Virginia in 1963. Pak cultivated the friendship of an airline pilot, Robert Roland, and his wife, but did not tell them of his association with Moon.
Boettcher learned that when Roland asked about Pak’s duties as assistant military attache, Pak said he “was responsible for liaison between South Koreans and American intelligence agencies, which often required his visiting the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) located at Fort Meade, Maryland."
Roland said that after dinner one evening, Pak revealed "step by step how the destiny of mankind was in the hands of a Korean named Moon.”
When Roland asked what his aim was in Washington, Pak said, “I must lay a firm foundation for Master by making influential political and social contacts.” In 1964, Bo Hi Pak came up with an idea to create a Moon American-based foundation.
According to Boettcher, Pak wanted the foundation to hide its identifcation with the Unification Church, while encouraging Americans to contribute money. “Unknowingly they would be serving Moon,” says Boettcher, “but in the long run [according to Pak’s plan] they would be rewarded by Moon’s establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth."
The foundation conceived by Pak was given the name the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF). The KCFF hid its affiliation with Moon, as planned. The money the foundation raised helped increase Moon’s power in America. Bo Hi Pak, through a friend, persuaded retired Admiral Arleigh Burke to become president of the KCFF. In order to create the illusion of respectability for the KCFF, Pak included Burke’s name on the foundation’s letterhead. The KCFF letterhead included other impressive names, such as former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower as honorary presidents; and as "directors and advisers”: Richard Nixon, George Meany, Pearl Mesta, Senator Hugh Scott, Senator Homer Capehart, General Matthew Ridgway, and Congressman Clement Zablocki.
Burke resigned his KCFF position in 1965, after Robert Roland sent him information about Moon’s relationship with Pak. Burke also distrusted Pak’s stories about where the KCFF’s money was going, but Pak continued to use Burke’s name in lobbying for the foundation. Moon founded a front group, the Little Angels, in 1962.
The Little Angels were a troupe of young girls who opened political doors by traveling as ambassadors of good will for Moon, performing traditional Korean songs and dances. Moon seized every chance to be photographed with influential people. In 1965, Bo Hi Pak arranged for him to meet Dwight D. Eisenhower at a Gettysburg photo-op.
Boettcher says Moon commented that the meeting with Eisenhower opened doors “to further recognition by national and international leaders.” Moon brought the Little Angels along to “charm the Eisenhowers.”
On other occasions, the girls’ troupe also performed for Queen Elizabeth, and at a United Nations performance attended by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.
Moon’s decades of courting influential American leaders in order to gain political power in this country have been fruitful.
For further information see Robert B. Boettcher “Gifts of Deceit”
Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandalis a non-fiction book on Koreagate and the Fraser Committee, a congressional subcommittee which investigated South Korean influence in the United States by the KCIA and the Unification Church, authored by Robert Boettcher, with Gordon L. Freedman.
ISBN 978-0030445767 402 pages published 1980
“Boettcher’s book is the first book which reveals the global geo-political ambitions of the Moon organization. It is a must for students of foreign relations, students of destructive cults, and for students of the U. S. Constitution particularly those who take an interest in the first and the thirteenth amendments.”
Robert B. Boettcher died May 1984 in a fall from the roof of an apartment building on Central Park West, where he lived. He was 44 years old.
On the Unification Church in Japan and its political (KCIA) origins
▲ Sun Myung Moon and Nobusuke Kishi
Excerpted from the FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW, pp. 19–22 - an article by John Roberts
In Japan…The Unification Church is known variously as SEKAI TOITSU KYOKAI, TOITSU GENRI, OR GENRI UNDO, with numerous variations. The main adjuncts or manifestations of the Church are the KOKUSAI SHOKYO RENGO (International Federation for Victory over Communism of IFFVOC), which is essentially the Japanese chapter or counterpart of the World Anticommunist League/Asian People’s Anticommunist League (WACL/APACL): and the Genri Group under which various student activities are conducted.
In a top position is Professor Juitsu Kitaoka, a leader of the United Nations Association and member of several pro-American rightist organizations. He is described as a violent anti-communist advocating rearmament…Kitaoka is a long-time associate of Dr. Tetsuzo Watanabe, a former film tycoon whose ideas are no less violent.
Organiser of the APACL in Japan, Watanabe became international president of the WACL/APACL, the IFFVOC’s alter ego. Watanabe was closely connected with US Army intelligence and maintained relations with prominent McCarthyites in the U.S.
GENRI leaders, by their own admission, have been collaborating with the KCIA, and their movement worked in alliance with other organizations, notably the centrist SOKA GAKKAI and ultranationalist groups such as underworld boss Yoshio Kodama’s Youth Thought Study Society, and of course the IFFVOC, established jointly by Moon and gambling czar Ryoichi Sasakawa in 1967…Later, however, under president Sasakawa, a more presentable line-up of complaisant politicians, businessmen and scholars was mustered.
The IFFVOC was based originally on Sasakawa’s Federation of Motorboat Racing Associations…It appears that the IFFVOC serves Sasakawa as a private police force for his motor-boat courses…Sasakawa’s remarks indicate that he considers it as patriotic militia in reserve for political crises, similar to Hitler’s brownshirts and the uniformed militarist party that Sasakawa, a self-proclaimed fascist, organised during the 1930s.
…the Moon Machine established the World Peace Academy (WPA) in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The Japan Chapter, set up in 1974, is reported to include among its consultants James Stewart of the Asia Foundation (an old CIA front) and Masahide Kanayama, a paid lobbyist of the South Korean Government and allegedly of the KCIA. One of the WPA’s activities is the International Congress for World Peace, to be held in Japan this summer under the co-sponsorship of the International Cultural Foundation, another Moon front. The WPA seems to have enlisted the active support or participation of the potent Japan Federation of Employers Associations, the Japan Productivity Centre, the Nomura Research Institute and the Mitsubishi Research Institute in its National Goals project for the study of Japan’s strategy in the 1980s.
The Moon Machine in Japan operates a…trading firm known as TOITSU SANGYO (Unification Industries) which raised eyebrows several years ago by importing several hundred shotguns and powerful air rifles manufactured by the Reverend Moon’s munitions factories in South Korea which assemble M‑16 rifles on a knockdown basis under US license and manufacture parts for the same weapons. Significantly, the shotguns and air rifles mentioned above were imported for the militant IFFVOC…
The picture is admittedly no more than an out-of-focus snapshot of the tip of the iceberg. Some of the Japan connections have been revealed or hinted at in the Koreagate investigations, but so far there has been no general expose…However, it has been reported that 200 Japanese right-wing politicians receive financial support from the Unification Church and its affiliates, or directly from the KCIA. This may be an understatement since at least 2,000 prominent Japanese politicians, businessmen and scholars as well as underworld bosses lend their support to Moon’s movement.
It may be recalled that Kishi, once a key figure in General Tojo’s World War II cabinet, became one of the most passionate spokesmen for Dr. Frank Buchman’s MORAL REARMAMENT (MRA) in the 1950s and 1960s. The striking similarities between the moral precepts and secular programmes of MRA and Moon’s church is of interest here because the latter was born as an international movement at the very time when MRA was swiftly declining in Japan. Following the upheaval over the Security Treaty in 1960, which forced his resignation as prime minister, Kishi declared with characteristic hyperbole: “But for MORAL REARMAMENT, Japan would be under communist control today.” Curiously, little heard about MRA after the early 1960s. Instead, there was much bombast about the Asian People’s Anticommunist League, in which Kishi played the same role as elder statesman and spokesman. There are reports that in 1959 or thereabouts Moon played go-between for an alliance between the MRA leadership and the APACL. When the World Anticommunist League and IFFVOC were formed in late 1966 and 1967 respectively, Kishi again came to the fore…
Revelations of the Fraser and Jaworski committees somehow stopped to exposing well-documented Korean depredations in Japan. Perhaps for diplomatic reasons, the US Government preferred to confine its investigation to events that occurred in the US, ignoring the fact that the Korean scandal is trilateral, with operations that involve and affect all three countries.
