They could be forgiven for their transgressions because they had submitted to God (the Fellowship). A number of observers of the Fellowship claim politicians love to get involved with the group because it is a way for them to escape accountability for their actions.

Hughes actually struck up a close relationship with Nixon’s Watergate consigliore Colson. Tom Phillips, the chief executive officer of Raytheon, where Colson once worked as general counsel before he joined the Nixon administration, arranged a meeting through Coe between Colson and Hughes. They immediately discussed how they had unconditionally accepted Christ and afterwards became great chums.

Colson had already been converted by Phillips, a man who made most of his company’s profits from arms sales to the U.S. military and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ironically, the Saudis, who championed the extreme fundamentalist form of Wahhabi Islam, despised Jews and Christians alike.

The aftermath of Watergate had a disastrous effect on mainstream Republicans, many of whom went down to defeat in the 1974 elections. But Watergate permitted a new breed of Republicans, those of the right-wing fundamentalist Christian variety, to advance up the political ladder. After Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which saw large numbers of Democrat white segregationists in the South convert to the Republican Party, the fundamentalist conservative Republicans had a ready-made flock of supporters.

Several foot soldiers of the extreme right would emerge from this period. One young Texas college apprentice of Nixon’s chief dirty tricks sorcerer Donald Segretti, Karl Christian Rove, was one of them. There were also credible reports that Segretti used members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist White People’s Party in Los Angeles to engage in dirty tricks on behalf of the Nixon campaign. Another suspected Nazi sympathizer with the Nixon campaign was his White house aide Fred Malek.

Nixon was also deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Nixon ordered Malek to find out if there was a “Jewish cabal” within the Bureau of Labor Statistics and he ordered him to make a list of Jews in the agency. Later, in 1988, Malek was George H. W. Bush’s liaison to Eastern European right-wing “ethnic community” leaders who were members of the Heritage Groups Council. Many of these ethnic leaders were ex-Nazis. They included Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross officer Laszlo Pastor, Romanian fascist Iron Guard official Father Florian Galdau, and Radi Slavoff of the Bulgarian National Front, the successor organization to Bulgaria’s wartime Nazi and Fascist parties.

Like Vereide, Rove was a Norwegian-American with a penchant for evangelical politics. Rove’s decidedly un-Christian method for going below the belt politically earned him the attention and interest of the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush. The 22-year-old Rove, who dropped out of college, decided to run for Chairman of the College Republicans. The coordinator of his campaign in the southern states was Lee Atwater, another noted dirty tricks operator. Both Rove and Atwater would rise to prominence as members of the Bush Dynasty’s inner circle.

Rove’s opponent to head the GOP College Republicans was Terry Dolan, a conservative but also a rumored homosexual. Rove, whose political attack skills were honed in the 1972 presidential race, wasted no time in feeding the rumor mill about Dolan. Rove defeated Dolan, who then went on the head the National Conservative Political Action Committee and coordinated his efforts with such right-wing “Christian” luminaries as Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie.

All three were connected to televangelist Pat Robertson, another “Christian” with a bon vivant past, who was also the son of Virginia’s segregationist Democratic Senator Willis Robertson. With the help of Weyrich, Falwell started Moral Majority. In 1988, after his own failed attempt to wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Vice President George H. W. Bush, Robertson would launch the Christian Coalition headed by himself and another young Republican operative, Ralph Reed.

The Bush Dynasty and the right-wing Christians decided to reach a concordat. Senior Bush’s intermediary with the Christian right was his “converted” son George W. Bush. After some fits and starts with booze and drugs, George W. Bush was ready for prime time and, with the fervent backing of the Fellowship and its subordinate and allied organizations – Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Unification Church, he was being groomed to enter national politics.

In 1973, Weyrich and Joseph Coors (after all, “Jesus” and beer are not mutually exclusive) started the right-wing Heritage Foundation, a spawning ground for future Republican politicians and policy planks. Many of their policy initiatives, including the dismantling of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, and Johnson’s Great Society, were to have their genesis in the Heritage Foundation.

Rove helped George W. Bush in his failed 1978 campaign for a congressional seat in Texas. Although Bush got his first dose of “Jesus” control in 1972 in San Diego, he was not a very good disciple.

In 1978, he was still drinking heavily. A failed oilman in west Texas, it would have been easy to write him off politically. But this son of George H. W. Bush would prove extremely useful for the Fellowship and its allies.

