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FTR#1309 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR#1310 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: These broadcasts supplement FTR#‘s 509, 1107 and 1108.
Significant sections of the latter two broadcasts are recapped in these programs and this description.
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- Iris Chang’s mother, Ying-Ying Chang, could not rule out the “dark conspiracy” that Iris was facing. Ying-Ying’s point of view was shaped, in part, by Steven Clemons’ observations.
- In an appendix titled “Requiem for Iris Chang,” Steven Clemons noted the alleged “suicide” of his associate Juzo Itami, who was battling the same forces as Iris Chang. “I have never bought the story about Juzo Itami, who was at war in his films with the Japanese right-wing crowd and yakuza.”
- Iris’ best-known work, The Rape of Nanking, inspired a congressional resolution supporting Japanese compensation for those who had been compelled to labor as slaves and slave prostitutes or “comfort women.”
- Iris was working on a book and documentary film project about the survivors of the Bataan Death March. Some of those veterans had been used as slave laborers by Japanese corporations during the war. The Bataan Death March veterans were among those who sued the Japanese corporations that had enslaved them.
- The presiding judge ruled against the veterans and for the Japanese corporations. On the day of Iris’ “suicide” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was meeting with Japanese businessmen to promote California-Japanese trade.
In early September of 2001, Iris spoke at a conference assembled to protest the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the U.S./Japanese treaty of 1951 (negotiated by John Foster Dulles). Iris called “the San Francisco Peace Treaty a travesty of justice, a betrayal of our own American veterans.” Recall the congressional resolution passed in the aftermath of, and because of The Rape of Nanking.- After watching a spirited discussion between Iris and the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., a friend of Iris’ father advised her to hire a bodyguard.
- As will be noted at greater length below, Iris was very critical of the George W. Bush administration and had written several articles critical of his policies.
- Iris was very critical of the George W. Bush administration, and had taken stances against many features of his foreign policy, Bush’s invasion of Iraq in particular. Iris had long opposed all forms of racism in this country.
- Sadly, many of those close to Iris dismissed her fears concerning the government’s targeting of her and the overlapping ideological animosity and targeting of her by the Japanese right-wing. The historical and operational overlap between the two is fundamental and is explored in some of the material below.
When she traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to interview survivors of the Bataan Death March, she felt she was under physical surveillance and harassment. We note below that Kentucky was a place where Bush confidant William Stamps Farish III had powerful connections.- During her book tour for The Rape of Nanking, Iris was approached by someone she felt was recruiting her. He said “You will be safer to join us.” Was this and attempt at recruitment by the CIA?
- We repeat the information in #11, for purposes of emphasis.
- Iris was convinced to her dying day that she was the focal point of hostility from the Bush administration. A remake of the movie The Manchurian Candidate heightened her anxiety. Her articles critical of the Bush administration and, as we have and shall see, the overlapping dynamics of her work on The Rape of Nanking and Gold Warriors further deepened her peril. She first purchased a firearm for protection and was hoping that John Kerry would defeat Bush in 2004.
- Despite the fact that Iris’ corpse was found in her car in the early morning, her parents weren’t notified of her death until almost midnight. Why?
- Iris’ corpse was discovered early in the morning with her head against the driver’s side window, her hands crossed in her lap and the gun on her left leg. While not physically impossible, this is altogether unlikely for someone who had allegedly committed suicide by firing a powerful hand gun into her mouth. She felt that her problems were “external,” while those around her thought they were “internal,” i.e. “all in her head.”
- Same as 16.
- Iris’ ordeal was remarkably similar to what Rita Katz endured following her work on Operation Green Quest and the SAAR investigation.
- George W. Bush was pursuing Philippine Golden Lily loot in order to increase U.S. gold reserves and, perhaps more importantly, to fortify his blind trust. That trust was overseen by William Stamps Farish III, who had considerable political and economic gravitas in the state of Kentucky.
- Bush’s Harken Energy may well have served as a money laundering front, perhaps for some of the gold recovered in the Philippines. We note that a director of Harken, Talat Othman, interceded directly with then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on behalf of the targets of the 3/20/2002 raids. The SAAR network was a primary target of those raids: we have seen how Rita Katz and her fellow investigators came under surveillance and harassment for digging into that case.
