Collateral Damage: US Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on 9-11

1) Theft of the Soviet treasury,
2) Currency destabilization of the Ruble,
3) Funding of the KGB Generals’ August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, and
4) Takeover of the key energy and defense industries in the Soviet Union.

At its inception, the program was conducted well within policy framework of the U.S. government as defined by several Executive Orders authored by Vice President Bush and signed by President Ronald Reagan. There is good reason to believe that the plan was initially formulated by Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey. During World War II, before Casey headed OSS operations in Europe, he worked for the Board of Economic Warfare and his role was “pinpointing Hitler’s economic jugular and investigating how it could be squeezed.”³⁰ Many of the program operatives were probably engaged through official CIA and National Security channels. However, as a result of the experience gained by the Bush cabinet and its private sector counterparts during the secretive Iran-Contra and Ferdinand Marcos gold operations (which will be explained in short order), the execution of that program would be accompanied by two new assumptions:

Belonging to this group ³¹ were:

· Dick Cheney
· Don Rumsfeld
· Colin Powell
· Paul Wolfowitz
· Richard Armitage
· Condoleezza Rice

The Vulcan’s drive to bring and end to the Cold War was fueled by a covert war chest invisible to congressional oversight. ³² This war chest would be known by several names: Black Eagle Trust, the Marcos gold, Yamashita’s Gold, the Golden Lily Treasure, the Durham Trust or Project Hammer.³³ These same Vulcans would be brought back to power in 2000 under the administration of President George W. Bush, son of President George H. W. Bush.

The covert operations conducted by the Vulcans involved – at a minimum – potential securities fraud, money laundering and violation of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.³⁴ In a number of situations, murder and false imprisonment seemed to be the mainstay of efforts to prevent any remorseful participants in this operation from going public with their stories.³⁵ While accomplishing its objective – bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union– the program also seems to have lined the pockets of the individuals that executed this policy, at US taxpayer expense. This was done to the tune of a mere $240 billion dollars in covert and allegedly illegal bonds, which appear to have been replaced with Treasury notes backed by U.S. taxpayers in the aftermath of September 11!

The covert securities used to accomplish the original national security objective of ending the Cold War ended up in the vaults of the brokers in the World Trade Center, and were destroyed on September 11, 2001.³⁶ They came due for settlement and clearing on September 12. The federal Agency investigating these bonds – The Office of Naval Intelligence- was in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed on September 11.³⁷ To a key group of senior National Security officials who had participated in the victory of the economic cold war in 1991, the WTC, the Pentagon, the four airliners and their occupants would became ‘collateral’ damage in the ending of the Cold War.

The story of these bonds and their source of funding has been publicized on the internet for several years,³⁸ but the story has never really gained much credibility, even though the bonds themselves have been at the heart of several law suits and criminal proceedings. In trying to understand the origins of what seems at first glance to be a sort of cold war internet-legend, history suggests that in September of 1991, George H.W. Bush and Alan Greenspan did indeed finance $240 billion in bonds in a buyout of the Soviet Union as part of a broader program to end the Cold War through an attack on the economy of the Soviet Union. More-over, President George H.W. Bush had initiated a number of related covert operations to takeover certain sectors of the Soviet economy, and ten years later in 2001, these programs had finally come back to haunt the U.S. policy makers. Most, if not all of these programs appear to have stepped outside of the boundaries of the law. As a result, investigative agencies from Britain, Switzerland, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Philippines were putting pressure on Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice to open up the accounts in the banks used to finance these covert activities, which were being viewed as criminal activities in foreign courts. Alan Greenspan, the Treasury Department and key banks in the U.S. and Europe were being sued for gold-price fixing or illegal gold sales which appears to have it’s origins in the covert war chest used to wage this war. ³⁹ At the same time, the suits brought by the Holocaust survivors victims of the Marcos regime, and the US Congress under influence of pro-Israeli lobbyists were putting pressure on the Swiss banking cartel to open it’s bullion records to public scrutiny. Full disclosure by these banks during an investigation would have resulted in a major exposure of U.S. Government complicity in some of the greatest financial fraud of the 1980s and early 1990s as well as 50 years of gold bullion theft by numerous U.S. and British government agencies. Moreover, investigation into these accounts would disclose a National Security secret known as the Black Eagle fund, and virtually every covert operation since World War II. Bringing an end to these investigations and preventing this disclosure was the sole objective for the destruction of the WTC and Pentagon.

