from Bad Moon Rising
An excerpt from John Gorenfeld's 2008 book on cult leader Sun Myung Moon and the Washington politicians who welcome his billions.
The Pilot's Story
When I listened to lectures on Rev. Moon's Divine Principle and Unification Thought here in the spirit world, I was so moved that I feel an ever-growing urge to be resurrected on earth every day.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the
United
States
(according
to
the Reverend Moon)
“Marines don't cry in public”
The year is 1967. A passenger plane skids to a stop, and Bob Roland, a forty-one-year-old preacher with a problem, walks off, changes from his United Airlines captain's uniform into street clothes, and heads for his secret layover meeting at a bar near Denver International Airport. Roland, who hails from a long line of Virginians, is a stubborn former World War II Marine who insists on his right to smoke in the cockpit. He hopes the man he's meeting with, a traveler to Korea, can help him.
A man called Sun Myung Moon has become the bone of contention in Roland's marriage. So when his passenger, a young American GI, mentioned being headed for duty near Seoul, Roland had chewed over a thought the rest of the flight. Then he asked the GI to perform some detective work for him in the Far East.
At the watering hole they form a plan. To prevent discovery, the soldier's research will be mailed to Roland care of the airline. His wife can't be allowed to find out that he's digging up dirt on her spiritual hero, a smiling mystery guru who is behind some shenanigans at the South Korean embassy, whose social circle Roland happens to have infiltrated, undercover.
The pilot is at wit's end. Here he is, a Presbyterian church elder who has preached the Gospel in the tropics, and he can't stop his wife from being enchanted with the Reverend Moon, who has come to America preaching the gospel of a second Messiah.
None of it makes sense. Who are these friends of hers? Ever since Moon's grand arrival in America—his wife's friends had counted down the days—the guru has taken up headquarters an apartment in the suburbs south of the Potomac. There his chief aide, Col. Bo Hi Pak, who'd done double duty as an embassy diplomat, arranges for photo opportunities with politicians, and runs a questionable money-making scheme known as the Korean and Culture Freedom Foundation (KCFF), whose board of directors Roland has joined in hopes of exposing the truth.
There is even a throne room. In a spare bedroom Pak has set up a winged chair, brocaded with gold, positioned on a white shag carpet. There, Moon reposes with his slippered feet tucked underneath, disciples at his feet, and a silver pitcher of water brought in from time to time on a red lacquer tray.
Meanwhile, at the Rolands' home on Apple Tree Drive in Alexandria, Betty Roland, according to Bob, has been sprinkling Moon's "holy salt" in the four compass directions. Blessed by Moon's hand, the salt is believed to drive Satan out of the home, like a snail from a garden. One day after returning from a flight, Bob Roland had come home early to see his wife praying with Colonel Pak over the crib of his newborn son. "We dedicated him to the Lord," his wife explained to Bob, who was furious, convinced the "Lord" in question was the man on the winged chair.
Three months after the Denver meeting, Roland checks his airline mail, finds a letter postmarked Seoul, and opens it, hands shaking. The letter explains that the GI has asked around and discovered that Moon is considered a laughingstock in Korea, linked to some unnamed sex scandal. It feeds Roland's hunger for more.
Robert Roland waves dismissively at a Kinko's box, in 2006, on the rolling shelf beside his easy chair in Las Vegas, in a tract of ranch homes northeast of the Strip. Inside is the origin story I've been afraid to touch. It's hard enough to explain to people that the Washington Times is owned by the same people behind the mass weddings from the 1970s, let alone that before Moon became a national phenomenon, he was allowed into the U.S. by Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC)—let loose upon American youth by unsuspecting politicians who admired Moon's hatred of communism.
From the opening pages of Roland's typed manuscript:
"[T]he gathering and research of data and material spans the years since February 1963. It was then that I became directly involved with the organization and its leader who, with cunning deceit, would ultimately wreak havoc upon the lives of my family."
A dog at his feet, Roland flips between cable news stations in the light of late afternoon. There are paintings on the wall, of propeller planes from forgotten airlines, and a dominating image of Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. His helper, a husky ex-soldier in his forties named Ken Cross, ambles in with TV dinners.
