ebook img

Gold warriors : America's secret recovery of Yamashita's gold PDF

514 Pages·2005·3.54 MB·English
by  Marcos
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Gold warriors : America's secret recovery of Yamashita's gold

GOLD WARRIORS HOW AMERICA SECRETLY RECOVERED YAMASHITA’S GOLD By Sterling & Peggy Seagrave “Easily the best guide to the scandal of Yamashita’s Gold” ~ Dr. Chalmers Johnson, London Review of Books. A BOWSTRING BOOK ©2010 Sterling and Peggy Seagrave All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. A BOWSTRING BOOK <www.bowstring.net> ISBN 1-85984-542-8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Also by Sterling Seagrave Yellow Rain Soldiers of Fortune Bush Pilots The Soong Dynasty The Marcos Dynasty with Peggy Seagrave Dragon Lady Lords of the Rim The Yamato Dynasty Red Sky in the Morning Lords 2010: China’s Renaissance CONTENTS Cast of Main Characters Authors’ Note Prologue: Buried Alive 1. Behind the Mask 2. Rogue Samurai 3. The Rape of China 4. Storming the Indies 5. Hiding the Plunder 6. The Eyewitness 7. Down the Rabbit Hole 8. Dirty Tricks 9. Heart of Darkness 10. The Umbrella 11. Pointing the Way 12. Sanctifying the Gold 13. The Paladins 14. Loose Cannons 15. Connect the Dots 16. Conflict of Interest 17. Grand Larceny Epilogue: Men in Black Acknowledgements Bibliography Annotations Notes CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS ACKERMAN, Robert A. – Washington lawyer, explained how ex-CIA officials tried to regain control of black gold accounts in New York banks. ANDERSON, Robert B. – Toured treasure sites with MacArthur, set up Black Eagle Trust with Japanese war loot, member of Eisenhower cabinet. ANGLETON, James Jesus – Top CIA official, used Nazi and Japanese war loot to rig postwar elections in Italy and Greece. ASAKA Yasuhiko, Prince – Commanded rape and looting of Nanking. BARANGAN, General Santiago – His memos to Marcos describe secret talks with top Japanese officials for joint recovery of war loot in Manila. BELLI, Melvin – San Francisco lawyer, sued Citibank for misappropriating war gold from Santa Romana accounts. BUSH, George H. W. President – Wrote personal note to head of Japan’s LDP that enabled Alexander Haig to negotiate a billion-dollar IOU. CANNON, Colonel Jack – Used war-gold to finance death squads in occupied Japan, to eliminate leftists and labor organizers. CASEY, William – CIA director; involved with Lansdale gold recoveries and Black Eagle Trust; later removed Marcos from power. CATHCART, Daniel – California lawyer whose successful suit against Marcos for theft of the Gold Buddha won a $43-billion judgment. CHICHIBU, Prince – Brother of Emperor Hirohito; headed Golden Lily campaign to loot all of East & Southeast Asia, then hid the treasure. CLINE, Ray – CIA deputy director; used Japanese war loot to manipulate foreign governments; fought for control of Santa Romana gold at Citibank. CURTIS, Robert – Mining expert brought in by Marcos to launder gold; engineered major recoveries, photographed 173 original Golden Lily maps. DOIHARA, General – Japan’s senior secret agent, one of five top men in Golden Lily, masterminded the looting of Manchuria and China. DULLES, Allen – CIA director, brother of J.F. Dulles, oversaw the Black Eagle Trust and setting up scores of slush funds around the world. DULLES, John Foster – Arch-conservative Secretary of State, contrived false 1951 peace treaty to shield Japan’s elite from reparations. FORINGER, Alan – CIA agent in Nippon Star and Phoenix Exploration; explained how war-gold would finance private American gestapo. HIROHITO, Emperor – Received and never returned the finest cultural treasures stolen from 12 countries; kept secret Swiss gold accounts. JONSSON, Olof — Swedish psychic brought in by Marcos to pinpoint treasure vaults and sunken ships, saw warehouses filled with stolen gold. KISHI, Nobosuke, Prime Minister – Headed looting of Manchuria, served in Tojo’s war cabinet; Nixon gave him control of the M-Fund. KODAMA, Yoshio – Japan’s top gangster; aided Golden Lily by looting China’s underworld; used proceeds to set up Japan’s ruling LDP. KOJIMA, Kashii – Chauffeur of General Yamashita, tortured by Lansdale and Santa Romana to reveal a dozen vaults where treasure was hidden. LANSDALE, Edward G. – Became America’s most famous Cold Warrior thanks to torture of Kojima and recovery of Japanese gold. LAUSIER, Edmond C. –Banking expert whose file of Japanese documents proved that notorious “57” debt instruments were not forgeries. MACARTHUR, General Douglas –Used war loot to create a trust fund for Hirohito at Sanwa Bank; also set up the secret M-Fund to back the LDP. MARCOS, Imelda – Former Philippine first lady, accused of hiding gold in banks around the world; bribed witnesses to lie about Gold Buddha. MARCOS, Ferdinand – Philippine dictator, recovered Japanese treasure in the 1970s, shared the gold with CIA and White House until his downfall. MCCLOY, John J. – Original planner of global Black Eagle Trust based on Nazi and Japanese war loot; became head of the World Bank. MCMICKING, Joseph – MacArthur protégé who presided over torture of Major Kojima; used some of the war gold to become a global financier. MIYAZAWA, Kiichi – Finance Minister and one of three Japanese who negotiated rigged 1951 peace treaty; still chief controller of the M-Fund. ROXAS, Roger – Found solid gold Buddha looted from Burma; after President Marcos stole it, Roxas was tortured and murdered to silence him. SANTA ROMANA, Severino – Tortured Yamashita’s driver, recovered 12 treasure vaults; became CIA ‘gatekeeper’ of the Black Eagle Trust. SCHLEI, Norbert – Former deputy U.S. attorney general, falsely convicted for trying to negotiate a “57” IOU; ruined financially and professionally. SCHWEITZER, General Robert – Advisor to President Reagan; begged Robert Curtis to help White House recover more war loot. SINGLAUB, General John – Schweitzer’s partner in gold recoveries, he spent millions in the Philippines digging holes in the wrong places. TAKEDA Tsuneyoshi, Prince – Cousin of Hirohito, grandson of Meiji; took charge of hiding war treasure at 175 vaults in the Philippines. VALMORES, Ben – Philippine rice farmer; as a boy he was valet to Prince Takeda, visiting all 175 treasure vaults; was given a copy of Takeda’s maps. WHITNEY, General Courtney – MacArthur’s lawyer and intelligence chief, set up M-Fund to influence Japanese elections with massive bribes. WILLOUGHBY, General Charles – MacArthur’s G-2 chief, paid war criminals to rewrite history and manipulate Japan’s government. YAMASHITA, General Tomoyuki – Japan’s top general, conqueror of Singapore; wrongly linked to plunder by the misnomer Yamashita’s Gold. AUTHORS’ NOTE: SLAYING THE MESSENGER 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,

Description:
In 1945, US 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 riches secret. These would be combined with treasure recovered inside Japan
See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.