Sterling Seagrave

I disagree. There is no evidence that Lansdale was involved in the assassination of JFK. Nor did he have a motive. JFK was influenced by Lansdale’s views on Vietnam. That is why he would have pulled out the troops if he had won the 1964 election. Lansdale was not sacked by JFK (although he did not intervene in the matter). It was Maxwell Taylor who arranged for Lansdale to have “early retirement”. The two men clashed about what should be done in Vietnam. Taylor took the view, as did virtually all the military top brass, that the war could be won by military power. Taylor and the Joint Chief of Staffs told JFK in the summer of 1963 that 40,000 US troops could clean up the Viet Cong threat in Vietnam and another 120,000 would be sufficient to cope with any possible North Vietnamese or Chinese intervention. His advice on Cuba was that the CIA should work closely with exiles, particularly those with middle-class professions, who had opposed Batista and had then become disillusioned with Castro because of his betrayal of the democratic process. Lansdale was also opposed to the Bay of Pigs operation because he knew that it would not trigger a popular uprising against Castro. Although JFK was highly suspicious of the CIA, as a result of the quality of Lansdale’s advice, he selected him to become project leader of Operation Mongoose. Lansdale had spent years studying the way Mao had taken power in China. He often quoted Mao of telling his guerrillas: “Buy and sell fairly. Return everything borrowed. Indemnify everything damaged. Do not bathe in view of women. Do not rob personal belongings of captives.” The purpose of such rules, according to Mao, was to create a good relationship between the army and its people. This was a strategy that had been adopted by the NLF. Lansdale believed that the US Army should adopt a similar approach. As Cecil B. Currey, the author of “Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American” pointed out: “Lansdale was a dedicated anticommunist, conservative in his thoughts. Many people of like persuasion were neither as willing to study their enemy nor as open to adopting communist ideas to use a countervailing force. If for no other reason, the fact makes Lansdale stand out in bold relief to the majority of fellow military men who struggled on behalf of America in those intense years of the cold war.” He argued against the overthrow of Diem. He told Robert McNamara that: “There’s a constitution in place… Please don’t destroy that when you’re trying to change the government. Remember there’s a vice president (Nguyen Ngoc Tho) who’s been elected and is now holding office. If anything happens to the president, he should replace him. Try to keep something sustained.” It was these views that got him removed from office. The pressure to remove Lansdale came from General Curtis LeMay and General Victor Krulak and other senior members of the military. As a result it was decided to abolish his post as assistant to the secretary of defence. He was not too upset because for some time McNamara had not been listening to Lansdale’s advice. His approach to foreign policy at once appealed to Kennedy and horrified the Joint Chiefs of Staff and politicians such as Dean Rusk. It is true that Lansdale was strongly anti-communist, but he was not a right-winger. In fact, although he was a conservative on some issues, he was liberal on others. Unlike most of the military leaders in Vietnam, he was not a racist. He had a deep respect for the Vietnamese culture and realised that you could not win by imposing American rule on the country. His second wife, Patrocinio Yapcinco, was from the Philippines. Out of office he continued to argue against LBJ’s decision to try and use military power to win the Vietnam War. When General William Westmoreland argued that: “We’re going to out-guerrilla the guerrilla and out-ambush the ambush… because we’re smarter, we have greater mobility and fire-power, we have more endurance and more to fight for… And we’ve got more guts.” Lansdale replied: “All actions in the war should be devised to attract and then make firm the allegiance of the people.” He added “we label our fight as helping the Vietnamese maintain their freedom” but when “we bomb their villages, with horrendous collateral damage in terms of both civilian property and lives… it might well provoke a man of good will to ask, just what freedom of what Vietnamese are we helping to maintain?” Lansdale quoted Robert Taber (The War of the Flea): “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert. Where these means cannot, for whatever reason, be used, the war is lost.” Lansdale thought this was the situation in Vietnam and wrote to a friend that if the solution was to “kill every last person in the enemy ranks” then he was “not only morally opposed” to this strategy but knew it was “humanly impossible”. Lansdale added “No idea can be bombed or beaten to death. Military action alone is never enough.” He pointed out that since 1945 the Viet Minh had been willing to fight against the strength of both France and the United States in order to ensure success of their own. “Without a better idea, rebels will eventually win, for ideas are defeated only by better ideas.” Lansdale was anti-communist because he really believed in democracy. Lansdale had been arguing since 1956 that the best way of dealing with the Viet Cong was to introduce free elections that included the rights of Chams, Khmers, Montagnards and other minorities to participate in voting. Lansdale said that he went into Vietnam as Tom Paine would have done. He was found of quoting Paine as saying: “Where liberty dwells not, there is my country.” He also distanced himself from the Freedom Studies Center of the Institute for American Strategy when he discovered it was being run by the John Birch Society. He told a friend: “I refused to have anything more to do with it… That isn’t what our country is all about.” Lansdale considered himself a “conservative moderate” who was tolerant of all minorities. Lansdale continued to advocate a non-military solution to Vietnam and in 1965, under orders from Lyndon Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge, the new US ambassador in Saigon, put Lansdale in charge of the “pacification program” in the country. As Newsweek reported: “Lansdale is expected to push hard for a greater effort on the political and economic fronts of the war, while opposing the recent trend bombing and the burning of villages.” One of those who served under him in this job was Daniel Ellsberg. The two men remained friends until the death of Lansdale. Ellsberg liked Lansdale because of his commitment to democracy. Ellsberg also agreed with Lansdale that the pacification program should be run by the Vietnamese. He argued that unless it was a Vietnam project it would never work. Lansdale knew that there was a deep xenophobia among Vietnamese. However, as he pointed out, he believed “Lyndon Johnson would have been just as xenophobic if Canadians or British or the French moved in force into the United States and took charge of his dreams for a great Society, told him what to do, and spread out by thousands throughout the nation to see that it got done.” In February 1966 Lansdale was removed from his position in control of the pacification program. However, instead of giving the job to a Vietnamese, William Porter, was given the post. Lansdale was now appointed as a senior liaison officer, with no specific responsibilities. Unlike most Americans in Vietnam, Lansdale believed it was essential for Vietnamese leaders to claim credit for any changes and reforms. His attitude aroused antagonism in the hearts of many within the U.S. bureaucracy who didn’t like the idea of allowing others to receive credit for successful programs – although they did not object to blaming Vietnamese leaders for projects that failed. Most importantly, Lansdale thought that the military should be careful to avoid causing civilian casualties. As his biographer, Cecil Currey pointed out: “Lansdale was primarily concerned about the welfare of people. Such a stance made him anathema to those more concerned about search and destroy missions, agent orange, free fire zones, harassing and interdicting fires, and body counts.” According to Lansdale “we lost the war at the Tet offensive”. The reason for this was that after this defeat American commanders lost the ability to discriminate between friend and foe. All Vietnamese were now “gooks”. Lansdale complained that commanders resorted more and more on artillery barrages that killed thousands of civilians. He told a friend that: “I don’t believe this is a government that can win the hearts and minds of the people.” Lansdale resigned and returned to the United States in June 1968. Lansdale argued that the current strategy in Vietnam was not working. “I’m afraid that we’re being taught some savage lessons about a type of warfare that the next generation or so of Americans will have to face up to on other continents as on this one.” This is why he was very critical of US involvement in El Salvador in the 1980s and if he had been alive today, would have opposed the invasion of Iraq and the sending of troops into Afghanistan. John: Thank you for that perspective on Lansdale; he was a unique warrior. But he was still CIA, and his affiliations cause me to be suspicious. Perhaps I'm influenced by Prouty's allegations. I think it was Dean Rusk who mistrusted Lansdale, and influenced his unsuccessful ambassador quest. My instincts still don't allow me to paint him as a friend or ally of JFK. And his specialty (in PsyOps) was the elaborate drama and scripted misdirection, such as we see occur in Dealey Plaza. So, he remains on my short list... Gene I talked with Fletch several times about Lansdale. He shared an office with Lansdale for many years in Washington. I have no doubt that his identification of Lansdale in the tramp photo is accurate. If Lansdale was in Dealey Plaza, maybe Professor Simkin will be kind enough to explain this coincidence to us. Jack I think it's very useful that John Simkin posted his take on Lansdale as a "good guy" because that gives some balance to an otherwise reptilian personna. Later today I will post some material on Lansdale's activities in Luzon 1945-1954 viz-a-viz the Huks, which is informed by a recent Pentagon analysis of what Lansdale, Bohannan, and Valeriano actually did (as opposed to what they professed to be doing). This is one of the best things about Grahame Greene's portrayal of Pyle in The Quiet American, by characterizing him as a sort of evangelical missionary who did evil by doing good. I had the same experience with Ted Shackley who projected the image of an extraordinary good guy while doing unbelievably vile things. (If anybody tops Lansdale, it's Shackley, the White Vampire.) I had childhood friends in Asia who as adults worked in Black Ops for Shackley in Vientiane and Saigon, and who totally believed in the evangelical image. But this is the crux of the problem. Americans see themselves as evangelicals, when they are often actually political pederasts sodding the rest of the world, like priests driving the fear of god into choir-boys. One wishes they would stop inflicting their dubious blessings on the rest of humanity. The price is far too high. /// As to Fletch and Dealey Plaza, Fletch knew the real Lansdale from 1945 on to the bitter end, and if Fletch says Lansdale was in Dealey Plaza, that's uniquely persuasive to me. Dallas was like a fraternity picnic for so may people, we may never unscramble who all were there. I knew Lansdale fairly well, and spent a lot of time with Bohannan, a professional killer who executed Lansdale's instructions in Manila and Saigon, but I never actually met Valeriano (the psychopathic killer) face to face. It was Valeriano's team of hitmen who snuffed a number of prominent leftists and other dissenters in Japan, and quite a few in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and -- of course -- the Philippines. These were the guys who tortured Laurel at Malacanang Palace, while trying to force Laurel to give up the codes and original docs he had as a partner of "Santy" (Santa Romana) in the recovery and distribution of the war loot recovered by Santy and Lansdale in Luzon. They tore out Laurel's fingernails, cut off his genitals, ripped out his left eyeball, and (when Laurel finally admitted that he had made his wife his beneficiary) they dragged him half dead before a priest to marry him to a Marcos family member so they could attempt to claim she was his heir. This was all done to oblige the US Treasury and the Fed to pay off on billions of dollars in bonds and notes. I have personally examined those documents in the originals, and have on CD a forensic study of their validity carried out by the University of Catalonia in Spain. If these were good guys, and evangelicals, I'd really like to have somebody explain to me how I can distinguish them from real "bad guys". The only distinction I can discover is that real "bad guys" do not pretend to be "good guys". A footnote: Lansdale was personally obsessed -- as only an old advertising man can be obsessed -- with umbrellas and the Eye of Ra (the right eye of Ra is the "evil eye" although Lansdale often used the left eye which is the benign or feminine). It was Lansdale who set up the channel known as "The Umbrella Organization" to move the war loot all over the world; so it says a lot for Fletch to identify Lansdale as the bum who then raised and opened an umbrella at Dealey Plaza. Sterling

Try reading Mr. Seagrave's books - they are heavily documented. He was just giving a brief outline of one aspect of what they contain. No bedtime story, rather the sad story of [part] of our secret history. Sterling, what was Lansdale doing, where was he based, and actively working with in the period just before and during 1963? I ask because many of us believe he might have been in Dallas for the assassination. Even Prouty thought so. So many of the spooks we know (and don't love) seem to have gotten their start in the secret intrigue at the end of and just after the Second World War. The connection between finance/great wealth and intelligence is so little appreciated. I think of the CIA and the other minions of intelligence as the military for the ultra-rich. How well-off did Landsdale himself become, being involved in all that gold and money? Thanks.

