THE EMPEROR'S GOLDEN LILY

Link: http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/goldp10.html

Nazi Gold
Part 10:The Emperor's Golden Lily

While the size of the Bormann treasure is not known with any accuracy, it undoubtedly is the largest Nazi treasure that has not been recovered. The only other treasure remaining from WWII that could rival it in size is the Golden Lily treasure collected for the Japanese Emperor. While the Nazi treasure has been the subject of numerous searches and research, the Japanese treasure has been largely left unexplored. While the Nazis appointed a special unit of the SS, Devisenschutzkommando to take charge of the looting of Europe, the Japanese likewise had a special unit. Whereas, the Nazi unit employed Frenchmen to locate gold and currency on a ten percent commission, the unit was plagued by individuals seeking to enrich themselves rather than the Third Reich and much gold was siphoned off into private treasures. Seeking to avoid a similar problem, Hirohito appointed Prince Takeda Tsuneoshi as chief financial officer of the Kwantung Army. Several princes were involved with the Golden Lily operation. After the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the Golden Lily operation conducted a parallel operation. Loot was amassed and trucked to Korea for shipment to the Japanese homeland.77

In 1939, the Japanese invaders suffered a stinging defeat at Nomonhan after a boarder clash with the Soviets. It’s worth noting that this was the first battle in which the Japanese Unit 731 employed biological warfare, using typhoid bacteria. The experiment was a failure. In 1941, Roosevelt signed a secret agreement with Britain and the Netherlands agreeing to go to their defense if their colonies in Southeast Asia were attacked. In 1940, Prince Chichibu was appointed to head the Golden Lily. He and Takeda traveled throughout China and Southeast Asia, overseeing the looting and shipping the treasure back to Japan aboard hospital ships. By 1943, the United States submarine blockade of the home islands became effective. This forced Prince Chichibu to move his Golden Lily headquarters from Singapore to Luzon. He spent the next two and half years inventorying and hiding the treasure in a series of vaults, tunnels, and caves. The treasure was hidden in a total of 172 sites.78 The hope was Japan could arrange a cease-fire and be allowed to hang onto the Philippines as a territory and then recover the treasure at their leisure.

Besides using the Philippines to hide the treasure in the last year of the war, Japan hid gold at sea by scuttling ships. The cruiser, Nachii was torpedoed by a submarine in Manila Bay. The submarine then machined gunned any survivors to ensure secrecy. President Marcos recovered the gold from the Nachii in the 1970s. In 1997, A Japanese television crew filmed the recovery of 1,800 gold bars worth $150 million. The Igorot hill people had discovered the gold. After the death of Prince Chichibu in the 1950s, a member of the Imperial family confided that the Golden Lily had amassed over $100 billion in treasure, much of which was hidden in the Philippines.79 He also confirmed that the prince had escaped from MacArthur’s advancing forces by submarine.

The hospital ship, Tenno Maru, arrived at Yoksuka Naval Base loaded with causalities from the Philippines and 2,000 metric tons of gold. Days later it moved to Maizura Naval Base, where additional treasure was put aboard. The ship then sailed at night. Its crew was murdered and the ship sunk in the bay. In a secret operation in 1987, Japan recovered the gold. Another hospital ship, Awa Maru was sunk mistakenly off the coast of China in April 1945. Aboard the ship was 40 metric tons of gold, 12 metric tons of platinum, 150,000 carats of diamonds, a large quantity of titanium, and other strategic materials. Old mines in the Japanese mountains served as repositories for portions of the Golden Lily treasure. Near the Olympic Village of Nagano, a tunnel complex was dug by Korean slave labors. A ten kilometer tunnel completed the complex.80 This complex was used to hide portions of the Golden Lily.

The Allies had made it clear that they intended to prosecute Japanese war criminals in the same manner as Nuremberg. However, unlike Germany, only a few generals and admirals were ever convicted. The archives in Japan had vanished. The United States took exclusive control over Japan, unlike the four zones in Germany. President Truman appointed MacArthur as the Supreme Commander. For six years after the surrender of Japan, MacArthur held virtually unchallenged power. As Supreme Commander he ignored the Far Eastern commission of eleven nations. MacArthur had the power to reform the country, but instead left it in the same hands that bombed Pearl Harbor. The only reform implemented was the successful land reform that went ahead before it could be blocked. Washington D.C. was at least partially responsible for the lack of reforms. The liberals in Washington wanted reform while the conservatives blocked all reform efforts. The conservative Democrats and the Republicans held Congress until the 1946 election when the Republicans regained a majority of seats, putting Congress solidly in the conservative camp.

