by Jerry Mel­don
CONSORTIUM NEWS

Editor’s Note: Over the years, we have writ­ten a num­ber of sto­ries about Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s influence-buying schemes inside U.S. con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal cir­cles – and the fed­eral government’s odd refusal to aggres­sively enforce laws when Moon’s oper­a­tion is caught in legally ques­tion­able activ­i­ties. [See, for instance, Moon/Bush ‘Ongo­ing Crime Enterprise’.]

In this guest arti­cle, Jerry Mel­don exam­ines the mys­te­ri­ous roots of the money that has funded right-wing Asian pol­i­tics since World War II and that has some­times spilled over into the United States:

On Feb. 19, Japan­ese For­eign Min­is­ter Taro Aso took excep­tion to a U.S. con­gres­sional res­o­lu­tion intro­duced by Rep. Mike Honda, D-California, call­ing on Japan to “for­mally acknowl­edge, apol­o­gize and accept his­tor­i­cal respon­si­bil­ity” for coerc­ing 200,000 Asian women into slav­ery as “Com­fort Women” (wartime pros­ti­tutes) for 3.5 mil­lion Japan­ese sol­diers. Mr. Aso said he con­sid­ers the accu­sa­tion ground­less and extremely regrettable.

Six decades after World War II, can it really be that Japan­ese offi­cials are still dis­tort­ing his­tory and insult­ing the Chi­nese, Kore­ans, Philip­pinos and oth­ers across Asia whom Hiro­hito’ s forces sav­agely bru­tal­ized and robbed?

And why does Wash­ing­ton turn a deaf ear?

The answers may be rooted in what tran­spired behind closed doors in Tokyo when Japan was occu­pied by the U.S. mil­i­tary in the post-war years .

Ster­ling and Peggy Sea­grave sug­gest a motive in their eye-opening – and at times stomach-turning – 2003 book, Gold War­riors: America’s Secret Recov­ery of Yamashita’s Gold. In the war’s imme­di­ate after­math, Gen. Dou­glas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of Allied occu­py­ing forces, secretly joined hands with Japan­ese war criminals.

Rather than con­vict, imprison and throw away the keys, MacArthur cod­dled those respon­si­ble for one of history’s blood­i­est wars of aggres­sion. When the U.S. occu­pa­tion ended in 1952, he released all those who were still in custody.

And it may have gone a lot fur­ther than that.

Accord­ing to Gold War­riors, e ven as the United States “intro­duced demo­c­ra­tic reforms and a new con­sti­tu­tion … [it ] put Japan back under the con­trol of men who were devot­edly unde­mo­c­ra­tic … [insist­ing] that Japan never stole any­thing and was flat broke … [when, in real­ity, Amer­ica had given it ] huge infu­sions of black money.”

Wash­ing­ton even had Arti­cle 14 of the 1951 Japan Peace Treaty state : “It is rec­og­nized that Japan should pay repa­ra­tions to the Allied Pow­ers for the dam­age and suf­fer­ing caused by it dur­ing the war. Nev­er­the­less it is also rec­og­nized that the resources of Japan are not presently suf­fi­cient … [There­fore] the Allied Pow­ers waive all repa­ra­tions claims of the Allied Pow­ers and their nation­als aris­ing out of any actions taken by Japan.”

As his­to­rian Christo­pher Simp­son put it , the United States thereby insured “that the vict ims of the war – rape camp sur­vivors, slave labor­ers and POWs – [would] be left with nothing.”

Fur­ther­more, accord­ing to the Sea­graves, “records of Japan’s loot­ing and eco­nomic con­spir­acy have been removed from West­ern archives and data­bases, remain under secret clas­si­fi­ca­tion and will not be made pub­lic for another half-century.”

The cover-up notwith­stand­ing, the Sea­graves some­how pen­e­trated the veil of secrecy and reported that the source of the black money that MacArthur bestowed on the Japan­ese. They wrote that after arriv­ing in Japan, the general’s aides located $100 bil­lion in gold, plat­inum and other trea­sures that Hirohito’s forces had sys­tem­at­i­cally plun­dered from occu­pied Asian nations and buried deep underground.

When MacArthur reported this to Wash­ing­ton, Pres­i­dent Harry S. Truman’s brain trust – which included John McCloy, who as U.S. High Com­mis­sioner for Ger­many would autho­rize the early release of many Nazi war crim­i­nals – decided to devote the for­tune to covert oper­a­tions such as the bankrolling of right­ist polit­i­cal par­ties and the recruit­ment of war crim­i­nals as U.S. intel­li­gence agents for the Cold War that was just beginning.

One of the most noto­ri­ous crooks MacArthur embraced was yakuza god­fa­ther Yoshio Kodama. With the exalted rank of rear admi­ral in the Japan­ese navy, Kodama had over­seen the wartime loot­ing of Asia’s crim­i­nal infra­struc­ture. In the process, he stashed away a per­sonal for­tune esti­mated at $13 billion.

