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

514 Pages·2005·3.54 MB·English

by  Marcos

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,