War at Home,

Moon Rising

excerpted from the book

Secrecy & Privilege

Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq

by Robert Parry

The Media Consortium Inc., 2004, paper

War at Home

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Some Reagan-Bush officials bristled at restrictions on government propaganda that exist in a democratic society compared with totalitarian systems. "The totalitarian states whose intelligence and propaganda apparatus we face have no internal problem in denying their citizens access to information or even flagrantly lying to them," wrote Kate Semerad, an external-relations official at the Agency for International Development in a summary of the internal administration debate in the early 1980s. "We have neither the apparatus nor the legal mechanism which would allow the success of an effort to emulate that of Moscow, Habana [sic] and Managua."

But the Semerad memo envisioned the creation of a U.S. propaganda apparatus that would level the supposedly tilted playing field. "We can and must go over the heads of our Marxist opponents directly to the American people." Semerad wrote. "Our targets would be: within the United States, the Congress, specifically the Foreign Affairs Committees and their staffs, ... the general public [and] the media."

The original name for the Reagan-Bush administration's plan to mount its own propaganda campaign within the United States was "Project Truth." It later merged with a broader program that combined domestic and international propaganda under the umbrella of "Project Democracy." The central figure in the administration's media operations was Walter Raymond Jr., a 30-year veteran of the CIA's propaganda office who was assigned to the National Security Council staff in 1982.

President Reagan took the first formal step to create the propaganda bureaucracy on January 14, 1983, by signing National Security Decision Directive 77, entitled "Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security." The secret directive deemed it "necessary to strengthen the organization, planning and coordination of the various aspects of public diplomacy of the United States Government." Reagan defined public diplomacy broadly as "those actions of the U.S. Government designed to generate support for our national security objectives."

To direct these "public diplomacy" campaigns, Reagan ordered the creation of a Special Planning Group - or SPG - within the National Security Council. "The SPG ... shall ensure that a wide-ranging program of effective initiatives is developed and implemented to support national security policy, objectives and decisions."

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... in CIA propaganda operations, the goal is no to inform a target population, but rather to manipulate it. The trick is to achieve a specific intelligence objective, not foster a full-and-open democratic debate. In such cases, CIA tactics include disinformation to spread confusion or psychological operations to exploit cultural weaknesses. . A skillful CIA operation will first carefully analyze what "themes" can work with a specific culture and then select - and if necessary distort - information /1 that advances those "themes." The CIA also looks for media outlets to disseminate the propaganda. Some are created; others are compromised with bribes to editors, reporters or owners.

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Under presidential executive orders, the CIA was barred from influencing U.S. politics and policies, a safeguard designed to prevent the spy agency from corrupting U.S. democratic institutions. Federal law also prohibited the Executive Branch from spending money to lobby Congress, except for the traditional practices of giving testimony, making speeches and talking one-on-one with members. Beyond the "bully pulpit," Presidents weren't allowed to spend taxpayers' money to disseminate propaganda or to organize grassroots lobbying campaigns to pressure Congress.

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If the administration's goal was to purge ... impressions held by the American public and much of the news media, it would have to suppress many facts that were demonstrably true. The administration was stressing a military solution; it was allied with some unsavory right-wing groups; it was sponsoring a covert war in Nicaragua; it was relying heavily on former Somoza national guardsmen as the nucleus of the contra army; it was seeking to oust the Sandinistas; it was showing little interest in serious talks to settle the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

To a great degree, the Reagan-Bush administration's attitude toward Nicaragua was colored by the theory espoused by U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who justified U.S. support for right-wing authoritarian governments as preferable to tolerating left-wing totalitarian regimes on the grounds that authoritarian government could evolve into democracies while totalitarian governments couldn't. Only a military victory could be expected to alter the status quo. In the early 1980s, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was[ another fixture of conservative orthodoxy, though it would be proven false in u less than a decade as Soviet bloc governments changed into democracies and the Sandinistas surrendered power after losing an election, not because the contras marched into Managua.

Nevertheless, Raymond and his "public diplomacy" crew saw their daunting task as forcing changes in the public perceptions about Central America, essentially berating anyone who presented evidence in support of the accurate impressions that had been cited in the May 5 strategy paper.

The strategy paper recommended a "public diplomacy effort" that would "foster a climate of editorial and public opinion that will encourage congressional support of administration policy." As for the press, "a comprehensive and responsive strategy, which would take timely advantage of favorable developments in the region, could at least neutralize the prevailing climate and perhaps, eventually overcome it," the paper said. It also urged the use of "opinion leaders in the mass media" to convey the administration's message to the American people.

