OPERATION GLADIO Exposed with COLONEL TOWNER in Gold Warriors Chapter 7

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0:17 All right. We're going to get this party started. Just want to confirm that we've got audio. There we go. Screen down a little bit. Okay. There we go. Get back over here so I can see my chat. All right. Sorry I missed on Tuesday. I'm getting to be a slacker. So much this Operation Gladio stuff is just exploding.

1:14 We have so much more content that Bridget and Liza and I have been digging on to bring to you guys that will complement this whole Southeast Asia book that we're doing. So anyway, thanks, Bridget. So down the rabbit hole, that's the name of chapter seven. We're going to start there. So.

1:46 This is back in September 1945. And after receiving the official notification that Japan had capitulated and there was a general, the general that we've been talking about, Yamashita, appears in the Philippines and basically

2:17 Holds his samurai sword. Approaching American lines. Basically to surrender. This is during the last month. That American forces. During the conflict. Had not been making up a lot of ground. But. What's interesting is he did not. Commit the ritual suicide. Because that's kind of. The Japanese culture. Was.

2:49 It doesn't talk about it in this book, but I've read several books about World War II, especially the Pacific Theater, that the culture in Japan was you never surrender. If you are in a no-win situation and that is the only answer, the expectation is that you will commit suicide. You don't surrender. Which is why when, not that I'm trying to justify it because I am absolutely not doing it,

3:19 prisoners of war they didn't understand why American people didn't do the same thing it was just completely strange to them that Americans allowed themselves to be captured so they thought that their use of the American people as slaves that there was no expectation that they were ever going to come home alive so the fact that they killed them

3:47 Well, they should have committed suicide anyway, so they didn't. And that's literally the way they thought. So Yamashita says, quote, if I kill myself, someone else will have to take the blame, unquote. So supposedly that's the only reason why he didn't commit suicide. And they basically talk a little bit about the whole.

4:22 Yamashita unbuckled his sword, bowed deeply, presented it to the major who was there. Five months later on February 23rd, 1946, after what many described as a grotesque miscarriage of justice, Yamashita was hung, hanged. So there's no mention of the plunder of treasure or the looting that was done during the war.

4:52 during the charges that were brought up against Yamashita during his trial. So it was quite obvious, and this was done very differently than, of course, the European theater, that they were just basically trying to get rid of him and use him as kind of the token because he knew where a lot of the treasure was buried on the Philippines because basically he was in charge of guarding it all.

5:20 He was charged with war crimes because of the atrocities committed against. But many of those were committed by the admiral as opposed to Yamashita. That was also on Manila, on the Philippines, in Manila. So the U.S. as a sovereign power tried a general of a defeated enemy nation for alleged war crimes.

5:50 The tribunal in Manila was not composed of men with legal degrees, and only hearsay evidence was offered to link Yamashita to the crimes. The prosecution was badgered by MacArthur's headquarters to quicken the pace to minimize court procedures and to allow hearsay evidence. Yamashita's defense team appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two Supreme Court justices denounced the conduct of the trial.

6:19 Justice Murphy said the petitioner was rushed to trial under an improper charge, given insufficient time to prepare an adequate defense, and there was no serious attempt to prove that he committed the recognized violations of laws of war because Yamashita did not.

6:44 He was not charged with personally participating in the acts of atrocity or with ordering or condoning their commission. Not even knowledge of these crimes was attributed to him, Justice Rutledge said. He also concluded that the process was departed, quote, from the whole British American tradition of common law and the Constitution, unquote. He also went on to say, quote,

7:14 He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemies from oppression. If he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach back to himself. Dang, I wish they still felt like that. After a failed appeal to President Truman, who did not respond at all, Yamashita was hanged. Many thought that he was railroaded because MacArthur was a...

7:47 vainglorious man who wanted revenge for being made to look incompetent because basically he was responsible for kicking MacArthur's butt off of the Philippines to begin with. And so they believe this was a revenge effort from MacArthur. But we now know that there was also a hidden agenda because it was not possible to

8:18 torture General Yamashita physically without this becoming evident to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. In particular, his driver, Major Kashi. He was given special attention. He had accompanied Yamashita everywhere since the general had arrived way back like in October of 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines.

8:52 Charge of the torture of Major Yojima was a Filipino-American intelligence officer, Saverino Garcia Diaz Santo Romana. His friends called him Santi. We'll hear a lot about him. He was a big boned man with a broad forehead. He was a black belt in judo. Santi was enjoying his work.

9:26 of interrogating all of the Japanese prisoners. Many Filipinos had been cruelly tortured and beheaded. Women and girls were gang raped in the streets. Many of them disemboweled and hacked to pieces. But Santi and his assistants were careful. They did not want to kill Major Kodima, nor to damage his memory, because they wanted to know where the gold was hidden.

9:57 The brutal interrogation of the major produced results that astounded everyone from MacArthur all the way up to the White House and became one of the biggest state secrets of the 20th century. Even today, it remains carefully obscured. And it's also inaccessible for any of the details other than what we have heard from other people. The official records are still classified, of course.

10:31 Santi's results greatly altered America's leverage throughout the world during the Cold War. Who was Santi? And for whom was he really actually working? Who ordered him to torture Major Kojima? Today, Santa Romana remains a legendary but mysterious figure at the CIA and in Manila, where it was not unusual for people to deny that he ever existed.

11:02 If he was spoke of at all, it was always as a senior CIA official to say that Santee at the time was an OSS agent, basically meaning that he worked for the Office of Strategic Services headed by Wild Bill Donovan. But as it turns out, Santee wasn't actually an employed OSS agent. And when he tortured the major,

11:36 the OSS had officially ceased to exist. You know, because there was a transition period between the OSS, then there was two iterations of offices called something else, and then the CIA. So we must ask how Santee knew about the hidden treasure of Golden Lily. America had realized for some time that Japan had been hiding plunder treasure in the Philippines.

12:08 although the details were not shared with Britain or other allies. During the last year of the war, Americans fighting alongside Filipino guerrillas observed a heavily laden Japanese hospital ship unloading bronze boxes at Subic Bay near Manila. The U.S. Warrant Officer John C. Ballinger, disguised as a fisherman, secretly photographed the vessel

12:37 From a highly painted Filipino fishing boat, he realized that it was not really a hospital ship. Because remember back in one of the earlier chapters, all of the stuff that was running this, other than the submarines that was running this treasure, they painted up as a hospital boat. So let's see. After studying the ship's profile and comparing it to naval intel records, they were able to identify it as...

13:17 The Huzi Maru, which had been built in 1937 and had been disguised with false outside structures, which we learned that they were doing that. They put like an extra smokestack on it or something, but it was basically fake. And that it had been carrying war loot from Singapore to Manila for Prince Chichibu and the Golden Lily.

13:46 Ballinger's unit, led by a guerrilla hero, Captain Medina, followed the convoy of army trucks carrying this odd cargo into the mountains. There they watched Japanese lug very heavy boxes into a cave. Ballinger had no idea what was in them, but it was clearly something of great value. Four men were needed to move each box using a sling harness. The guerrillas took several days to reopen the cave and found that the boxes also contained

14:15 75 kilo gold bars. There were rows upon rows of boxes. Photographs of the ship, along with the report of the cave full of gold, were sent by submarine to MacArthur's intelligence headquarters in Australia. According to Ballinger's son, Gene, his father assumed that he was reporting to the OSS, but nothing was that simple. Some months later, when the American troops had landed in Leyte,

14:43 Bellinger witnessed another movement of treasure by the Japanese. This time, a convoy of trucks carried heavy boxes out of Japanese Army headquarters into a tunnel near a hospital on the outskirts of town. Bellinger's son, Gene, told us this was not nearly as big a secret at this time as the Japanese wanted it to be.

15:11 They were in a big hurry and made the mistake of not paying attention. Medina's company kicked their ass and blew the tunnel shut, Japs and all. A report on this action also was passed up the line by John Bellinger to the OSS or whoever it was. Wonder why those were not booby trapped. Yeah, right.

15:42 Very unusual. But also the guy that was really doing most of the booby trapping was not the Chichibu guy who they were just talking about. And because this is so close to the end of the war, it may have been done in a much bigger hurry than what the rest of them were.

16:08 Trying today to trace any of these intelligence reports on war loot is like falling down a rabbit hole, entering a subterranean world full of lies, evasions, and mad hatters. America's wartime effort to monitor movements of looted bullion, gold bullion, was a major responsibility of the OSS. There were also special intelligence units responsible for monitoring displaced and looted artworks.

16:40 It was called the Art Looting Investigative Unit and the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Group. But these were much more effective in Europe than in Asia. Compared to Europe, Allied intelligence services in Asia and the Pacific were fragmented and did not cooperate. Nearly all of those records kept by the intelligence services of the U.S. have since been made to vanish.

17:11 What has surfaced did so accidentally. In Europe, the OSS at times worked closely with other intel services, but competition and rivalry were intense. One of the fiercest turf battles over the tracking of Nazi loot went on inside the U.S. government, waged between the Secretary of Treasury, Harry Morgenthau, and Alan Dulles, the OSS chief in Switzerland.