Also conspicuously absent from the investigation is evidence linking the CIA with the KCIA, its creation, and its grandchild, the Unification Church.
In court of law, the existence of such a link could not be proved but clues are everywhere. One of them is a series of documents (Supplement to Part 4) submitted in the March 1968 hearings of the Zablocki Committee. The concern a William A. Curtin Jr. and the Korean Freedom and Cultural Foundation. Curtin, an Army intelligence colonel, had been attached to the office of the Secretary of Defense. In 1959–60, he served a tour as adviser to the South Korean Army. In September 1960, he made a brief official trip to Japan and South Korea “where he met various ranking Korean government officials.”
His activities until his retirement in 1962 are not specified, but thereafter he devoted his time conning prominent Americans into lending their names or financial suport to the non-existent Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF). This was nominally to promote friendly relations between the two countries in commemoration of the Korean War, but in practice it was used to raise funds for propaganda, suborning of American politicians and funding KCIA operations in Japan and Korea as well as the U.S., according to Department of Justice reports.
The foundation was formally registered in 1964 by Curtain (vice-president) and two American dummy directors. Astonishingly, the two honorary predsidents were REAL presidents — Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — and the KCCF president was Admiral Arleigh Burke of World War II fame.
The honorary chairman of KCFF was Kim Jong Pil, founder of the KCIA who used the Unification Church as his tool. Serving as vice-presidents were Dr. Yang Yu Chan, ROK ambassador to Washington, and (later) Pak Bo Hi, the Reverend Moon’s right-hand man. The board of directors and advisory board — more than 100 persons in all — is a veritable roster of the American political and financial elite. How Curtin, reported by the FBI to be a dipsomaniac and a sick man (he died in 1965), could have assembled such a brilliant array of supporters is puzzling indeed. Probably, the dignataries did not inquire too deeply into the affairs of the organization whose overt activities included the promotion of the Little Angels of Korea choral group and financial support for the APACL Freedom Centre (APACLFC) in Seoul, Korea, which was also a client of Asia Foundation…
Another project of KCFF was Radio of Free Asia (ROFA), established in 1966 with General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Burke, and Ambassador Chang as honorary heads and Pak Bo Hi as executive director. On the advisory council were six senators, 12 congressmen and eight state governors as well as Richard Nixon and Ed Sullivan. ROFA raised political funds for dubious destinations and beamed pro-American propaganda to Asia during the Vietnam War. The US Department of Justice heard many complaints about ROFA…and in 1971 showed signs of investigating it on suspicion of violating the Foreign Registration Act and abusing its privileges as a tax-free foundation.
Through divine providence or other means, Pak Bo Hi secured the legal services of Robert Amory Jr., former deputy director of the CIA and a law partner of Thomas G. Corcoran, an adviser to the CIA and a prominent lobbyist for the ROK and Taiwan. The Justice Department dropped the investigation like a radioactive potato, and the KCFF and ROFA continued their work for the KCIA unmolested until the Koreagate investigation brought them out into the shrivelling glare of public opinion.
These revelations do not tell us who or what is behind the Moon Machine’s brash operations in Japan. However, the Fraser Committee in Washington has been under increasing pressure from some quarters to investigate not only the US angle but also corrupt US-Tokyo-Seoul connections.
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On the Unification Church in Japan - excerpted from Moonwebs
▲ During the Korean War, a Korean carries his aged father across the icy Han River at Chungju, Korea in their flight to the South to escape the onrushing Communist Forces.
Date: January 14, 1951. Photo Credit: US Army by Cpl. J.J. McGinty
Gifts of Deceit (1980) by Robert B. Boettcher pages 325-350
Chapter 13 – The Menace
America was an ideal place for Park, Moon, and Tongsun to operate. As an ally, South Korea was not suspected of subversion. The U.S. government was watching the Soviet KGB, not the Korean CIA. All three men were able to manipulate at will.
American institutions are vulnerable to such people. In an open society such as this, any view can be expressed. If it sounds convincing, people will believe it. The halls of Congress are open to foreign government officials, businessmen, or evangelists from whatever country. If the country was Korea, they were always welcome because of the long friendship with the United States. Throughout this country, the agents of the Korean influence campaign could come and go as they pleased. Some people believed what they said. Some accepted money from them. Some were intimidated by them. Some became controlled by them.
President Park’s KCIA forced unsubmissive Koreans out of business in the United States. His political party extorted money for him from American businessmen in Korea. Money was offered to get Park’s picture on the front page of Time or Newsweek. The KCIA’s written plans targeted about a hundred American leaders for “manipulation” or “co-opting.” Agents such as Moon and Tongsun bribed Congressmen or prepared Americans to die for Korea. It was a great boondoggle for Moon and Tongsun. In the land of big money and big power, they made both.
President Park benefited less from the influence campaign than did Tongsun and Moon. That is ironic, since the objective of the Blue House planning meetings in 1970 was to get more American support for the R.O.K. government. At that time, Park and his advisers were overreacting to changes in U.S. policy, as usual. Nixon and Kissinger were absolutely determined to protect South Korea from another war with the North. Park knew that. He had nothing to worry about on that score, if that was his main concern.
There had to be another reason for Park’s extreme anxiety. It can be seen in the thrust of his personal political maneuvers. In 1969 he railroaded a change in the constitution to allow him to run for another term. After he was reelected, Park declared martial law for several months. Then, in 1972, he dumped the old constitution and replaced it with a new one giving him unlimited powers. Under the Yushin system, he can remain President as long as he wishes without being bothered by elections.
The influence campaign was designed to get maximum American support to help keep Park Chung Hee in power.
American Presidents did support Park’s government, but not as a result of the influence campaign. They did it for the traditional reason: to ensure stability for U.S. strategic interests. The many visits of Congressmen to Korea, however, yielded Park some benefits. In Korea, the regime’s propaganda created public impressions that the Americans were with him all the way. In the United States, some of the opposition in Congress to the Carter troop withdrawal plan undoubtedly could be traced to the Park regime’s expert orchestration of congressional visits in the past.
The failures of the influence campaign outweigh the successes, though. The campaign gained Park nothing he could not have gotten without all the skulduggery. His country was one that Americans were quite willing to support under normal circumstances. Exposing the campaign in 1976 brought two years of the most strained relations the two allies ever had. As for military aid, the campaign seems not to have had a positive effect during its heyday. Except in 1974 and 1976, Congress did not even make a separate decision on how much aid Korea would get. That was done by the State Department and the Pentagon after Congress had approved an overall amount for all countries together, which included the extra aid Nixon had promised the Koreans. Each year Congress had cut the overall figure, but this was not aimed at Korea, though Korea got less than planned as a result. Congress just wanted to trim military aid in general. The lobbying and payoffs had been virtually irrelevant.
In 1974, when Congress did vote on aid for Korea separately, Park lost. Fraser’s amendment denied $93 million for the most humiliating reason: suppression of human rights. Phase two of the influence campaign—enhancing Park’s image in the United States—clearly had not succeeded.
