Richard McGarrah Helms

[Linda Minor]

A question I have been curious about is how Helms is often descibed as out of the loop in the Bay of Pigs. Was he, and why did a guy whose last job was the U2 have more organizational experience with exiles than Helms-- unless designed from the very first as a failure that would require the direct intervenion. If so what did that imply about the guy who was nominally running it?

Was Helms part of a wider loop on Bay of Pigs?

I don't know about this specific question Nathaniel, but I'll wade in anyway just because it seems to me that Allen Dulles took great pains to be out of the loop during the Bay of Pigs. Literally, I mean he left the country so that on the day of the invasion Kennedy was left holding the bag, and that was part of the setup that was supposed to force Kennedy to call in the overt armed forces.
The CIA is so good at being plausibly deniably "out of the loop."

You may remember this exchange in Posts #11 and #12 at EF involving Sterling Seagrave:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....topic=9196
The death of FDR brought about a sea-change in America that restored to power essentially the same group that had gained control under Woodrow Wilson and hugely expanded that power under Herbert Hoover. They were the same people who would have preferred an alliance with the Nazis against the Soviets, but were outmaneuvered by FDR and Churchill. Many of them had never lost power under FDR, simply submerging, remaining as a 5th Column, or taking refuge in the OSS, or on Wall Street. Averell Harriman, for example, posed as a Democrat, while his magazine NEWSWEEK became a key reactionary instrument in attacking the credentials of war crimes investigators, journalists, and sabotaging systematically the long-projected reform of Japan into a democratic society. Only land reform was accomplished before the group including Hoover, Harriman, Morgan, Rockefeller, and others using General MacArthur as their cat’s-paw, were able to redeem Hirohito, free all the indicted war criminals from Sugamo Prison, and enlist the most dangerous of them to suppress any form of democracy, labor unions, or multi-party democracy, returning government to the wartime fascists where power remains today. This was done not only to fulfill America’s Puritanical obsession with righteous money, but to acquire Japan (the most industrialized country in Asia) as an economic ally, and as a fascist bulwark against the encroaching Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, or any group of underdogs whose protests could easily be labeled Leftist. Control of US and European media was a priority, a lesson learned from Goebbels, and the vast treasures looted by the Nazis and the Japanese were used in secret slush funds to acquire newspapers, magazines, radio and later television, throughout the world. This was an imperfect effort at Mediopoly, but it had the result of dumbing down the audience. And in the meantime war crimes investigators who persisted in Asia were victims of “assisted suicide” or mysterious plane crashes. Thousands of European and Asian POWs and civilian prisoners and slave laborers were buried alive in mine-shafts and treasure vaults by Japanese corporations like Mitsubishi, while survivors were warned not to pursue lawsuits for compensation. Those tainted Japanese corporations quickly regained their global leverage, claiming that their war crimes had been the work of different, earlier, management.

Ultimately, the motive of American politicians, financiers, industrialists, lobbyists, and their journalistic pawns, was to replace global European empires with an American empire - to profit in countless ways from WW2 as they had from WW1. They were quick to do so, so quick that OSS agents in Bangkok who thought they were still at war with fascism were astonished to be replaced overnight by CIA agents who were allied with fascism against communism - publicly. It soon became evident even to the slow-witted among them that power and leverage were attained and secured by money, so once the Nazi and Japanese war loot was in the pipeline, drugs and the laundering of drug money replaced gold as the universal standard backing the dollar. It is no exaggeration to say that the day after WW2 ended, Richard Nixon woke up in bed with Meyer Lansky.

I agree with that historical analysis completely, and it fits in with the importance of Texan Jesse Jones, who left the FDR administration to return to his friends in Texas who were affiliated with the Mellon oil and banking empire.

In later posts to that thread at EF, John Simkin attached chapter 17 from Gold Warriors later edition and an epilogue containing this:

Two attachments.
Excerpt from Gold Warriors--epilogue:

Currently, when “black gold” is recovered from Japanese treasure vaults in the Philippines it enters the world market through an agency in Australia with genetic ties to the Bank of England. First the ingots are taken to Manila where they are assayed by international gold buyers (one of whom is our source). Once satisfied with the assay, the broker buys the gold at a deep
discount, then airlifts or sealifts it to Australia where it is “sanctified” by Johnson Matthey Bank (JMB), the UK gold bank that worked with President Marcos. Following a major scandal with questions in Parliament, JMB was absorbed in late 1984 by the Bank of England. Two years later, in April 1986, the JMB bullion operation was sold to the biggest Australian banking, mining, and bullion syndicate, Mase-Westpac. Our gold broker source swears that upon reaching Australia the gold is re-smelted to London standard by JMB and re-papered by JMB, and then simply joins the flow of newly-mined gold shipped from Australia to the City of London, where it enters the world market.5 That at least appears to establish a direct link between gold laundering and the BoE.

Sources in Manila also insist that Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, whose family is so closely identified with the Bank of England and the US Fed, is the true majority owner of the Benguet goldmines in the Philippines. There is nothing startling about that, in and of itself, but the Benguet board has long been dominated by members of Imelda Marcos’s Romualdez family, and still is today....

During the Marcos years, a big piece of Benguet was acquired by a group of Wall Street venture capitalists who shared property ownership and a casino in the Bahamas with the Mafia’s Meyer Lansky....

Helliwell’s ultimate boss during and after WW2, was Wall Street attorney and former OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who also was the boss of Allen Dulles, William Colby, Bill Casey, and others who later became heads of the CIA – and an intimate friend of Meyer Lansky....

The front man for Helliwell was banker General Erle Cocke, a Grand Commander of the Knights of Malta, to which Donovan and many other OSS and CIA brass belonged – which was, in turn, closely linked to Vatican secret services. Knights of Malta membership is dominated by reactionary European aristocracy and Americans whose names read like a Who’s Who of the Black
Eagle Trust: Former OSS chief Donovan, former CIA top brass William Colby, John McCone, William Casey, George H. W. Bush, James Jesus Angleton, and Vernon Walters. Also on the roster were General Douglas MacArthur’s intimates, General Charles Willoughby and General Bonner Fellers. Last but not least, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig who negotiated the “57” in Tokyo with the help of the first President Bush, described in Chapter 9.

Donovan was the chief spider – America’s original man in black. It was Donovan, working behind the scenes with John J. McCloy and the Dulles brothers, who set up the global network of secret funds and black banks that made creative use of the Black Eagle Trust, and laundered drug profits before they entered U.S. banks to bolster the American economy. This was racketeering on a global scale, run by covert agents of the U.S. Government, with proceeds so huge the only way to hide them was by claiming National Security was constantly at stake....

In 1923, he [Donovan] was a little-known Assistant U.S. Attorney in the state of New York, who became friends with super-rich Albert Lasker, one of the heads of the General American Tank Car Company, which had the first patent for a welded petroleum railway tank car (without rivets) and dominated the shipment of Rockefeller petroleum on Harriman railways. This, plus Lasker’s tight family connections with Germany, and his financial cronyism with most of the Robber Barons, allowed him to introduce Donovan to all the right people....

Once OSS was set up, Donovan became heavily involved in opium and heroin, mingling narcotics with espionage during the war.8 He learned a lot from the Brits. In China, he worked with SOE’s William and John Keswick of Jardine-Matheson, Britain’s biggest opium cartel in Asia, with a controlling interest in
Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, and ties to the Openheimer family through the giant mining firm Rio Tinto Zinc....

Donovan also set up a special office in OSS called X-2, which spied on foreign insurance companies – many of the biggest being in Nazi Germany....

In 1946, when the OSS was shut down by Truman, to be succeeded by the CIA, Donovan pretended to resume private practice as a Wall Street attorney, but in reality spent most of his time helping Paul Helliwell set up black banks to make use of the Black Eagle Trust....Mixing drugs and espionage in Italy, Donovan and Angleton forged a three-way alliance with the Mafia, the postwar Christian Democratic Party, and the Vatican. New York narcotics boss Frank Coppola was recruited to be Donovan’s liaison with Sicilian godfather Salvatore Giuliano.

...The point here is that it was not strictly a CIA operation, it was a Donovan operation supported by the CIA, and Donovan’s WCC had been set up with Rockefeller money. Where do you draw the line?

Air America was dreamed up by Donovan and Old China Hands William Pawley, Whiting Willauer, and General Claire Chennault. In the 1930s, Pawley had set up the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO) for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, to assemble planes for what later were called the Flying Tigers....Meanwhile, Pawley helped Donovan persuade Texas right-wing oil man H.L. Hunt to support the KMT regime with millions of dollars for covert operations....

The fact that the US Government has been able to pull in all this gold, both Japanese and Nazi war loot and gold from a large number of endangered banks and desperate individuals, and then renege on redeeming their holdings, has enabled the US to acquire companies and properties throughout the world that represent an American financial global empire by massive fraud. One is tempted to speculate that these manuevers were part of what put the Clinton Administration in the black. US imperial policy pretends to occupy a theological and morale highground compared to Old Europe and Old Asia, but it is a farce.

It was all summed up brilliantly by Henry Ford: “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

[David Guyatt]

Since Seagrave drew on some of my research without crediting it and published documentation in his Gold Warrior's I sent him in strict confidence, which he had agreed to abide by but didn't, I feel I can add some insights here. He got some things wrong. That's the problem with swiping other peoples work without understanding the background of how it arose.

For example, General Erle Cocke was not a Grand Commander of the Knights of Malta. If he had scrutinized Project Hammer with more care he would've have known that Cocke claimed to be as he stated (actually I stated) but that further ongoing research revealed he was not listed on the SMOM membership. I checked with Guy Stair Santy who is the acknowledged world expert on Chivalric Orders. And I made this clear in part two of my Hammer file, "Project Hammer Reloaded" and my earlier "Spoils of War".

Almost certainly Cocke was a Grand Commander of the fake SMOM Order the Shickshinny Knights - and this, of course, would open up a whole new vipers nest because Shickshinny Knights were, by and large, fascists who ran a private intelligence service rivaling the CIA. My guess is that this rival service was fed and nourished by the Vatican intelligence service, the world's oldest and arguably most effective intelligence gathering service. But this is simply speculation on my part, obviously.

One person who was a Shickshinny knight was Colonel Philip Corso, a former post WWII "Paperclip" officer who was possibly involved with the Gladio network when he worked with Gehlen's BND. He is, perhaps, best remembered for his sensational book "The Day After Roswell" which purported to tell the "true" story about the recovery of aliens and alien technology in the "UFO crash" at Roswell in New Mexico in 1947. Need I say more?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Since Seagrave drew on some of my research without crediting it and published documentation in his Gold Warrior's I sent him in strict confidence, which he had agreed to abide by but didn't, I feel I can add some insights here. He got some things wrong. That's the problem with swiping other peoples work without understanding the background of how it arose.

For example, General Erle Cocke was not a Grand Commander of the Knights of Malta. If he had scrutinized Project Hammer with more care he would've have known that Cocke claimed to be as he stated (actually I stated) but that further ongoing research revealed he was not listed on the SMOM membership. I checked with Guy Stair Santy who is the acknowledged world expert on Chivalric Orders. And I made this clear in part two of my Hammer file, "Project Hammer Reloaded" and my earlier "Spoils of War".