Another troubled young man who was exposed to Christian evangelism but who became active in right-wing Nazi causes was John W. Hinckley, Jr., the Texas-raised son of the wealthy head of Vanderbilt Energy Company, John W. Hinckley, Sr. Eventually, the Hinckleys moved from Dallas, Texas to Evergreen, Colorado. Hinckley, Jr., like Rove, dropped out of college.

After a failed attempt at becoming a songwriter in Hollywood, Hinckley returned to Evergreen, where he worked as a busboy in a nightclub. In late 1980, at the same time George H. W. Bush was planning his meeting in Paris with emissaries of the Islamic regime in Iran to convince them to hold on to U.S. embassy hostages taken captive in Tehran in 1979 until after the presidential election -- in order to deny President Carter an “October Surprise” -- Hinckley began stalking Carter. He also stalked presidential candidate Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. When Nashville Airport baggage metal detectors identified two handguns in Hinckley’s luggage, he was arrested, had his weapons confiscated, fined $62.50, and released. President Carter was making a campaign stop in Nashville the day Hinckley was arrested but the Secret Service decided not to make any more inquiries. Hinckley then purchased two more handguns.

John Hinckley’s brother Scott, who was Vice President of Vanderbilt Energy, was a friend of Neil Bush, George H. W. Bush’s Colorado-based son who would later go on to infamy in the Silverado Savings & Loan scandal.

George H. W. Bush was sworn in as Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1981. Instead of a surprise that would help Carter win re-election, the October Surprise turned out to be a Bush surprise that cost Carter the election.

True to their agreement with Bush, the Iranians released American embassy hostages they very moment Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. A few weeks later, Reagan appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton Hotel along with Vice President Bush. Longtime Fellowship leader Albert Quie, then Governor of Minnesota, gave the keynote message.

A little over two months later, John W. Hinckley, Jr., stepped from a crowd gathered outside the very same hotel where Reagan had prayed in February with the Fellowship. Hinckley fired six shots from his Rohm R6-14 handgun in the direction of Reagan. One struck the president in his left chest, the bullet lodging an inch from Reagan’s heart.

George H. W. Bush was literally one inch from the presidency. But the Bush dynasty’s total seizure of the White House would have to wait.

At George Washington Hospital, Reagan was erroneously given a cold blood transfusion, something that a number of medical experts later saw as contributing to the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. White House Press Secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a Washington police officer were also wounded – Brady so severely he became an invalid.

Ironically, the next evening, Neil was to have hosted Hinckley’s brother Scott at a dinner party at his Colorado home. Immediately, the media began to concentrate on the connections between Reagan’s attempted assassin and the Bush family. NBC’s John Chancellor was particularly interested in the connection between Bush and Hinckley. According to the Houston Post, Bush spokeswoman Shirley Green called the connection “a bizarre happenstance, a weird occurrence.” For a family whose imprimatur is connected to so many American scandals, bizarre and weird should have been replaced with commonplace and expected.

John Hinckley and Neil Bush both lived in Lubbock, Texas during 1978. Neil was in Lubbock to work as manager for his brother George’s 1978 congressional campaign.

Also in Lubbock was John Hinckley, Jr., who lived there since 1974. Rove was also a frequent visitor to Lubbock as a campaign strategist for the Bush campaign. It was yet another nexus between the Bush Family and other nefarious events.

After all, George H. W. Bush’s address and phone number (“Bush, George H.W. [Poppy] 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland 4-6355”) were found in the address book of George de Mohrenschildt, a Texan and Russian émigré with a fascist past in Europe who befriended Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald after the future accused assassin of President Kennedy returned from the Soviet Union.

The pro-Nazi Allen Dulles was appointed by President Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission, which ensured the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination never went beyond the self-described “patsy,” Oswald, to include his right-wing friends and associates.

And the Nazi thread was also strong with both Oswald and Hinckley. Oswald had the Arlington, Virginia Nazi Party headquarters address of George Lincoln Rockwell in his address book when he was arrested following Kennedy’s assassination.

Hinckley was a member of the National Socialist Party of America, which continued to function after Rockwell’s assassination in Arlington in 1967. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Hinckley, Jr. had participated in a march honoring Rockwell.

The senior Hinckley had been involved with World Vision, a Christian evangelical association involved with a number of covert U.S. intelligence operations abroad.

Like the Fellowship, World Vision acted as a Trojan horse for U.S. intelligence and business interests in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and Central America during the illegal U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras.

