Carlton
Sherwood, who has produced an anti-John Kerry video that
will be aired across the United States before the Nov. 2
elections, wrote a book in the 1980s denouncing federal
investigators who tried to crack down on Rev. Sun Myung
Moon’s illicit financial operations.
In retrospect, Sherwood’s book,
Inquisition: The Prosecution and Persecution of the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon, appears to have been part of a
right-wing counter-offensive aimed at discouraging scrutiny
of Moon and his mysterious money flows. The strategy largely
succeeded, enabling Moon to continue funneling hundreds of
millions of dollars into the U.S. political process, most
notably to publish the ultra-conservative Washington Times
but also to make payments to prominent politicians,
including former President George H.W. Bush.
New evidence also makes clear that Moon
resumed his practice of laundering money into the United
States after serving a 13-month prison sentence for a 1982
conviction for tax law violations. Former Moon associates,
including his ex-daughter-in-law, have disclosed that Moon’s
organization smuggled cash across U.S. borders, but those
admissions have not led to renewed federal investigations.
[For details, see Robert Parry,
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate
to Iraq.]
Indeed, the pummeling of federal
investigators who examined Moon’s financial schemes in the
1970s and early 1980s – and Moon’s enormous clout among
conservatives in Washington – have made the South Korean
theocrat something of a political untouchable. The
congressional investigators, who first uncovered Moon’s
financial irregularities, and the federal prosecutor, who
narrowed that evidence into a successful prosecution for tax
evasion, were made into cautionary tales for others thinking
about challenging Moon.
Accused Investigators
Government investigators, including
former Rep. Donald Fraser and ex-federal prosecutor Martin
Flumenbaum, were accused by Moon defenders of offenses
ranging from a lack of patriotism to racial and religious
bigotry. Sherwood, a former Washington Times reporter, was
among the Moon defenders who lashed out at Fraser and
Flumenbaum, portraying them as unscrupulous witch hunters
who abused their investigative authority.
In Inquisition, Sherwood claimed
he had examined the financial records of Moon’s organization
and found nothing improper, concluding that Moon and his
associates “were and continued to be the victims of the
worst kind of religious prejudice and racial bigotry this
country has witnessed in over a century.” Sherwood portrayed
Moon as a religious martyr.
But there was a back story to
Sherwood’s book. Inquisition was originally put out
by a little-known publisher called Andromeda, which
apparently operated out of the house of Roger Fontaine, a
former member of Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council
staff who later worked as a reporter for Moon’s Washington
Times. In 1991, the book was republished by Regnery-Gateway,
which was run by conservative operative Alfred Regnery, who
worked in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department.
Beyond the conservative allegiances of
Sherwood’s backers, there also was evidence that Moon
himself subsidized the book. A PBS Frontline documentary in
1992 reported that former Washington Times editor James
Whelan said Sherwood told Regnery that Moon’s
organization would buy 100,000 copies of Inquisition,
which would assure Regnery a handsome profit. Frontline
reported that Regnery denied Whelan’s statement, as has
Sherwood.
However, a week after interviewing
Regnery, Frontline said it obtained a copy of a letter that
corroborated claims of a secret Moon role in the production
of Sherwood’s book. The letter, addressed to Moon from his
aide James Gavin, stated that Gavin had reviewed the
“overall tone and factual contents” of Inquisition
before publication and had suggested revisions.
“Mr. Sherwood has assured me that all
this will be done when the manuscript is sent to the
publisher,” Gavin wrote. “When all of our suggestions have
been incorporated, the book will be complete and in my
opinion will make a significant impact. … In addition to
silencing our critics now, the book should be invaluable in
persuading others of our legitimacy for many years to come.”
Frontline said Gavin refused to be interviewed about the
letter.
Sherwood’s book did contribute to a
successful campaign that silenced many of Moon’s critics.
The self-proclaimed Messiah helped his cause, too, by
becoming a major benefactor to the U.S. conservative
movement, sponsoring lavish conferences as well as financing
right-wing media outlets.
Koreagate
The Right’s "defend Moon campaign"
dated back to the late 1970s when an investigation by a
House subcommittee headed by Rep. Fraser, a Minnesota
Democrat, discovered that Moon had participated in the
“Koreagate” influence-buying scheme. In that operation, the
South Korean intelligence agency was caught secretly trying
to manipulate U.S. policy and politics by spreading money
around Washington. One of South Korea’s conduits was Moon,
then best known as a religious cult leader who presided over
mass weddings of his followers and was accused of
“brainwashing” young recruits.