Almost certainly Cocke was a Grand Commander of the fake SMOM Order the Shickshinny Knights - and this, of course, would open up a whole new vipers nest because Shickshinny Knights were, by and large, fascists who ran a private intelligence service rivaling the CIA. My guess is that this rival service was fed and nourished by the Vatican intelligence service, the world's oldest and arguably most effective intelligence gathering service. But this is simply speculation on my part, obviously.

One person who was a Shickshinny knight was Colonel Philip Corso, a former post WWII "Paperclip" officer who was possibly involved with the Gladio network when he worked with Gehlen's BND. He is, perhaps, best remembered for his sensational book "The Day After Roswell" which purported to tell the "true" story about the recovery of aliens and alien technology in the "UFO crash" at Roswell in New Mexico in 1947.

David - thank you for providing that highly illuminating background.

Need I say more?

No. :listen:

Yes. :alberteinstein:

[Linda Minor]

David,
Do you remember, years ago, we were looking into the Shickshinny Knights, which seemed to originate in a remote area of western Pennsylvania. I seem to recall finding some links to old banking families in Pennsylvania--Drexels, Biddles, and intelligence assets married into those families--basicially affiliated with the Morgan banking empire (Bullitt) before it was taken over by the Percy Rockefeller group around 1933-34 (which has been operated by the investment banking network of the Bush family including its intelligence assets).

David's work:
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/the_spoils_of_war.htm

Some of my old research:
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lm7,1,02,h...ronpt5.htm
Elite Philadelphia Families Tied to Global Agendas of Old World Wealth

The house of Drexel & Co. was founded in 1837 by Francis Martin Drexel, an Austrian, born in Dornbirn, Tyrol in western Austria near Switzerland and Liechtenstein, who arrived in the U.S. in 1817, one year before a branch of Brown Brothers opened in Philadelphia. Associated with him were his sons Francis Anthony, Anthony Joseph, and Joseph William. Francis Anthony Drexel, who married Emma Bouvier (the sister of John Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy's great grandfather), in 1863 became the senior member of the firm. 15 He forged an alliance in 1871 with Junius Morgan's son, J. Pierpont, to allow Drexel to tap into the lucrative European market for American bonds. Drexel's place of birth was the province controlled by the German merchant prince family of Fugger, who built the Fuggerei "poor house" in Tirol, and whose wealth had enabled them to make large loans to the German king, Maximilian I. 16 It was the debts to the Fuggers that resulted in the British Crown's being given to William and Mary from Amsterdam, who chartered the Bank of England in 1694. It is not known whether Drexel had connections to the descendants of this wealthy German family. The new firm--established in New York--became Drexel, Morgan & Co., and another firm, called Drexel, Harjes & Co., was in Paris. Anthony married Ellen Roset and had three sons and four daughters, one of whom, Emilie, married a Biddle. In 1891 Anthony Drexel founded, and endowed with $2,000,000, the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia, now Drexel University, and died at Karlsbad, Germany, in 1893.

Emilie Drexel Biddle's grandson, Andrew Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr., after his first marriage to Mary Duke of the North Carolina tobacco family ended in divorce, married the daughter of William Boyce Thompson, a graduate of Phillips Exeter and Yale (also Skull and Bones), who controlled an American mining empire. Thompson is a very important player in the story of the American International Corporation, discussed later in this article. In his book, The Duchess of Windsor, Charles Higham mentions that the Duchess was a good friend of A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. and his wife, Margaret, having met with the Biddles on at least two occasions: (1) in 1940 aboard ship, when the Windsors left Portugal to take up the appointment as Governor of the Bahamas, where they entertained the Biddles and U.S. Ambassador to Italy William Phillips (of Massachusetts), at dinner; and (2) in 1951 the Windsors stayed with the Biddles in London while King George was having throat surgery.

A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. was appointed as Ambassador to Poland in 1937, just as World War II began to break out, and fled from one place to another to avoid the invading German Army, ending up in Paris, where he also served as Deputy Ambassador to France. It was in Paris that the Biddles became close friends with the Windsors, who stayed for a considerable length of time in the home of Baron Eugene Rothschild and his wife Kitty. During that time, according to Charles Higham, their "greatest friend in Paris that year was Ambassador William Bullitt ... a tacit Nazi sympathizer who was so fanatically bent upon war with Russia that he was prepared to support every kind of Fascist movement in Western Europe....He was a man after the Windsors' own heart. He schemed against the popular front and collaborated with the so-called 200 Families, which in the words of George Seldes, 'turned out to be the French Fifth Column.' " (The Duchess of Windsor, p. 276). From a reading of the various diplomatic communiqués, however, it appears that Bullitt was more motivated by financial and economic concerns than by mere politics. 17

While serving as Ambassador to Moscow, Bullitt (from an "old," elite Philadelphia family) met Louise Bryant (they married in 1923), who had formerly been married to John Reed, organizer of the American Communist Party. 18 The Bullitts had one daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt, who according to Bullitt's listing in Who's Who 1954, married Nicholas Benjamin Duke Biddle, son of A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. and his wife Mary Duke (married 1915, divorced 1931), and a nephew of Doris Duke, heiress to American Tobacco Co., the Duke Power Co. and real estate investments. It seems very strange, however, that the listing for A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. in the same volume of Who's Who does not mention his marriage to Mary Duke, nor the birth of any children. Bullitt had married Ernesta Drinker in 1916, but they divorced in 1923 without children. A lawyer named William C. Bullitt, born in Bryn Mawr in 1946, is now a partner at Philadelphia's Drinker, Biddle & Reath in the personal and fiduciary law department, as well as being a board member for Philadelphia County. He is not listed as the son of Ambassador Bullitt in the 1954 Who's Who. 19

Reed appears to have been a tool of the "left wing" forces of the Syndicate. He went to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution as a reporter for a magazine owned by Harry Payne Whitney, then a director of Guaranty Trust. Harry's sister, Dorothy, married Thomas Lamont's protégé, Willard Straight, who re-negotiated loans for J.P. Morgan & Co. at Mukden in Russia and Manchuria the decade before the Russian revolution. The Paynes were heirs of one of Rockefeller's partners in the Standard Oil trust. Dorothy and Harry's brother, Payne Whitney and his wife Helen Hay, were the parents of Joan Whitney Payson and John Hay "Jock" Whitney--a graduate of Yale (Skull and Bones) and Oxford. Jock, an investment banker and member of the syndicate we have described in earlier parts of this series, was Ambassador to Great Britain from 1957 to 1961. It is interesting as well to note that Lamont, while serving as a financial expert at the Versailles negotiations in 1919 had met Lord Robert Cecil, whom he later hosted in New York while Cecil and Philip Noel-Baker were promoting the League of Nations; Lamont was a member of the League of Nations Association and the Foreign Policy Association. 20

Bullitt was part of Col. House's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, serving as chief of the division of current intelligence. He first visited Russia in 1919 at the behest of Col. House, to whom he sent reports back, and, after meeting with Lenin, he carried a proposal from the Bolsheviks to Versailles, by which Lenin agreed to confine Soviet rule to central Russia and to release claims to all outlying provinces. When Wilson allowed Lenin's proposal to lapse, Bullitt resigned from the foreign service while denouncing the treaty. Sigmund Freud, who co-authored a psychological biography of Wilson with Bullitt, considered this "the most important single decision that he [Wilson] made in Paris." 21 Bullitt returned to a diplomatic role when Roosevelt, secretly being advised by Col. House, made him special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He then served as the executive officer of the American delegation at the London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933. In the fall of that year Bullitt was deeply involved in the negotiation of the Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements, which established diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. His appointment as the first ambassador to Moscow was announced immediately after the signing of the agreements. He left Moscow in 1936 and became Ambassador to France from 1936-41. From June 1942 to July 1943 Bullitt was a special assistant to the secretary of the navy. In 1944 he joined the French army while retaining American citizenship, and was a foreign correspondent for Life magazine to report on conditions in Italy, which had just fallen to the Allied troops. Bullitt placed a great importance on "the papacy as an institution and on the reigning pontiff." 22

In 1941 A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. was named U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Greece, Luxembourg, and Yugoslavia, whose governments were in exile in London. This extraordinary posting was termed at the time the biggest and in some ways the most important diplomatic mission ever handled by a single envoy. Biddle retired from the diplomatic corps in 1944 to resume active duty in the Army as a Lt. Colonel, rising to the rank of Brigadier General in 1951. During those years he worked closely with General Eisenhower as deputy chief of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and as a representative to United States European Command (EUCOM) and Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). 23 The 1950s found Biddle serving as Adjutant General of the State of Pennsylvania, on numerous Pennsylvania state boards and commissions, and as a trustee at Temple University. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy chose Biddle for his last diplomatic position, that of Ambassador to Spain, where he served until his death. It is fascinating to note that between the years 1955 and 1968, the ambassadorship of Spain was held by a Lodge, a Forbes and two Biddles. What could that signify? The Forbes and Lodge families, through intermarriage with Cabots, long-standing trading partners with Spanish merchants, had been global merchants for centuries, involved in trade in both slaves and opium. (Click. Part 1) Spain became a fascist haven, along with Argentina, for many Nazis fleeing Germany at the close of World War II. The Nazis had been allied with Catholics in Croatia, who turned to both the Swiss and to the Vatican to assist them in rescuing gold and other treasures looted from murdered Jews. 24

Over several generations, the Drexel family have become very close to the British royal family, with John R. Drexel IV being currently the Chancellor of the American Society of the Most Venerable Order of St. John--formerly known as the Grand Priory in the British Realm of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, formed in 1831 by some French Knights of Malta, who intended to set up a non-Catholic priory in England. This priory was designed along the lines of the German Bailiwick of Brandenburg and of a short-lived Russian Orthodox Grand Priory, which was in existence for a few years around 1800. The English priory was incorporated by royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1888. Chancellor Drexel, who was installed by the Grand Priory (Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth), is married to Noreen Stonor Drexel--from a fragment of English gentry and nobility which stubbornly maintained its Catholic faith through severe persecution during the Reformation. Their family's manor house located southeast of Oxford secretly conducted Catholic worship despite the prohibition. Mrs. Drexel's nephew is the seventh Baron Camoys (Ralph Stonor), the first Catholic to serve as the Queen's chief of staff, or Lord Chamberlain, since the reign of Henry VIII. 25

The Drexels are connected by marriage to the Astor family which was instrumental in combining the American and British elites into the Round Table group which administered the estates of Cecil Rhodes and Albert Beit, mentioned in Part Three. William Waldorf Astor's wife was Mary Dahlgren Paul from Philadelphia. The couple lived in Rome from 1882 to 1885 while Astor was US ambassador to Italy. Mary Paul Astor's brother married her husband's sister. [Source: John D. Gates, The Astor Family: A Unique Exploration of One of America's First Families (Doubleday, 1981), p. 103] Later generations of the Pauls reflect intermarriage with the Delano family--whose members are intermarried with Astors and Roosevelts. This reaffirms the fact that there was a strong link between London and Philadelphia and that an alliance was created by these intermarried drug-running families. 26

