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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment. [6]
Introduction: This broadcast commemorates the lives and passing of Peggy and Sterling Seagrave, investigators, journalists, authors and heroes.
A peripheral internet search conducted while re-reading Gold Warriors [7] yielded the sad news that both Peggy and Sterling Seagrave had passed. Peggy passed away in 2016 and Sterling in the spring of 2017.
Authors of a number of ground-breaking and overlapping historical/political exposes, they culminated their remarkable careers with Gold Warriors [7], which Mr. Emory feels is as important a book as has ever been written and is a MUST read for anyone genuinely concerned with the state of world affairs, past, present and future.
More admirable than even their consummate investigative and literary skills is the fact that they continued their research and reporting in the face of serious death threats and attempts, as well as lethal consequences visited on some of the participants in the “Black Gold” transactions and, apparently, on some of those investigating the machinations of the nations, commercial institutions and individuals involved with the operations.
(FTR #‘s 427 [8], 428 [9], 446 [10], 451 [11], 501 [12], 509 [13], 688 [14], 689 [15] deal with the subject of the Golden Lily program successfully implemented by the Japanese to loot Asia. That loot was merged with Nazi gold, became the Black Eagle Trust, which not only financed Cold War covert operations but underwrote much of the post-war global economy.)
[16]In FTR #‘s 446 [10] and 509 [13], we highlighted and reviewed the death threats and hands-on interference experienced by the Seagraves in response to their investigations. In 509 [13], we also noted the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of the heroic Iris Chang, who aided the Seagraves in their Gold Warriors [7] project. Having authored a book on the Rape of Nanking and working on another about the Bataan Death March, Ms. Chang had crossed the very power structure delineated at length, depth and detail in the Seagraves volume.
In our last visit with the Seagraves, a 2009 interview that was the focus of FTR #689 [15], Sterling expressed anxiety about the proximity of their residence in Southern France to the Spanish border and the formidable presence of Opus Dei in Franco’s former domain.
The Vatican’s relationship to fascism, including Opus Dei, is highlighted in, among other programs AFA #17 [17].
The remarkable Severino Santa Romana, prime mover in the Black Eagle Trust operations in the Philippines and the gold recoveries in those islands was, in addition to his work for U.S. intelligence, an operative of the powerful Vatican order Opus Dei. It appears that Opus Dei was Santa Romana’s primary affiliation and his U.S. intelligence connections were derivative.
With strong connections in Spain, dating to the Franco fascist regime (which maintains powerful presence in contemporary Spain), Opus Dei is a major factor in the contemporary political scene. Sterling opined in FTR #689 [15] that his and Peggy’s proximity to the Spanish border might expose them to violence.
[18]His fear turned out to be prescient. On Christmas Day of 2011, he narrowly escaped assassination while returning home. He felt that the attempt on his life may well have been motivated by the publication of the Spanish language edition of Gold Warriors [7].
After detailing the attempt on his life, we set forth Santa Romana’s relationship with Opus Dei. Santa Romana’s Opus Dei operations were essential for the fiscal reinforcement of the Vatican’s financial institutions, which benefitted from the Golden Lily-derived treasure from the Philippines.
1. The program begins by reviewing the death threats and intimidation that the authors of Gold Warriors received over the publication of this and other books.
. . . . Many people told us this book was historically important and must be published—then warned us that if it were published, we would be murdered. An Australian economist who read it said, ” I hope they let you live.” He did not have to explain who “they” were.
Japan’s looting of Asia, and the hiding of this war-gold in American banks, is closely linked to the issue of Holocaust gold hidden in Swiss banks. Revealing the secrets of either is a dangerous business. Jean Ziegler, a Swiss professor and parliamentarian, did much to expose five decades of official amnesia in his book The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. After publishing it and testifying in 1998 before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee about Jewish assets in Swiss banks, he was charged with ‘treason’ by Swiss Federal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. The charge was brought by twenty-one financiers, commercial lawyers, and politicians of the far right, many of them major stockholders in large Swiss banks. They accused Ziegler of being an accomplice of Jewish organizations who “extorted” vast sums of money from Switzerland.
Ziegler is only one of many who have been persecuted for putting ethics before greed. Christophe Meili, a Union Banque Suisse (UBS) security guard, was threatened with murder and the kidnapping of his wife and children after he testified before a U.S. Senate committee about documents he rescued from UBS shredders. He and his family were given asylum in America.
