Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 952
EAN num: 9781844675319
ISBN number: 1844675319
Label: Verso
Manufacturer: Verso
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: December 26, 2005
Publishing house: Verso
Sale Popularity Level: 545924
Studio: Verso
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In 1945, US intelligence officers in manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold but to keep its riches secret. These would be combined with treasure recovered inside Japan during the US occupation, and with Nazi loot recovered in Europe, to create a worldwide American political action fund to fight communism.
Overseen by General MacArthur, President Truman and John Foster Dulles, this 'Black Gold' gave Washington virtually limitless, unaccountable funds, providing an asset base to reinforce the treasuries of America's allies, to bribe political and military leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries for more than fifty years. Drawing on a vast range of original documents and thousands of hours of interviews, Gold Warriors exposes one of the great state secrets of the twentieth century.
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Rated by buyers 
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Many of the earlier reviewers of "Gold Warriors" have admired the voluminous references presented by the Seagraves to support their incredible assertions. However, I'd like to point out that my personal investigations into a sample of their sources have exposed the Seagraves' quite cynical "research" methods. They are prepared to use sources that are laughably insubstantial, and then present these sources as if they are highly credible. The Seagraves also deliberately misrepresent the words of a source to make it fit the story that they wish to convey.
The whole of page 62 of "Gold Warriors" is given over to the Seagraves' theorising that nearly 400 Allied Prisoners of War were massacred after stowing gold bullion in a mine on Sado Island, Japan. This is outrageous. The source that they use, "Betrayal in High Places", is a book that looks extremely unreliable when very first picked up, and its claims fail to be confirmed by any other historical source. In any case, "Betrayal in High Places" does not actually claim that any stolen gold was stored by the POWs!
I am one of the authors of a recent historical paper, published in the Journal of Military History, which has proven the Sado Island Massacre story to be pure fiction. The Seagraves are smart enough to have worked this out for themselves, but they have chosen to legitimise this fantasy in order to sell their books and CDs.
The Seagraves further illustrate their manipulative ways when they cite an innocent travel book as the source of their further assertion,
"more than a thousand Korean slave laborers ... on Sado Island also vanished without a trace" (bottom of p62).
This is just another dishonest misquote. The travel book (Waycott: "Sado: Japan's Island of Exile") actually says,
"...During these years, forced labor was certainly used: of the tens of thousands of Koreans imported to work for Imperial Japan, more than 1,000 are known to have been sent to Sado. Of these, 145 are said to have 'escaped' (but where to?) and a dozen or so - surely a low estimate - were killed. Their existence became public knowledge in 1991, after records were released of Mitsubishi's distribution of cigarette rations to its workers."
Westcott's travel book is actually quite pleasant and informative, and there is nothing dishonest about his speculation - but it's only a travel book! Historically, it's clear from post-war Korean records that many "escapes" were indeed successful (often into the local community, or by fishing boat back to nearby Korea). It's also true that a relatively small number of Koreans were killed in mining accidents, and that no "massacre" occurred. Waycott doesn't allege a massacre in any case - but the Seagraves do!
(Page 62 of "Gold Warriors" can be previewed online here on Amazon, for those who would care to check for themselves...)
The Seagraves are obviously misusing these sources quite deliberately. I think it's very reprehensible for modern authors to push this type of mean deception masquerading as history. This is not a victimless crime. (My mum's brother died as a prisoner of the Japanese in WW2, and it is upsetting to see authors such as the Seagraves take these liberties with the emotions of dead POWs' families.)
Not content with pocketing their customers' money for this book, the Seagraves also use their book to continually push their privately-sold CDs, which they claim contain the "evidence" to back up their assertions. In fact, most of the documents on the CDs are just correspondence between "treasure hunters" - who also make their money by selling their Treasure Maps to the gullible... These are hardly independent or authoritative people! Many of the "certificates", which have been laboriously translated (possibly to tire out the reader) can easily be seen to be fakes once you look at images of the "originals". They have cut-and-pasted values for the gold on deposit!
The CDs even torpedo the Seagraves' own assertions in some places. On CD#1 (Jones.PDF file, page 65), a 1997 letter from "R. A. Medland, Senior Manager, Commonwealth Bank Group Investigations/Security Dept." [Melbourne, Australia] says that the gold deposit certificates are, "utter rubbish"! There's also a scary-looking photo of a sleazy Indonesian "lawyer" displaying the "certificates", and a hilarious document very reminiscent of a "Nigerian Letter", purportedly from President Suharto of Indonesia, on the same CD.
Gee, it's a pity these Certificates are rubbish - they were for 420 tonnes and 120 tonnes of Gold !
(US total annual production in 1940 was 155 tonnes, just to show how incredibly unrealistic these numbers are.)