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lm7,1,02,h...ronpt5.htm
25 http://www.archdiocese-phl.org/cs&t/120700/news3.htm and http://www.saintjohn.org/history.htm
It may not be a coincidence that a mirror order to the Russian Grand Priory was formed before WWI, which would subsequently be based in Shickshinny, Pa.--thus referred to as the "Shickshinny Knights of Malta." http://www2.prestel.co.uk/church/lumpen/saucers.htm ("Saucers, Secrets and Shickshinny Knights" by Martin Davis): In the early sixties Philip Corso was a member of a secret society called The Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, also known as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, after the Pennsylvania town where the order was based. The order's "Armed Services Committee" was full of retired military types with ultra-rightist sympathies and included generals from the Douglas MacArthur circle like Bonner Fellers and Pedro del Valle. The Committee also included British Admiral Sir Barry Domville, who was fingered by the English as a Nazi agent and jailed during World War II, and General Charles Willoughby, former chief of intelligence for General Douglas MacArthur, whom MacArthur referred to as "my little fascist." The Shickshinny Knights were fanatical anticommunists. Some of them, like Willoughby, were affiliated with international ultra-rightist organizations like the World Anticommunist League and the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture. Shickshinny, PA was itself the home of many White Russians who had fled Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. In 1963, the Grand Chancellor of the Order was Col. Charles Thourot Pichel; during the thirties, Pichel had lobbied the German government to appoint him the official American liaison to Hitler. The Shickshinny Knights Armed Services Committee membership list also included Philip J. Corso, who, according to Dick Russell, "had been a twenty-year Army Intelligence career man until his retirement in August 1963". Russell notes that in 1954 Corso had been the Army Operations Coordinating Board's delegate to the CIA team planning the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. (This coup, in which the democratically elected leftist Arbenz was successfully removed from office, was primarily a U.S. intelligence operation. It was celebrated by the CIA as a "bloodless coup" because nary a shot was fired; rather, Arbenz was driven to flee the country by a barrage of U.S.-backed disinformation and propaganda. In other words, it was for the most part what spy folk call a "psy op," or psychological operation.) In 1956, Corso worked with West German paramilitary units connected to the spy network of former Nazi master spy Reinhard Gehlen.13 (Corso himself claims that he participated in Operation Paperclip, the American intelligence operation that repatriated Nazi rocket scientists like Werner von Braun and Walter Dornberger to the U.S., so that they could run the U.S. space program.) According to Peter Dale Scott, after the Kennedy assassination, both Corso and Frank Capell (another Shickshinny Knight, also an editor for the John Birch Society) were instrumental in spreading "stories linking Oswald to Russia and Ruby to Castro's Cuba." In Deep Politics, Scott argues that such stories were systematically disseminated after the assassination as part of a cover-up, i.e., a disinformation scheme whose purpose was to deflect attention away from the real forces behind the Kennedy murder. Russell concurs, saying that Corso was "among the first to spread rumors hinting that Oswald was tied to a Communist ring inside the CIA". Apparently the colonel is still on the case: according to Corso co-author Birne, an upcoming volume from the duo, tentatively titled The Day After Dallas, will give the real insider's lowdown on the JFK assassination, emphasizing alleged penetration of the CIA and "the entire U.S. secret government," by the KGB. (Interestingly, Russell explores indications--admittedly circumstantial--suggesting that the real group behind the assassination was connected to Willoughby and a "right-wing clique inside the Pentagon." Both Russell and Scott link Willoughby, Corso, and company to a power struggle within the national security establishment between ultra-right military intelligence types and more "liberal," civilian CIA men. Willoughby's "old boys" were a vastly different breed from the old-school tie, Ivy League crowd who ran the CIA. Their enmity went back to a battle for hegemony between Military Intelligence and the OSS [the CIA] during World War II. While the CIA's power base expanded, the MacArthur-Willoughby's team's very existence was threatened. One Democratic president, Harry Truman, pushed them out of the far east. But Willoughby and his ilk did not fade away. They melded into global alliances, extending from quasi-religious orders such as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta to the [ex-Nazi] Reinhard Gehlen-Otto Skorzeny spy team in Europe. Such details may have no bearing on Corso's bizarre UFO memoir. But they make clear that Corso has had a lifelong association with military intelligence and the ultra-right. They also suggest that he's no slouch at disinformation schemes and no stranger to hidden agendas. Furthermore, it's clear from such history that Corso is a veteran of CIA-style espionage. Interestingly, in The Day After Roswell, he paints CIA types as the bad guys in the story. It's this branch of the government that is bent on keeping the truth from the American people, Corso implies. Salt of the earth military patriots like himself just want the truth to come out, dadgummit. The Shickshinny Knights who made up the Armed Services Committee of the society were described in the group's literature as "Soldiers of Christ and Advocates of a Free World"--as the shock troops of global anticommunism. Sharing the wealth, it seems safe to say, was not part of their agenda. But even Corso's pseudo-populist position has a Shickshinny feel to it. As both Scott and Russell demonstrate, the Shickshinny milieu represents a faction of the intelligence community that is to the right of the CIA and which views the whole civilian intelligence apparatus as a hotbed of dangerous liberalism. J. Edgar Hoover's own turf war with the CIA during the 1950s factors into this. As Scott writes: "The intra-bureaucratic feud of the 1950s between the CIA and Hoover was much more than a matter of personalities: it was a conflict between alternate visions (globalist/internationalist versus nationalist/expansionist) of how the United States should expand into the rest of the world. Where the major oil companies and their allies in the CIA thought of creating and dominating a global economy, their nationalist opposition in the United States preferred unilateralist expansion into specific areas, above all Latin America and the far east. The latter group allied dissident generals, resentful of civilian control, with exploiters of minerals and independent oilmen opposed to the oil majors, like William Pawley and H. L. Hunt." These days, many would argue that the people would be well served by more opposition to the global economy and its elite promoters. But the "nationalist" opposition to globalization described above might as well be called the "fascist" opposition. Hunt, Hoover, and the Shickshinny types may not be fans of globalization, but they sure aren't the champions of ordinary folk. For "unilateralist expansion into. . . Latin America and the far east," read "Guatemala," "Chile," "Korea," "Vietnam."
http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhrepor...well3.html At the time Corso joined the exclusive sect, its leader was one Colonel Charles Thourot Pichel. Pichel was an explicit, undeniable Nazi. During the Third Reich, he had begged Hitler's government for the job of representing Nazi political interests in the United States. Willoughby had also joined the Shickshinny Knights at this time, and co-published with the organization a periodical called the "Foreign Intelligence Journal." This journal specialized in anti-Semitic theories and the kind of extremist "enemy-within" anti-Communist blather we associate with groups like the John Birch Society. Apparently, this rather odd group had become, in the early 1960s, something of a dumping-ground for military intelligence veterans who were so zealous they had come to consider the CIA hopelessly "pink." The darling of this Corso's "Knights" was a very strange man named Michael Goliniewsky, whose name pops up in most histories of the CIA "mole-hunts" of the 1960s. Goliniewsky was a high-ranking Polish intelligence officer who sympathized with "the West," and began feeding information to the CIA. Apparently, his info was rather good at first. The Soviets became suspicious of him, so he had to scuttle off to America quickly....The CIA soon learned not to take Goliniewsky seriously. But his demented world-view fit right in with the ideas held by the Knights, Willoughby, Corso and co. So these "Knights" became the chief propagandists for Goliniewsky in the United States. [NOTE: Remember that Drexel Biddle, Jr. had connections to Poland since being appointed ambassador in 1937.] ~~~~~~~

An interesting chart can be seen at http://www.vaticanassassins.org/ (click on "chart" in frames to the left). Notice how many powerful intelligence operatives in America have been connected to Knights of Malta.

[David Guyatt]

Indeed I do Linda. And thanks for posting your invaluable research piece here now. I am going to follow suit and post my Spoils of War piece below to add to this thread.

Concerning the chart on Eric Phelps website, I remember emailing an inquiry to John Simkin a couple of years ago asking for his thoughts about this author's stated claim about the role of English Knights of St. John in the assassination of JFK. As oddball as this might sound, I had been in contact with a lovely old guy who, just prior to his death, had privately published a slim volume - but packed with detailed research - on the role of British Freemasonry in the bringing down of Gough Whitlam in Australia. Another thread he diligently followed in his book was the role of the KstJ in the assassination of JFK and he had, he said, received confirmation of their role in that affair. Simin didn't bother to respond of course, but the book remains a favourite of mine for the connections it makes in all sorts of ways with chivalric orders and their spooky (MI5/MI6) and elite membership.

Having myself been a member of a City Ward Club, I was able to see at first hand how that cub was the first rug on the ladder of the entire rightist City (often Freemasonic) power "connectivity" that leads to City of London Livery Companies which, in turn, feed directly to the elite/government/aristo and royal family. For example, Prince Philip is the patron of the Air Pilots & Air Navigators. Margaret Thatcher was a Pouter for example (see: http://www.london-footprints.co.uk/artliverycos.htm).

http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/the_spoils_of_war_pr.htm

THE SPOILS OF WAR

The Secret Story of WWII Japanese & Nazi Gold


By David Guyatt

copyright 2002 for


The use of suspect gold to launder drug profits is well established. One example of such laundering activities concerns a rogue airline that had the reputation of flying anything to anywhere. Over a two-year period between 1989-91, the airline made four flights carrying gold bullion weighing 160 tonnes with a market value of two billion dollars. Each of the four flights carried boxes with twelve bars of gold to a box that overall weighed 41 tonnes per flight. All the boxes were palletised for easy loading and accompanied by a guard. The flights originated from Medellin, Columbia, and were airlifted to London and apparently cleared both ends without customs inspection. [1]

The amount of gold shipped was more than the gold reserves of most central banks. The question then arises: where did this gold originate? The likelihood is that it was part of the vast amounts of gold plundered in WWII by the Axis powers.

The story about what really happened to the loot plundered by the Nazis and Japanese during WWII remains one of the best-kept secrets of the last fifty years. Few outside of the charmed circle of initiated insiders possess any knowledge whatsoever of the true dimensions of what can be described as the biggest cover-up of all time.

But it is not just public awareness of what exactly “happened” to this plunder in the post war years that is the cause of supreme unease amongst the powers that be. It is the sheer magnitude of treasure forcibly confiscated by the Axis powers that causes trepidation. Were the actual dollar numbers involved to be revealed, it would lay bare an even more sensitive secret – one that has endured for a hundred or more years.

A decades long propaganda campaign had served to focus public attention on the gold stolen from governments – known as monetary gold – as a means of eclipsing from public view far larger amounts of privately held gold that was also stolen.

The heavy cloak of disinformation and double-talk had still another layer. By putting the spotlight on Nazi plunder from the very beginning, public attention was diverted away from the industrial scale looting undertaken by Japan’s special plunder teams known as the “Golden Lily.” And it is here that the real story dwells.

THE PRINCE OF PLUNDER

History should have recorded him as the world’s most ruthless and avaricious bandit of all time. Instead, it has passed him by virtually unnoticed, thanks to the onset of the cold war and the well-laid designs of western elites.

Prince Chichibu was the younger brother of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito and had been named by the Emperor to head the ultra-secret Golden Lily – a secretive group tasked with looting China of its wealth – both government and privately owned hard assets. Beginning in 1937, with the Rape of Nanking, the plunder teams set to work with a vengeance. The spoils were far larger than had been imagined. It is believed that 6,000 metric tonnes of gold, plus a bounty of silver and precious gemstones fell in to the hands of Japan’s imperial treasury as a consequence. [2]

The phenomenal wealth of East and Southeast Asia had accrued over thousands of years and Japan wanted it all. Over the next seven years the Orient was wrung dry of its precious metals, solid gold religious artefacts and an unbelievable quantity of gemstones.

