Tail of Chapter 2 I tracked down Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and arranged a meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. He was curious to know why I was so interested in a book about Chinese brainwashing he had written 15 years earlier, in 1961. He was amazed when I described to him, in detail, what the Moonies do to recruit members and how they run their 3 day workshops, their 7 day workshops, and their 21 day, 40 day, and 120 day workshops. He said, “What you are telling me is so much more sophisticated than what the Chinese did in the ‘50s. It’s like a hybrid mutation of a virulent virus strain!” Lifton shifted my entire perspective on myself when he said, “You know more about this than I do, because you’ve lived it. You know it instrumentally. I only know it theoretically and second-hand. You must study psychology and take what you know through your experience and tell others about it.” He later asked me to co-author a book with him on mind control (something that was never to be). I was flattered by his offer and intended to take him up on it, but the timing wasn’t right for me. I Decide To Go Public Meeting Lifton transformed my life. Instead of looking at myself and seeing a college dropout, a poet with no poetry (I sorely regretted throwing those four hundred poems away), and a former cult member, I saw that perhaps there was a higher purpose for me. At that time, although I was no longer a Moonie, I was still thinking somewhat in black and white terms: good versus evil, us versus them. The world’s most renowned expert on brainwashing thought that I had an important contribution to make, that what I had experienced could be useful in helping people. By this time I had started attending cult awareness meetings of people affected by the problem and was approached by many parents of people in the Moonies. They asked me if I would talk to their children still trapped in the Moonies. I agreed. It was then, in 1976, that I seriously began taking steps to become a professional counselor. At first I had my work cut out for me; there were then no alternatives to forcible deprogramming. I had undergone a little training as a peer counselor at college before joining the Moonies. I myself had been deprogrammed. Most helpful of all in talking to members was that I had been a Moonie at a high level, and I knew the group doctrine and policies inside and out. I reread Moon’s _Divine Principle_. I studied the Bible and sorted out which things Moon said about it were true, which ones weren’t, and what was taken out of context. I established my own belief system. I was involved with deprogramming for about a year. A couple of the cases may have involved abduction by parents or people they hired; most were cases in which members came home to visit and weren’t allowed to leave. Some of these were legal conservatorship cases, in which the family received legal custody of an adult child. (Such conservatorship laws are now gone. This change is partly the result of legal and lobbying efforts by cult lawyers, as well as by more well-intentioned people who did not understand the gross human rights violations of mind control cults.) Fortunately, I was never sued. All of my cases were successful, except two, when the Moonies went back to the group. The exhilaration of helping someone reclaim their life and be restored to their loved ones is beyond words. The closest thing I can use to describe the feeling is how I felt when a friend of mine had a leg cramp in the ocean and was going under and I ran out to the waves, dived in, swam as hard and fast as I could and managed to pull him safely to shore. However, I disliked the stress of forcible deprogramming and wanted to find some other way to help members of destructive cults. After a year of going public, giving lectures, and doing television and radio interviews, I decided that I needed to figure out who I was again. I went back to college for a semester at Yale and temporarily dropped out of my life as a full-time cult fighter. I wrote poetry, played basketball, went out on dates, and tried to be normal. I did not like Yale, switched to Boston University, volunteered to be a counselor in two student counseling agencies and got in touch with myself again. During this time, though, Moon was making new and bigger waves. In Congress, the House Subcommittee on International Relations held a lengthy investigation into Korean CIA activities in the United States and other efforts by Korean agents to influence United States’ government decisions. I agreed to help the investigation as much as the committee wanted, provided they not ask me to testify publicly. The truth was, as the highest-ranking recent defector who knew a lot of the inner workings, I was afraid of being harassed and possibly murdered. I didn’t really follow the “Koreagate” investigation, except when I read an occasional article. I was absolutely confident that the government would expose the Moon group and it would be destroyed. The final report of the investigation had an 80-page section on the Moonies.[45] The report found that the Moon organization “systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency, and Foreign Agents Registration Act laws, as well as state and local laws relating to charity fraud.” It called for an interagency task force to continue to gather evidence, and to prosecute Moon and other Unification Church leaders for their criminal violations. The subcommittee’s Republican minority included its own statement, which said, in part, “It is difficult to understand why the appropriate agencies of the Executive Branch have not long since taken action against those activities of the Moon organization that are illegal.” The report was released October 31, 1978. Three weeks later, California Congressman Leo J. Ryan, a member of the Koreagate investigation, was gunned down at an airstrip near Jonestown, Guyana, while trying to help members of another cult, the People’s Temple, escape the horrors of Jim Jones’ camp. Others with Ryan were shot or killed. I watched the news bulletins about the nine hundred people who were dead because a cult leader had ordered mass murder. Chills went down my spine. I had never heard of the People’s Temple before, but I completely identified with the mindset of its members. I remembered listening to Moon harangue us and ask if we were willing to follow him to our deaths. I remembered hearing Moon say that if North Korea invaded South Korea, he would send American Unification members to die on the front lines, so that Americans would be inspired to fight another land war in Asia. I spent days thinking about the cult problem. More than anything else, the Jonestown massacre motivated me to become a public activist again. I accepted several invitations to appear on television. I was asked to speak at Senator Robert Dole’s public hearing on cults, on Capitol Hill, in 1979. But at the last moment, all the ex-cult members invited to speak were taken off the program due to political pressure from cults. The hearing was a disaster and the effort to educate the Government officials and the public about the dangers of destructive cults was undermined. After that, Moon’s political influence began to grow. When Ronald Reagan became president, Moon-controlled groups began funding the New Right political movement in Washington. When it was clear the federal government would do nothing about the Moonies, I decided to organize. I started a group called Ex-Members Against Moon, later Ex-Moon, Inc. I sponsored press conferences, edited a monthly newsletter, and gave numerous interviews. I had considered starting a group of former members from many different cult groups, but I decided that with the release of the Congressional investigation, it would be more effective for me to focus on the Moonies. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Defense, asking why a Moon company, Tong II Industries, was permitted to make American M-16 rifles in Korea when only the South Korean government had legal permission to do so. Was the Moon organization part of the Korean government? Was the Department of Defense giving it favored treatment? The request was turned down on the grounds that revealing the information I asked for would compromise the security of the United States. To this day I cannot confirm what I believe to be the truth—that the Moon group was a creature of the Intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, I knew that I would not do any more forceful deprogramming. I had to find a way to help people out of cults that would be less traumatic and less expensive, and that would not violate the law. I had read many dozens of books and thousands of pages—everything I could get my hands on—about thought reform, brainwashing, attitude change, persuasion, and CIA recruitment and indoctrination. The next and most important area to research was the field of hypnosis. In 1980, I attended a seminar by Richard Bandler on hypnosis that was based on the work of the psychiatrist Milton Erickson. Bandler and John Grinder had also developed a model based on the work of therapist Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson. They called it Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. The seminar gave me a greater understanding of techniques of hypnotic mind control and how to combat them. I spent nearly two years studying NLP with everyone involved in its formulation and presentation, even moving to Santa Cruz, California to do an apprenticeship with John Grinder. By this time, I had fallen in love and married. Eventually I moved back to Massachusetts when my wife, Aureet Bar-Yam, was given a scholarship to work toward her master’s degree in psychology at Harvard.[46] Over time, however, I became more and more concerned about the ethics of NLP. It seemed to me that its leaders had launched a mass-market campaign to promote NLP as a tool for power enhancement. Bandler and Grinder shifted their focus from training away from therapists and teachers. They started training anyone, especially salespeople and business executives. One of my big problems was their dictum, “Do what works.” Eventually I realized that NLP was amoral. It depended entirely on the conscience and good will of the practitioner. This was not too much of an issue with a licensed therapist who had strict ethical guidelines. But it was another matter entirely when practitioners were salespeople or corporate executives who were interested in power, money, or sex. I left my association with NLP forever. I earned my master’s degree in counseling psychology from Cambridge College in 1985, allowing me to begin to receive training from experts in the field of clinical hypnosis. I studied the work of Dr. Milton Erickson from his books and tapes, and from people trained by him. I learned a great deal about how the mind functions, as well as how to communicate with people more effectively. These studies gave me a better way to apply what I had learned to help people trapped in cults. It was possible, I discovered, to create a model of the entire process of change that occurs when a person gets drawn into a cult group and then successfully leaves it. I asked myself a range of essential questions. What specific factors make a person able to move out of a mind controlled psyche? Why are certain interventions successful and others not? What goes on in the thought processes of people who simply walk out of cults? Patterns began to appear. I found that people who were able to walk away without intervention were those who had maintained contact with people outside the destructive cult. When people could maintain communication with outsiders, valuable information that could change their life could penetrate cult-constructed mental walls. I knew how important my father’s tears had been for me. More importantly, I realized that he had been able to _invite me to look at myself from his perspective_, and re-examine my own information from his viewpoint. In analyzing my own experience, I recognized that what helped me most was my own internal voice and my own first-hand experiences, buried beneath all the emotional suppression and the thought-stopping rituals of chanting and praying. Underneath, the real me wasn’t dead. Maybe it had been bound and gagged, but I was still very much alive. The accident and the deprogramming had helped move me physically and psychologically to a place where I was able to get in touch with myself. Indeed, it was my ideals and my own fantasy of an ideal world that had lured me into the Moonies. Those ideals ultimately enabled me to walk out and publicly condemn cult mind control. No matter how deeply the Unification Church virus had invaded the “child parts” of my identity—the real me had not been destroyed. After decades of membership, I have learned that all of my “spiritual children”—the people I recruited—have exited the cult. A very great relief. After receiving my master’s degree, I began a new phase of my life. While practicing psychotherapy and conducting my public education activities, I also worked as the national coordinator for FOCUS, a support group of former cult members who want to help each other. For the past years, I have worked to increase public awareness of destructive cults, undue influence, and mind control. These cults did not go away as the idealistic youth of the 1970s became the young professionals of the 1980s, the leaders of the 1990s and 2000s, and the new retirees of the 2010s. Sadly, destructive cults continue to grow, thrive, and recruit people of all ages and from all walks of life. Yet, while destructive cults continue to grow, so too does our understanding of the process of mind control and undue influence. The availability of help for mind control victims continues to increase. We know far more about the neurological processes of the brain than we did even a decade ago. As more and more people—especially mental health professionals, social workers, doctors, and lawyers—lose loved ones to mind control cults, a sense of urgency is building. There are some basic ways to identify destructive cults, protect yourself from mind control, and help others shake free of its influence. Giving the keys to that knowledge is what this book is all about.