The strategy recognized, too, the need to target specific American interest groups defined by geography, religion and ethnic backgrounds. "Themes will obviously have to be tailored to the target audience," the paper said. An addendum matched up key members of Congress with their hometown newspapers that would get special attention from the "public diplomacy" operatives. By influencing the local newspapers' editorial boards, the administration would bring pressure on its congressional critics.

Pollster Richard Wirthlin defined one "hot button" that might work for Americans living in the Southwest: the fear of refugees. Using focus groups, Wirthlin found that anticommunist pitches didn't score well because many Americans didn't take the threat that seriously. But when he asked about the prospect of millions of Central American refugees flooding into the United States, he discovered that eight out often respondents expressed a "great deal of concern."

The public diplomacy team quickly translated Wirthlin's findings into the "feet people" theme, arguing that ten percent of each Central American country would flee if a "Marxist dictatorship" took power. Reagan personally deployed the new theme in a June 1983 speech, declaring that "a string of anti-American Marxist dictatorships" in Central America could lead to "a tidal wave of refugees, and this time, they'll be 'feet people' and not 'boat people' swarming into our country."

While effective in rallying support for the administration's policies, the "feet people" theme also demonstrated how fear and emotionalism could be used to overwhelm rational debate in a public diplomacy campaign. Like CIA propaganda - seeking to exploit cultural weaknesses - the "feet people" theme played on American fears of an influx of dark-skinned foreigners.

The argument also lacked factual support. The administration never supplied any documentation to back up its ten percent estimate, and the reality was that in the early 1980s, the bulk of the Central American refugees were streaming north from El Salvador and Guatemala, not from Nicaragua. In other words, they were fleeing violence in rightist-ruled countries, not in leftist Nicaragua. The obvious reason is that people try to escape danger whatever its political ideology.

People also migrate when jobs are scarce or when they see little opportunity for a better future. U.S. intelligence officials told me at the time that they were surprised that the Sandinistas had been able to maintain a fairly stable economy through the first half of the 1980s. Ironically, the flow of Nicaraguan refugees to the United States increased in the latter half of the decade when the contra war and a U.S. economic embargo succeeded in 1 devastating Nicaragua's economy.

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Besides hyping evidence to make the Sandinistas look bad, the Reagan-Bush administration struggled to keep under wraps the brutality committed by some of the Argentine-trained-and-CIA-backed contra units.

Contra director Edgar Chamorro was one of the leaders recruited by the CIA to a new contra umbrella group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force - or FDN - because he was free of any taint from the Somoza dictatorship. But Chamorro, a university professor in pre-revolutionary Nicaragua, gradually grew deeply disillusioned by what he witnessed and the lies he was forced to tell as a chief contra spokesman.

Chamorro told me later that his first personal crisis came in late 1982 when the contras kidnapped an elderly Nicaraguan couple, Felipe and Maria Barreda. Chamorro had known the family before the revolution in Esteli and tried to intervene to protect them. But witnesses said the contras tortured the couple into confessing that they were Sandinista intelligence agents and then executed them. The Sandinistas later denied that the Barredas were intelligence agents.

At times, Chamorro recognized that the contra violence was tinged with madness, a kind of blood lust that often surfaced in the Nazi-like excesses of South American political repression.

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The Reagan-Bush public diplomacy team had its work cut out for it, with the ongoing genocide in Guatemala, the "death squads" in El Salvador and a contra problem in Nicaragua that involved both atrocities and cocaine smuggling. If the American people had a clear picture of what their tax dollars were funding, they might not stand for it. So, the task of regulating what the American people would get to see became a job for Walter Raymond's "public diplomacy" operation.

Later, one National Security Council official told me, the "perception management" campaign was modeled after CIA psychological operations abroad where information is manipulated to bring a population into line with a desired political position. "They were trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion - using the tools of Walt Raymond's trade craft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operations shop," the official said.

... Reagan's speechwriters penned descriptions of Sandinistal ruled Nicaragua as a "totalitarian dungeon" and the contras as the "moral equals of our Founding Fathers." Neither description was accurate. Both were hyperbole. But Reagan and his team were putting down markers and daring their critics to take the challenge. Few did.