Numerous sources have documented that at the end of World War Two, the treasury of the Japanese Empire was discovered in the Philippines by a staff member of General Charles Willoughby, who was General MacArthur’s chief of Intelligence. Then known as the Golden Lily Treasure, this mass of wealth had been accumulated by the Japanese with over fifty years of its army pillaging Southeast Asia and China. It was deposited in the Philippines due to the U.S. submarine blockade of Japan. Reports vary, but documents in the public domain suggest the recovered treasure was in excess of 280,000 metric tonnes of gold, not including jewels and diamonds. ⁴⁰ After the War that staff member, Edward Lansdale and Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana tortured Major Kojima Kashii - General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s driver –until he revealed and created a map of the gold sites.⁴¹

Lansdale briefed Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy about the findings, and a U.S. Cabinet level decision was made to confiscate the gold and cover-up its discovery. The gold would be added to the Black Eagle Trust fund. It was McCloy, along with Secretary of the Navy Robert B. Anderson and Secretary of War Henry L Stimson who created the Black Eagle Trust.⁴² John McCloy, who had shared a box at the 1939 Olympics with Adolph Hitler, went on to become President of the World Bank. Robert Anderson would go on to operate the Commercial Exchange Bank in the British West Indies, be convicted of running illegal banking operations and tax evasion, and be sentenced to prison. ⁴³ A fourth member of that group – William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan – would go on to found the CIA, distribute the gold to key banks represented by his staffers, and establish AIG as a key partner in the CIA’s covert operations.

The trust they created takes its name from the Nazi Black Eagle stamped on the gold bars of the Third Reich. Gold bullion confiscated from the Reich and not returned to its rightful owners and their heirs was the original source of funding for this trust.⁴⁴ Over the years, the significance of the Nazi gold would pale in comparison to the confiscated Japanese treasure. As the fund grew, it was distributed in private accounts across the globe in over 100 banks, and administered by General Earle Cocke, financial advisor to every U.S. President from Truman to Clinton, until his death.⁴⁵ Most of the individuals who controlled these accounts are long dead, and attempts by their heirs to access these accounts have been met with stonewalling, false imprisonment or death under suspicious circumstances. Santa Romano’s heirs are one example.⁴⁶ Mrs. V. K. Durham is one such individual. Her husband, Colonel Russell Herman, controlled the Durham Trust. This report will return to their story in a little while.

· Wild Bill Donovan, the most decorated soldier of World War I and head of the OSS and his direct staff which included:

· Allen Dulles, future Director of the CIA and a principal of Bank of New York, and legal representative of Brown Brothers, Harriman.⁴⁷

· Henry S Morgan and Spencer Morgan. Henry and Spencer were the sons of JP Morgan, and would return from their service to manage the financial empire that would evolve from JP Morgan to ‘Morgan and Chase’ to then to ‘Chase Manhattan’ to finally what in 2008 was known as Chase.

· Paul Helliwell would become the primary covert operations banker for U.S. intelligence, setting up in Nassau Castle Bank and then Mercantile Bank and Trust. When Castle Bank needed to be closed, he set up Nugan Hand Bank. When the Nugan Hand Bank closed, he helped shift banking operations to Household Bank in Chicago, Illinois and to the notorious BCCI bank. His front man, and associate of Bill Donovan was General Earle (a.k.a. Erle) Cocke.⁴⁸

· General Earl Cocke would be the financial advisor to every President from Truman until Cocke’s death in the year 2000. Cocke was a true American hero in the classical sense: the recipient of the Silver Star, four Bronze Stars and four Purple Hearts. He was also the coordinator for the Black Eagle Fund and Project Hammer, which would be used to bring down the Soviet Union and attempt to bring Soviet oil and gas resources under the control of Western investors.

· George S Moore; future President and CEO of First National City Bank of New York, which would evolve to become Citibank. Citibank would end up with over 116,000 metric tonnes of the Marcos Gold.⁴⁹

· General George Olmsted; was another World War II hero who subsequently was responsible for distributing U.S. Military Assistance, later becoming President of a Washington DC based bank holding company known as International Bank, which took over the CIA’s Mercantile Bank and Trust in the Bahamas.⁵⁰ Under Olmsted’s leadership, International Bank sold Financial General Bankshares (FGB) then known as First American, to BCCI.⁵¹

· William Colby future CIA director and lawyer for Helliwell’s covert operation banks.

· William Casey, decorated World War II veteran, future Director of the CIA. Casey took over from Paul Helliwell the “Secret Intelligence Branch” of the OSS in Europe in 1945.⁵²

These men would form the core of the OSS that worked to create an “apparatus belli,”53 and virtually all of them would play a dominant role in the worlds’ most important banks. From the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) came participation and support for the OSS from John and William Keswick from the Jardine Matheson Bank.⁵⁴ The Keswick family would also control the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).⁵⁵ Fifty years later, the financial institutions represented by these individuals would become the major financial banks in the world, along with the Swiss-German banks they hid their gold in.

Lansdale and Santa Romana were made responsible for recovery of the treasure. They fabricated a “Communist Revolution” by the Hukbalahak rebels in order to confiscate the land where much of the gold was buried, and proceeded to mine it.⁵⁶ Several sites sit on Clark Air Force Base.⁵⁷ Over the years, Lansdale’s personal account in Zurich grew to over thirty thousand metric tonnes – greater than the national treasury of any modern nation state.