17:45 Cavalier attitude existed among Allen Dulles, and the Axis loot was being moved under the noses of the Allies into neutral safe havens. American agents in Switzerland watched 280 trucks of Nazi gold move from Germany across France and Spain to the safe haven of neutral Portugal.

18:14 Private Swiss firms, the trucks were painted with the Swiss cross, allowing the gold to be moved as if it was part of a neutral cover. So again, nothing about Swiss or Sweden has ever been neutral in any form or fashion. And it's interesting to note.

18:45 which comes up often in Operation Gladio conversations, that both Spain and Portugal were at the time still under fascist governments. And they would pick Portugal where they basically had the leader, which was a dictator, under control, bought off, if you will.

19:20 So gold didn't necessarily go to Australia. Gold from the Black Eagle Fund, a lot of Hitler's gold that they had stolen. So let me just back up for just a second so we can make this clear. The gold that was on the Philippines is buried in tunnel systems.

19:54 When, between World War I and World War II, they set up the Bank of International Settlement. And the Bank of International Settlement took quite a bit of all of the country's gold during the interim peacetime from World War I to World War II. And the reason that they set that up, they said, was so that they could, the justification was so that the countries that

20:23 Germany had invaded in World War I could get paid back reparations, right? Because the settlement at the end of World War I put an onus burden on Germany to pay the rest of the country's reparations. In the past, that had been done using a trust. But for some reason, these fascists who want world control

20:50 It was just another step in their plan. We have to have a global bank. So that was going to be the Bank of International Settlements. And all of the countries sign up to do that. We didn't initially. And they deposit millions and millions and millions of dollars. And then they just keep a ledger. The gold never left the Bank of International Settlements. So when the Germans during World War II started invading all the countries like Romania and Czechoslovakia,

21:20 The banker, Slat, would call up the Bank of International Settlements and say, move Czechoslovakia's gold to the German ledger, move Romania's, move Hungary's, move France's. And so basically all of the gold as they conquered one country after another country after another country, all ended up on Germany's ledger. And in addition to that gold,

21:50 There was gold that they confiscated. They didn't do it nearly as extensively as what is done in Golden Lily. But they did go through all of the territories collecting treasure from the museums and castles and everywhere that they conquered. So you basically have multiple avenues of wealth.

22:19 Part of it is the gold. I have read where much of the gold that had been moved to Germany's ledger did find its way out of the Bank of International Settlements into other places. So that's part of it.

22:47 In addition to that, the gold that was found on the premises of all of the places in the banks and everything else that they took. So we're talking about all of that in Europe's case. So let's move on. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, S-T-I-M-S-O-N, ultimately all such reports,

23:20 as far as the intelligence on where all of this loot was, was passed up to the Secretary of War. And he had a special interest in the subject of the looted gold and kept a group of financial experts thinking hard about it. Three of these men were Stimson's special assistants, John McCloy, Robert Lovett, and Robert B. Anderson.

23:51 The problem was how to deal with the plundered treasure and what to do with the Axis gold after the war. It was discussed in July 1944 when 44 nations met at the Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to basically plan what the post-war economy was going to look like. These discussions, some of which were extremely secret,

24:19 revealed the flaws and loopholes that existed in the international financial system, making any clear-cut resolution unlikely. Among the delegates, trust was not a common theme. Many of them believed that the Bank of International Settlements was secretly laundering Nazi loot. So that's exactly what was happening.

24:50 So what I said was sent to Australia was photographs of the ships. So Ballinger was up on that mountain and he was taking photographs because remember before MacArthur moves back to the Philippines, his headquarters was in Australia, right? So he moved his headquarters and is hanging out in Australia during the Pacific battle.

25:20 What was sent to Australia was the photographs of the gold being moved, not the actual gold. Sorry, that wasn't clear. So the Bank of International Settlements was definitely laundering Nazi loot. This distrust basically set the tone of Bretton Woods. And the Bretton Woods agreement was.

25:54 to set a fixed price for gold at $35 an ounce and ban the importation of gold to America for personal use. Neutral countries that signed the pact promised not to knowingly accept stolen gold and other looted assets. But Portugal forgot to include Macau in the list of its dependent territories because at the time,

26:24 Macau was part of Portugal territory. This was a convenient oversight. So we already read chapter four, which talked about Macau and the mafia that existed there. They became the world center for trade in illicit gold and was heavily exploited by Japan. Unlike Europe, where the OSS was tolerated by Eisenhower.

26:55 In the southwest Pacific, General MacArthur resisted all attempts by the OSS to get a foothold in his territory. MacArthur and his staff intended to conduct their own special operations from his headquarters in Australia. Intelligence gathering in MacArthur's domain was under the command of Charles Willoughby. Charles Willoughby is a very interesting guy.

27:22 He was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1892. He basically was illegitimate between a Baron T. Schlepp-Weidenbach and a woman by the name of Emma Willoughby of Baltimore, Maryland. By 1910, her romance with the Baron had turned sour and Emma returned to the United States.

27:52 with her 18-year-old son, who immediately enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. So eventually, he goes on to graduate from Gettysburg College, gets his degree, rejoins the Army as an officer, served in France during World War I, went to Fort Benning. That comes up in a lot of stories. The next few years, he served as an army attache at U.S. embassies in Venezuela, Colombia.

28:22 That keeps coming up, too. Ecuador. He spoke Spanish with a very heavy German accent. He is then sent to Manila to be MacArthur's assistant chief of staff for logistics. Well, and everybody here knows that logistics is very different than intelligence. So by the mid 1941.

28:52 MacArthur became commander of the new U.S. Far East Command and Willoughby wanted to stick around and work for MacArthur. So Willoughby becomes his assistant chief of staff for intelligence and MacArthur promotes him to colonel. When Japan attacked, Willoughby moved with MacArthur to Australia.

29:23 MacArthur wanted absolute control of intelligence gathering and special operations in his zone of command. Willoughby's qualification for such work was zero. He had no intelligence experience at all. And basically completely screwed up many of the battlefield estimates on force capability. And the rest of the people that were actually trained intelligence people kind of did the face plant all the time.

29:52 What's going on here? It made no sense for Willoughby to be that close to MacArthur as an intelligence person. However, many people thought at the time MacArthur was very vain and he liked the suck up kind of people. And Willoughby kind of just worshipped the ground that MacArthur walked on. So many people allege that's the reason why that happened.

30:24 And for Willoughby, who had no allegiance to the truth at all, viewed truth as being a flexible tool. So he sets up a thing called the Allied Intelligence Bureau to run guerrilla operations in the Philippines. He also started the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section to monitor Japanese radio broadcast.

30:53 interrogate prisoners, and translate captured Japanese documents. Willoughby's approach to guerrilla warfare proved to be too cautious for MacArthur, who craved audacity. So MacArthur gave special operations to another friend of his, which was his actual personal attorney in civilian life, Courtney Whitney.

31:21 Willoughby was furious at the separation of his jobs and the fact that it was given to someone else. But basically, MacArthur kind of patted him on the head and said, hey, I'll promote you to brigadier general. You just sit over here and do your intelligence stuff. MacArthur's intimate friend and attorney, Courtney Whitney.

31:45 became the key man running secret agents on the islands and reading reports of war loot, including those from John Ballinger. The OSS had no part whatsoever in this. Whitney was effective in special operations because he was well connected in Manila and a clever, rich man on the first name basis with basically all of the politically connected families in the Philippines.

32:17 MacArthur got Whitney a job when he had graduated the law firm. And, or excuse me, when he had graduated college, MacArthur is the one that was responsible for getting him his first job. And he worked at a Philippine law firm called DeWitt, Perkins, and Enrail, who handled MacArthur's financial affairs in the islands. Because remember,

32:48 MacArthur is basically functioning as the governor of Philippines when all of this stuff happened. And there was a gold mining operation called Benye on the island in which MacArthur was heavily invested. Yeah, MacArthur was running his own version of the OSS. That's a perfect way of saying that. So MacArthur's heavily invested in gold in the Philippines.

33:25 Whitney was intimately involved in all manners of politics, legal work, and financial intrigue as it played out on the island. And he also was intimately familiar with Santa Romana, the guy that's interrogating Yamashita's driver. So according to CIA sources, including former Deputy Director Ray Klein, Santa Romana

33:57 was born in Luzon in 1907, one of seven children. And he basically had went to school in California, married a wealthy young heiress by the name of Evangeline Hampton, C-A-M-P-T-O-N. Her family owned a hotel on Stockton Street in San Francisco. After the quake,

34:29 They rebuilt the hotel that they owned and sold it to new owners. And then it became called the Drake Wilshire. Today, the location still is called Campton Place. The hotel has been renamed to Campton Place Hotel. In the 1930s, Santis took Angelina back to, I guess that's what they called her. Her name is Evangelina. Angelina back to the Philippines where...

34:59 Her inheritance got him started in business, and he became a fringe member of the social circle of MacArthur Whitney and Andreas Soriano, owner of the San Miguel Brewery and one of the richest men on the island. Santee and Angelina had three children. Angelina is said to have died in the early weeks of World War II when she was killed by a Japanese bomb, leaving the children.

