Will Moonie Money Be Used
in Netanyahu-Sharon Election Theft?
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Reports are already coming in from sources in Israel that the radical right wing there is banking on massive amounts of money from the United States, to swipe the upcoming Knesset and prime ministerial elections, and consolidate a Jewish fascist garrison state. Some of the money, according to the sources, is flowing in from so-called Christian Zionist networks in the United States, and in the next weeks, the newly anointed Foreign Minister, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, is coming to America to arrange an even larger flood of dirty money. It is illegal for foreign funds to be used in Israeli electoral campaigns, so the entire dirty operation has the potential to blow up in the faces of the Jabotinskyite fascists. These reports of cash flows into Israel raises an obvious question: Are Likudniks ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon banking on Moonie money to hijack a quick election, against a possibly resurgent Labor Party?
As this news services has reported for the last three weeks, the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon has been spending billions of dollars in offshore money in the United States; its origin is unknown, but is widely suspected of being illegal weapons-for-drugs proceeds. Rev. Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and all of the lesser "Christian Zionists" have been long-since bought up by the Moonies. Thus, the entire flow of Christian Zionist cash into the Radical Right in Israel is already known to be Moonie-tainted money.
The issue of Moonie illegal funds became a major national scandal in Uruguay, one of South America's most notorious money-laundering centers, in 1996, after bank employees' union officials blew the whistle on a massive Moonie cash-laundering scheme. According to stories that appeared at the time in the Montevideo newspaper El Observador, during a short period of time, more than 4,000 Japanese women—all members of the Moon organization—appeared at the Banco de Crédito in Montevideo and deposited large amounts of cash from unknown sources. In one day alone, $19 million was thus deposited in a Moonie-controlled account under the name "Cami II." All told, $80 million was laundered through the account at Banco de Crédito in less than a month in late 1996, and there is no reason to believe that this was a "one-time" effort.
In 1983, Rev. Moon had plunked down $52 million to purchase Banco de Crédito, one of the largest financial institutions in Uruguay. However, a short time later, officials of the military junta "bought" a bundle of non-performing debt, held by Banco de Crédito, for a reported $60 million!
When El Observador investigative reporter Pablo Alfano published his exposes of the Moonie laundering operations at Banco de Crédito, he was kidnapped at gunpoint, and threatened with murder if he continued to probe the Moonie story.
The Moon-Sharon Alliance
The Moonie ties to the Sharon mafia in Israel are not just mediated through the Falwell-Robertson gang in America. Since no later than 1980, the Moonies, through a string of front groups, have been engaged in many joint dirty ventures with the Sharon grouping of the Israeli right wing. The depth of those ties, and their links to some of the nastiest narco-terrorist regimes in South and Central America, begs the question: Does offshore Moonie money hold the key to the Likud's and other super-extremists' electoral strategy?
One of the principal liaisons between the Moonie apparatus and the Sharon mafia in Israel was the late Dr. Joseph Churba. A close associate of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane from boyhood, Churba was part of the Betar youth networks (the Jabotinsky youth movement), trained by former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens. Churba and Kahane co-founded the terrorist Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s, after running a pro-Vietnam War front group on the campus of Columbia University, the July Fourth Committee. "J-4" was bankrolled both by the FBI and by Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, who were assets of CIA Counterintelligence Director James Jesus Angleton within the International Department of the AFL-CIO, which housed international counterinsurgency operations within the labor movement. Angleton also was the person in charge of the "Israel franchise" at the CIA.
Despite his known JDL and Kahane ties, Churba was able to get a job in U.S. Air Force Intelligence in the 1970s, rising to be the head of the Mideast section. After crossing swords with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. George Brown over U.S. policy towards Israel, Churba was dumped by the Air Force and lost his security clearance. He immediately signed up with the Moonies. From 1980 until his death in 1996, Churba ran the International Security Council, the in-house think-tank of Moon's CAUSA International. CAUSA was a major conduit of dirty funds to the Oliver North "Enterprise" behind the Iran-Contra fiasco. Its International President was Col. Bo Hi Pak, the KCIA founder and actual controller of the Moon empire. One of the biggest sources of narco-dollars for North et al. was a series of joint Moonie-Sharon criminal operations in Central and South America.
