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INTERVIEW WITH STERLING AND PEGGY SEAGRAVE
Authors, GOLD WARRIORS: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold
(Bowstring Books, 2002, 330 pp., 2 CDs with 900 MB documents optional)
Interview Conducted 1 November 2003.
Let’s begin with a personal question. Sterling, how did you and Peggy meet, and
what was your first project together?
STERLING: We were both working for Time-Life Books – Peggy as a senior picture
editor and senior researcher, me as a text editor and writer – so we were thrown together
on different book projects. We liked working together, and she was always scolding me
for bending the facts to get a nice turn of phrase. She was a great researcher, and a born
editor, so it would have been crazy not to marry her. Our first big project together was
THE SOONG DYNASTY, a multi-generational biography of Madame Chiang Kaishek’s family, which was a bestseller, and is still in print today in many languages. We
were the first to find a surviving copy of Generalissimo Chiang’s police record, which
proved that he had started his career as a gangster and hitman for the Green Gang in
Shanghai. The book was banned in Taiwan, and Madame Chiang tried to have us
murdered, but we went underground for a year on an island off the coast of British
Columbia. In our absence, Taiwan hitmen from the Bamboo Gang flew to San Francisco
and shot dead journalist Henry Liu. They passed the word around Chinatown that they
had “killed the chicken to frighten the fox”. But ultimately the revelations in our book
helped to bring about the collapse of the KMT dictatorship, and today there’s a
Taiwanese edition of SOONG DYNASTY available all over the island.
Peggy, when you look back at how you did your research back then, and how you
did your research for GOLD WARRIORS, what’s changed?
PEGGY: Back then we had to do a lot of physical digging at the National Archives and
the Library of Congress, photo-copying old letters, out-of-print books and other raw
materials – the same at local libraries in North Carolina, and in other countries. Today,
all that and more is available on the Internet, which makes the collecting much easier.
You can easily access obscure materials in Indonesia or the Philippines. But one thing
technology hasn’t changed is my voracious appetite for reading. What matters most is to
persevere. Many famous journalists were in Manila over the decades since WW2 but not
one made a serious effort to investigate the heroic claims of President Marcos. For
example, Marcos claimed that his father had been the governor of a province in
Mindanao – but we easily discovered that this was one of many lies. His father had been
only a clerk in the governor’s office and after a few months he was fired. Far from being
a war hero, we discovered that Ferdinand Marcos had been a Japanese agent. Al McCoy,
who wrote THE POLITICS OF HEROIN was an exception – he was the first to discover
that Marcos had lied about his war record. Most journalists don’t do their homework.
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Sterling, you’ve focused extensively on the Chinese diaspora. Talk to us about doing
research in the Chinese language. What methods do you use to integrate sources,
translators, intermediaries, and technology.
STERLING: As a child I was multilingual in Thai, Burmese, and Chinese, and still retain
some of it, but I never learned to read Chinese. So I rely on a network of colleagues who
do field research for us in different countries – local journalists, college professors, and
foreign correspondents. We also have friends who are retired intelligence officers,
linguists, or economists. This web allows us to stay in close contact. For example, the
final editing of GOLD WARRIORS in Chinese translation is being done by one of
China’s most celebrated women intellectuals, Wang Xuan. Her endorsement on the
cover will help guarantee our book’s success with Chinese readers.
Peggy, you did some important work in Australia. Walk us through that from the
time you got off the plane to the day you left. What were your sources and
methods?
PEGGY: I flew to Sydney to go through the personal papers of Dr. George Morrison,
who was the top Western journalist in China in the final years of the Manchu Dynasty,
working for The Times of London, the world’s newspaper of record then. Morrison was
the primary source of the myths about the Boxer Rebellion, the Siege of the Legations in
1900, and the evil image of China’s dowager empress. While I was combing through his
papers at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, I saw that his personal diary and letters about
those events were very different from his published articles. In short, Morrison had lied.
He loved gossip, and what he could not publish in The Times he put into his diary and his
letters. Like many historians and journalists, he was an imperial triumphalist who
modified his reports to flatter his audience and advance his career. He kept the truth
secret. He wildly exaggerated the Boxer Rebellion, greatly distorted the Siege of the
Legations to make it look all China’s fault, and created a totally false image of the
dowager empress. For example, Morrison wrote in The Times that the Chinese
themselves burned down their own National Archive, next door to the British Legation –
the truth was that people from the Legation looted the archive and then burned it down to
hide what they had done. This was confirmed by a number of obscure memoirs and
diaries published in the early 20th century, particularly those of young language students
who were attached to the legations. This taught me to look for obscure and overlooked
sources, first-person memoirs that were crucial for books we did later.
