VLVL background: Japanese gold & the CIA

[pynchonoid]

September 26, 2003
Gold Warriors
The Plundering of Asia

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Gold Warriors is more than a book about Japan's
"serious, sober and deliberate" plundering of Asia's
treasure from 1895 until 1945, and its collusion after
the war with American officials to recover and use the
loot as a secret political action slush fund to
promote right wing regimes: Gold Warriors:America's
Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold is a journey into
the darkest recesses of history and the human soul.
Authors Peggy and Sterling Seagrave not only unravel
one of the greatest crimes and cover-ups ever, they
reveal something new and startling about the depths of
human depravity and barbarity, and the human capacity
for deceit.

[...] It's also with the Rape of Nanking that the
authors introduce the main characters in the book; the
Japanese soldiers, crime lords, and officials who, by
the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, realize they
have bitten off more than they chew, and begin their
retreat to Japan. A small inner circle becomes
responsible for securing billions of dollars worth of
gold, platinum, cultural artifacts and precious gems
stolen over the previous 45 years. The Japanese call
this operation Golden Lily, and the Seagraves do not
shy away from naming those involved. They finger
General Doihara, and Japan's top yakuza gangster,
Kodama Yoshio, both of whom worked closely with
Chinese drug smugglers in Manchuria and Shanghai.
Golden Lily's overall boss is Prince Chichibu, one of
Emperor Hirohito's three brothers. The Kempeitai were
Golden Lily's first agents, moving 6000 metric tons of
gold from Nanking to Japan in 1938. But most of the
Golden Lily treasure was buried in the Philippines by
General Yamashita, and it is in the Philippines that
most of the action in the book takes place.

When the Seagraves claim that their lives are in
danger for having written this book, they aren't
kidding. This is explosive material, for they not only
name the Japanese involved in Golden Lily, they name
the Japanese corporations, including Nissan, Mitsui
(which processed Manchurian opium into heroin in the
1930s), Mitsubishi and Sumitomo as having used
American POWs as slave laborers during the war. They
also name the Americans who worked with the Japanese
to recover the buried loot after World War II. The
Japanese had no monopoly on deceit or disregard for
human suffering, and some of these Americans conspired
with the Japanese to deny reparations to the POWs, sex
slaves and forced laborers that survived.

The reader will learn how, in order to share in the
plunder, members of General Douglas MacArthur's
occupation army, along with US government officials
and banks, connived to absolve Japanese corporations,
war criminals and drug smugglers ­ many prominent
officials in the Post War government ­ of
responsibility for these ghastly crimes. How the
Americans went about this is very interesting. To
ensure his silence, General Yamashita was hanged by a
military tribunal in February 1946, while his right
hand man, Kojima, was tortured by a Filipino, Santa
Romana, into revealing where the treasure vaults were
buried in the Philippines. Romana then guided CIA
officer Edward Lansdale to the loot. Lansdale did a
quick inventory, and for the next 20 years supervised
Romana, the unlikely front man for a number of slush
funds. Thereafter the purloined gold was moved through
176 accounts in 42 banks in several countries, to
people and organizations the CIA wanted to secretly
support.

The Americans viewed this money as a War prize, and
every American president from Harry Truman to George
W. Bush has used the slush funds for various purposes.
Truman, through a number of his top aides close to the
Harrimans and the Rockefellers, set up the Black Eagle
Trust Fund to fight communism. General MacArthur set
up the Yotsuya Fund to finance Japan's yakuza
underworld, and one of his aides set up the M-Fund to
help reconstruct Japan and turn it into an economic
powerhouse. Eisenhower used the M-Fund to help create
Japan's Liberal Democratic Party in 1956, and in 1960,
Vice President Richard Nixon turned over M-Fund over
to Japan's Prime Minister, Kishi Nobosuke, in return
for kickbacks Nixon used to help finance his
presidential campaign. Carter, Reagan, Clinton and
both Bushes were complicit, using Golden Lily slush
fund money to buy elections in nations all around the
world. George W. got into the act in March 2001,
sending Navy SEAL commandos to the Philippines to
recover a portion of General Yamashita's gold. Bush
was privately in the market to buy some of the bullion
that was being recovered. His representative was
William S. Parish, his nominee as ambassador to Great
Britain, and the manager of his blind trust

[...] 


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com