There were great plans for reforms, such as the dissolution of the zaibatsu, conglomerates, banking reforms, and a new constitution as well as restitution payments to nations ravaged by Japan. None of these plans were ever implemented. MacArthur killed those plans and was soon backing away from punishment of war criminals. To protect the ruling elite, MacArthur soon banned all labor demonstrations and canceled the right of labor unions to strike.

Just as the denazification of Germany had been sabotaged, the democratization of Japan was sabotaged by MacArthur and his staff with additional help coming from the former ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, and former President Herbert Hoover. Grew had been ambassador to Japan appointed to the post by Hoover in 1932 and was acting secretary of state in 1945. His wife was a grand niece of Commodore Perry and her mother was a Cabot. Grew was from the top society of Boston and was deaf to those beneath his stature in society. Grew’s family had longtime ties to Asia. The Grews had been bankers, who underwrote the opium clipper ships of the 1800s.

Grew had started sabotaging the democratization of Japan during the war. During the war Grew held private talks with Japan’s ambassador to Switzerland and promised that the United States would not prosecute Hirohito and that he would be allowed to keep his throne. Such a promise was adamantly opposed by both the Roosevelt and the Truman administrations, which both called for unconditional surrender and prosecution of war criminals.

Grew however, knew he had the backing of some of the most powerful figures in American politics and high finance. He left it up to Bonner Fellers to see to it. Fellers was a former OSS agent attached to MacArthur’s command who had been stationed in Cairo in 1941. While stationed in Cairo to observe the British operations in North Africa, he transmitted reports back to his superiors using the black code. The Italians had broken the black code and within minutes of Feller’s transmissions, Rommel knew the positions of British forces and battleplan. After being transferred to the states for a brief period Fellers was attached to MacArthur’s command.

The groundwork for sabotaging the peace in Japan had been laid out by Grew and Hoover. Fellers was friends with both and had acquired a reputation of being an expert on Japan. He had been stationed in the Philippines in the 1930s and had made frequent trips to Japan during that time. Hoover used Fellers during the occupation of Japan to convey ideas to MacArthur. MacArthur used Fellers in turn to push his presidential ambitions to Hoover and the Republican hierarchy.

As president, Hoover showed little concern about foreign affairs. However, after his defeat and as the war clouds descended on Europe, he took an active interest in foreign affairs. In 1938, Hoover met with Hitler. Even at this late date, Hoover still would have aligned the country with Hitler to defeat Stalin. He was also a friend with Japanese royalty from his time spent in China. Hoover wanted Japan to be a conservative Pacific outpost strongly opposed to communism. He wanted Japan to be allied with the US and to act as an Asian base for the Republican Party and its Wall Street cronies. Once he could cleanse the emperor of any guilt over the war, he could cleanse the government and Japanese factories would be humming again.

Hoover’s and Grew’s plan to cleanse the emperor and the Japanese government of any war crimes had to be kept secret. There were still far too many, bitter war memories from Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, and Japanese forced labor camps. As late as 1945, Congress had voted that Hirohito should be tried as a war criminal. Fellers and another Grew protégé, Max Bishop, engineered the cleansing process. First, to discover the true extent of Hirohito’s guilt, they questioned Japanese officials and indicted war criminals in secret. Once all the facts had been assembled, they sanitized each incriminating bit of information by suborning witnesses. Before the trials could begin, several adverse witnesses conveniently died. American POWs on their way home were forced by US intelligence to sign documents forbidding them to talk about the harsh treatment they received at the hands of the Japanese.

While MacArthur was quietly trying to stop the trials, he received a blunt reminder from the Joint Chiefs to get serious about bringing the Emperor to trial. Despite such orders, MacArthur would not permit a trial of Hirohito. MacArthur even put Hirohito on the public relations circuit, showing him shaking hands and portraying him as a great pacifist. Behind the scenes, MacArthur and Fellers were castigating anyone not falling in line with the opinion that the war was the fault of the military.

MacArthur’s list of war criminals was remarkably short. Of 300 cases investigated only 28 appeared before the court. Only seven were executed. All of those hung were Choshu and not Satsuma. This may have been a payoff to the royal court from a long-standing feud dating back to the early days of the Meiji Restoration. Even post war maps omitted the name Choshu after renaming the prefecture Yamaguchi.