In fact, a number of World Vision officials, including two of its presidents, have been core members of the Fellowship. World Vision continues to involve itself in such hot spots as Iraq and Congo. According to Jeff Sharlet’s 2003 article in Harper’s, Coe admitted to having a close relationship with Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the dictator the Sandinistas overthrew in 1979.

While the senior Hinckley headed up World Vision, one of its youthful volunteers was Mark David Chapman, also a native of Texas. He would later assassinated ex-Beatle John Lennon on a New York City street. Like John W. Hinckley, Jr., another right-wing would-be assassin and busboy was Arthur Herman Bremer from Milwaukee.

An ultra-rightist who shaved his head in the Nazi style, Bremer despised George McGovern and stalked him during the 1972 presidential election. But McGovern would not ultimately be his target. On May 15, 1972, Bremer, sporting a “Wallace for President” button, approached Alabama Democratic Governor and presidential candidate George C. Wallace at a campaign stop at a Laurel, Maryland shopping center. Bremer fired five bullets into Wallace, who was paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Wallace, of course, was not what the new right-wing Republicans wanted to see grab the Democratic nomination. After all, Republican Winton Blount’s senatorial campaign in Alabama against veteran Democrat John Sparkman was intended to help wrest control of the South from the Democratic Party. It was a campaign that George W. Bush participated in by making cameo appearances between Christian drug rehab sessions in San Diego. Wallace stood to derail the Republican’s “Southern Strategy.”

By sidelining Wallace, Bremer helped propel the GOP’s new Southern Strategy. The strategy would be refined in 1973 by the new chairman of the Republican National Committee – George H. W. Bush, -- who would have two young and ruthless assistants to help him – Karl Rove and Lee Atwater. With the help of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, and other fundamentalist Christians, the South would eventually fall under almost complete control of a Republican Party that emphasized intolerance and a de facto return to Jim Crow laws. Ironically, Wallace, a former segregationist, would later win back the Governorship of Alabama with a majority of the African-American vote.

The world would not hear the last of Rockwell and his disciples. His Nazi Party would change its name to the National Socialist White People’s Party and remain in Arlington.

Eventually, it would change its name to “The Order” and move to the West where it became even more violent. One former Rockwell assistant, William Pierce, would form the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Pierce had worked with Rockwell in Arlington in the 1960s. He later joined the National Youth Alliance, headed up by another neo-Nazi, Willis Carto, who also led the Liberty Lobby.

Using the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, Pierce would pen “The Turner Diaries,” a neo-Nazi rant that called for the overthrow of the U.S. government and the extermination of non-whites and Jews. Pierce was the inspiration behind the founding of the Aryan “Christian Identity” movement.

One of Pierce’s fans was Timothy McVeigh, found guilty of bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, including a number of children. According to Jersey City Police sources, when arrested, McVeigh had the business card of a Jersey City social services worker in his possession.

Jersey City was a major base of operations for Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi, who piloted two passenger jet liners into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This would not be the only connection between right-wing Nazis and radical Islamists.

The Fellowship and Doug Coe reached out to the most radical elements in the Islamic world, including members of the Saudi royal elite who bankrolled Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers. According to the Los Angeles Times, as early as 1979, Coe had a special relationship with the Saudis when he arranged a meeting between a Pentagon official and the Saudi Minister of Commerce.

In 1988, Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Saud, read passages from the Koran at the National Prayer Breakfast. This was at a time the Afghan mujaheddin was coming under the radical influences of Saudi Wahhabis through the “good offices” of Osama bin Laden and other radicals. Coe and his Cedars members also kept in close touch with such Muslim leaders as Presidents Suharto and Megawati Sukarnaputri of Indonesia, General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia (who offered Coe that he would convert to Christianity from Islam if he could be assured of U.S. weapons sales to combat aggression from Soviet-armed Ethiopia), Kuwaiti officials, and even Saddam Hussein. At the same time, Coe heaped praise on the “covenants” Bin Laden, as well as Hitler, established with their respective followers.

In 1990, just prior to George H. W. Bush launch of Desert Storm against Iraq in response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Fellowship core member Senator David Durenberger (R-MN) led a Fellowship delegation to Baghdad. That same year, the Senate Ethics Committee ordered Durenberger to pay over $124,000 in restitution for shady book and real estate deals. Such ethical lapses were the rule rather than the exception with many politician members of the Fellowship.