35:30 What was left of her money, her marriage to Santi had chilled out earlier. In the Catholic Philippines, divorce was illegal. So in 1936, dropping the name Diaz and using the name Silverino, Santa Romano Santi married a pretty school teacher by the name of Julieta Horarto on the island of Maduro.

36:01 by whom he later had a daughter called Diana. Now, this is all going to be important when we get to the end on what happens to all the gold. So we're just going to go through this. It's a little monotonous, but we need to know this. In his marriage application, Santee claimed to be a school teacher himself. These deceptions were necessary because he was actually committing bigamy. During the war, Santee stayed.

36:29 in the islands, becoming one of Whitney's most effective agents. Therefore, only Whitney, MacArthur's friend and attorney, could have authorized Santee's torture of Major Kojima in September 1945. Whitney never acted without MacArthur's approval, so there is no question that it was done with the full knowledge of MacArthur and his inner circle.

36:57 Japan surrendered. The need for Whitney's special operations officially ceased. Willoughby's G2 Army Intelligence Unit continued to exist pro forma, but both Willoughby and Whitney accompanied General MacArthur to Japan. The Philippines continued to be Whitney's personal power base and one leg of MacArthur's power base.

37:21 Whitney and MacArthur watched closely as the trial of General Yamashito got underway. And as we have seen, they interfered often in the legal process. They also stayed informed on the interrogations of Yamashito's staff. Another key figure in MacArthur's Manila circle was Joseph McMickering, M-I-C-K-I-N-G. Who makes up these names?

37:53 whose father was also the law partner of Whitney. When the Japanese invaded, Captain McMickering was made Assistant G2 to Willoughby. So you have the law partners, and this law partner is running the special operations interrogation garbage. And this law partner's over here's son.

38:26 is the assistant to Willoughby's intelligence network. So the law firm has all of the intel, right? That's important. He was among the baton boys who fled with MacArthur in the boat that ended up in Australia. And during the torture of Major Kojima,

39:06 In 1945, Colonel McMickering was the immediate G2 supervisor of Santa Romana and was the interface between Santee and Manila and Whitney and MacArthur in Tokyo. So when Major Kojima broke and Santee began recovering billions in gold, McMickering became financially

39:36 wealthy seemingly overnight and married a woman by the name of Mercedes Zobel, the heiress of the Zobel Ayala clan of Spanish grandees in the Philippines. In the explosive wealth that came into being in Manila that followed Santee's recoveries, Joe McMickering masterminded the Zobel Ayala,

40:06 clan's acquisition of global real estate, helping create what became one of the world's greatest fortunes. While the Zobel Ayala, and let me spell that for you, Z-O-B-E-L dash A-Y-A-L-A clan certainly was not poor. Their pockets were not as deep as McMickering's. The Philippine star called McMickering's

40:33 the real money bags behind today's colossal Zobel Ayala's fortune. In the early 60s, McMickering and his wife set up the Ayala Foundation to promote vocational education, arts, and livelihood projects in the Philippines. It may be sheer coincidence, but in 1983, it was the Ayala Corporation that bought the rundown Campton Place Hotel,

41:04 in San Francisco and turned it into an elegant and expensive boutique hotel. Yeah, I'm thinking that's not a coincidence. The OSS only became involved in Santee's interrogation by sheer chance. Eight days after General Yamashito's surrender, Captain Ed Lansdale, formerly of the OSS, arrived in Manila by plane from San Francisco and began looking for something to do.

41:34 Lansdale was a very deceptive, engaging and colorful character. And I don't know. We've talked about him before. We'll go through a little bit about him. So overall, people he has kind of two people view him in basically two ways, either as a savior of Asia.

42:07 Or the war criminal and far-right Hackett man. And it's basically the second. So Fletcher Prouty, the U.S. military intelligence officer who kind of wrote supposedly what was a tell-all book of the CIA, but basically it was limited hangout. He only revealed stuff that had already been declassified and was out in the public space.

42:36 He shared office space, Prouty did, with Lansdale for many years and identified Lansdale in photographs taken during the assassination of President Kennedy, identification confirmed by others. In the movie JFK Oliver Stone produced, it was a thinly disguised Lansdale involved in the assassination of the president. We already know how.

43:04 Kennedy was assassinated and it wasn't by Lansdale. Not that there wasn't CIA involvement because there was. Lansdale, interestingly enough, because this comes up repeatedly, was he basically before he was in the OSS, he was in the PR department. He ran like an advertising agency. And it says that.

43:39 When he landed in Manila in 1945, Lansdale was 37 and in the whole scheme of things, insignificant. He had spent the entire war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the OSS because he's good at PR. Lansdale is originally from Detroit and he was a CIA field agent.

44:10 He was taught the same, what's the word, background as the other agents that was going to be working in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan. And basically, they had created, he kind of was responsible for like creating code words for covert operations. Again, he's kind of the PR guy.

44:43 So these code names for covert operations became important because they were recited to Asian secret police bosses. And over the years, Santee picked up this habit of Lansdell's and repeated the same signature phrases that had been used for these secret operations. And he even did it in his last will and testament.

45:15 During the Depression, Lansdale had studied journalism at UCLA. He enlisted, and then he went to intelligence school, then eventually made it into the OSS. And Lansdale's life changed in a big way when President Truman ordered the OSS closed down at the end of September 1945. In the weeks remaining, General Donovan and his deputy, Brigadier General John McGruder,

45:45 look for ways to preserve people that were in the OSS and basically was shifting them around to different intelligence services. And in some cases, even to private American corporations like General Electric to continue doing the spying just appear to be a civilian that could afford to sustain clusters of secret agents in various parts of the war for commercial intelligence work. So these were the Blackwaters before Blackwater.

46:15 They hid intelligence components in international countries, companies, and then put them in foreign countries to do intel as if they actually work for that company. And so you should not find it at all strange when people are arrested in foreign countries that work for these conglomerates, the international syndicate, and are posing as journalists.

46:41 They're not journalists when they're in a foreign country and they're caught with classified information. That makes them a spy by default. So just know that all of our international companies still do this. So Captain Lansdell was one of the 50 OSS staff officers who were given a chance to transfer to General Willoughby's G2 section in the Philippines, headed by Colonel McMickering.

47:15 When Lansdale arrived in Manila, he was shocked by the first sight of war close up. The city was in ruins. And in an entry dated November 10th, 1946, it says, many of the Filipinos were tortured until they were just broken lumps of bleeding flesh. In his office at G2, Lansdale discovered files describing gold being hidden by Japanese soldiers and

47:46 heard of Santee's interrogation of Major Kojima. Electrified, he seized the initiative, taking administrative control of Santee's interrogation. Lansdell was able to do this because most of MacArthur's team, including Willoughby's senior staff officers, were all in Japan at the time. In Manila, Lansdell had the G2 office more or less to himself.

48:12 He galvanized his Filipino and American clerical staff into painstakingly searching the files for all mentioning of the Japanese war loot. The G2's office at our headquarters held a treasury of reports whose content I had to master for my daily work. This is what he recorded in his journal. I gave my intelligence group the task of sorting through what we already knew and obtaining any other facts available.

48:40 Santee was extracting those further facts from the major that he was torturing. In October, after many days of torture, Cochimo broke and revealed everything he knew. Lansdale organized a convoy of cars and set out with Santee and the major to retrace trips made by General Yamashita to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults. Now keep in mind, there's 175.

49:10 There were all in the high valleys north of Manila in a triangle and near the northern tip of Luzon. When they returned to Manila in mid-October, Lansdale reported to Colonel McMickering, then flew to Tokyo where he briefed Willoughby, Whitney, and MacArthur. At their instructions, he flew to Washington to brief General McGruder.

49:37 who still headed the Strategic Services Unit, the last vestige of the OSS office, and before the new Central Intelligence Group was created under General Hoyt Vandenberg. It was Magruder who had moved Lansdell to Manila two months earlier. Vandenberg or Magruder then sent Lansdell to the White House to brief President Truman.

50:07 Clark Clifford, who ends up in the CIA and members of the cabinet. President Truman decided to keep discovery secret. The secret surrounding Santee's recovery is nearly total. So you have the president of the United States being briefed that the Japanese spent the better part of a decade stealing.

50:38 all of the wealth of the Pacific theater, burying it in the Philippines. And upon discovery of that information, he's going to keep it a national secret and not tell any of us about it. What we know from two separate high-level sources in the CIA is that Robert Anderson flew back to Tokyo with Lansdale for discussions with MacArthur.

51:08 MacArthur and Anderson flew secretly to Manila, where they were taken by Lansdale and Santee to some of the sites in the mountains and to six other sites around Apari at the northern tip of Luzon. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a few hand-picked teams, had successfully opened several of these vaults where MacArthur and Anderson were able to scroll down

51:41 Row after row of gold bars. Other sites were opened in subsequent months. In all, recoveries took two years to complete from 45 to 47. And again, which is what, what's his face was, I'd have to go back and, who was it? SR71 was saying, what happened to the booby traps?