Linda ~ I've given a lot of thought to who were really the patrons of Robert Anderson, McCloy, Lovett, Stimson, the Dulles brothers, and others. In some cases, particularly the Dulles brothers and McCloy, they did not begin life as patricians. In one way or the other, they came from outside the magic circle, and initially became the servants of patricians. In their cases the patrons were the senior Rockefellers, the senior Harrimans, the senior Mellons, and the like. They became their gofers, if you will. As Kissinger was of the Rockefellers. You can see this from their early years, as they were on their way up the ladder. Between WW1 and WW2 the Dulles brothers were essentially carrying out tasks for their patrons in Europe, with one foot in Wall Street. Many of their activities were, of course, financial -- but with great political impact. In the case of Anderson the links (at least in Texas) are less clear, although it could have been any number of patricians including the Rockefellers. In any event, just knowing who their patrons were does not provide the kind of evidence one craves to have of how they were directed to do this or that. We know much more about this cause-and-effect with the Dulles brothers, thanks to recent books examining their activities in Europe, especially viz-a-viz German bankers. It is less easy to see who actually pushed the buttons of Clark Clifford over those many years. After a certain point, such men may simply go on autopilot. Like Rupert Murdoch after his tight friendship with the Agency station chief in Canberra caused Murdoch to vault out of oblivion onto the world stage with incredibly deep pockets to buy an extraordinary range of media. In a case like Murdoch's a point is reached where the monster no longer needs frequent contact with Dr. Frankenstein. The man becomes the mission. It would be great to know more about this. But when a senior TIME Inc editor finally worked up the courage to do a book on the Oppenheimers, the result was predictably cautious. Too bad!

Sterling, I studied your books several years ago, primarily because of my interest in the Texan Robert B. Anderson. Do you have any theories about who he really was--or who he represented--and why he was chosen to go with Lansdale to the Philippines? Any thoughts at all about his role?

Len ~ I take your point, but I have to disagree about your perspective. Briefly, you’re saying that China owes it to the US to rescue it, because the US rescued China from Japan in WW2. That assumption requires taking a US triumphalist view of the war, which concludes that the US defeated Japan and rescued China in the process. This is not true nor valid, especially when said in the same breath. There were several wars going on concurrently, and over different time spans. Japan began invading the Asian mainland in 1895, starting what came to be called the Greater East Asian War; after Korea, Japan invaded Manchuria, then North China, then (in 1937) invaded South China and seized Vietnam; then (after Pearl Harbor) invaded the rest of Southeast Asia and the archipelago. For America, WW2 in Asia only began with Pearl Harbor, and involved the US in different ways: (i) With US Navy forces in the Pacific War, (ii) US ground forces and naval support in the Island-Hopping campaign of MacArthur, and (iii) limited US ground forces and air forces under Stilwell in parts of the mainland, being almost exclusively Burma and Assam. Of these, the Pacific War certainly was won by the US admirals, no question. MacArthur’s Island-Hopping was a series of bloodbaths that were individual tactical victories, but proceeded contrary to the strategic objectives of the US admirals who, for example, wanted MacArthur to by-pass the Philippines and instead attack Taiwan. -- MacArthur did the reverse, which resulted in the total destruction of Manila, then failed to defeat the Japanese in Luzon, and did not proceed to or result in the invasion of Japan’s Home Islands, leaving the whole question of strategic victory for MacArthur undecided/ambiguous at the very least. On the mainland, which was a separate war, the Japanese were prevented by the British from invading India by Slim’s success at Imphal and Kohima; Stilwell was the victor defeating the Japanese in Burma. But Stilwell’s efforts to defeat the Japanese in China by putting both the Nationalist and Communist forces under his command (authorized by FDR and Marshall) failed when Stilwell was undermined by a GOP conspiracy organized by Herbert Hoover and the China Lobby working through Chennault and Joe Alsop, leading to Stilwell’s recall by FDR. For the most part, the Nationalists in China did not fight the Japanese except for certain notable battles such as their defense of Hengyang, which prevented the Japanese Operation Ichigo from succeeding in 1944, which would have given Japan for the first time a land route connecting their occupied territories in China and those in Southeast Asia. Chennault’s air strategy failed when Operation Ichigo destroyed his forward bases. Mostly, Generalissimo Chiang’s efforts were focused on the civil war against the Communists, but included selling US Lend-Lease supplies to the Japanese, and other collusion. The only long-term victories against the Japanese in China were achieved by the Communist forces in North and Central China. In 1945, the Japanese in China had not been defeated by the US or anyone else, but were told to surrender by Hirohito. The US, since the recall of Stilwell, had done everything possible to stymie the Communist effort to defeat the Japanese in North China. (The new US ambassador, Hurley, was a Hoover groupie.) After 1945, the US effort continued to be in favor of the Nationalists and against the Communists, who were victorious at the end of 1948. In the absence of any clear “victory” by anyone over the Japanese in China, and in light of the GOP undercutting all Stilwell’s efforts, and the CIA’s efforts to block the Communists between 1947-1949, it cannot be said that the US did anything magnanimous for China (Lend-Lease aside), beyond nuking Japan and saving everyone the trouble of invading the Home Islands, where they would have had to actually defeat the Japanese on the ground. To the contrary, the US (Hoover, et al) then did everything possible to rescue Japan and put its wartime fascist leaders back in power in Tokyo. This greatly delayed any normalization of life in China after the Maoist victory in 1948-1949 (politics aside). This interference and obfuscation of China continued for many years thereafter. We all know that the decision to nuke Japan was made for a number of other reasons having nothing whatever to do with “rescuing” China. Aside from obfuscating China, the US during the Korean War dropped a horrific range of chemical and biological weapons on China, including plague germs, mostly on civilian regions far down the coast. It could be argued that drenching the coast of China with CBW weapons after WW2 voided whatever positive things the US did for China during WW2. Therefore, both militarily and theoretically, the US might have intended originally to rescue China from the Japanese, but ended up neither defeating the Japanese in China nor fulfilling the original intention to “rescue” China in any other way. A great many Americans might have wanted to rescue China and shaft Japan, but a lot of other Americans wanted to rescue Japan and shaft China. The pro-Japan group won. Things have now changed. Or so it seems to me... Sterling

It is an inescapable fact that from the beginning of the US occupation of Japan, General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and others, knew all about the stolen treasure in Japan and the continuing extraordinary wealth of the Japanese elite, despite losing the war. In an official report on the occupation prepared by MacArthur’s headquarters and published in 1950, there is a startling admission: “One of the spectacular tasks of the occupation dealt with collecting and putting under guard the great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates, and all currency not legal in Japan. Even though the bulk of this wealth was collected and placed under United States military custody by Japanese officials, undeclared caches of these treasures were known to exist.” MacArthur’s staff knew, for example, of $2-billion in gold bullion that had been sunk in Tokyo Bay, later recovered. Another great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 was $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a ‘rear admiral’ in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan’s wartime drug trade throughout Asia. Kodama specialized in looting platinum for his own hoard. As this was too heavy to airlift to Japan, Kodama also helped himself to the finest gems looted by his men, taking large bags of gems to Japan each time he flew back during the war. After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave over $100-million in US currency to the CIA. He was also, amazingly, put on General Willoughby’s payroll, and remained on the CIA payroll for the rest of his life, among other favors brokering the Lockheed aircraft deal that became a major scandal for Japan’s Liberal Demopcratic Party. Kodama personally financed the creation of the postwar political parties that merged into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington. Both Kodama and his underworld associate Sasakawa Ryiochi, were then involved with the CIA in joint recoveries of Japanese war-loot from the Philippines. On September 2, 1945, after receiving official notice of Japan’s surrender, General Yamaxxxxa and his staff emerged from their mountain stronghold in the Kiangan Pocket on Luzon, and presented their swords to a group of U.S. Army officers led by Military Police Major A.S. ‘Jack’ Kenworthy, who took them to Bilibad Prison outside Manila. Because of gruesome atrocities committed earlier by Admiral Iwabuchi Kanji’s sailors and marines in the city of Manila (after Yamaxxxxa had ordered them to leave the city unharmed), the general was charged with war crimes. During his trial there was no mention of war loot. But there was a hidden agenda. Because it was not possible to torture General Yamaxxxxa physically without this becoming evident to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. Since Yamaxxxxa had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere. In charge of Kojima’s torture was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana, a man of many names and personalities, whose friends called him ‘Santy’. He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to which he had taken Yamaxxxxa, where bullion and other treasure were hidden. Supervising Santy was Captain Edward G. Lansdale, later one of America’s best-known Cold Warriors. In September 1945, Lansdale was 37 years old and utterly insignificant, only an advertising agency copywriter who had spent the war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the 0SS. In September 1945, chance entered Lansdale’s life in a big way when President Truman ordered the OSS to close down. To preserve America’s intelligence assets, and his own personal network, OSS chief Donovan moved personnel to other government or military posts. Captain Lansdale was one of fifty office staff given a chance to transfer to U.S. Army G-2 in the Philippines. There, Lansdale heard about Santy torturing General Yamaxxxxa’s driver, and joined the torture sessions as an observer and participant. Early that October, Major Kojima broke down and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila. While Santy and his teams set to opening the rest of these vaults, Captain Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, then on to Washington to brief President Truman. After discussions with his cabinet, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret. The treasure – gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems – was combined with Axis loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This ‘black gold’ gave the Truman Administration access to virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. It also provided an asset base that was used by Washington to reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was only a matter of time before treasure began to be recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries and civilian victims. To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank. There were other reasons why the gold was difficult to trace. Many of the original owners had died, and pre-war governments had ceased to exist. Eastern Europe was falling under the control of the Soviet Union, so returning gold looted there was out of the question. Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources,including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.) After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down “row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall”. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been tucked away there in what the US Army statement called “undeclared caches of these treasures ... known to exist” . Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched, and -- thanks to Washington’s intervention -- used this treasure to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, while its victims struggled on for decades. The gold recovered in the Philippines was not put in Fort Knox to benefit American citizens. There has been no audit of Ft. Knox since 1950. According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. The gold was trucked to warehouses at the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, or the U.S. Air Force base at Clark Field. Preference went to the U.S. Navy because of the weight of the bullion. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a huge mass of stolen gold became known, the market price of gold would plummet, and thousands of people would come forward to claim it, and Washington would be bogged down resolving ownership. The secrecy surrounding these recoveries was total. Robert Anderson and CIA agent Paul Helliwell traveled all over the planet, setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the noncommunist world. In 1953, to reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide network of “black banks”, set up by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led to Anderson being involved in the scandal of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a Pakistani bank with CIA ties. No one made better use of the recoveries than Lansdale. For his role in enabling the Black Eagle Trust, Lansdale became the darling of the Dulles brothers and their Georgetown coven, which included key officials in the CIA during the years it was run by Allen Dulles. Writing to the U.S. Ambassador in Manila, Admiral Raymond Spruance, Allen Dulles called Lansdale “our mutual friend”. In the early 1950s, Allen Dulles gave Lansdale $5-million to finance CIA operations against the Huks, rural peasant farmers fighting for land-reform in the Philippines. When he sent Lansdale to Vietnam in 1954, Dulles told Eisenhower he was sending one of his “best men”. In the late 1950s, he was in and out of Tokyo on secret missions with a hand-picked team of Filipino assassins, assassinating leftists, liberals and progressives. Lansdale was also close to Richard Nixon, and headed efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Without exception, Lansdale’s Asian adventures were costly failures. But Washington’s effort to boost the LDP in Japan was a big success. Long time Tokyo correspondent Robert Whiting described “a secret billion-dollar slush fund … equivalent to nearly 10 percent of Japan’s 1950 GNP. ... The Japanese government also sold [on the blackmarket] great stockpiles of gold, silver and copper …which they had concealed in early 1945 in anticipation of Japan’s defeat.”