Fraser tried for another cut in 1976, but the House defeated his amendment. The State Department and the Korean Embassy had argued strongly against a second cut. There was no evidence of improper persuasion. Tongsun and the KCIA apparently were not instrumental in the lobbying.
The end of the scandal afforded a chance for re-warming relations between Seoul and Washington. Two years had gone by without Park having a meeting with the new President of the United States. That had never happened before. Park had never had a face-to-face talk with the man who intended to take all American ground troops out of Korea. He had wanted to meet Jimmy Carter from the beginning. If a summit meeting was held during Koreagate, Park could say it was proof of what he had been maintaining all along: that the “so-called Tongsun Park case” really was not a serious problem with Washington.
Carter did not fall for that. He had an extra reason for holding Park off anyhow. He wanted Kim Dae-Jung freed. Park resisted. Not only did he resent Carter trying to force him to let a political prisoner go; it was also important to him that his most influential political prisoner stay in jail. After Koreagate had quieted down, he yielded. On December 27, 1978, Kim was released. The release opened the way for a Carter-Park meeting. It was set for the end of June when Carter was to be in the area for the Tokyo summit meeting of the heads of the industrial powers.
It worried Park that his visitor was a President known to be a human rights advocate. The regime prepared for Carter’s coming by announcing that human rights was not expected to be on the agenda, placing Kim Dae-Jung under house arrest, and threatening to prosecute persons who made “disrespectful statements” about President Park to the Carter party.
Human rights was on Carter’s agenda, nonetheless. In his only public statement while in Seoul, which was televised live with translation into Korean, he said he believed South Korea’s economic progress “can be matched by similar progress through the realization of basic human aspirations in political and human rights.” He had talks with rights leaders Cardinal Kim and the Reverend Kim Kwan-Suk, and the president of the opposition New Democratic Party, Kim Young-Sam. There was a line about human rights in Carter’s and Park’s concluding joint communique, a first for any meeting between an American President and the head of a repressive government. Before leaving, Carter had Secretary of State Vance inform the press that he had requested the release of over one hundred political prisoners by name. Although Carter’s human rights initiatives surpassed anything done by his predecessors during visits, the results were not encouraging. The Korean press was not allowed to report the American call for release of prisoners, and the newspapers downplayed the talks with religious and opposition figures as no more than “shooting the breeze.” Park’s release of eighty-six prisoners on July 17, hardly a sign of liberalization, seemed designed only to placate Carter. For Koreans, he promised the full force of Emergency Measure Number 9, the catch-all edict for throwing people in jail. Two days after freeing the eighty-six, Park issued a stern warning to those who favored changing the constitution “by demanding what is called ‘the restoration of democracy’.” Ready, as ever, with a list of perils to justify prolonging the dictatorship, he added a new item, “the national security problem following the recent Korea-U.S. summit conference.” In every other context, the regime was hailing the Carter visit as a major triumph for Park Chung Hee.
The new “security problem” Park cited was the rejection by North Korea of his and Carter’s proposal to convene three-way talks aimed at reducing tensions and reunifying the Korean peninsula. A hostile North Korea proved once again to be the best thing Park had going for himself. By joining Carter in the proposal, he appeared reasonable to the Americans. Rejection of the proposal strengthened his case for staying firmly in power and insisting on full support from the United States. No time was lost in taking advantage of North Korea’s intransigence. The day after Park’s warning, National Assembly Speaker Paik Too-Chin said North Korea’s response was “unmistakable evidence that it is seeking to invade South Korea.” Therefore, there could be no freedom for dissent, which he equated with “communistic activities,” because “anti-Communism is the blood vessel of our survival.”
To Park’s further satisfaction, on July 21 Carter ordered a halt to the planned withdrawal of American troops because U.S. intelligence had discovered a sizable buildup of ground forces by North Korea. Although troop withdrawal, with a delay until 1981 at the earliest, remained an American policy goal, the Korean government called the halt a “virtual nullification” of the policy.
With American military support holding firm no matter how he ruled, Park’s crackdowns grew bolder. The headquarters of the opposition New Democratic party was raided at 2:00 a.m. on August 11 by some one thousand policemen and KCIA plainclothes agents; 172 unemployed women textile workers and 26 New Democratic party legislators were forced out of the building with tear gas and clubs. Many were injured and one woman was killed. The U.S. State Department called the action “excessive and brutal.”
Park’s next target was the president of the New Democratic party, Kim Young-Sam, who had been criticizing Park regularly since winning his post in May. After some court maneuvers to deprive Kim of the party position, Park had him expelled from the National Assembly on October 4. The method was, by now, a characteristic one: Members of Park’s party convened not in the Assembly chamber but in an underground conference room with a heavy police guard to keep the opposition out. In protest, Washington immediately recalled Ambassador Gleysteen from Seoul, an unprecedented move that shocked Korean leaders. The remaining opposition Assembly members, newly galvanized, then resigned their seats en masse on October 13. By the 18th, the government had imposed martial law on Busan, South Korea’s second largest city and Kim Young-Sam’s home district, in an attempt to quell anti-government demonstrations. In 1960, Busan had been a starting point for the demonstrations that brought down Syngman Rhee’s government.
Within the establishment there were those who began to feel Park Chung Hee had gone too far. Some of the generals and members of the ruling party privately viewed the expulsion of Kim Young-Sam as a great blunder. With apparently no thought of getting rid of the President or overhauling the regime, they did favor somehow pulling back at least to the way things were before Kim was ousted.
From an unexpected quarter came the most extreme measure. On October 26, Park Chung Hee was shot to death across a dinner table by his host, KCIA Director Kim Jae-Kyu.
That the assassin should be, of all people, the director of the KCIA, was astonishing. So was Kim Jae-Kyu’s reported motive: disagreement with Park’s heavy-handed treatment of dissenters. The KCIA had always been Park’s personal instrument of control. The death of the President at the hands of the director threw the agency into a demoralized state, its future uncertain. Whatever Kim Jae-Kyu’s power goals, they came to naught. The generals refused to join him and he was jailed along with his alleged accomplice, Blue House aide Kim Kye-Won (himself a former KCIA director). That the leaders of the establishment now seemed to favor liberalization was encouraging, since they had so long supported Park’s president-for-life drive. There emerged an immediate consensus among them that the Yushin constitution would not be suitable for the post-Park era. The government of Acting President Choi Kyu-Ha, who had been Park’s figurehead Prime Minister, spoke in support of revising the constitution, releasing persons imprisoned under Emergency Measure Number 9, and holding a presidential election under a new constitution.
Kim Jong-Pil, founding director of the KCIA and early ally of Sun Myung Moon, reappeared as a major power contender. Two weeks after the assassination, he was chosen unanimously to succeed Park as head of the Democratic Republican party (of which he was also the founder). In a public show of conciliation, he paid a courtesy call on opposition party chief Kim Young-Sam. Both men aspired to the presidency, as did former Prime Minister Chung Il-Kwon and Kim Dae-Jung, who was released from house arrest. Opposition leaders, suspecting attempts by Park’s clique to rig the future system for its own benefit, denounced the government plan to retain the Yushin system for the interim.
Hard-line generals moved to shut the opening political door just six weeks after Park was killed. In what looked very much like a military coup, sixteen army leaders were arrested and replaced with men trusted by Major General Chon Too-Hwan, head of the Army Security Command and his power-behind-the throne, Major General Roh Tae-Woo. With Chon in control, the United States could find itself thrown back to a situation not unlike 1961 when Park Chung Hee seized power: takeover by an autocratic general backed by a Kim Jong-Pil-type mastermind, neither of whom was noted for close ties or sympathies with America.