Most of this was shipped by the Japanese to the Philippines as a collecting point, for onward shipment to Tokyo. However, by 1943 the sea-lanes had been cut by US submarines and the decision was taken to bury the plunder throughout the Philippines. This was based on Japan’s expectation of a negotiated truce that would leave them ruling the Philippines. Thereafter, the recovery of the plunder could take place in secret over many years making Japan one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

That, however, was not to be. The United States had its own well-laid plans to become the imperial world power of post WWII. These plans had been formulated before the Second World War by The Council on Foreign Relations an organisation founded by wealthy Americans in the wake of WWI, in tandem with England’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as “Chatham House” for short.

The CFR plan called for a “Grand Area” that was to come under US control. Included was the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe, the Far East and the former British Empire. The latter was being actively dismantled for this purpose. Also listed was the Middle East, whose colossal oil resources were eyed with great passion. In fact, if it was possible to achieve, the entire planet was to come under US domination. [3]

In this scheme, Japan and Germany were assigned the role of the “great workshops” of productivity. In short, there was no place for a separate imperial power and Japan (and Germany) had to be thoroughly defeated. Roosevelt’s call for “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers not only smashed Japan’s comfortable view of what would be, but also sealed the fate of the post WWII world.

In addition to the Philippines, treasure plundered by the Japanese is believed to have been stashed in Indonesia and, probably Korea, too. But the Philippine Islands were the key. Here treasure sites were excavated – usually using prisoners of war as slave labour. The plunder was then stashed in these sites and booby traps were set to deter would be treasure hunters. With the prisoners of war still inside the sites were sealed and disguised – leading hundreds to die a grisly death in the name of greed and secrecy.

THE BLACK EAGLE FUND

The quantity of gold and other treasures buried was phenomenal. Japanese cartographers made maps of each site and trusted accountants marked them with three digits signifying the Yen values of the gold, diamonds and other assets buried in each.

A site bearing the designation “777” was valued at 777 billion yen. With 1945 exchange rates fluctuating between 3.50 and 4.00 yen to the dollar, just one triple seven site was worth almost US$200 billion – a king’s ransom by any measure. There were many triple seven (“777”) sites as well as triple nine and lesser sites.

Not only were these figures based on 1945 values -- when a dollar was really a dollar – but also when the price of gold was $35.00 an ounce. Today the price of gold is closer to $300 an ounce. But add to this the fact that in the Philippines alone there were over 170 burial sites, and a picture forms of a wealth so unimaginable that it almost defies belief. [4]

With the defeat of Japanese forces in the Philippines in 1945, a project of the utmost secrecy was launched to recover the buried Golden Lily plunder. This project was placed under the day-to-day control of Captain Edward Lansdale and OSS operative Severino Garcia Santa Romana. In 1945, Lansdale had been ordered to Manila as part of General Willoughby’s G2 military intelligence team. On arrival, Lansdale met up with Santa Romana and set to work. The CIA would later recruit both officers.

Over the next few years numerous plunder sites were located and the stolen assets recovered. The gold, gemstones and other treasure were deposited in over 170 bank accounts spread across more than forty countries – all of whom were signatories of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Collectively, the recovered loot came to be known as the Black Eagle Trust or fund.

Even to this day the mere mention of the Black Eagle Fund causes unease, and the entire subject remains cloaked in official secrecy. For example, during a 1999 discussion on this subject, one highly placed banker familiar with the existence and arrangements of this slush fund cautioned: “if you wish to discuss certain aspects of military program finance on the internet, you may be doing so in contravention of several statutes and regulations, both in the United States and in any NATO-member jurisdiction.”

A RARE LIE

According to official figures, the present volume of above ground gold stocks is approximately 142,000 metric tonnes. This, it is claimed, accounts for all the gold mined over six thousand years. [5] In contrast to these figures, just one of the many “777” Golden Lily sites would have held, using a conservative estimate, upwards of 90,000 metric tonnes. [6]

Clearly, official figures don’t remotely begin to mesh with the volumes of “black gold” stolen by the Axis powers. One major reason for this is simply that the official statistics have never included gold production in China, Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union.

Since the latter was the world’s second largest gold producer after South Africa, this was bound to distort the accuracy of official statistics. Curiously, despite the end of the cold war no apparent effort has been made to “update” these figures following access to strategic information of the former Soviet Union, who is now a member of the powerful G8 group of nations. Meanwhile, China and the Orient have had a love affair with gold dating back 6,000 years. This obviously had to come from somewhere.

Is it really possible that the official gold mining figures are just so much flim-flam, designed to hide the real picture? Could a conspiracy so flagrant and so large be perpetrated under the noses of an unsuspecting public?

To answer these questions we need do no more than hop across the street to gold’s sister market -- diamonds. Diamonds are said to be rare which accounts for their value. But like gold, they are not nearly so rare as we have been told. One example of their abundance is the Argyle mine in Australia, which was discovered in 1979. The mine was estimated to have over one billion carats – the majority of which were of gem quality. This is in stark contrast to South Africa’s entire diamond reserves of 200 million carats noted in a 1980 US Geological Survey.

Diamonds may be a “girls best friend” but that is about as far as it goes. As a true store of value in a true and unfettered free market, diamonds would be worth considerably less. What keeps the value high is the restricted access to gem quality stones which are rigidly controlled by the “cartel.” The cartel is thought to be controlled by the South African Oppenheimer family and De Beers, via the London based Central Selling Organisation or CSO. [7]

Any one person or group that has a stranglehold on gold, platinum and diamonds also has a strategic stranglehold on world commerce. Industrial diamonds are the backbone of productive industry and without adequate supplies of these, production would grind to a halt. Such a situation came close to happening during WWII.

In a Washington Post article on 18th October 1988, former director of the CIA accused De Beers and the Oppenheimer family of refusing to sell the US a large quantity of industrial diamonds necessary for war production. In a 2nd November 1988 letter, Sir Phillip Oppenheimer retorted angrily to these charges calling them “unsubstantiated.”

Documentary filmmaker and author, Jani Farrel-Roberts, has exhaustively investigated the diamond trade for many years and undertook to discover what truth, if any, lay behind Admiral Turner’s astonishing allegations. Access to government documents under the Freedom of Information Act as well as extensive interviews with attorneys who had spent years investigating De Beers on behalf of the US government convinced her that De Beers had indeed “…rationed diamonds supplies to the United States, depriving it of essential war tools at a time when De Beers had ample diamonds to supply all Allied needs. [8]

But more shocks were to come. Unearthed in the mounds of declassified documents obtained by Farrell-Roberts was a highly sensitive report on a secret British American investigation detailing how Hitler’s Germany acquired all the industrial diamonds it needed for its own war effort. Completed in 1944, the report concluded that the Nazi’s were getting their diamonds from the same syndicate that supplied the Allies.

Major A. W. Schmidt, the senior US investigating officer, stated in the report that this trade was protected by senior officials in the British Governments Ministry of Economic Warfare and accused these officials of being treasonous and of prolonging the war. [9] Schmidt additionally reported that measures taken to curtail the flow of diamonds to Germany were “…sabotaged, not by the British Government, but by the representatives of the Diamond Trading Corporation in London through their domination of the Diamond Committee of the MEW [Ministry of Economic Warfare].” [10]

THE PRIORY OF SION EXPLAINED?

the Minister of Economic Warfare during this period [1942-5] was Lord Selborne. Amongst his other associations, Selborne was a member of the top level “circle of initiates” of the secret society formed by South African gold and diamond magnate, Cecil Rhodes – who founded De Beers. Following Rhodes death this powerful and secretive group was run by Lord Alfred Milner with Lord Selborne in the deputy leader slot. [11] . Following Milner’s death in 1925, he assumed the leadership of the “group.” Among his other wartime duties he headed Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Lord Selborne would later come to the attention of millions of readers of “The Messianic Legacy,” the best selling sequel about the mystery of treasure hidden in Rennes le Chateau in the French Pyrennes. This story was first brought to public attention in the smash selling book “Holy Blood – Holy Grail” by the same authors. Lord Selborne was identified as one of the principals who in 1956, applied for export licenses of ancient parchments said to directly relate to the Rennes le Chateau mystery. [12]

Did this mysterious treasure really have ancient roots or was it of a more contemporary origin? There are good reasons to believe it may rather have been part of the gold plundered by the Nazi’s that was being buried, rather than ancient loot being dug up.

Nazi loot would certainly account for Lord Selborne’s interest in these matters and would also bring in to sharp focus the August 1956, date mentioned above. Just months earlier in May 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany had recovered it’s sovereignty, following the cessation of Allied military rule. Consequently, the outflow of plunder and assets orchestrated under the Nazi capital flight programme “Operation Eagle’s Flight,” was put into reverse gear by Reichsleiter Martin Bormann. This soon resulted in a massive influx of capital into the newly risen Germany. More than anything else, this is believed to account for Germany’s miraculous post war recovery. [13]

Behind Bormann’s programme of repatriating Nazi assets was the idea, developed in 1943, of using them in a confederated post war Europe under Germany’s covert control in what was even then called a “European Economic Community” or EEC. [14] Even though this pre-dated the actual foundation of the EEC in March 1957, it was not a new idea. Half a century earlier in 1899, W T Stead, a close confidant of Cecil Rhodes, had authored a book titled “The United States of Europe” along with “The Americanisation of the World.” [15]

Since these are issues that remain current a century later, one cannot help but acknowledge the foresight of Stead and Rhodes and also wonder if Bormann was part of this overall strategy – knowingly or not? Bormann was not a Rhodes scholar but some influential Germans of that period were, and others had close affiliations with members of the secret society founded by Rhodes who formed the ruling elite of England during the war years. [16] Normally regarded as Anglo-American in tone, the Rhodes Trust and Scholars had a rather more “teutonic” flavour. [17]

The secretive nature of Rhodes secret society – arguably fronted by the Rhodes Scholarships – throws up other curiosities as well. Only 3 of the 47 individuals who had been appointed trustees of Rhodes Trust between the years 1902 – 1995 – have been Rhodes Scholars. Furthermore, of the 17 Rhodes Trust Secretaries and Wardens of Rhodes House appointed during these same years, not one has been a Rhodes scholar. This is less than half a percent overall. Democratic representation seems not to be an issue. [18]

In the latter months of the war, Bormann looked to SS Major Otto Skorzeny to play a crucial role in spiriting away Nazi loot before Germany surrendered. [19] In early 1944, Hitler’s “favourite commando” was sent on a secret mission to the Corbieres region of the French Pyrennes, on the instructions of SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. What the purpose of this mission was remains unknown. [20]

These curiosities multiply even further. Pierre Plantard, the central character of the Rennes le Chateau mystery and supposed head of the ancient Order, the Prieure of Sion, is reported to have transferred a “large quantity of gold to Switzerland in 1952.” [21] Despite claims that the Priory of Sion has a 1000-year history dating back to the Order of warrior knights, the Knights Templar - chartered in 1151 - it only surfaced in 1956.