It is an inescapable fact that from the beginning of the US occupation of Japan, General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and others, knew all about the stolen treasure in Japan and the continuing extraordinary wealth of the Japanese elite, despite losing the war. In an official report on the occupation prepared by MacArthur’s headquarters and published in 1950, there is a startling admission: “One of the spectacular tasks of the occupation dealt with collecting and putting under guard the great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates, and all currency not legal in Japan. Even though the bulk of this wealth was collected and placed under United States military custody by Japanese officials, undeclared caches of these treasures were known to exist.” MacArthur’s staff knew, for example, of $2-billion in gold bullion that had been sunk in Tokyo Bay, later recovered. Another great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 was $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a ‘rear admiral’ in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan’s wartime drug trade throughout Asia. Kodama specialized in looting platinum for his own hoard. As this was too heavy to airlift to Japan, Kodama also helped himself to the finest gems looted by his men, taking large bags of gems to Japan each time he flew back during the war. After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave over $100-million in US currency to the CIA. He was also, amazingly, put on General Willoughby’s payroll, and remained on the CIA payroll for the rest of his life, among other favors brokering the Lockheed aircraft deal that became a major scandal for Japan’s Liberal Demopcratic Party. Kodama personally financed the creation of the postwar political parties that merged into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington. Both Kodama and his underworld associate Sasakawa Ryiochi, were then involved with the CIA in joint recoveries of Japanese war-loot from the Philippines. On September 2, 1945, after receiving official notice of Japan’s surrender, General Yamaxxxxa and his staff emerged from their mountain stronghold in the Kiangan Pocket on Luzon, and presented their swords to a group of U.S. Army officers led by Military Police Major A.S. ‘Jack’ Kenworthy, who took them to Bilibad Prison outside Manila. Because of gruesome atrocities committed earlier by Admiral Iwabuchi Kanji’s sailors and marines in the city of Manila (after Yamaxxxxa had ordered them to leave the city unharmed), the general was charged with war crimes. During his trial there was no mention of war loot. But there was a hidden agenda. Because it was not possible to torture General Yamaxxxxa physically without this becoming evident to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. Since Yamaxxxxa had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere. In charge of Kojima’s torture was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana, a man of many names and personalities, whose friends called him ‘Santy’. He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to which he had taken Yamaxxxxa, where bullion and other treasure were hidden. Supervising Santy was Captain Edward G. Lansdale, later one of America’s best-known Cold Warriors. In September 1945, Lansdale was 37 years old and utterly insignificant, only an advertising agency copywriter who had spent the war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the 0SS. In September 1945, chance entered Lansdale’s life in a big way when President Truman ordered the OSS to close down. To preserve America’s intelligence assets, and his own personal network, OSS chief Donovan moved personnel to other government or military posts. Captain Lansdale was one of fifty office staff given a chance to transfer to U.S. Army G-2 in the Philippines. There, Lansdale heard about Santy torturing General Yamaxxxxa’s driver, and joined the torture sessions as an observer and participant. Early that October, Major Kojima broke down and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila. While Santy and his teams set to opening the rest of these vaults, Captain Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, then on to Washington to brief President Truman. After discussions with his cabinet, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret. The treasure – gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems – was combined with Axis loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This ‘black gold’ gave the Truman Administration access to virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. It also provided an asset base that was used by Washington to reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was only a matter of time before treasure began to be recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries and civilian victims. To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank. There were other reasons why the gold was difficult to trace. Many of the original owners had died, and pre-war governments had ceased to exist. Eastern Europe was falling under the control of the Soviet Union, so returning gold looted there was out of the question. Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources,including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.) After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down “row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall”. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been tucked away there in what the US Army statement called “undeclared caches of these treasures ... known to exist” . Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched, and -- thanks to Washington’s intervention -- used this treasure to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, while its victims struggled on for decades. The gold recovered in the Philippines was not put in Fort Knox to benefit American citizens. There has been no audit of Ft. Knox since 1950. According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. The gold was trucked to warehouses at the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, or the U.S. Air Force base at Clark Field. Preference went to the U.S. Navy because of the weight of the bullion. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a huge mass of stolen gold became known, the market price of gold would plummet, and thousands of people would come forward to claim it, and Washington would be bogged down resolving ownership. The secrecy surrounding these recoveries was total. Robert Anderson and CIA agent Paul Helliwell traveled all over the planet, setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the noncommunist world. In 1953, to reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide network of “black banks”, set up by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led to Anderson being involved in the scandal of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a Pakistani bank with CIA ties. No one made better use of the recoveries than Lansdale. For his role in enabling the Black Eagle Trust, Lansdale became the darling of the Dulles brothers and their Georgetown coven, which included key officials in the CIA during the years it was run by Allen Dulles. Writing to the U.S. Ambassador in Manila, Admiral Raymond Spruance, Allen Dulles called Lansdale “our mutual friend”. In the early 1950s, Allen Dulles gave Lansdale $5-million to finance CIA operations against the Huks, rural peasant farmers fighting for land-reform in the Philippines. When he sent Lansdale to Vietnam in 1954, Dulles told Eisenhower he was sending one of his “best men”. In the late 1950s, he was in and out of Tokyo on secret missions with a hand-picked team of Filipino assassins, assassinating leftists, liberals and progressives. Lansdale was also close to Richard Nixon, and headed efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Without exception, Lansdale’s Asian adventures were costly failures. But Washington’s effort to boost the LDP in Japan was a big success. Long time Tokyo correspondent Robert Whiting described “a secret billion-dollar slush fund … equivalent to nearly 10 percent of Japan’s 1950 GNP. ... The Japanese government also sold [on the blackmarket] great stockpiles of gold, silver and copper …which they had concealed in early 1945 in anticipation of Japan’s defeat.”

It is an inescapable fact that from the beginning of the US occupation of Japan, General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and others, knew all about the stolen treasure in Japan and the continuing extraordinary wealth of the Japanese elite, despite losing the war. In an official report on the occupation prepared by MacArthur’s headquarters and published in 1950, there is a startling admission: “One of the spectacular tasks of the occupation dealt with collecting and putting under guard the great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates, and all currency not legal in Japan. Even though the bulk of this wealth was collected and placed under United States military custody by Japanese officials, undeclared caches of these treasures were known to exist.” MacArthur’s staff knew, for example, of $2-billion in gold bullion that had been sunk in Tokyo Bay, later recovered. Another great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 was $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a ‘rear admiral’ in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan’s wartime drug trade throughout Asia. Kodama specialized in looting platinum for his own hoard. As this was too heavy to airlift to Japan, Kodama also helped himself to the finest gems looted by his men, taking large bags of gems to Japan each time he flew back during the war. After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave over $100-million in US currency to the CIA. He was also, amazingly, put on General Willoughby’s payroll, and remained on the CIA payroll for the rest of his life, among other favors brokering the Lockheed aircraft deal that became a major scandal for Japan’s Liberal Demopcratic Party. Kodama personally financed the creation of the postwar political parties that merged into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington. Both Kodama and his underworld associate Sasakawa Ryiochi, were then involved with the CIA in joint recoveries of Japanese war-loot from the Philippines. On September 2, 1945, after receiving official notice of Japan’s surrender, General Yamaxxxxa and his staff emerged from their mountain stronghold in the Kiangan Pocket on Luzon, and presented their swords to a group of U.S. Army officers led by Military Police Major A.S. ‘Jack’ Kenworthy, who took them to Bilibad Prison outside Manila. Because of gruesome atrocities committed earlier by Admiral Iwabuchi Kanji’s sailors and marines in the city of Manila (after Yamaxxxxa had ordered them to leave the city unharmed), the general was charged with war crimes. During his trial there was no mention of war loot. But there was a hidden agenda. Because it was not possible to torture General Yamaxxxxa physically without this becoming evident to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. Since Yamaxxxxa had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere. In charge of Kojima’s torture was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana, a man of many names and personalities, whose friends called him ‘Santy’. He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to which he had taken Yamaxxxxa, where bullion and other treasure were hidden. Supervising Santy was Captain Edward G. Lansdale, later one of America’s best-known Cold Warriors. In September 1945, Lansdale was 37 years old and utterly insignificant, only an advertising agency copywriter who had spent the war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the 0SS. In September 1945, chance entered Lansdale’s life in a big way when President Truman ordered the OSS to close down. To preserve America’s intelligence assets, and his own personal network, OSS chief Donovan moved personnel to other government or military posts. Captain Lansdale was one of fifty office staff given a chance to transfer to U.S. Army G-2 in the Philippines. There, Lansdale heard about Santy torturing General Yamaxxxxa’s driver, and joined the torture sessions as an observer and participant. Early that October, Major Kojima broke down and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila. While Santy and his teams set to opening the rest of these vaults, Captain Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, then on to Washington to brief President Truman. After discussions with his cabinet, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret. The treasure – gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems – was combined with Axis loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This ‘black gold’ gave the Truman Administration access to virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. It also provided an asset base that was used by Washington to reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was only a matter of time before treasure began to be recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries and civilian victims. To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank. There were other reasons why the gold was difficult to trace. Many of the original owners had died, and pre-war governments had ceased to exist. Eastern Europe was falling under the control of the Soviet Union, so returning gold looted there was out of the question. Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources,including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.) After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down “row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall”. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been tucked away there in what the US Army statement called “undeclared caches of these treasures ... known to exist” . Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched, and -- thanks to Washington’s intervention -- used this treasure to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, while its victims struggled on for decades. The gold recovered in the Philippines was not put in Fort Knox to benefit American citizens. There has been no audit of Ft. Knox since 1950. According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. The gold was trucked to warehouses at the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, or the U.S. Air Force base at Clark Field. Preference went to the U.S. Navy because of the weight of the bullion. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a huge mass of stolen gold became known, the market price of gold would plummet, and thousands of people would come forward to claim it, and Washington would be bogged down resolving ownership. The secrecy surrounding these recoveries was total. Robert Anderson and CIA agent Paul Helliwell traveled all over the planet, setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the noncommunist world. In 1953, to reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide network of “black banks”, set up by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led to Anderson being involved in the scandal of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a Pakistani bank with CIA ties. No one made better use of the recoveries than Lansdale. For his role in enabling the Black Eagle Trust, Lansdale became the darling of the Dulles brothers and their Georgetown coven, which included key officials in the CIA during the years it was run by Allen Dulles. Writing to the U.S. Ambassador in Manila, Admiral Raymond Spruance, Allen Dulles called Lansdale “our mutual friend”. In the early 1950s, Allen Dulles gave Lansdale $5-million to finance CIA operations against the Huks, rural peasant farmers fighting for land-reform in the Philippines. When he sent Lansdale to Vietnam in 1954, Dulles told Eisenhower he was sending one of his “best men”. In the late 1950s, he was in and out of Tokyo on secret missions with a hand-picked team of Filipino assassins, assassinating leftists, liberals and progressives. Lansdale was also close to Richard Nixon, and headed efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Without exception, Lansdale’s Asian adventures were costly failures. But Washington’s effort to boost the LDP in Japan was a big success. Long time Tokyo correspondent Robert Whiting described “a secret billion-dollar slush fund … equivalent to nearly 10 percent of Japan’s 1950 GNP. ... The Japanese government also sold [on the blackmarket] great stockpiles of gold, silver and copper …which they had concealed in early 1945 in anticipation of Japan’s defeat.”