PART II
THE CEDARS OF LEBANON

In 1976, the Fellowship began looking for a permanent headquarters in Arlington. It set its sights on the estate of George Mason IV, The Cedars, located at 2301 North Uhle Street. Mason was one of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. The Fellowship, also known as the International Foundation, bought the property from Charles Piluso. Although not much is known about Piluso, the Los Angeles Times reported that Howard Hughes, the man with whom Fellowship Senator Ralph Owen Brewster once sparred, also lived there.

According to a senior Pentagon official, the Cedars had been used as a CIA safe house prior to the Fellowship’s purchase of the estate. The Fellowship paid $1.5 million for the Cedars, the money coming from Tom Phillips, the CEO of Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation. Sanford McDonnell of McDonnell Douglas Corporation was another deep-pocketed supporter of the Fellowship through Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, an activity linked to Fellowship core member Pat Robertson.

According to the Los Angeles Times, other wealthy contributors to the Fellowship and its adjunct International Foundation include Republican donor Michael Timmis, a conservative Catholic Detroit lawyer who replaced Colson as chairman of Prison Fellowship International (Colson remained as Chairman Emeritus) and who also served on the board of the Promise Keepers, another evangelical group; Jerome A. Lewis, the Denver-based oilman who is chairman of Petro-Lewis, one of the largest oil and natural gas partnership firms in the world; and Maryland oilman Paul N. Temple.

The Fellowship has also received support from the Eli Lilly and Pew Foundations, contributors to a number of right-wing causes.

In 1991, according to the New York Times, Fellowship member Mark Hatfield came under a Senate ethics investigation and a Federal grand jury probe after he made $300,000 from real estate deals since 1981 involving the sale and purchase of properties from Temple. The investigation of Hatfield followed years of reports that he had received additional largesse from the Fellowship in loans and other favors.

It should be noted that Hatfield’s son, Mark Hatfield, is currently the Director of Communications for the Department of Homeland Security. The Fellowship and its members know good real estate deals when they see them. For example, the Cedars is now valued at $4.4 million – and Arlington County received zero in taxes from it because it is tax-exempts a “church.”

A letter from the Fellowship Foundation’s lawyers, Barman, Radigan, Suiters & Brown, to Van Caffo, Zoning Administrator for Arlington County, dated September 9, 1976, requested permission to house “overnight guests” at the Fellowship’s recently-purchased estate, known as “The Cedars.” The letter stated, “no more than ten individuals could be accommodated at any one time.” The letter also affirmed, “that no [emphasis in original] person not involved in the Fellowship would ever be invited to spend the night at the House.” That statement would later prove embarrassing to a number of politicians who stayed at Fellowship group homes while insisting they were not members of the group.

The Fellowship’s attorneys stressed that “anyone staying at the House will have prior involvement with the activities of Fellowship Foundation.” The letter continued, “According to Mr. Coe, these individuals fall into two main categories:

1. Those who come to the Washington area for the sole [emphasis in original] purpose of participating in the worship activities of Fellowship Foundation. I understand that you have no problem with this category.

2. Those who come to the Washington area for a dual purpose, one of which is participation in the worship activities of Fellowship Foundation. It is this category of individuals, which apparently gives you pause.”

For Arlington County, the mere presence of yet another right-wing group, in addition to the Nazis who had already given the county a black eye in the national media, was more than reason to be concerned. However, the Fellowship’s attorneys, using double-speak, convinced the Arlington authorities to grant the group the necessary permits. The Fellowship’s attorneys also made it clear that “the Foundation works quietly but extremely effectively in accomplishing its singular purpose.”

A letter from Arlington County’s Department of Inspection Services to Coe’s attorneys, dated September 20, 1976, granted the Fellowship use of the Cedars as a “place of worship.” The Fellowship would provide more than just a place of worship at the Cedars. The estate would become the site for international intrigue and charges from neighbors that troubled young people staying at the home were being subjected to mind control.

In 1984, the Fellowship achieved a record at its National Prayer Breakfast. The 34th such gathering attracted representatives from over 100 nations. Similar prayer breakfasts were held in over 500 American cities. Conservative politicians were being tapped as never before for future service to the goals of the Fellowship and its affiliates.

Moreover, the Christian fundamentalists were gaining influence in the media. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club began the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), which cleverly combined news broadcasts with religious programming.

In 1983, Moon started the Washington Times, a paper that was built on the remains of the William F. Buckley’s defunct Washington Evening Star. Ronald Reagan called the money-losing Washington Times his favorite newspaper. It did not matter that Moon was named as a central player in the Koreagate scandal that rocked Washington politics from 1976 to 1978.