It is said that the founding of the Priory of Sion was an artful ploy by Charles de Gaulle to conceal the true activities that were taking place in France at that time. These had more to do with laundering suspect gold bullion and political intrigue than ancient treasure, religious cults or biblical bloodlines. The latter were an accrual of old myths and legends cobbled together to form a diversionary cover story [22]

The selection of Annemasse on the French Swiss border for Priory’s headquarters in 1956 is also interesting. This small border town is reported to be the centre for the “Gladio” stay-behind units formed to fight behind the lines in the event the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. The prospect of Russia over-running Europe was most unlikely - a fact known by the US and European military and intelligence community of the day. The Europe-wide Gladio operation had far darker designs. Its principal objective was directed at keeping the allegiance of Western European nations securely in the US economic orbit as well as moving their political infrastructure further to the right. [23]

RICH KNIGHTS OR POOR KNIGHTS?

Whether the Priory of Sion really had any historical relationship with the Knights of Malta (SMOM) – who are sometimes referred to as the “poor knights” – remains unknown. But different factions of Malta Knights continually enter the story of gold and treasure plundered during WWII.

An intriguing example of this involved the CIA front company and Australian headquartered Nugan Hand Bank. Nugan hand Bank was active in laundering WWII gold bullion recovered by Philippine President, Ferdinand Marcos. It was also very active in the Golden Triangle narcotics traffic. The bank was closed in 1980’s following the “assisted” suicide of the banks co-founder, Frank Nugan.

Brigadier General Erle Cocke who was the Washington office of the bank, was a Knight of Malta. In an April 2000 deposition that directly related to gold plundered during the war, Cocke stated that he was a “…Grand Commander in the Knight of Malta…” [24]

But according to Guy Stair Sainty, an acknowledged expert on Knightly Orders – and a member of the “False Orders committee of the five Order of St. John,” the title “Grand Commander” does not exist in the genuine Order recognised by the Vatican, and Cocke’s name does not appear on the official membership roll. [25]

Names that do appear either as members of as recipients of SMOM awards, include many senior CIA officers – for example, Bill Casey, Vernon Walters and James Jesus Angleton. The former Nazi spymaster, Reinhard Gehlen, was awarded SMOM’s Cross of Merito Melitense in 1948. Immediately the war, Gehlen went to work for the CIA and later assumed command of the West German intelligence organisation the BND, when born in 1955. Post WWII, Gehlen worked closely with Otto Skorzeny and his boss, Martin Bormann. [26]

But if Erle Cocke Jr. was not a member of the official Order of SMOM, the likelihood is that he was a member of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta of Pennsylvania. A so-called “false order,” the Shickshinny knights were composed of individuals who leaned to the extreme political right. The Order’s “Armed Services Committee,” included such military notables as British Admiral, Sir Barry Domville – a former head of Naval intelligence who was imprisoned in WWII for his pro-Nazi activities. Domville headed a pro-Hitler group called “The Link” which was intimately associated with the powerful and traitorous pro-Nazi “Right Club.”

Membership of this “club” was composed of over 250 leading lights of Britain’s Establishment. Included was John Milner Bailey, the son of Sir Abe Bailey - another South African gold mining millionaire who was a contemporary of Rhodes. Sir Abe was also the main financial supporter of the Rhodes-Milner group after Rhodes death and was an “initiate” of Rhodes secret society. A close friend of both Rhodes and Milner, he named his son after the latter. Significantly, John Milner Bailey was the largest financial contributor to the “Right Club,” and had married Winston Churchill’s daughter Diana, some years earlier.

The Rhodes group was not only zealously anti-Bolshevik – which it typified as a tyranny – and generally pro-German (if not always pro-Hitler) but was the moving force behind the formation of the Anglo-American “special relationship.”

These reasons probably account for Admiral Domville’s membership of the Shickshinny Knights of Pennsylvania – a state that boasted a large “White Russian” community. Indeed, the Shickshinny Knights are a “Russian” Order of Knighthood – albeit one that pre-dated the arrival of Bolshevism in Russia. [27]

Another leading member of the Shickshinny Armed Services Committee was Colonel, Philip J. Corso, who had served in US Army intelligence for many years, including the latter years of WWII. At that time he worked on Operation Paperclip, recruiting former Nazi scientists to work for the United States. [28] By the middle 1950’s, Corso was working with West German paramilitary types connected to Gehlen’s BND intelligence organisation. It is not hard to conclude that the “paramilitary” activities described were part of Operation Gladio. [29]

And it is with the Shickshinny Knights that this story of WWII plunder comes full circle – almost anyway. Two other members of the Armed Services Committee” were members of General Douglas MacArthur’s WWII inner circle of trusted confidants. It will be remembered that MacArthur ran Japan in the post war years as though by divine right. [30]

THE “M” FUND

The two MacArthur intimates were the German born, General Charles Willoughby, who headed MacArthur’s intelligence apparatus (for whom Ed Lansdale worked) and Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, MacArthur’s military secretary. Not mentioned as a Shickshinny Knight is Major General William Marquat, MacArthur’s deputy, economic supremo and of MacArthur’s “inner circle.

General Marquat was placed in charge of a massive slush fund that came to be known as the “M-fund.” This fund merged several prior secret funds including the “Yotsuya Fund” – that was created by General Willoughby using proceeds from black market operations. Another merged fund was the “Keenan Fund” named after Joseph Keenan, the chief prosecutor of war crimes trials that was composed of money derived from confiscated property. But the M-fund was predominantly created from sales of Japanese war loot including industrial diamonds, gold, platinum and silver plundered from nations occupied by Japan during the war. [31]

Marquat’s slush fund was used to influence Japanese politics in the immediate post-war years as well as for other sensitive projects. The main aim was to ensure that Japan would snugly fit into the US scheme of things rather than choose non-alignment. Political payoffs were the price needed to ensure this happened as planned.

The M-fund was operated jointly by Americans and Japanese until the late 1950’s but was then turned over exclusively to Japanese control by Vice President Nixon. It has since been alleged that in return for this largesse, Nixon secured a promise that Japan would assist him to become the US president.

By 1960 the M-fund is believed to have been worth $35 billion but has since multiplied at a truly staggering rate. By 1995 it was said to be worth a cool half trillion dollars and is under the complete control of shadowy Japanese politicians and has been the cause for several political murders.

THE SPOILS OF WAR

The key to understanding the secrecy that embraces this story is that much – probably most - of gold that was plundered by Japan and Germany was already “black” gold that didn’t officially exist. Consequently, when the United States re-plundered this metal it did so in complete secrecy. Not only was there the fear of crippling the price of gold – and the world economy with it - were it discovered that monumental quantities of gold existed, in addition to official stocks, but the use to which it was to be put, also demanded secrecy.

How can fabulous volumes of gold exist when all the world’s bankers and economists continue to tell us that this metal is so rare? The answer is as prosaic as it is damning.

Mining industry sources reveal that as much as 30% of annual production of gold is quietly filtered into the “private market” and does not, therefore, impact on the official figures. In years past, off-market sales by the mining industry have been reported to be as high as 80%. The reasons for selling into the private market are varied but the central one is the avoidance of tax. In addition, as we have already noted, gold production in the former Soviet Union – the world’s second largest producer after South Africa – and that of China and Southeast Asia have never been included in official gold mining statistics.

Prior to the American Gold Rush of 1848, the amount of gold said to be in existence amounts to a miserly 10,000 tonnes. This, we are told, is the sum total of gold mined throughout the world during the preceding 5,850 years, for which mining records exist (and If you believe that, I have a nice parcel of valuable land set in the attractive Atlantic trench to sell you). Unsurprisingly, when pressed to verify the accuracy of these figures, it was admitted that they were nothing more than industry “estimates.” [32] Never-the-less, this estimate has been incorporated into current day official mining figures and punched out as actual fact. It is not hard, therefore, to conclude that there are, indeed, very substantial volumes of black gold in existence.

The total quantity of gold buried in the Philippines during WWII has been reported to be over 1 million tonnes - or roughly 90% of the worlds “actual” gold stock. [33] During the course of a seven-year investigation into the subject, this writer has accumulated information from a variety of sources suggesting this is indeed, a more accurate figure. In other words, official statistics represent a modest 10% of reality.

One knowledgeable source told this writer that one family, the Oppenheimer’s, effectively control the world’s gold, diamond and platinum market. [34] The Oppenheimer business empire of today was, of course, drawn largely from the old business empire of Cecil Rhodes. During the course of his life, Sir Harry Oppenheimer held Rhodes in the highest regard, referring to him as “the Colossus.” Sir Harry, who later converted from Judaism to Christianity, was made a Knight of St. John – the British equivalent to the Catholic SMOM. [35]

He shares this distinction with other notable Establishment figures such as Sir Otto Beit, the son of the German born Alfred Beit - a contemporary of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa’s Kimberley diamond fields and also a shareholder in De Beers. Alfred Beit also generously helped to finance Rhodes secret society.

Lord Carrington is also a Knight of St. John and a former director of Rio Tinto Zinc, Hambros Bank and was also Co-President of Chatham House (all are, or were at one time, associated with the Rhodes-Milner group). [36] Lord Carrington is also a leading light of the secretive Bilderberg Group. Since its inception in 1954 (the same year that the London gold market reopened following its closure in 1939) Bilderberg has had a large German representation over the years.

Indeed, the first Bilderberg chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, is by birth, a German prince who prior to the war was a member of the Nazi leaning I G Farben intelligence department: N W 7. Perhaps it is just coincidence that Martin Bormann was the protégé of Herman Schmitz, Farben’s president, who taught Bormann everything he knew about financial camouflage and capital flight. [37] ?

Although Lord Carrington did not attend the first Bilderberg meeting there were many from the ruling British Establishment that did. For example, Sir Oliver (later Lord) Franks, once a director of the Rockerfeller Foundation and the Schroder bank (that positively rumbled with Nazi and Bormann connections before, during & after the war). Interestingly, Lord Franks was appointed a Rhodes Trustee in 1957.

Another attendee was Sir Colin Gubbins, who became Executive Director of the SOE in 1942, and thus would have reported to Lord Selbourne. Yet another present at the first meeting was Hugh Gaitskell who was the Principal Private Secretary to the Minister of Economic Warfare (Hugh Dalton) until 1942, when Churchill replaced Dalton with Lord Selbourne. Gaitskell was also a Rockerfeller Fellow between 1933-4.

Not least amongst those at the 1954 Bilderberg conference was Ralph Assheton – later Lord Clitheroe. Assheton was Deputy CEO of RTZ Chemicals (Rio Tinto Zinc) during the years 1973-87. 1973 also saw him appointed a director of Halliburton, a position he held until 2002. [38] During that period he would certainly have been aware that the late Ferdinand Marcos was a large Halliburton shareholder via several cloaked foundations he owned that were managed by Swiss banks. These included the Winthrop Foundation, The Palmy Foundation, The Xandy Corp and the Scolari Foundation. [39]

Meanwhile, Peter Carrington is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission – which can be said to be the Bilderberg group dressed in another frock (membership critically includes Japan’s elite) - has been deeply involved in black gold, according to several accounts. Prior to the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos as president of the Philippines, representatives of the Trilateral Commission tried to persuade him to turn over 63,000 metric tonnes of gold to them. Marcos didn’t like the terms presented and refused. A few days later his reign as President came to an abrupt end. [40]

But the last word about the involvement of the Trilateral Commission in plundered gold comes from Mr. Goldfinger himself – Severino Garcia Santa Romana. Prior to his death in 1974, Sta. Romana told his wife that he was a senior member (indeed, he claimed to be the head) of the Trilateral Commission that he said “controlled world finance.” He also revealed he was deeply involved with a secret society known as the “Illuminati” which he maintained had set in motion a fifty year plan to “corner the major part of the worlds gold supply” [41]

It is, of course, impossible to verify this claim. But it can be no more an outrageous idea than that propounded by Cecil Rhodes for his secret society. For it to succeed, Rhodes wrote in 1891, to his friend W T Stead, would require “…gradually absorbing the wealth of the world…” [42] Controlling the world’s supply of gold, platinum and diamonds would undoubtedly be one way of achieving this ambition.

