Posted on 12/07/2003 5:25:04 PM PST by Cicero
Who has Yamashita’s gold?
By Rony V. Diaz
A PAGE-TURNER of a book came out in September this year. It’s called Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave.
The subtitle says it all. The US government got most of the gold that the Japanese Army looted in the countries it occupied. Some of the treasure trove, however, has not been found and the Seagraves believe it is in the Philippines.
The story begins with General Douglas MacArthur. At war’s end he reported finding “great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates … and currency not legal in Japan.”
The US government kept this report secret. In fact, to this day the US keeps many of its archives on postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws.
When John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to end the Allied occupation of Japan, drafted the 1951 peace treaty he made sure that all the victims of the war would be prevented from seeking compensation. He forced the other Allies to accept his draft. Only China and Russia did not sign.
Article 14 (b) of the treaty, signed in San Francisco on September 8, 1951, reads: “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.”
Why was the US so protective of Japan, the Emperor and the politicians who were responsible for the War, in fact exculpating them of any guilt? The public reason was the need to rebuild Japan as a bulwark against communism. The Seagraves see a more sinister motive: the appropriation by the US government of Japan’s war booty and its use to advance the postwar aims of the United States.
The person that the Americans used to track the gold was Yoshio Kodama, an underworld figure who sold opium in China during the war and supervised the collection and shipment to Japan of tungsten, titanium and platinum. In exchange for heroin and liquor, Kodama also collected gold coins, jewelry and objets d’art that were melted down into bars and shipped to Japan.
He grew very wealthy. On his return to Japan, he was arrested but released in 1949. With his money, he helped set up the LDP, the party that has been in power from 1949 to the present. Kodama was employed by the CIA. He also became the chief agent in Japan of Lockheed Aircraft Co. to bribe or blackmail politicians into agreeing to buy Lockheed’s fighter and cargo planes.
One of the most startling allegations in Gold Warriors concerns the role of the Imperial household in the looting of Asia. It will be remembered that General MacArthur concocted the fiction that Emperor Hirohito was blameless for the war and was misled by the militarists.
This confabulation is shattered by the disclosure that Hirohito appointed one of his brothers, a first cousin and an uncle to supervise the collection, accounting and safekeeping of war booty in the principal theaters.
A secret organization, called Kin no yuri (“Golden Lily,”) headed by Prince Chichibu, Hirohito’s brother, was set up for this purpose.
To have an idea of the value of the loot, one example is enough. After the final assault on Nanking between December 2 and 6, 1937, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, the Emperor’s uncle, removed 6,000 tons of gold from Chiang Kai-shek’s treasury that he had shipped immediately to Tokyo.
Golden Lily operatives were very active in 1941-42 when Southeast Asia, except Thailand, was occupied. They seized not only temple gold, including solid gold Buddhas, but gemstones and the monetary assets of the Dutch, British, French and Americans in their colonies. The gold was melted into ingots at a smelter in Ipoh, Malaya, marked with its degree of purity and weight. They were transported to Japan in boats disguised as hospital ships. Some of the boats were sunk by American submarines.
To prevent further losses, Chichibu ordered the headquarters of Golden Lily transferred from Singapore to Manila. Thereafter, all shipments were sent to Philippine ports.
Chichibu reasoned that in the negotiation to end the war, the Allies could be persuaded to cede the Philippines to Japan.
From 1942 Chichibu supervised the construction of “Imperial” sites to hide the loot. Slaves and POWs dug tunnels and caves and were buried alive upon their completion. There are 175 such locations.
The Golden Lily location maps were in a code that was known to only a handful of people.
Some of these repositories have been found. The key figure in their discovery was Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana (an alias), who was on the staff of General MacArthur’s chief intelligence officer, General Willoughby. Santa Romana saw a Japanese ship being unloaded and heavy boxes deposited in a tunnel whose entrance was sealed with a dynamite blast.
After the war, Santa Romana and then Captain Edward Lansdale of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) tortured the driver of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japan’s last commander in the Philippines, into revealing some of the Golden Lily sites.
Hand-picked troops of the US Army Corps of Engineers opened about a dozen Golden Lily sites in valleys north of Manila. They found gold ingots “higher than their heads.”
Lansdale reported the find to MacArthur in Tokyo, who ordered him to brief Truman’s security adviser, Clark Clifford.
According to the Seagraves, MacArthur himself and Henry Stimson flew to Manila secretly to inspect the treasure caves. They concluded that the Golden Lily sites in the Philippines contained several billion dollars’ worth of gold.
In order to keep the discoveries secret, MacArthur decided to have Yamashita tried by a court-martial for war crimes and then hanged on February 23, 1946.
Lansdale was put in charge of the recovery of the Golden Lily treasures. The Seagraves aver that Santa Romana was instructed by members of Stimson’s staff to deposit the gold in 176 banks in 42 countries. The deposits were in his name or in one of his many aliases. Negotiable certificates were issued by the banks against the gold deposits.
It was this money, the Seagraves alleged, that the CIA used to buy politicians in Japan, Greece, Italy, the UK and many other countries around the world. It also paid for the secret rearmament of Japan after the outbreak of the Korean War.
In 1974 Santa Romana died. He left a hand-written will that named Tarciana Rodriguez and Luz Rambano, his common-law wife, as his heirs.
With the help of Melvin Belli, a San Francisco lawyer, Rambano filed a suit against John Reed, the CEO of Citibank, for the “wrongful conversion” of some $20 billion of Santa Romana’s gold. The case is still unresolved.
Not all the Golden Lily sites have been discovered. President Ferdinand Marcos is said to have authorized the continuation of the search. The Seagraves say that Marcos recovered at least $14 billion in gold—$6 billion from a sunken Japanese cruiser and $8 billion from a tunnel known as “Teresa 2,” about 45 kilometers south of Manila in Rizal province.
Marcos himself supervised the opening of at least six sites and seized the gold found by other treasure hunters.
In 1998 the Supreme Court of Hawaii affirmed a judgment against his estate for $1.4 billion in favor of the alleged finder of a solid gold Buddha who said that it was stolen from him by Marcos.
The person who helped Marcos in his treasure hunting was Robert Curtis, an American mining engineer. He was hired by Marcos to resmelt the gold to hide its provenance and to make it acceptable in the international gold market.
Curtis was also able to decipher some of the extant Golden Lily maps that were in Marcos’s possession. The Curtis episodes are among the most gripping sections of the book as they include a narrow escape from death after he discovered Teresa 2.
The Seagraves correctly felt that their account is so astounding that readers might think that it is fiction.
To overcome this problem, they are making two CDs containing more than 900 megabytes of documents, maps and photographs available to any one who wants them. They can be ordered from their website—www.bowstring.net.
As a further precaution, the book ends with a note that “should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites. If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who ‘they’ are.”
Fact or fiction or a concatenation of both, Gold Warriors is a fascinating read.
Anyway, it's our duty to spread the word before the authors mysteriously disappear.
So9
Tyson and clinton split it, 50-50.
Same guy, but a far more complex and involved novel.
So9
Not any more it isn't. ~evil grin
Doubtful that would happen, this story has been around for years.
It was buried on the grassy knoll.
Says who?
Yah but under which shooter ? ;-)
The one-armed one.
To overcome this problem, they are making two CDs containing more than 900 megabytes of documents, maps and photographs available to any one who wants them. They can be ordered from their website—
Nothing sez "Wild Goose Chase" louder than an offer to sell the "treasure map".
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