Moon, an operative named Bo Hi Pak (who was president of the Washington Times), and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency were accused of bribing politicians. Ford’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1976, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, was one of those who called for a full investigation of Moon.

Representative Donald Fraser (D-MN) launched a House investigation of the Korean political influence peddler. Fraser’s committee concluded that Moon was a central to an “international network of organizations engaged in economic and political activities” and that Moon’s organization “had systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency, and Foreign Agents Registration Act laws.” The New York Daily News’ Lars Erik Nelson called for the Justice Department to investigate the Washington Times for violation of the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act.

The Fraser Report also proved the connection between Moon and the Korean CIA. For his efforts, Moon’s propaganda machine branded Fraser an “agent of Moscow” and began a vicious character assassination campaign against him. Undaunted, Fraser went on to become Mayor of Minneapolis. But for the Christian Right, Moon’s personal attack template would serve as a blueprint for future Christian fundamentalist candidates. One recommendation of the Fraser Committee went unheeded by the incoming Reagan administration: a White House Task Force to investigate Moon and his operations. George H. W. Bush’s hat trick with the Iranian hostage takers ensured that Moon would not have to worry about White House interference.

Nor did it matter that U.S. counter-narcotics investigators were uncovering evidence that Moon supplemented his various enterprises around the world with money from drugs from Latin America and Asia – proceeds that partially wound up in the coffers of Jerry Falwell. The Fascist thread that Moon inherited from Buchman’s Moral Rearmament was evident in one of Moon’s richest supporters, Ryoichi Sasakawa, one of Japan’s richest businessmen and a self-described “fascist.” According to PBS’s Frontline, Sasakawa, who met Benito Mussolini in 1939 and called him the perfect “fascist,” was imprisoned by U.S. forces after World War II as a war criminal.

In 1967, Sasakawa and Moon formed the Japanese chapter of the right-wing World Anti Communist League, a right-wing group that would help Moon gain an entrée to Latin American military dictators and other right-wing groups around the world. It was the same network that was used by the Fellowship Foundation and World Vision. Moon and Sasakawa were also connected to the Japanese “Yakuza,” the Mafia that controlled gambling and the illegal narcotics market in the country.

But while he thought he had a free pass from Reagan and the conservatives in his administration, Moon miscalculated the IRS and its enforcement of tax laws. In 1982, Moon was convicted in a federal court for income tax evasion. He was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment at the Danbury Federal Correctional Facility in Connecticut.

Immediately, Falwell called for a presidential pardon from Reagan. The pardon initiative for Moon was championed by former Senator Paul Laxalt (R-NV) and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). When Fellowship core member Richard Thornburgh, the former Governor of Pennsylvania, became Attorney General under George H. W. Bush, the Fellowship network no longer had to worry about running afoul of tax laws. Thornburgh would later serve on a committee that investigated CBS anchor Dan Rather and 60 Minutes for their use of Texas Air National Guard documents that pointed to George W. Bush’s absent without leave (AWOL) status in 1972. The original documents had been scanned thus giving them the appearance of being forged.

However, 60 Minutes, which had exposed past government, business, and religious wrongdoing, had been largely neutered and Rather announced his retirement. One former Justice Department Criminal Division attorney said he was not surprised to hear that former Attorneys General Ed Meese, Thornburgh, and John Ashcroft were core members of the Fellowship. He said they were “the three worst Attorneys General my division ever worked for.”

One other prominent Christian reconstructionist member of Reagan’s cabinet was Interior Secretary James Watt. He actually once told a congressional panel that the environment was not important in light of the imminent return of Jesus. Under oath, he told a congressional committee that believed that Jesus would return “after the last tree is felled.”

At the same time Moon was on his rise, another Christian dominionist began to put his stamp on Republican right-wing policies. His name was Rousas John Rushdoony, the son of Armenian refugees from the anti-Armenian Turkish pogroms of the early 20th century.

Rushdoony ran a Christian Right think tank in Los Angeles called the Chalcedon Foundation. Chalcedon became the source for much of the philosophical underpinnings of the Fellowship’s political platform – a platform that would provide much of the political and religious propaganda spread by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on their respective television programs.

Robertson had been very much like George W. Bush in his earlier years. The son of Senator A. Willis Robertson (D-VA), Robertson was known as a playboy with a questionable military service record during the Korean War. But like George W. Bush, Robertson “found God.” Converted by Vereide’s close associate Harold Bredesen who spoke in “tongues.”

