Connecticut Danny said:
#3020,,, thank you for the updates that many people enjoy.
You are welcome #3021. A little more on topic is this note from my friend, who I think is much more knowledgeable with respect to the topic than anybody else here, especially those that deny that looting took place during WWII, or that the Germans looted, and the Japanese did not:
It is an inescapable fact that from the beginning of the US occupation of Japan, General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and others, knew all about the stolen treasure in Japan and the continuing extraordinary wealth of the Japanese elite, despite losing the war.
In an official report on the occupation prepared by MacArthur’s headquarters and published in 1950, there is a startling admission: “One of the spectacular tasks of the occupation dealt with collecting and putting under guard the great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates, and all currency not legal in Japan.
Even though the bulk of this wealth was collected and placed under United States military custody by Japanese officials, undeclared caches of these treasures were known to exist.”
MacArthur’s staff knew, for example, of $2-billion in gold bullion that had been sunk in Tokyo Bay, later recovered. Another great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 was $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a ‘rear admiral’ in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was
in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan’s wartime drug trade throughout Asia. Kodama specialized in looting platinum for his own hoard. As this was too heavy to airlift to Japan, Kodama also helped himself to the finest gems looted by his men, taking large bags of gems to Japan each time he flew back during the war.
After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave over $100-million in US currency to the CIA. He was also, amazingly, put on General Willoughby’s payroll, and remained on the CIA payroll for the rest of his life, among other favors brokering the Lockheed aircraft deal that became a major scandal for Japan’s Liberal Demopcratic Party. Kodama personally financed the creation of the postwar political parties that merged into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington.
Both Kodama and his underworld associate Sasakawa Ryiochi, were then involved with the CIA in joint recoveries of Japanese war-loot from the Philippines.
On September 2, 1945, after receiving official notice of Japan’s surrender, General Yamashita and his staff emerged from their mountain stronghold in the Kiangan Pocket on Luzon, and presented their swords to a group of U.S. Army officers led by Military Police Major A.S. ‘Jack’ Kenworthy, who took them to Bilibad Prison outside Manila. Because of gruesome atrocities committed earlier by Admiral Iwabuchi Kanji’s sailors and marines in the city of Manila (after Yamashita had ordered them to leave the city unharmed), the general was charged with war crimes. During his trial there was no mention
of war loot. But there was a hidden agenda.
Because it was not possible to torture General Yamashita physically without this becoming evident to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. Since Yamashita had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere.
In charge of Kojima’s torture was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana, a man of many names and personalities, whose friends called him ‘Santy’. He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to which he had taken Yamashita, where bullion and other treasure were hidden.
Supervising Santy was Captain Edward G. Lansdale, later one of America’s best-known Cold Warriors. In September 1945, Lansdale was 37 years old and utterly insignificant, only an advertising agency copywriter who had spent the war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the 0SS. In September 1945, chance entered Lansdale’s life in a big way when President
Truman ordered the OSS to close down. To preserve America’s intelligence assets, and his own personal network, OSS chief Donovan moved personnel to other government or military posts. Captain Lansdale was one of fifty office staff given a chance to transfer to U.S. Army G-2 in the Philippines.
There, Lansdale heard about Santy torturing General Yamashita’s driver, and joined the torture sessions as an observer and participant.
Early that October, Major Kojima broke down and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila.
While Santy and his teams set to opening the rest of these vaults, Captain Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, then on to Washington to brief President Truman. After discussions with his cabinet, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret.
The treasure – gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems – was combined with Axis loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This ‘black gold’ gave the Truman Administration access to virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. It also provided an asset base that was used by Washington to
reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries.
It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was
only a matter of time before treasure began to be recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries and civilian victims. To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank. There were other reasons why the gold was difficult to trace. Many of the original owners had died, and pre-war governments had ceased to exist. Eastern Europe was falling under the control of the Soviet Union, so returning gold looted there was out of the question.
Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally
called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources,including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.)
After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down “row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall”. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been tucked away there in what the US Army statement called “undeclared caches of these treasures ... known to exist” .
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