STERLING: Most of the terrific Chinese fusillades that were fired during the Siege left
no bullet holes in the legations because the Chinese were really only setting off strings of
firecrackers.
Sterling, you and Peggy have put together 900 megabytes of documents on the two
CD-ROMs that accompany GOLD WARRIORS. What’s in those two CDs, and
where did you find these documents and maps? Take your time and talk about
several examples.
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STERLING: We actually began working on this subject in 1984, right after THE
SOONG DYNASTY, when our publisher asked us to do THE MARCOS DYNASTY.
So we’ve been collecting material for over 20 years. Some of it didn’t make sense back
in 1984, because we didn’t know that America had secretly recovered a lot of Japanese
war loot right after the war. We thought Washington only became involved when
President Marcos began making gold recoveries in the late 1960s. I interviewed General
Lansdale after he retired, and he mentioned debriefing somebody named Kojima, but the
name meant nothing to me, and Lansdale refused to explain. Then, while we were
researching our biography of the Japanese imperial family, THE YAMATO DYNASTY,
we learned that Hirohito’s brother Prince Chichibu was the secret overseer of a program
called Golden Lily to loot the whole Co-Prosperity Sphere. As we dug into this, we
chanced upon a memo and some letters stating flatly that Lansdale had helped torture
General Yamashita’s driver, a man named Kojima, and this led to Washington’s recovery
of a dozen Japanese treasure vaults between 1945 and 1947. Peggy and I were
astounded. Material we had been collecting for many years suddenly began fitting
together. Things we never understood, like Lansdale’s cryptic reference to Kojima,
became clear. We decided we had to do a separate investigation, which took three more
years, and led to GOLD WARRIORS. One of our best sources for documents was
Robert Curtis, a mining expert in Nevada, who had worked for Marcos in 1975, reverseengineering many of the original Japanese treasure maps, so that Marcos was able to
recover billions of dollars worth of gold. Curtis then had to flee for his life, because
Marcos was in the habit of killing people once their usefulness was ended. Luckily,
Curtis was an obsessive collector of documents, tape recordings, and records of all kinds.
While he was working for Marcos he had the sense to photograph most of the Japanese
treasure maps and send the copies to his wife in Nevada as a kind of insurance. Curtis
gave us access to over 60,000 documents he collected, including some of the original
maps. We also tracked down the Filipino rice farmer named Ben Valmores who as a boy
had been the valet of Prince Takeda – the Japanese prince who supervised the hiding of
looted treasure in the Philippines. We interviewed Ben many times over several years,
deliberately asking him to confirm incorrect information, and to identify photos of
Japanese who never were in the Philippines. Ben never failed to catch us at this, so we
became convinced that he was telling the truth. We were amazed when Ben correctly
identified 1930s photos of Japanese princes that most people would never recognize. In
the end we even found a photograph showing Ben with Prince Takeda and General
Yamashita, a photo taken in 1944 by a Japanese army photographer. We did not include
this photo in our CDs, because we promised our source that we would not circulate it.
We scanned hundreds of other documents and made them available on the CDs, because
we know readers will want to see more evidence than we could possibly pack into the
book. Among those documents is evidence from actual U.S. Army files that Washington
recovered a great deal of looted gold and diamonds in Japan during the Occupation – all
of which has since been denied and covered up. This is the first time an investigative
book has been published with scanned documents on CDs – so we hope to start a trend.
Peggy, you and Sterling decline to travel to the United Kingdom or the United
States. Please tell us why.
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PEGGY: We have been warned repeatedly that something will be planted in our
luggage, so we can be arrested and salted away. Neither one of us wants to be a
permanent guest at Guantanamo. We’ve even been told that the State Department has us
on a list of “anti-Americans”. That’s ridiculous. Is being anti-corruption the same as
being anti-American? Of course not – the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We’re not
right-wing nor left-wing. We’re equal-opportunity muckrakers. As for the UK, there
have been many cases of people who were falsely arrested and jailed in UK for asking
too many questions about gold-bearer-certificates, based on the Black Eagle Trust. The
collaboration of Bush and Blair in lying about Iraq makes us wary of both regimes.