In the 591 meticulously detailed pages are names of Japanese businessmen, duped U.S. diplomats, South Korean officials, dollar figures, and high jinks. During the late 1970s, Roland supplied all this to American congressional investigators, who bore out many of the claims. While Bob Dole's 1976 hearings on the Hill had narrowly focused on the Reverend Moon's beguiling of teenagers, a subsequent House probe during the Carter years had gone deeper—into manipulation of politics, not just people. If little is known about the Unification Church, most of it is from the huge dump of documents released during what came to be known, awkwardly, as the Investigation of Korean-American Relations.
Roland had taken the stand to say his his wife and daughter had been taken from him by a group with unhealthy political aims. In response, Moon aide Col. Bo Hi Pak, his ex-friend, testified that it was "sad that the U.S. Congress gave a man like Robert Roland credibility and a forum to pursue the obviously personal vendetta against our church, Reverend Moon and myself. He is filled with hatred and anger, and has a long history of trying anything to destroy the Unification Church."
Now Roland has a bad case of emphysema. What's on his mind is being reunited soon with a soldier buddy, gunned down sixty years ago by the Japanese on a beach in Saipan. ("Marines don't cry in public," he told a historian, of the incident.)
Then there is the woman he loved, who has been a member of the Unification Church for decades now. It's because of her that almost to his dying day he walks with difficulty into the front room of the house, logs onto the Usenet forum alt.religion.unification, and picks Internet fights, under the name "Robroy," with the people whose god publishes the Washington Times.
"Stick your Moonie True Love where the sun don't shine," he types to them.
They write back. "I know that Robroy believes he is a hero for exposing the enemies of God in this forum. I for one pity him for I know what is in store for bigots."
"The sickest bunch of people I ever met in my life," Roland says.
"He is among whoremongers and drunkards," they write.
At the Las Vegas Rescue Mission, Roland drove up one day and hired a homeless man, Cross, to care for him, and he has also put up a single mom in the spare bedroom. Cross gets a look in his eye when he talks about Roland, whom he calls the Captain: his pastor and his drill sergeant. Cross tells me that a dove that settled beside him the other day foretold the Captain's power to bring a tramp to Jesus.
"Aw, bull crap," retorts the Captain. He does not want to be a cult leader. Later he grumbles at the television: "Fox News can bring Bill Gertz on time after time and put him forth as an authority," he says of the Washington Times national security reporter and Moon follower. "And no one ever connects him to Moon."
As usual, Gertz's reporting has been supporting the White House's positions. One of his recent stories has revealed that, yes, Saddam Hussein had WMDs—but they were spirited away, at the last minute, by Russians. The fable remains popular among the staff of the National Review. ("Thank God for Bill Gertz," Moon's top American preacher has said in a sermon. "We don't know where we would stand as a nation without him. . . . It didn't just come from his own hard work. It came from True Parents.")
Soon the Captain is back thirty years in time and thousands of miles away, in Alexandria. That's where, according to the story he outlined in sworn testimony before Congress, Robert W. Roland went undercover to keep his family together and expose the influence of Moon. It is a cloak-and-dagger story that is striking for how different it is from the college student captivity narratives that we associate with cult leaders.
"I had a way with them," he says. "I'm pretty cagey."
For years Roland kept an eye out for travelers who could answer his question: Who is Moon? Bob "had moles everywhere," remembers his daughter, Linda Mattix. From the GI headed for Asia, to the eyes and ears who spotted Moon one day on the Vegas strip, the tips came in.
In 1976, Roland paid a showgirl to try and photograph Moon. News had come to him that the Returning Lord, along with American church president Neil Salonen and others, were taking in an 8 P.M. show that night at the Riviera. Ostensibly Moon was here to scout for talent for one of his enterprises, a troupe of dancing little girls christened by him the Little Angels. Moon also enjoyed blackjack. One day his daughter-in-law Nansook, confused one day as to why the True Father was placing wages, was told he had descended into the casino to understand sinners.
For Roland, it wasn't enough that he'd already destroyed Moon's relationship with a legendary Navy admiral, convincing the man he'd been conned into helping the Unification Church. He'd done this after infiltrating the inner ring of Moon's Washington, D.C. soirees, pretending to play along with his wife's guru. "I did things that would give him the sneaking suspicion that I was coming around," he says. He even invited Pak to speak at his church. Roland sat in the pews, watching the bald man in the spectacles, letting him think that the group's latest fish was Bob Roland, president of the Men's Council of the Presbyterian Church of the Potomac.
