-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
The Marcos Dynasty
Sterling Seagrave©1988
Harper & Row, Inc
ISBN 0-06-015815-8
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Sixteen
YAMASHITA'S GOLD, PART TWO
AS EARLY AS 1968, Ferdinand Marcos was being called the richest man in Asia,
and ten years later his personal holdings were calculated to be in excess of
$5 billion, but those who made these appraisals failed to specify how he had
come by such extreme wealth so quickly. Some members of this exotic,
super-rich peer group had achieved their immense fortunes by fairly obvious
devices, such as war profiteering and criminal racketeering, real estate
speculation, domination of major economic sectors such as shipping,
electronics, and oil, or had accumulated their wealth over generations by
shrewd management of family, corporate, or religious funds.
To be sure, there were all the obvious sources. Among journalists, it was
generally understood that some of the Marcos wealth came from the crooked
sale of import licenses; from countless murky business deals; from his
tobacco monopoly and other partnerships with Harry Stonehill and various
international operators; from deals with Japanese and Chinese tycoons; from
multinational kickbacks; from smuggling and racketeering with Chinese
syndicates and Japanese Yakuza; from deals with American mobsters; and from a
lion's share of Philippine gambling proceeds. A large part certainly came
from the U.S. government in the form of misdirected aid funds, detoured war
reparations, inflated military base rent, sidetracked World Bank and IMF
millions, and secret grants made by the White House as a means of high-level
bribery. Another sizable portion came from confiscating the wealth of others
and seizing businesses and properties. Every journalist could tick off other
examples, such as landgrabbing from hill tribes, then selling the land to
multinationals, but nobody could rationalize more than $1 or $2 billion.
What was tantalizing about Ferdinand Marcos was not whether he had $10
billion or $20 billion, but that most of it could not be accounted for. This
was attributed to an enormous secret hoard of gold bullion. There were
persistent reports that he had vaults full of diamonds and gold; stories of a
gold Buddha weighing over a ton; rumors of incredible secret bullion deals in
London, Hong Kong, Sydney, and elsewherethe clandestine sales of 10 metric
tons of illicit gold bullion at a time, much greater in aggregate than the
known gold reserves of the Philippines. Periodically, the London gold market,
the biggest in the world, stirred with fresh rumors of secret transactions
called "Marcos Black Eagle deals." The term Black Eagle originally referred
to Nazi gold spirited out of the Reichsbank in Berlin just before the fall of
Hitler's Third Reich. Over $2.5 billion worth of gold and currency vanished,
stolen by Russians and Americans and former Nazis, some of it trickling back
later into the gold market. The deals of Ferdinand Marcos were also called
"Black Eagles" because they were understood to originate similarly with Axis
war loot-Yamashita's Gold-and the loot was being marketed surreptitiously.
Ferdinand had first become involved in the search after the war, when he
claimed that he was called in by two Filipino laborers in a dispute with two
former Japanese officers over a pit full of gold bars.
Later, as part of President Quirino's Ilocano political machine, he worked
closely with the Japanese-American investigator, Fukimitsu, when he
interviewed Japanese sources and dug through the Imperial Army archives-only
to claim that he found nothing.
The legend came back to life in 1970 when a Filipino locksmith and amateur
treasure hunter, Rogelio Roxas, dug up a solid gold Buddha weighing 1 ton.
Roxas, a former president of the Treasure Hunters Association of the
Philippines, said he acquired a Japanese map showing a site near Baguio in
abandoned shafts of Benguet mines. Armed with an old-fashioned metal
detector, Roxas said he spent months systematically searching for the correct
part of the tunnel. After seven months of digging, he said his party reached
a cave littered with skeletons. There were no gold bars and coins, only a
crate. When they pried it open they found a gold Buddha, distinctly Siamese
in its features, possibly the one supposed to have been taken to Baguio by
Yamashita when he moved his headquarters there. The Buddha was 28 inches tall
and later was determined to weigh 2,000 pounds. The head could be removed.
Inside the torso were jewels, assumed to be the crown jewels of some Siamese
or Mon ruler in the Malay Peninsula. It might have been seized anywhere in
Siam during the Japanese occupation; taken from a member of the Thai
aristocracy or from a wealthy Chinese businessman in Bangkok, or from one of
the kingdom's well-endowed temples.
The Buddha was appraised at $5 million for its gold content alone when it was
discovered in 1970. By 1986, the gold content would have brought $26 million.
After retrieving the piece, the excavation was said to have been abandoned
because the old mine shaft started to cave in. There are speculations that
this was all a cover story contrived by Roxas to protect the real site where
he found the Buddha, apparently beneath a flagpole in the quadrangle of a
military compound, one of the one hundred and seventy-two sites clearly
marked on genuine maps. The maps were reported to contain exact instructions
in code on how to dig down to the treasure and avoid booby traps.
Roxas said he received many offers for the Buddha, including one from the
president's mother, Josefa. When he refused to sell, ten soldiers showed up
at his house in Baguio at 2:00 A.M. one night, armed with guns and a warrant
from Josefa's brother-in-law, Judge Pio Marcos. These men, agents from the
National Bureau of Investigation and the Criminal Investigation Service of
the Constabulary, carted the Buddha away in a truck, along with the jewels
and eighteen gold bars Roxas had also recovered, each measuring 1 X 2 X 3
inches. Why Roxas had not been more discreet is beside the point. He was not
expecting to be robbed by the family of the president; the leader of the
raiding party was the president's brother-in-law, Marcelino Barba, the
husband of Fortuna "Baby" Marcos, Ferdinand's youngest sister.
