Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Peggy Seagrave (Author) "During the night of October 7, 1895, thirty Japanese assassins forced their way into Korea's royal palace in Seoul..." (more)
Key Phrases: red series maps, gold cartel, war loot, New York, Golden Lily, Santa Romana (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Seagraves, bestselling authors (Lords of the Rim, etc.), contend that Japan systematically looted the entire continent of Asia during WWII, seizing billions in precious metals, gems and artworks. Further, according to the authors, from war's end to the present, the looted treasure, used by President Truman to create a secret slush fund to fight communism, has had a malignant effect on American and Asian politics. The Seagraves assert that the Japanese imperial family, along with Ferdinand Marcos, every American president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, and numerous sinister figures on the American hard right have been tainted and in many cases utterly corrupted by the loot. Postwar efforts to recover and exploit the treasure, according to the Seagraves, involved murders, dishonest deals and cover-ups. Readers who want to examine the full range of sources for this controversial account are referred in the book to the authors' Web site, where two CDs containing "more than 900 megabytes" of supporting documentation are available. But a paradox affecting conspiracy histories such as this one is the authors' frequent insistence that the malefactors have suppressed relevant evidence. Conceptual difficulties of this sort make it impossible for the lay reader to judge this book's credibility, even while one is swept up in the high-intensity story the Seagraves tell. FYI: The authors claim that in consequence of their revealing the existence of the slush fund and its resulting "global network of corruption," they have received "veiled death threats."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Announcing they might be murdered for writing this book, the Seagraves proceed to tell an involved story about Japanese plunder from World War II that, never returned to its rightful owners, underwrites political slush funds and other financial legerdemain conducted by American and Japanese power brokers. According to the cognoscenti, some of the boodle is called the M-Fund, after the initial of a Douglas MacArthur crony who set it up; the gold behind it, in turn, was secreted in the Philippines under the supervision of the imperial Japanese family. The Seagraves, reputable authors of East Asian histories, advance considerable sourcing for their claims, some of which, however, rely precariously on the word of single individuals, while others are anonymous. It is, therefore, a challenge for the reader to decide what's true here, such as the authors' explosive assertion that Richard Nixon exchanged a political promise (returning Okinawa to Japan) for money from the M-Fund. In any event, the Seagraves' tale of treasure hunting, war crimes, and skulduggery will prompt some head scratching. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Verso (September 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859845428
• ISBN-13: 978-1859845424
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #145,249 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Earth-Shattering, Faith-Shaking, Well-Documented Deceit, September 25, 2003

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This book is earth-shattering and faith-shaking, a well-documented tale of deceit at the highest levels of the US government. So controversial and potentially explosive are the findings of this book, to wit, that the White House recovered most of the Nazi and Japanese loot and created a secret slush fund for covert political operations world-wide, that the authors go the extra mile and offer, at a nominal price, two CD-ROMS containing 60,000 pages of supporting documentation including the Japanese treasure maps used by the US to recover the gold and other valuables.

Major players include Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, both Allen and John Foster Dulles, Douglas MacArthur, John McCloy, and the famous unconventional warrior Edward Lansdale. What we learn from this book is that those writing about "blowback" (the consequences of unwise US actions) have barely scratched the surface. What we learn is that rather than truly seeking to help the Japanese, Chinese, and other looted nations recover in the aftermath of WWII, the most senior leaders of the US government, no doubt with the best of intentions, actually conspired with Nazi bankers and the Japanese imperial family to create a Black Eagle Trust controlled by a very select hand-picked cabal in Washington.

Originally used to fight communism, the Black Eagle Trust, according to the authors and as thoroughly documented by the book and the two CD-ROMS (which I am happy to have in hand), quickly became a global slush fund used to bribe national leaders and manipulate elections around the world. This fund remains in existence today, making the Swiss Holocaust funds seem like loose-change. According to the authors, major banks are "addicted" to the funds and would face collapse if public investigations resulted in a forced return of this gold and related certificates to the rightful owners.

The authors have produced a magnificent work of both scholarship and investigative journalism. They document the extent of Japanese looting of Korea (beginning in 1895) and China as well as the other countries in the "co-prosperity sphere." They document the manner in which Japan hid most of the gold in the Philippines (some in Indonesia), and were forced to leave it there from 1943 onwards, when US submarine interdiction became too effective to risk shipments homeward.

I found the level of detail in this book to be quite gripping. The ingenious nature of the Japanese burial sites, with caverns below the more obvious tunnels, with sea-water protection, with maps created in reverse--and the in-bred cruelty of the Japanese, thinking nothing of burying all of the US and other national slave labor *and the Japanese engineers* alive as the final stage of protecting the looted treasure, leave one stunned.