Chief prosecutor was Joseph Keenan, the eleven-member panel of judges consisted of a judge from each Allied nation. Some of the criminals high on the list were granted pardons arbitrarily. For instance, the British decided not to prosecute a naval officer who ordered the machine gunning of 600 British sailors trying to stay afloat after their ship had been sunk. MacArthur ordered that not a single bit of information about biological warfare and Unit 731 be admitted in the trials.81

While Herbert Hoover kept Fellers and MacArthur busy in Japan, nursing MacArthur’s political ambition, he guided Grew stateside. At the end of the war Grew resigned from the State Department and moved to Wall Street, where he became the leading spokesman for the Japan crowd. Grew became the co-chairman of the American Council on Japan (ACJ). The ACJ was a political action committee formed by wealthy conservatives immediately after the war to lobby Washington and to fight any efforts to reform Japan. The ACJ was backed by Newsweek, a newsmagazine founded in 1937 by Averell Harriman. His brother was a director. While Harriman was equally guilty in supplying Hitler before the war, he is normally associated with the Democratic Party. Newsweek’s pro-Japanese stance had his blessing. His role as a leading fundraiser of Democratic causes obviously came at a cost as he was looking out for his financial interests and those of his clients. The magazine hailed the Wall Street vision for Japan. Chief organizers for the AJC were Harry Kern, Newsweek foreign editor, Compton Pakenham, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Tokyo, and James Kauffman, a New York lawyer who served the interest of General Electric, Standard Oil, Ford, National Cash register, Ottis Elevator, and Dillon Reed in Japan.82

Grew’s cochairman at ACJ was another agent of Herbert Hoover, William Castle. Castle was a wealthy plantation owner from Hawaii and a former ambassador to Japan. Ambassador positions at the state department were regarded by the wealthy as their own providence. Grew’s assistant at the ACJ was Eugene Dooman, who was raised in Japan. They regarded their mission to stop any excesses in reforming Japan. Right wing business leaders were careful to denounce cartels and monopolies in principle, but fought vigorously against any effort to break up Japanese conglomerates. They looked toward restoring trade with Japan and saw that Japan was Asia’s only industrial base. Once the financial elite of Japan could be restored to power, the quicker business could resume.

In the summer of 1947, Kauffman visited Tokyo on behalf of Dillon Reed and made a personal assessment of Truman’s plan to break apart the zaibatsu. Truman’s plans were classified secret. However, Undersecretary of Defense William Draper leaked the documents to Newsweek. The reader should recall that William Draper played a prominent role in sabotaging the 4-Ds program in postwar Germany. In December, as the nation was gearing up for the presidential election, Newsweek denounced the overall plan for Japan as costly.

In Congress, the attack was led by Republican Senator William Knowland a wealthy newspaper publisher from California. Knowland claimed the Truman policy on Japan was written by communists, paving the way for Joe McCarthy. Knowland and Congressman Walter Judd a Republican from Minnesota, led the China lobby on Capitol Hill and blamed the loss of China to communism on Truman. Herbert Hoover meanwhile continued to lead MacArthur on about his chances of being nominated for the Republican ticket. MacArthur was particularly sensitive to Newsweek’s charges of communism. Those charges enraged the general and he halted all further implementation of the reform program.

The final deathblow for reform in Japan came early in 1948. In February, William Draper and Percy Johnson, a Wall Street banker, toured Japan to review the policy. Johnston was chairman of Chemical Bank, which had a long time relationship with Mitsui Bank. The outcome was predictable. Of the original list of 325 Japanese companies that were to be broken apart, only 20 remained on the Draper-Johnston list. Not a single Japanese bank would be restructured. The Japanese banks changed their names as a precaution and hid their past.

By 1952, when the occupation ended, all leftists had once again been purged and the conservatives were in control of Japan. The Emperor’s fortune still laid under the waters of Tokyo Bay and in other locations. The first recovery of a portion of the Golden Lily is known as the Santa Romana recovery. In the Philippines during the waning days of the war, Filipino guerillas observed the Japanese transporting heavy bronze cases and hiding them in a cave. An OSS major was with the group that observed the burial. After the treasure was hidden in the cave, the entrance was dynamited shut and concealed. The OSS agent reopened the cave and found the cases to contain gold. Following the war, between 1945 and 1948, the gold was recovered. The operation was known to Wiliam Donovan, MacArthur, Fellers, Edward Langsdale, and Herbert Hoover. Later, Allen Dulles knew of the operation. Donovan and Langsdale were assigned the recovery. No attempt was ever made to return the gold to its rightful heirs. Instead, the gold was deposited in 176 bank accounts in 42 different countries. It became the basis of the CIA off the books financing. This financing was done by issuing gold certificates to influential people, binding them to the CIA. One account in Langsdale’s name in the Geneva branch of Union Banque Suisse contained 20,000 metric tons of gold. The insiders squirreled some of the bullion away for private use. Documents confirm that one of the largest accounts was in the name of MacArthur.