MACARTHUR SHUTS DOWN ONGOING WAR CRIMES INVESTIGATIONS In 1946, Hirohito (having been quietly exonerated himself) was allowed by Washington to privately exonerate all key Japanese officials from any risk of trial for war crimes, with the exception of a few “show trials” conducted by MacArthur’s military tribunals, placing all blame on Tojo, who was hanged. At the same time, MacArthur acted to end all other US war crimes investigations throughout Asia-Pacific; by mid-1947 the US was secretly urging all Allied governments to stop their own tribunals and investigations. The British government complied, issuing instructions that “no further trials of war criminals should be started after 31 August 1948.” Secret communications from the foreign ministries in Ottawa, London, The Hague, Canberra, Auckland, reveal the extent to which Washington was able to abort these investigations and criminal proceedings. The excuse given for closing them down was strategic urgency following the USSR’s successful test of its own atom bomb in the spring of 1946, and the increasing likelihood of a communist victory in the Chinese civil war. But the Soviet atom bomb test was hardly a surprise, nor was a victory by Mao in China. Both had been expected for a long time. So these justifications were falsely exaggerated to hide other reasons for Washington reversing itself -- to shield Japan from being held accountable for its crimes. Japan was not only the most industrialized nation in East Asia but also the most anti-communist, therefore it could be America’s bastion against the two largest communist states. It was inevitable that this would become an obsession of rightwing Americans, after the death of the progressive President Roosevelt brought the resurgence of GOP reactionaries. But that, too, was long expected. Where war crimes investigators persisted, General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's chief of counter-intelligence, used blunt instruments. His hand is visible in a number of mysterious deaths among the investigators. In Hong Kong, two war crimes investigators, Colonel Cyril Wild and the civilian prosecutor Rex Davies, died when their plane exploded as it reached altitude after takeoff. Curiously the official crash investigation records contain no condition report of the engines. A similar aircraft explosion at altitude near Guam killed George Atcheson, a US political advisor to MacArthur who opposed the sharp swerve to the right. These explosions in midair had all the hallmarks of the OSS altitude-detonation bombs also used in 1946 to eliminate KMT Secret Police Chief Dai Li, an adversary of OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan. In Singapore, Britain’s Colonel H.E.R. Smith was about to start hearings in absentia of the notorious Japanese mass-murderer, Colonel Tsuji Masanobu. Smith had already overseen investigations, trials and successful convictions of more than 200 Japanese war criminals. Colonel Tsuji was at that time living comfortably in Tokyo working for General Willoughby. On the eve of the Tsuji hearings, Smith received a series of death-threats against him and members of his family. He was told by the British Provost Marshal that the threats originated with a group of Japanese terrorists, who had also been used by Willoughby inside Japan. British intelligence was so alarmed, they whisked Smith out of Singapore and gave him a new identity. As “Colonel Craig-Hallam” he lived another 52-years. In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese had put thousands of Allied prisoners into woven bamboo “pig-baskets”, loaded on trucks and dumped into rivers to drown, or put on barges and dumped into the ocean. Dutch and Australian investigators gathering dossiers on these war crimes were forced to abandon their work and were silenced. Another target was Colonel Arvo Thompson, who was “minding” Japan’s Unit 731 scientists, given blanket immunity from prosecution in exchange for turning over their expertise to America's own CBW program. As he learned more grisly details about what Japan had done with biological weapons during the war in China, Thompson apparently rebelled at the idea of exonerating the “monsters”, and died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. Wu Tien-wien, a scholar who devoted years of his life to the subject of Unit 731, discovered information that Thompson committed “suicide”, but it was not clear whether it was “assisted suicide”. It proved impossible to find any record of his place of burial. A few years later, Thompson's colleague, Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the CIA, was murdered after learning that the US Army was using Japanese anthrax from Unit 731 as a weapon in the Korean War. Three days after handing in his resignation in protest, Olson was dead. What was labeled suicide in his case was subsequently proved during a forty-year long investigation to have been murder. Olson was bludgeoned to death, and his body thrown out a hotel window. The CIA has since admitted to foul play in Olson's death, stopping just shy of accepting responsibility. Aside from these and other similar cases, the US Army and their British counterparts forced all men returning from Asia-Pacific combat zones to sign statements that they would not reveal anything about Japanese war crimes or atrocities they had suffered or observed. This unscrupulous intervention blocked their involvement in any future lawsuits that might expose Japan’s hiding of war loot in the Philippines or Japan, where Japanese corporations like Mitsubishi used POWs and civilians as slave labor to dig tunnels and vaults. In short, much darker motives lay behind the whitewash, cover-up, and silencing of ongoing investigations. RECOVERIES OF WAR-LOOT IN JAPAN It is an inescapable fact that from the beginning of the US occupation of Japan, General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and others, knew all about the stolen treasure in Japan and the continuing extraordinary wealth of the Japanese elite, despite losing the war. In an official report on the occupation prepared by MacArthur’s headquarters and published in 1950, there is a startling admission: “One of the spectacular tasks of the occupation dealt with collecting and putting under guard the great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates, and all currency not legal in Japan. Even though the bulk of this wealth was collected and placed under United States military custody by Japanese officials, undeclared caches of these treasures were known to exist.” MacArthur’s staff knew, for example, of $2-billion in gold bullion that had been sunk in Tokyo Bay, later recovered. Another great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 was $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a ‘rear admiral’ in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan’s wartime drug trade throughout Asia. Kodama specialized in looting platinum for his own hoard. As this was too heavy to airlift to Japan, Kodama also helped himself to the finest gems looted by his men, taking large bags of gems to Japan each time he flew back during the war. After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave over $100-million in US currency to the CIA. He was also, amazingly, put on General Willoughby’s payroll, and remained on the CIA payroll for the rest of his life, among other favors brokering the Lockheed aircraft deal that became a major scandal for Japan’s Liberal Demopcratic Party. Kodama personally financed the creation of the postwar political parties that merged into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington. Both Kodama and his underworld associate Sasakawa Ryiochi, were then involved with the CIA in joint recoveries of Japanese war-loot from the Philippines. RECOVERIES OF LOOTED TREASURE IN THE PHILIPPINES, 1945-51. On September 2, 1945, after receiving official notice of Japan’s surrender, General Yamaxxxxa and his staff emerged from their mountain stronghold in the Kiangan Pocket on Luzon, and presented their swords to a group of U.S. Army officers led by Military Police Major A.S. ‘Jack’ Kenworthy, who took them to Bilibad Prison outside Manila. Because of gruesome atrocities committed earlier by Admiral Iwabuchi Kanji’s sailors and marines in the city of Manila (after Yamaxxxxa had ordered them to leave the city unharmed), the general was charged with war crimes. During his trial there was no mention of war loot. But there was a hidden agenda. Because it was not possible to torture General Yamaxxxxa physically without this becoming evident to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. Since Yamaxxxxa had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere. In charge of Kojima’s torture was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana, a man of many names and personalities, whose friends called him ‘Santy’. He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to which he had taken Yamaxxxxa, where bullion and other treasure were hidden. Supervising Santy was Captain Edward G. Lansdale, later one of America’s best-known Cold Warriors. In September 1945, Lansdale was 37 years old and utterly insignificant, only an advertising agency copywriter who had spent the war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the 0SS. In September 1945, chance entered Lansdale’s life in a big way when President Truman ordered the OSS to close down. To preserve America’s intelligence assets, and his own personal network, OSS chief Donovan moved personnel to other government or military posts. Captain Lansdale was one of fifty office staff given a chance to transfer to U.S. Army G-2 in the Philippines. There, Lansdale heard about Santy torturing General Yamaxxxxa’s driver, and joined the torture sessions as an observer and participant. Early that October, Major Kojima broke down and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila. WASHINGTON WAS ADVISED OF LOOT RECOVERED IN LUZON While Santy and his teams set to opening the rest of these vaults, Captain Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, then on to Washington to brief President Truman. After discussions with his cabinet, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret. The treasure – gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems – was combined with Axis loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This ‘black gold’ gave the Truman Administration access to virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. It also provided an asset base that was used by Washington to reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was only a matter of time before treasure began to be recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries and civilian victims. To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank. There were other reasons why the gold was difficult to trace. Many of the original owners had died, and pre-war governments had ceased to exist. Eastern Europe was falling under the control of the Soviet Union, so returning gold looted there was out of the question. Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources,including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.) After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down “row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall”. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been tucked away there in what the US Army statement called “undeclared caches of these treasures ... known to exist” . Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched, and -- thanks to Washington’s intervention -- used this treasure to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, while its victims struggled on for decades. The gold recovered in the Philippines was not put in Fort Knox to benefit American citizens. There has been no audit of Ft. Knox since 1950. According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. The gold was trucked to warehouses at the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, or the U.S. Air Force base at Clark Field. Preference went to the U.S. Navy because of the weight of the bullion. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a huge mass of stolen gold became known, the market price of gold would plummet, and thousands of people would come forward to claim it, and Washington would be bogged down resolving ownership. The secrecy surrounding these recoveries was total. Robert Anderson and CIA agent Paul Helliwell traveled all over the planet, setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the noncommunist world. In 1953, to reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide network of “black banks”, set up by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led to Anderson being involved in the scandal of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a Pakistani bank with CIA ties. No one made better use of the recoveries than Lansdale. For his role in enabling the Black Eagle Trust, Lansdale became the darling of the Dulles brothers and their Georgetown coven, which included key officials in the CIA during the years it was run by Allen Dulles. Writing to the U.S. Ambassador in Manila, Admiral Raymond Spruance, Allen Dulles called Lansdale “our mutual friend”. In the early 1950s, Allen Dulles gave Lansdale $5-million to finance CIA operations against the Huks, rural peasant farmers fighting for land-reform in the Philippines. When he sent Lansdale to Vietnam in 1954, Dulles told Eisenhower he was sending one of his “best men”. In the late 1950s, he was in and out of Tokyo on secret missions with a hand-picked team of Filipino assassins, assassinating leftists, liberals and progressives. Lansdale was also close to Richard Nixon, and headed efforts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Without exception, Lansdale’s Asian adventures were costly failures. But Washington’s effort to boost the LDP in Japan was a big success. Long time Tokyo correspondent Robert Whiting described “a secret billion-dollar slush fund … equivalent to nearly 10 percent of Japan’s 1950 GNP. ... The Japanese government also sold [on the blackmarket] great stockpiles of gold, silver and copper …which they had concealed in early 1945 in anticipation of Japan’s defeat.” SECOND SET OF RECOVERIES FROM THE PHILIPPINES After the fraudulent 1951 Japan Peace Treaty was inflicted on Asia, there was a lull of twenty years before President Ferdinand Marcos began making new recoveries of Japanese war loot, working with Kodama and Sasakawa. Tokyo offered to help Filipinos repair war damage with ‘free’ infrastructure projects, including irrigation systems in odd places, and roads that took unlikely routes through the mountains. Japanese salvage firms offered to remove the hulks cluttering up Manila Bay, and to dredge and restore the battered bay front; in the course of this work they salvaged ships that had been scuttled at the docks with bullion aboard. Japanese corporations built factories throughout the Philippines, with very deep excavations. In them, Filipino workers on assembly lines put together TVs, tape recorders, computers, refrigerators and air conditioners, which were then shipped to Japan in remarkably heavy crates. According to a CIA source, the Agency knew that gold bullion was being smuggled out of the Philippines this way, but did not interfere. Instead, the CIA and White House leaned on Marcos to share his part of the gold recoveries, in exchange for cash and US debt instruments. When he was elected president in 1965, Marcos was approached directly by Japanese underworld fixer Sasakawa Ryoichi, offering to do joint recoveries of war loot. A crony of Kodama, Sasakawa knew the location of a number of major vaults. For a substantial cut, Marcos could grant presidential authorizations. When Marcos balked at turning over all his own hoard to President Reagan, CIA Director William Casey had Marcos kidnapped and put in house arrest in Hawaii. Marcos died before he could be forced to reveal the locations of his hoard, which had been reburied in six vaults known only to Marcos loyalists. As part of America’s secret deal with Japan, a billion-dollar gold bullion trust fund was set up at Sanwa Bank in Osaka in behalf of Emperor Hirohito and the imperial family. Sanwa Bank was one of Japan’s oldest, and Hirohito owned a large chunk of its stock from before World War II. The trust appears to have been set up by Robert B. Anderson shortly after he toured the Golden Lily treasure sites in the Philippines with MacArthur and Lansdale. According to journalist Paul Manning who had access to SCAP records during an early stage of the U.S. Occupation, the emperor already had $1- billion in gold and currency hidden in overseas accounts before Pearl Harbor. Significantly, Sanwa Bank was one of three Japanese banks left untouched by the US occupation. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos learned of the Showa Trust at Sanwa Bank while combing through Santy’s papers after his death. According to documents we reproduce, by 1981 the Showa Trust was generating over $300-million in interest every quarter, or over one billion dollars of interest annually. As one of the bank’s owners, the emperor was doubtless getting a favorable rate of interest. (These documents were found in Marcos’s private safe in Malacanang Palace after he was removed from Power.) Bluntly put, the terrible secret is that for over half a century some officials of the US Government – not least of them its presidents – greatly advanced their careers by receiving stolen goods, made unscrupulous use of covert funds, and continue to collude with Tokyo. Justification always has been “national security”. In plain English, it’s conflict of interest. Politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, military officers, businessmen, have been involved in falsification and manipulation of facts and records. Whether cynical or misguided, they aided and abetted extraordinary corruption. In September 2001, The Economist reported that the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee “has uncovered evidence that the American government, assisted by others, has somehow ‘lent’ thousands of tons [of gold bullion] to speculators and bullion banks, notably Citibank and J.P. Morgan Chase, to depress the gold price.” Conflict of interest is evident in all these instances. VICTIM’S CHEATED FOR HALF A CENTURY In 1952, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee admitted that claims of Asian nations against Japan could total “as much as $100-billion” (1952 values). Japan paid only $3-billion in reparations. Even today, Germany continues its program of compensation and reparations, but Japan has dug in its heels and said it was all settled in by the Dulles Peace Treaty in 1951. Its position is backed adamantly by the US State Department, determined to block compensation payments even to U.S. citizens, even to former POWs. Britain, having parroted Washington by declaring that all this was ‘settled’ in 1951, reversed itself in 2001, by agreeing to pay – from its own tax revenues – a £10,000 one-time settlement on former British POWs of Japan and their heirs. This may seem humane, but it sidesteps the real question of why Japan continues to be shielded from paying. It also does not satisfy the demands of British POWs and internees for an official apology from Japan. On the other hand, since 1945, Tokyo has passed fifteen laws giving its own nationals compensation of $400-billion. Among those receiving compensation and pensions were indicted war criminals. Japanese sociologist Tanaka Hiroshi said, “We are generous with ourselves, stingy with others, [and] our policy on war compensation is manifestly unfair to foreigners, and unrepentant of the past.” Washington has paid compensation to Japanese civilians interned unjustly in America during the war. Each internee, even babies born at the end of this period, was awarded $20,000. Most of them were complete innocents and their lives were, in many cases, damaged or destroyed by the internment. But not one was forced to perform slave labor. Since 1999, more than thirty lawsuits have been filed in California courts by survivors of the Bataan Death March and other POWs who were forced to provide slave labor for Japanese companies. They were focused in California because the state legislature had extended the period when such claims could be filed. The US Government then had the cases transferred to a federal court in San Francisco, where most of these suits then were rejected in September 2000 by Federal Judge Vaughn Walker. Judge Walker said they were ‘barred’ by the terms of the 1951 Peace Treaty, the same stonewalling used by Tokyo and Washington. Hard as it may be to believe, the State Department argued on the side of Japanese corporations in these cases. Walker summed up his decision by stating that the 1951 Peace Treaty had “exchanged full compensation of plaintiffs for a future peace”. In other words, Japan and America were allowed to keep all the treasure stolen from China and the rest Asia between 1895-1945 in return for future peace? Japan expert Dr. Chalmers Johnson reacted by pointing out that since the treaty was signed in 1951, at least ten million people and 55,000 Americans have died in Asian wars. By those facts alone, he rightly called Judge Walker’s statement “one of the more abysmal moments of denial”. Some fought back. In March 2001, U.S. Congressmen Mike Honda (D. San Jose) and Dana Rohrabacher (R. Huntington Beach) introduced a bill, “Justice for Prisoners of War Act” before the U.S. Congress. The bill had strong bipartisan support and by August 2002 had 228 co-signers including House whips for both parties. Honda’s bill called for “clarification of the wording of the 1951 Peace Treaty” to keep the State Department from deviously interfering in victims’ lawsuits. The bill would have removed a key legal barrier used in Judge Walker’s rejection of the slave-labor lawsuits. Article 26 of the 1951 treaty reads: “Should Japan make a peace settlement or war claims settlement with any State granting that State greater advantages than those provided by the present Treaty, those same advantages shall be extended to the parties to the present Treaty.” In other words, if Japan were ever to give another country greater advantages for war claims than those granted in the treaty, then it had to extend such terms to all forty-eight countries that signed the treaty. Yet as we now know, a secret deal was arranged by Dulles for the Dutch government to receive $10-million from Japan. Therefore, Article 26 was already met by Japan’s secret deal with the Dutch -- why it was kept secret. Both Switzerland and Burma also negotiated compensation to their citizens that would today be worth about $50,000 each. While Burma was occupied by Japan, Switzerland was not even a belligerent during the war. China, which lost by far the greatest amount of treasure to Japan, was not a signatory to the 1951 Treaty. Therefore its government and citizens are not restrained by the Treaty terms. The real question is whether Japan alone is guilty of preventing China, the Chinese people, and other Asian victims of Japan’s aggression and industrial-scale looting, from recovering their treasure. Or is Washington as culpable, for having deviously shielded Tokyo -- or, more important, for having stolen a second time (and made vanish) what was stolen the first time by Japan. As many Chinese people are asking in November 2008: “Why should China rescue the US economy today when America secretly recovered what Japan stole during WW2, and blocked victims from getting it back?”