Another part of the administration's strategy was to target journalistic "enemies" - the likes of Raymond Bonner - while rewarding ideological allies. According to one National Security Council memo dated May 20, 1983, U.S. Information Agency director Charles Z. Wick brought together private donors to the White House Situation Room for a fund-raiser that collected $400,000 for Accuracy in Media, Freedom House and other groups assisting the public diplomacy operations.

... Raymond was soon implementing the recommendations, including a scheme to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. According to a memo dated August 9, 1983, Raymond reported to USIA director Wick that "via Murdock [sic], may be able to draw down added funds" to support public diplomacy initiatives.

The public diplomacy chief suggested routing the "funding via Freedom House or some other structure that has credibility in the political center." With Raymond's support, Freedom House - a prominent critic of the Sandinistas - also would become a major recipient of U.S. government largesse. The government-funded National Endowment for Democracy awarded Freedom House $200,000 in 1984 to build "a network of democratic opinion-makers." By 1988, the endowment would give Freedom House $2.6 million, which would total more than one-third of Freedom House's budget.

Besides avoiding congressional oversight, private money had the benefit of creating the impression that an independent group was embracing the administration's policies on their merits. Without knowing that the money had been arranged by the government, the public would be inclined to believe that the position was more objective than the word of a government spokesman. In foreign countries, the CIA often used similar techniques to create what intelligence operatives called "the Mighty Wurlitzer," a propaganda organ playing the desired notes in a carefully scripted harmony.

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Besides planting favorable stories, the Reagan-Bush "public diplomacy" operatives took note when U.S. reporters insisted on revealing unfavorable facts. While Raymond oversaw the broader program from the National Security Council staff, a new organization within the State Department, the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America [S/LPD] challenged individual journalists and appealed to their editors when troublesome stories made it into the public domain.

To run the office, the administration picked Cuban exile Otto Reich, a former Miami businessman and city official known as a fierce anticommunist. For Reich - a blustery, zealous and combative man - the "war of ideas" was all about winning. One public diplomacy official told me that Reich acted like a coach of a sports team. If a "favorable" story about the Sandinistas appeared in the U.S. media, Reich would exhort his "players" to get those points back by scoring with the placement of some anti-Sandinista articles, the official said.

Reich also seemed to be keeping score when he confronted National Public Radio in 1984 with complaints that the network had run more contra" minutes versus "pro-contra" minutes. "We said, 'how could you decide what was anti-contra?" asked N's foreign editor Paul Allen. "But the point was, 'we're monitoring you- holding a stop watch on you.' The point was, someone was listening and they were doing it with a very critical view."

Bill Buzenberg, NPR's foreign affairs correspondent, later described the meeting with Reich in a speech in Seattle. Buzenberg said Reich informed the NPR editors that he had "a special consultant service listening to all NPR programs" on Central America, analyzing them for possible bias against U.S. policy. Reich also referred to his larger campaign to force changes in U.S. press coverage, saying he had "made similar visits to other unnamed newspapers and major television networks [and] had gotten others to change some of their reporters in the field because of perceived bias," Buzenberg said.

For Allen, who oversaw NPR' s coverage worldwide, the intervention by a government official to pressure the radio network to alter its coverage of an important public topic was extraordinary. "Never in our coverage of Poland, South Africa, Lebanon, Afghanistan had they chosen to come in and remonstrate with us," Allen told me. "We understood what Otto Reich's job was. He was engaged in an effort to alter coverage. It was a special effort."

Given NPR's sensitivity to government strings on its public funding, the intervention also worked. At Allen's next job evaluation, NPR executives upbraided him for one of the stories singled out by Reich. A year later, Allen resigned from NPR and left journalism.

As Reich indicated to the NPR staff, he was busy with other news outlets, too. In April 1984, Reich visited the Washington office of CBS News after President Reagan got mad at the network's coverage of El Salvador and Nicaragua. After Reich's trip, Secretary of State George Shultz sent Reagan a memo describing how Reich had spent one hour complaining to the correspondent involved and two more hours with his Washington bureau chief "to point out the flaws in the information." Shultz wrote that the CBS trip was just one example of "what the Office of Public Diplomacy has been doing to help improve the quality of information the American people are receiving . ... It has been repeated dozens of times over the past few months."

Beyond hectoring wayward journalists and going over their heads to news executives, the Office of Public Diplomacy also disseminated the administration's propaganda messages through as many outlets as possible. In its first year alone, Reich's office booked more than 1,500 speaking engagements from radio appearances to editorial-board interviews; published three booklets on Nicaragua; and distributed material to 1,600 libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers and 107 religious organizations.