The next day, Roxas complained to Pio Marcos. Sternly, the judge warned him
to be careful and keep quiet about the seizure. Roxas took the warning
seriously and went into hiding.
Fourteen days later, after the story hit the Manila papers, another judge in
a Baguio court ordered the military to turn over the statue. The army delayed
a fortnight, while a Manila sculptor worked furiously, then delivered a
Buddha made of brass, its head not detachable. The brass Buddha was kept
thereafter in Ferdinand's study at Malacanang, where it was used to deflect
questions about the genuine article, which was kept out of sight at his
heavily guarded beach palace in Bataan. The Buddha in Ferdinand's study at
Malacanang Palace was examined closely by long-time CIA resident Charles
Glazer. Glazer confirmed that it was brass, that the head did not unscrew,
and that it was distinctly not Siamese. The Buddha at the beach palace was
later examined by a U.S. mining engineer and metallurgist, a private guest of
the president, who determined that it was gold, just under I meter in height,
weighing approximately 2,000 pounds. The head unscrewed, revealing a cavity
the size of a small bean pot. Ferdinand told him frankly that it was part of
Yamashita's Gold, although he did not elaborate on how it had come into his
possession; presumably it was on loan from Josefa.
In May 1971, a committee of the Philippine Senate opened an investigation
into the Gold Buddha affair. Ferdinand denounced the Senate inquiry as a
scurrilous, politically motivated attack, and threatened a "personal
vendetta." Roxas was scheduled to tell the real story of the Buddha-napping
before television cameras at the Plaza Miranda rally in August 1971, when
bombs and grenades were thrown by Marcos agents, killing nine people and
severely injuring ninety-six, including the eight senatorial candidates
present. Primitivo Mijares said palace security men told him instructions
were given to the grenade throwers to "get Rogelio Roxas killed" to prevent
him from talking.
Roxas was not injured, but he was prevented from telling his story. Ferdinand
threatened to go after anyone who linked him and his relatives to the seizure
of the Buddha. Witnesses soon began to disappear, including the Baguio police
chief who had been among the night raiders, and Rogelio Roxas himself. Roxas
spent the first two years of martial law in prison. On his release, he went
into hiding again.
Ferdinand often answered casual inquiries about his wealth by saying that he
had found Yamashita's Gold. Reporters were never sure whether he was serious.
How could he be? Everyone knew that Yamashita's Gold was only a legend. On
the other hand, Marcos was known to have a personal cache of bullion and
diamonds. Nobody could be certain of its size or its provenance, but the Far
Eastern Economic Review made periodic references to his "reputedly already
sizeable hoard" of gold bars.
Whatever he had found earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, the discovery of the
Gold Buddha inspired Ferdinand to renew efforts to locate the remaining
Japanese loot. After declaring martial law, he could dig for Yamashita's Gold
with impunity. At first, his efforts were concentrated on Fort Bonifacio. He
believed that the Japanese had buried much of the treasure underneath
MacArthur's headquarters in the fortress. In the center of the compound, next
to the officers' hall and across from MacArthur's living quarters, was a
circular driveway. In its middle was the entrance to MacArthur's personal
bomb shelter. When the Japanese took over the compound, they dug additional
tunnels; these were deliberately blocked just before the end of the war.
Ferdinand was convinced that this was a prime site of the treasure. He kept
two thousand soldiers busy for years, excavating 35 miles of tunnels. In the
first two years of digging he reportedly uncovered only a single gold bar.
After that, however, he must have stumbled onto what he was looking for,
because by 1975 he and Ver had shown several visitors specially built
subterranean vaults beneath the Bataan beach palace filled with what the
guests later described as staggering quantities of gold bullion, rows upon
rows of gold bars. These were independent confirmations by different
individuals, and their accounts are strikingly similar. Prospective brokers
also were shown a large underground storeroom or warehouse near Malacanang
Palace containing a similar hoard.
Next, officers of the treasure task force suggested that they start
excavating Fort Santiago, under cover of a historical restoration project of
the First Lady.
One of the problems encountered from the beginning was that the general
location of a treasure site was inadequate. Gold takes little space. Without
precise coordinates, digging in a single field could continue for months or
years, missing the trove. It was a question of inches. The digging at Fort
Bonifacio had gone on for nearly five years. Fort Santiago could take just as
long. This was complicated by the fact that the Japanese had buried the gold
deep, so it could take months of digging down to discover that you were in
the wrong spot. There were clues, such as specific arrangements of certain
bones at different depths, with 2,000-pound bombs waiting for those who dug
straight down instead of following precise instructions coded in the
engineering drawings.
To speed things up, the Marcoses invited a Swedish psychic, Olof Jonsson,
living in Chicago, to visit them at Malacanang Palace. Several books had been
written about Jonsson and his feats. His previous experiences in locating
buried treasure were well publicized. Jonsson was also one of the world's
true innocents, a modest man whose psychic gift earned more for others than
it did for him. Entertaining psychics at Malacanang was something the
Marcoses did from time to time for their own amusement. Both Imelda and
Ferdinand were fascinated by psychic phenomena, and believed that they
themselves had supernatural powers. During conversations with Jonsson, they
brought up the mystery of Yamashita's Gold. Perhaps Jonsson could help.
These discussions led to other problems associated with the treasure. If it
was found-thousands of tons of it-how did you dispose of it without causing
world gold prices to plummet, and without revealing its origins, inviting
international legal challenges? Having already recovered at least one very
large cache of gold bars, and possibly others he did not mention, Ferdinand
had a particular question that plagued him: all gold bars had a fingerprint
in their composition, which would reveal on analysis that they came from
mines in certain places. How could you disguise the gold so that nobody could
discover where it came from by analyzing the composition of the bullion? You
had to find a way to "launder" the gold.
