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Hidden and not talked about by all major networks worldwide is about all the gold and treasures stolen during WW2. Several books have been written in great detail such as those by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave. Their books, and especially Gold Warriors, details how vast amounts of stolen wealth made for much more power and all kinds of manipulation after the war.

Excerpts of "Black Eagle Fund and the Shadow CIA" (freely available on the internet and is not copyright):

What we have is evidence of some people knew how to game the financial system and on Sept. 11, 2001 nine federal investigation were stopped and there is every reason to believe activities in the Bank of New York in the aftermath of September 11th are worthy of suspicion.

It is said that in 1936 Japan's Emperor Hirohito realized that a new world war was coming. He foresaw that to defeat the United States would require extraordinary military forces backed by unprecedented financing. He organized a special team to confiscate the wealth of Asia, overseen by his brother Prince Chichibu. Japan's top underworld crime boss, Yoshio Kodama, was made an admiral and put in charge of looting occupied Asia's gangsters. The latter's organization was code-named kin no yuri, or 'Golden Lily', the title of one of the emperor's poems.

Other princes headed different parts of Golden Lily across the conquered territories. One of these was Prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi, one of Hirohito's first cousins and grandson of the emperor Meiji, who is said to have been ultimately responsible for seeing that all the gold in the Philippines was buried.

The first major project of this group – the rape of Nanking – was only the tip of the iceberg. As the Japanese imperial army swept through China and occupied virtually all of south-east Asia, it seized over 4,000 years' worth of stored gold, silver, precious gems and works of art.

Much of Europe's vast wealth had also been secretly placed in Japan's path. This included moving many of the national treasures of the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), French Indochina (Vietnam) and those of Britain to Singapore. Field Marshall Count Terauchi commanded the Japanese imperial forces in the south-eastern Pacific. He sent orders to Admiral Masaharu, the military commander of the Philippines before Yamashita, and several other admirals and generals saying that all war booty taken from their respective occupied territories – Java, Sumatra, Singapore, Malaya, Thailand, Burma and northern India – should be collected and transferred to Japan. However, from the end of 1943, the great bulk of the World War II treasure was sent to the Philippines. The Japanese strongly believed that they would be able to keep the Philippines as a concession for peace, then would use the vast wealth hidden there to rebuild their empire. Thus, the relocation of the enormous shipments of war treasure to the Philippines was seen as Japan's only hope of ethnic survival.

As the shipping lanes to Japan became too dangerous due to patrolling US Navy. The Japanese forces were busy hiding and securing the stolen loot. Elaborate tunnels were dug, some to depths of hundreds of feet, to the final 'storage chambers'. Many of these tunnels were excavated just below the water table during the dry season, which meant that they would eventually fill with water – a deterrent to any future salvagers. And if that were not enough, most if not all of the tunnels were booby-trapped with 1,000- and 2,000-lb bombs and poisonous gas.

In most cases, POW labor was used to dig the intricate tunneling systems. In all cases, when securing the gold in the pits was completed, the POWs were executed and buried along with the treasures. In rare cases, Japanese officers even had their own soldiers killed and buried along with the treasure, to protect the secret locations.

In June 1945, with US tanks less than 30 kilometers away, General Yamashita, head of the Japanese occupying army in the Philippines, knew the war was lost. He held a farewell party in Luzon province for 175 Japanese chief engineers, in one of the 175 underground tunnel complexes the engineers had constructed. At midnight, with the sake and patriotic singing in full flow, Yamashita (with two of Emperor Hirohito's princes) slipped out and detonated dynamite at the tunnel's entrance. Buried 70 meters underground, the engineers had only the mute company of row converted by Web2PDFConvert.comupon row of gold bars, looted by the Japanese army from the territories it had conquered in Asia.

When the Americans invaded the islands, there was still much treasure remaining to be buried. Japanese forces took it with them during their retreat and interred it in many different locations. In the Philippines, there are said to be 172 "documented" official Japanese imperial burial sites (138 on land and 34 in deliberately scuttled ships), not to mention the numerous instances of World War II loot buried by greedy officers and renegade soldiers. The worth of all this booty is estimated to be as much as $3 billion at 1940 rates – the equivalent of over $100 billion today. According to various post-war estimates, the gold bullion alone totals 4,000 to 6,000 tons.