Other documents indicated Herbert Hoover had an account containing $100 million in gold bullion. One can be certain that Hoover’s deep concern over Japan was based on his ability to smell a big payoff in gold from his previous experiences in China and Australia. The large holding of gold by Hoover was confirmed after his death, when his son sought out government approval to dispose of a large sum of gold bullion. The large accounts of MacArthur and Hoover suggest that the cleansing of Hirohito came at a high price.83

Edwin Pauley, a rich oilman, had been dispatched to Japan to assess Japan’s ability to pay reparations. Pauly was informed of the $2 billion dollars of gold in Tokyo Bay shortly after his arrival in Japan. Yet, Pauley concluded Japan was in shambles and could not pay its fair share of expenses of the American occupation, let alone to anyone else’s rebuilding efforts. Largely due to Pauley’s assessment, Japan’s bill for reparations came to only one billion dollars. If such a sum had been distributed equally to the next of kin of the 20 million people who died as a result of Japan’s aggression, each would have received the paltry sum of $30. In the immediate post war scramble for reparations, the wealthy in Japan who had profited from the war and hid their profits submitted their own claim for reparations, totaling $5 billion. Many of these claims were paid.

Instead of cash payment to countries, Japan was ordered to provide industrial equipment. Even such token payments were suspended by Washington when the equipment was claimed as collateral for bonds issued before the war by American firms. Two of the largest American firms making such claims were Morgan Bank and Dillon Reed. By 1950, Japan owed Morgan Bank over $600 million in interest, penalties, and principle just for the 1924 earthquake loans. In 1951, Japan arranged for refinancing of the loans through Smith Barney and Guaranty Trust. By 1952, Japan had repaid all prewar investments by American corporations and compensated them for all property damage. While all prewar Japanese bonds held by companies affiliated with the ACJ were repaid, companies not affiliated were not so fortunate. The reader should ponder long and hard how a country so shattered was able to pay off such a colossal debt in such a short time.84

The issue of Japan’s compensation is still an issue. In 1998, one month before Prince Akihito’s visit to Britain, Congress passed the following resolution.

Whereas the government of Germany has formally apologized to the victims of the Holocaust and gone to great lengths to provide financial compensation to the victims and to provide for their needs and recovery; and Whereas by contrast the Government of Japan has refused to fully acknowledge the crimes it committed during World War II and to provide Reparations to its victims: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of the Congress that the Government of Japan should.

1.Formally issue a clear and unambiguous apology for the atrocious war crimes committed by the Japanese military during World War II; and:

2. Immediately pay reparations to the victims of those crimes including United States military and civilian prisoners of, people of Guam who were subjected to violence and imprisonment, survivors of the "Rape of Nanking" from December 1937, until February, 1938, and the women who were forced into sexual slavery and known by the Japanese military as "comfort women."85

One intriguing theory that sheds additional light on the fate of the Golden Lily comes from David Guyatt, author and researcher.86 Guyatt theorizes that the total mined supply of gold has been deliberately understated and that the supply of gold is much larger than the 140,000 tons reported. This additional supply of black gold is controlled by extremely right wing fascists. One reported trader in this market is the son of George Bush.

His theory revolves around the year 1954. London Bullion Market was shut down in 1939 at the onset of war. Even before the war, England’s gold reserves were extremely low. The war was an additional drain on those reserves, as evident by the destroyer trade and England’s reliance on the Lend Lease program. As well as the concession of Portugal to accept the pound in trade rather than demand gold. In short, England was walking among the financially dead at the war’s end. However, in 1954, just nine short years from the end of the war, England had apparently acquired enough supply of gold to reopen the bullion market.

The Bilderberg group held its first meeting in 1954. The Bilderberg group was founded by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and former officer in the SS. Bernhard had also worked in I.G. Farben’s notorious NW7 group, which served as spies for the Third Reich. The Prince is also associated with the Knights of Templar, through its Dutch variety. Bernhard was appointed to govern the Dutch order in 1954. John Foster Dulles was reported to have been one of the most helpful Americans in establishing the Bilderberg group. Incidentally, in 1954 Dulles testified in favor of a bill designed to return vested enemy assets such as GAF, to their previous owners. From the beginning, the Bilderberg group had several members of the intelligence community associated with it. Sir Colin Gubbins, Britian’s wartime SOE head, was a founding member. Walter Bedell Smith was a co-chairman of the group in the US.