Visitors to the bullion vaults under the Bataan palace reported seeing large
numbers of ingots with Japanese and Chinese markings and in a variety of
shapes and sizes characteristic of both countries, not the standard sizes and
weights stipulated by the London gold pool, which sets international
standards for bullion trading. Evidently a large portion of the loot had come
from China, or from Chinese sources in Southeast Asia. The bars marked in
Japanese presumably had been jewelry or coins melted down before shipment to
Manila on the way home to Tokyo.
Olof Jonsson introduced the Marcoses to Norman Kirst, a smoothtalking
Wisconsin wheeler-dealer. He presented himself to the Marcoses as a
financier. Ferdinand told Jonsson and Kirst that one of his friends, the
president of Costa Rica-Jose Figueroa-had told him about a man in Nevada, a
mining engineer and metallurgist named Robert Curtis, who had developed two
interesting processes. One enabled him to extract a slightly higher
percentage of gold from any given ore, and the other process enabled him to
melt down gold bars and alter the composition so the bars could be recast
with any metallurgical fingerprint you wanted. With the help of this man
Curtis, Yamashita's Gold could be poured into new bars to look as though it
came from Benguet Consolidated or other mines in the region. Benguet was
extracting around 100,000 ounces of gold per year, but the figure could be
increased to cover the gradual introduction of a lot of Japanese war gold
into the market. If Curtis could be persuaded to bring his equipment to
Manila, it could be set up under the auspices of Benguet, so nobody would be
any the wiser. The Marcoses had been buying into Benguet for years and by the
mid-1970s had gained a majority ownership of the company through front men.
Kirst volunteered to get in touch with Curtis in Reno, and immediately did so
on a palace telephone. He followed this up by making several trips to Nevada,
where he outlined the deal to Curtis and offered to let him in on it,
providing Curtis agreed to pay Kirst and Jonsson's expenses, running to
several thousand a month. Ferdinand, who was addicted to codenames and
Hollywood-style espionage, decided that the men involved would be called the
Leber Group ("rebel" spelled backward). He would be "Charlie" and Ver
"Jimmy." General Ver would coordinate operations. Imelda and Kokoy were kept
informed by Kirst, evidently on the assumption that he was protecting
himself, but they were not yet directly involved.
Kirst told Curtis that President Marcos had already retrieved several hundred
million dollars' worth of gold bars and other valuables, including the Gold
Buddha. Curtis did not believe him at first. Eventually, he became hooked by
the challenge, but he remained not entirely convinced even when he flew to
Manila.
Compared to most treasure hunters, Robert Curtis was a bit of a Boy Scout. He
had made his living in the deserts and mountains of America's Far West as a
banker and car salesman, becoming the president of several small corporations
engaged in mining and processing precious metals. He was active in that
fraternity of rock hounds and precious metals freaks who spend every spare
moment searching for gold with metal detectors, or scheming grandly to find
El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Cibola. When Kirst phoned him the first
time from Malacanang Palace, Curtis had financial problems. His company, U.S.
Platinum, was deep in the red because of the cost of purchasing equipment to
carry out his processes. A conservative politically, Curtis had borrowed
$250,000 from wealthy members of the right-wing John Birch Society and was
having trouble paying it back. The prospect of solving all his financial
worries by taking part in the discovery of Japanese war booty seemed like the
answer to his prayers. Curtis was sincere and ingenuous and, like many
engineers, single-minded about getting his work done in the most efficient
manner possible. As a romantic, he was gullible about politics and business,
but he understood human nature well enough to avoid becoming involved with
people and projects that had a very bad smell. Since Ferdinand was the
president of the Philippines, a right-wing ally of the United States, Curtis
made allowances about the ethics of the situation. Engineers have to work
within tolerances.
Fortunately, Curtis had a mania for accurate record keeping, and a knack for
gadgetry that led him to tape-record every phone conversation he had, and
even to tape face-to-face meetings with friends. Years later, when his story
was challenged, he could produce thousands of pages of documentation and
countless hours of tapes that took weeks to assess. Ultimately, he was able
to convince stubborn unbelievers all the way up to the Pentagon, the CIA, and
the White House.
Curtis worried a lot about where the gold came from, the brutal circumstances
under which it was seized by the Japanese, and the horrors involved in its
burial. But the practical problem confronting him was how to find it and get
it out of the ground. After it was recovered, there would be plenty of time
to sort out the ethics of the situation.
Characteristically, Ferdinand was not planning to pay Curtis anything for his
trouble. Curtis had to ship his gold-processing equipment from Nevada to
Manila at his own expense. There, space would be made available, either on a
military base or at the beach palace, to set up the equipment and process the
gold into -new ingots. As a partner in the Leber Group, of course, Curtis was
to be rewarded with a percentage of the loot. Or so it was put to him.
Curtis made two trips to the Philippines between March and July 1975. He,
Olof Jonsson, and Norman Kirst first arrived in Manila together in March
1975, and were met by other members of the Leber Group, headed by Ferdinand's
errand boy Amelito Mutuc. Mutuc had been President Macapagal's executive
secretary, but was sacked for his ties to Harry Stonehill. He became
Ferdinand's gofer, and transmitted bribes to Primitivo Mijares. Others Curtis
met included Paul Jiga and Ben Balmores, who were identified as eyewitnesses
to the burial of the treasure. Curtis and Jonsson were taken to over two
dozen sites, the most important ones at Fort Santiago and Fort Bonifacio in
Manila; at Teresa barrio 30 miles from the city; at San Agustin Church in the
old walled city of Intramuros (where loot had been stashed in a deep crypt
beneath the altar with the consent of the priests); at a property belonging
to the wealthy Don Paco Ortigas; and at San Sebastian Church,
Christ the King Church, a railroad site, and several others. Frequently they
met General Ver and a Colonel Lachica, a member of Ver's staff who headed a
security force responsible for protecting the First Lady.
