Existence of Secret WWII Gold Horde Confirmed
Exclusive to American
Free Press
By Michael
Collins Piper
An authoritative new book sheds remarkable light on one of
the great financial and political secrets of the 20th Century: vast
hordes of gold-looted by the Japanese-and later recovered by American forces
following World War II. During the
mid-1980s, international correspondent Andrew St. George and a team of
investigative reporters working for The Spotlight newspaper astounded many of its readers by challenging a legend
then-popular in the “mainstream” media in America: the theory that former
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his colorful wife Imelda had stolen
billions of dollars from their nation’s treasury, and much of it from U.S.
foreign aid to the Asian republic.
Now-nearly 20 years after the fact-the exclusive reports by
St. George and his Spotlight team have been
confirmed by an unlikely source: veteran writer Sterling Seagrave, a well-known
authority on the Far East and an unabashed critic of the Marcos regime.
In a new book, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret
Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold, Seagrave and
his co-author (his wife, Peggy) have affirmed virtually all of what The
Spotlight reported about Marcos and his rise to
power-and of his ultimate ouster, including the reasons why.
But even more than that, the Seagraves have outlined the
existence of an extraordinary hidden cache of gold-looted by infamous Japanese
warlord Yamashita Tomoyuki from the nations of Asia prior to and during World
War II—much of which (but not all) was later seized by American forces and used
to fund what was called the Black Eagle Trust, a multi-national covert
operations treasure chest utilized during the Cold War and up until,
apparently, even today. And yes, Marcos
himself recovered a big chunk of the treasure.
This was, as The Spotlight said to much
criticism, the real source of his wealth.
Big names such as former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles, John J. McCloy, head of the World Bank, General Edward Lansdale and
others are just a few of the familiar figures whose roles in the shadowy Black
Eagle Trust are recounted by the Seagraves.
The tentacles of this massive treasure reach throughout the big banks of
the world today and its economic impact has never before been outlined in such
amazing detail.
It seems that no American president has been in the dark
about the existence of this gold horde—much of which still remains hidden,
buried, in the Philippine islands and elsewhere in the Pacific and which is
still the subject of wide-ranging treasure hunts.
According to the Seagraves, as late as March 2001—in the
early weeks of the newly-minted George W. Bush administration, associates of
the Bush family were evidently deeply involved in the treasure-hunting and in
efforts to profit from the sale and transfer of the recovered treasure. And what is of particular note is that, so
say the Seagraves, two U.S. Navy ships were being utilized in the effort.
What about the Marcos connection? The Spotlight asserted that
Marcos’s actual wealth—in unaccounted billions—stemmed from the fact that
Marcos had actually recovered a large cache of the hidden gold in the days
following the end of World War II.
Critics said The Spotlight was wrong and
that Marcos had actually stolen billions from his nation’s treasury. Now, however, the Seagraves cite no less an
authority than retired General John Singlaub, a vaunted hero of both World War
II and Korea who finished up his career as the top U.S. military commander in
Korea, dismissed by then-President Jimmy Carter.
Singlaub actually became quite active in the covert American
efforts to recover the “Yamashita treasure” and, according to Singlaub, “I knew
from past experience that stories of buried Japanese gold in the Philippines
were legitimate. Marcos’s $12 billion
fortunate actually came from [this] treasure, not skimmed-off U.S. aid. But Marcos had only managed to rake off a
dozen or so of the biggest sites. That
left well over a hundred untouched.”
This, of course, means that Yamashita’s gold—which amounts
to certainly hundreds of billions in value, probably trillions—was a real
source of power and influence for Marcos and, in the end, proved not only to be
a source of his rise to power, but, ultimately, his undoing.
The Seagraves relate—echoing The Spotlight—that when Marcos demanded a higher-than-usual commission for lending a
portion of his gold horde to the Reagan administration in order to prop up a Reagan
scheme to manipulate the world gold market, this was the beginning of Marcos’
downfall. As a consequence, then U.S.
CIA-Director William Casey set in motion the riots and protests that began
creating trouble for Marcos in the streets of Manila.
Although Casey flew to Manila, along with U.S. Treasury
Secretary Donald Regen, CIA economist Professor Higdon and an attorney,
Lawrence Kreager, to give Marcos a “last chance”, the Philippine nationalist
would not buckle. Higdon told Marcos
that he would be out of power “in two weeks” for not appeasing the
international banking houses and their agents in the American administration.
The Seagraves report that a source close to Marcos advised
them that Marcos was then approached by an emissary from David Rockefeller’s
Trilateral Commission asking Marcos to contribute $54 billion in gold bullion
to a so-called “global development fund”.
Marcos’ response was to consign the Trilateral demand into a waste
basket.