Sterling, based on all that you know about the Black Eagle Trust, do you think
George Bush and Dick Cheney have been briefed and are counting on those funds as
a backstop to the costs of the misadventure in Iraq?
STERLING: You can never be sure what Bush knows, or really comprehends, but after
all Dick Cheney’s years in government it’s a pretty safe bet that he is well-informed
about the Black Eagle Trust. After all, it was during the presidency of Daddy Bush that
Nobert Schlei was falsely charged and professionally ruined for trying to get the Japanese
government to honor a special kind of IOU that Prime Minister Tanaka had issued, based
on war loot. At the same time, Daddy Bush gave Alexander Haig a private letter to one
of Tanaka’s cronies, which enabled Haig to negotiate a similar billion-dollar IOU. This
makes is obvious that if you’re a friend of the White House you can do things that other
people are crucified for. Unfortunately, President Clinton never granted Schlei clemency,
as he should have. As for Iraq, I don’t think any Black Eagle assets will be spent there.
The Black Eagle Trust is one of the deepest and oldest pork barrels on earth, going back
over half a century to WW2. During that time so many Big Boys, and Big Banks, have
got their snouts stuck deep into the Trust that they regard it as their private property. So
they won’t waste any on Iraq. They’re trying to con everyone else to pay for Iraq.
If Congress and the General Accounting Office were to start an investigation today,
aimed at recovering all the Black Eagle Trust funds and returning them to the
countries and original owners, where should Congress begin?
STERLING: We don’t think there will ever be a GAO investigation, because asking
Insiders to investigate a huge pork barrel is like asking the Mafia to investigate the Mafia.
Congressional hearings will go nowhere because too many Senators and Congressmen
worry mostly about their careers. John Reed, the former CEO of Citibank who was
deeply embarrassed by charges of money-laundering, and manipulating Japanese war
loot, escaped with only a slap on the wrist, and now heads the New York Stock
Exchange. Clinton signed the War-Crimes Disclosure Act only after it was made totally
toothless. People don’t believe us when we say the U.S. Archives have been laundered of
material critical of Japan. But on our CDs, Greg Bradsher of the National Archives
explains in detail how this was done. Both under Clinton and under Bush, lawsuits by
former POWs and civilian victims of Japan have been blocked in American courts, on the
excuse that this was ruled out by the 1951 Japan Peace Treaty – but that Treaty was so
corrupt it’s still kept secret today. Nobody in either political party wants the truth to
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come out. Both parties are protecting billion-dollar Japanese corporations that enslaved
Allied soldiers and buried many alive. Even if Bush loses the coming election to a
serious reformer, we’re talking about corruption so deep, so pervasive, that it’s like a
house completely eaten by termites. A builder would tell you to tear down the house, and
build a new one. Nobody in Washington wants to do that, because they’re scared what
will happen. We published our findings because so many Americans and other Allied
soldiers died fighting Japan, and so many POWs and civilian victims who survived have
been denied any form of justice, that we owe it to them to get the truth out before they-re
all dead – that they were betrayed by their own Allied governments.
Sterling, since you are focused on this, a follow-up. Forget an internal US
investigation. Let’s talk instead about an international investigation, in which both
the families of the murdered American prisoners of war, and the international
citizens who were individually looted, and the governments whose citizens were
looted, all come together to pursue a global prosecution. What then?
Now we're talking. In the past, the victims all sued Japanese corporations, and the
Japanese government, and got nowhere. Washington always blocks lawsuits on the
argument that nothing justifies putting Japan in jeopardy. That’s bullshit. Putting
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party in jeopardy doesn’t mean putting the Japanese
people in jeopardy – just the opposite. The Japanese people deserve democracy. They
were promised it in 1945, only to have it taken away in 1948 because of collusion
between Washington and Tokyo, when America put the war criminals back in command.
If the LDP collapses today, there are other Japanese political parties that will rise to the
occasion in proper democratic fashion. Although Japan’s treasury has been looted by the
LDP, Japan’s fat-cat oligarchs still have most of the treasure looted during the war and
never returned. What is needed is a global class-action suit. The courage to do this
hinges on the Korean and Chinese language editions of GOLD WARRIORS, and the
global influence of Overseas Chinese. When everybody discovers it’s Washington that
has shielded Japan from paying reparations and returning the looted treasure, the target
will shift from Tokyo to Washington. The legal context will shift. Once people become
really outraged, I think we can expect a global movement for restitution. Look what
happened when the financier Edgar Bronfman got behind the campaign to force Swiss
banks to return the Holocaust gold still hidden in their vaults. We need somebody like
that to lead the global campaign to force restitution from Japan. Insiders tell us that most
of the big U.S. law firms involved in the victims’ lawsuits today are only milking the
victims by dragging the suits out. You get my drift.