52:08 Well, since we know that they were booby trapped, what's being left out of this is how many people died in the excavation, right? Because people, there's cyanide and all kinds of poison in all of these caves. And if they're opening these things up, there are people being buried by the sand. There are people being poisoned by the...

52:36 cyanide gas that was left in little glass vials that were broken. And none of that is being recorded as having happened, but we know that it happened because we know that they were booby trapped. So, also discovered by the U.S. Army investigators in Japan, let's see, from what was seen in these vaults and also discovered by the Army in Japan, because remember, a lot of the loot stayed in Japan.

53:09 in the emperor's personal inventory and banks, right? So everything that they really, really wanted, like the art pieces and the pottery, the special porcelain, and that stuff stayed in Japan. So there is some of this loot in Japan. There's just a whole lot of it in the Philippines.

53:34 It became evident that over a period of decades, Japan had looted billions, I'd say we're in the trillions in today's dollars, of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasures from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea or over land from China through Korea, but a lot had been hidden in the Philippines. Washington's official

54:03 figure for recovered Nazi gold still is only 550 metric tons. But Anderson knew better. One of his business associates saw photos in Anderson's office of an American soldier sitting on top of a stack of gold that Hitler had stolen from Poland, Austria, Belgium, and France. It ended up with the Allied high command and no one was allowed to talk about it.

54:33 The same source said he was taken to a courtyard of a convent in Europe where 11,000 metric tons of Nazi looted gold had been collected. So when 100 tons of Nazi gold were recovered from a salt mine near Germany, the truck convoy carried it to Frankfurt.

55:05 and then banished. It is said to have been hijacked, but the more likely explanation is the gold was among the gold bullion that was located in that convent courtyard. You don't steal that much gold, I'm sorry. The reason for all of this discretion was a top secret project called Black Eagle, a strategy first suggested to President Roosevelt by Secretary of War Stimson.

55:36 and his wartime advisor, John McCloy, later head of the World Bank. These little bastards. Robert Lovett, who became the Secretary of Defense, and Robert Anderson, who was later the Secretary of the Treasury. You see how they're going to hide all this stuff? You've got the perfect setup right there. The Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the guy that's going on to be the World Bank president.

56:07 Stimson proposed using all recovered Axis war loot from the Nazis, the fascists, and the Japanese to finance a global political action fund. And do we know the name of that political action fund? That would be Operation Gladio. Because it would be difficult to, if not impossible, to determine who were the rightful owners of all the looted gold. Better to keep the recovery quiet and set up a trust.

56:37 to help friendly government stay in power after the war. It was informally called the Black Eagle Trust after the Germans' Black Eagle, referring to the Nazi bullion mark on their gold with an eagle and a swastika recovered from the underground vault of the right bank. Now, it's interesting to listen to what...

57:06 Their rationale was, but I have told you all gold has a signature. Any person that is a good metal geologist can tell you exactly where gold comes from within a very close perimeter. It's almost like a cell phone signal because of what is in the gold itself. And this is all documented.

57:37 So the Black Eagle Trust could only have been set up with the cooperation of the most powerful banking families in America and Europe, including the Rockefellers, Harriemans, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Warbirds, and others. A brilliant Wall Street attorney, Stimson. Hey, wait a minute. Isn't that the guy, the war guy? Oh yeah, that's him. He's a Wall Street attorney. Was a man of immense experience who served in various posts for five presidents, Taft, Coolidge.

58:08 Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman. He was also nearing the end of his extraordinary career. He knew Manila intimately, having served as the Governor General in the Philippines in the 1920s. President Hoover had then named him as Secretary of State. Like Hoover, Stimson thought very highly of MacArthur. By Pearl Harbor, Stimson was already in his 70s.

58:35 He managed a vast wartime responsibility by delegating authority to his assistant secretaries, Robert Patterson, who was a lawyer and former federal judge, Harvey Bundy, a Boston lawyer and Yale graduate, and John McCloy and Robert Lovett. What they all had in common was a close relationship to Harrimans and Rockefellers.

59:09 Robert Lovett's father had been the right-hand man of E.H. Harriman, who once tried to buy the railroad in China from Japan. We read about that in like chapter one. Following his father's footsteps, Robert Lovett worked for Avril Harriman at the Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, handling international currency and lending operations.

59:39 John McCloy, by contrast, was a poor boy from Philadelphia who graduated from Harvard Law School, joined the Kravitz firm on Wall Street, and gained the admiration of Avril Herriman by helping set up $77 million worth of bond issues for the Union Pacific Railroad. McCloy engineered such deals for everyone from the House of Morgan on down.

1:00:08 Working for the Secretary of War, Lovett and McGloy became midwives at the birth of America's post-war national security establishment, closely interwoven to the financial community. McGloy was a troubleshooter and expert fixer. There's so many of those fixers. He said his job was to be at all points on the organizational chart where the lines did not quite intersect.

1:00:41 He made trips all over the world, solving problems, working with statesmen, bankers, and generals. He intensely was involved backstage strategy. McCloy knew all the ins and outs of the international finance system. After the war, he became a partner in the law firm of Milbank Tweed, which handled the affairs of the Rockefeller family and its Chase Bank.

1:01:11 became a leader in the Council of Foreign Relations, because of course he did. He became the head of the World Bank, chairman of Chase, and head of Ford Foundation. He may have been the key player in executing the Black Eagle Trust Fund, the one who took Stimson's idea and turned it into a working reality. And it is important to understand that between the World Bank, Chase,

1:01:41 And the Ford Foundation, because keep in mind, the Ford Foundation is what basically operated as a CIA front and giving out. It was a money laundering operation. So things got donated to the Ford Foundation, which then became legitimate money to send forward in the form of like the National Endowment for Democracy, those kinds of current initiatives.

1:02:12 That's what the Ford and the Carnegie Foundation and all of those basically did. It was a way to take dirty black money, send it through banks into these nonprofits and then use them for activity within the CIA, like Operation Gladio type things for funding. And the gold was always better if you could launder it through a legitimate entity because you got more.

1:02:43 than what you would have gotten if you sold it on the black market. That comes up too. So by comparison, Robert Anderson got off to an inconspicuous start. He was out of Texas. He taught school for a little bit and studied law at the University of Texas. He was elected to the state legislature there.

1:03:12 He was appointed assistant attorney general in Texas back in the 1930s. Then somehow Anderson left government to become an extraordinarily successful financial consultant, almost like somebody got into a lot of money and called him up on the phone and said, hey, I got a job for you. He became a financial consultant to some very wealthy people.

1:03:45 And so by the 1940s, he was the general manager of the W.T. Wagner estate, W-A-G-G-O-N-E-R, Wagner. This family owned ranch land and oil land all over Texas. So this guy provides, he has no background as a financial assistant. But hey, Anderson was so,

1:04:16 deft at money management that President Roosevelt appointed him a special aide to the Secretary of War, Stimson. Huh, so he's going to have access to all that Black Eagle money with responsibility for keeping tabs on the Axis loot. Navy Captain Clark Clifford, Truman's aide for national security matters, was also briefed by Captain Lansdell.

1:04:44 was Anderson's protege and intimate friend. Together, Anderson and Clifford became major power brokers. Got a lot of money. McGloy also left government service at this time, and he and Anderson continued to be involved in overseeing the Black Eagle Trust. According to former CIA Deputy Director Ray Kline, the gold boyan recovered from Santa Romana

1:05:13 was put in 176 bank accounts in 42 countries. Anderson apparently traveled all over the world setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the non-communist world. Later, he closely examined, we closely examined several. In 1953,

1:05:38 To reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a cabinet position as Secretary Navy. The following year, he rose to Deputy Secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower administration, he became Secretary of Treasury from 57 to 61. After that, Anderson resumed private life, intimately involved in the CIA's worldwide network of banks,

1:06:03 set up after the war by Paul Helliwell. What? The same Paul Helliwell that laundered all of the drug money for Operation Gladio and set up the Castle Bank in the Bahamas to launder money? What? So Anderson is working with Paul Helliwell.

1:06:30 to run the CIA's worldwide network of banks. Imagine that. Oh, and look, Anderson becomes involved in the BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, that was set up by the CIA with Saudi money in Pakistan to launder more Operation Gladio money. What?

1:07:04 So BCCI is known as the money laundering bank. And basically, remember when we did one of our other book reviews, we find out that they had illegally bought two banks, one in Atlanta and one in D.C. And the specific one they bought in D.C. was where all of the Congress people tended to bank.

1:07:33 So then they go on to say that the BCCI was the Pakistani bank with CIA ties that parlayed money laundering and the discrete movement of black gold into ownership of the biggest bank in Washington, D.C., which would be the bank that BCCI bought. The collapse of BCCI in what the Wall Street Journal called the world's largest bank fraud.

1:08:10 Also sneered Anderson's protege, Clark Clifford, who was indicted for fraud. Clifford and his associate, Robert Altman, headed First American Bank Shares. That's the bank. It was a BCCI front bank in the nation's capital and was accused of using political patronage to shield BCCI from full investigation, which is exactly what they were doing. Anderson's reputation began to crumble.