In a bizarre display, Bredesen reportedly once spoke in ancient Arabic to a wealthy Egyptian heiress during a Fellowship meeting. Robertson, in addition to running his 700 Club television program, decided to invest in diamond mines in Africa. He became close to three of Africa’s most infamous despots – Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent D. Kabila of Zaire/Congo and Charles Taylor of Liberia. It was discovered that Robertson was using his “Operation Blessing” aircraft, not to provide aid to African victims of famine, war, and disease, but to transport equipment and supplies for his various diamond mining ventures on the continent. It would not be the only criminal activity engaged in by the Fellowship in Africa’s affairs.

Rushdoony became a Presbyterian minister in California during the mid-1940s, the same time Vereide and Buchman were extending their influence in Washington and around the world. Rushdoony’s writings attacked the Unitarian religion and what he considered its contrivances, which included the United Nations. He was also an early proponent of home schooling (an important part of the Fellowship’s agenda) and a charter member of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) – a right-wing version of the Council on Foreign Relations whose first head was Christian Right leader Tim LaHaye, the one-time head of the Moon-funded Coalition for Religious Freedom whose advisory board members included such Christian Right luminaries as Don Wildmon, the pro-censorship head of the American Family Association; Pat Crouch, the founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network; and James Kennedy, the televangelist head of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Another important CNP member was Baptist deacon and former Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who also championed right-wing fascist Latin American leaders favored and supported by the Fellowship. These included El Salvadorean death squad leaders Roberto d’Aubisson and General Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova (now living in South Florida under the protection of Jeb Bush and the right-wing Cuban community), El Salvador’s right-wing President Alfredo Cristiani (in 1990, President George H. W. Bush reportedly held a special prayer with Cristiani and death squad leader d’Aubisson in a side room at the National Prayer Breakfast with Coe officiating), Honduran evangelical Christian death squad leader General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Brazilian dictator Artur da Costa e Silva, Guatemalan dictator and evangelist Efrain Rios Montt (in 2004, Montt’s daughter, Guatemalan Senator Zury Rios Sosa married Fellowship adherent Representative Jerry Weller (R-IL), Guatemala’s evangelist President Jorge Serrano Elias (his George W. Bush-like quote upon election in 1991: “We have won the election with the support of the people and God. I have no commitment to any political power base; my only commitment is to God, to whom I've committed myself to govern the best I can`. . .”); and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (also one of Coe’s friends).

The Fellowship had been on very good terms with Panamanian dictator and drug runner Manuel Noriega who the first Bush ousted in a 1989 military invasion. Other CNP initiatives included supporting apartheid in South Africa (Jerry Falwell called South Africa’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu a “phony” and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club provided a convenient propaganda outlet for South Africa’s apartheid regime) and opposing Corazon Aquino’s attempt to depose Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

The looted gold bullion and gems from the deposed Philippine dictator’s coffers and other ill-gotten foreign funds would eventually be used to fatten the off-shore Bush bank accounts (artifices with various Bush family corporate code names – Five Star Companies, Lone Star Companies, Phoenix Group, Winston Partners, Cosmos Corporation, Hamilton Trust, InterFirst Bank, European Pacific Group, Mongoose Enterprises, Equity Trust, Interfax Gold Corporation, etc.) and serve as the source for the money used in the future to “fix” elections in favor of George W. Bush and his political allies.

Rushdoony developed his own network of right-wing fundamentalist Christians, including Oklahoma State Representative Bill Graves, an ardent Christian dominionist, and John Whitehead, the director of the Rutherford Institute, the right-wing outfit funded by Rushdoony that propelled Paula Jones to national stardom as Bill Clinton’s chief accuser and involved itself in the 2000 Florida election recount fiasco on behalf of George W. Bush.

Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North, is a very active Christian dominionist in right-wing politics and the proponent of “Christian economics,” which is based on the Austrian (Fredrich von Hayek) or Mount Pelerin Society schools of economics.

The precepts of this economic school are based on Fascist economic theories of the 1920s and 30s. The umbrella organization for Rushdoony and North’s activities was the William Volker Fund, which also funded the conservative Hoover Institution.

North also founded the Aaron Burr Society. The group’s emblem has a drawing of Burr shooting Alexander Hamilton in their infamous duel. The emblem bears the motto: “Not soon enough,” referring to the notion that Hamilton’s assassination should have occurred much sooner.