In October 1945, American intelligence agents learned where some of the Japanese loot was hidden. OSS spies watched as Japanese troops buried treasure on the island of Luzon and the OSS began a clandestine recovery operation that lasted until 1948. This was headed by a Filipino- American OSS contract agent, Severino Garcia Santa Romana. Santa Romana`s OSS case officer was BG Edward Lansdale. Lansdale was a member of the staff of General Charles Willoughby, who was General MacArthur's chief of Intelligence. Lansdale and Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana tortured Major Kojima Kashii, General Yamashita Tomoyuki's driver, until he revealed the sites of the gold.

General Douglas MacArthur, former US president Herbert Hoover and CIA Director Allen Dulles knew the US was confiscating this loot. Lansdale briefed Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy about the findings, and a US Cabinet-level decision was made to confiscate the gold and cover-up its discovery. President Truman may also have been in the charmed circle of those who were in the know. Santa Romana set up numerous front companies to launder the secretly recovered gold bullion.

The Golden Lily loot now financed the clandestine Yotsuya Fund which supported a death squad of Kodama's criminal associates, headed by a US army colonel, which targeted student leaders, liberals, leftists, union organizers, journalists and others who got in the way of the revival of capitalism in Japan. The Keenan Fund, named after Joseph Keenan, the chief prosecutor in the Tokyo war crimes trials, also drew on Golden Lily funds to bribe witnesses to falsify their testimony so that the reputations of the emperor, right-wing politicians and criminal bosses like Kodama could be refurbished and bolster pro-US and solidly conservative political influence in post-war Japan.

The fund bribed witnesses of Japan's chemical and biological warfare program to commit perjury so that the deadly knowledge they held could be kept secret and passed on to the US military. It also bribed witnesses of the Golden Lily project itself. Making common cause with the Yotsuya Fund, there were violent deaths and suspicious "assisted suicides of those who resisted the bribes.

Both funds were eventually rolled into the M-Fund, which began at a "modest US$2 billion, but grew quickly to be almost 10% of Japan's gross national product by 1950. The profits financed Japan's "self-defense army and the formation of Japan's hegemonic right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

The M-Fund paid huge inducements to all LDP factions to support Nobosuke Kishi, who was actively involved in the use of slave labor as a wartime minister (and with a sideline in narcotics since the 1930s), as LDP leader against a less pro-US rival. During his three-year reign as prime minister, from 1957-1960, the LDP received $10 million each year from the CIA, chiefly drawn from the M-Fund.

Under international law the gold should have been either returned to the countries from which it was stolen or should have been incorporated into the US Treasury. The name of this secret fund most commonly used is the Black Eagle Trust, which came from the Eagle stamped on capture Nazi gold and was the original captured gold. This secret fund is also known as the Marcos gold, Yamashita's Gold, the Golden Lily Treasure, and the Durham Trust or Project. Over the years, the significance of the Nazi gold would pale in comparison to the confiscated Japanese treasure. The Japanese Army for over fifty years had been pillaging of Southeast Asia and China. Reports vary, but documents in the public domain suggest the recovered treasure was in excess of 280,000 metric tons of gold.

The men responsible for initiating and executing the confiscation this gold were the most senior Intelligence officers in the US and Britain Armies at the end of World War II, and the Cabinet of the President of the United States. The financial institutions represented by these individuals would become the major financial banks in the world, along with the Swiss-German banks where they hid their gold.

Lansdale and Santa Romana were made responsible for recovery of the treasure, confiscated the land where much of the gold was buried, and proceeded to mine it. Several sites sit on Clark Air Force Base. Over the years, Lansdale's personal account in Zurich grew to over 30,000 metric tons – greater than the national treasury of any modern nation state. Santa Romana had multiple accounts and the largest single account was valued at over 20,000 metric tons. While these accounts were created in their names, over time it would be shown these were actually government accounts. As a point of reference, the annual gold production of the world is estimated to be 1,200 tons, and the US gold repository at Fort Knox held in 1980 was only 8,221 tons. On his death, Santa Romana's will and his tax record have provided evidence of his fortune deposited in the US, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

It would be Lansdale who would initiate a bond between the US intelligence organizations and the Israeli intelligence. It would be Lansdale that would set precedents for the Intelligence community to retain the services of organized crime. Lansdale hired the Italian Mafia families to wage an illegal operation against the Italian Communist party. He also hired American Mafia family heads Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano in the US war against Fidel Castro in 1961.