A poll conducted by the Gallup institute in 1979 showed the American people’s support for South Korea was at its lowest point ever. Only 21 percent said they believed U.S. forces should be sent to Korea in the event of another war there. In a 1978 survey, conducted by Potomac Associates, South Korea ranked low on a list of which countries Americans considered it was important to get along with, and was regarded as less reliable a friend of the United States than Japan or India among Asian nations.
Americans who have soured on Korea because of the scandal should reconsider. Deceitful men like Park Chung Hee, Sun Myung Moon, and Tongsun Park are not all Korea has to offer. The Korean people have proved themselves among the most capable in the world. They have achieved an economic miracle in only a few years. South Korea is far too important a country for the United States to reject. It is no longer the pitiful poverty case it was in the 1950s. It is a growing industrial nation and an important trading partner with the United States. Growth of democracy could have a chance with Park gone. South Korea still has a belligerent foe in North Korea. Park Chung Hee’s self-serving exaggerations aside, Americans can believe their own leaders’ assessment that North Korea is dangerous. And it should not be forgotten that the United States bears a very large responsibility for what has happened in Korea for the past thirty-five years, both good and bad.
The kind of government South Korea has had makes many Americans reluctant to give support. Park Chung Hee betrayed his American ally by setting up the Yushin dictatorship. It has caused suffering for Koreans and trouble with the United States without strengthening South Korea’s security. On one point Yushin was completely successful: it kept Park in power, safe from all opponents, until he was struck down by one of his own men.
Tongsun did extremely well by the influence campaign while it lasted. Korea’s interests may have been poorly served, but not his own.
When it was all over, he had some regrets. The scandal had caused so much notoriety and taken so much of his time, he said, it kept him from making about $20 million more from his businesses. And he had missed the Washington social life. Tongsun remained undaunted, though. His enterprises in Korea and the Middle East were still flourishing. He thought a political career in Korea should be the next step for him. Preposterous as that seems after the disaster he brought the South Korean government, it is not unlike Tongsun. He never says “never.”
With the dismissal of his indictment in August 1979 under the immunity agreement, Tongsun was once again free to come and go in this country.
The charmed circle, no longer charmed, is out of Congress. Hanna chose not to run for reelection in 1974 and went to prison in 1978 for conspiracy to defraud the United States. Repentant, he entered the federal penitentiary at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. There, the former Democratic Congressman made friends with a Republican with whom he had been at odds during another scandal, John Mitchell.
Comparing Watergate and Koreagate, Mitchell insisted there was nothing similar between the two.
“Oh yes, there is, John,” Hanna rejoined. “Down here, we’re both in the same camp!” Mitchell let out with a gutsy laugh of the kind Watergate TV viewers never heard.
Passman, after being indicted, had asked not be tried at all because of advanced age and failing health. A judge turned down the request after a court-appointed doctor examined Passman. Awaiting trial, he steadfastly insisted he never accepted money from Tongsun.
“Seventy-eight years down the drain.” Passman lamented, viewing the charges as the ruination of his life. “I stood for everything good. I was a Grand Mason. Only a hundred were ever chosen. Now the only thing I have to look forward to is the grave.”
As things turned out, he had a great deal to look forward to. On April 1, 1979, Passman was acquitted on all charges after a hometown jury deliberated only 90 minutes.
While his trial was going on, Passman was seen each morning arriving for breakfast in a Cadillac, walking briskly in and out of a hotel without a cane. For the courthouse arrival, he traveled by Chevrolet and made his way inside by leaning on his lawyers and a cane. Central to his defense was a claim that he had been an unwitting tool in a plan devised by Governor Edwards, Gordon Dore, and Tongsun. After the favorable verdict was announced, the defense team joined together in song and dance for all to behold, chanting, “The Governor made me do it! The Governor made me do it!” Passman, in equally high spirits and having abandoned the cane, said the next day, “I’ve made an amazing recovery since last night.”
Grover Connell, Tongsun’s rice dealer and sometime ally with Passman behind the scenes against Tongsun, was indicted in April 1978 for lying to a grand jury about his dealings with Tongsun. After Tongsun had proved to be an unconvincing witness in the Passman trial, the charges against Connell were dropped in April 1979.
No convictions resulted from Tongsun’s testimony. Hanna, the only Congressman to go to jail, had pleaded guilty. Comparing his plight to Passman’s happy ending, he said his guilty plea looked foolish in retrospect. In May 1979 he was released from prison for good behavior after serving one year of a two-year sentence.
Two members of the charmed circle emerged from Koreagate with no legal problems to worry about. By the time Tongsun came back to testify in 1978, it was too late to do anything to Gallagher and Minshall. They could not be prosecuted because the five-year statute of limitations had run out. Leaving Congress in 1974, Minshall was working in Washington in 1979 as head of a lobbying concern, Congressional Associates. After Gallagher served his sentence for income tax evasion, he went back to New Jersey to be a middleman for sales between American and foreign companies. In late 1976, before the statute of limitations had expired, Paul Michel of the Justice Department had backed off even from having Gallagher questioned by the grand jury. That was shortly after Michel had let Tongsun slip through his fingers and at at time when he had quite a bit of material on Gallagher.
Michel became Associate Deputy Attorney General in 1978.
Kim Hancho, supposedly intended as the KCIA’s successor to Tongsun, was convicted in May 1978 for conspiracy and lying to a grand jury. He never paid Congressmen a penny of the $600,000 the KCIA gave him. In July 1979, he began serving a six-month sentence after being placed on probation for a separate tax conviction and obtaining dismissal of an indictment for contempt of Congress.
Congressmen Joseph Addabbo and Robert Leggett, whom the Justice Department began investigating in early 1976, were not indicted. Only three months after Assistant Secretary of State Habib had succeeded in getting a Justice probe under way, their names were the first to surface in public as being suspected of receiving Korean payments. The Koreagate investigations came up with no admissible evidence, and intelligence reports were insufficient. In 1979, Addabbo became chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Leggett survived his 1976 election contest in spite of public revelations about his tripartite love life, which included Suzi Park Thomson. Ending his congressional career in 1978, he became president of the Joint Maritime Congress, which lobbies the government.
There were no job offers in Congress for Suzi Park Thomson after Speaker Albert retired. In 1977, she announced she was opening a catering service in Washington, explaining that since giving parties was what she was best known for, she might as well try to make a living out of it.
In the Senate, where Tongsun had been less active, the Select Committee on Ethics found substantial contributions to the election campaigns of “at least seven Senators,” but that none had been guilty of violating the ethics code. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana was criticized for “neglect” of his duties by stating in writing twice that he had neither received nor been offered more than $35 from Tongsun. There was “substantial credible evidence” of a $1,000 contribution. Also, Tongsun had given a party in Bayh’s honor that cost $3,800. One Senator, the late Allen El-lender of Louisiana, had himself credited Tongsun, along with Passman and Governor Edwards, with convincing him to change his vote to favor an amendment for military aid to Korea in 1972. But there was no evidence that Ellender did so as a result of any contribution, actual or promised.
For all the fuss about a scandal big enough to rival Watergate, the results were meager indeed.
In the spring of 1979, less than six months after the bribery investigations, it appeared as if Koreagate might have a successor. The House Ethics Committee began a preliminary probe into allegations of influence-buying by South Africa and Iran.
The furor over congressional bribery obscured the menace of Moon in the United States. That, too, was a tragedy.