- We revisit the deep politics of the Bush family, the family of Douglas MacArthur and William and Alan Quasha.
- More about the deep politics of the Philippines, the Bush family, father and son Quasha, and the possibility that Alan Quasha’s dominant presence in Harken Energy may be derivative of the clandestine acquisition of Golden Lily loot.
- The program concludes with review of the operations of Golden Lily and their involvement with things Iris was investigating. The Rape of Nanking marked the formal beginning of Golden Lily.
- Colonel Tsuji Masanobu was heavily involved with Golden Lily and the Bataan Death March, the survivors of which were a focal point of Iris Chang’s research at the time of her death.
. . . . Since 1999, more than thirty lawsuits have been filed in California courts by survivors of the Bataan Death March and other POW’s who were forced to provide slave labor for Japanese companies. [Emphasis added.] They were focused in California because the state legislature had extended the period when such claims could be filed. The U.S. government then had the cases transferred to a federal court in San Francisco, where most of these suits then were rejected in September 2000 by Federal Judge Vaughn Walker. Judge Walker said they were ‘barred’ by the terms of the 1951 Peace Treaty, the same stonewalling used by Tokyo and Washington.
Hard as it may be to believe, the State Department argued on the side of Japanese corporations in these cases. Walker summed up his decision by stating that the San Francisco Peace Treaty had ‘exchanged full compensation of plaintiffs for a future peace. History has vindicated the wisdom of that bargain.”
. . . Some fought back. In March 2001, U.S. Congressmen Mike Honda (D‑San Jose) and Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Huntington Beach) introduced a bill, ‘Justice for Prisoners of War Act’ before the U.S. Congress. The bill had strong bipartisan support and by August 2002 had 228 co-signers including House whips for both parties. Honda’s bill called for ‘clarification of the wording of the 1951 Peace Treaty between Japan and the United States’ to keep the State Department from deviously interfering in victims’ lawsuits. . . .
. . . . “If this bill became law, it could open a window for compensation to POWs who were forced to perform slave labor for Japanese companies like Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, which are among the richest on earth. The bill would remove a key legal barrier [Article 26—D.E.] used in Judge Walker’s rejection of the slave-labor lawsuits. . . .
. . . . Judge Walker, possibly under considerable pressure, sided with the State Department and ruled that Article 26 cannot be invoked by private citizens, but only by their government. The Honda-Rohrabacher bill would get around that bizarre ruling by having Congress act for the victims. The State Department’s unelected bureaucrats, aghast at the temerity of America’s elected lawmakers, realized that Honda’s bill cannot be thrown out by the exercise of political pressure over federal judges. Instead, State took the high moral ground by claiming that passage of Honda’s bill ‘would be an act of extreme bad faith.’ Bad faith toward Japan’s biggest corporations and its extraordinarily corrupt and incompetent LDP bosses. . . .
. . . . The Department of State and Department of Justice are using Article 14 of the 1951 peace treaty to prevent POWs and other victims from suing immensely rich Japanese corporations such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. At U.S. Senate hearings in June 2000, chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah challenged State and Justice attorneys about the legitimacy of their claim that the 1951 Peace Treaty canceled all rights of victims. “You mean our federal government can just say, ‘To hell with you, Bataan Death Marchers, and you people who were mistreated, we’re just going to waive all your rights. . . .’ Constitutionally, can our government take away the rights of individual citizens just because they put it in a treaty . . . .? We’re not asking the Japanese government to pay. We’re asking the companies that did the acts to pay, some of these companies are multi-billion-dollar companies today.”
Despite such impassioned appeals, on September 21, 2000, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against American POWs and other slave laborers. Walker dismissed their suits, saying it was dangerous to upset the diplomatic alliance that existed between America and Japan since the end of the war. . . .
. . . At the same time, torrents of hate mail came in, Brett [her husband] said. “Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up,” he recalled. “When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She’s very much a perfectionist. It was hard for her not to react every single time.” Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. ‘We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth,’ Brett said. ‘She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called ‘Iris Chang and Her Lies.’ She would just laugh.”
But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, ‘You will NOT continue writing this.’ She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail. “There are a fair number of people who don’t take kindly to what she wrote in The Rape of Nanking.” Brett said, “so she’s always been very, very private about our family life.” . . . .