Curtis stayed in Malacanang Palace. He had many conversations with
Ferdinand in his private chambers. At first Curtis was not abso-lutely
convinced that the treasure existed; he did not become certain until he was
overwhelmed by evidence. Ferdinand had obtained from Balmores and Jiga
several of the original secret Japanese maps detailing
the disposition of the treasure. In all there were 138 land locations and 34
water locations—172 sites. Japanese engineering drawings of each site
indicated precisely how they had been laid out, including telltale markings
at various levels, and how to avoid booby traps. Most of the maps were still
in the hands of Jiga and Balmores, hidden by them for their own safety. At
each site were layers of human bone-skulls, hands, arms-placed to indicate
that the recoverer was proceeding correctly. It was explained to Curtis that
the instructions on the maps were inscribed in a Japanese dialect that had
not been in common use for one thousand years. Curtis studied modern
engineering drawings of several troves, executed at Ferdinand's order by a
team of Filipino engineers, geologists, architects, and cartographers. He
accompanied Marcos and Ver to the beach palace at Mariveles in Bataan, to
"work out all rough
edges." There, Curtis was taken by General Ver to a vault in the base-ment.
"I saw the bars stacked from floor to ceiling," he claimed. Curtis estimated
that he was looking at close to $60 million in gold in that one room alone.
Ver told him that this was only some of the gold from one site and that there
was considerably more stored in adjacent vaults. It was at Mariveles, too,
that Curtis was able to make a personal inspection of the real Gold Buddha,
which was on the floor beside Ferdinand's desk. Ferdinand talked to him at
length about getting the right paper
records assembled and marketing the treasure to the gold pools in London and
Zurich.
Curtis agreed to have two small furnaces dismantled at his plant in Reno and
shipped to Manila, along with other equipment to reprocess the gold. This
would be done under cover of providing mining equipment to Benguet.
Marcos and Curtis decided to concentrate first on one water site and two land
sites. The water site was the wreck of the Japanese cruiser Nachi. The two
land sites were "Teresa II" and the property of Don Paco Ortigas.
For his own confidence, Curtis wanted to begin by confirming the authenticity
of the sites, the maps, and the eyewitnesses, so he spent a lot of time
talking to Jiga and Balmores. When Curtis met him in 1975, Jiga gave his age
as fifty-seven. He was living in Manila, employed by the Philippine Refining
Company, part of an American multinational that made shampoo and toothpaste.
Balmores was older and had already retired.
Curtis listened to their accounts of how they had worked as houseboys and
interpreters for Japanese generals and had witnessed all the gold burials,
including the sinking of the cruiser Nachi, then had stolen the treasure maps.
Filipinos in the Leber Group referred to Balmores and Jiga contemptuously as
turncoats—dual Japanese-Filipino citizens who betrayed the Philippines to
become spies, scouts, and interpreters for the Japanese high command, then
betrayed their trust again when they stole the plans. They had never
attempted to get the gold themselves because the Japanese had made each site
too intricate for casual retrieval. They knew it would take teams of men,
lots of money, and engineering skill to circumvent the booby traps and find
the precise locations. Jiga and Balmores were now in thrall. to Marcos.
Marcos needed Balmores and Jiga, too. They had the maps, and they were
intimate with the sites, having witnessed the burials. The two men were so
relieved to find Curtis a sympathetic character that they turned their
remaining maps over to him. Later, the older man, Balmores, blurted out to
Curtis something in private that even Marcos and Ver had failed to
discoverthe truth that they had kept hidden for thirty years.
To find the cruiser Nachi, Ferdinand promised that navy PT boats and divers
would be on hand to assist Olof Jonsson, once he pinpointed the exact
location of the treasure with his psychic powers. As a precaution, Ferdinand
then issued a presidential decree requiring his personal approval for any
future salvage operations in Philippine waters. In April 1975 Jonsson,
Curtis, Kirst, Balmores, and Jiga boarded a PT boat together with Ver's
security men.
After Ver's divers spent hours searching fruitlessly in the place where the
Japanese maps showed the wreck to be, the psychic insisted that they drop
anchor several hundred yards away. Again, the divers were dispatched and
within minutes surfaced to shout that Jonsson had brought them to the exact
spot. Floating buoys were anchored to the bow and stern of the cruiser. When
they returned to Manila, Ver was elated. But when they came back the
following day, the buoys were gone. Perhaps currents had broken the ropes. It
was too late in the day to relocate the vessel. On the third day, Jonsson
again found the cruiser. New buoys were placed securely and Ver promised to
leave a patrol boat in the area to guard against intruders. Plans were made
to return in three days' time with more divers and equipment. But when they
returned, the new buoys also were gone. When Curtis asked Ver about the
failure of his security precautions, hinting that Ver's own men might have
removed them, Ver insisted that his guard boat had been obliged to leave
because it had to escort the presidential yacht on a voyage.
It- was obvious to Curtis and his companions that Marcos and Ver were playing
some kind of game with the wreck of the Nachi, so they shifted their efforts
to the land site at Teresa II.