1:08:40 when it was revealed that Bernard Nostiter, N-O-S-S-I-T-E-R, in the Washington Post said that he had sought and received $290,000 from a Texas oil man while serving as Eisenhower's Secretary of Treasury. Anderson later pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax evasion and money laundering and died in disgrace. Isn't that interesting?

1:09:10 Anderson, McCloy, and the others that administered the Black Eagle Trust from the top down would be too big for what we're talking about in here. But there is a lot to dig out of their dealings because basically what we're talking about and what all of this gold eventually gets used for that they had access to was Operation Gladio, Black Ops.

1:09:41 Spoiler alert. So, let's see. The players we know were involved, and it is known about the public side of the arrangements made at the Brenton Woods conference. And we found out that the American allies basically

1:10:20 had no choice but to stand aside as the U.S. government set about the dollarization of the global economy. The economics see the end of World War II as year zero for the current system of international finance. I made a note here because I had read another article about this. It does make you wonder if that was the end.

1:10:54 one of the purposes of World War I and II was basically to bleed everybody dry, wear everybody out, and then use the U.S. as a battering ram afterwards to bring everybody into the one world government. Because it does seem like that's kind of what happened. Because of the widespread suspicion of the Bank of International Settlements in Zurich,

1:11:25 and the fact that they had been laundering access loot, Brenton would set up a new central financial clearinghouse called the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, to act as the world's future financial clearinghouse and money changer. Gold was assigned a dollar value of $35 an ounce, and all other currencies was valued against the dollar. This removed any doubt that the relative...

1:11:53 position of the dollar and the British pound, for example, would ever basically, they're going to be pegged. So although Britain was a partner in the plan, she was deep in debt to the U.S. In 1941, in exchange for a $30 billion war loan, Britain had been obliged to take a backseat to the post-war planning. And, you know, let me just say that these people that wrote this book,

1:12:24 are from Britain. I don't agree with that statement. I'm just going to put that out there. Britain didn't take a back roll to anybody. They were very much through the Rothschilds in control of a lot of this. Each IMF member country agreed on a value for its currency expressed in terms of the U.S. dollar. Each member country deposited with the IMF an amount in gold and currency as reserve. So basically they're setting the IMF

1:12:54 IMF up to function exactly like the Bank of International Settlements. And many people have said that the Bank of International Settlements was kind of the precursor, the foot in the door to then go on to the IMF and the World Bank. And they did it under the duress of needing it for war reparations. And what I did forget to say earlier when I mentioned the war reparations is as soon as the Bank of International Settlements was set up,

1:13:23 the collective forgave all of the reparation payments. So the whole purpose of setting it up was to process the reparation payments. As soon as it was set up, it was all forgiven. So the whole thing was bull crap to go down another step in the formation of one world government. So each IMF member country agreed to the value. And let's see.

1:13:57 The main function of the IMF was to maintain stable values for the currencies by shifting funds temporarily from one to the other. While it was a global organization, its most important backer was the U.S. government. Federal statistics show that at the end of the war, the U.S. held 60% of the world's official gold reserves, which put Washington in a position of being able to manipulate the other nations. By 1960, however, it was evident. But see what they leave out here?

1:14:27 where was the gold the liber that was in london it was not in the united states the whole manipulation of the gold and silver market happens in london not the united states just keep that in mind in 1960 however it was evident to the european members of the imf that they would soon hold dollars far in excess of the official u.s gold reserve one solution

1:14:52 would have been to devalue the dollar, but Washington blocked this. Instead, in 1961, the U.S., and they talk about it right here, joined with the central banks of Europe, Great Britain, and Switzerland to form the gold pool managed by the Bank of England. This is where it was always going all the time. The idea was that the collective official reserves

1:15:17 of the countries would give them enough gold to intervene in the private market for gold to keep the price at $35. It worked for a while, but in 1968, France had left the gold pool and British pound had been devalued and private demand for gold skyrocketed. In a last ditch attempt to sustain the gold pool, the U.S. Air Force made

1:15:42 emergency airlifts of gold from Fort Knox to London. So much gold bullion was moved onto the weighing room at the Bank of England that the floor collapsed. It was an omen for the gold pool itself collapsed shortly thereafter. These people are crazy. That's just all you can say at the end of the day. They're crazy. The invisible Black Eagle Trust set up by Stimson's team

1:16:11 beefed up by bullion from the Santa Romana recoveries, created a separate pool of black gold that put an extra floor under the post-war economy and gave Washington and its allies covert financial leverage. There were certain similarities between this trust and the diamond cartel identified with the De Beers and the gold cartel identified with Oppenheimer family of South Africa.

1:16:41 According to informed sources, these similarities exist for good reason and on many different planes. The diamond cartel was able to amass huge quantities of stone and yet keep prices artificially high by limiting it to a trickle the number of diamonds that actually reached the market, maintaining the impression that they were all very rare when in fact they are not.

1:17:08 The black gold cartel could hold many thousands of metrics of tons of gold buoyant, far more than the official gold supply, keeping gold artificially high while discreetly using derivatives of it as gold as a clandestine slush fund. If the recovery of this huge mass of plundered gold was known only to a trusted few, those countries and individuals

1:17:36 that had been robbed by the Nazis and the fascists or the Japanese, would not sue to recover it. If it became public knowledge, it would cause the fixed price of $35 to collapse, and with it, the currencies of many different countries. At least they thought. So gold prices...

1:18:03 could be kept at $35 an ounce, currencies pegged to the gold would be stable, and black gold would serve as a reserve asset, bolstering the prime banks in each country, strengthening the governments. So now here's what they did, just so that we can put this into perspective.

1:18:23 They went around and they told you how they were flying around putting gold in all the different banks in all the different countries. Now, what that means is that sits on those banks. It's not in the bank's account, so it's not technically their gold. But because it shows up as an asset on the bank's account and it's going to sit there, they...

1:18:47 In fractional lending, they now can lend out $9 for every $1 worth of gold sitting on their books. So you see why this is very important. And eventually we're going to get to the part in the book where the people like Santa's descendants who actually, because some of these accounts were put in his name eventually, and we'll get to that part. But when they go to claim the gold, none of the banks want to give them their gold.

1:19:16 Because the banks have been using this as their leverage for decades at that point. And they did go through some heinous maneuvers to cheat all of these people out of their gold, even a second time. And there's even more fraud attached to this gold, as you'll see. They come up with all kinds of shenanigans in playing with this because they have no intentions.

1:19:47 of ever not having control of this so what they would do in order to fund clandestine um activities is they would leverage that goal as like um an asset to loan money to um or to kind of like a cash advance if you will with that as collateral to go plan all the poppy things and then pay that bank that back and use the profits

1:20:15 for the clandestine operations. So this is just a boon for them when it comes to black ops is the bottom line. So the underground funds, let's see, they're used to bribe people, this slush fund, by elections, which the author mentions Italy, Greece, and Japan, which that is true. It was used there, but it was used much more extensively than that.

1:20:52 Also, some internationally famous banks appear to have been addicted to having bullion of the black gold in their vaults, so addicted that they refused to surrender it, which is what we were just talking about. In a certain sense, no one better than Santo Romano Recovery.

1:21:21 knew more about it than Lansdell. His role at first was strictly as a facilitator, supervising the recovery of some of the gold vaults, inventorying the bullion, having it trucked to warehouses to the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay or the Air Force base at Clark Field. This was kept under tight security by armed convoys, military aircraft, and Navy vessels. Preference went to the Navy because of the weight.

1:21:49 One source even insisted that this was one of the reasons President Eisenhower appointed Anderson Secretary of the Navy, which that makes sense. The transfer of these big quantities of bullion is confirmed by documents, bills of laden, insurance covers, and a multitude of other paperwork over the years and revealed the names of the individuals and famous brokerages involved, prime banks to which the bullion was shipped.

1:22:17 In later chapters, some of these shipments will be described. General Willoughby, a man of limited imagination, detested Lansdell as a smartass and blocked his promotion to major until 1947, when Lansdell also made deputy director of G2 at the Philippines. General Hoyt Vandenberg, chief of the new Central Intelligence Group, came to Lansdell's rescue and transferred him to the Air Force.

1:22:49 After a few months at its strategic intelligence school in Colorado, where he rose to lieutenant colonel, Lansdale was sent back to the Philippines as a full colonel working for Frank Wisner. And Frank Wisner is definitely one of the premier CIA guys. Frank Wisner ends up being in charge of what they referred to as the Dirty Tricks Division at the Office of Policy Coordination.

1:23:20 He started out at the State Department doing the same thing before the OSS even was a thing. So then he transitions from the State Department into the CIA once it stood up, basically doing the same job that he had been doing at the State Department. It just gets folded into the CIA. So at that point, Lansdell's career is like a rocket ship.

1:23:49 This usually is attributed to his success in grooming a guy by the name of Ramon Sagsaysay. It's spelt M-A-G-S-A-Y-S-A-Y, Magsaysay, to be the America's boy in the newly independent Philippines and Lansdale's much exaggerated success in suppressing the quote unquote communist.

1:24:20 There was no communist rebellion. They basically are going to use the Philippines as one of the first testing of the use of this gold in order to rig elections. So Lansdale, always the huckster, had movie crews film phony attacks on villages staged by special units of the Filipino army, like Operation Gladio.