. . . . Among her many television appearances was a memorable evening on “Nightline,” where she was the only Asian and the only woman among a panel of China experts. “To see her on TV, defending Rape of Nanking so fiercely and so fearlessly—I just sat down, stopped, in awe,” said Helen Zia, author of Asian-American Dreams: Emergence of an American People and co-author Wen-Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused.”
“Iris truly had no fear. You could see it in the steadiness of her voice and in her persistence,” Zia recalled. “She would just say, matter-of-factly, ‘Japan is lying and here’s why.”’ Later Iris challenged the Japanese ambassador to a debate on the ‘MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour’ on PBS. After the ambassador spoke of events in Nanking, Iris turned to the moderator and said: “I didn’t hear an apology.” [This would NOT have been well received by the Japanese political and national security establishments, who would never have countenanced a government official being taken to task by a Chinese woman–D.E.]
. . . . He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver’s seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. . . .
. . . . For two months after the raids I didn’t hear a word from Green Quest. Then one day Mark suddenly called and asked to see me. ‘Why?’ I said cynically. ‘Your investigation is over. You don’t need me anymore.’ He understood. ‘Please don’t be cross,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t talk to you. I too was under investigation. I was being followed, my phones were tapped, and I was questioned. I was miserable. They gave me a very hard time. Please don’t give any more grief. I don’t deserve it.’ What was this, I thought, another rerun of the story with John Canfield? What’s wrong with these people who keep investigating the investigators? ‘If you don’t believe me,’ he continued, ‘talk to the U.S. attorney you worked with. He’ll tell you. He and everyone else on the team were under investigation.’ Mark, I knew, was not a guy to make something like that up. But I was curious, and I called the U.S. attorney to get his take. I didn’t press him too, much, because the whole thing was—and probably still is—under investigation. But he did verify everything Mark had told me. Practically everyone involved with the SAAR investigation had been under surveillance. The FBI was among the agencies conducting that investigation.
. . . . For two months after the raids I didn’t hear a word from Green Quest. Then one day Mark suddenly called and asked to see me. ‘Why?’ I said cynically. ‘Your investigation is over. You don’t need me anymore.’ He understood. ‘Please don’t be cross,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t talk to you. I too was under investigation. I was being followed, my phones were tapped, and I was questioned. I was miserable. They gave me a very hard time. Please don’t give any more grief. I don’t deserve it.’ What was this, I thought, another rerun of the story with John Canfield? What’s wrong with these people who keep investigating the investigators? ‘If you don’t believe me,’ he continued, ‘talk to the U.S. attorney you worked with. He’ll tell you. He and everyone else on the team were under investigation.’ Mark, I knew, was not a guy to make something like that up. But I was curious, and I called the U.S. attorney to get his take. I didn’t press him too, much, because the whole thing was—and probably still is—under investigation. But he did verify everything Mark had told me. Practically everyone involved with the SAAR investigation had been under surveillance. The FBI was among the agencies conducting that investigation.
Now, as I write these lines, the FBI is trying to take over the investigation altogether. Once again, a replay of the story with Sami al-Arian and with John Canfield. The FBI claims that Customs and Green Quest were rightfully the ones to initiate the investigation, when it seemed to be about money laundering. But now that it’s become a terrorism-related matter, Customs is incapable, you see, of dealing with it. Isn’t that peachy? Judging by what the FBI did with other investigations, if it indeed succeeds in taking over the SAAR probe, we can all kiss this investigation good-bye. How many terrorism-related successes can the FBI take the credit for? Not too many, that’s for sure.
Yet the FBI wasn’t the worst part in that sticky affair. The CIA was. The CIA was investigating me and the SAAR investigators from Green Quest and Customs. The CIA and the FBI investigated everyone who had anything to do with the SAAR investigation. White vans and SUV’s with dark windows appeared near all the homes of the SAAR investigators. All agents, some of whom were very experienced with surveillance, knew they were being followed. So was I. I felt that I was being followed everywhere and watched at home, in the supermarket, on the way to work . . . and for what? . Now—I was being watched 24/7. It’s a terrible sensation to know that you have no privacy. . . . and no security. That strange clicking of the phones that wasn’t there before. . . the oh-so-crudely opened mail at home in the office. . . and the same man I spied in my neighborhood supermarket, who was also on the train I took to Washington a week ago. . . Life can be miserable when you know that someone’s always breathing down your neck. . . .