Many Chinese are now asking: “Why should China rescue the US economy when America secretly recovered a lot of what Japan stole during WW2, and blocked victims from getting it back?” Treasure stolen from China and the rest of Asia by the Japanese during World War Two (the Pacific War) was secretly stolen a second time at the end of the war by the government of the United States. Some of this war loot was recovered by the US Army inside Japan during the US occupation. Other huge quantities of Japanese war loot were recovered by the US from the Philippines, directly during the 1945-1951 period, and later in collusion with key Japanese players in joint recoveries from the Philippines. In the first instance, 1945-1951, the US kept its recoveries secret, and blocked future legal action by victims through a deceitfully contrived 1951 Peace Treaty with Japan. The Treaty, prepared by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, enshrined certain false assertions, which other Allied nations were bullied into accepting. The recovered war loot, being secret, never was deposited at Fort Knox or any other government repository for the benefit of the American people, but was used to fund covert operations during the Cold War, including the acquisition of global media, or was siphoned off through private financial channels. In the first two weeks following the surrender, before the Allies set foot in Japan, the government in Tokyo gushed money in all directions. Records discovered by Japanese journalists in the 1970s revealed that their government gave nearly 300-billion yen in war contracts, materials and stockpiles to various zaibatsu conglomerates just before the Americans arrived. So these conglomerates realized 30 per cent of their entire war profits in the first four months after the surrender. Once US forces were in Japan, and it became evident to Japanese that the Americans were not aware of what was going on under their noses, the gusher of government money continued. Historian John Dower says this represented something in the neighborhood of 300-million tons of goods -- diamonds, gold, steel, rubber, chemicals, oil, salt, drugs and titanium, mostly looted from conquered countries. The value of these goods then was $20- billion ($200-billion in present values). The Allies turned over to the Japanese government 100-billion yen in new humanitarian stockpiles — clothing, food and medicine for distribution to the civilian population. Instead, these goods vanished into the black market where fortunes were being made by Japanese gangsters with close ties to government leaders. Stockpiles of opium, heroin and morphine were among “medicines” that disappeared. Strangely, nowhere in the official records of the U.S. occupation so far declassified is there any tally of Japan’s 1945 national gold reserves, plundered art and cultural objects, looted religious artifacts, personal jewelry and heirlooms, no tally of what was stolen from safe deposit boxes in twelve countries, or from family burial vaults and imperial tombs across Asia. If all this hidden information were to be made public, it would make a mockery of the Peace Treaty and of the secret negotiations conducted by John Foster Dulles. During those negotiations, Dulles aggressively manipulated the Allies, including Great Britain. In Britain’s first draft proposal, Clause 39 read “Japan shall pay reparation [to GB] in the amount of £60-million in monetary gold over a period of three years.” (Monetary gold is gold that is kept in central banks for use by national governments to protect their currency, or to buy foreign goods.) Clause 53 of Great Britain’s draft proposed that “Japan shall restore to Governments of the United Nations concerned all monetary gold looted or wrongfully removed.” This sum was not disclosed, but the statement itself affirms that Japan did loot large quantities of gold from all the allies, not just from Britain, and should be made to return this looted treasure. Note that neither clause 39 nor clause 53 mentioned anything about “non-monetary gold” -- privately held gold taken from museums, religious orders and private citizens of those countries, including jewelry, gold ingots, platinum and silver, artworks, and religious objects. The British Treasury was far from happy with Washington’s assertion that Japan’s cupboard was absolutely bare. It took the following position regarding gold: “We regard the payment of Japan’s ‘gold pot’ as reparation as one of the points on which it is essential for us to be firm”. (1) As this and other statements of the British government show, there was no doubt whatever that Japan had plundered a great deal of gold, which America was then recovering both in Japan and from hidden caches in the Philippines. The following month, April 1951, the British Foreign Office asked the prime minister for “authority to modify our attitude so that we can agree with the U.S. that the gold can remain in Japan. It is now quite clear that even if we could get the gold away from the Japanese (and agreement on this is by no means certain) there is for practical purposes no possibility of our obtaining a share of it.” (2) In other words, the British Treasury’s original firm position was caving in, under American pressure. The official British record goes on to say that the view of the United States and SCAP (General MacArthur’s “Supreme Command” in Tokyo) was that the “gold should be left in Japan as an addition to foreign exchange resources in order to assist her general [economic] stabilization. ” (3) In the end, Britain capitulated and went even further: “We have agreed that gold should not be mentioned in the Treaty.” (4) Other Allies followed suit after similarly having their feet held to the fire. In its final form, the 1951 Peace Treaty tried to block any future efforts by private individuals to claim reparations. According to the British Foreign Office archives: “Canadian authorities had themselves felt that provision should have been made in the Treaty for compensation to civilian internees and indeed raised the question in Washington ... but on meeting resistance did not press the point.” (5) In conclusion, the Foreign Office noted: “If Article 16 was widened to include civilians, the amount of claimants would be so far increased (by the inclusion of Asiatic claimants) that the amount available to each would be derisory.” (6) It bears repeating that Article 14 of the Treaty reads: (7) “It is recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognized that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient“. (Our italics: the cupboard was “bare”.) The Treaty stated: “Except as otherwise provided in the present Treaty, the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan and its nationals in the course of the prosecution of the war, and claims of the Allied Powers for direct military costs of occupation.” So, with the sweep of a pen, the United States unfairly/deceitfully shut the door on the claims of looted countries, looted banks, looted museums, looted private citizens, of comfort women, Asian slave labor, and Allied prisoners of war. (8) While it is clear that the 1951 Peace Treaty is invalid because it is based on lies and deceptions contrived during the occupation, every American and British government since 1945 has vigorously blocked all efforts to right the wrongs done to Japan’s victims. To this day the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Justice Department, and the Japanese Foreign Ministry invoke the 1951 Peace Treaty to block any attempt by victims to sue for the compensation so long denied them. The 1951 peace treaty was skewed by deceits, so thousands of POWs and civilians who were forced to perform slave labor for Japanese corporations received no compensation for their suffering. To shield Japan from demands for war reparations, John Foster Dulles met privately with three Japanese to work out the Treaty terms. One of the three, Miyazawa Kiichi, later served as Japan’s prime minister and repeatedly as its minister of finance, whose daughter was married to a senior US State Department official and CIA agent. According to Article 14 of the Treaty, “It is recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognized that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient.” To reinforce the claim that Japan was broke, Article 14 stated that “the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan.” By letting themselves be bullied into signing the Treaty, Allied countries concurred that Japan’s plunder had vanished down a rabbit hole, and all Japan’s victims were out of luck. Washington’s role is all too clear in the way the Peace Treaty was bullied through. Professor John Price sums it up: “the U.S. monopolized and abused the treaty preparations.” (9) As we now know, Japan was not bankrupted by the war. By 1951, six years after the war and while Germany was still staggering, Japan’s economy was stronger than it had been during the best business years before the war. Carlos Romulo, head of the Philippine delegation to the peace conference, “demolished the U.S. argument that Japan lacked the ability to pay for economic reasons.” (10) Japan’s industrial activity was 32 percent above pre-war levels, its fiscal position showed a surplus, and its balance of trade had moved into the black. In discussions between U.S. monetary experts and Japan’s Finance Minister Ikeda Hayato just before the peace conference, he admitted to a budget surplus of over 100-billion yen and planned to use 40-billion of it as a tax-rebate to Japanese taxpayers. The governor of the Bank of Japan pleaded with U.S. authorities to take custody of US $200-million dollars worth of gold holdings because he feared “that the Filipinos might try to attach the gold as reparations.” (11) John Foster Dulles allowed other Allied nations such as the Netherlands to secretly acquire special conditions on reparations. These agreements were considered so sensitive that Washington withheld these documents as “top secret” for the next 50 years. The Dutch gambit only came to light in 2000. The problem with the 1951 Treaty terms, as the Dutch government expressed it, was that “it would appear the Dutch Government was, by the act of signing..., giving up without due process the rights held by Dutch subjects.” Dulles grudgingly agreed to give Dutch citizens the right to make separate claims against the Japanese government. Speaking of this secret deal with the Dutch government, a U.S. Senator remarked “Dulles and the others ...realized article 14 (ii) was wrong. Then in an effort to cover it all up to satisfy the Dutch, he buried it. He classified it and kept it classified for 50 years to keep these [victims] from having the right to go to court. That is what he did. That is what the U.S. Government did. That is wrong, and we need to correct it.” (12) Then he added: “Our own government would not give these documents to our own soldiers. What an outrage that is.” Eventually, the Dutch government did secretly negotiate reparations from Japan that resulted in Tokyo paying $10-million in 1956. 13 But $10-million was only a drop in the bucket. In 1952, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee admitted that claims of Asian nations alone could total “as much as $100-billion” (1952 values). (14) This is exactly the amount of gold one Japanese imperial prince estimated was hidden by Golden Lily in the Philippines. If all this were not enough, the chain of evidence was willfully destroyed by the American and Japanese governments. Before the Occupation began in 1945, Japan burnt great quantities of war records and documents. Skies all over the islands were filled with smoke. In 1946, millions of pages of Japanese government and military records were transferred to Herbert Hoover -- which is peculiar as Hoover was at the time a private citizen, not a government official. He was, as we revealed in The Yamato Dynasty, a chief mover in whitewashing Emperor Hirohito, shifting all blame for the war to General Tojo, and putting Japan’s war criminals back in power. Hoover shipped these records to the Hoover Institution in California, but half a century later their location remains a total mystery. Another huge collection of Japanese documents was transferred to the CIA in the late 1940s. After the CIA had removed “sensitive” documents, the rest were turned over to the National Archives. The State Department then decided, amazingly, to return them all to Japan. Despite protests from scholars, only 10 percent were microfilmed first, and these doubtless were laundered to erase evidence of looting, bribery and collusion. Of the captured Japanese documents that were turned over to the National Archives for study by researchers, there were puzzling gaps in the records. In 1950, James William Morley, a professor of history at Union College, was disappointed and surprised to find that “Large as the collection is, it clearly does not represent all of the records of these ministries and their predecessors. Very few files are complete; many, no doubt, are entirely missing. Probably some were hidden or destroyed and others retained by interested occupation and other United States government authorities for current use. A few of the obvious deficiencies are the almost complete absence of the official Army General Staff Headquarters histories of Japan's major expeditions and war, and the startling paucity of materials relating to the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident, and the Great East Asia War." Judging from the documents Morley found at the National Archives, it would be hard to prove that there ever had been a war. Since Professor Morley completed his survey, the bulk of the records kept in other agencies also were returned to the Japanese Government. The government of Japan was even given the privilege of requesting specific documents from the State Department, including “evidence collected" for war crimes trials. (Even today, as the process of declassification of Japanese war crimes records is taking place in Washington, the State Department was about to grant a request from the government of Japan to allow Japanese officials to review these documents before they will be released.) Only about 5% of the captured documents were copied or retained, the other 95% were simply returned to Tokyo, where today they remain under lock and key. American officials in charge of the record transfers to Japan "forgot" to make specific provisions for any future access to these papers. (1) Britain’s Ministry of the Treasury’s remarks about Japan’s “gold” are from Foreign Office Records 371/92533 p. 118. Public Records Office. (2) “authority to modify our attitude” is from from British Foreign Office Records 371/92540 p. 11, April. Public Records Office. (3) $200 million in gold in Japan is from Britain’s first treaty draft, clause 53 is quoted from Foreign Office Records 371/92545 p. 66, reporting on a meeting in Washington D.C. which took place on April 26, 1951. Public Records Office. (4) ”Gold should not be mentioned in the Treaty” is quoted from Foreign Office Record 371/92555 p. 115. (5) Canadian efforts to provide for compensation to civilians and the way in which she was thwarted by the United States government is from the Foreign Office 371/92591, p. 48 27 August 1951. Public Records Office. (6) British Foreign office discussions about extending Article 16 benefits to include civilians is found in Foreign Office 371/92591 p. 4. Public Records Office. See also the ABCIFER website abcifer.com/ww2/newpage1. (7) The text of the San Francisco Treaty can be found online. (8) 700,000 victims still alive. See Henk Zeeman “Don’t Forget the Japanese” in Sunday Start Times, June 16, 1996. Available at elibrary.com (9) “Monopolized and abused” is from John Price “A Just Peace? The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty in Historical Perspective”. JPRI Working Paper No. 78: June 2001. Available at the JPRI website. (10) “Romulo demolished” see John Price “A Just Peace?” (11)Japan’s economic status in 1951, Romulo’s role, conversations of Finance minister Ikeda, the 100-billion yen budget surplus and the $200-million in gold in the Bank of Japan. Drawn from John Price, “A Just Peace.” (12) Senator Smith’s remarks are included in the Congressional Record, September 10, 2001 pages S9209-S9246. This contains the text of the Senate debate on the issue and is available online from the U.S. Congress website. (13) The signatories to the Treaty waived “all reparations claims”, but recently declassified documents show that Dulles “in negotiating this clause, also negotiated a way out of it.” Because of the reparations clause, Korea, China and the Soviet Union refused to sign the agreement and for a time it looked like the Netherlands was also going to refuse. Dulles was frightened that if the Netherlands refused that this might encourage the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to follow suit. Just hours before the Treaty was signed, Dulles arranged a confidential exchange of letters between Dutch foreign minister Dirk Stikker and Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru of Japan. In these letters, the government of Japan stated that it did “not consider that the Government of the Netherlands by signing the Treaty has itself expropriated the private claims of its nationals so that, as a consequence thereof, after the Treaty comes into force these claims would be non-existent.” The revelations about Dulles providing for a secret clause to allow for reparations agreements. See Steven C.Clemons, “Recovering Japan’s Wartime Past and Ours,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 10 September 2001. The article is also available at www.asiamedia.ucla.edu. It is also the source for the quote from the Stikker Yoshida letters. (14) “As much as $100-billion” is from the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, report of February 14, 1951 as quoted in Uldis Kruze, San Francisco and the 1951 US-Japan Treaty Conference, San Francisco: University of San Francisco, 2001. The pamphlet prepared for the 50th anniversary celebration was regarded by many people as another statement by apologists for Japan’s actions during World War Two. Ironically, Mr. Kruze includes many quotes from contemporary sources that support our contention of Japan’s looting of Asia and he even goes so far as to say the “peace treaty was kind to Japan.” The pamphlet also includes a photograph of Dulles at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where an exhibit of art treasures had been assembled for the peace treaty signing. The exhibit was prepared by Dr. Jiro Harada, head of the former Imperial Household Museum. Dr. Harada had presided over the imperial collections since the 1920s. In 1937, only a few months before the Rape of Nanking, the Imperial Household Museum was inaugurated. Here, the priceless mansucripts, art and religious treasure of Asia, looted by the Japanese, were stored and exhibited as part of the imperial treasures. At the end of the war, the Occupation authorities hastily renamed it the National Museum, but Dr. Harada continued as its chief. Today, Korea and many other Asian countries continue to petition the government of Japan for the return of art works looted from their citizens, religious organizations and private collections.