The Fellowship also made inroads within the U.S. military, particularly the officers’ ranks. Through an entity known as the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF), the Fellowship tapped officers in all the services and future officers in the service academies to become “ambassadors for Christ in uniform.”

The motto of the OCF is “Pray, Discover, Obey.” The Christian Military Fellowship served as the OCF’s counterpart among the enlisted ranks. Adjunct Fellowship organizations targeted foreign officers and enlisted men, particularly in Great Britain and Australia; service spouses; and service mothers.

The international military fellowship is known as the Association of Military Christian Fellowships (AMCF). One person close to the AMCF is Arthur E. (“Gene”) Dewey, a retired Army officer who served as Colin Powell’s Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. Dewey was also a personal consultant to Douglas Coe. In his State Department position, Dewey was an ardent foe of international family planning programs, including the denial of reproductive health care to refugee women.

Eventually, the Fellowship would count some of the military’s top leaders among its members. They include former Joint Chiefs Chairman General David Jones, current Joint Chiefs chairman General Richard Myers, former Marine Corps Commandant and current NATO commander General James L. Jones, Iran-contra figure Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, and, perhaps even more controversial than North, Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, the military head of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s intelligence branch.

In 2003, Boykin, in a speech to the First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, Florida, referred to the United States as a “Christian nation” and, that in reference to a Somali warlord, he stated, “ I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

The reverberations of Boykin’s comments were felt around the world. But his allies and Fellowship compatriots, Rumsfeld, Myers, Kansas Representative Todd Tiahrt, and most important, George W. Bush, refused to condemn him. Calls for Boykin’s reassignment when unheeded.

Soon afterwards, Boykin’s Pentagon intelligence group was discovered to have been involved with the torture and sexual molestation of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The sexual molestation of prisoners included male and female teens being held in Iraq. Also of note is the current head executive director of the OCF. He is retired Lt. Gen. Bruce Fister, the former head of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command.

One of the larger OCF chapters is at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the home of the U.S. military’s disciplinary barracks and a prime recruiting and mentoring center for Fellowship members. All sorts of military members who have been sentenced by courts martial around the world have served their prison terms at Leavenworth.

In 1982, a key member of the OCF began his four-year sentence at hard labor at Leavenworth after he was convicted of over 19 counts of lewd and lascivious acts with minors, including the dependents of naval personnel under his command. He was Lieutenant Commander Larry W. (Bill) Frawley, Jr., U.S. Naval Academy graduate, P-3 Orion pilot, and the one-time Commanding Officer of the Coos Head, Oregon Naval Facility, a classified Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) station that mainly monitored Soviet submarines on missile patrol and maneuvers in the Pacific.

Frawley was heavily involved in a child pornography ring before FBI agents discovered his name after a major bust of a kiddie porn kingpin in Chicago. The Operations Officer assigned to Coos Head was requested by the Naval Investigative Service and the FBI to set up a “sting” against Frawley. Duly sworn in as a temporary special agent of the FBI, the Operations Officer gained Frawley’s trust, gathered incriminating evidence against him, handed it to federal and local law enforcement agents from Coos Bay, Oregon; Portland, and Seattle, and testified as the government’s star witness at Frawley’s court martial at the Navy’s Sand Point Base in Seattle. It was later discovered by NIS and the FBI that Frawley and other members of the OCF used the Christian organization as a cover for their child pornography business. And one other tidbit had been discovered by the FBI. Frawley had traveled secretly to the Soviet Union while he held a Top Secret nuclear weapons and cryptographic security clearance.

That discovery led to the reassignment of the Operations Officer, the Portland-based and Seattle-based NIS agents, and the Coos Bay-based FBI agent to relatively insignificant desk jobs in Washington, DC. While he held his confidence and trust, Frawley revealed to the Operations Officer that those involved with his ring included other top-ranking military officers, lawyers, and members of the clergy. Later, the two NIS agents revealed that the Coos Bay scandal “went to the very top” of the Reagan administration. Frawley’s prison term at Leavenworth was anything but “hard labor.” Navy insiders reported that he attended therapy sessions.

If the sessions involved the OCF, it is easy to ascertain how they operated. Jeff Sharlet’s Harper’s article provides a unique insight into the Fellowship’s thinking about sex perverts. Sharlet recounted a discussion Douglas Coe’s son, David, was having with one recruit named Beau at the Ivanwald compound. Coe asked Beau, “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?” Embarrassed, Beau replied, “Probably that I’m pretty bad!” Coe responded, “No, Beau, I wouldn’t. Because I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing.” Beau’s answer was, “Jesus!”