Rated by buyers -
This another of Seagrave's entertaining reads, awesome in conjuring up images of lust for power, greed, evil, diabolical cabals, and corrupt government. Their were some errors I believe in detailing the size of the various hoards of gold, diamonds, silver etc. and the names are sometimes a little off but otherwise this was a wonderful book for a long weekend. Some of the other readers were more critical but I know from personal experience that there is a lot here that is right on the money and should not be dismissed so lightly.
Rated by buyers 
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Gold Warriors is the book to add to your "deep cover" collection that shows one exactly where the US government has gotten its financial resources to engage in CIA activities without its impacting the economies of the American people.
Rated by buyers 
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In 'Gold Warriors' by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave claim that materials seized by the Japanese military from across Asia between 1895 and 1945 have been used to finance a range of ethically and morally questionable political activities with the United States government acting as the leader of this cabal.
These valuables range from cultural items through intellectual property, industrial materials and equipment and precious and semi-precious gemstones to massive quantities of gold and other metals. The Seagraves claim that much of the materials seized between 1942 and 1945 were secreted at 175 sites in the Philippines; this country being used as the transit station.
The authors go on to state that much of this treasure trove has been recovered by a loosely linked collection of groups including the US, Japanese and Phillipino governments, various crime cartels and treasure hunters. In the case of the US governemnt, this wealth was used to finance anti-communist and/or right-wing agenda groups.
When I considered how to rate this book, I was conflicted. As fiction, it is clearly worth a five star rating. As non-fiction, that is to say the truth, I have to give it two stars...and that's generous.
The problem is lack of documentation for many of the claims. Now, before the Seagraves or you say, "Check the CDs!" (the authors tell you repeatedly of the wealth of information that is on three CDs you can get from them...sort of like the hunt for the gold and other valuables in this story: "The wealth is there, surely you must beleive me!") I have to say, "I purchased this book on the assumption the story would be told with backing documentation attached."
Documentation is few and far between this work. Some other critques have cited mis-spellings of place names and technical inaccuracies related to volumes of gold in the world. To them, I want to add: Battery Crockett on Corregidor - cited as a location where looted gold was hidden in the remains of a power room hit by a Japanese shell - was neither a mortar battery, nor was it damaged by a major explosion caused by the Japanese bombardment. The explosion happened at Battery Geary.
In addition, the site of Post Theater - where a small quantity of gold was hidden in a bomb crater that a treasure hunter was able to locate because he was able to find two aerial photos of the site that were taken minutes apart with one showing the crater and the second showing the crater having been filled - is also mis-identified as to location on Corregidor. For those who care, the Post Theater was on Middleside, close to the major set of enlisted barracks, not on Topside near MacArthur's so-called headquarters and the 'Mile-long Barracks'. In fact, while the Post Headquarters was at Topside, MacArthur's HQ was in Manila until he evacuated the city. Then it was in Malinta Tunnel, well below the surface of the island. In fact, it was his using the tunnel that resulted the troops calling him, 'Dugout Doug'.)
All this simply builds the case for not just shoddy research but a questionable truth about what is being said as a whole.
As I have not seen the CDs (BTW, I don't intend to pursue getting them) I don't know if they contain information that may provide proof for many of the statements contained in this book. You see, if they don't, we are compelled to believe second and third hand accounts of what deceased and/or unidentified individuals have claimed.
Or at least it is a statement that the authors claim was made. My concern is that validity is not automatically granted by placing a statement in quotations; an activity that occurs frequently in this book.
It is in that aspect that this book falls into what I call "heresay history," a circumatnce where the opinions of an author or authors are presented as documented evidence.
In fact, as I think about this story - which I'm sure contains any number of truths like Japanese looting and hiidng of valuables and killing of POWs - my overall impression is 'Gold Warriors' great similarity with other questionably documented stories such as Roswell, The Philadelphia Experiment, The Montauk Project or Project Phoenix, the Kennedy Assasination Conspiracies, etc. etc. etc.
But, it is a heck of an entertaining read on a long airplane flight.
Rated by buyers -
While this book may be based, in part, on some reality, their claims of the total amount of gold involved are beyond ridiculous, and completely unsupported, and thus, the book is more likely to be purposful disinformation, or lies put out by the establishment, on purpose, to try and discredit gold as an investment. The reality is that paper money is the real fraud, based on many frauds such as fractional reserve banking. The real truth is that central banks have been secretly selling gold for years to suppress gold prices to prop up their paper currencies. The real stats are that the world has mined about 150,000 tonnes of gold in all of human history, and the world mines about 2500 tonnes per year, and that demand stands at about 5000 tonnes per year. Central banks have now sold about half of their 30,000 tonnes, and without prior selling of 1500 tonnes of gold per year, the gold price would have been, and will be, much higher.
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