Fraser’s investigators found that
Moon’s organization was funneling large sums of money into
the United States from Japan, but the investigators couldn’t
trace the money all the way back to its source.
Moon, who
was already investing in Washington’s conservative political
infrastructure, turned to American right-wing operatives for
help. In pro-Moon publications,
Fraser and his staff were pilloried as leftists. Anti-Moon
witnesses were assailed as unstable liars. Minor bookkeeping
problems inside Fraser’s investigation, such as Fraser's
salary advances to some staff members, prompted letters
demanding an ethics probe of the congressman.
One of those letters, dated June
30, 1978, was written by John T. "Terry" Dolan of the
National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). At
the time, Dolan's group was pioneering the strategy of
"independent" TV attack ads. In turn, Moon's CAUSA
International helped Dolan by contributing $500,000 to
another Dolan group, known as the Conservative Alliance or
CALL. [Washington Post,
Sept. 17, 1984]
With support from Dolan and other
conservatives, Moon weathered the Koreagate political storm.
Facing questions about his patriotism, Fraser lost a Senate
bid in 1978 and left Congress.
Another early
Moon defender was Grover Norquist, who interrupted a 1983
press conference by the moderate Republican Ripon Society as
it was warning that the New Right had entered into “an
alliance of expediency” with Moon’s organization. Ripon’s
chairman, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, had released a study which
alleged that the College Republican National Committee
“solicited and received” money from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused
Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media of benefiting from low-cost
or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.
Leach said
the Unification Church has “infiltrated the New Right
and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and
infiltrated the media as well.” Then-college GOP leader
Norquist disrupted Ripon’s news conference with accusations
that Leach was lying. (Norquist is now a prominent
conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the
highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration.)
Over the next two decades, despite
Moon’s controversial goals that include replacing democracy
and individuality with his own personal theocratic rule,
Moon lured into his circle prominent political figures. One
of those leaders was George H.W. Bush, who accepted hundreds
of thousands of dollars from Moon’s organization for giving
speeches.
Crime
Connections
Another
concern about Moon was his longstanding ties to organized
crime figures in Asia and South America, including
Japanese rightists Ryoichi
Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, reputed leaders of the yakuza
organized-crime syndicate that profited off drug
smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea.
Though briefly jailed as war
criminals after World War II, Sasakawa and Kodama rebounded
to become power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic
Party. They also collaborated with Moon in organizing
far-right anti-communist organizations, such as the World
Anti-Communist League (WACL). According to David E. Kaplan
and Alec Dubro in their book, Yakuza, "Sasakawa
became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese
branch of the Unification Church" and helped recruit many of its
original members.
Moon also associated with
right-wing South American leaders implicated in cocaine
trafficking. In 1980, Moon’s organization made
friends with Bolivia’s “Cocaine Coup” conspirators who had
overthrown a left-of-center government and seized
dictatorial power. The violent coup installed drug-tainted
military officers at the head of Bolivia’s government,
giving the putsch the nickname the “Cocaine Coup.”
One of
the first well-wishers arriving in
La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top
lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a
photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, Gen. Garcia
Meza. After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak
declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the
world’s highest city.”
According to later Bolivian government and newspaper
reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in
preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives
also played key roles, and CAUSA, another of Moon’s
anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all
the leading Bolivian coup-makers.
By late 1981, however, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s
military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering
that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking
point. “The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as
clandestinely as they had arrived,” reported German
journalist Kai Hermann. [An English translation of Hermann’s
report on the Moon organization’s role in the Cocaine Coup
was published in Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter
1986]
The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run,
too. Interior Minister Luis Arce-Gomez was eventually
extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison
for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez, who was Arce-Gomez’s
cousin and had helped finance the coup, got a 15-year prison
term. Gen. Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year
sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power,
corruption and murder.
But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions
from its coziness with the Cocaine Coup plotters. By the
early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had
moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican
administration in Washington. There, Moon made his
organization useful to President Reagan, Vice President Bush
and other leading Republicans. [For more on Moon and the
Cocaine Coup, see Parry’s
Secrecy & Privilege.]
Contra Cocaine
Moon cemented his relationship with the
U.S. conservative movement by creating the Washington Times
in 1982 and making it a reliable propaganda organ for the
Republican Party. Moon’s newspaper also promoted
conservative causes dear to Ronald Reagan’s heart, such as
the contra rebels who were fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s
leftist Sandinista government. In the 1980s, Moon’s
organization and the Reagan-Bush administration found common
cause, too, in covering up evidence of contra-connected drug
smuggling.