That Moon was a part of the Korean government’s influence campaign is a point well established. He was one of its three main elements along with the KCIA and Tongsun’s operation in Congress. His Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation and his Washington minion, Bo Hi Pak, were listed for lobbying at President Park’s Blue House planning meetings in 1970. He planted “PR sisters” in Congressmen’s offices. His agents promoted Korean interests in Congress. He organized a political demonstration for the KCIA in 1974. A component of the Moon organization was included in the KCIA’s written plan for operations in the United States for 1976. In that year, President Park himself still considered Moon useful.
Even without the documented ties to the influence campaign, common sense says the Korean government would consider it more than a little helpful that Moon had thousands of obedient American youths cheering and praying for Korea every day and believing Korea was God’s chosen nation. Quite an investment in future American support for Korea.
It was Moon’s good fortune and America’s misfortune that no evidence was found that Moon bribed a Congressman. Petty as payments would be compared to the damage Moon has actually done to society, the Justice Department and the newspapers might then have thought he was a major problem. Bribery is not Moon’s racket, though. To bribe is to give money. Moon takes money. He takes it by the millions every month.
The Korean scandal missed the mark by a mile. Most people who followed the scandal did not even know Moon had anything to do with the Korean influence campaign. It was all about payoffs to Congressmen. That made news. Tongsun’s little escapade is over. But Moon is still riding high.
Exposing the influence campaign brought down some Korean agents and Congressmen, perhaps including Speaker Carl Albert. But not Moon. He always told the cult he was bigger than the KCIA, Korea, the United States, even “better” than God. So far, his record on those points is pretty good.
He needed the KCIA’s blessing to get going in Korea. He got it by way of cult members close to Director Kim Jong-Pil. The Korean government became indebted to him because of the Little Angels’ propaganda bonanza. The doors to big business were therefore opened to him. Contracts for manufacturing weapons followed. Moon became a multimillionaire in Korea. In the meantime, Bo Hi Pak was lining things up for Master on the American end. He got powerful Americans to support Moon’s front, the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, pretending it had no connection with Moon. The cult needed money, so Pak ripped off Americans with Radio of Free Asia, helped by KCIA Director Kim Hyung-Wook.
President Park and his influence planners may have thought they were using Moon for Korea. What they may not have realized was how much Moon was using Korea for himself. Korea was the Adam country but only because it gave birth to him. He treats all governments, just as he treats all people, with contempt. People are mere stepping stones to the throne he claims God promised him. The path he treaded to power must be paved with important people. Dwight Eisenhower “paid his bill” by having his picture taken with Moon, and lending his name, unsuspectingly, to the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation. The annual “International Conference for the Unity of Sciences” is important enough for Moon to spend half a million dollars bringing scientists from all over the world. The subsidized scholars’ mission is to make Moon look good and develop unified thinking that “will be the leading ideology of the world.” Back in their home countries, scholars are supposed to do things “which will enable us to direct the world policies toward the same goals.” Well paid, many scholars return to Moon’s jamboree year after year, unaffected by public exposure of his hidden purposes.
When skeptics suggest something less than noble motives behind the science conferences, the cult answers with one of Moon’s ready-made turnabout questions: “Do they really think that such eminent scientists and scholars are so foolish as to allow themselves to be so used?”
Moon’s track record suggests either the world is dumb enough, or he is smart enough, to get what he wants. Certainly he is contemptuous enough to believe both.
For Moon, President Park’s influence campaign was just a part of his own influence campaign. Tongsun’s idea was similar, but he was successful on a much smaller scale. Moon was not as dependent on the government as Tongsun and Suzi Park Thomson. By the time the government’s campaign collapsed in scandal, it had already served him well. He no longer needed it. He was firmly established in the United States, the land of big money and big power.
He did not come through Koreagate unscathed by bad publicity. The controversy over Moon in America led the Park regime to make some unfriendly gestures for appearance’s sake. As late as the end of 1977, however, one of Moon’s companies was negotiating over a Korean government weapons contract in the United States.
Politically, Moon was in a weaker position than before Koreagate. He still had his cult, though, with plenty of money and members. He concentrated on expanding the business empire and tightening discipline.
The business empire afforded Moon more direct control than the unwieldy arena of politics. The companies belong to the Family. Father runs the Family. There is no such thing as dissent against Father in the cult. In some ways, the business empire is like a huge, multinational corporation. Its scope extends from selling flowers to making antiaircraft guns. Profits could be shifted from place to place for tax advantages or new investment: among companies, among countries, or between taxable and tax-exempt components of the Moon organization. People could be shifted in the same way, whenever it suited Father.
Moving people around the business empire has another advantage. It offers great training for the all-purpose militant society Moon is preparing for. He is developing highly skilled slaves. Not surprisingly, the quality of work is quite high. Opportunities for advancement are there, too. A capable member of the cult can graduate from peddling candy in supermarket parking lots to being a shipbuilding executive. There is no salary incentive, though, since the money goes back into the cult. But that is no big problem. Moon knows how to use the money best for building a better world. It all has its appeal to bright people in their twenties under Moon’s control.
Where Moonies go into business, they are formidable. Fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, have tasted the stiff competition. Things have not been the same since the Moonies came to town with apparently unlimited money and almost unpaid manpower from the cult.
The cult has answers to criticisms of its business involvement. Members of the Unification Church are getting “spiritual training” working in church businesses. To single out the Unification Church for criticism is unfair, says Bo Hi Pak. He and other leaders of the cult like to claim what they are doing is no different from the business dealings of the established churches. Their favorite analogy is the Catholic Church and its huge holdings.
The analogy crumbles in the most cursory comparison of the Pope and Catholic businessmen with Moon and the Unification Church. When young girls have not met the day’s fund-raising quota, the Pope does not leave them at bars at 3:00 a.m. to hawk for money. Moon does. Catholic businessmen are not required to turn over almost all their earnings to the church. Moonies are. The Pope does not directly control church investments. Moon does. The Pope does not tell Catholics to lie in order to make money for the church. Moon does. There are many different Catholic views about business in the world. There is only one Moonie view.
Deprogramming, the ritual death of over 900 members of the People’s Temple in Guyana, and the report of the Fraser Subcommittee have resulted in tighter discipline inside Moon’s cult and more militancy toward the non-Moon world. Deprogramming is the process of talking someone out of cult control. Past associations are reawakened and the person begins to think for himself again. Obviously, this is the most serious kind of subversive threat to Moon. Many hundreds of persons have been deprogrammed. The success rate is about 95 percent. Using those retaken by Moon, the cult has succeeded in legal action against some of the deprogrammers. The reason is that cult members are at first held against their will by parents and deprogrammers.
The large number of members lost through deprogramming is a big concern to Moon. Not only has he lost them; many of them are working actively against him now. Preventive measures have been taken. Deprogrammers are described as depraved persons. Moonies are being told that deprogrammers will rape them or beat them, or that parents will put them in an insane asylum. Cult leaders have given instructions that if a member knows he is being led to a deprogramming, he should try to commit suicide by being run over by the car. That way, Moon would be served with double justice: the member would not have failed Father, and the parents or deprogrammers would be charged with killing. If there is no chance for a car suicide before the member is taken home, he should go into the bathroom and slash his wrists.
