Gold Warriors, The Covert History of Yamashita’s Gold : How Washington Secretly Recovered it to Set Up Giant Cold War Slush Funds and Manipulate Foreign Governments, by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, originally published 2002 by Bowstring Books, 3rd edition 2010, 617 pages. Available free from Internet Archive or Kindle Unlimited or as free Audiobook. (I have no trouble recommending free access, since the Seagraves are no longer alive.)
How did our CIA become so immensely powerful and so immensely corrupt?
This book tells a story that feels essentially relevant to me. Nevertheless, it is a story that has not been incorporated into narratives of any of the skeptical and well-informed independent journalists whom I most respect. It is 20 years old now, and the book is as exceedingly readable as it is meticulously documented.
Through wars of conquest beginning in the 19th Century, Japan systematically looted staggering quantities of gold from China, Korea, and SE Asia. Anticipating defeat in WWII, members of the Japanese imperial family sent the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Chichibu, to bury gold and jewels at dozens of remote sites on occupied Philippine islands. At the conclusion of the war, the driver of Chichibu’s jeep was captured and tortured to disclose the locations of some of the underground sites. In the Seagraves’ account, the amount of gold is many hundreds of thousands of tons, equivalent in value to the GDP of the entire world today. A portion of this loot funded the Black Eagle Trust, a secret account used to create the CIA and support its clandestine operations, fomenting wars and overthrowing popular governments around the world on behalf of the world’s largest corporations. The M-Fund was used to kickstart “democracy” in Japan by supporting the election of war criminals and reliable anti-communists. Another major share passed through the personal holdings of Ferdinand Marcos, an American-supported President and then dictator in the Philippines from 1965 – 1986. Other beneficiaries included evangelist Sun Myung Moon, VP Richard Nixon, mobster Meyer Lansky, and Pope Pius XII. In the Seagraves’ story, everyone who came in contact with this treasure was corrupted, participating in murder, treachery, and unspeakable cruelty.
My candidate for the greatest evil in the world today would be the CIA. Whether or not you agree, you have to admit it’s a mystery how this organization acquired so much power so fast. Formed in 1947 from the contained WWII spy operation called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA was already overthrowing foreign governments in 1953, 1954, and 1958, and the American government in 1963. It was the subject of warnings issued by President Truman and by President Eisenhower as he departed in 1961. By the time President Kennedy left office, it was the CIA that escorted him out, and too abruptly for him to have a chance to warn us. He had exclaimed (after he had been deceived in the Bay of Pigs fiasco) he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” Who better to place in charge of the Warren Commission investigation into his murder than Allen Dulles — who had been CIA director until JFK fired him after the Bay of Pigs?
The book is meticulously referenced with two CDs full of original documents (no longer available on the Web, to the best of my knowledge). But even more convincing is the level of narrative detail that they offer, detail that may not be relevant to the larger historical perspective, but which makes the volume fun to read, as they validate the Seagraves’ sources.
Their two best sources are Ben Valmores and Robert Curtis, both of whom they interviewed extensively. Ben had been a Filipino boy when he was kidnapped by Japanese military officers and recruited to be valet and personal servant to Prince Takeda, cousin of the Emperor. Though he was kept against his will, he was treated well and eventually came to be trusted by the royal family. As the final surrender of Gen Yamashita was foreseen, Prince Takeda entrusted Ben with a trunk full of maps with coded instructions for locating all 175 treasure vaults. Ben faithfully buried the trunks as he had been instructed, and later resisted many attempts to obtain them by trickery until after Takeda’s death in 1992.
Curtis was an American mining engineer, hired by Marcos to track down and recover Yamashita’s gold, then re-smelt it into bars that could not be chemically distinguished from the product of Filipino gold mines. Marcos originally promised Curtis a share of the haul, but betrayed him once he had served his purpose.
Another source for the book was court records from the case of Roxas vs Marcos, Hawaii 1998. Rogelio Roxas was a private Filipino citizen and amateur treasure hunter. From the court findings:
In 1961, Roxas met a man named Fuchugami in Baguio City, who claimed that his father had been in the Japanese army and had drawn a map identifying the location of the legendary “Yamashita Treasure.” …Roxas organized a group of partners and laborers to search for the treasure and obtained a permit for the purpose from Judge Pio Marcos, a relative of Ferdinand. Judge Marcos informed Roxas that, in accordance with Philippine law, a thirty-percent share of any discovered treasure would have to be paid to the government.
…After approximately seven months of searching… the group broke into a system of underground tunnels…Roxas discovered a gold-colored buddha statue, which he estimated to be about three feet in height. The statue was extremely heavy; it required ten men to transport it to the surface using a chain block hoist, ropes, and rolling logs. Although he never weighed the statue, Roxas estimated its weight to be 1,000 kilograms, or one metric ton. Roxas directed his laborers to transport the statue to his home and place it in a closet.
For context, a ton of gold at today’s price is worth about $50 million, not counting the museum value of an ancient work of art. The court document goes on to relate that Roxas’s house was raided by government agents; Roxas himself was arrested and tortured; just at this time, Marcos declared martial law and installed himself as permanent head of the Philippine government after his elected term should have expired. The testimony of Robert Curtis is cited. Curtis had been hired by Marcos originally to process the gold and make it saleable without suspicion. In the end, Marcos didn’t treat Curtis much better than he treated Roxas, and that may have motivated him to testify for Roxas as plaintiff.
Five years after his death, the Hawaiian jury awarded $43 billion to the heirs of Rogelio Roxas, the largest award in the history of jurisprudence. As the Seagrave book went to press, they were still trying to collect it in 2003.