. . . . In March 2001, only weeks into the new Bush Administration, two U.S. Navy ships arrived in the Philippines carrying teams of SEAL commandos. According to a source at the U.S. Embassy, they were sent to the Philippines to recover gold as part of a plan to enlarge America’s reserves. This gold, the embassy source said, would come from two places:–New excavations of Yamashita Gold vaults, and the purchase (at a deep discount) of Japanese loot already recovered and held in private vaults by wealthy Filipinos. One of the two ships sailed on to Mindanao to take on a load of bullion the embassy source said was owned by the family of the new president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. President Bush, the source said, was “being aggressive”.
The buzz among gold hunters in Luzon was that associates of President Bush and his family were privately in the market to buy some of the bullion still being recovered from Golden Lily sites. One of the names being dropped by goldbugs in Manila was that of East Texas oil billionaire William Stamps Farish, an intimate friend and fishing companion of the Bush family. Will Farish, who raises horses in Kentucky and is board chairman of Churchill Downs where the Kentucky Derby is staged, had just been nominated by President Bush to be America’s new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, where he was a personal friend of Queen Elizabeth. The buzz had special resonance because Will Farish is said to be the manager of President Bush’s blind trust. . . .
In September of 1986, as oil prices continued to collapse and W.’s previous financial savior, the Cincinnati-based Spectrum 7 Energy, was itself failing, along came the Dallas-based Harken, a comparatively little-known independent oil and gas company, riding to the rescue. Harken snapped up Spectrum, put W. on its board, and gave him a handsome compensation package. In return, W. was allowed to go about his business–which at the time meant playing a crucial role in his father’s presidential campaign. But the Harken assist didn’t just benefit Poppy’s political fortunes. Profits from W.’s subsequent sale of Harken stock would jack up his own political career. The Harken deal ultimately made it possible for him to become part owner and highly visible “managing director” of the popular Texas Rangers baseball tam–a position that would enhance his modest resume as a candidate for governor a few years later. Thus, the largesse of the figures behind Harken played a key role in George W. Bush’s quick march to the Presidency.
Virtually everyone who has looked at Harken over the years agrees that it is some strange kind of corporate beast, like a newly discovered species of manatee. The company’s books have never made any sense to outsiders–which might have had something to do with the fact that the only people who seemed to make any money were the insiders. In 1991 Time proclaimed Harken “one of the most mysterious and eccentric outfits ever to drill for oil.”
The Harken story reads at times like the stuff of an airport bookstore thriller. One finds figures associated with BCCI, gold caches, and an alphabet soup of secret societies appearing at critical junctures to bail out Harken . . . .
Poppy Bush himself doesn’t talk much about the Philippines, but he too did service there. Among other things, he participated in numerous bombing runs over the islands when they were in Japanese hands–including Manila Harbor as part of MacArthur’s effort to retake the territory.
And, of course there was his intelligence work. As noted in chapter 2, on his way to the Pacific, Poppy stopped off at Pearl Harbor for some face time with officers assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center for the Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA). The early incarnation of JICOA was headed by Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, who would after the war become the director of the CIA. JICPOA remains little known and little discussed, but it was a crucial development in wartime intelligence, and played a key role in Admiral Chester Nimitz’s successful island-hopping campaign, of which Bush was a part.
Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in July 1942 to replace a previous intelligence system that was deemed ineffective. General MacArthur, however, barred the OSS from operating in the Philippines so that battleground was pretty much his own show.
Thus, Bush became part of a joint intelligence effort coordinated with MacArthur’s command. The association with the Bush circle would date back to the days when Douglas MacArthur was a young man and his mother contacted E.H. Harriman, father of Prescott’s future business partnrs, to ask the railroad tycoon to give her son a job. Years later, when Poppy Bush became U.N. ambassador, he took an apartment next to Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, and in 1978, the widow contributed to W.’s Midland Texas congressional campaign. . . .
. . . . Even before Douglas MacArthur commanded U.S. troops in the country, he had major holdings in the largest Philippine gold mine. MacArthur’s staff officer, Major General Courtney Whitney, had been an executive of several gold mining companies before the war.
