The Unification Church
The Moonies and 'Victims of Communism'
Googling “conspiracy theorist cult leader,” it’s unsurprising to see Lyndon LaRouche on the first page. “Conspiracy theorist cult leader buys 130 acre mountainside 'training center' in Tennessee” was one of the top results, but this Daily Mail article was about the son of Sun Myung Moon.
In 2002, LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review dedicated a full issue to “defeating” another anti-communist cult, Moon’s Unification Church. One article referred to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) as a “Moonie front group.” In this case, the LaRouchies were so close, but so far.
The author relied on just two connections: “The president of this Foundation, Lee Edwards, is the [senior] editor of the Sun Myung Moon magazine, The World and I. Its public liaison officer is society editor of Moon’s Washington Times.” While the VOC is not a “Moonie front group,” the Executive Intelligence Review just scratched the surface.
“Reverend Moon is not the first publisher I’ve worked for who thinks he’s God,” became Lee Edward’s canned response to questions about working for a messiah claimant (over ten years). To hear it from Edwards, a co-founder of the Victims of Communism, “While the majority of the reporters and editors at the [Washington Times] newspaper were not ‘Moonies,’ I was the only non-Moonie at the World & I, aside from the editor in chief.”
Lee Edwards eventually became a “Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought” at the Heritage Foundation, a powerful far-right think tank that will have to be addressed (another day) because of its close ties to VOC. Ed Feulner, a founder and longtime chairman of the Heritage Foundation, was an early backer of the VOC who chaired the board of trustees in 2021. According to Bad Moon Rising by John Gorenfeld, Feulner “wrote for the Reverend Moon’s 1970s newsletter, Rising Tide, when his own operation filled merely a small office.”
According to a House investigation, Feulner was introduced by the Unification Church’s Dan Fefferman to South Korean officials who would soon direct funds his way: “In 1975, Ed Feulner… was introduced to KCIA [Korean Central Intelligence Agency] station chief Kim Yung Kwan by Neil Salonen and Dan Fefferman of the Freedom Leadership Foundation [a Moon group].” After Feulner’s trip, $2.2 million in mysterious Seoul cash rolled into the mighty think tank [the Heritage Foundation].
Lev Dobriansky, the arguably more important VOC co-founder, was potentially even more entangled with the Moonies. In one collection of his papers I found a program from a 1973 Unification Church banquet in Washington DC that was addressed by Reverend Moon. From 1987-92, Dobriansky served as the president of the Moonie-funded Global Economic Action Institute.
According to ex-Moonie researcher Ed Coffman, by the 1980s, Dobriansky attended “International Conferences on the Unity of Sciences” and gave lectures at the Unification Theological Seminary in New York. Coffman said that in the 1990s, Lev Dobriansky was a “VIP guest at speeches given by Sun Myung Moon’s wife…and possibly Moon himself.”
Ed Coffman suspected that Dobriansky authorized and potentially mobilized the “captive nations” contingent at the 1976 Moonie rally at the Washington Monument. Neil Salonen, a leader of Moon’s network in the United States (who served on the board of directors of the American Council for World Freedom alongside Edwards and Dobriansky), reported that there was “a strong representation from Captive Nations.”
Lev Dobriansky chaired the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC) for life, which he established in 1959-60. Donald L. Miller, a retired Naval intelligence officer, immediately joined the NCNC and chaired the Captive Nations Committee in Washington. In November 1963, Miller was appointed vice chairman and executive director of the NCNC. Two years later, the CIA wondered if he might be “a member of, or in any other way connected with,” the conspiracist John Birch Society.
Keith Allen Dennis, a historian of the World Anti-Communist League, tells us that Donald Miller became the executive director of the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) in 1970, two years after registering as a foreign agent of South Korea. The KCFF was a Moonie front implicated in the largely forgotten Koreagate scandal of the 1970s.
Koreagate might be why Miller stepped aside as executive director of the NCNC at some point in the 1970s, but he returned to the position from 1985 “into the late 1990s,” after the NCNC established the VOC. In 2002, when Lyndon LaRouche’s publication took aim at the Unification Church, Donald Miller was still on the board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation… Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the “Captive Nations lobby,” including the Moonies.
This post is dedicated to the memory of Ed Coffman, without whom you would not be reading this. Ed, also known as “Don Diligent,” was a tireless researcher of the Moonie cult who spent 36 years in the Unification Church. We met on The Farm (which isn’t the name of another cult but a podcast), as “co-panelists” in a series of episodes about the World Anti-Communist League. Click here for his episode on the Moonies with Keith Allen Dennis.