In no short order, of course, Marcos was forced from office
and flown to Hawaii with his family where they were held effectively under
house arrest. Marcos and his wife told
many people—including reporters from The Spotlight—that they had never expected to be taken to Hawaii, that they had,
instead, expected to be flown to safety from Manila to Marco’s home island of
Ilocos Norte.
In the meantime, billions of dollars worth of gold
certificates that the Marcos [couple] had taken with them were confiscated by
the U.S. government. But when the
Marcoses demanded the return of the certificates, the U.S. said the
certificates were “fake”.
In other words, the Reagan administration casually and
ruthlessly stole billions from the Marcos, at the same time helping perpetuate
the media myth that the Marcos family had stolen billions from their own
nation’s treasury.
(And it should be noted, for the historical record, that one
of the key behind-the-scenes Reagan administration operatives plotting against
Marcos was one Paul Wolfowitz, now internationally known today as one of the
prime movers behind the American effort to depose Saddam Hussein—probably no
coincidence considering Saddam’s refusal, like Marcos, to surrender his
nation’s sovereignty to international banking interests.)
The Seagraves also outline—and this will interest many
people—the strange dealings of the John Birch Society (as far back as the
mid-1970s) in a scheme to cut business arrangements with the Marcos regime in
the marketing of some $20 billion of Marcos’ private gold horde. These deals fell through and, in the end,
the Birchers fell out with their partners in the scheme. Evidently Congressman Larry McDonald
(D-Ga.), then a leader of the Birch group, was privy to these events and thus
evidently knew quite a bit about the international Black Eagle Trust at the
time of his death. [The “shoot down” of
flight KAL 007 is still surrounded by mystery.]
Considering the fact that The Spotlight was the only American newspaper to honestly report on the
behind-the-scenes intrigues that led to the destruction of Ferdinand Marcos, it
was no coincidence that after his ouster, Marcos gave The
Spotlight several exclusive interviews at his home
in exile in Hawaii, pushing The Spotlight to the top of a
long list of worldwide newspapers clamoring for the opportunity to interview
the fallen leader.
It turns out that, at precisely the time when The
Spotlight was interviewing Marcos, a young American
CIA operative, Alan Foringer, was deeply involved in the covert operations
trying to secure what remained of the Yamashita (and Marcos) gold.
So, it’s probably no coincidence, again, that Foringer
popped up at The Spotlight’s offices on a
number of occasions, posing as an international businessman. It was only the publication of the
Seagrave’s book that exposed precisely who Foringer really was: a CIA figure
trying to find out what The Spotlight knew (if
anything) about the Marcos treasure.
Foringer himself later died under mysterious circumstances, probably a
victim of murder.
These are just a few of the revelations appearing in the 332
detail-packed pages of this remarkable new book, one which is thoroughly
documented. The Seagraves know that
they risked a great deal by bringing out these facts but they say right up
front that “if we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out
who ‘they’ are.”
Pedigree
The author, Michael Collins Piper, spent a day with former
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda at their home in
exile in Honolulu, Hawaii in April of 1987.
GOLD WARRIORS
From the back cover:
BLACK GOLD
In 1945,
American Intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had
hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the
Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold, but to keep its recovery
secret. The treasure—gold, platinum,
barrels of diamonds and gemstones plundered by Japan from all of East and
Southeast Asia—would be combined with Nazi loot recovered in Europe to create a
worldwide American political action fund to fight communism. This “Black Gold” gave Washington virtually
limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. According to CIA officials, between 1945 and 1947 the gold
bullion was secretly moved to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. This provided an asset base to reinforce the
treasuries of America’s allies, to bribe political and military leaders, and to
manipulate elections in foreign countries.
Other treasure was recovered inside Japan during the U.S. Occupation.
General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and a handful
of others, knew all about the hidden plunder.
Every president since Harry Truman has been involved in covering up the
existence of these secret funds. Gold
Warriors traces more than half a century of secret collaboration between
Washington and Tokyo, between the CIA and the underworld in Japan and other
countries. The cloak of “national
security” created a situation ripe for abuse and corruption. The authors reveal how former CIA and
Pentagon officials, and rogue entrepreneurs, use these secret funds to set up
private intelligence and security operations to meddle in American foreign
policy—without Congressional oversight, or the knowledge of the American
people. Drawing on thousands of pages
of original documents and thousands of hours of interviews, the Seagraves
expose one of the great state secrets of the 20thCentury.
SLAYING THE MESSENGER
Authors’ Note: Sterling &
Peggy Seagrave
Many
people told us this book was historically important and must be published—then
warned us that if it were published, we would be murdered. An Australian economist who read it said, “I
hope they let you live.” He did not
have to explain who “they” were.
Japan’s looting of Asia, and the
hiding of this war-gold in American banks, is closely linked to the issue of
Holocaust gold hidden in Swiss banks.