The year 1954 was significant in a number of other ways. A memorandum of agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department that allowed the CIA to police itself was dated February 18, 1954. In effect, it allowed the CIA free reign as the Justice department would turn a blind eye towards matters of national security. Another noteworthy aspect of 1954 was the merger of the Schroder Bank and the Wagg family to form the city based merchant bank, J. Henry Schroder Wagg & Co. Wackenhut Corporation, a corporation with deep ties to both the military and intelligence communities, was formed in 1954.

However, more significant was that 1954 was the year the U.S. had forecasted that the Soviet Union would have thermo nuclear weapons. With their greater numerical strength, a massive military build up had been launched, costing taxpayers billions, while the corporations reaped fat profits. It was also the year in which General James Doolittle concluded his study of the CIA and reached the conclusion that the agency was not as adept as the KGB. The MK-Ultra, the mind control program of the CIA, began in 1954.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of all events in 1954 was a strange audit of the gold supply in Fort Knox. Every bar, totaling almost three quarters of a million, was weighed singularly. Moreover, every hundredth bar was drilled and a small sample taken to be assayed. No single assayer was used so the extent of the audit could not be deduced. No reasonable explanation for such a detailed and secret audit has been uncovered.

A partial list of significant events of 1954 follows: After learning about the Japanese treasures in November 1953, Marcos starts digging for gold in the Philippines. Fred Meuser, Lockheed's European Director, transfers to Geneva to live, this event figures in later. The Four-Power Treaty is signed in Paris to terminate the occupation regime in Germany. Germany joins NATO. Geneva Accord reached regarding peace between France and Indochina. Additionally, 1954 was the year that Edward Landsdale arrived in Vietnam to take over the opium trade. The Israeli Mossad and US CIA formed an intelligence "partnership." Nazi gold was moved from Argentina to the Philippines in 1954 after the Mosad determined it was located in Argentina.

Guyatt provides a more extensive list of events revolving around 1954 than provided above. However, the essential events to support his theory have been covered and we can now begin to look more directly at the Golden Lily and its recovery. Research done by the Seagraves has found 172 treasure sites of the Golden Lily in the Philippines. One of those sites audited by Japanese accountants contained a staggering 777 billion yen or the equivalent of $194 billion.87 Estimates for all 172 sites comes to a staggering $100 trillion. Over the years, numerous right wing groups have aided and abetted the CIA by laundering plundered items from the Golden Lily.

One of the latest recoveries, which raised scandalous headlines in 1994 involving former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, was part of an operation involving the CIA and former General John Singlaub. The operation, dubbed Nippon Star, had recovered in excess of 500 metric tons of gold recovered from the Philippines. Singlaub, who is very active in right wing extremist groups and political intrigue in Central and South America, headed the team. Singlaub was part of the military/CIA intelligence complex before retiring. The team consisted of Gunther Russbacher, a CIA agent, five other Americans, and a handful of Filipinos. The recovered gold contained Nazi gold and gold stole from China by the Japanese. Kurt Waldheim served as the intermediary between the Austrian National Bank and Philippine President Ramos.

What is intriguing about this sale, besides the extraordinary size, is this operation was also known to the Knights of Malta. A document from the Knights of Malta entitled the Landsdale Project references 500 MT. Moreover, it refers to a meeting of Washington people to discuss the ramifications of another Landsdale project. While a number of former intelligence officials and military leaders are known members of the Knights of Malta, their knowledge of a secret CIA operation raises further questions. Who else was in on this operation? What were the ramifications of the second Landsdale Project? Was the Vatican a part of this operation? For now, those questions and others will have to go unanswered.

The stated reason for the transfer to Austria was to provide backing for the Euro dollar. However, the presence of Waldheim as an intermediary only raises questions of connections to Nazis and fascism. Even before Waldheim took his office in the UN, the CIA and military intelligence must have known about his former background as an SS officer. It is inconceivable that the US did not know of his background, since he was in an automatic arrest category following the war.