But in what is undoubtedly a complex story riddled with many mysteries, there is one additional strand worthy of a brief note. This is the extreme right-wing World Ant-Communist League (WACL). Colonel Philip Corso, who we mentioned earlier, was a member of this group. So to, were the late Ferdinand Marcos, and the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence, Ray Cline. Perhaps the most notorious member was the one time chairman, General John Singlaub, a covert operator of considerable talent.

In 1986, a business company called Nippon Star that had a tangled ownership and shadowy connections, set out to recover some of the gold buried in the Philippines. This was to be used to fund right-wing activities. Sitting behind Nippon Star were a group of former military and intelligence officers. These included the CIA’s Ray Cline; General John Vessey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Robert Schweitzer formerly of the Pentagon and National Security Council and, not least… General John Singlaub. [43]

Whoever now controls the spoils of war buried in the Philippines by the Japanese Golden Lily has arguably “cornered” the major part of world’s gold supply. Whether this was by design or default it would seem that Santa Romana’s boast has come true.

ENDS

[1] Privately sourced.

[2] Drawn from personal correspondence and conversations with Robert Curtis, a mining engineer, who has 6,000 pages of documentation from the private files of former President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, concerning the Golden Lily and Marcos gold transactions. For additional background, see also Sterling Seagrave’s “Yamato Dynasty” (Bantam Press, London, 1999) who was also sourced by Curtis.

[3] See Shoup & Minter’s “Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy, for a background on the CFR’s ‘Grand Area.’ Likewise, Noam Chomsky’s “What Uncle Sam Has Really Wants.”

[4] Many trillions of 1945 dollars worth, in fact.

[5] A brochure published by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) states that “…almost all the gold ever mined, in excess of 100,000 tonnes, remains in existence today.” In 1998, the World Gold Council’s website stated “In the last 6000 years over 125,000 tons of gold has been recovered.” Once cannot help pondering on the use of the caveats “in excess of” and “over” in both these cases. Meanwhile, the November 1998 issue of the LBMA’s house magazine “Alchemist” provides a pie-chart which, when totalled, places the figure at 134,800 metric tonnes.

[6] This calculation assumes that only half the $200 billion value of plundered assets that composed a triple seven site was gold with the balance being made up of gemstones and other treasure.

[7] See Jani Farrell-Roberts excellent self published book “Blood Stained Diamonds – A World-wide Diamond Investigation” http://www.glitter-plus.com.

[8] Jani Farrell-Roberts “Blood Stained Diamonds,” page 54 (see note above for details of this book).

[9] Ibid page 72.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Carroll Quigley “The Anglo-American Establishment (GSG & Associates, C\alifornia – 1981) page 48. Following Rhodes death the group became known as “Milner’s Kintergarden,” with Lord Selborne operating as deputy leader. Milner was born in 1854 in Giessen, a small town in Germany, and later studied Oxford University where he made his mark.

[12] Baignent, Leigh & Lincoln’s “The Messianic Legacy” (Corgi Books, 1986) page 306

[13] Paul Manning “Martin Bormann - Nazi in Exile” (Lyle Stuart Inc, New Jersey – 1981) pages 281-2.

[14] Carter P Hydrick’s excellent “Critical Mass – The Real Story of the Birth of the Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Age (privately published).

[15] In late October 2002, Valery Giscard D’estang – the former French President, and European Union trouble-shooter, announced plans for a “United States of Europe.”

[16] Indeed, Germans were some of the first to be awarded Rhodes scholarships, a practice that began in 1902 and continued through 1913, but ceased with the onset of WWI. Thereafter German names that are listed in the register of Scholars are predominantly of North American universities – although scholarships of German nationals recommenced beginning 1930, but in far smaller numbers.

[17] Perhaps “Saxon” is a better word than Teutonic if one bears in mind the significance of the Saxon peoples prior to the pre-Norman conquest of Southern Britain.

[18] Drawn from the Register of Rhodes Scholars 1903-1995.

[19] Charles Higham “American Swastika” (Doubleday & Co, Inc, NY – 1985) pages247-8.

[20] Guy Patton & Robin Mackness “Web of Gold” (Sidgwick & Jackson, London – 2000) pages 144-9.

[21] Ibid page 214.

[22] One knowledgeable French source states that the Priory was specifically created by Charles de Gaulle for the purpose of laundering gold bullion and engaging in political intrigue.

[23] Philip Willan “Puppet Masters – The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy” (Constable, London – 1991) pages 146-59.

[24] Extracted from a copy of the deposition in this writer’s possession.

[25] Private correspondence with Guy Stair Sainty, 25th September 2001. The five Orders h mentions are: the SMOM, the British, German, Dutch and Swedish orders of St John

[26] See Paul Manning’s book cited in an earlier footnote.

[27] See Carroll Quigley’s “Anglo American Establishment” cited elsewhere in these footnotes for background on the Rhodes’ group virulent ant-Bolshevik attitude.

[28] Interestingly, Corso - like Edward Lansdale and his boss, General Willoughby – have all, at one time or another, been connected to the JFK assassination. See Martin Davis, “Saucers, Secrets & Shickshinny Knights - http://www.osjknights.btinternet.co.uk/l...aucers.htm

[29] “Gladio” was the name of the short sword used by Roman Legionnaires. Hence in England it was known as Operation “Sword” and in Austria Operation “Schwert” – meaning sword. For further information see my article “Operation Gladio” at http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk.

[30] For background on the Shickshinny Knights see Martin Davis, “Saucers, Secrets & Shickshinny Knights, in a foregoing footnote.

[31] Extracted from a July 1995 paper published by the Japan Policy research Institute (paper #11) entitled “The 1955 System and the American Connection: A Bibliographic Introduction” by Chalmers Johnson. This includes a four-page summary document written by Norbert Schlei, a former Assistant Attorney General in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

[32] Correspondence with the World Gold Council, circa 1998.

[33] Eric San Juan’s “The Marcos Legacy Revisited.”

[34] Correspondence from Robert Curtis, 29th January 1998.

[35] Oppenheimer’s membership of St. John is referenced in the privately published book “The Obedience of Australia” by the late Peter Jones.

[36] Lord Armstrong of Ilminster was also a director of Rio Tinto Zinc and was appointed a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust in 1975.

[37] See Manning’s “Martin Bormann – Nazi in Exile” referenced elsewhere in these endnotes detailing this very close relationship.

[38] The inter-connections of the 1954 Bilderberg meeting with SOE/Rhodes types has been only briefly touched upon here but are extensive and fascinating. For example, none of the named Germans appear in the 1954/55 or current International Who’s Who except for one: Max Brauer, who left Germany in 1933 and later delegated by the league of Nations to be an adviser on local government and administrative affairs to General Chang Kai-Shek. The story of Chang Kai-Shek and looted Chinese gold is fulsome, indeed.

[39] Copies of Marcos bank statements showing these holding – and a great many others, in fact – are in this writer’s possession.

[40] The actual amount of gold involved in the Trilateral Commission negotiations with Marcos was 62,321 metric tonnes. A copy of the TC letter is in this writer’s possession. Bob Curtis says that Imelda Marcos later turned over the bullion as part of her settlement to walk away from federal prosecution – correspondence dated 27th January 1998.

[41] Extracted from numerous papers, documents and writings (in this writer’s possession) of C.E. “Jim” Brown, the second husband of Santa Romana’s widow, Luz. For viability of a “fifty year plan” see footnote 14 regarding plans just outlined to federate Europe into a “United States of Europe.”

[42] Referenced only (and thus easily missed) in the endnotes of Chapter Three of Carroll Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment. Quigley – an academic of the first order - subsequently noted that Rhodes secret society not only survived his death but also grew in strength over the next decades and had sufficient power to punish Quigley for revealing its secrets in his massive exposition “Tragedy & Fate” published in 1966. No mainstream publishing house would touch Quigley’s writings after that.

[43] See my e-book “The Secret Gold Treaty” – http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk for further details.

[Linda Minor]

http://www.sandersresearch.com/index.php...ew&id=326/
***
The 1893 Panic would create the impetus that would lead to the eventual takeover of Morgan interests by Harriman and Rockefeller investment syndicates. Most of America’s railroads had been placed in receivership as a result of the gold drain—culminating in E.H. Harriman’s acquisition of the Union Pacific railroad (previously owned by Jay Gould). In 1901 Harriman challenged James J. Hill for control of the John Murray Forbes CB&Q railroad; Morgan sided with Hill and lost the contest. Harriman then gained the support of Rothschilds agent Kuhn, Loeb as well as the Standard Oil group, which then included Oliver Payne and later his nephew Payne Whitney.

At his death in 1904, William C. Whitney left his fortune to son Harry (married to heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt) and to his daughter Dorothy. Harry was a director of Guaranty Trust (Morgan), while Dorothy was married to Willard Straight, a partner in the Morgan investment bank. According to Carroll Quigley, the Morgan group, which had been responsible for putting the capital together to finance the Bolsheviks in Russia, infiltrated the political left in the United States. [5] After J.P. Morgan’s death in 1913, partners Thomas W. Lamont and Henry P. Davison [Texan Jesse Jones, a close associate of Andrew Mellon who had been Sec. of Treas. in Woodrow Wilson administration had been mentored in financial intelligence ops by Davison in International Red Cross during WWI] used Willard Straight to work out a loan to Russia, while Dorothy Whitney Straight subsidized the “liberal press”—both The Nation and The New Republic . Payne Whitney inherited his uncle Oliver Payne’s Standard Oil stock and the social set that entailed.

The result of the rise of Rockefeller to dominance in the Federal Reserve meant that those companies in which the family was most heavily invested became the ones that the Rockefeller-controlled banks (Chase and CitiGroup) protected. The industries that Morgan dominated—such as U.S. Steel and General Electric—would become increasingly less important until by the end of World War II major emphasis would shift to oil, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

The Big Cheese Takes the Gold
But what can we say about Henry Stimson? In the beginning his power came from Morgan—through his control of Whitney, Root and Cleveland. But Stimson remained, even as Morgan’s position waned, and Rockefeller’s moon began to wax ever stronger. Stimson knew where all the bones were buried. As revealed by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, it was Stimson who first suggested to President Franklin Roosevelt at the end of World War II that all the recovered Axis war loot from the Nazis and Japanese be used to finance a “global political action fund.” [6]

Stimson managed this top secret project called Black Eagle “by delegating authority to four assistant secretaries of War: Robert Patterson, a lawyer and former federal judge; Harvey Bundy, Boston lawyer and Yale graduate; and two dynamos Stimson called his Heavenly Twins—John McCloy and Robert Lovett. What they all had in common was their close relationship to the Harrimans and Rockefellers.” [7] Though Allen Dulles was not one of Stimson’s inner circle, as attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell, which handled other legal work for the Rockefellers, he would become privy to the plan as well. [8]

We [referring to other articles I wrote for Sanders Research] have met Bundy and McCloy in previous articles about John Kerry’s family background. [Robert A.] Lovett was also from Skull and Bones (Yale 1918) and grew up with Averell and Bunny Harriman [Lovett's father was an attorney in Texas who moved to Houston to work for Baker & Botts before being hired to run both the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads in New York for Harriman interests in about 1900-02.]. [9] He married the daughter of a senior partner of the Brown Brothers investment bank, which he helped to merge with W.A. Harriman & Co., for which Prescott Bush and his father-in-law worked—making its executive committee very top-heavy with Skull and Bones members. Robert Patterson—senior partner of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler—a Wall Street firm set up in 1938 as an offshoot of McCloy’s Milbank Tweed which handled Rockefeller’s banking and oil business—represented the Rockefeller philanthropies.