Besides the indigenous gold, a great fortune in gold booty was . . . . buried in the Philippines, seized by the Japanese as they plundered one East Asian country after another. . . . Several journalists, who have spent combined decades on the Philippines gold story, assert that the cache was actually seized by American forces under MacArthur and that its very existence is a sensitive secret. . . .
. . . . At the end of the war, MacArthur appointed William Quasha as alien property administrator “Alien property” would have included anything of value captured by the Japanese. . . .
. . . . Authors Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave contend . . . . that the United States did locate the Japanese gold and used it to fund anti-Communist operations the world over. Investigators in the Philippines have said that the gold was stashed in bank vaults in forty-two countries. Some of the money was used in Japan, to quickly reestablish the ruling clique, and a pro‑U.S. ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party. MacArthur oversaw the postwar occupation of Japan. The administrator of the . . . . M Fund that secretly channeled these monies to Tokyo was none other than Poppy Bush friend and CIA officer Alfred C. Ulmer. . . .
. . . . Poppy Bush and Ferdinand Marcos cultivated a relationship of mutual appreciation. “We love your adherence to democratic principles,” Poppy gushed during a visit to Manila in 1981. Marcos knew how to play the anti-Communist card, and like nearly all U.S. leaders, Poppy avidly helped prop up the dictator. A number of Poppy’s lieutenants, including Lee Atwater, Paul Manafort and the notorious “dirty trickster” Roger Stone (no relation to Robert G. Stone Jr.) did political consulting for Marcos. Ed Rollins, the manage of the Reagan-Bush 1984 reelection campaign, admitted that a top Filipino politician illegally delivered ten million dollars in cash from Marcos to Reagan’s 1984 campaign, though he declined to name him.
Poppy also is known to have personally urged Ferdinand Marcos to invest money in the United States. Imelda has claimed that Poppy urged her husband to put “his” funds into something that Imelda knew only as the Communist Takeover Fund. That suggests that gold in the Philippines has long been seen as a funding vehicle for off-the-books intelligence, covert operations, weapons trafficking, and even coups–plus protection money that Maracos felt he had to pay. . . .
. . . . If all this gold was going somewhere, we have to ask: Was some of it going into Harken Energy, where George W. Bush was deeply involved? Certainly, Alan Quasha had a relationship with his father that somewhat paralleled that of W. and Poppy’s.
Having remained in the Philippines after the war, William Quasha eventually attained the rarefied status as the only American licensed to practice law there. He also picked up some intriguing clients, including the CIA-tied Nugan Hand Bank. . . .
. . . . He was well-off and well connected with capital sources. In the final days of the Marcos reign, after nearly all the expatriates had abandoned him, Quasha continued to stick by his man, leading the American Chamber of Commerce to condemn his “partisan approach.”
He also may have been a Marcos money man, just as Phil Kendrick had heard. Philippine investigators seeking to track the billions Marcos had embezzled from the Philippine treasury or obtained as bribes found that most of the money had been moved overseas through intermediaries. . . .
. . . . During the years William Quasha was living in Manila and conducting his law practice, his son Alan attended Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School–even studying in years that overlapped W.’s time there. Then Alan Quasha set up a law practice specializing in the alchemy of corporate restructuring. News reports have characterized his approach to acquiring companies on the cheap as bottom-feeding, and noted that the provenance of the funding was not always clear. Additionally, at the time of the Harken purchase, Poppy Bush, a former CIA director, was vice president, with the portfolio for managing covert operations–an empire that was undergirded by laundered intelligence funds.
When Alan Quasha took control of Harken in 1983, he was essentially an unknown and a small-timer. Several years later, he appeared to be on top of the world. Did gold, and/or Marcos’s billions have anything to do with this? . . . .
. . . . In the Rape of Nanking that followed, some 300,000 defenseless civilians were slain by Japanese troops, between 20,000 and 80,000 women of all ages were raped repeatedly, including children, adolescent girls, and grandmothers, many of them disemboweled in the process. Men, women and children were subjected to acts of such barbarism that the world recoiled in horror. Thousands of men were roped together and machine-gunned, or doused with gasoline and set afire. Others were used for bayonet practice, or to practice beheading, in a sporting competition to see which officer could behead the greatest number that day. Weeks passed while atrocities continued, streets and alleys piled high with corpses. Unlike previous mass atrocities, done out of sight, these were witnessed by hundreds of Westerners including diplomats, doctors and missionaries, some of whom smuggled out photographic evidence.
