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ADNAN KHASHOGGI LINKED TO 911 TERRORISTS |
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PART 5: TAPED CONVERSATIONS & A
SHOWER OF GOLD FOR AMERICA by Alex Constantine After the nightmare of Black Tuesday, a tape recording of a private conference at the Hotel Royale Monceau in Paris, France found its way to Observer reporter Greg Palast. The topic of this meeting of minds was protection money, as in how much of it to give bin Laden to assure that no messy al Qaeda bombs exploded in Saudi Arabia. This cabal was in general agreement that their friend Osama had done quite well promoting Wahhabism in the Middle East. They were very complimentary. Some of the usual suspects attended this session:
(The 9/11 families have mentioned a French intelligence report of the meeting in a lawsuit filed against Saudi royals, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on August 16, 2002.) Reverse the tape, now. More wretched voices drift upward from the charred recesses of 911 history... On April 4, 1993, the Las Vegas Sun revealed that it had obtained a tape recording of its own, this one from an unnamed intelligence source. On the tape, Middle Eastern gold traders toyed with the notion of killing President Bill Clinton.3 As if this little attention-getter wasn't enough, the Arab businessmen went on to discuss options for dealing with widow Imelda Marcos and her son, then exiled in Hawaii. From the balmy islands, Imelda Marcos was heaving billions of dollars in gold on the black market, frantically, before the remains of their tin dictatorship was seized by the courts. The sudden infusion of Philippine gold on the world market threatened to depress the already-sagging price of the metal. This cabal settled on a drastic solution - a strategic terrorist act staged to drive up the price of gold. The threats "may be nothing more than ill-conceived boasting," the Sun allowed. "There may well be no connection between the [1993] New York blast - which DID impact installation of new computer programs at a major commodity exchange [also, one of the largest repositories of gold in the world, worth $1 billion, situated beneath the skyscraper4] - and the Marcos efforts to sell.... Yet far-fetched as it sounds, terrorist acts aimed at eroding public confidence in the world's most stable nation and commodity markets could make gold more attractive and drive its price higher."5 The Ford Econoline that exploded at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 left behind one of the biggest crime scenes in New York history, with six dead, 1,000 injured. The damage was estimated at an excess of $500 million. Police dubbed it "the case of the century."6 Assistant FBI director James Fox explained to reporters that Mohammed Salameh, a follower of Omar Abdel Rahman, had been ID'd as the bomber. The New York Times reported that Rahman was a "Suspect Tied to an Islamic Fundamentalist Sect." Ramzi Yousef, suspected to be the "mastermind" of the plot, lit for Pakistan... Khashoggi was given a taste of the Marcos gold back in 1963 - when he was running with Edwin Pauley and George DeMorenschieldt - converted into a certificate issued by the Bank of Switzerland to one "Adnan Kasogi." Adnan was a familar face around the Marcos palace. So was Kodama Yoshio, a Khashoggi business partner - also a Japanese Naval rear admiral during WW II, a CIA asset, a thug in the Yakuza crime organization, a future mover in the Unification Church. Yoshio had shipped the so-called "Golden Lilly" Japanese gold war reserve to the Philippines after the war. Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, in Gold Warriors (2002), detail a "great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 ... $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a rear admiral' in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan's wartime drug trade throughout Asia. After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave $100-million to the CIA." Kodama, the all-purpose Yakuza, "personally financed the creation of the two political parties that merged into Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington." As the Seagraves detail it, Kodama "spent two years in Sugamo Prison as an indicted war criminal, but was magically released in mid-1948 when he made a deal with General Willoughby [a viable suspect in the plot to murder John Kennedy] to give the CIA $100-million (equal to $1-billion in today's values.) This payment [was] placed in one of the secret slush funds controlled by the CIA station at the U.S. Embassy. Subsequently, Kodama was put directly on the CIA payroll." Khashoggi's gold certificate was his own pay-off for services rendered. Gary Weadon, in The Nazi Hydra in America, recalls that Khashoggi was an agent of Lockheed with a Yakuza business partner who'd brought a furtune in gold to the Philippines: "This gold certificate was issued just before Lockheed paid the first known bribe to Prince Bernhard. Lockheed was being used by the CIA to funnel money worldwide. Moreover, Lockheed's European Sales Director, Dutchman Fred Meuser, had been a member of