We have been threatened with murder before. When we published The Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us. He said, ‘I would take this very seriously, if I were you.’ We vanished for a year to an island off the coast of British Columbia. While we were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu.
When we published The Marcos Dynasty we expected trouble from the Marcos family and its cronies, but instead we were harassed by Washington. Others had investigated Marcos, but we were the first to show how the U.S. Government was secretly involved with Marcos gold deals. We came under attack from the U.S. Treasury Department and its Internal Revenue Service, whose agents made threatening midnight phone calls to our elderly parents. Arriving in New York for an author tour, one of us was intercepted at JFK airport, passport seized, and held incommunicado for three hours. Eventually the passport was returned, without a word of explanation. When we ran Freedom of Information queries to see what was behind it, we were grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message, on which every word was blacked out, including the date. The justification given for this censorship was the need to protect government sources, which are above the law.
During one harassing phone call from a U.S. Treasury agent, he said he was sitting in his office watching an interview we had done for a Japanese TV network—an interview broadcast only in Japanese, which we had never seen. After publishing The Yamato Dynasty, which briefly mentioned the discovery that is the basis for Gold Warriors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a European clinic briefly for a medical procedure, the head nurse reported that “someone posing as your American doctor” had been on the phone asking questions.
When a brief extract of this book was published in the South China Morning Post in August 2001, several phone calls from the editors were cut off suddenly. Emails from the newspaper took 72 hours to reach us, while copies sent to an associate nearby arrived instantly. In recent months, we began to receive veiled death threats.
What have we done to provoke murder? To borrow a phrase from Jean Ziegler, we are “combating official amnesia.” We live in dangerous times, like Germany in the 1930’s when anyone who makes inconvenient disclosures about hidden assets can be branded a “terrorist” or a “traitor. . . .”
Despite the best efforts of the American and Japanese governments to destroy, withhold, or lose documentation related to Golden Lily, we have accumulated thousands of documents, conducted thousands of hours of interviews, and we make all of these available to readers of this book on two compact discs, available from our website www.bowstring.net [no longer online–D.E.] so they can make up their own minds. We encourage others with knowledge of these events to come forward. When the top is corrupt, the truth will not come from the top. It will emerge in bits and pieces from people like Jean Ziegler and Christophe Meili, who decided they had to “do something.” As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites. If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who “they” are. . . .
2. Next, we excerpt FTR #689. [15] The remarkable Severino Santa Romana, prime mover in the Black Eagle Trust operations in the Philippines and the gold recoveries in those islands was, in addition to his work for U.S. intelligence, an operative of the powerful Vatican order Opus Dei. It appears that Opus Dei was Santa Romana’s primary affiliation and his U.S. intelligence connections were derivative.
With strong connections in Spain, dating to the Franco fascist regime (which maintains powerful presence in contemporary Spain), Opus Dei is a major factor in the contemporary political scene. Sterling opined in FTR #689 [15] that his and Peggy’s proximity to the Spanish border might expose them to violence.
3. Sterling’s fears about Opus Dei and his and Peggy’s proximity to the turned out to be prescient. On Christmas Day of 2011, he narrowly escaped assassination while returning home. He felt that the attempt on his life may well have been motivated by the publication of the Spanish language edition of Gold Warriors [7].
“Sterling Seagrave, 1937–2017;” versobooks.com; 7/31/2017. [19]
. . . . Seagrave will be remembered warmly by Verso staff for his lively correspondence. In a 2011 email, he described an attempt on his life that followed the Spanish publication of Gold Warriors:
“A hired thug tried to murder me on the serpentine road leading up to our isolated house on the ridge overlooking Banyuls-sur-Mer, and nearly succeeded. (We’ve had several serious death threats because of our books.) The road was very narrow in places, with tarmac barely the width of my tires. At 10 pm Christmas night, in 2011, after visiting Peggy at a clinic in Perpignan, as I turned the final hairpin, I clearly saw a guy sitting on a cement block path leading up to a shed for the uphill vineyard. He was obviously waiting for me because we were the only people living up there on that mountain shoulder. He jumped up, raised a long pole, and unfurled a black fabric that totally blocked the narrowest turn ahead of me. I tried to swerve to avoid him (not knowing whether he also had a gun), and my right front drive wheel went off the tarmac and lost traction in the rubble.