It was at this point that Golden Lily came into existence.
When the Japanese Army swarmed down the China Coast in 1937, crossed the Yangtze, and moved westward to Nanking, so many units were involved across such a broad front that there was danger of Japan’s ruling elite losing control of the financial side of conquest, as rival commanders competed for spoils. How could you keep army or navy officers from side-tracking gold bullion and priceless art works, not to mention smaller scale theft by soldiers? At the same time, groups of yakuza were moving through newly occupied areas, conducting their own reign of terror. To keep everything under strict control at the highest level, the Imperial General Headquarters created Golden Lily (kin no yuri) named after one of Hirohito’s poems. This was to be a palace organization of Japan’s top financial minds and specialists in all forms of treasure including cultural and religious antiquities, supported by accountants, bookkeepers, shipping experts, and units of the army and navy, all overseen by princes of the blood. When China was milked by Golden Lily, the army would hold the cow, while princes skimmed the cream. This organization was put directly under the command of the emperor’s brother, Prince Chichibu. We know the date because the Imperial General Headquarters itself was only set up in the imperial palace in Tokyo in November 1937, just as the Rape of Nanking was commencing. . . . The Imperial Army already had a number of Special Service Units, among them intelligence teams specializing in different kinds of cultural and financial espionage, and secret service agents like General Doihara, outside the ordinary command structure. These were reassigned to Golden Lily, giving it the resources needed to find treasure of all kinds, from the sublime to the most prosaic.
In Nanking, the first wave of Golden Lily helpers were kempeitai [the Japanese intelligence service]. Special kempeitai units moved through the city seizing all government assets, blowing open bank vaults, breaking into and emptying homes of wealthy families of whatever gold, gemstones, jewelry, artworks, and currency could be found. Nanking had been rich for over a thousand years. Many wealthy and prominent Chinese had mansions in town, and estates in the surrounding countryside. This was not the only time Nanking was ransacked by conquerors, but it was by far the most deliberate, meticulous, and systematic. At least 6,ooo metric tons of gold are reported to have been amassed by the kempeitai during this first pass. Historical research into looting shows that what is officially reported typically is only a tiny fraction of what is actually stolen. Also looted were many of the small biscuit bars that individual Chinese prefer to hoard, along with small platinum ingots, diamonds, rubies and sapphires, small works of art, and antiquities. These were taken from private homes and from tombs vandalized by the army in the countryside. Remorselessly thorough, the Japanese hammered the teeth out of corpses to extract gold fillings. . . .
. . . . A number of other princes joined Golden Lily at this stage, spending the war enriching Japan, rather than participating in less glamorous and dangerous combat assignments. Aside from Prince Asaka [the Emperor’s uncle and in charge of the Rape of Nanking–D.E.], we know Prince Chichibu and Prince Takeda were at Nanking because both later confided to friends that they had horrific nightmares from witnessing atrocities. . . .
. . . . One Japanese source told us Ishihara might be the notorious Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, reviled for the Sook Ching massacres of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, and for eating an Allied pilot’s liver. After Sook Ching, he was sent to Manila as troubleshooter with the rank of “Imperial Inspector General.” True to form, Tsuji became a key figure responsible for the Bataan Death March when he bypassed mild-mannered General Homma and urged field officers to murder Allied prisoners during the march. When he was in areas controlled by the Imperial Navy, Tsuji had the navy rank of captain. In areas controlled by the army, he changed uniforms and became a colonel. Although he made frequent trips to Tokyo by plane the next two years, and put in appearances at Guadalcanal and other battles, he is said to have spent most of 1943 and 1944 in Luzon working with Kodama and keeping an eye on Golden Lily treasure sites in and around Manila. Late in 1944, Tsuji moved to Burma and Siam, and was in Bangkok in August 1945 when Japan surrendered, eluding capture. . . .
Do we have any information pertaining to who replaced Martin Bormann and Heinrich Mueller in the leadership of the Underground Reich/Bormann Organization? As they are both surely deceased by now
@James Cordon–
Sadly, we do not.
Best,
Dave Emory