Moonie phobia over defectors spawns actual violence, as Brett Blaze learned when he returned to pick up his clothes and van after leaving the cult in August 1979. The Moonies, one of them holding a gun, refused to let him have his van. Blaze and his five companions got into their car, vowing to go to the police. As they pulled away from the curb, Scott Powell, Virginia state director of the Unification Church, ordered Mark Boitano to shoot. One bullet hit a front tire. Another pierced a door, but no one was injured. Powell and Boitano were arrested and charged with both shooting into an occupied vehicle and using Blaze’s van without authorization. A Moonie official told reporters that the occupants of the car were to blame: Powell and Boitano only wanted to flatten the tires so “the criminals could not get away.”
The Guyana mass deaths horrified the nation into greater cult consciousness. The Moonies downplayed the connection. They insisted they are a church, not a cult. Massachusetts Moonie chief Aidan Barry pooh-poohed the whole thing, saying, “It’s like crying ‘Wolf, Wolf’. . . when the real wolf is Communism.” The Moonies were helped by apparently well-meaning established church leaders such as Dr. James E. Wood, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. At Senator Robert Dole’s public congressional meeting on the cults on February 5, 1979, Wood objected to any use of “pejorative” words like “cult” because they are not nice.
The Fraser Report of October 31, 1978, gave detailed evidence of lawbreaking by the Moon organization. Also included was a description of Moon’s involvement in the influence campaign. Moon and Pak have never conceded a Korean influence campaign existed, much less their own participation in it. Instead, they mirrored the Park regime’s position that the whole thing was a matter of Tongsun Park acting all on his own. The Moonies published a response to the Fraser Report. It did not even refer to many of the findings.
Before the report, cult members had already been programmed to believe Fraser was a Communist and an instrument of the Devil. It was easy, then, to program responses to outsiders who mentioned the report. Fund raising at the Newark Airport, Kathy Brown knew what she was supposed to say. She was beautiful except for the zombielike, glassy look in her eyes. Softly and sweetly, she said, “They have no proof. It’s all lies.”
She was asked about Fraser’s house being set on fire. “We don’t have to do things like that,” she replied. “God punishes those who go against him. Why waste your life thinking negative thoughts? We are doing beautiful things for the world.”
Thinking for oneself is a very painful thing for a Moonie to do. Father removes pain by removing thought.
At Senator Dole’s hearing there was testimony about the physical condition of Moonies. Joe Alexander was affiliated with a rehabilitation center for former cult members in Tucson, Arizona, until lawsuits forced it to close down. He said: “We have seen and helped, during rehabilitation, girls having their menstrual cycles for the first time in months and years. We have seen and helped young men whose beards have stopped growing while in the cults.”
Those statements brought laughter from the hundred or so Moonies packed into the hearing room. At other times and with other speakers, they yelled, “Garbage!” or “Liar!”
Shelley Turner remembers what Moonie leaders told girls like herself who missed their period for many months. They said it was fine; it meant being “pregnant with God.” It was a good enough explanation for Shelley while she was in the cult. Four years after leaving, though, she still had the problem.
There is a Moonie explanation for everything.
Lying. One of the central tenets of the faith is the Doctrine of Heavenly Deception. Good must deceive evil. The non-Moon world is evil. It must be lied to so it can help Moon take over. Then it can become good under Moon’s control. In the Bible, Jacob lied to Isaac. God rewarded Jacob by making him the father of the nation of Israel. Closer to home, you lie to little children about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny until they are old enough to understand, don’t you?
“Zombie” eyes. A sign of deep spirituality, unity with Father. Members are encouraged to use mirrors so they can watch the transfixed gaze develop.
Lack of sleep and food. If the spirit is strong, the body will be strong. If the body is weak, it is because of “spiritual problems.”
Killing parents. They might try to destroy Master. There is no choice between the life of a “flesh” father and Moon; Master’s work must go on. Anyway, parents who don’t believe in Moon belong to Satan and must die.
Suicide. Better to die faithful to Father than be a living “Judas.”
All these things are taught in the name of religion, a belief in God according to the gospel of the “Reverend” Moon. Inside the cult, mind control is used to make it convincing. Outside, free-thinking people balk. Moon has an explanation for that, too: the power of Satan. Again, the cult believes him, but it isn’t enough for dissenters in the non-Moon world.
The non-Moon world, being of Satan, lives under the laws of Cain. Constantly, they get in Moon’s way. One law, however, is very useful. It makes it possible to try to get around all the others. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. As long as Moon says everything the cult does is religious, he can claim the protection of the First Amendment.
The advantages of using the First Amendment were seen early. Before Moon moved to the United States in 1971, he and his small band of followers realized the operation would have the most flexibility if it was called a church. Businesses, political activities, and tax-exempt status could be protected. Moon was dubbed “Reverend” in 1969. In 1970 the name “Unified Family” was changed to “Unification Church.” Organization and goals stayed the same. Only the name was changed, for its “effect on the institutions of society.” A cult publication explained, “The name implies respectability and stability.”
Since Moon’s invasion of America began, he has marched forward steadily behind the First Amendment shield. Calling himself “Reverend” and his operation a church early enough, Moon put the burden of contrary proof on the non-Moon world. His beliefs are protected fully by the First Amendment. He insists his actions are, too. His beliefs cover everything. No matter what the cult does, therefore, it is claimed to be an exercise of religious belief.
In the non-Moon world, Fraser conducts an investigation. He wants to find out if the Moon organization’s political and business activities are part of the Korean influence campaign. At first, he has only allegations that the Moonies acted as unregistered agents of a foreign intelligence service, the KCIA. The Moonies can believe in God as they choose, but they ought not to violate the law in the process, he thinks. He is amazed at what he finds: evidence that the Moon organization has violated laws on banking, immigration, taxes, currency control, charity fraud, arms export control, and foreign agents registration.
To the Moonies, everything Fraser did from start to finish violated their freedom of religion. Since they claim everything they do is religious, Fraser had no right to question what they do. The cult’s published comment on the Fraser Report says it well: “Its objections to the activities of the followers of Rev. Moon are fundamentally objections to their religious beliefs.”
Moon apparently thinks his “religious beliefs” are a special license to break laws. The new Messiah is above the laws of Cain. Whatever contempt Moon has for the laws of the United States, he sees fit to hide behind the First Amendment to the Constitution. That raises questions for the non-Moon world about the meaning of freedom of religion:
Does freedom of religion give Moon the right to violate the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which outlaws slavery?
Did freedom of religion give Moon the right to be paid secretly by the KCIA to carry out a plot to throw eggs at the Japanese ambassador and disrupt an official visit of the Prime Minister of Japan?
Does freedom of religion give Moon the right to smuggle large amounts of money into the United States?
Did freedom of religion give Moon the right to try to take over an American bank in violation of banking laws by buying half the bank’s stock secretly with cult money?
Did freedom of religion give Moon the right to smuggle hundreds of aliens into this country under the guise of “students” or “religious trainees” so he could put them to work full-time in his businesses?
Does freedom of religion give Moon the right to evade taxes by transferring large amounts of money from one cult member to another, calling it a loan?
Did freedom of religion give Moon’s minion, Bo Hi Pak, the right to collect $1 million from Americans under the guise of a “Children’s Relief Fund,” and then use 93 percent of the money to pay public relations men?
Did freedom of religion give Moon and his cult the right to negotiate, as an unregistered agent of the Korean government, for the manufacture and export of M-16 rifles?
Does freedom of religion give Moon the right to infiltrate the offices of Senators and Congressmen with covert agents who report details of personal lives to the cult for its special card file?
Did freedom of religion give Moon the right to refuse to answer questions about these activities before a subcommittee of Congress?