Ironically, in 1986, the leading U.S.
senator who challenged the contra cocaine cover-up was John
Kerry. Soon, the freshman senator from Massachusetts found
himself under attack from Moon’s Washington Times. The
newspaper published articles depicting Kerry’s contra drug
probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. “Kerry’s
anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,”
announced the headline of one Times article. [Washington
Times, Aug. 13, 1986]
But when
the evidence continued to build, the Washington Times
shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began
accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their
investigation supposedly interfered with Reagan-Bush
administration efforts to get at the truth. “Congressional
investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal
drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness
while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the
Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials
said,” according to one of the articles. [Washington Times,
Jan. 21, 1987]
Despite
the newspaper’s attacks and pressure from the Reagan-Bush
administration, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually
concluded that contra units – both in Costa Rica and
Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade.
“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the
contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply
network of the contras was used by drug trafficking
organizations, and elements of the contras themselves
knowingly received financial and material assistance from
drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation said in a report
issued April 13, 1989. “In each case, one or another agency
of the U.S. government had information regarding the
involvement either while it was occurring or immediately
thereafter.”
Kerry’s investigation also found
that Honduras had become an important way station for
cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.
“Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the
protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report
said. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S.
government officials throughout the period. Instead of
moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by
stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the
foreign assistance the United States was extending to the
Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA
office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the
issue.”
In the late 1980s, Kerry’s dramatic
findings weren’t taken seriously by the New York Times, the
Washington Post and other major news media. The Reagan-Bush
attacks on Kerry as an irresponsible investigator had stuck.
In a Conventional Wisdom Watch item, Newsweek summed up this
dominant view, calling Kerry a “randy conspiracy buff.”
It took another decade for the
inspectors general of the CIA and the Justice Department to
conduct their own investigations that corroborated Kerry’s
findings of both contra trafficking and Reagan-Bush neglect
of the evidence. In a two-volume report issued in 1998, CIA
inspector general Frederick Hitz disclosed that more than 50
contras and contra-related entities had become involved in
the cocaine trade during the 1980s and that incriminating
information – which was known to the Reagan-Bush
administration – was withheld from Congress.
Hitz said the chief reason for the
CIA’s protective handling of the contra drug information was
Langley’s “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista
government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the
various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to
prevent effective implementation of the contra program.”
[For details, see Robert Parry's
Lost History.]
Moon’s Washington Times also had played
an important role in the cover-up of the contra cocaine
trafficking, although the motives of Moon’s organization –
including its longstanding relationship with drug-tainted
leaders in South America – may have added extra incentives
to frustrate Kerry’s investigation.
More Kerry Bashing
Now, nearly two decades after Kerry’s
contra cocaine investigation, Moon’s organization is trying
to keep its old adversary out of the White House and away
from control of the Justice Department.
On a number of topics, the Washington
Times has led the way in battering Kerry. For instance, as
Kerry emerged as the Democratic frontrunner this year, the
newspaper promoted an investigative report questioning
whether Kerry was lying when he said some foreign leaders
favored him over George W. Bush. [Washington Times, March
12, 2004] Though clearly many foreign leaders did favor a
change in the White House, the Times opened up a line of
attack against Kerry’s honesty and internationalism that has
continued to this day. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush
and the L-Word.”]
Also popping up again is Carlton
Sherwood, who has produced a video that virtually calls
Kerry a traitor for his anti-Vietnam War activities. The
video, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” will be
broadcast before the Nov. 2 election on Sinclair Broadcast
Group’s 62 stations, the largest chain of television
stations in the United States.
The Sinclair chain is headed by David Smith and his three
brothers whose collection of TV stations have promoted right-wing causes before,
even barring its ABC affiliates from airing Nightline on April 30 when Ted
Koppel paid tribute to U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq by reading their names and
showing their photographs. Sinclair's thinking apparently was that listing the
names of the dead would undermine the war effort.
“The Smith brothers and their executives have made 97
percent of their political donations during the 2004 election cycle to Bush and
the Republicans,” according to Washington Post reporters Howard Kurtz and Frank
Ahrens. [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2004]
Democratic leaders have cited these
Republican political ties in complaining that the Sinclair
chain is simply broadcasting “Stolen Honor” as anti-Kerry
propaganda to benefit the Bush campaign.
But Sherwood’s longstanding ties to
Moon’s organization raise other troubling questions: Do
inside-the-Beltway conservatives have a financial incentive
to make sure a Moon-friendly politician like Bush stays in
charge of the Executive Branch? Would a Kerry victory
potentially mean more trouble for Moon getting his
mysterious money into the United States? |