On the Japanese maps, Teresa 11 was described as containing 777 billion yen
in treasure (1944 currency), and 777 was Ferdinand's lucky number. It was to
be excavated by the Age (pronounced "ahgay") Construction Company, headed by
Dr. Eduardo Escobar, Ver's personal choice for the job. Security on the site
would be provided by Ver's men.
With the Japanese maps and help from Olof Jonsson's psychic powers, they
located and marked the exact spot of the Teresa II site where excavation
should begin. Digging started in mid-May in plain sight of nearby housing.
The twenty-man work crews of the construction company were told only that
they were involved in a soil test; they would be replaced by Ver's men before
the treasure was reached. Digging went on around the clock, averaging 3 feet
per day. On June 8, they reached the top of a concrete tunnel. When the
concrete was pierced, the workers suffered headaches and nausea so severe
that some were hospitalized. Balmores and Jiga said it was gas from the
remains of the POWs buried alive in the tunnel-arm bones and hand bones were
uncovered in curious patterns throughout the descent.
As indicated on the maps, they found a level of burned charcoal, a layer of
bamboo, then a layer of crisscrossed wooden boards. Then more bones, the
fender of a truck, and another piece of metal. Before they could dig further,
the chief security officer vanished and came back with a truck full of
heavily armed soldiers. These troops it turned out were loyal to Imelda. They
took over guarding the site. When word reached Ver, his own security forces
moved in, getting the drop on
Imelda's troops and forcing them to put down their weapons. A marital quarrel.
Digging resumed. Curtis was lowered into the shaft and studied the two metal
objects-one plainly the fender of a truck, the other a section of one of
several 1,000-pound bombs guarding the treasure. This news was passed to
Malacanang. It was now July 6, 1975. Digging was suddenly halted at
Ferdinand's order. Primitivo Mijares had just testified before the U.S.
Congress: Washington columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten had written a
piece repeating Mijares's allegation that President Marcos was searching for
Yamashita's Gold. This had alarmed Ferdinand. Although Ver had been excited
about the discovery of the trucks, Ferdinand was more concerned about "leaks"
in the Leber Group. He ordered Ver to question all the civilian workers.
Everyone had been warned that leaks could be fatal.
That night Olof Jonsson told Curtis he was leaving Manila immediately and
advised Curtis to do the same. The psychic had an intuition that they were
all in grave danger. The next morning Jonsson took the first flight out.
Curtis stayed long enough to see Ver and conclude arrangements for his
furnaces and other processing equipment that he had gone to great expense to
ship to Manila. It was too late to intercept the shipment. He was invited to
spend a week on holiday in Baguio, but felt uneasy after Jonsson's warning.
He claimed he had urgent business back in Reno, and boarded a flight home on
July 10. Norman Kirst stayed behind, imagining that he could make a deal with
President Marcos. He spent the next ten days, as he put it, "virtually
entombed," until he concocted letters and cables designed to discredit
Curtis. The idea was to slur Curtis so that he would not be believed if he
ever revealed what the Leber Group was up to.
Curtis, meanwhile, was sitting pretty. When he had left Manila, he had taken
Jiga's and Balmores's treasure maps with him. When Ferdinand discovered that
the maps were gone, he made repeated attempts through intermediaries to
reassure Curtis and get him back to Manila. By then Curtis had other
problems. Ferdinand had double-crossed him, swindled him out of his
equipment, but that was only the beginning. To pay everyone's expenses for
the whole venture, Curtis once again had approached his rich moneylenders in
the John Birch Society, apprised them confidentially of the Yamashita Gold
deal, and had arranged to borrow another $125,000. He now owed them $375,000.
The man with whom he was dealing, multi-millionaire Jay Agnew, was a member
of the national council of the John Birch Society. Agnew owned a lumber
company in Washington State, and his son Dan was an attorney there. Curtis
claimed that they and other officials of the John Birch Society volunteered
to launder his future share of the gold, which they expected to be $2
billion, and in which they now had a significant interest because of their
loans to him. He said they told him the laundering would be done through an
offshore company called Commonwealth Packaging Ltd., which they had set up in
the Bahamas; in Nassau, the money would be deposited in a branch of the Royal
Bank of Canada. Then, using various accounts controlled by senior members of
the Birch Society, the money would be transferred a chunk at a time to the
Royal Bank branch in Kelowna, British Columbia, where it would be credited to
an account controlled by one of the key financial experts of the John Birch
Society, who would retrieve it and carry it across the border. Curtis claimed
that the Birchers boasted of successfully smuggling large sums into the
United States through Canadian banks in this fashion.
Involved in the deal in addition to the Agnews, Curtis said, were Georgia
Congressman Larry P. McDonald; former California Congressman John Schmitz,
once a presidential candidate on the right-wing American party ticket; Floyd
Paxton, of Yakima, Washington, who had been defeated three times in efforts
to be elected to Congress; and his son Jerry Paxton of Yakima, who ran the
worldwide Kwik Lok Corporation, which made the ubiquitous little plastic
clips used to close bakery, produce, and frozen food bags in supermarkets.
Because of his wealth, Floyd Paxton was the Birch Society's financial expert
and a member of its executive committee. Curtis said Paxton would be the one
who took the money out of the Royal Bank's Kelowna branch, where it would be
kept in an account belonging to the Kelowna plant of Kwik Lok. Another
participant, Curtis said, was Jerry Adams of Atlanta, a Bircher and head of
the Great American Silver Corporation, a precious metals company being probed
by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Curtis said he was told the
laundering scheme had been cleared with the man then heading the Birch
Society, Congressman McDonald, and Robert Welch, the millionaire candy
manufacturer and founder of the Society, who once accused President
Eisenhower of being a Communist.