Moon and Sharon in Honduras
In the early 1980s, then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon made a secret trip to Honduras, to establish Israeli collusion with a group of right-wing military officers, linked to Colombian drug traffickers. Shortly after the Sharon trip, the late Gen. Reshavam Ze'evi, a longtime Sharon ally and the well-known head of the Israeli Mafia, set up shop in Honduras, providing large volumes of Israeli weapons—in return for narcotics. In January 1983, Bo Hi Pak also visited Honduras, forging alliances with the same dope-tainted colonels and generals, including Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. The Moonies set up a Honduran front group, the Association for the Development of Honduras (APROH).
On March 31, 1984, the Alvarez group was removed from power in a bloodless coup, which, shortly afterwards, resulted in indictments of eight Hondurans on charges of smuggling an estimated $10 million in Colombian cocaine into the United States, to fund a coup against the newly-installed President, Roberto Suazo. The ringleader of the plot was identified in the U.S. indictment as General Bueso-Rosa, Alvarez's former chief of staff, and a card-carrying member of the Moonies' APROH.
The same Ze'evi-Moon alliance was a key factor in the August 1980 "Cocaine Colonels" coup in Bolivia, which created one of the most notorious narco-regimes in history, complete with its cast of World War II outright Nazis, like Klaus Barbie. General Ze'evi was in Bolivia during the Colonels' Coup, and CAUSA was credited with having conduited $4 million to the putschists for the overthrow. CAUSA established a major beachhead in La Paz under the Colonels, complementing their already-noted operations in Uruguay, which was, at the time, also run by a right-wing military junta.
Moon Over Tel Aviv
The Moonie-Sharon dirty alliance was hardly a dark secret. During the height of the Jonathan Jay Pollard spy scandal in the United States, CAUSA's International Security Council staged two high-profile conferences in Tel Aviv, where the Moonies publicly mingled with the Sharon mafia. On Jan. 26-29, 1986, ISC sponsored a conference on "State Terrorism and the International System." Churba chaired the conference, and introduced his boss, Col. Bo Hi Pak, who delivered the opening remarks. Moonie-owned Washington Times editor-in-chief Arnaud de Borchgrave urged the conference attendees to back a new Washington-Tel Aviv axis for combatting terrorism.
Two of the other speakers at the Moonie event were Raphael "Dirty Rafi" Eytan and Yossef Bodansky. Up until the day of Jonathan Pollard's arrest in Nov. 1985, Eytan was the director of the super-secret Israeli espionage unit, Lekem, which was established under the Ministry of Defense when Sharon was its Minister. Eytan has been Sharon's partner in crime since the 1950s, when Eytan was a top official of Israeli intellgence and Sharon ran IDF "Brigade 101," a death squad that assassinated Palestinians and Arabs.
Bodansky had worked for Israeli Air Force Intelligence before coming to the United States. According to one account in the Dec. 1, 1985 issue of the Israeli newspaper Davar, Bodansky, while working as a "journalist" for the Moonie-owned Washington Times, was, in fact, one of the Lekem agents in Washington—controlling Pollard's spy activities. Bodansky, according to Israeli sources, was dispatched to the United States by Moshe Arens, to obtain U.S. technical secrets that Israel desperately needed, to complete work on their Lavie jet.
Bodansky insinuated himself in the U.S. right-wing Zionist circles, centered around the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), where he worked closely with Richard Perle, Stephen Bryen, and Michael Ledeen. Bodansky was hired in the early 1980s as an "outside consultant" to the Pentagon unit headed by Perle and Bryen, which specialized in military and dual-use technology transfers.
Bodansky, in addition to his "employment" by the Moonie Washington Times, also was a partner of Washington Times editor-in-chief Arnaud de Borchgrave and British spook John Rees in Mid-Atlantic Associates, a small "think tank" that was bankrolled by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith and by right-wing moneybags Richard Mellon Scaife.
The CAUSA-ISC held a second conference in Tel Aviv between Oct. 19-21, 1986 on "The Soviet-Syrian Alliance and the Security of the Middle East," where, once again, Churba, Bo Hi Pak, Eytan, and Bodansky shared the podium with such figures as former Israeli military intelligence chief Yehoshua Sagui.
Given this more than 20-year history of filthy ties between the worldwide Moonie hot money and crime apparatus, and the Sharon mafia in Israel, anyone concerned about the legitimacy of Israel's upcoming elections would do well to raise the question about illicit Moon funds—before the election has been stolen "fair and square."