This Wall Street (mostly Skull and Bones) team began in 1945 with a “separate pool of black gold that put an extra floor under the postwar economy,” to make a concerted effort to keep “gold prices artificially high while discreetly using derivatives of this gold as a clandestine slush fund.” [10] Very little, it seems, had changed in the years since Morgan had worked with August Belmont, Jr. to stop America’s gold from draining to Europe. August Belmont IV stepped in to advise the Rockefellers on how to create a web of corporations out of natural gas discoveries and energy pipelines—a subject which also requires a separate article.

Stimson’s Wealth Came from Loomis and Thorne Investments

As we mentioned earlier in Can We Handle the Truth, Henry Stimson was very close to both Alfred Loomis and Landon Thorne, who not only made Stimson rich, but created, through stock manipulation of public utility companies, a slush fund that pre-dated the Black Eagle trust—a fund which financed the research of nuclear power without which we could not have bombed Japan. Thorne worked on his stock spinning out of an office at White & Case located at 14 Wall—the Bankers Trust Building—adorned with a pyramid atop J.P. Morgan’s penthouse. Thorne’s son, who would spend his entire career working for Bankers Trust, was John Kerry’s father-in-law. The elder Thorne had in 1911 married Loomis’ sister, Julia Atterbury Loomis. Thus, not only was Kerry tied to the Stimson network through his roommate Harvey Bundy III [see Untitled Aristocracy] , but also through his wife Julia, whose grandmother was a first cousin of Stimson.[11]

Bankers Trust—a Morgan subsidiary set up to manage trust funds of wealthy clients such as the Du Ponts and Astors—was incorporated in 1901 by the law firm of White & Case, which has represented it ever since. [12] The purchase of Bonbright & Co. by Loomis and Thorne had been underwritten by J.P. Morgan & Co., through its full control of General Electric in 1892. [13] Bonbright was used as a front for the Morgan bank (much as it had used Whitney in 1890) to finance rural electrification and expand electrical markets all over the world. Loomis joined Thorne at Bonbright in 1919, six years after J.P. Morgan had died. It was not coincidental that Benjamin Strong, the man named to head the New York Fed in 1914, came from Bankers Trust, since Morgan was then the equivalent of an American central bank.

All the utility companies Bonbright financed were taken public not long before the 1929 crash. Bonbright joined with the Morgan bank in issuing securities for a new holding company, United Corporation, which would control one-third of electric power in the eastern twelve states. The initial price of the stock was so inflated, the men later claimed they realized how massive the Wall Street bubble had become. As author Jennet Conant says, “quietly, over a period of months, Loomis and Thorne liquidated their remaining securities and converted everything into sound, long-term treasury bonds and cash. Then came Black Thursday. [14]

A year after leaving the bank, they sold their interest and placed the proceeds in a holding company managed by Thorne, who also would continue to manage investments for Stimson. In 1932, however, while they were still actively running the business, the grandson of the famous August Belmont, N.M. Rothschild’s American agent became an associate of the firm. The Who’s Who for August Belmont IV (1908-1995) notes that he was “with” Bonbright & Co. from 1932-42. At this point we can only speculate whether there was a secretive Rothschild alliance that would help explain the young men’s rapid rise in the world of high finance. In the years after 1942 Belmont would move to Dillon Read, where he would be at the center of every issue of securities involving natural gas in Texas, as well as all major pipeline companies in that state.

John Kerry’s Ties to Bankers Trust

You will recall that Landon Thorne, Sr. worked out of an office at the White & Case law firm, located in the Bankers Trust Building at 14 Wall Street, and that his son—father of John Kerry’s wife Julia—spent his entire career at Bankers Trust. In 1966, in fact, John Kerry designated his fiancee Julia Thorne as a beneficiary of his Navy life insurance, with her address as 14 Wall Street. He and Julia were married in 1970, shortly before her twin brother began grooming Kerry for his first run for Congress. Her father died in 1980. In 1988 she divorced Kerry—the same year the Senator issued the “Kerry Report” on Iran-Contra, in which he covered up the Mena drug-smuggling [subject of Terry Reed's book, Compromised, about the Clintons' involvement in Mena] that helped pay for the arms sent to Nicaragua. [15] We have never found out the entire truth of that operation.

Did John Kerry have connections through his marriage to Bankers Trust? What is the significance of the sale of Bankers Trust in 1999 to Deutsche Bank—ten years after Deutsche Bank acquired Morgan Grenfell UK?

We know that White & Case drafted the merger documents in 1999 to allow Deutsche Bank to buy out Bankers Trust (which had merged with Alex. Brown & Co.). Deutsche Bank had acquired Morgan Grenfell of the UK ten years earlier. Stocks on world markets had taken a 23% dive in October 1987, just two months after Alan Greenspan—appointed by President Reagan and sworn in by Vice-President George Bush—replaced Paul Volcker as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan at that time acknowledged his debt to his mentor, Dr. Arthur F. Burns—the Austrian-born economist appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1970 by Richard Nixon.

Burns had been at the Fed when Nixon and Treasury Secretary John Connally imposed wage and price controls and removed the gold backing on the dollar. [16] The result was that the dollar suffered its greatest loss in value since the Civil War. Burns left the Fed in 1978 and was subsequently appointed by Reagan as American ambassador to Germany, serving until 1985. [17]
The Gold Vanishes

What was the end result of the dollar’s decline?

According to the writers of Executive Intelligence Review , by 1981 the dollar had fallen to 60% of its pre-1971 level, while American stock equity fell 30% in terms of gold. Every major brokerage firm in the United States at that point began having serious financial problems. Lehman Brothers sold 7% of its equity to a Lugano-based Swiss bank functioning as a subsidiary of Banca Commerciale d’Italia (where the P2 Masonic lodge had been created). [18] Drexel Burnham Lambert sold out its entire capital to the Lambert family of Brussels, Belgian cousins of the Rothschilds. A.G. Becker of Chicago merged with the S.G. Warburg bank and Paribas to form Warburg-Becker-Paribas, which merged into Merrill-Lynch in 1984. In 1981, Salomon Brothers (investing arm of Citibank) merged with Phibro (the trading arm of the Oppenheimer interests); the name was changed to Salomon, Inc. in 1986, and is now a division within the Citibank corporate banking system.

Therefore, according to EIR, “Oppenheimers acquired effective policy control of the largest American commercial bank, Citibank.” [19] As we know, Citibank now controls the New York Fed, which controls America’s entire Federal Reserve System.

Henry Stimson had died in 1950, by which time his team in control of Project Black Eagle had managed to secrete gold in 176 accounts in 42 different countries. [20] Of Black Eagle’s original team and others who would have been taken into the circle: Robert Patterson died in 1952, Harvey Bundy in 1963, and Allen Dulles in 1969. Robert A. Lovett died in May 1986, and John McCloy would follow in March 1989. Robert B. Anderson, who was also a trustee, would depart the scene in August 1989, two years after William J. Casey, who expired in May 1987.

As the last of the Black Eagle trustees were fading away, others who took the side of the “old soldier,” General Douglas MacArthur, were appearing on the scene. “Private” organizations linked to elements of U.S. intelligence and anti-communists recovered more hidden gold from the Philippines. General John Singlaub—closely associated with the former World Anti-Communist League and the off-the-shelf intelligence operations associated with the Iran-Contra affair—was part of a recovery program known as the Nippon Star (a subsidiary to Nippon Electronics). [21] Also interested were former military and intelligence officers Ray Steiner Cline, CIA deputy director of operations; General John Vessey, the first man to rise through ranks from private to four-star general to chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1979-85; and General Robert Schweitzer, Reagan’s National Security Council chairman (Oliver North’s boss). [22]

Another insider in this group was General Erle Cocke, Jr., an alternate executive director of the World Bank, 1961-64, who died in 2000. Cocke was interviewed before his death by former banker, David Guyatt, who has written about his own experience with “Project Hammer,” a collateral trading program wherein “vast pools of unvouchered slush funds,” were transferred in 1989. Used to “generate funds to pay off debts on bullion certificates issued by certain metal trusts , the funds were siphoned off surreptitiously in order to rescue numerous major U.S. and other banks that by the latter half of the 1980s were tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.” [emphasis added] [23] It should be noted here that the Euro, which was introduced January 1, 2002, claimed to be backed by precious metals, presumably under the control of the “metal trusts” which benefited from the diversion of the gold to the Fed banks in 1989.

The October 1987 stock market crash occurred one year after the Iran/Contra scandal had hit the headlines. Oliver North was convicted in May 1989—at the same point in time that Project Hammer was taking place. The discovery was soon made that certain slush funds, or the gold used as their asset base, had disappeared. We may infer from Guyatt's research that the gold had been diverted by the U.S. Federal Reserve—primarily Citibank and other New York banks—which had suffered heavily from the global stock crash of 1987 and were on the verge of bankruptcy. [24]

An integral player in Project Hammer was Bankers Trust. Guyatt has been led to believe that all the gold certificates that arose from the World War II looted gold accounts were originated in the offices of White & Case—long-time attorney of the old Morgan subsidiary that handled trust funds of American oligarchs like the Astors and Belmonts.

As yet we are unable to explain whether John Kerry had knowledge of the reasons for the gold’s disappearance. We do know his committee protected the drug money-laundering operations of Barry Seal at Mena, Arkansas, that had been conducted with the protection of then-governor Bill Clinton as an operation run through the offices of then-vice-president George H.W. Bush. As a result, we know that the outcome of this year’s election had been pre-determined. Regardless of the victor, globalism is the ultimate winner. Under the Hegelian philosophy adopted by Skull and Bones, the scenario which makes the most sense is a shift purportedly to the left, which will advance the world closer to centralized control by European-based banks. Should that not happen in 2004, it is only a matter of time.

[David Guyatt]

John Kerry’s Ties to Bankers Trust

You will recall that Landon Thorne, Sr. worked out of an office at the White & Case law firm, located in the Bankers Trust Building at 14 Wall Street, and that his son—father of John Kerry’s wife Julia—spent his entire career at Bankers Trust. In 1966, in fact, John Kerry designated his fiancee Julia Thorne as a beneficiary of his Navy life insurance, with her address as 14 Wall Street. He and Julia were married in 1970, shortly before her twin brother began grooming Kerry for his first run for Congress. Her father died in 1980. In 1988 she divorced Kerry—the same year the Senator issued the “Kerry Report” on Iran-Contra, in which he covered up the Mena drug-smuggling [subject of Terry Reed's book, Compromised, about the Clintons' involvement in Mena] that helped pay for the arms sent to Nicaragua. [15] We have never found out the entire truth of that operation.