1:24:59 And the next day filmed the liberation of the village led by the Masese guy as if it was a Hollywood production. So they are faking a communist Marxist insurgency with film crews on hand and then basically allowing the Filipino army to assassinate them all to install their.

1:25:30 puppet government in the Philippines so they can continue to dominate these gold sites and continue to excavate the gold. So you can't have anybody there that's actually a nationalist and wants the U.S. out. So the Philippines becomes one of the ground zeros for the initial Operation Gladio-styled attacks. So let's see. Okay.

1:26:05 So Lansdell was easily able to con powerful men in Washington into believing that he had done all of this by himself as far as taking care of the government over there in the Philippines. America's greatest mission was taken seriously by Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles, who was a great power, but little direct experience in Asia.

1:26:31 because they were primarily focused in Europe. So writing to the U.S. ambassador in Manila, Admiral Raymond Spruces said, Alan Dulles called Lansdell our mutual friend. When he sent Lansdell to Vietnam in 1954, Dulles told Eisenhower he was sending one of the best men. Eisenhower enjoyed hearing that Lansdell's escapades in the Philippines.

1:27:02 and recounted with humor and heavy irony, Lansdell was also close to Richard Nixon, which led to a number of unsavory consequences. Remember that Nixon is Eisenhower's vice president. Others noticed that Lansdell had a curious gleam in his eye, not unlike that of Elmer Gantry, and concluded that he was nuts. It must be stopped at all costs, according to

1:27:32 Doug Valentine, when he wrote in his book called The Phoenix Program, which is a good book, by the way, even though Doug Valentine is a significant leftist. He does do great research. Lansdale used Madison Avenue language to construct a squeaky clean Boy Scout image behind which he masked his own perverse delight in atrocity. This is what Doug Valentine is saying.

1:28:04 In the 1950s, Alan Dulles gave Lansdale $5 million to finance CIA operations in the Philippines, but after the money was spent, Lansdale's protege, President Magsaysay, died prematurely in a plane crash. What? He must have outlived his usefulness. For Lansdale in Vietnam, he initially spread

1:28:39 $12 million in black money in a misguided attempt to reverse the flood tide of events by backing the Dem family, D-I-E-M. Lansdale loved the power he gained by having access to unlimited covert funds. And like Willoughby, he was largely successful in keeping his failure secret, the very essence of national security cover, because that national security stamp is good for being.

1:29:08 completely worthless. In the late 1950s, he was in and out of Tokyo on secret missions with a hand-picked team of Filipino assassins, including his favorite and cold-blooded killer, Napoleon Valerino, the daughter of an American officer who knew Lansdale, told how he arrived in Japan with characters who were known to be assassins.

1:29:36 the one he brought in from the Philippines. As a kid, I was fascinated by him and his gun, which everyone could see. Unusual because no one in Japan had weapons. The whole idea of Lansdell and our government assassinating people struck me as shockingly weird. That's what the girl said. So basically, the moral of the story is this gold gets into the hands of

1:30:13 the CIA operators, and they create enormous political action funds soon that result in basically mass killing around the world. Along the way, it was necessary to do a lot of lying and even some killing, especially lying about Japan, which had stolen most of the gold to start with, to keep people from knowing about the Santo Romano recoveries.

1:30:43 and the Black Eagle Trust, Washington had to insist that Japan never stole anything and was flat broke and bankrupt at the end of the war. So that's it for chapter seven. We'll do chapter eight next time. And I will be doing a few this weekend kind of on an unannounced schedule, if you will. So just kind of keep an eye out for the announcement.

1:31:13 Because we are going to be in St. Augustine. And so as I have time available, I'm going to do a couple more chapters of the book review since I was negligent on Tuesday and didn't get them in. So let me go through the comments here real quick. When I was stationed in Korea, I took the time to listen to those who had survived the Korean War.

1:31:39 So that's interesting. Hold on just a second because I want to write that down. We are going to be doing a Korea expose. I kind of talked a little bit about Korea today. And I'm going to look into that Kwanju massacre because I know Bridget and Liza has done some awesome work already in Korea. And we're going to bring you a whole.

1:32:10 litany of information about Korea. Korea is nothing like what you think. It didn't happen at all the way we were told, not that we're shocked at this point, but it absolutely did not happen the way we were told it happened. It is another unbelievable mess. Okay. Let's see. So Donnie vision, you'll have to stay tuned on that.

1:32:43 And let's see. He found a way. Let's see. Let's see. U.S. declared war to move Japan away from the battle with the Russian islands at the end of Russia so that Russia could fight an upcoming battle against the Germans. Why do you think so many countries?

1:33:13 Hate the USA. My father knew the Navy was corrupt as a supply officer commander on the carrier. Yeah, that's probably the most thankless job in the world is the supply officer, especially in the Navy. And what I found interesting, because the Navy is the only one that put the supply officer as a non-line officer. So for those of you not having ever been in the military,

1:33:42 There's a category of line officers and non-line officers. And for promotion, when it's the most relevant, line officers are both operations, like in the Air Force, all your pilots and the support people, like personnel, intel, and all that stuff. Those are all line officers.

1:34:02 Non-line officers are usually ones that require a fairly high level of education, like doctors and lawyers and chaplains, that is very unique and couldn't compete in a normal promotion board with line officers who basically drop bombs and kill people. So as a result of that, these guys all have their own special promotion categories. In the Air Force, supply falls under logistics.

1:34:31 which is a line officer. And that is true in the other services with the exception of the Navy. The Navy, because of their international porting and the legalities of the contracting that they have to do as supply officers, you oftentimes have to tell your commander no and not allow him to get himself into legal jeopardy, much like an attorney does. And because of that,

1:35:00 They made supply officers non-line, which from someone who worked in personnel in the Air Force, the first time I had heard that, I was like, what the hell? That doesn't make any sense to me at all. But the more you advance in rank and the more you understand about the missions of the different services, it made all the sense in the world because of the conflicting legal.

1:35:31 role that supply officers, you know, because they have to, there's contracts written for gassing in foreign ports and that type of thing. For us, we gas in the air. You know, we don't even have to get gas at an airport. We just take off, tap on the refueler and move on. So you're isolated, if you will, on a lot of the legal

1:36:00 situations that the Navy has to encounter all the time in foreign ports. I got a sneeze. So that's very interesting. And thanks for adding that Frogger. We're all conspiracy theories or theorists at this point. Let's look back through the deep state put sanctions on Japan's oil so that they would no longer have a choice.

1:36:35 They rigged the system. Now we know why England never adopted the euro. Not from your country, a young participant in war, but if you've been born earlier, I certainly would cross the border from the north side. Sounds like the EU on the financial side. MACVSOG was intelligence death squads in Vietnam.

1:37:03 Yeah, Frogger, again, Vietnam, like Korea, completely different than what we were told. We also have an upcoming feature that we're going to do on Vietnam. Having walked around all over Vietnam, I've been in northern Vietnam, in Hanoi. I went to Nha Phong Harbor. I was all over the south part of Vietnam, and we kept calling it Saigon.

1:37:30 though they call it Ho Chi Minh City. And you could tell why we were there doing that, that it aggravated the hell out of them. And went through, we also went through Cambodia and Laos and Thailand. And I have some very interesting things to add to what we found there as far as history and researching Operation Gladio there and the Phoenix program and all the other aspects to it. So hopefully we're going to get.

1:37:59 to that as soon as we can. Okay. So I think that pretty much gathers up all of the comments. Let's go back to the supply officers, easy to blackmail. Yeah. And honestly, that's the reason why they had to be put in their own category. Yeah.

1:38:32 Country definitely has done some bad things. So, all right. Again, just keep watch on our account on True Social and on X, and I'll announce with as much time as I can ahead of time. The book reviews will get to Chapter 8. Chapter 8 is called Dirty Tricks.

1:38:59 Also, let me just look here real quick. It's not a very long chapter. And then The Heart of Darkness is going to follow. So we will get to that just as quickly as we can. Oh, also, cool announcement. I'm going to take some video. I will show you the video. I will be going to General Flynn's movie premiere tomorrow.

1:39:30 in Venice with Brian Cates and a few other people that you guys will recognize once we get down there. And I will post pictures and video and I'll show what I can here on the book review that we do once I get back. So the next couple of book reviews is going to be from my mobile command post, which y'all might call an RV.

1:39:59 And I'm looking forward to it. So thanks, everybody, for being here. And I'll see you next time.

