I'm Looking for the Golden Kitty
CHAPTER SEVEN
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
What Santy wanted to know was where the gold was hidden. He wanted the major to reveal each place where he had taken General Yamashita during the past year, where bullion and other plundered treasure was placed for recovery later. He wanted the major to take him to each site, to point out the entrance, and to describe the booby traps in detail.
This brutal interrogation of Major Kojima produced results that astounded everyone from General MacArthur all the way up to the White House, and became one of the biggest state secrets of the twentieth century. Even today it remains carefully obscured, by making all archival records on this topic inaccessible for ‘reasons of national security’.
Because of the intense secrecy surrounding this subject, trying today to trace any of those intelligence reports on war loot is like falling down a rabbit hole, entering a subterranean world full of lies, evasions, and Mad Hatters.
Dude Mad Hatter
CH 7
Lansdale was a deceptively engaging and colorful character, the elusive Cheshire Cat in our rabbit hole. Later, he became an icon of gigantic mythology, as one of America’s most famous Cold Warriors (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view). Many novelists including Graham Greene used him as the model for obsessive or pathological characters pushing the American Way in Asia. Lansdale was always on stage, acting various characters. So evasive was he about his life that the myth he contrived has overwhelmed the facts. There are two schools of thought — Lansdale as the savior of Asia, or Lansdale as war criminal and far-right hachetman. (Fletcher Prouty, a U.S. military intelligence officer and historian who shared office space with Lansdale for many years, positively identified Lansdale in photographs taken during the assassination of President Kennedy, identification confirmed by others. In the movie JFK Oliver Stone has a thinly-disguised Lansdale involved in the assassination of the president.)
What we do know, from two separate high-level sources in the CIA, is that Robert B. Anderson flew back to Tokyo with Lansdale, for discussions with MacArthur. After some days of meetings, MacArthur and Anderson flew secretly to Manila, where they were taken by Lansdale and Santy to some of the sites in the mountains, and to six other sites around Aparri at the northern tip of Luzon. In the intervening weeks, Santy’s men, aided by hand-picked teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had successfully opened several of these vaults, where MacArthur and Anderson were able to stroll down row after row of gold bars. Other sites were opened in subsequent months. In all, the recoveries took two years to complete, from late 1945 to early 1947.
From what was seen in these vaults, and also discovered by U.S. Army investigators in Japan, it became evident that over a period of 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, but a lot had been hidden in the Philippines.
Washington’s ‘official’ (public) figure for recovered Nazi gold still is only 550 metric tons. But Anderson knew better. One of his business associates saw photos in Anderson’s office of an American soldier “sitting on top of stacks of bullion that Hitler had stolen from Poland, Austria, Belgium and France. It ended up with the Allied high command and no one was allowed to talk about it.” The same source said he was taken to the courtyard of a convent in Europe where 11,200 metric tons of Nazi looted bullion had been collected.
The reason for all this discretion was a top secret project sometimes called Black Eagle, a strategy first suggested to President Roosevelt by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and his wartime advisors, John J. McCloy (later head of the World Bank), Robert Lovett (later secretary of Defense), and Robert B. Anderson (later secretary of the Treasury). Stimson proposed using all recovered Axis war loot (Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese) to finance a global political action fund. Because it would be difficult if not impossible to determine who were the rightful owners of all the looted gold, better to keep its recovery quiet and set up a trust to help friendly governments stay in power after the war. This was informally called the Black Eagle Trust after the German black eagle, referring to Nazi bullion marked with an eagle and swastika, recovered from underground vaults of the Reichsbank.
According to some sources, the Black Eagle Trust could only have been set up with the cooperation of the most powerful banking families in America and Europe, including the Rockefellers, Harrimans, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Warburgs, and others.
Tomorrow
CHAPTER EIGHT
DIRTY TRICKS