Ron, I think part of the name confusion arises from differences between Cubans of Spanish descent, and Cubans of Catalan descent, both of whom occur in John's excellent thread. In Spanish the word "mill" as in windmill, would be rendered Molina/Molinas. In Catalan it would be Molins. This has caused a lot of confusion for centuries, among Anglos, and is apparent in arguments about whether John Cabot was British, or a Catalan named Joan/Juan Cabot who was working for the Brits. Cabotage is the act of "coasting" on a boat or ship, so the Catalans argue that John Cabot was a professional Catalan skipper expert in coasting, who was hired to pilot the British vessel that "discovered" North America. Catalans were always among the most adventuresome "Spanish" explorers, and of course today the difference between Catalans and Spaniards is epitomized by the intense rivalry between the football (soccer) teams of Madrid and Barcelona. For more see Richard Hughes, BARCELONA. Naturally, these linguistic differences enrich the use of nommes de guerre. Sterling

Sterling Seagrave grew up on the China-Burma border, son of “Burma Surgeon” Dr. Gordon Seagrave. After several years on the staff of The Washington Post in the 1960s, he became a freelance investigative journalist in Asia, contributing to many magazines and newspapers. Since 1980 he has published nine books, in collaboration with his wife, Peggy Seagrave. They live in France. More details at their website <www.bowstring.net>.