According to Curtis, Paxton and the Agnews were very accommodating and had
explained how his $2 billion share of the Japanese war booty could easily be
smuggled into the United States, "without violating any laws or paying any
taxes." Curtis said the Birch Society also informed General Ver that they
would guarantee to launder for President Marcos the first $20 billion in gold
recovered from the sites. Beyond $20 billion, the Society suggested a plan by
which the gold would be offered secretly to Arab oil states in exchange for
oil; Ferdinand could then sell the oil to Japan, receiving clean money.
The generosity of the Birch Society in making such an offer to Ferdinand
Marcos and Fabian Ver can only be fully savored by keeping in mind that the
gold in question was stolen from banks, governments, religious organizations,
and private individuals throughout Asia, that the Marcoses were
simultaneously swindling the U.S. government, private banks, and numerous
individuals out of hundreds of millions of dollars that were salted in
offshore accounts, that Ver was in direct charge of the imprisonment,
torture, and murder of dissident Filipinos—and at that very moment, according
to all evidence available, was getting ready to entertain kidnapped U.S.
congressional witness Primitivo Mijares by having his teenage son's eyeballs
plucked out of their sockets.
Now that his part in the Yamashita Gold project had collapsed and his
equipment was forfeit, Curtis could not pay back the borrowed money, and he
found himself facing a federal indictment on charges brought by members of
the Birch Society that Curtis had obtained the funds under false pretenses.
The absurdity of the Society's position was not apparent at the time to
anyone but Curtis.
His back to the wall because of the Birch Society lawsuit, Curtis decided in
December 1977 to take his story and his evidence (including over three
hundred hours of taped phone conversations and two thousand pages of
documents) to the office of Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, then head of the
Senate Intelligence Committee. This material was sent to Laxalt's aide,
Robert Ashley Hall, who later became city manager of Las Vegas. Hall spent
the entire New Year's weekend reviewing the materials and wrote a memo to
Laxalt recommending that the evidence be turned over to the Senate
Intelligence Committee. The committee reviewed it and passed the word back
that nothing could be done. However, copies of the Curtis material were
quietly passed to leading right-wing activists.
In desperation, Curtis decided to go public. He contacted editor Brian
Greenspun of the Las Vegas Sun, columnist Jack Anderson, and writers for the
Philippine News in San Francisco. They published his story in detail in 1978,
such as it was known at the time.
Ferdinand responded to all the publicity by ridiculing the legend of
Yamashita's Gold as a hoax, describing Curtis as a "mentally ill exconvict,"
and by dispatching Fabian Ver to silence Curtis, as he had silenced Mijares.
At the end of June 1978, it was reported that Fabian Ver and three
unidentified Philippine colonels had secretly entered the United States to
meet underworld figures in San Francisco and Chicago, and to set up murder
contracts. The three colonels were recognized by Filipino exiles in San
Francisco, identified as a trio believed to have engineered numerous
killings. One of their targets this time was Robert Curtis.
Norman Kirst learned of the murder plot from Filipino friends and warned Olof
Jonsson, with whom he was still friendly. Jonsson in turn alerted Curtis.
Curtis immediately went underground, adopted a new identity, and found a new
job in a new place. He has remained underground ever since.
One of the things Curtis kept completely to himself was a chilling discovery
he had made on his own in Manila. Jiga, and Balmores had been lying all
along. Their story about being Filipino houseboys forced into service of the
Japanese generals responsible for burying the treasure was a fake. After
winning their confidence, Curtis had become close to the two men and Balmores
apparently decided to tell him the real story. Far from being houseboys, Paul
and Ben were not even Filipinos. They were Japanese. During the war, Curtis
discovered, they had served in the navy, not the army, in the secret section
responsible for collecting war booty and shipping it back to the Home
Islands. They had risen to the rank of commander, just shy of rear admiral,
and were actually the officers in charge of the marines who had buried most
of the treasure. What they did not tell Curtis (and it would not have meant
anything to him at the time if they had) was that they were directly
responsible to two Japanese admirals. In Manila itself, they were on the
staff of the man who became notorious as the "Butcher of Manila-Rear Admiral
Iwabuchi Sanji. But on a higher level they had ultimate responsibility to the
man who collected the loot all over Asia and sent it back toward Japan by way
of Manila-Rear Admiral Kodama Yoshio, Japan's criminal mastermind.
It was at Kodama's order that Balmores and Jiga came to bury the loot during
1943 and 1944—including the sinking of the cruiser Nachi by a Japanese sub
before it could leave Manila Bay, an operation arranged by Rear Admiral
Iwabuchi, who still had two mini-submarines at his disposal.
As naval commanders working for Kodama, a man whose power put him beyond the
reach of ordinary mortals, Balmores; and Jiga also were untouchables. In the
Philippines, they had a free hand in burying the loot, with unlimited forced
labor by POWs and all the marines they needed for security and brute force.
It was not Yamashita's Gold they buried. It was Kodama's Gold. They were not
helpless onlookers when thousands of POWs were hacked to pieces, drowned, or
buried alive. No wonder Balmores was troubled by the memory.
Kodama was safely back in Japan by the time MacArthur invaded Luzon, but
Balmores and Jiga were trapped. They made it sound as though they panicked,
stole the secret maps of each site, and faded into the jungle. But, in fact,
it did not happen that way.
Many months passed between MacArthur's invasion and Yamashita's surrender.