Arrested as a Class A war crim­i­nal, he made a deal with MacArthur’s intel­li­gence chief, Gen. Charles Willoughby. Kodama handed the CIA $100 mil­lion in return for his release from Sug­amo Prison. Return­ing to the under­world, he regained con­trol of the Asian heroin traffic.

Accord­ing to the Sea­graves and oth­ers, he also remained a CIA asset until his death in 1984. It was appar­ently in that capac­ity that he became a major behind-the-scenes polit­i­cal force, pri­mar­ily in Japan but, indi­rectly, across the Pacific as well.

Together with his fel­low rack­e­teer and Class A war crim­i­nal Ryoichi Sasakawa, Kodama under­wrote the cre­ation of two Japan­ese polit­i­cal par­ties that later com­bined to form the Lib­eral Demo­c­ra­tic Party (LDP). Except for a brief hia­tus when vot­ers had had their fill of cor­rup­tion, the con­ser­v­a­tive LDP has ruled Japan ever since. Accord­ing to sources cited by the Sea­graves, the LDP secretly con­tributed to the 1960 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign of Richard M. Nixon.

The LDP was not the only orga­ni­za­tion which Kodama and Sasakawa bankrolled, that lav­ished the gang­sters’ ill-begotten wealth on Amer­i­can politi­cians. They also under­wrote the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, which owns the right-wing daily, the Wash­ing­ton Times.

When Gen. Park Chung Hee staged a coup and installed him­self as South Korea’s dic­ta­tor in 1961, he des­ig­nated the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church to be his polit­i­cal arm. Suc­ces­sive South Korean lead­ers have used it to influ­ence U.S. for­eign policy.

A 1978 con­gres­sional inquiry found that Moon’s orga­ni­za­tion, in coor­di­na­tion with South Korea’s CIA-molded intel­li­gence agency, the KCIA, paid off sev­eral U.S. con­gress­men. Rep. Richard Hanna, D-California, and Otto Pass­man, D-Louisiana, accepted approx­i­mately $200,000 each.

Hanna was slapped with a six-to-30-month sen­tence and spent a year behind bars. Pass­man man­aged to have him­self tried in his home town and was acquit­ted. For­tu­nately for Reps. Cor­nelius Gal­lagher, D-New Jer­sey, and William Mar­shall, R-Ohio, the five-year statute of lim­i­ta­tions ran out before they could be pros­e­cuted. Three oth­ers con­gress­men were rep­ri­manded for lying about their gifts.

Kodama and Sasakawa, together with fol­low­ers of Rev. Moon, also under­wrote the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) as a pro­pa­ganda mill for the dic­ta­tor­ships of Tai­wan and South Korea. In 1966, the APACL expanded to become the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) . Euro­pean neo-nazi ter­ror­ists and Latin Amer­i­can death squad lead­ers attended WACL con­fer­ences in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ronald Rea­gan – whose 1981 pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion was attended by the god­fa­ther of Cen­tral America’s death squads, Mario San­doval Alar­con – sent the fol­low­ing mes­sage to the 1985 WACL con­ven­tion in Dallas:

“I com­mend you all for your part in this noble cause. Our com­bined efforts are mov­ing the tide of his­tory toward world free­dom. We must per­se­vere and never fal­ter. I send all you who help in your cru­sade for lib­erty my best wishes. God bless you.”

The pre­vi­ous year, Con­gress had blocked con­tin­ued White House fund­ing for the counter-revolutionary Nicaraguan con­tras. Undaunted, the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion solicited dona­tions from pri­vate right-wing sources, includ­ing the two orga­ni­za­tions that Kodama and Sasa
kawa had spawned. WACL and the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church each obliged the Rea­gan team with gen­er­ous dona­tions that kept the con­tras afloat.

In that same period, WACL also con­tributed heav­ily in the United States to right-wing can­di­dates run­ning against pro­gres­sive incum­bents. One such ben­e­fi­ciary, WACL con­feree Steven Symms, unseated the chair­man of the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee, Frank Church, D-Idaho. A promi­nent Viet­nam War critic, Church had chaired a 1975 Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tion that uncov­ered CIA plots to assas­si­nate for­eign leaders.

Putting the pieces of the puz­zle together, a pic­ture emerges of CIA-controlled Japan­ese wartime loot being fun­neled by Japan­ese war crim­i­nals, via right­ist Asian con­duit orga­ni­za­tions, to Amer­i­can politicians.

Maybe that explains why Wash­ing­ton turns a deaf ear when Japan­ese offi­cials san­i­tize their country’s wartime atroc­i­ties. After all, the bruised feel­ings of a cou­ple of bil­lion Asian main­lan­ders is a small price to pay for keep­ing a lid on the truth.