Entities here

Claims made here

Tomoyuki Yamashita operated_in Philippines documented ▶ 1:46

“This is back in September 1945. And after receiving the official notification that Japan had capitulated and there was a general, the general that we've been talking about, Yamashita, appears in the P…”

Tomoyuki Yamashita died_in Philippines documented ▶ 4:22

“Yamashita unbuckled his sword, bowed deeply, presented it to the major who was there. Five months later on February 23rd, 1946, after what many described as a grotesque miscarriage of justice, Yamashi…”

United States ordered_assassination_of Tomoyuki Yamashita host_asserted ▶ 5:20

“He was charged with war crimes because of the atrocities committed against. But many of those were committed by the admiral as opposed to Yamashita. That was also on Manila, on the Philippines, in Man…”

Douglas MacArthur ordered_assassination_of Tomoyuki Yamashita host_asserted ▶ 7:47

“vainglorious man who wanted revenge for being made to look incompetent because basically he was responsible for kicking MacArthur's butt off of the Philippines to begin with. And so they believe this …”

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana spied_on Major Koijima Kashi book_quoted ▶ 8:52

“Charge of the torture of Major Yojima was a Filipino-American intelligence officer, Saverino Garcia Diaz Santo Romana. His friends called him Santi. We'll hear a lot about him. He was a big boned man …”

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana spied_on Tomoyuki Yamashita book_quoted ▶ 9:26

“of interrogating all of the Japanese prisoners. Many Filipinos had been cruelly tortured and beheaded. Women and girls were gang raped in the streets. Many of them disemboweled and hacked to pieces. B…”

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana member_of Strategic Services Unit book_quoted ▶ 11:02

“If he was spoke of at all, it was always as a senior CIA official to say that Santee at the time was an OSS agent, basically meaning that he worked for the Office of Strategic Services headed by Wild …”

John C. Ballinger spied_on Japan book_quoted ▶ 12:08

“although the details were not shared with Britain or other allies. During the last year of the war, Americans fighting alongside Filipino guerrillas observed a heavily laden Japanese hospital ship unl…”

John C. Ballinger member_of Strategic Services Unit book_quoted ▶ 14:15

“75 kilo gold bars. There were rows upon rows of boxes. Photographs of the ship, along with the report of the cave full of gold, were sent by submarine to MacArthur's intelligence headquarters in Austr…”

Allen Dulles spied_on Germany book_quoted ▶ 17:45

“Cavalier attitude existed among Allen Dulles, and the Axis loot was being moved under the noses of the Allies into neutral safe havens. American agents in Switzerland watched 280 trucks of Nazi gold m…”

Bank for International Settlements laundered_money_for Germany book_quoted ▶ 24:19

“revealed the flaws and loopholes that existed in the international financial system, making any clear-cut resolution unlikely. Among the delegates, trust was not a common theme. Many of them believed …”

Charles Willoughby born_in Heidelberg book_quoted ▶ 27:22

“He was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1892. He basically was illegitimate between a Baron T. Schlepp-Weidenbach and a woman by the name of Emma Willoughby of Baltimore, Maryland. By 1910, her romance …”

Charles Willoughby studied_at Gettysburg College book_quoted ▶ 27:52

“with her 18-year-old son, who immediately enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. So eventually, he goes on to graduate from Gettysburg College, gets his degree, rejoins the Army as an officer, served…”

Charles Willoughby studied_at Fort Benning book_quoted ▶ 27:52

Douglas MacArthur appointed Charles Willoughby book_quoted ▶ 28:52

“MacArthur became commander of the new U.S. Far East Command and Willoughby wanted to stick around and work for MacArthur. So Willoughby becomes his assistant chief of staff for intelligence and MacArt…”

Charles Willoughby headed Allied Translator and Interpreter Section book_quoted ▶ 30:24

“And for Willoughby, who had no allegiance to the truth at all, viewed truth as being a flexible tool. So he sets up a thing called the Allied Intelligence Bureau to run guerrilla operations in the Phi…”

Charles Willoughby headed Allied Intelligence Bureau book_quoted ▶ 30:24

Douglas MacArthur headed Allied Intelligence Bureau book_quoted ▶ 30:24

Douglas MacArthur appointed Courtney Whitney book_quoted ▶ 30:53

“interrogate prisoners, and translate captured Japanese documents. Willoughby's approach to guerrilla warfare proved to be too cautious for MacArthur, who craved audacity. So MacArthur gave special ope…”

Courtney Whitney member_of DeWitt, Perkins, and Enrail book_quoted ▶ 32:17

“MacArthur got Whitney a job when he had graduated the law firm. And, or excuse me, when he had graduated college, MacArthur is the one that was responsible for getting him his first job. And he worked…”

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana studied_at Californian book_quoted ▶ 33:57

“was born in Luzon in 1907, one of seven children. And he basically had went to school in California, married a wealthy young heiress by the name of Evangeline Hampton, C-A-M-P-T-O-N. Her family owned …”

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana married Evangeline Hampton book_quoted ▶ 33:57

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana born_in Luzon book_quoted ▶ 33:57

Andreas Soriano secretly_owned San Miguel Brewery book_quoted ▶ 34:59

“Her inheritance got him started in business, and he became a fringe member of the social circle of MacArthur Whitney and Andreas Soriano, owner of the San Miguel Brewery and one of the richest men on …”

Servino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana married Julieta Horarto book_quoted ▶ 35:30

“What was left of her money, her marriage to Santi had chilled out earlier. In the Catholic Philippines, divorce was illegal. So in 1936, dropping the name Diaz and using the name Silverino, Santa Roma…”

Courtney Whitney spied_on Major Koijima Kashi book_quoted ▶ 36:29

“in the islands, becoming one of Whitney's most effective agents. Therefore, only Whitney, MacArthur's friend and attorney, could have authorized Santee's torture of Major Kojima in September 1945. Whi…”

Douglas MacArthur ordered_assassination_of Major Koijima Kashi book_quoted ▶ 36:29

Jacques Whitney member_of Inger Ingersoll host_asserted ▶ 36:57

“Japan surrendered. The need for Whitney's special operations officially ceased. Willoughby's G2 Army Intelligence Unit continued to exist pro forma, but both Willoughby and Whitney accompanied General…”

Jacques Whitney operated_in Philippines host_asserted ▶ 36:57

Joseph McMickering member_of Inger Ingersoll host_asserted ▶ 37:53

“whose father was also the law partner of Whitney. When the Japanese invaded, Captain McMickering was made Assistant G2 to Willoughby. So you have the law partners, and this law partner is running the …”

Joseph McMickering married Mercedes Zobel host_asserted ▶ 39:36

“wealthy seemingly overnight and married a woman by the name of Mercedes Zobel, the heiress of the Zobel Ayala clan of Spanish grandees in the Philippines. In the explosive wealth that came into being …”

Joseph McMickering funded Zobel Ayala clan host_asserted ▶ 40:06

“clan's acquisition of global real estate, helping create what became one of the world's greatest fortunes. While the Zobel Ayala, and let me spell that for you, Z-O-B-E-L dash A-Y-A-L-A clan certainly…”

Joseph McMickering founded Ford Foundation host_asserted ▶ 40:33

“the real money bags behind today's colossal Zobel Ayala's fortune. In the early 60s, McMickering and his wife set up the Ayala Foundation to promote vocational education, arts, and livelihood projects…”

Atlas Corporation acquired United States host_asserted ▶ 40:33

Fletcher Prouty exposed Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 42:36

“He shared office space, Prouty did, with Lansdale for many years and identified Lansdale in photographs taken during the assassination of President Kennedy, identification confirmed by others. In the …”

Edward Lansdale studied_at United States host_asserted ▶ 45:15

“During the Depression, Lansdale had studied journalism at UCLA. He enlisted, and then he went to intelligence school, then eventually made it into the OSS. And Lansdale's life changed in a big way whe…”

Edward Lansdale member_of Inger Ingersoll host_asserted ▶ 46:41

“They're not journalists when they're in a foreign country and they're caught with classified information. That makes them a spy by default. So just know that all of our international companies still d…”

Edward Lansdale carried_out_attack Philippines host_asserted ▶ 47:46

“heard of Santee's interrogation of Major Kojima. Electrified, he seized the initiative, taking administrative control of Santee's interrogation. Lansdell was able to do this because most of MacArthur'…”

Edward Lansdale briefed John Magruder host_asserted ▶ 49:10

“There were all in the high valleys north of Manila in a triangle and near the northern tip of Luzon. When they returned to Manila in mid-October, Lansdale reported to Colonel McMickering, then flew to…”

Edward Lansdale briefed Douglas MacArthur host_asserted ▶ 49:10

Edward Lansdale briefed Harry S. Truman host_asserted ▶ 49:37

“who still headed the Strategic Services Unit, the last vestige of the OSS office, and before the new Central Intelligence Group was created under General Hoyt Vandenberg. It was Magruder who had moved…”

John Magruder reassigned Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 49:37

Robert Anderson did_business_with Douglas MacArthur host_asserted ▶ 50:38

“all of the wealth of the Pacific theater, burying it in the Philippines. And upon discovery of that information, he's going to keep it a national secret and not tell any of us about it. What we know f…”

Douglas MacArthur moved_to Philippines host_asserted ▶ 51:08

“MacArthur and Anderson flew secretly to Manila, where they were taken by Lansdale and Santee to some of the sites in the mountains and to six other sites around Apari at the northern tip of Luzon. The…”

Robert Anderson moved_to Philippines host_asserted ▶ 51:08

Henry Stimson proposed Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 55:05

“and then banished. It is said to have been hijacked, but the more likely explanation is the gold was among the gold bullion that was located in that convent courtyard. You don't steal that much gold, …”