While the Reagan-Bush "public diplomacy" campaign racked up victories in getting some reporters reassigned and some editors relieved of their duties, the more permanent solution to the information problem was to have reliable conservative news outlets that would join the administration's chorus willingly, not only after visits from Otto Reich. By the early 1980s, that list was growing.

But the biggest splash in the Washington media pond in the first half of the 1980s came from the chunky figure of Sun Myung Moon. The selfproclaimed Messiah from South Korea had managed to fend off most of the negative consequences from the congressional Koreagate investigation into his covert activities on behalf of the KCIA. Still, the revelations of his mysterious money flows led to a federal prosecution of Moon for violating U.S. tax laws and a 13-month prison term.

Nevertheless, by 1982, Moon was in position to make one of his boldest bids for political influence. With the blessings of the Reagan-Bush administration, Moon launched The Washington Times newspaper and related publications, including Insight magazine. The Washington Times was just what the administration had wanted, a reliable voice for its version of events that could inject that message into the public debate. Though Moon would have to subsidize his publications with hundreds of millions of dollars from his seemingly bottomless pool of cash, The Washington Times would over the next two decades - change the parameters of how the national press corps works and affect the course of U.S. presidential campaigns.

Ronald Reagan would soon hail Moon's publication as his "favorite newspaper." But the greatest beneficiaries of Moon's propaganda sheet would turn out to be George H.W. and George W. Bush.

*****

Moon Rising

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Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible. The five were Taiwan's dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea's dictator Park Chung flee, yakuza gangsters Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, and Moon, "an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of 'Heavenly Deception," the Andersons wrote.

WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that "would further Moon's global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade," the Andersons wrote.

Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons. Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the Allies - the United' \ States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War, helping both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism. Following a global "lesser evil" strategy, the United States and other Western democracies found justification in allying with fascists to defeat the Soviet Union, much as the democracies had allied with the Soviet Union during World War II to defeat the fascists.

Some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, but others managed to make their escapes along "rat lines" to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States. Argentina became a natural haven \ given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis \ also found a home with like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.

In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay. Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies. Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States. Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord's accomplices as some of Paraguay's highest-ranking military officers.

Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also "took on assignments for Argentina's terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance," Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup. During President Nixon's "war on drugs," U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.

By the time the French Connection was severed, however, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America's military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place. Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA's training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations.

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During this time of transition, Sun Myung Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina had occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires. But he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships. Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.

"Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church's political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America," the Andersons wrote in Inside the League. "As an international money laundry, the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent."

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Starting in 1981, the FBI cooperated with one of Moon's front groups during a five-year nationwide investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a domestic organization critical of Reagan's policies in Central America. According to FBI documents obtained by Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan, the FBI collected reports from Moon's Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), which was spying on CISPES supporters. The reports came from CARP members at ten university campuses around the United States and included commentaries / \ on the purported political beliefs of Reagan's critics.

... While Moon's organization was helping spy on American citizens, the Reagan-Bush administration dropped the investigation of Moon as a suspected intelligence agent for South Korea. It's still not clear why.

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(The Washington Times ... promotes politicians who then find themselves in position to protect Moon's interests. If The Washington Times can help assure the election of a U.S. President, for instance, his administration may feel indebted enough not to examine the financial workings of Moon's operations too closely.

So, while Moon can count on his mid-level editors to assure that the daily content of the newspaper is tilted to the right, Moon's hand-picked moneymen and top editors need only guarantee that a few politically strategic stories are spun aggressively. Those articles can be planted to embarrass a political adversary at key a moment in an election campaign or to discredit any news that is getting too close to Moon's core interests. Indeed, this is how effective propaganda has always worked. Good propaganda depends on some measure of public trust based on the fact that most of the articles in a news outlet are reliable. That way, the readers' defenses are down when encountering the occasional piece of disinformation or propaganda.

... In a world in which the perception of power is power, the purpose of everything that's done at the Times is to give Moon the appearance of having power. For Moon to gain cachet in the eyes of offshore anticommunists who might extend privileges or cash to his operations, it's necessary to demonstrate from time to time that he has the capacity to influence decisions in Washington."

Often, the beneficiaries of dubious stories in The Washington Times have been members of the Bush family. For example, when Vice President George H.W. Bush was struggling in his 1988 presidential campaign against Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, The Washington Times published a slanted story about Dukakis's mental health.