The Fellowship certainly did not mind when singer Michael Jackson stayed with his children at the Cedars in October 2001 when he was in Washington for a benefit concert for the 911 victims.

In a lawsuit filed in 1993, Jackson was accused of sexually molesting a 13-year-old boy. According to a September 27, 2002 Los Angeles Times article by Lisa Getter, Jackson’s stay at the Cedars was arranged through David Kuo, George W. Bush’s White House director of the Office of Faith-based Initiatives.

Kuo, a former CIA employee who co-wrote a book with Ralph Reed, had been Executive Director of the Center for Effective Compassion, founded in 1995 by Arianna Huffington and Marvin Olasky. Olasky is a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity, a major Christian reconstructionist proponent, and an ardent supporter of George W. Bush. Kuo also previously worked for the Christian Coalition and Senator John Ashcroft.

After the Navy’s cover-up of the Frawley and other related criminal cases, the Operations Officer used his Washington, DC base to expose the matter to the public. He received warnings from other active duty and retired Navy personnel that his activities were “embarrassing” to the Navy and that there would be professional and “other consequences” if he did not desist.

The cover-up went to the highest echelons of the Navy’s command structure and included Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, the man whose obfuscation abilities would be used to cover-up the gun turret explosion on board the USS Iowa battleship, the tail hook scandal involving naval aviators, and, ultimately, the 911 attacks when he was named as a member of the 911 Commission by George W. Bush. In the interest of full disclosure, it must be stated that this author was the Operations Officer referenced above.

Another organization affiliated with the Fellowship is the Campus Crusade for Christ, which, in turn, runs something called the Christian Embassy, its outreach arm in Washington.

There is also an “International Christian Embassy” in Jerusalem that also houses the studios of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Through the Campus Crusade, the Fellowship and its affiliates seek converts among college students in the United States and abroad.

An additional Fellowship activity is the National Student Leadership Program and the associated Navigators, which seek converts among college and high school-aged young people. The Fellowship’s network can also reach out to other evangelicals for the purpose of political marches on Washington.

Whether they are called “Jesus Marches,” Promise Keeper rallies, or anti-abortion gatherings, the fundamentalists have been able to tap the support of Falwell; Richard Roberts, the son of Oklahoma-based evangelist Oral Roberts; and Florida-based evangelist Benny Hinn. In addition, the Fellowship has its own aggressive “Youth Corps,” which is active seeking converts, according to Jeff Sharlet’s Harper’s article, in countries as diverse as Russia, Ukraine, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru. The Fellowship seeks to groom young leaders for future positions of leadership in countries around the world. According to Sharlet, the goal of the Fellowship is “two hundred national and international world leaders bound together relationally by a mutual love for God and the family.”

In Fellowship-speak, the “family” is synonymous with the Fellowship. The strategy of placing Fellowship “moles” in foreign governments would pay off nicely when George W. Bush and his advisers had to cobble together a “Coalition of the Willing” to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The Christian Right, having cleverly hidden its Nazi and Fascist past, was on the march. The movement would soon tap ambitious conservative politicians eager to use its vast resources to achieve political power. Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay, Dan Quayle --- and, after a concordat with failed 1988 Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson -- George H. W. Bush, would all become followers, some for truly religious reasons, but most for political opportunism. But the biggest prize of all was yet to be heard from. The failed businessman and politician from west Texas, George W. Bush, was now a firm believer in the Fellowship agenda.

In his father’s 1988 race against Michael Dukakis, the junior Bush was his father’s liaison to the fundamentalist right. Junior Bush would help channel advice and money from the Christian Right to his father’s campaign. In a sign of things to come, the Bush campaign savaged Michael Dukakis over a convicted murderer and prison parolee in Massachusetts named Willie Horton, who, after he was released from prison, held a Maryland couple hostage, raping the wife and stabbing her husband. The strategy was based on the Bush campaign notion that Dukakis, if elected, would pardon African American prisoners who would rape white women. An attack ad ran on television by a Republican group insinuated that Dukakis would release blacks who would threaten whites. For the junior Bush and the Christian Right, it was a campaign position that would pay off handsomely in the future when dealing with John McCain and John Kerry.

One of the architects of the 1988 “Willie Horton was Lee Atwater, the close associate of Karl Rove. In 1990, Atwater would move into the Cedars after he discovered he was dying from brain cancer.

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