The car teetered and then plunged down through a steep vineyard on my right side, rolling and bouncing front and rear, 100 meters into a ravine where it finally came to rest against a tree. Thanks to my seatbelt and air bag, I survived. I don’t know how many concussions I got on the way down, but I managed to squeeze out the driver’s door and fell onto the rubble. I got up on my left hand and knees, but my right shoulder caved in. (Turned out later that I had fractured my right shoulder, and all the ligaments there had torn loose.) I passed out and remained unconscious for 14 hours. After 12 hours, a vigneron driving up the next morning saw my wrecked car and body.
He called the Gendarmerie on his portable, and I was hoisted out unconscious by a chopper and flown to an old Victorian-era hospital in Perpignan where they did nothing but keep me doped on morphine for two weeks — no X‑rays or serious medical care. Finally, friends in Banyuls got me (and Peggy) transferred to a clinic on the beach there, where Peggy and I shared a room while we both recovered. I got my right shoulder ligaments fixed by an excellent surgeon in Perpignan. (Peggy did not know it then but she had an early stage of cancer.) I still have a hairline fracture in my right shoulder.
I attribute the event to staying too long in one place, so the spooks eventually tracked me down. We had been living for years on a sailboat, moving from Holland to Britain to Portugal to Spain and finally to France, where we found — in Catalonia — an ideal village at the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. In retrospect, I’m sorry I agreed to move ashore for Peggy’s sake, and sold the beautiful 43-foot boat I had built from a bare hull. It was very comfortable, but Peggy wanted a house. We never did find the right house in Banyuls — so we spent 18 years restoring a 13th century Templar ruin on the shoulder of the mountain. Made me an easy target. Definitely a bad decision. I think it was the Spanish edition of Gold Warriors that made me the easy target.
4a. Next, we present the Seagraves coverage of Santa Romana’s Opus Dei membership:
. . . . Authoritatiave souces in Spain with strong ties to the Philippines have now confirmed that Santy was actually a secret agent of the Vatican. Santy did have ties to the wartime U.S. underground in the Philippines, overseen for General MacArthur by General Whitney, General Willoughby, and Colonel McMicking. After the war, Santy did work in harness with Lansdale and the CIA. But his real loyalty was to the Vatican. Sources close to the Manila archdiocese always insisted that Santy was “working for the Vatican,” and was not a CIA agent.
Our Spanish sources have now told us that Santy was “training for the Church” before the war. Given that he had been married twice already, with children from both marriages, in a country where divorce was illegal, he was a bigamist. So he was clearly not training for the priesthood. Instead, long before the Japanese invasion, Santy became a lay member of one of the Vatican’s militant orders. There are a number of these, the most prominent being the Jesuits, the Dominicans, and Opus Dei. The sources refuse to be explicit about which order Santy directly worked for, arguing that ultimately he was working for the bishops and cardinals in charge of the Vatican’s financial office. But we have established that he was with Opus Dei. . . .
4b. Santa Romana’s Opus Dei operations were essential for the fiscal reinforcement of the Vatican’s financial institutions, which benefitted from the Golden Lily-derived treasure from the Philippines.
. . . . Because of the key role played by Santy [Severino Santa Romana], as the gold was recovered and moved to banks throughout the world, a major portion went to the Vatican bank and other banks tied to the Vatican, as we describe in Chapters 4 and 8.
It is now clear that this is why Santy was treated with such respect by bankers who came to see him at his Manila Hilton suite, although he remained a secretive figure and was never the subject of a magazine profile in the Philippines or anywhere else. It was not his connection to the CIA that gave him invisibility, but his position as an agent of the Vatican secret services, filing the coffers of the Vatican bank. Diagrams of the “Umbrella” organization that moved much of the gold, which we reproduce on our CDs, show that security was provided both by the CIA and by the Italian Mafia. Collaboration in Europe between the Mafia and the OSS began on the eve of the war, and continued throughout. OSS agents were smuggled into Italy through Sicily. In return, at the end of the war, top Mafia figures were released from American prisons and allowed to return to Italy, where they helped the CIA and the Vatican promote candidates of the Christian Democrats, to prevent the Communist Party from gaining control of Italy’s government.
Santy’s stature in the Vatican financial hierarchy must have been assured by his role in restoring solvency to banks linked to the Vatican. . . .
5a. In a transitional element to our next program, we note that the late author Iris Chang had an endorsement of the Seagraves’ work on the cover of Gold Warriors: “The Seagraves have uncovered one of the biggest secrets of the twentieth century.”
5b. In the acknowledgements section of Gold Warriors, the authors thank Iris Chang for her support:
. . . . We are especially indebted to Iris Chang, Ignatius Ding, and Jesse Hwa, for their unstinting support and encouragement throughout. . . .