Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush — the son of former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush — found himself in trouble and faltering after his New Hampshire defeat to Senator John McCain. A shadowy, secretive and spooky network centered around right wing religious organizations and causes rushed to his rescue in South Carolina.

At the crux of this network is the Council for National Policy (CNP) founded in 1981 by the Rev. Tim LaHaye and T. Cullen Davis, members of the ultra-right John Birch Society with financial backing from Nelson Bunker Hunt. Currently, the clandestine CNP has over 500 members and serves as the Who’s Who network of the United States’ right wing. At the center of the CNP, with a seemingly endless supply of questionable cash, is self-proclaimed Messiah and mind control cult leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Ron Godwin, Senior Vice President of the Moon-owned Washington Times, and Robert Grant, President of Moon-affiliated American Freedom Coalition (AFC), are CNP members. The main function of the Moon organization seems to be providing media propaganda and financially propping up failing right wing organizations. In the mid-1980’s when New Right direct mail king Richard Viguerie fell into debt, Moon’s Unification Church bought his building for ten million dollars. Viguerie served on the Board of the AFC and has done mailings for that organization and the Washington Times. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell fell on hard times, once again, it was the Moonies to the rescue.

Moon has reportedly lost a billion dollars in the 1980’s and 90’s operating the Washington Times. In 1992, a PBS Frontline investigative report claimed that a key money source for Rev. Moon’s far-flung world financial empire was Ryoichi Sasakawa, the self-proclaimed “world’s richest fascist” who died in 1995. At the time of his death, Sasakawa administered a “charitable foundation” taking in nearly $24 billion a year from a monopoly on legalized gambling in Japan.

Sasakawa was one of Japan’s foremost fascists in the 1930’s. He modeled his own private army of 15,000 men and 20 warplanes after Mussolini’s Black Shirts. After the World War II, Sasakawa, a classified Class A war criminal, awaited death in a military prison before suddenly being released by General Douglas McArthur. Also released with Sasakawa was leading Japanese organized crime syndicate leader Yoshio Kodama of the Yakuza.

The Japanese News Service KYODO released documents linking Sasakawa to U.S. military intelligence. Declassified documents link Kodama’s release to the CIA. Both Kodama and Sasakawa played a key role in the rise of the Moon organization. In 1977, Congressman Donald Fraser launched an investigation into the Moonie organization. The 444-page Congressional report alleged Moonie involvement in arms sales, bribery, bank fraud and illegal kickbacks. Not surprisingly, the report suggested that Moon’s Unification Church was a tool of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and was being used to influence U.S. foreign and domestic policy. The U.S. CIA created the Korean KCIA and also established the ties between Sasakawa, Kodama and Moon.

Moon, a Korean, and his two Japanese buddies, first joined forces in the 1960’s to form the Asian people’s Anti-Communist League with the aid of KCIA agents and allegedly financed by Japanese Yakuza money. In 1964, League money set up Moon’s “Freedom Center” in the U.S. with crime boss Kodama serving as Chief Advisor to the Moon subsidiary “Win Over Communism.” In 1966, the League merged with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a group with strong fascist ties to form the World Anti-Communist League led by retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub. Singlaub, a good friend of the Bush family, serves on the CNP and enlisted paramilitary organizations to support the contra cause in Nicaragua. These are the FOBs (Friends of Bush), a shadowy network connected to the CIA, mind control, fascism and arms and drug-running.