Around that time Pak was arranging meetings for Moon using an adorable facade, a gimmick whose simple brilliance he credited to the Master. Who could resist a traveling musical troupe of patriotic little girls?
In the twilight of Dwight Eisenhower's life, in the fall of 1965, he and his wife, Mamie, emerged from their white farmhouse in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where they kept a hundred Angus steers, to greet the girls and their entourage. A photographer from the local Gettysburg Times covered the charming rendezvous: the old American general and the Korean moppets.
The Little Angels toured major American cities without any notice being paid to their messianic sponsor. They even opened a number of shows for Liberace, revealing a hidden link between the two most flamboyant men in American history.
One Little Angel saluted in a U.S. Navy admiral cap, like Shirley Temple. They performed the Sword Dance, the Drum Dance, and the Court Dance. Cameras flashed. With their drums and silk dresses, their red bodices and fans, their streamers and ribbons, their celebration of golden harvests in an ancient land, the Angels left arts critics breathless across America. "Little fragile blooms," wrote a smitten newspaper arts critic in Maryland, "like a branch of a peach tree that had been brought in during winter. Back stage after the performance, with little angels scattering around like nervous little mice, giggling, helping, hindering, I had a chance to talk to the charming Colonel Bo Hi Pak . . . director of the Little Angels."
Bo Hi Pak stepped from the caravan of sedans. He had brought Eisenhower a guest: the Reverend Moon.
Pak had worked as an officer at the South Korean embassy in Washington. It was only in his spare time that he worked his diplomatic connections to find friends for Moon. But now that the patriarch had formally arrived, Pak resigned from government work to become his full-time booster.
Having set foot in California early in the year, Moon consecrated "holy ground" in his name as his campaign marched east from the Pacific to the Potomac. The first spot was the Twin Peaks of San Francisco, which Moon had likened to a mother's breasts, overlooking the bay that reminded him of a womb. Then he was driven past the Grand Canyon and listened with interest to stories of the Dust Bowl, took in the sights of the heartland he believed he was destined to rule. Now the procession had reached the East Coast, ready to cap off its victory with a photo op that could multiply Moon's perceived importance.
"Never seen anything like this before," Eisenhower said as he looked at a photograph of sixty-two couples, married at once. Or at least according to the Moonies' version of the story.
Eisenhower had a right to be confused. The Korea group had shifted shape. It had been presented to him as somehow affiliated with the South Korean government, not a messianic religious leader. Equally in the dark were officials who had booked the meeting, who were under the misapprehension that Moon was merely some exotic Buddhist priest. In internal documents, the director of the Little Angels warned churchmen not to say too much about the link between the girls, referred to as "Divine Principle Children," and Moon. "If we use the Little Angels to promote Our Master and the Church too extensively," read a memo that later turned up before Congress, "Satan will attack by saying that Reverend Moon is exploiting these children for his own glory."
The Divine Principle Children were presented as orphans, though most were from middle-class families. They were also used as mules for unregulated foreign cash, stuffed into their socks. A single troupe once hauled $58,000 in Japanese yen to Pak's Virginia home.
Pak was savvy enough to know that no one in Washington would warm to Moon if he came on too strong as an incoming political ruler. Nor would a new world messiah be the kind of cause for which Americans would write big checks. So Pak surrounded the KCFF in a cloud of Cold War patriotism. Presenting it as a grand diplomatic project of enormous weight and respectability, he scouted out top names who would agree to be listed on his letterhead in the cause of standing up to communist North Korea. He succeeded in snagging Eisenhower as well as Adm. Arleigh Burke, a World War II hero with a class of warships named for him. The Gettysburg visit surpassed expectations. In the Moon publication New Age Frontiers, a disciple raved, "Time originally allotted for our Leader's visit—5 minutes. Time spent with General Eisenhower—45 minutes! Truly a successful day!"