The Fraser Report recommended a federal task force to investigate the Moon organization for lawbreaking. Evidence of systematic violation of laws appears in the report. But a subcommittee of Congress is neither a law enforcement agency nor a court. It can only investigate and legislate. The Fraser Subcommittee did not recommend making any new laws to deal with the Moonies in the areas investigated. It found evidence that the Moon organization had violated many existing laws. What the subcommittee called for was for law enforcement and regulatory agencies to do their jobs, specifically the Department of Justice (including the FBI, the Antitrust Division, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service), the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Internal Revenue Service.
Past attempts at investigating Moon activities by each of those agencies alone had been piecemeal, inconclusive, and without the benefit of pooled information. That worked to Moon’s advantage every time. It is one of the pitfalls of Washington bureaucracy. That was why the Fraser Subcommittee recommended a coordinated effort by an interagency task force.
After the Fraser Report and the Guyana tragedy, there was still no indication that any such investigation would begin.
The American system is ill-equipped to deal with Moon. He knows this and benefits from it. He can break some laws and use others for protection. By perverting freedom of religion, he can keep thousands of people in brainwashed captivity while he intimidates and manipulates the non-Moon world. He hurls lawsuits at those who offend him, whether parents of cult members or the New York Times. He has Nobel laureates feeding his ego and prestige by attending his conferences. He has high-principled civil libertarians and churchmen rallying to his defense.
Moon also has held the Department of Justice cautiously at bay for years. In 1976, Undersecretary of State Habib had asked for an investigation of the Moonies under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Justice refused even to take a look, since the Moonies called themselves a church.
It was still hands off in 1977. On July 29, Assistant Attorney General Civiletti, in a letter to a Congressman, wrote, “It has been our experience that members of these religious sects are apparently competent, consenting adults.” He decided to do nothing because to take brainwashing seriously “would seem to require a finding that the members’ religious beliefs were false.” The United States government believed brainwashing was real enough in the Korean War. Apparently that was different because Communists were doing it to American soldiers. When Moon does it in the name of God he gets away with it.
Attorney General Griffin Bell added confusion to his Department’s caution. After the deaths in Guyana, he said, “I don’t know what a cult is. I’m a Baptist. Maybe that makes me a member of a cult.” Then two months later, on February 2, 1979, he said he believed Patty Hearst had been brainwashed.
An open society must let totalitarian have their say. If the Nazis are able to march down the street, and the Communists can publish their Daily World, then Moon has the right to tell people God wants him to take over the world. Likewise, others are entitled to criticize what he says. Not so, says Moon.
Hundreds from his cult were shipped to Washington to protest Senator Dole’s information meeting on the cult phenomenon. Outside the Senate Office Building, they waved signs proclaiming “Senator Dole, this is a witch hunt.” Inside, Neil Salonen took the stand and told the Senators and Congressmen what the Moonies thought about the meeting.
This very proceeding itself violates the spirit of the First Amendment and violates the rights of believers which the First Amendment was designed to protect. It will have a chilling effect on the free exercise of those beliefs.
George Swope, a Baptist minister, gave a different view of congressional inquiry into church activities:-
Members of the Congress, I tell you frankly, if you receive hundreds of accusing letters from parents of young adults who have joined the Baptist denomination, and if you receive hundreds of statements from young adults who have left the Baptists alleging mind control, the potential for suicide and murder, illegal immigration and financial practices, and other destructive physical and psychological activities, I feel it would be your duty to establish a task force to investigate those allegations against my own denomination.
President Park Chung Hee’s illegal Korean influence campaign was waged for almost six years before it was stopped. Henry Kissinger knew bribery and espionage were going on in 1971. It was four years before he did anything. House Speaker Carl Albert learned Suzi Park Thomson was connected with the KCIA in 1971. He kept her on his staff for five more years. In 1971 the FBI knew Congressmen Hanna and Gallagher were in Tongsun’s pay. They were left alone. That same year, the Justice Department and the FBI ignored the evidence that the Moon organization was working for the Korean government. Eight years later, they still had done nothing about Moon.
Sun Myung Moon is the flourishing survivor of the scandal. The Attorney General continues to be deceived by Moon’s perversion of religious freedom, even after the horror of the People’s Temple. Some civil libertarians and leaders of established churches likewise play into Moon’s hands. As for the major newspapers, they have yet to take the offensive with the kind of investigative reporting that uncovered so much in Watergate and the payoffs in Koreagate.
What will it take to bring the menace of Moon into account with the law? The dictatorship and slavery he is building cannot survive in this country. But too often justice moves slowly.
The People’s Temple had its retreat at Jonestown in the Guyana jungle. Off the coast of South Korea, Moon is said to have an island. Members of the cult are told that is where Father will take them when the world moves against him.
There is no central lesson to be learned from Koreagate, no one deficiency that can be identified and corrected to safeguard the future. The elements were too diverse for that. The influence campaign fed on neglect by leaders of our government, inadequate law enforcement, the greed of politicians, gullibility to con men, the alienation of youth, and family disunity. These are foibles all too familiar to Americans.
NOTES
Chapter 13 THE MENACE
328 “disrespectful statements”: Dong-A Ilbo, Seoul, June 27, 1979.
328 “can be matched by similar progress”: Korea Herald, July 1, 1979.
329 Carter-Park communique: New York Times, July 2, 1979.
329 “shooting the breeze”: New York Times, July 3, 1979.
329 “by demanding . . . ‘the restoration of democracy’ ”: Korea Herald, July 20, 1979.
329 Remarks of Speaker Paik Too Chin: Korea Herald, July 21, 1979.
330 Details on the assassination of Park Chung Hee: New York Times, Oct. 30, 1979.
332 “A poll conducted by the Gallup institute”: Korea Herald, July 15, 1979. The poll had been done by Gallup for American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1979, John E. Reilly, editor, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Chicago, 1979.
332 “a 1978 survey”: The United States and Korea: American Attitudes and Policies by Ralph N. Clough and William Watts, Potomac Associates, Washington, 1978.
333 “When it was all over, he had some regrets”: interview with Tongsun Park, July 1978.
334 “Oh, yes there is, John”: interview with Richard Hanna and John Mitchell, December 1978.
334 “Seventy-eight years down the drain”: interview with Otto Passman, December 1978.
334 Behavior and tactics of Passman and his lawyers during the trial: interview with a reporter who covered the trial.
335 Hanna’s comment after the Passman trial: Washington Post, Mar. 29, 1979.
336 Suzi Park Thomson announces the opening of a catering service: Washington Star, Dec. 9, 1977.
336 Findings of the Senate Ethics Committee: Senate Ethics Report, pp. 2, 77, 124.
337 “A component of the Moon organization was included in the KCIA’s written plan”: The component is the Freedom Leadership Foundation. The KCIA Plan was published in English and Korean by the Fraser Subcommittee (KI Part 3, pp. 107-138).
338 Moon’s International Conference for the Unity of the Sciences: As soon as the Fraser investigation was over, thus terminating its subpoena power, Moon returned to the United States in time to appear at his seventh “Unity of the Sciences” conference, held in Boston, Nov. 24-26, 1978.
338 “will be the leading ideology of the world,” “which will enable us to direct the world policies toward the same goals”: Master Speaks, Jan. 30, 1973 (KI Appendix C-211). For further description of the science conference as a Moon tool, see KI Report, pp. 321-322.
339 “Do they really think that such eminent scientists”: Our Response, published by the Unification Church, New York, 1979, p. 55.
339 “one of Moon’s companies was negotiating over a Korean government weapons contract”: KI Report, pp. 326-328, 371, 366-369; KI Appendix C-34-39, 41-45.