Prince Bernhard's wartime air force squadron. An additional member of the Lockheed bribe team was CIA officer Nicholas Deak." Deak had set up a brokering front to launder CIA funds and slip them discreetly to Kodama. Deak merged with Lionel C. Perera, founder of Perera, Manfra & Brookes. "Perera was attached to the Chief of Military Government Finance Office at the Third Army's headquarters in Germany at war's end, where he interviewed Colonel Rauch. Rauch was the SS colonel responsible for hiding the Reich Bank gold reserves." Another Nazi entrusted with the postwar wealth of the SS was Francois Genoud. In 1992, the Observer identified Genoud as "one of the world's leading Nazis." Authorites suggest that he "transferred the defeated Nazis' gold into Swiss bank accounts." Genoud underwrote the postwar Odessa organization.8 On March 12, 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle let on that Swiss police "believe Genoud founded al Taqwa Bank and allocated its resources to support international terrorists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Carlos the Jackal, and bin Laden."9 A few days later, Salon reported that Osama bin Laden had received funding from Al Taqwa, with "shareholders that include prominent Arab figures from numerous countries in the Middle East. Among the shareholders are the grand mufti of the United Arab Emirates and prominent families in the UAE and Kuwait. Two sisters of Osama bin Laden are also on the list, undermining the bin Laden family's claim that it separated itself from his terrorist pursuits after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1994.10 With all this subterfuge in the background, the Khashoggi-Lockheed bribery scandal begs reappraisal. Marcos, Yoshia and Iran-contra's John Singlaub were all charter members of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a para-fascist organization of old guard Nazis, death squad leaders, spooks and propagandists. WACL provides further right-wing context; the CIA and WACL were arguably symbiotic. David Guyatt reports that a letter from Henry Kissinger dated February 21, 1986 was sent to Marcos, ordering the sale of 63,321 tons of gold to 2000 US and European banks. Marcos stubbornly refused and was dethroned.11 _______________ Notes: 1) Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, London: Pluto Press, 2002. 2) Gary Thompson and Steve Kanigher, "Coverup Spans 50 Years," Las Vegas Sun, April 4, 1993. 3) Ibid. 4) "World Trade Center of New York City, Web-Dictionary.org: "One of the world's largest gold depositories was stored underneath the World Trade Center, owned by a group of commercial banks. The 1993 bomb detonated close to the vault, but it withstood the explosion. One source estimates the 1993 value of the gold at one billion dollars, believed to be owned by Kuwaiti interests." The gold was recovered in late 2001. 5) Anon., "The World Trade Center Bombing," Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network, http://www.adl.org/learn/jttf/wtcb_jttf.asp 6) See Santa Fe New Mexican, March 20, 2003. 7) Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors, Bowstring, 2002. Another, immense domestic gold reserve began as cachés of Nazi and Japanese loot, seized by the allies, intended not as compensation to victims and survivors of the war, but as an "action fund" - for bribing foreign officials, influencing elections, and such - known as the Black Eagle Trust. Seagraves: "The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came.... To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank." The "egg" of the Black Eagle Trust was laid at the secret Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when representatives of forty-four nations met to plan the postwar global economy. This has been verified by documents and official sources. One of them is former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline [yet another Iran-contra conspirator], who was aware of Nazi and Japanese gold recoveries in 1945. "As recently as the 1990's," the Seagraves write, "Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.... Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson." General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall'. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of years Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only the gold that had not reached Japan. Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched." And so had the U.S. after the war when the pelf was seized and cabbaged away as a covert foreign policy slush fund. 8) David Lee Preston, "Hitler's Swiss Connection," Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 5, 1997. 9) Jay Bushinsky, "Suspected financial ties to al Qaeda," San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 2002. 10) Lucy Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror? Salon, March 15, 2002. See, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/15/al_taqwa/ 11) For Guyatt's reconstruction, See Gary Weadon excerpt, "Nazi Gold," chapter 10. http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/goldp10.html
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