Many Japanese officers did vanishing acts. Perhaps the most famous was the
brilliant Colonel Tsuji. After helping Kodama loot Southeast Asia, Tsuji
eluded Allied capture by disguising himself as a Buddhist monk, and wandered
through Southeast Asia and China for the next three years. After the war
crimes trials had ended and his friend Kodama had been freed from Sugamo
Prison and could again pull strings, Tsuji returned to Japan, wrote a book
about his adventures, became with Kodama a power behind the resurgence of the
right wing, and was elected to the Diet.
What Jiga and Balmores did was a calculated decision. It involved not General
Yamashita, but Admiral Iwabuchi. Only the basic elements are well known.
Yamashita had withdrawn to the mountains and ordered all Japanese forces to
leave Manila as an open city. Specifically, Yamashita instructed General
Yokoyama Shizuo, the Shimbu Group Commander, to destroy the bridges over the
Pasig River, to blow up other key installations, and then to evacuate the
city. Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji, who commanded the naval forces in the
Manila area, was determined to fight, and General Yokoyama soon discovered
that under the peculiar command and control arrangements of the Japanese army
and navy, he could not force Iwabuchi to do otherwise.
Iwabuchi chose for reasons of his own to defy Yamashita's order and remain in
Manila with the sixteen thousand marines and sailors under his command. As
units of the First Cavalry and the 37th Division closed in on the city,
Iwabuchi's forces withdrew across the Pasig River, destroying military
facilities and supplies in the port area, as well as the Pasig bridges. This
fulfilled the standing orders Iwabuchi had been given by naval headquarters
in Tokyo not to let the Americans capture these stocks and facilities intact.
On February 3, 1945, when the first American cavalrymen entered the city,
followed the next day by infantrymen, they found themselves confronted by a
large Japanese force determined to fight for every inch. Iwabuchi's men had
set up barbed wire and barricades, with machinegun nests and salvaged naval
guns dug in at strategic intersections. At the center was Iwabuchi himself,
holed up with his toughest units in the old walled city of Intramuros, behind
stone walls 40 feet thick. His strong points were in government buildings
heavily built of reinforced concrete. Between the Japanese and the three
American divisions entering the city were seven hundred thousand Filipino
civilians. MacArthur forbade air attacks in order to avoid civilian
casualties. Nevertheless, civilians died in large numbers from the heavy use
of artillery by both sides. Japanese fighting men added to the carnage by
murdering, raping, beating, or burning hapless civilians caught within their
lines. About one hundred thousand Filipino civilians died in the battle for
Manila-almost six times the number of soldiers killed on both sides.
Iwabuchi's decision to stage a battle to the death has always been explained
by Western military historians as a suicidal act based on the Samurai
tradition of refusing to surrender. It was known that he had been ordered by
his superior, Vice Admiral Okochi Denshichi, to destroy Manila's docks and
other vital installations before they could fall into American hands. But
nobody could figure out why Iwabuchi changed this typical military command
into a suicidal showdown that resulted in some of the worst carnage of the
war. It is true that he and his men were cut off from withdrawal into the
mountains by MacArthur's craving to seize what he thought was an undefended
city,. in order to stage a triumphal procession in his own honor. That might
explain a decision to fight it out to the finish, but it does not explain all
the other things Iwabuchi was doing besides trying to take as many people
with him as he could.
Iwabuchi hardly seemed the type to be the butcher of anywhere. He was born in
1893 in Niigato Prefecture, an impulsive but pleasant young man who impressed
his fellow cadets at the Naval Academy at Etajima. He must have been bright
and well connected, because at graduation he was named an imperial aide.
Little is known of his career from 1915 to 1942, which seems to have been
spent in the secret service, where as an imperial aide he would have been at
home under the overall command of a prince, and where eventually he would
have become a colleague of Kodama.
In the early spring of 1942, Iwabuchi reappeared in dispatches when he was
made captain of the battleship Kirishima and commanded her in the Battle of
Midway and at Guadalcanal. His ship was among those dispatched by Admiral
Yamamoto with the mission to destroy Henderson Field on the island. The
attack, led by Vice Admiral Abe aboard the flagship Hid, resulted in a
disastrous defeat for the Japanese, both Iwabuchi and Abe being forced to
scuttle their ships. Curiously, while Abe was demoted for his part in the
fiasco, Iwabuchi was promoted to rear admiral.
After this one brief appearance on regular duty at the end of 1942, Iwabuchi
again became a ghost and remained one throughout 1943 and 1944, when he was
suddenly appointed commander of the Manila naval district just before
MacArthur's invasion of Luzon. It seems that he had returned to work as one
of the naval officers seconded to Kodama, responsible for moving war loot and
strategic materials to Manila for transshipment to Tokyo. It would have been
natural, then, to give him the job of looking after the last-minute treasure
burials in and around Manila as the Americans approached, and to make him
secretly responsible for disguising the sites, disposing of the POWs and
other conscripts working at the sites, and maintaining whatever defense of
Manila was required until all traces of the hidden loot were gone. This would
have been an awesome responsibility and it would go a long way toward
explaining the murderous determination of Iwabuchi and his men, who were for
a time driven quite literally insane.
Iwabuchi had a lot of civilian hostages in Intramuros, men, women, and
children, and he seemed to be making heavy use of POWs inside the tunnel
system beneath the old city. He also had 4,500 marines holed up in the tunnel
system at Corregidor, who seemed to be remarkably busy. The end to their
defense of Corregidor came spectacularly on the morning of February 26 when
the Japanese defenders set off tons of ammunition and explosives stored in
the tunnels. They were all killed instantly. Scores of Americans were also
killed, buried in rock slides or hurled bodily off the island as Corregidor
convulsed violently.