I know Jack Singlaub personally, and knew Bill Casey slightly, as well. Jack is an incredibly arrogant and egotistical man who, as a consequence, does amazingly stupid things. As one of his associates told me, "Generals are different because they can shout louder." You obey them or else, whether it's stupid or not. Casey was one of the key men in the acquisition of media after WW2. It was one of his proteges (a young German immigrant to the US) who was sent back to Germany after the war to take over Bertelsmann and build it up. Rupert Murdoch was very tight with Shackley, which is how he got launched on his global acquisitions and has now taken over the WSJ. Murdoch was running a failed national newspaper in Australia while Shackley was station chief in Oz. Then suddenly he becomes a US citizen literally overnight and goes on an endless buying spree. Shackley's pockets were infinitely deep. At the time, Murdoch was facing the likely closure of his newspaper THE AUSTRALIAN. His ticket out was Shackley. This also explains why Murdoch was allowed to break all the rules in acquisition of media in America. I've known Peter R. Kann since Saigon days, and we were always friendly, although he and his wife's politics and involvement in the manipulations of the Condescendi made my skin crawl. His wife, Karen House, took over and ultimately destroyed the Far Eastern Economic Review because she simply did not comprehend it. So she neutralized it by making it a clone of all the other trivial magazines in the world. They all give me the creeps. We are all under that ancient Chinese curse: " May you live in interesting times."

Rupert Murdoch was very tight with Shackley, which is how he got launched on his global acquisitions and has now taken over the WSJ. Murdoch was running a failed national newspaper in Australia while Shackley was station chief in Oz. Then suddenly he becomes a US citizen literally overnight and goes on an endless buying spree. Shackley's pockets were infinitely deep. At the time, Murdoch was facing the likely closure of his newspaper THE AUSTRALIAN. His ticket out was Shackley. This also explains why Murdoch was allowed to break all the rules in acquisition of media in America.

Bill Casey was one of the key men in the acquisition of media after WW2. It was one of his proteges (a young German immigrant to the US) who was sent back to Germany after the war to take over Bertelsmann and build it up. Rupert Murdoch was very tight with Shackley, which is how he got launched on his global acquisitions and has now taken over the WSJ. Murdoch was running a failed national newspaper in Australia while Shackley was station chief in Oz. Then suddenly he becomes a US citizen literally overnight and goes on an endless buying spree. Shackley's pockets were infinitely deep. At the time, Murdoch was facing the likely closure of his newspaper THE AUSTRALIAN. His ticket out was Shackley. This also explains why Murdoch was allowed to break all the rules in acquisition of media in America.

I know Jack Singlaub personally, and knew Bill Casey slightly, as well. Jack is an incredibly arrogant and egotistical man who, as a consequence, does amazingly stupid things. As one of his associates told me, "Generals are different because they can shout louder." You obey them or else, whether it's stupid or not. Casey was one of the key men in the acquisition of media after WW2. It was one of his proteges (a young German immigrant to the US) who was sent back to Germany after the war to take over Bertelsmann and build it up. Rupert Murdoch was very tight with Shackley, which is how he got launched on his global acquisitions and has now taken over the WSJ. Murdoch was running a failed national newspaper in Australia while Shackley was station chief in Oz. Then suddenly he becomes a US citizen literally overnight and goes on an endless buying spree. Shackley's pockets were infinitely deep. At the time, Murdoch was facing the likely closure of his newspaper THE AUSTRALIAN. His ticket out was Shackley. This also explains why Murdoch was allowed to break all the rules in acquisition of media in America. I've known Peter R. Kann since Saigon days, and we were always friendly, although he and his wife's politics and involvement in the manipulations of the Condescendi made my skin crawl. His wife, Karen House, took over and ultimately destroyed the Far Eastern Economic Review because she simply did not comprehend it. So she neutralized it by making it a clone of all the other trivial magazines in the world. They all give me the creeps. We are all under that ancient Chinese curse: " May you live in interesting times."

Mr. Seagrave, Thanks for joining this Forum. I've enjoyed reading all of your posts. Based on information in this and other threads I just ordered the hardback edition of Gold Warriors. I'm looking forward to reading it. Could you briefly elaborate on the two additional chapters contained in the paperback version? Thank you very much. Mike Hogan

I agree. This was the first question that I asked at our meeting in London. David argued that LBJ's response to the assassination suggested that he was unaware that it was going to take place. I will start a new thread on this topic and try to get David to answer questions on LBJ and the assassination. I have been impressed by what I would describe as the balance of the book. All pertinent views are represented and David goes to great pains to avoid expressions of personal judgement. This, IMO, has lead to what I would consider a less explosive book overall (I thoroughly enjoyed it though, very well written and enlightening) in that every reader can have their point of view reinforced. If you are a right wing nut, you can read that Kennedy was a weak, Commie loving, black (though thats not what the right winger I had in mind would say) loving president. You could side with Le May and the JCS very easily. You could understand why Kennedy 'had to go' and if you were so inclined actually rejoice. I was struck by the absolute naiveté of JFK and his brother. In a lot of places they move too soon without preparing their constinuency for the moves. I loved their vision and embraced their direction. The point I'm trying to make is, for the most part, this book allows reader's own biases prior to reading the book to be reinforced whilst at the same time permits re-evaluation, if one was inclined. Two stools which are notoriously hard to straddle for any writer. There were three non-military men in the first tier of government whose careers were to be terminated by JFK, and they already knew they were doomed if JFK remained in place. These were Allen Dulles, LBJ, and LBJ’s neighbor J. Edgar Hoover. Although LBJ would have been the chief victim of the Bobby Baker case, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles had both been involved in collusion with LBJ and his patron Sam Rayburn in defense industry bribery and the myriad other scandals that made the Bobby Baker case such a pig-wallow. IMO, the temptation to pin the assassination and coup on one mastermind is a dangerous error, which is a good reason not to point the finger at LBJ alone. It’s one of the virtues of David Talbot’s book that he does not point the finger at LBJ or any other individual. Start making a list of all those who probably were involved in various ways, and you end up with pages and pages of names. Talbot has done a service by avoiding this and maintaining a remarkably moderate tone throughout his book. Readers who would become hostile to finger pointing will now come to see the context of the coup and begin to grasp that the Kennedys were murdered by their seniormost military and civilian colleagues. Who then had the power to cover it all up with the Warren Commission, and throw away the key. Sterling Seagrave

There may have been a time, long ago, when The Washington Post was something like its mythic image from all the hype surrounding its role in Watergate. But this was achieved by the hard work and tenacity of many individuals who passed through its editorial turnstile. It was never the achievement of the Washington Post corporation -- as any honest reporter or editor who worked there would affirm. Today, especially since Donald Graham has taken over from his late mother, The Washington Post is barely a mere shadow of that myth. Instead, it is a Trojan horse posing as what it used to be, while actually being one of the leading elements in Mockingbird. During the years I worked at The Washington Post, I directly observed (more than once) the collusion of its senior-most editors with LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover and others. Specifically I will cite the instance of Hoover’s aide and joyboy Walter Jenkins being caught by vice squad cops for the umpteenth time soliciting in a men’s room. I sat at my desk three or four feet from the telephone on which LBJ (at a banquet in New York) told Russell Wiggins and Alfred Friendly how LBJ wanted them to play the story. Both senior editors (the editor in chief and the managing editor) literally groveled. Whatever illusions I had about the paper died at that instant. It was only among the first of many similar instances I observed directly. Any critique the Post makes of David Talbot’s book and to boost Bugliosi should go straight into the trash. Sterling Seagrave

From what I've read so far, I think David Talbot's book "Brothers - The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" is the most important book to address the assassination of JFK in years, mainly because it provides the propert approach, perspective, synopsis, deep background and overall big picture to the assassination that is necessary before resolving the crime. Discarding the Conspiracy Theorists vs. Lone Nut debate that has dominated the media, Talbot cuts a path that allows a third, independent force to enter the discussion, and the game, and make the political and legal moves necessary to determine the total truth, in our lifetime. Whether justice will follow is yet to be seen. But the Great Game isn't up until everyone is dead. And that hasn't happened yet. Kiddoos to David Talbot for setting the stage for the next Act in the greatest political drama of our times. The best is yet to come. BK Bill makes an excellent point. I’m puzzled that so many people flatly want to know what individual was behind JFK’s murder, such as LBJ, when it has been obvious for a long time that a large number of people were either directly involved, or on the periphery, or in the cover-up. The notion that it was a Mafia hit, or a CIA-Mafia hit, may be comforting to those with a short attention span, but merely distracts us from the fact that it was much larger than that. Anyway, who can neatly separate the CIA from the Mafia, or Alpha 66, or Operation 40, or Opus Dei, or The Knights of Malta, or the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex, or The Fed, the Trilats, the Bilderbergs, etc., when they are all intertwined -- hence the old nickname “The Octopus”. In the multiple threads of this excellent Forum the intimacy of those linkages are there to be seen, and traced from one to another to another. The sheer number of people involved (or witting) tends to obscure one of the crucial questions: Why was JFK murdered? I’ve thought about this a great deal since being on The Washington Post staff and in the newsroom when JFK was shot, being part of the team covering the assassination, and writing the first Post profile on Jack Ruby. I’m waiting for the book to arrive and shed more light on this, but my personal conclusion is that JFK told too many people what he was planning to do, who he was planning to fire, and what he was going to change. This gave a lot of power freaks time to find common ground, and to develop a number of scenarios, of which Dallas was only one. How many people are aware that JFK was invited to go bird-hunting on a ranch outside Dallas the next day? (I read it on one of the Post’s news tickers, minutes before the shooting began.) There are larger issues here than “who struck John”. My impression of the book, so far, is that it will address a lot of these more profound (and scary) subjects. Sterling Seagrave