Times reporter Gene Grabowski interviewed a Dukakis relative and asked whether Dukakis had ever sought psychiatric help during a low period in his life. "It's possible, but I doubt it," the relative responded. Grabowski's editors, however, snipped out the phrase "but I doubt it" while keeping the phrase "it's possible" and then spotlighting the story under a headline, "Dukakis Kin Hints at Sessions." Dukakis's supposedly questionable mental health became an important theme for the Republicans. President Reagan personally underscored the message by referring to Dukakis as a "cripple," which forced more mainstream publications to reprise the suspicions about the suspected psychiatric treatment. The story spread doubts among the electorate about Dukakis's fitness for office. For his part, Grabowski, a former Associated Press reporter, resigned in protest of the distortion, but by then the damage to Dukakis was done.

As the conservative news media has expanded, other Washington Times "hit pieces" have gained greater currency within American politics. A Times story will go quickly to Rush Limbaugh and other radio talk shows; it can buzz around the Internet; it can show up on the Fox News cable network, putting pressure on more mainstream cable networks, like CNN, to run the story as well. The Washington Times' front page is regularly hoisted by CSPAN talk show hosts who discuss its articles with the same neutral tone that they would use in referring to articles in The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times.

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Where Moon gets his cash has been a long-running mystery that few American conservatives have been eager to solve. "Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking," wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. "Others feel that despite the disclosures of Koreagate, the Church has continued to do the Korean government's international bidding and is receiving official funds to do so."

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In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under attacks from Moon's Washington Times. An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in a front-page Washington Times article with the headline: "Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.

When Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra drug trafficking, The Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry's probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. "Kerry's anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," announced the headline of one Times article.

But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, The Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry's staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth. "Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe," said one Times article that opened with the assertion: "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."

Despite the attacks from The Washington Times and pressure from the ReaganBush administration to back off, Kerry's contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of 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 stated 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 probe 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."

The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System. In short, Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to counter the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.

If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family. By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, The Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President.

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As Moon continued to expand his influence in American politics, so~)~me Republicans began to raise red flags. In 1983, the GOP's moderate Ripon Society charged that the New Right had entered "an alliance of expediency" with Moon's church. Ripon's chairman, Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, 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." Leach's news conference was disrupted when then-college GOP leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now a prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the highest levels of George W. Bush's administration.) The Washington Times dismissed Leach's charges as "flummeries" and mocked the Ripon Society as a "discredited and insignificant left-wing offshoot of the Republican Party. ,

Despite periodic fretting over Moon's influence, conservatives continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance. When White House aide Oliver North was scratching for support for the Nicaraguan contras, for instance, The Washington Times established a contra fund-raising operation. By the mid-1980s, Moon's Unification Church had carved out a niche as an acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers, Moon boasted that "without knowing it, even President Reagan is being guided by Father [Moon]."

Yet, Moon also made clear that his longer-range goal was destroying the U.S. Constitution and America's democratic form of government. "History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government will bow down to him," Moon said, speaking of himself in the third person. "That is Father's tactic, the natural subjugation of the American government and population."

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Though Moon's money sources remained shrouded in secrecy, his cash ) undeniably gave the Right an edge over its political adversaries. After the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in fall 1986, The Washington Times and other Moon-related organizations rushed to the battlements to defend Reagan's White House and Oliver North. Ronald S. Godwin, who was a link between Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Moon's Washington Times, raised funds for North through a group called the Interamerican Partnership, which was a forerunner to North's own Freedom Alliance.

Another Moon-connected group, the American Freedom Coalition, went to bat for North. According to Andrew Leigh, who worked for a Moon front called Global Image Associates, AFC broadcast a pro-North video, "Ollie North: Fight for Freedom," more than 600 times on more than 100 TV stations. Leigh quoted one AFC official as saying that AFC received $5 million to $6 million from business interests associated with Moon. AFC also bragged that it helped put George Bush into the White House in 1988 by distributing 30 million pieces of political literature."

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By the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Washington Times was the daily billboard where conservatives placed their messages to each other and to the outside world.

In 1991, when conservative commentator Wesley Pruden was named the new editor of The Washington Times, President George H.W. Bush invited Pruden to a private White House lunch. The purpose, Bush explained, was "just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.

While the Moon organization was promoting the interests of the Reagan-Bush team, the administration was shielding Moon's operations from federal probes into its finances and possible intelligence role, U.S. government documents show. According to Justice Department documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, administration officials were rebuffing hundreds of requests - many from common U.S. citizens - for examination of Moon's foreign ties and money sources.

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