One of the earliest documents attesting to Marcos’s recovering the treasure of the Golden Lily is a gold certificate dated 1956. This was before Marcos had become a member of the senate. Swiss Bank Corporation (Schweizerische Bank GESELLSCHAFT M.H.C.) issued the certificate for a deposit of 7,120 metric tons of gold. Marcos collaborated with Japanese-American investigator Minoru Fukimatsu. Together they interviewed over 300 witnesses and somehow accessed secret Japanese government archives in determining the locations of the treasure.

Another gold certificate was issued on January 17, 1963 by Unions Bank of Switzerland. The certificate was issued to Adnan Kasogi. Adnan Kasogi was actually Adnan Khashoggi, a Marcos crony. Khashoggi's name was misspelled, but that is often the case in these certificates. Khashoggi was a Lockheed agent and partner of Yoshio Kodama. Kodama was a Japanese rear admiral during the war and also a member of the Japanese Yakuza crime clan. Kodama was charged with shipping the loot to the Philippines during the war. This gold certificate was issued just before Lockheed paid the first known bribe to Prince Bernhard. Lockheed was being used by the CIA to funnel money worldwide. Moreover, Lockheed’s European Sales Director, Dutchman Fred Meuser, had been a member of Prince Bernhard’s wartime air force squadron. An additional member of the Lockheed bribe team was CIA officer Nicholas Deak. Deak had founded a money brokering firm that was used to funnel money to Kodama. Deak’s company later merged with Lionel C. Perera, who founded the money firm of Perera, Manfra & Brookes. Perera was attached to the Chief of Military Government Finance Office at the Third Army’s headquarters in Germany at war's end, where he interviewed Colonel Rauch. Rauch was the SS colonel responsible for hiding the Reich Bank gold reserves.

With so many figures involved directly with both the Nazi and the Japanese treasures, such an event as the Lockheed bribery cannot be dismissed as mere happenstance. However, the intrigue does not stop there. Marcos, Kodama, and Singlaub were all members of the World Anti-Communist League, a right wing extremist group populated with known war criminals and fascists. Under the Reagan administration, the World Anti-Communist League was granted tax-exempt status. That raises the possibility that the World Anti-Communist League was being used as a front for the CIA. Moreover, the intrigue continues. Guyatt goes on to claim that a letter from Henry Kissinger was sent to Marcos on Trilateral notepaper. Kissinger demanded that Marcos sell "63,321 tons of gold to 2000 US and European banks admittedly controlled by the Trilateral." The letter was dated February 21, 1986. Marcos refused and was overthrown as a result of his refusal. Imelda Marcos, however, chose to sell the gold to avoid criminal charges, and the gold was transferred aboard the US Eisenhower to the United States.

Additional evidence of Marco’s recovering the Golden Lily treasure comes from the Filipino newspaper, The Inquirer. In 1998 the paper published an article entitled "Soldiers of Fortune." The article revealed that all members of the 16th Infantry Battalion had signed a joint affidavit declaring that, together with members of the 51st Engineering Brigade, they had recovered 60,000 metric tons of gold from thirty sites between 1973 and 1985. Both units operated in strict secrecy under Marcos’ henchman Fabian Ver.

Whether Guyatt’s theory of a secret gold treaty being reached in 1954 is correct or not, it is obvious from his findings and those of the Seagraves that considerable treasure has been recovered from the Golden Lily, ending up in the hands of those involved in intelligence and right wing causes. Was this gold put to private use or the use of the CIA? It’s most likely that a portion was skimmed for private use while the bulk of the remainder was used to fund clandestine CIA operations. It is interesting to note that those connected with the secret recoveries: Herbert Hoover, MacArthur, Allen Dulles, and others were the very ones that worked the hardest in derailing the reform of Japan and Nazi Germany. Their sole objective was to reestablish the cartels and get on with business as usual, and to hell with war crimes. Moreover, it seems certain that a large portion of the Nazi treasure and the Golden Lily was used in rebuilding Germany and Japan with the explicit approval of the right wing in America.

While the largest portions of the Nazi hoard and the Golden Lily remains shrouded under a curtain of mystery and controversy a good deal is known about smaller caches that have been recovered. Until recently, little was known about America’s acquisition of treasures from the war. Much mystery still remains and undoubtedly more caches will surface with additional time. Although Congress passed legislation requiring the return to Germany of much of this material, the bulk of it remains stored in the American archives and private collections. The legislation has been supported by court rulings. Only after Clinton authorized Eizenstat to reach a settlement on unclaimed assets has the New York Federal Reserve admitted to holding two tons of Nazi gold. There has been little effort to return the war booty.