Moon owed Eisenhower. But as he saw it, the reverse was true. Ike, Moon told his followers, had "paid his bill in full," and they smiled on his turn of luck. According to the report from the House of Representatives years later, Pak confided to an associate that the president had "opened all the doors for Sun Myung Moon." He went ahead and quoted Eisenhower in one of the fundraising letters, apparently distributed by the up-and-coming conservative fundraising titan, Richard Viguerie: "I urge my fellow Americans to study and support the objectives and programs of the KCFF."
The intertwining of Bob Roland's life with Moon's had begun in 1963, with a chance meeting at the Washington Golf and Country Club. There, on Tuesdays, businessmen and preachers mingled, prayed, and took turns speaking about the gospels. The luncheons were put on by a Protestant group with strong political connections, International Christian Leader- ship. One day Roland was standing before the table, giving off-the-cuff remarks, when he was surprised to see a balding, somewhat awkward- looking Asian military officer in uniform, hanging on every word. Colonel Pak was taking copious notes. After the meeting broke up, he approached Bob with folded hands and introduced himself as assistant military attache for his country's embassy. "Mr. Roland, never in all of my life have I met anyone with such wisdom as yours," the pilot recalls Pak saying. "Especially someone so young as you."
Embarrassed by his new fan, Roland could already picture the ribbing he was in for at next week's lunch. He wasn't Billy Graham, for Pete's sake. "But at least someone was listening this time," he thought dryly. The pilot walked out into the cold, clear day and left Pak standing at the country club. He didn't think they'd meet again, but they did.
"A dragon emerges from a ditch," they say in Korea, of men whose iron will has lifted them from poverty, war, and other hardships that have tested the Land of the Morning Calm for centuries.
As he put the pieces together in the Reverend Moon story, Robert Roland learned the basics. Moon had been born Yong Myung-Moon ("Shining Dragon") in 1920, to poor farmers who struggled to get by in northern Korea. Under the humiliating occupation of Imperial Japan, Koreans were forced to speak the colonizer's language and answer to Japanese names. In this misery, the story goes, Moon grew up weighed down by the suffering of the world, as if preternaturally knowing his destiny.
Yong-Myung Moon became Sun Myung Moon only after his vision of Jesus in 1935. During Easter, he went up a small hill, at the foot of the rocky peaks of Mount Myodu, to pray. Then God appeared to tell him, "You are the son I have been seeking, the one who can begin my eternal history."
When Moon's vision came, he balked at the impossible new mission. "God does not easily give the title 'Son of God,'" Moon recalled in 1977. What hurt wasn't just the crushing responsibility to save the world but intimate knowledge of the Fall of Man that even God found too agonizing to admit. "Even God said 'No' to Father three times when he presented the Divine Principle," according to a June 10, 2001, sermon by follower Rev. Kevin McCarthy. "Father told God: 'Bullshit!' [God] knew he was right."
Moon learned that Jesus had failed in his mission—as Moon saw it, not to die but to marry, beget children, and build a tangible, thriving Peace Kingdom. Instead, Jesus had failed miserably. In 1978, Moon would explain, "by the imperfection of Jesus's dispensation, two thousand years ago . . . all previous work was nullified, no value."
A softer version is presented to kids in True Parents' History for Children "I came to earth almost two thousand years ago to save the world from Satan. I was the Messiah. I wanted to make this world into a beautiful and loving place where everyone could be happy. But they killed me before I could finish my work. Now, another person must be the Messiah. . . ." . . . Then Father began to feel achy and miserable all over. He began to cry. The tears came faster and faster. "Oh, it hurts so much," he cried to God. My heart is aching. I feel like I can never stop crying. Why is this?" He bent over in pain. He was feeling the pain that had been in God's heart for so long.
But Moon mustered the strength to embrace his quest. Meanwhile, his rise had caught the attention of Lucifer. "'Hey, [Satan] snarled, 'if this guy learns about what happened in the Garden of Eden, I'm doomed,'" the children's account goes. "'I've gotta put a stop to this nonsense.'" The evil forces swooped in upon Moon, but he tamed the devil—then beat the truth out of him. Under his interrogation techniques, Satan confessed to his "secret crime," so shameful that it had been omitted from the Bible: having sex with Eve.