Sterling, please expand on that just a tad. Tell me, in order of priority by country,
with gross amounts, the financial value in today’s dollars of what appears to have
been looted.
There’s no way you can put a dollar value on it. All of Korea was looted of everything of
value, which was shipped to Japan. Even its ancient tombs were broken open and looted.
The same thing happened to all the provinces of China that were overrun by the Japanese
Army. They were stripped of everything of value including flush toilets and copper
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wiring ripped from the walls of private homes. We're talking not only about billions in
gold, billions in platinum, and billions in loose gems and diamonds. We're also talking
about priceless art objects, whole libraries, whole museums, millions of stolen historical
documents, national patrimony and religious patrimony that is beyond price, including
solid gold Buddhas weighing several tons. All this continues to sit in Japan’s government
vaults and in the coffers of Japanese oligarchs. The same happened to Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, Burma, Siam, Malaya, the Philippines and Dutch East Indies. There’s no way
to add it up, because a lot of the gold was looted from the underworld, or traded for
heroin supplied by Japan. Along the way, millions and millions of people were
slaughtered – in the little island of Singapore alone, some 100,000 civilians were
murdered, many of them hauled out to sea on barges and dropped overboard. Japan made
the Nazis look like amateurs, because Japan did this for 50 years: 1895-1945. So I would
put China at the top of the list of victims, followed by Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia and Laos. We’re not only talking
about Asian victims – hundreds of thousands of Brits, Dutch, Ozzies, Kiwis, Canadians
and Yanks were robbed and brutalized. Even if you picked a figure out of a hat, like a
trillion dollars, how could you settle for just a financial settlement? What about all that
stolen art and antiquities – the heritage of 10 or 12 countries?
Sterling, walk us through how you’d spend $10-million running down all the black
gold and related gold certificates. What kind of sources and methods, what
objectives would you have?
STERLING: Norbert Schlei came very close to unraveling the whole thing – that’s why
the Japanese kingmakers got scared and pressed Daddy Bush’s White House to crucify
him. Schlei had a former Japanese Finance Minister – Watanabe – who was prepared to
go public because he was too old to care about the consequences. He wanted to help
Schlei clean out the LDP cesspit. Unfortunately, Watanabe died before he could go
public. Anyone who wants to get to the bottom of this should start with the entire Schlei
dossier, all the lawsuit documents, all of Schlei’s friends, colleagues and admirers, many
of whom are attorneys or bankers or economists, and know a lot about this. We’ve been
there, done that. In Japan there are many informed sources, journalists, scholars,
economists, and bankers, but most would be too scared to talk unless they had total
immunity. Even that would not protect them from “assisted suicide”. On Wall Street
there are a number of very well informed investment bankers and currency traders who
know all about this, but they are really scared of being murdered. You’d have to pry
information out of the big banks, which are sitting on all this war loot. They have the
financial resources to tie this up in court for another generation. Then you’d have to get
the media behind it, which is asking a lot in today’s corporate media. A lot depends on
who is the next U.S. president. Let’s face it, a government in Washington that has
bungled and looted the U.S. economy is not going to let its biggest banks be prosecuted.
We’ve all seen how easy it was to get the Supreme Court to falsify the results of the last
presidential election. Some day the American people may get sick of all this, and will
make some changes, but right now everyone’s too scared.
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Peggy, do you believe that there are private sector networks that can manipulate
and overturn or ignore governments. Talk to us about the Overseas Chinese
example in Southeast Asia.
PEGGY: The Overseas Chinese dominate the economies of all those countries, and are
very skilled at backing certain generals, like Indonesia’s Suharto, so that these military
proxies take control of a government, and allow their Chinese backers to do whatever
they wish. Washington got in bed with Tokyo right after WW2, but Washington had
been in bed with the Chinese Nationalists before that. The Chiang regime on Taiwan
bribed Congressmen, scholars and journalists for decades. The irony now is that those
Asian economies are booming, so they can afford to manipulate America the way the
U.S. used to manipulate them. The shoe is on the other foot. We all remember the
Overseas Chinese money flowing into Clinton’s coffers. Tokyo does the same. The
Japanese are very skilled at subsidizing American college professors, diplomats, and
members of Congress. It’s amazing how many former U.S. diplomats (or their wives) are
highly paid consultants to huge Japanese corporations.