According to David Guyatt and Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, the Yamashita gold would become the cornerstone of the Black Eagle Fund, from which many covert operations of the U.S. intelligence would be funded. ⁵⁸ The most common interpretation international law is that the gold should have been either returned to the countries from which it was stolen (as was done with the Nazi gold⁵⁹), or should have been incorporated into the U.S. Treasury.

It would be Lansdale’s team that would propose and justify sacrificing innocent U.S. civilians in order to rally the American citizenry to support an invasion of foreign soil. This was done under a program run by Brigadier General William H. Craig, who reported to Lansdale for the Cuba project.⁶¹ This project was called Operation Northwoods. Documents for this project would be accidentally released from the files of Robert McNamara into the public domain some 40 years later, exposing the degree to which Lansdale’s operatives would go to wage war. ⁶² In these documents, the U.S. military acknowledged it could wage a “terror” campaign against US citizens in order to justify a second invasion of Cuba. It would be the first official recognition that US intelligence operations used terrorist tactics.

It was Lansdale who oversaw the set up of assassination squads to target Fidel Castro while operating out of Florida. One of Lansdale’s protégés’ in the assassination business was Ted Shackley, would go on to set up assassination squads in Vietnam under Operation Phoenix.⁶³ Shackley would take Felix Rodriguez with him from the Cuba Project to Laos for a secret war in support of Vietnam. Felix Rodriguez was a close confidante of former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and maintained direct phone contact with Bush when Bush became Vice President under Ronald Reagan.⁶⁴ When the U.S. intelligence funded, Iran-Contra gun running pilot was shot down in Nicaragua, it was Rodriguez that called George Bush to let him know that the pilot had been captured alive. In Vietnam, Shackley and Rodriguez would expand their circle of operatives to include Oliver North, Richard Secord and Richard Armitage. North, Secord and Armitage had proven themselves as men who could ‘get results’ against the communists by operating outside of the rules. They would provide the second generation of U.S. black ops leadership. The ‘whatever it takes’ zeal that these men developed in service of their country was ruled unacceptable in U.S. Military courts at the Mai Lai Massacre trial65, but it was still condoned by ‘apparatus belli’ spawned by Wild Bill Donovan.

While in Southeast Asia, North, Secord, Armitage, Rodriguez and Shackley would finance their operations through the Nugan Hand bank in Australia rather than with funds under congressional oversight.⁶⁶ Nugan Hand Ltd. was founded in Sydney in 1973 by Australian lawyer Frank Nugan (who was reputedly associated with the Mafia) and former U.S. Green Beret Michael Jon Hand who operated in Northern Laos as part of the Phoenix Project. They were assisted in this by Paul Helliwell, one of the primary OSS agents in the original Yamashita gold operation.⁶⁷

Frank Nugan’s family ran the primary supply shipping operation between the U.S. Navy base in the Philippines and Australia.⁶⁸ It is through Frank Nugan and his business partner Peter Abeles, that insight is provided to the flow of some of this Marcos treasure. Peter Abeles was reputed to be a member of what was known in Australia as the Hungarian Mafia and a partner with Henry Keswick. Sir Henry Keswick was the son of SOE officer John Keswick.

· General Leroy J. Manor (manager of the Manila branch) former chief of staff of the U.S. Pacific; Command and deputy director for counterinsurgency and special activities; he shared his office with Marcos’s brother-in-law ;

· General Edwin F. Black (president of Hawaii branch) former commander of U.S. forces in Thailand;

· Richard Secord (all around operative with responsibilities in Iran-Contra, Vietnam assassinations, creating Mujahadeen armies in Afghanistan, and central Asia);

· Dale Holmgreen (former chairman CIA's Civil Air Transport, manager of the Taiwan branch);

· Richard L. Armitage (was special consultant to the Pentagon in Thailand who oversaw the transfer of heroin profits from Indonesia to Shackley's account in Tehran);

· William Colby (former director of the CIA as legal counsel);

· Rear-Admiral Earl P. Yates, the former Chief of Staff for Policy and Plans of the U.S. Pacific Command and a counter-insurgency specialist, became president of the company;

· Walter McDonald (retired CIA deputy director, headed Annapolis branch);

· Dr. Guy Parker (an expert from the RAND Corporation who came on as a bank consultant) senior Republican foreign policy adviser;

The bank was founded as a funding operation for U.S. covert operations in Australia74, and was a conduit for Marcos gold. One of the objectives of the ‘bank’ was to bring about the pre-mature closure of the Australian labor government. The Whitlam government had quietly threatened to nationalize subsidiaries of American corporations.

· Morgan Guaranty Trust
· Chase Manhattan
· Citibank
· Jardine Matheson
· UBS
· Deutschebank
· HSBC

First published at http://www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/Collateral_Damage_911.pdf