After his vision, Moon went to Japan to study electrical engineering, a discipline that would lend a technician's logic to his holy book, the Divine Principle. But as the young man began to preach in prewar northern Korea, Christians angrily rejected his message. One explanation for Moon's cold reception was later given by U.S. embassy officials in the 1960s, who periodically passed along rumors that his church performed X-rated rites to drive Satan from women. But the Unification Church calls this a libel. "I have lived a chaste life," Bo Hi Pak would tell Congress, sobbing, in 1977, telling a legislator the claim—which had made the American press— "will haunt you to your grave."
But the Reverend Moon, by his own admission, was surrounded by female admirers. He recalled years later that "all the women around me, from age eighteen to eighty, wanted to be my spouse. . . . I would kick them out but they would climb the fence to come back. Husbands would confine them to the house, take away their clothes, and underwear, and tie them up. . . . Many rumors began. Husbands wanted to kill me."
In 1948, with the Japanese driven from Korea, the Communist guerilla Kim Il Sung took power in the north. According to official history, Moon was sentenced to a miserable work camp in the northeast, the notorious Hungnam Prison. In the camps of the new tyranny of North Korea, dissidents were worked to death, while guards told them the Great Leader's benevolent mercy kept them alive. They grabbed fistfuls from mountains of old fertilizer, stuffed it into straw bags headed on trains to Kim's farm collectives, ate rice from dead men's lips, and suffered beatings.
There, fellow inmates came to see Moon, Prisoner 596, as a man of miracles. He often debated points in the Bible with his work leader, Pak Chung Hwa (no relation to Colonel Pak), Prisoner 919. At first he scoffed at Moon's unusual teachings—especially the idea that John the Baptist, Jesus's disciple, had been no hero, but the weak link in God's failed plan. "He could not fulfill his responsibility," Moon insisted. "That was the reason why God could not prevent King Herod from cutting off his head." It was the same reasoning he would later use to explain the Holocaust: those who bungled Jesus's mission must suffer.
As the story goes, Prisoner 919 found this line of reasoning questionable until one morning when he woke from a dream of an old man, telling him that Moon was the Second Coming. And once he started thinking about it, it seemed to explain why the reverend was such a physical dynamo. Where others died all around him, three years of hell hadn't reduced Moon's electric vigor. Amid that suffering, the church teaches, Moon became the perfect human being.
The official account of Moon's escape reads like the screenplay to a Michael Bay film. The two men, and a third friend, were facing certain execution when they heard the thunderbolt of American warplanes over the nearby city. The forces of the United Nations, the organization that would occupy so much of Moon's spiritual imagination, were liberating the death camp while Moon and his friends fled the bombardment. It was all part of Korea's divine providence as the Father Nation—so destined, Moon has said, because of the peninsula's resemblance to a penis. Japan, the Mother Nation, "yearns for male-like peninsular Korea on the mainland."
The children's version explains:
During this time, the war continued between the communists and the United Nations troops. The communists were led by two men. One was a Chinese man named Mao Tse Tung, and the other was a Korean named Kim Il Sung. Satan was using these two men to build the Satanic Kingdom on earth. God was using Father to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth.
There were three men headed south through the devastation. Pak Chung Hwa was wounded, and it's said he begged to be left to die. But Moon told him, "If we die, we die together; and if we survive, we survive together."
A ramshackle church of the new faith was set up in Pusan, southern Korea, in 1951, built from U.S. Army ration packets and other war debris. Soon the faith grew to number thousands of followers. At first the South didn't look on Moon any more kindly than the North had. But then, in 1961, the government collapsed, stunning the Kennedy administration. which didn't know what to make of new generalissimo Park Chung Hee but opened friendly relations with him.
This was not the free South Korea of the 1988 Olympics and today. The military regime cracked down on most Christian churches and outlawed a wide range of groups, but found use to smile on Moon and his fanatically anti-Communist religion. The Reverend Moon now had congregations in thirty cities. Four Korean Army officers close to the new junta were also friendly with Moon's group. They included Col. Bo Hi Pak, the young embassy liaison. The most powerful early ally was a politician and later prime minister named Kim Jong-Pil, who established the new regime's Korean Central Intelligence Agency, an unsparing secret police force that has been scrapped and repudiated in modern South Korea.