Revealing the secrets of either is a dangerous business. Jean Ziegler, a Swiss professor and
parliamentarian, did much to expose five decades of official amnesia in his
book, The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead.
After publishing it and testifying in 1998 before the U.S. Senate
Banking Committee about Jewish assets in Swiss banks, he was charged with
“treason” by Swiss Federal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. The charge was brought by twenty-one financiers,
commercial lawyers and politicians of the far right, many of them major
stockholders in large Swiss banks. They
accused Ziegler of being an accomplice of Jewish organizations who “extorted”
vast sums of money from Switzerland.
Ziegler is only one of many who
have been persecuted for putting ethics before greed. Christophe Meili, a Union Banque Suisse (UBS) security guard, was
threatened with murder and the kidnapping of his wife and children after he
testified before a U.S. Senate committee about documents he rescued from UBS
shredders. He and his family were given
asylum in America.
We have been threatened with
murder before. When we published The
Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was
being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us.
He said, “I would take this very seriously, if I were you.” We vanished for a year to an island off the
coast of British Columbia. While we
were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the
Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu.
When we published The Marcos
Dynasty we expected trouble from the Marcos family and its cronies, but
instead we were harassed by Washington.
Others had investigated Marcos, but we were the first to show how the
U.S. Government was secretly involved with Marcos gold deals. We came under attack from the U.S. Treasury
Department and its Internal Revenue Service, whose agents made threatening
midnight phone calls to our elderly parents.
Arriving in New York for an author tour, one of us was intercepted at
JFK airport, passport seized, and held incommunicado for three hours. Eventually the passport was returned,
without a word of explanation. When we
ran Freedom of Information queries to see what was behind it, we were
grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message on which every word was blacked out,
including the date. The justification
given for this censorship was the need to protect government sources, which are
above the law.
During one harassing phone call
from a U.S. Treasury agent, he said he was sitting in his office watching an
interview we had done for a Japanese TV network—an interview broadcast only in
Japanese, which we had never seen.
After publishing The Yamato
Dynasty, which briefly mentioned the discovery that is the basis for Gold
Warriors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a European clinic
briefly for a medical procedure, the head nurse reported that “someone posing
as your American doctor” had been on the phone asking questions.
When a brief extract of this book
was published in the South China Morning Post in August 2001, several
phone calls from the editors were cut off suddenly. Emails from the newspaper took 72 hours to reach us, while copies
sent to an associate nearby arrived instantly.
In recent months, we began to
receive veiled death threats.
What have we done to provoke
murder? To borrow a phrase from Jean
Ziegler, we are “combating official amnesia”.
We live in dangerous times, like
Germany in the 1930s, when anyone who makes inconvenient disclosures about
hidden assets can be branded a “terrorist” or a “traitor”. A few months ago, three ex-ambassadors to
Japan declared that former American POWs and civilian slave laborers, suing giant
Japanese corporations for compensation, were tantamount to terrorists. Now a CIA official says that leaks of
classified information must be stopped, even if it is necessary to “send SWAT
teams into journalists’ homes”.
Everybody’s national security is a
serious matter. We have no argument
with that. But national security can be
invoked to hide official corruption and conflict of interest. It’s called tyranny. The only cure is openness and sunlight.
In this book, we do not question
whether President Truman did the right thing in keeping these war-gold
recoveries secret. That is for others
to debate. What we point out is that
total secrecy enabled corrupt people to abuse the resulting slush funds, and
these abuses have multiplied like a cancer, ever since. A global network of corruption has grown
around the slush funds. Bureaucrats,
politicians, spooks, and generals, have become addicted to black money. There are indications that a lot of this
war-gold has been siphoned off by America’s far right, under the guise of
patriotism. The unintended consequences
of Truman’s decision have become a poisonous part of the world financial
system, putting innocent people at hazard.
Those people and institutions benefiting from this corruption will do
everything possible to hide it, including murder.
The only way to get rid of an
illness is first to recognize what it is.
But when the emperor goes crazy from syphilis of the brain, the first
person to be tortured and burned at the stake is the doctor who made the
diagnosis—slaying the messenger.
Despite the best efforts of the
American and Japanese governments to destroy, withhold, or lose documentation
related to Golden Lily, we have accumulated thousands of documents,
conducted thousands of hours of interviews, and we make all of these available
to readers of this book, and on the two accompanying Compact Disks, so they can
make up their own minds. We encourage
others with knowledge of these events to come forward. When the top is corrupt, the truth will not
come from the top. It will emerge in bits
and pieces from people like Jean Ziegler and Christophe Meili, who decided they
had to “do something”.
As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have
arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet
at a number of sites.
If we are murdered, readers will
have no difficulty figuring out who “they” are.
To order
this exciting book go to: http://www.preferrednetwork.com/html/catalog.htm