The authors document the central role played by Lansdale in recognizing the opportunity and then briefing MacArthur and then President Truman. According to the authors, the architects of the Black Eagle Trust were three advisors to President's Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson: John McCloy (later head of the World Bank), Robert Lovett (later Secretary of Defense), and Robert Anderson (later Secretary of the Treasury). They made the case to Roosevelt, and presumably to Truman after Roosevelt died, that it would be impractical to return the looted gold to the rightful owners, in part because many of the looted countries were now under Soviet control.

The authors, who conducted many interviews in support of the work, including interviews of former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who they say was involved with Lansdale and the gold in the 1940's and remained involved with the black gold through the 1980's, provide copies of documents showing the redirection of the looted gold to 176 bank accounts in 42 countries. The gold was then used to support the creation of gold bearer certificates that were in turned used to bribe the most senior officials around the world.

The authors tell a shocking tale of how quickly MacArthur chose to collaborate with the very leadership of Japan that declared war on the USA and was responsible for genocide and looting in Asia on a scale rarely achieved by anyone else. Bringing the story up to date, the authors show how prior attempts to investigate the Black Eagle Trust have led to the ruin of individuals such as Norbert Schlei, at one time deputy attorney general to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. While I have no direct knowledge and cannot be certain myself, I believe the authors have provided a sufficiently compelling case to warrant an international investigation concurrently with a General Accounting Office investigation to be chartered by Congress with unlimited supeona powers specifically directed against classified personalities and archives.

If this story is true, and I personally think that it is, then the US government, in active collusion with the very people the American people fought to defeat in WWII, has been guilty of fraud and depravity on a global scale and against the best interests of both the American people, and the against the rightful owners of the looted gold and other treasures. The authors may well have uncovered the last really big secret of the post-WW II era, and in so doing, opened the way for a restoration of the balance of power among diverse nations, and a sharp delimitation of the abuses that appear to characterize American leadership when it thinks it can rely on secret gold and stolen oil to engage in imperial adventures and domestic improprieties. As an American citizen and voter, and as a person of faith who believes that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us, I find this book to be shocking, credible, and a basis for popular outrage and demands for truth and reconciliation.

42 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gold Warriors: Why the POWs in Asia were Betrayed!, October 15, 2003

By	Federico Baldassarre (Hayward, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In 1947, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered the immediate termination of all investigations of Japanese war crimes and the immediate suspension of the arrest of any suspected war criminals.

In June 2000, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) said, "You mean our federal government can just say, 'To hell with you, Bataan Death Marchers, and you people who were mistreated (by the Japanese), we are just going to waive all your rights.'"

As disturbing and painful as it may be to read, this is a book all victims of the Japanese, and their next of kins, must read. It's documentation and research is beyond reproach. For many of us, this book will be our 'fall from innocence', if that is still possible.

Fred Baldassarre
Son of a Bataan Survivor

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Critical to understanding post Cold War politics, October 29, 2004

By	R. C. O'Brien (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Absolutely astonishing book - and while one fellow above bashed the supporting references, I note that he didn't delve into the 2 CDs of supporting material (such as scans of maps made by the Japanese military showing where the gold was hidden in the Phillipines & all the boobytraps).

A lot of this makes sense, intuitively. For example, where in the heck did Ferdinand & Imelda Marcos get all of that wealth? I've read that they "looted the Phillipine people" - hello? Where did the Phillipine people get billions of dollars (American) to loot in the first place?

Secondly, if you read more about how the world's economy was changed fundamentally after World War II, this book provides some missing pieces. It's a brilliant strategy, really - the USA essentially cornering the market on gold, forcing the rest of the world to adopt gold (and pegging it to the dollar) as the new standard, and thus, you are left with (for all practical purposes) endless funds for covert wars against Communist/ leftist regimes.

Why people are shocked by this is puzzling. In the 1950's and 1960's it wasn't considered any sort of problem to be meddling in the world's politics; and the history of US involvement repressing elections in Latin America is well documented. And we won't even get into some of the covert actions (like Iran-Contra) that we KNOW about, so an educated student of history has to assume there are far more details than we have even been told.

Back to the book, the story about how Nixon eventually surrenders control of the secret gold to the Japanese power structure in exchange for covert funds for his presidential campaign sure sounds like the Nixon we are all familiar with.

This is an extraordinary book, one can only wonder how many more details will surface in upcoming years...