In a February 26, 1963, report, a CIA analyst wrote in an intelligence cable that it was Jong-Pil who "organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] Central Intelligence Agency." Eager to build a mutually beneficial relationship with Moon, this chief of the secret police met with Moon's proselytizers at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco and promised support, according to congressional investigators. Another U.S. intelligence agency memorandum, dated December 18, 1964, said that Pak's money-making scheme, the KCFF, was "the first step towards organizing a Tong-Il [Korean for Unification] in Washington."
Roland, though a staunch anti-Communist, was horrified as he read about the KCIA's reign of terror. Its torture practices included waterboarding, as well as the KCIA "barbecue," the practice of stringing citizens spread- eagled over a flame to elicit confessions. By 1967, South Korean agents were kidnapping Korean exiles and sending death threats ("you will be killed Sunday") to the editor of a reformist Korean newspaper editor in California.
But Korea wasn't the only place where Moon made right-wing friends. Seeing potential in him, the tycoon Ryoichi Sasakawa, who presided over an empire of motorboat gambling, convened a meeting near a lake in Yamanashi Prefacture, where he invited Moon to meet with him and Shirai Tameo, a youth training leader for the yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. Their discussions would lead to the formation by 1970 of a joint project combining the muscle of the Mob with the feverish devotion of the Unification Church. The name was Shokyo Rengo, "Victory over Communism." It became Japan's official chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, an international coalition also affiliated with neo-Nazis, terrorists, and various other extremists across the globe. It was the kind of organization whose existence sounds ludicrous until you discover that the expert on it is no less a journalist than the New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson, the title of whose book on the subject speaks for itself: Inside The League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League.
Prisoner 919, the man said to have been carried hundreds of miles on the Reverend Moon's back, later accused him of running a sex club. In postwar South Korea, the government had accused Moon of luring girls into a life of sin. For refusing to abandon the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, fourteen girls were dismissed from Ehwa Women's University, and two professors were fired. Moon called this "the climax of persecution." In 1955, he was arrested, on charges that vary depending on whom you ask: draft dodging or bringing a woman who was not his wife to a "love hotel." He was acquitted.
In 1993, Prisoner 919 wrote an inflammatory tract, The Tragedy of the Six Marys, claiming inside knowledge that it was all true. The early sales pitch to young men, said he said, had been that membership brought access to a harem.
The charge echoed earlier U.S. intelligence reports on Moon, long rejected by the church as slander by Christian missionaries with axes to grind. Moon's defender, journalist Carlton Sherwood, quotes this Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report and claimed, prior to the Six Marys book, that it was an outrageous lie: "Directly under Founder/Sect leader MUN [sic], are his six main disciples, all females, who are called 'Marys' in the UC. In spreading the religion, each of the 'Marys' first recruited three males." An FBI file had furthermore speculated that the rites involved "having a nude women in a darkened room with MUN while he recited a long prayer and caressed their bodies. . . . At these meetings, MUN pre- pared special food and drink, and gathered his nude congregation into a darkened room where they all prayed for twenty-four hours."
Now Prisoner 919 claimed that sex with the six had, indeed, been an early Moonie initiation rite, a "blood exchange" that freed women from the stain of Eve by infusing them with God's bloodline. According to Prisoner 919, Moon hadn't been content with just six but sixty, and pregnant women were not guaranteed child support. "He violated mothers, their daughters, their sisters," wrote Moon's ex-comrade. One woman, Yu Shin Hee, said she was ruined after being discarded as a woman that the men had tired of transmogrifying into a Mary.
But in November 1995, as Moon was touring with George Bush, Prisoner 919 recanted his attack on Moon, saying it had been made in bitterness. "I've always wondered what the price was of that retraction," Moon's daughter-in-law, Nansook, wrote.
For his part, the aging veteran of the North Korean death camp insisted he was retracting the story in response to his conscience. After their great escape, he had wrongly held a grudge against Moon, blaming him for his own hardships as a refugee in shattered, postwar South Korea. Hadn't Moon promised to look after him? "Just the thought of Reverend Moon, even at night when I was asleep, would make me jump up and want to take an ax and smash his head open," he said.
Now he saw his error and recognized Moon as the Messiah. Part of this, he said, was seeing tremendous works in America: the East Garden palace, the New Yorker Hotel.
"I was glad, too, to see the Washington Times," he said. "It made me understand how Reverend Moon's work is being accomplished all over the world. I saw where God has appeared to us in the form of Reverend Moon and is accomplishing His will in our midst."