Jiga and Balmores were working directly for Iwabuchi, and it was for him, not
for Yamashita, that they carried out their final excavations in the tunnel
system under Fort Santiago, Fort Bonifacio, and Intramuros, and at churches,
municipal buildings, bayfront and harbor sites described by Jiga and Balmores
as the burial locations for the treasure. Iwabuchi controlled the only two
Japanese submarines remaining in Philippine waters, one of which sank the
cruiser Nachi with all aboard. And it was from Iwabuchi's headquarters, not
Yamashita's, that Jiga and Balmores stole the treasure maps.
Eventually, the American forces besieging Iwabuchi in Manila grew tired of
the slow progress they were making and brought in heavy mortars and
artillery, destroying all that was left of the inner city and flattening
Intramuros. Iwabuchi was thought to have held out to the last in the Finance
Building, the Legislative Building, and the Bureau of Agriculture and
Commerce, and was presumed to have died in the rubble of the Finance Building
when it was at last silenced on March 3.
Nobody ever positively identified Iwabuchi's remains in the Finance Building.
He may very well have slipped away through the tunnel system in the last
stages of the battle, to survive the war in disguise. Interestingly, despite
the appalling and otherwise seemingly pointless carnage and destruction,
Iwabuchi was posthumously honored by the Imperial Navy with a promotion to
Vice Admiral and the First Order of the Golden Kite. For what were they
honoring him, really?
It is always possible that Jiga and Balmores were under orders from Kodama to
make off with the maps before the end came, so that Kodama could have the
sites excavated after the war by groups posing as salvage operators or
construction companies. A number of Japanese salvage operators did obtain
rights to work offshore in the Philippines after the war. Japanese
construction companies and industrial concerns made unusually low bids to win
postwar contracts in the Philippines in areas where the maps of Jiga and
Balmores show locations of Yamashita's Gold. Many of the locations Ferdinand
turned over to Imelda, for her bayfront landfills, excavations, and
historical restorations were prime sites on the maps. After the Dovie Beams
affair, Ferdinand apparently was forced to divide the treasure sites between
them in return for domestic tranquility.
After stealing the maps, Balmores and Jiga went to ground, living on small
stashes of treasure that they had set aside for the purpose. They could not
risk being discovered by their own countrymen. If Kodama knew they had
survived the flattening of Intramuros, he would find ways to regain the maps.
In the early 1950s, Jiga and Balmores ran out of money and decided it was
worth the risk to make one excavation, up at an isolated site near Baguio.
They hired two Filipino laborers to do the digging, recovered a mass of gold
bars, and then became so excited that they refused to pay the diggers. The
laborers went to Ferdinand's law office in town, and that was how he tumbled
to Jiga and Balmores and his first big stash of Yamashita's Gold. Marcos
reached an agreement with them in which he kept most of the gold in return
for letting the two former Japanese naval officers survive, under his
protection. Thus encouraged, Marcos persuaded President Quirino to strike a
deal with Fukimitsu to investigate the whole story. How much was recovered as
a result is not known. To protect themselves, Balmores and Jiga. were obliged
over the years to take ordinary jobs and live within their salaries. After
being befriended by Curtis, it was again to protect themselves that they
decided to turn over to him all the rest of their maps, and the aging
Balmores blurted out the real story he had kept bottled up all those years.
It was probably this hunt for Yamashita's Gold that led Ferdinand Marcos to
become friends with Kodama and Sasakawa during the 1950s. Kodama apparently
was able to recover portions of the loot using Japanese-funded construction
projects and offshore salvage operations as cover, the rights for which he
must have paid Ferdinand dearly.
In 1975, when President Marcos decreed that all further offshore operations
had to be approved by him personally, he bypassed Kodama and issued a salvage
permit to the Korean Yakuza for the recovery of the Nachi. He sold the South
Korean syndicate of Machii Hisayuki "coral reef exploration rights" for the
entire Philippines. Machii, like many of his Japanese counterparts, had
served the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps in South Korea after World War II
by using his "Voice of the East Gang" to break up strikes and intimidate
those flirting with communism. He became close to Korea's President Park
Chung Hee. In 1970, Park gave Machii control of the ferry line between Pusan,
South Korea, and Shimonaseki, Japan-the shortest route between the two
countries. Machii became a billionaire, indulging his passion for Picassos
and porcelains, all under government protection. He also enjoyed government
protection in the Philippines. Apparently, the Nachi was completely emptied
by Machii, because after that nobody showed the slightest interest in
salvaging the wreck.
In 1976, after sixty-five years of unprecedented mischief, Kodama had a
stroke and went into eclipse. Inevitably, there were rumors of poison. He
lived another eight years, still manipulating events from behind the black
curtain, finally dying in January 1984.
After declaring publicly in 1975 that the Yamashita Gold story was a hoax,
Ferdinand resumed recovery efforts with renewed energy. The Teresa II site
was emptied. Seven years later, in 1982, two men, one of them a full-time CIA
officer, were flown in Ferdinand's helicopter to the Bataan beach palace in
Mariveles, where they were taken into "the left tunnel," which was 80 feet
wide, "as long as a football field," and stacked with gold bars. The gold
bars were "standard size" but had "AAA" markings, and were said to have been
retrieved from the Teresa II site. The two men were shown the gold vaults in
1982 because the CIA had become involved in helping Ferdinand move and market
the treasure.
There were many other sites onshore and off, waiting for recovery, but
without the original Japanese engineering drawings that Curtis had taken, it
was little better than groping in the dark. Attempts were made to persuade
Olof Jonsson to return to the Philippines to pinpoint them, but Jonsson did
not need his psychic powers to know the next journey to Manila could be his
last.
pp.396-317
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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