Linda, we're like a double-act. Hopefully a good one though.

On White & Case, boy did I have some fun chasing down that firm. The following is extracted from Project Hammer Reloaded:

THE EMPIRE STATE CONNECTION

During his April 2000 deposition, just days before his death from cancer, Brigadier-General Erle Cocke, when asked about the overall objective of Project Hammer, replied:
Well, it was mainly to bring back monies to the United States from all types of activities, both legitimately and illegitimately. Not that they were in the smuggling business per se, but they were all in the arms business, they were all retracing dollars of one description or another that had accumulated all through the ’40s and ’50s, really. And that probably is as broad a definition as I can give you
General Cocke then added that involvement in Project Hammer extended to:
the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agencies of all types, Pentagon in the broad sense of it and as such, the Treasury, Federal Reserve. Nobody got out of the act, everybody wanted to get in on the act." 5
Cocke’s involvement with clandestine CIA activities dates back many years. At the very least, he is known to have been involved with the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank. For example, US Treasury records obtained by veteran journalist and author Jonathan Kwitny show Cocke as the registered "person in charge" of Nugan Hand’s Washington office. 6

Cocke also indicated in his affidavit that he was regularly contacted by the CIA for expert assistance over the years and was usually debriefed by them following overseas travel. Despite this, a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA made on behalf of this writer was dismissed with the statement that "no records responsive to your request were located" --which is not entirely the same thing as saying that no records exist. 7

It also appears that the CIA is not the only one that cares to deny knowledge of General Cocke. Another is former Citibank CEO and Chairman John Reed, who, in a sworn affidavit dated 5 December 2000, stated he had "no knowledge of any persons named Erle Cocke, Jr, or Barrie D. Wamboldt". Both the CIA and Citibank’s John Reed hold at least one major advantage over General Cocke: they are alive and he is dead; and while it is true that the dead can’t lie, it is also true that they can’t rebut anyone’s testimony--sworn or otherwise. 8

In his deposition, Cocke states that although he had never "met" John Reed, he had attempted on numerous occasions to speak with him, but was continually rejected:
We did our best to make the normal approaches, but I can see the President of the United States with no trouble. I cannot see Reed. 9
The "we" Cocke was referring to, besides himself, was Paul Green, a "long-time real estate lawyer in New York" with "50 years practice", who "had done most of his real estate dealings through Citibank".10 Green also did some of his banking business with Citibank at its Fifth Avenue, New York, branch under account FOCUS #946 963 94.

According to Cocke, Paul Green was an outside counsel for Citibank and went back "30-odd years with large transactions through that bank, buying and selling big buildings. He was very much involved buying and selling the Empire State Building one time." 11 Asked if Green was involved in the purchase and sale of collateral instruments, Cocke replied:
Probably not as an individual. But he represented the clients that certainly wanted to do the same thing. 12
News in late March 2003 revealed that the Empire State Building had just been sold by casino king Donald Trump and the heirs of shady Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi for US$57.5 million. Yokoi (who, at the time, was serving a prison sentence and had secretly negotiated the transaction through a middleman) and his partner Trump had gained ownership of the building in 1991 for US$42 million. Little is known about Yokoi’s World War II activities.

The building last changed hands four decades earlier in 1961, when it was acquired by real estate tycoon Harry Helmsley from the Prudential Insurance Company in a sale-leaseback deal. The world-renowned skyscraper was built on land owned by the Astor family and sold to the DuPonts in 1929.

Construction of the Empire State Building began in 1930. John Jacob Astor was one of the first Americans to become involved in the opium trade, from which his later fortune derived. This he invested in Manhattan real estate. The architects of the Empire State Building were Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates --designers of One Bankers Trust Plaza, the HQ of Bankers Trust, together with the Credit Lyonnais building in New York City.

It is of more than passing interest that one law firm represents many of the "actors" who appear in this story. That firm is White & Case. Amongst numerous notable achievements listed on its website background/history is its representation of the DuPont Group in its sale of the Empire State Building in 1954 for the princely sum of US$51.5 million.

As we noted earlier, almost 40 years later, in 1991, the building sold for the less than princely sum of US$42 million. I am not certain how the real estate investors define investment performance over the years, but an aggregate loss of US$9.5 million over the course of 37 years doesn’t usually constitute an investment accomplishment by any standard I know.13

Meanwhile, a brief review of White & Case’s client list tell us that they also represented,
the First National Bank (the forerunner of Citibank)
Astor Trust Company 14
Prudential
J. P. Morgan & Co.
Saudi Aramco
Swiss Bank Corporation
Seagram Company Ltd of Canada, controlled by the Bronfman family --regarded by some as the kings of the Canadian mafia 15
But White & Case’s most "enduring" client is Bankers Trust Company, a J. P. Morgan-controlled bank which the law firm was "centrally involved" in forming back in 1903.

The ancestor of all trust companies is England’s Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust, which dates back to 1868 and was conceived by one of the foremost legal minds of the day, Lord Westbury. The current Lord Westbury, Richard Bethell, will appear later in this story.

And on the Lord Westbury angle, the following too:

Richard Bethel – elevated to Lord Westbury following the recent death of his father – was a former SAS and Scots Guards officer and, like Alan Shepherd, an Old Harrovian. The Hart Group of which he is the Chief Executive officer, is one of a number of companies that form the Global Marine Security Systems Company (GMSSCO). If one is a distinct cynic – as this writer has become – it would be easy to conclude that a marked similarity in structure exists between GMSSCO and Rolf van Rooyen’s South African “Eastcorp Syndicate” that was closely allied with the “London Network” of Executive Outcomes. For example, companies belonging to the Eastcorp syndicate also had a maritime and security theme.

But the similarity doesn’t end there. Lord Westbury, is currently serving as Chief Executive Officer of Defence Systems Limited which, as we have already seen, is an integral member of the London “network” of the Palace Group (named so because of its close proximity to the Royal family’s official London residence, Buckingham Palace).[65] Moreover, Executive Outcomes has been described as “the advance guard for major business interests engaged in a latter-day scramble for the mineral wealth of Africa."[66] This is a particularly incisive description when readers of part one of this series will recall that one aspect of Project Hammer apparently involved the disappearance of substantial quantities of gold reserves as well as stocks of De Beers diamonds, just prior to the takeover of the Republic of South Africa in 1994 by Nelson Mandela and the ANC. This theft has become known as “Apartheid’s missing billions.”

Defence Systems Limited have a client list that comes straight from the top-drawer and includes oil and gas companies like British Petroleum, Shell, British Gas of the UK and “Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Texaco of the United States.” Major mining and mineral extraction companies such as Canada’s Cambior and De Beers and Anglo American of South Africa and the giant US construction firm of Bechtel also feature.

Another client is Canadian based Ranger Oil, which by happy coincidence, is the same name as an entity that forms part of the Palace Group and which is run by arms trader Mick Ranger. By miraculous good fortune, Mick Ranger was also a board member of Bridge S A, which was one of the entities formed and run by Rolf van Rooyen and Riaan Stander. Meanwhile, Sandline, which many knowledgeable insiders believe is Executive Outcomes by another name, has a client base that includes Rio Tinto Zinc.

DSL is now owned by Armor Holdings Inc of Jacksonville, Florida, but is still headquartered in London. This affiliation seems, on the face of it, to be a particularly binding one for Armor Holdings is said to have its very own US spook-type “network.”[67] The senior executives of Armor Holdings are predominantly bankers of one strain or another. Take, for example, Thomas W. Strauss, formerly a vice chairman of Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank that was once minority owned by the Oppenheimer’s Anglo-American & De Beers strategic holding company Minorco.[68] Until 1993, Salomon’s owned the controlling interest in Bank of New York, which as you will recall, is the current affiliated clearing bank of Gregory Serras’s Vanguard Capital. Today, Salomon’s is owned by Citigroup.[69]

We might also mention Armor Holdings director, Burtt R Ehrlich, whose family securities firm, Ehrlich and Boger is owned by Cater Allen Bank of the Channel Islands and which specialises in “offshore finance.” Likewise, Nicholas Sokolow, formerly a partner in the Wall Street firm of Coudert Brothers, and Warren B Canders, a former senior vice president of Orion Bank Ltd – a merchant bank owned by the Royal Bank of Canada.

A subsidiary of Armor Holdings is the very shadowy United States Defense Systems Inc (USDS) that on paper is based in Chantilly, Virginia. However, its real operating headquarters are Manassas, Virginia. Staff recruited by USDS are usually former military types or specialists with criminal intelligence backgrounds possessing surveillance skills. They are usually told they will be working in support of Department of Defense programmes and require a DoD security clearance. Operations have, in the past, included surveillance of US citizens during Fourth of July at Capitol Mall in DC.[70]

A Google internet search using the search term “Armor Holdings Inc revealed a curious message dated September 2001 from an aggrieved investor who wanted to know:

I'm horrified to find one of my investments is in a company with links to Bin Laden. Apparently it is common knowledge in London that a senior figure in Armor, Ambrose Cary has familial ties to Bin Laden and uses those in his work. How can it be allowed that a US company providing security to US companies, embassies and airports round the world can deal simultaneously with this type of person? Does anyone else have further information on this?

And further on White & Case:

White & Case: No doubt by sheer coincidence alone, the Marcos account at Southeast Bank held by Roberto Benedicto was a “White & Case Trust” account (number 018-410191). It may also have been mere coincidence that Peter Seaman’s and Stuart Root’s attorney Kenneth C Ellis – who was the registered addressee at Southeast Bank building for the Bowery Advisors Subsidiary Corporation – is also listed on the White & Case website as a Partner of that firm who specialises in financial matters and who now works out of their Singapore office.

The foregoing just goes to show that once you lever up the iron lid that covers the underground sewers, the tunnels thereby revealed lead absolutely everywhere.

Edit = PS, Linda, I just read the above again. Actually I didn't interview Cocke,he was dead by the time I came along. But I did acquire the 68-page affidavit he made shortly prior to his death - a sort of "going way" present, I think. I also acquired various other paperwork from him and about him. I wanted to interview his wife but that didn't happen, unfortunately. I did put in a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA about him, but they seemed unable to locate any information pursuant to my request. :lollypop: I also had a copy of the affidavit made by Citibank CEO and Chairman John Reed. Most curiously I thought, he also didn't appear to know Cocke either.

When connected people die, those around seem to instantly forget they ever knew them.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

News To me: I found this especially interesting given Helms development of the Safari Club circa 73-80 in Iran and with Saudi GDI;
--------
The Taliban, for their part, employed as their PR oficer in the US Laila Helms,
neice of Richard Helms, former director of the CIA and former US ambassdor
to Iran. In March 2001, Helms succeeded in brining Rahmatullah Hashami, Mullah Omar's adviser, to Washington. Apparently, he even brought a carpet as a gift for george W. Bush from hte Taliban leader. As late as August 2001,
meetings were held in Pakistan to discuss the pipeline business. At one of these, which took place in Islamabad on August 2, Christina Rocca, in charge of Asian affairs at the State Department, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef.
p. 199 Terror Incorporated, Loretta Napoleani.

Unocal Huh? I thought Dick Helms could do better than that tsk!