341 “The success rate is about 95 percent”: interviews with deprogrammers.
341 “he should try to commit suicide by being run over by the car”: interviews with former Moonies.
341-342 Shooting incident in Norfolk, Va.: Washington Post, Aug. 22, 1979.
342 “It’s like crying ‘Wolf ”: comment to Boston television reporters by Aidan Barry, Nov. 22, 1978.
342 “Cult” as a pejorative word: testimony of James Wood at an information meeting, “The Cult Phenomenon in the United States,” U.S. Senate, Washington, Feb. 5, 1979.
343 Kathy Brown: conversation with the author, Newark Airport, Feb. 6, 1979.
343 Joe Alexander: testimony at Senate meeting on the cult phenomenon, Washington, Feb. 5, 1979.
343-344 “There is a Moonie explanation for everything”: interviews with former Moonies, including Shelley Turner and Steve Hassan.
345 “A cult publication explained”: New Age Frontiers, Jan. 1971 (KI Report, p. 318).
345 “Its objections to the activities”: Our Response, published by the Unification Church, New York, 1979, p. 123.
346-347 The Fraser Subcommittee’s recommendations are in KI Report, pp. 390-392.
348 “It has been our experience”: the full text of Assistant Attorney General Civiletti’s letter is in Our Response, pp. 270-271.
348 “I don’t know what a cult is”: Attorney General Bell at a press conference in Los Angeles, Dec. 7, 1978.
348 “he said he believed Patty Hearst had been brainwashed”: appearance by Attorney General Bell on ABC’s Good Morning, America, Feb. 2, 1979.
348-349 Neil Salonen and George Swope: testimony at Senate meeting on the cult phenomenon, Washington, Feb. 5, 1979.
350 An island off the coast of South Korea for Moon’s last stand: interviews with former Moonies. [“An entire island on the Jeju Island chain was sold” by FFWPU, probably in 2018. The FFWPU also own land and a palace, opened in September 2011, on Geomun Island.]
Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean scandal – Chapter 2, The Lord of the Second Advent
Gifts of Deceit – Chapter 6, Minions and Master
Gifts of Deceit – Chapter 12, Dueling with the Moonies
Moonie “Dirty Tricks” against Donald Fraser
Bo Hi Pak contradicted himself about being the father of Sam Park. Bo Hi Pak lied in court.
Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe
Moon sought to influence the American political agenda by pouring more than a billion dollars into media.
Sun Myung Moon and the United Nations
United States Congressional investigation of Moon’s organization
Bo Hi Pak and the KCFF scam – and Sun Myung Moon’s ROFA scam
Gifts of Deceit – Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park and the Korean Scandal. (1980) by Robert B. Boettcher
▲ Robert B. Boettcher
pages 46-47:
The Korean government took full advantage of the propaganda opportunities afforded by the Little Angels. They were billed as “unofficial ambassadors of goodwill,” and Korean embassies all over the world eagerly promoted visits by the troupe. KCIA director Kim Hyung Wook expedited the issuing of passports (which are hard for Koreans to get and must be reissued for each trip) for the girls whenever Pak requested them. The government financed overseas tours and donated choice land outside Seoul for a multimillion-dollar school and performance center.
Bo Hi Pak peddled the widely believed story that the girls were orphans, when actually most came from upper-middle-class families who competed to get their daughters in. He discovered the Little Angels could be convenient vehicles for bringing cash to the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation into the United Sates from Japan, where the Moon organization had abundant sources of money. Large amounts could be divided among members of the company before passing through Customs. They could then be divested of the money in Pak’s home, which he maintained as a logistics center whenever the Angels were in the United States. In 1972, the Little Angles traveling group delivered 18 million yen ($58,000).
Moon always regarded the Little Angels as an instrument for exerting influence over social and political institutions. After a successful appearance by them in Japan, he told his followers that “we have laid the foundation to win the embassy personnel stationed in Japan to our side–and through them we can influence their respective nations.” In Korea, where rumors about ties to Moon where becoming a problem because of his growing notoriety, Pak ran a newspaper ad denying that the Little Angels had anything to do with the Unification Church. The troupe’s booking agent, fearful that links with Moon would harm their otherwise excellent reputation, asked for official reassurance. The KCFF board chairman informed him that Moon was merely a friend and supporter of the Little Angels, not unlike millions of others. American Moonies where ordered not to promote them too openly or else “Satan will attack by saying that Reverend Moon is exploiting these children for his own glory.”
For more than ten years the truth about Moon’s scheme was kept from non-Moonies on the KCFF board and from the many thousands of Americans who gave money to the foundation.
The next project for KCFF was Radio of Free Asia (ROFA), launched in 1966. The idea, modeled on Radio Free Europe, was to broadcast anti-Communist programs from South Korea to North Korea, China, and North Vietnam. Moon and Pak gave it a special twist, however. They would conduct mass mailings to Americans asking for money to pay for broadcast facilities in Korea but arrange for free use of transmitters and studios through the KCIA. The money could be pumped into the Unification Church or other Moon activities, as needed. KCFF’s list of American luminaries could be used for promoting ROFA, since the radio was a KCFF project. It was another multipurpose Moonie venture with benefits above and below the surface: promoting anti-Communism, becoming more valuable to the Korean government, gaining greater prominence in the United States, and making money for Moon. Bo Hi Pak was thrilled by it. It was described to prospective contributors as “one of the most daring undertakings against communists on the mainland of Asia in the last thirty years.”
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pages 321-322:
The Korean Culture and Freedom Foundation had been barred from soliciting contributions in New York after 1976. The State Social Welfare Board had discovered that less than 7 percent of the funds collected by KCFF for the Children’s Relief Fund could have been used for that purpose. The public was told that money was needed urgently to save the lives of 350,000 children who were facing “terminal forms of malnutrition” in Southeast Asia. Contributions were to be used to buy emergency supplies of blood plasma and food. The Children’s Relief Fund appears to have been more an exercise in image-building than a drive to raise funds for the cult’s coffers. An audit showed that Bo Hi Pak himself got $26,000 each year, while the bulk of the contributions in 1975, $920,000, was paid to Richard A. Viguerie Company, a professional fund raising firm, for handling mail order solicitations. Another $58,000 went to the Associated Public Relations Council of Washington, owned by Donald Miller, who was also the executive director of KCFF.
Bo Hi Pak declared he was leaving the UC and tore up his membership form in a leader’s meeting
Bo Hi Pak and The Origins of KCFF
Moon sought to influence the American political agenda by pouring more than a billion dollars into media.
Should Bo Hi Pak have been charged with the crime of perjury for his Fraser testimony of 1978?
US ‘Unification Church Pension Fund International’ – never heard of it? Bo Hi Pak explained
Chicago Tribune: “Government Files Trace Church from Sex Cult”
Bo Hi Pak contradicted himself about being the father of Sam Park. Bo Hi Pak lied in court.
Robert B. Boettcher died May 1984 in a fall from the roof of an apartment building on Central Park West, where he lived. He was 44 years old. LINK
Last night was AWESOME. Carrie & I went to the Kansas City Film Festival to watch a short film/pilot called Everyone Is Doing Great, starring Stephen Colletti and James Lafferty. The two wrote it & James directed it. It was hilarious. When I was 12-14 years old I had the biggest crush on Stephen Colletti when he starred on Laguna Beach & meeting him was amazing. A night to remember for sure!! ♥️ #KCFF #onetreehill #everyoneisdoinggreat #fangirledsohard (at Cinemark Palace At The Plaza)