Benjamin Fulford is former Asia-Pacific editor of FORBES, who has just published a book in Japan with a Japanese co-author, which essentially examines the Christian Zionist cabal that colludes with some extremist Israeli (and non-Israeli) Jewish Zionists in current doomsday policies in the Middle East. Benjamin, who is himself a Jew, has come under extreme attack from the Wiesenthal Center, which is trying to get his book banned, and to destroy the company that published it by freezing their financial assets. Benjamin also mentions below a passage in his book that refers to the ownership of the US Fed as being primarily Rockefeller, Mellon (both Christian families), and the Warburgs (Jewish). He does not mention the Rothschilds or other Jewish members of the financial cabal such as the Oppenheimers. However, here is a good illustration of the extreme and unscrupulous tactics of the cabal (whether Christian, Jewish, Shinto, or whatever), to not only suppress but to destroy criticism of any kind. Imagine the irony of the Wiesenthal Center threatening to crush a publishing company unless they remove from circulation a book, written by a person of Jewish ancestry, that denounces genocide. The trigger for this ongoing outrage was some mistranslations from the book "Nietsche understood: the Judeo-Christian mechanism for creating a global monoculture." The mistranslations were sent by a former Israeli embassy official working at Nemri, an organization founded by former Mossad members. In the past, when the Wiesenthal Center has made a complaint about a book or magazine article in Japan, they have been unwilling to accept revisions or clarifications but demand complete bans. Publishers that refused to comply have been subjected to systematic advertising boycotts and a recall of their bank loans. Company presidents have also been forced to resign. Attached you can find a letter sent to the Wiesenthal Center with translations of the sections of the book they complained about and suggestions for removing any possible anti-semitic nuance. If they refuse to accept these clarifications I suggest holding a press conference with Tokuma, the publishers of the book, where we will identify the entire network of blackmail, starting with specific banks and advertising agencies and working right up the chain of command. If there is one lesson I have learned from the holocaust it is this: We must never allow such things to take place again. Below you will find my response to the letter they sent to my publisher. Benjamin Fulford Dear Sirs, As the author of the problematic parts of the book, first of all I would like you to know that I deplore racism and prejudice in all its forms, including anti-semitism. I apologize if the passages you point to create the impression that I am an anti-semite and I am willing to make changes to make sure my intent is not misinterpreted. Below you will find my translations of the problematic sections including their context and my suggestions for removing any misunderstanding. First the title. Here is my translation: "Nietche Understood: the Judeo-Christian mechanism for creating a world monoculture. If you read the book it is very obvious this is about belief systems and not about temporal world conquest. Page 30: President Bush is a Christian fundamentalist and his beliefs are linked with U.S. Middle-Eastern policy. Bush really believes the end times are close. He says "I am doing God's will." So, he killed 650,000 Iraqis and aligned himself with Israeli extremists. Instead of wanting a peace treaty and doing something about the Palestinian issue, his real aim is to kill them all and turn the whole Middle East into his own people's territory. Here definitely, I need to make changes. First of all, instead of saying Bush killed 650,000 people, I propose saying 650,000 people died violently as a result of his invasion of Iraq (The 650,000 figure comes from Lancet). The reference to killing them all and turning the Middle-East into his own people's territory, is too vague and wrong. I refer here to the radical Christian fundamentalist belief of the Rapture that holds that Christ will return when all lands between the Euphrates and the Nile revert to the Jews. I also point out that it is in the records of the Israeli Parliament that Israel tried to develop biological weapons that only kill Arabs. Here is a quote for you guys to contemplate: "Advanced forms of biological warfare that can specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." (From page 60 of the essay "Rebuilding America's Defenses" written by, among others Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Jebb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Forbes.) I also point out that thousands of tons of uranium dust has been spread throughout Iraq and that the inventor of so-called depleted uranium weapons has become a whistleblower warning of millions of deaths. A physicist from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories told me that much of the Iraqi population could die as a result of the uranium dust left behind. Because of the nature of radioactivity these deaths will take place starting a decade from now. If there is one lesson I learned from the holocaust it is this: WE MUST NEVER ALLOW SUCH THINGS TO HAPPEN EVER AGAIN. So, in view of the above information, how do you suggest we proceed? I suggest saying "650,000 people died violently as a result of Bush's invasion of Iraq. If there is one lesson to be learned from the holocaust is that we must never let such a thing happen again. There are signs that some very radical people want to kill a large part of the Iraqi population and we must make sure this does not happen. Page 90: "For example, the jews make up only 3% of the U.S. population but account for 27% of its Nobel Prize winners. Most of these are Ashkenazim. These people were only allowed to partake in certain professions, notably finance. As a result of this they began to have a hidden influence. To prevent attacks on themselves, they formed an alliance with the aristocrats of Europe. These are the roots of some secret societies. They wanted to build their own country so, after many years of effort, they were able to establish Israel. This is a very difficult issue that needs to be tread on carefully but, it is a fact that a very small group of people secretly control great power. Some of these people are Jewish and some of them are not. It is just a question of percentages. That is why I am strongly opposed to the malign expression "Jewish Capital". This would be like, in Japan, referring to Yakuza crime gangs as "Burakumin [minority people] capital". I personally hate anti-semitism. But, the reality is that there are really some bad people who use the Jewish taboo as camouflage. It is like in Japan were fake Dowa gangs use the Dowa taboo [against discrimination] to cover up for bad activities. In a similar way, there are people who are doing evil things on a global scale who use the Jewish taboo as camouflage. If you say a small group of financiers control the world people automatically accuse you of being an anti-semite. The people I am referring to above are mostly not Jews. I am talking about the families that own the U.S. Federal Reserve Board such as the Rockefellers, the Mellons (both Christian) and the Warburgs (Jewish). I think one of the causes of the resurgence in anti-semitism is that these and other hyper-wealthy families, most of whom are not Jewish, use anti-semitism as camouflage for large-scale gangsterism. My suggestion is to add a sentence at the end of that section saying "But the fact is that this group has nothing to do with the Jews." Here is my translation of the problematic section on pages 172-173: America was founded by people who fled British oppression. Their philosophy of live and let live meant that traditionally the U.S. was a country with little anti-semitism. In the long stream of U.S. history anti-semites like Henry Ford were the exception. The UK also had relatively little anti-semitism and people got along well. A good example is the fact that Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew, became Prime Minister. Incidentally, in both the U.S. and England freemasons served as a sort of mediator between Jews and Gentiles by providing a social gathering place that was not a Church. One type of thinking that has been ingrained in me since childhood is that prejudice is wrong. I especially hate racism. I also felt guilt about the Jews because I had been taught they experienced discrimination for many years. To make sure something like the Holocaust never takes place again, criticizing Jews has become a very big taboo in Western society. I personally have no wish to be prejudiced against Jews. I have Jewish blood from my mother's side [Hollander] so I am myself a Jew. I want to make this very clear before I say this: Within the Jewish community there are some Mafia-like people who use the anti-semitism taboo who have taken over the media. The people I am referring to are 7 individuals and, if necessary, I can name them. The fact is I believe the owners of the big media companies do the Jewish community a disservice by making taboo discussions that openly appear in the Israeli media. They add to an atmosphere of anti-semitism and, with their ham-headed censorship, they fan the prejudice that Jews control the media. It is not Jews who control the media, it is a small cabal of old men whose ethnic identity I should have not bothered to mention. So, how about saying "There is a small group of people who own much of the U.S. media who censor things related to the Middle-East that would not be censored in Israeli media." In conclusion, I would like to say I appreciate the work the Wiesenthal Center has done over the years and I hope you use your moral influence to help tame homicidal neo-con impulses. I also apologize if I have mistakenly created the impression I am an anti-semite.

Hi Charles ~ Sorry, but Peggy only lets me out of my cage every other day. No. Not that I recall. I know the term, but don't associate it with recoveries of Japanese loot in the PI. There everything seems to have been done by Willoughby's G-2 (with help from US Army Corps of Engineers) until CIA came on the scene and privatized it. However, in Japan, Willoughby re-focussed on having leftists and liberals assassinated, and employing Kodama, Sasakawa and other war criminals excused from Sugamo Prison -- so the US Army carried out most recoveries in the Home Islands. This is supported by US Army archives that cite an astonishing quantity of recovered war loot and drugs. This meant a number of organizations became involved in Japan. Sterling

Pat ~ We had not looked into the murder of Holohan by Icardi, but it follows: It was James Jesus Angleton who was in charge of CIA covert ops in Italy, which were largely carried out through the Sicilian Mafia following a deal made with Mafia families in America, and the Vatican's Opus Dei and other militant orders, who shared the Mafia's fear of a Communist takeover of Italy after WW2. In Manila, Santa Romana was a member of Opus Dei, working with Lansdale and the CIA in moving Japanese looted gold to the Vatican bank and other banks in Europe and South America with links to the Vatican. A lot of this bullion was physically moved and guarded in transit by the Mafia (as verified by a schematic diagram drawn by President Marcos, showing the basic networking of The Umbrella, reproduced on our CDs). While the Mafia carried out the rough stuff, including murdering anyone who voted for the Italian Communist Party, the Mafia and Opus Dei had what can only be described as an "uneasy relationship" -- very accurately portrayed BTW in "Godfather-3" -- and illustrated by the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, and related murders, including of a Pope. This arrangement preceded the CIA and was functioning during WW2, linking OSS-Vatican-Mafia long before the Allied landings in Sicily. The fact that Holohan was an Irish Catholic OSS agent moving bullion covertly to the Italian underground, which was largely communist , while Icardi was a violently anti-communist Mafia hit-man who saw a chance to divert the bullion to Palermo, gives you all you need to value the Italian conviction. However, the deal made by Washington with the American Mafia families, meant that "made guys" like Icardi had to be protected (absolved). Williams was a flamboyant choice to pleade the case, but the key was the CIA agent Maheu who got an Italian "communist" patsy to take the fall -- all part of blaming the PCI for everything including rancid olive oil. The same Maheu, I believe, who ended up wiping Howard Hughes' backside, and appears to have been one of many involved in the JFK assassination. See our new Epilogue for Wild Bill Donovan's history in all this. Angleton later was promoted to chief of counter-intelligence at the CIA, a job Angleton confided he got only when he swore he would never subject either Allen Dulles or John Foster Dulles to lie detector tests about their pre-war and wartime collaboration with Nazi bankers and secret agents. Sterling Seagrave

Sure. Allen Dulles was a servant of the people who set up the Fed, and Edward Lansdale also. Lansdale was extremely close to HL Hunt and the Murchisons, and to Bill Pawley, Meyer Lansky, Nixon, Santo Trafficante, Shackley and Clines. Col. Fletcher Prouty, who firstmet Lansdale in Manila in 1945 and later became the primary liaison between DIA and CIA, while also being a VIP pilot of Air Force One, was a crucial source for our research. He personally identified Lansdale in the crowd at Dealey Plaza. You may not know this, but if they had failed at Dealey Plaza, JFK was supposed to go hunting with the Texas Robber Barons the following day. I could go on and on and on. **************************************************************** Dear Mr. Seagrave, I consider Col. L. Fletcher Prouty to be a mentor of mine since I first came upon his works being distributed by a company based in Costa Mesa, CA, known as The Noontide Press, in 1990. Have you ever been contacted by Len Osanic to appear on Black Op Radio to speak about your books and your contribution to the cause? Len is the archivist for all of Prouty's works and has kept his site known as www.prouty.org going since before I remember finding it on the web in 1997, when I first went on-line. As I write this to you, there is an 8 X 10 framed photo of Prouty looking down on me from the wall to the right of my computer. A birthday gift to me from Len a few years back. I don't get a chance to go to the site as much as I used to, but I catch the archived shows of BOR, especially when Len sends me a link to something he feels I need to know. I have met with Len a couple of times on his trips down to L.A., and he always has a home at my house, and use of my truck, if he needs it. I really want to purchase your full set of works, as soon as possible. My e-mail address is tmauro@pacbell.net. Do you take B of A VISA? Because,- the more I read of your posts, the more imperative the need for me to get my hands on your books. I just got off the phone with Len Osanic, informing him that I'm in the middle of posting this to you on The Education Forum. He would love to hear from you, and extends the invitation to appear on his Black Op Radio Show, airing from Vancouver, B.C. every Thursday evening from 17:30 to 18:30 PST. His e-mail address is osanic@prouty.org. Please get back to me regarding the purchase of your books, ASAP, if at all possible. I am known for purchasing books for gift-giving, as a way of getting the message across, and your message has been my message for 40 or more years, and most definitely for the last seventeen. Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely yours, Theresa C. Mauro aka Ter Culver City, CA Hi Ter ~ We've been in touch with Len Osanic, who kindly provided us with a CDROM of some of Fletcher Prouty's archives. We haven't done any live interviews in a long time, except by email where we can reflect on things before we reply. We're allergic to the media because we've been burned by both a British TV producer and a Japanese TV producer. The Brit turned out to be working for some folks at the US Embassy who wanted to smear us, and the Japanese were sent to find out exactly where we lived -- which resulted in threatening midnight phonecalls from US Treasury agents to my wife's elderly parents in North Carolina, and an attempt to trick us into going to the US Consulate in Marseille for "an IRS audit" where we would have been "disappeared". We managed to block the harrassment by reporting all this to the French DEST, whose HQ is just down the road. /// The only book we sell at our website is the first edition of GOLD WARRIORS, and three CDs of documentation (BofA cards accepted, especially yours). The rest are either available at Amazon.com or at Abebooks.com (a global net of used book dealers). Probably the best edition of Gold Warriors is the paperback, which has two new chapters added. But for those with the hardback, John Simkin has now posted PDF versions somewhere here. (I'm still a novice finding my way around here.) Sterling