Henry Stimson funded Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 56:07

“Stimson proposed using all recovered Axis war loot from the Nazis, the fascists, and the Japanese to finance a global political action fund. And do we know the name of that political action fund? That…”

Black Eagle Trust front_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 56:37

“to help friendly government stay in power after the war. It was informally called the Black Eagle Trust after the Germans' Black Eagle, referring to the Nazi bullion mark on their gold with an eagle a…”

Rothschild family funded Black Eagle Trust host_asserted ▶ 57:37

“So the Black Eagle Trust could only have been set up with the cooperation of the most powerful banking families in America and Europe, including the Rockefellers, Harriemans, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers…”

Rockefeller family funded Black Eagle Trust host_asserted ▶ 57:37

Harriman family funded Black Eagle Trust host_asserted ▶ 57:37

Oppenheimer family funded Black Eagle Trust host_asserted ▶ 57:37

Henry Stimson lived_in Philippines host_asserted ▶ 58:08

“Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman. He was also nearing the end of his extraordinary career. He knew Manila intimately, having served as the Governor General in the Philippines in the 1920s. President Hoov…”

Robert Lovett member_of Harriman family host_asserted ▶ 59:09

“Robert Lovett's father had been the right-hand man of E.H. Harriman, who once tried to buy the railroad in China from Japan. We read about that in like chapter one. Following his father's footsteps, R…”

John J. McCloy studied_at United States host_asserted ▶ 59:39

“John McCloy, by contrast, was a poor boy from Philadelphia who graduated from Harvard Law School, joined the Kravitz firm on Wall Street, and gained the admiration of Avril Herriman by helping set up …”

John J. McCloy member_of Rockefeller family host_asserted ▶ 1:00:41

“He made trips all over the world, solving problems, working with statesmen, bankers, and generals. He intensely was involved backstage strategy. McCloy knew all the ins and outs of the international f…”

John J. McCloy headed Chase Manhattan Bank host_asserted ▶ 1:01:11

“became a leader in the Council of Foreign Relations, because of course he did. He became the head of the World Bank, chairman of Chase, and head of Ford Foundation. He may have been the key player in …”

John J. McCloy headed World Bank host_asserted ▶ 1:01:11

John J. McCloy headed Ford Foundation host_asserted ▶ 1:01:11

Ford Foundation laundered_money_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 1:02:12

“That's what the Ford and the Carnegie Foundation and all of those basically did. It was a way to take dirty black money, send it through banks into these nonprofits and then use them for activity with…”

Robert Anderson studied_at United States host_asserted ▶ 1:02:43

“than what you would have gotten if you sold it on the black market. That comes up too. So by comparison, Robert Anderson got off to an inconspicuous start. He was out of Texas. He taught school for a …”

Harry S. Truman appointed Clark Clifford host_asserted ▶ 1:04:16

“deft at money management that President Roosevelt appointed him a special aide to the Secretary of War, Stimson. Huh, so he's going to have access to all that Black Eagle money with responsibility for…”

Robert Anderson funded Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 1:05:13

“was put in 176 bank accounts in 42 countries. Anderson apparently traveled all over the world setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the non-commun…”

Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Robert Anderson host_asserted ▶ 1:05:38

“To reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a cabinet position as Secretary Navy. The following year, he rose to Deputy Secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower administration,…”

Paul Helliwell laundered_money_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 1:06:03

“set up after the war by Paul Helliwell. What? The same Paul Helliwell that laundered all of the drug money for Operation Gladio and set up the Castle Bank in the Bahamas to launder money? What? So And…”

BCCI laundered_money_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 1:06:30

“to run the CIA's worldwide network of banks. Imagine that. Oh, and look, Anderson becomes involved in the BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, that was set up by the CIA with Saudi mon…”

Robert Anderson did_business_with Paul Helliwell host_asserted ▶ 1:06:30

BCCI acquired First American Bank host_asserted ▶ 1:07:04

“So BCCI is known as the money laundering bank. And basically, remember when we did one of our other book reviews, we find out that they had illegally bought two banks, one in Atlanta and one in D.C. A…”

Clark Clifford member_of First American Bank host_asserted ▶ 1:08:10

“Also sneered Anderson's protege, Clark Clifford, who was indicted for fraud. Clifford and his associate, Robert Altman, headed First American Bank Shares. That's the bank. It was a BCCI front bank in …”

Robert Altman member_of First American Bank host_asserted ▶ 1:08:10

First American Bank front_for BCCI host_asserted ▶ 1:08:10

Robert Anderson covered_up United States host_asserted ▶ 1:08:40

“when it was revealed that Bernard Nostiter, N-O-S-S-I-T-E-R, in the Washington Post said that he had sought and received $290,000 from a Texas oil man while serving as Eisenhower's Secretary of Treasu…”

Bank for International Settlements laundered_money_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 1:10:54

“one of the purposes of World War I and II was basically to bleed everybody dry, wear everybody out, and then use the U.S. as a battering ram afterwards to bring everybody into the one world government…”

IMF founded United States host_asserted ▶ 1:11:25

“and the fact that they had been laundering access loot, Brenton would set up a new central financial clearinghouse called the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, to act as the world's future financi…”

United States formed Gold Pool documented ▶ 1:14:52

“would have been to devalue the dollar, but Washington blocked this. Instead, in 1961, the U.S., and they talk about it right here, joined with the central banks of Europe, Great Britain, and Switzerla…”

France left Gold Pool documented ▶ 1:15:17

“of the countries would give them enough gold to intervene in the private market for gold to keep the price at $35. It worked for a while, but in 1968, France had left the gold pool and British pound h…”

Henry Stimson set_up Black Eagle Trust host_asserted ▶ 1:15:42

“emergency airlifts of gold from Fort Knox to London. So much gold bullion was moved onto the weighing room at the Bank of England that the floor collapsed. It was an omen for the gold pool itself coll…”

Black Eagle Trust funded_by Santo Romano Recoveries host_asserted ▶ 1:16:11

“beefed up by bullion from the Santa Romana recoveries, created a separate pool of black gold that put an extra floor under the post-war economy and gave Washington and its allies covert financial leve…”

Edward Lansdale transported_gold_to Clark Field host_asserted ▶ 1:21:21

“knew more about it than Lansdell. His role at first was strictly as a facilitator, supervising the recovery of some of the gold vaults, inventorying the bullion, having it trucked to warehouses to the…”

Edward Lansdale supervised Santo Romano Recoveries host_asserted ▶ 1:21:21

Edward Lansdale transported_gold_to Subic Bay host_asserted ▶ 1:21:21

Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Robert A. Lovett host_asserted ▶ 1:21:49

“One source even insisted that this was one of the reasons President Eisenhower appointed Anderson Secretary of the Navy, which that makes sense. The transfer of these big quantities of bullion is conf…”

Hoyt Vandenberg transferred Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 1:22:17

“In later chapters, some of these shipments will be described. General Willoughby, a man of limited imagination, detested Lansdell as a smartass and blocked his promotion to major until 1947, when Lans…”

Charles Willoughby blocked_promotion_of Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 1:22:17

Edward Lansdale worked_for Frank Wisner host_asserted ▶ 1:22:49

“After a few months at its strategic intelligence school in Colorado, where he rose to lieutenant colonel, Lansdale was sent back to the Philippines as a full colonel working for Frank Wisner. And Fran…”

Frank Wisner headed Office of Policy Coordination host_asserted ▶ 1:22:49

Edward Lansdale groomed Ramon Magsaysay host_asserted ▶ 1:23:49

“This usually is attributed to his success in grooming a guy by the name of Ramon Sagsaysay. It's spelt M-A-G-S-A-Y-S-A-Y, Magsaysay, to be the America's boy in the newly independent Philippines and La…”

Allen Dulles sent Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 1:26:31

“because they were primarily focused in Europe. So writing to the U.S. ambassador in Manila, Admiral Raymond Spruces said, Alan Dulles called Lansdell our mutual friend. When he sent Lansdell to Vietna…”

Allen Dulles called Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 1:26:31

Edward Lansdale close_to Richard Nixon host_asserted ▶ 1:27:02

“and recounted with humor and heavy irony, Lansdell was also close to Richard Nixon, which led to a number of unsavory consequences. Remember that Nixon is Eisenhower's vice president. Others noticed t…”

Allen Dulles gave_money_to Edward Lansdale host_asserted ▶ 1:28:04

“In the 1950s, Alan Dulles gave Lansdale $5 million to finance CIA operations in the Philippines, but after the money was spent, Lansdale's protege, President Magsaysay, died prematurely in a plane cra…”

Edward Lansdale backed Diem family host_asserted ▶ 1:28:39

“$12 million in black money in a misguided attempt to reverse the flood tide of events by backing the Dem family, D-I-E-M. Lansdale loved the power he gained by having access to unlimited covert funds.…”

Edward Lansdale brought Napoleon Valeriano host_asserted ▶ 1:29:08

“completely worthless. In the late 1950s, he was in and out of Tokyo on secret missions with a hand-picked team of Filipino assassins, including his favorite and cold-blooded killer, Napoleon Valerino,…”