Sterling, let me take a different tack now. You are aware that the U.S. Government
spends $35-billion a year attempting to steal secrets, and almost nothing on open
sources of information. If I gave you $1-billion a year to monitor the world using
only legal and ethical means, how would you allocate those funds.
STERLING: From my perspective as a researcher using open sources, where America
has gone wrong is its obsession with secret technical collection, to the exclusion of
virtually all else. Also, America is amazingly ignorant of the real world because it
ignores what is openly available, if it’s not in English. If I had $1 billion I would divide it
three ways. First, I’d establish regional collection centers and regional networks of
“correspondents” who would identify all kinds of open knowledge, both in print and in
oral debriefings, which would be translated and digitized, through a multi-national
endeavor. (The private National Security Archives, and the Center for Investigative
Reporting, are two modest examples already in existence.) Second, America has failed to
fully exploit the possibilities of information technology, applying it only in isolated little
bunkers, refusing to get behind inter-operable databases. I’d set up a national processing
network, applying grid computing to open sources of information in all languages, to
truly visualize the real world on a 24/7 basis, open to all nations. Third, America must put
great effort into foreign area studies and foreign language study. I would push through a
National Security Education Act that would have as its goal no fewer than 100 worldclass linguists and experts for every country in the world, no matter how “unimportant”
that country might seem to be. Sri Lanka, for example, which has the potential to
become the Singapore of South Asia. I doubt that America has more than a handful of
analysts able to speak either Tamil or Singhalese. I’ve only met two Americans who
comprehend that Sri Lanka has been ruled for half a century by a single family tyranny –
the Bandaranaikes – because Americans are so ignorant of that huge island nation. So,
in the face of such ignorance, there’s no way America can be effective in helping Sri
Lanka end its civil war and achieve its great potential.
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Peggy, a last word to the many intelligence professionals that are listening to you
and Sterling, on the future of open source intelligence and the kind of investigative
successes you and Sterling have had?
PEGGY: Technology helps a lot, whether it’s Keyhole satellites or the Internet, but in
the end Humint is what really counts – boots on the ground, personal letters,
conversations, and a lot of reading and sifting. Our most important discoveries came
from a willingness to examine reams and reams of evidence, or to comb through scores of
medical journals. Few journalists will do serious homework. No government is ever
clever enough to hide ALL the evidence, so if you persevere, sooner or later you find the
evidence.
STERLING: In America, bureaucracy kills Humint. Many administrators are concerned
about their careers, after the ruthless tactics of the Blair and Bush governments in
terrorizing critics in the intelligence community like Dr. David Kelly, or the disclosure of
Ambassador Wilson’s wife as a CIA agent. When single-minded fanatics are put in
charge, governments gallop off in the wrong direction. When you’ve got your hands in
the public treasury, everything you do will be malignant.
Sterling, we have to end on a more positive note. I agree with you that HUMINT,
and especially overt human intelligence and access to open sources, are important,
but please, give us a last word that makes us proud to be intelligence professionals.
STERLING: Sorry, but like most cynics I’m a frustrated romantic. The positive note is
that the world is now too complex for policymakers to pillage the treasury and bullshit
their way, without being noticed. Even after the mind-blowing shock of 911, it has only
taken a few months for people to wake up to the way we are being manipulated, and to
start bitching and organizing. It’s like being teleported back into Nazi Germany in the
1930s – we’ve got to make one hell of a stink or we’ll all be goose-stepping up Main
Street. Intelligence, properly done, and freed from self-serving “National Security”
shackles, is going to be the core competency of government in the future—intelligence
and open-sources will determine whether nations live or die.
PEGGY: I agree. A major problem facing modern nations today is that many
universities, newspapers, and other “informational” enterprises have become complacent,
if not corrupt. For example, too many Western scholars studying Japan are receiving
major grants from Japanese corporations. This erodes their willingness to look at the
dark side, like wartime slave labor and the live burials of thousands of prisoners.
Intelligence—the ethics of intelligence from a global community of individuals who can
not be bribed, intimidated, or fooled—this is our safety net for the future of mankind.
Ω