"I must lay a firm foundation for Master by making influential political and social contacts," Pak explained one night over dinner to Bob and Betty Roland, whom he had finally won over as friends despite repeated rejections. They dined at Pak's house in a middle-class neighborhood on Utah Street in Arlington, which by evenings were awhirl with guests—not just Pak's fellow Moonies but new potential friends—other figures in the northern Virginia suburbs drawn, like the Rolands, to his hospitality.
One night Mr. and Mrs. Roland were surprised to find themselves the only guests. Pak said something in a thick accent that Roland didn't understand. It sounded like "The Lord is back on Earth." His wife's eyes flashed with what looked to Roland like excitement.
"What did you say?" they said.
"The Lord of the Second Advent is back on Earth," Pak said, and he told them about a man named Sun Myung Moon who, through his work, had identified the savior.
"I think your friend Bo Hi has flipped his lid," Roland told his wife after they left. His wife wasn't so sure.
Out of curiosity, according to Roland, Betty pored over the dense passages from Moon's leather tome, the Divine Principle, an intricate anatomy of the universe. It begins:
Everyone, without exception, is struggling to gain happiness. The first step in attaining this goal is to overcome present unhappiness. From small individual affairs to history-making global events, everything is an expression of human lives, which are constantly striving to become happier. How, then, can happiness be attained?
The Principles would not come into focus, the church taught, unless the student read them dozens of times for understanding.
Through origin-division-union action, the dual characteristics of God are projected to form two distinct and substantial object partners, which interact with each other as subject partner and object partner. The object partner responds to the subject partner to form a common base and begins give and take action around the subject partner. As they are held in balance by the force of giving (centrifugal) and the force of receiving (centripetal), the object partner revolves around the subject partner in a circular motion, and thus they become harmonious and unified.
By the end of the book, the clouds have parted, and simplicity has returned to the language.
Therefore, the nation of the East where Christ will come again would be none other than Korea.
One day in 1965, Adm. Arleigh Burke—who had pushed destroyers to boiler-busting limits and survived kamikaze plane attacks—opened an envelope to read some typed passages that had been mailed to him, using unfamiliar language. "We today are now the Third Israel. We are those who come under the protection of the body and blood of the Divine Principles."
From a newsletter called New Age Frontiers, published by a church he'd never heard of, the excerpts described a "Throne Room" where Moon sat in a "magnificent wing-chair." And this Third Israel, whatever it was, was somehow linked to a meeting with Burke's old commanding officer, Dwight Eisenhower.
The letter had come from Robert Roland, one of the names on the KCFF letterhead. Roland claimed the group to which Burke had lent his name was a secret front "for the financial support and propagation of the ideology of the Holy Spirit Association and its leader, Mr. Sun Myung Moon of Seoul, Korea."
"It jolted me," Burke wrote in a letter describing how he'd misunderstood the group's nature.
I had never heard of the Unification Church or Mr. Moon, and I knew nothing at all about either. I had previously known that Col. Pak was quite religious and an ardent Buddhist. . . .
I called Mr. Roland, who was with United Air Lines, but he could not add more than was in his letter. He was sure he was correct. I checked with a few people who knew Mr. Roland and they said he was a man of good judgment.
The admiral resigned from the board but appears to have gone out of his way to avoid embarrassing Eisenhower, giving only the most polite ex- planation for his resignation. Eisenhower, whose name remained on the KCFF letterhead, wrote back to Burke that he sympathized with the admiral for not having the energy to devote to the project.
"Time takes its toll," Eisenhower wrote. "On top of this, you and I are not blessed with the large and comprehensive staff of aides and assistants that we once had."
Burke phoned Bo Hi Pak, who promised to explain his complicated relationship with Bob Roland.
While Roland tried to hold his marriage together, the divide over the Returning Lord sometimes became too much. One night after he flew into a rage—"I am asking that you choose whether you want this family, or whether you want Moon," he said—he drove Betty over to Bo Hi Pak's house, suitcases and all, feeling shot through with pain.
He peeked into a room where servants in white linen came in from time to time. The door opened to a long coffee table and, at the end of it, Moon on his American throne...
E-mail this to a friend