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ILLUMINATI INTRIGUE AND "BLACK" GOLD COLLATERAL
The gold "connection" remains unclear. However, there is reason to
suppose that the dollar "assets" that date back to the 1940s and
1950s, as earlier discussed by General Erle Cocke, may relate in
part to vast quantities of gold looted during World War II by the
Japanese plunder teams (known as the Golden Lily) and also by the
Nazis in Europe.
That substantial amounts of gold bullion were ransacked and then
hidden throughout the Philippines prior to war’s end is now
undeniable. This, however, was "black"
gold - meaning it did not
appear on official statistics or in treasury department lists.
Santa Romana was an OSS officer operating in the Philippines during
the war and learned where the Japanese had buried plundered gold and
other valuables. But there are other aspects to the Santa Romana
gold story that are only now coming to the surface. They reveal a
shocking secret that, if true, could shake the foundations of our
belief and change the way we view the world we live in.
According to Santa Romana’s widow, Luz, her husband told her that he
was a member of
the Illuminati - a very secretive elite group that
dates back to 1776 when it was founded by Adam Weishaupt at the
University of Ingolstadt, Germany. According to those who have
researched it, the purpose of the Illuminati was to set in motion,
in secret, a
New World Order of world revolution.
This, however, does not fully tally with what Santa Romana told his
wife about them. According to Luz, the purpose of the Illuminati was
based on the knowledge that the
royal families of Europe were aware
that they were losing political and effective control of their
nations. But it was the possible loss of control over the wealth of
their kingdoms that bothered them most. Consequently, they founded
the Illuminati and set in motion long-term plans aimed at secretly
taking control of world finances, especially gold and other precious
metals.
In time, the royal families who sat at the centre of the Illuminati movement were forced to expand and take into membership political
and business leaders. At some point in the early 20th century, two
50-year plans were set in motion, aimed at cornering the world’s
precious metal reserves.
The foregoing is the account given to Luz by her husband Santa Romana. How true it is remains to be seen, and it is not hard to
view it as disinformation told by Santa Romana to his wife to
conceal his real motives - whatever they may have been.
More intriguing still is Luz’s account that her late husband was the
one-time "head" of the
Trilateral Commission - an elite group which
is known to have tentacles deeply embedded in the Marcos gold story
of later years. Again, there is no corroborating evidence, and the
fact that the Trilateral Commission was founded only in 1973,
whereas Santa Romana died in 1974, suggests this is unlikely.
However, it is more than a little curious that whilst Santa Romana
eventually (and undoubtedly) came to control the great bulk of gold
that resulted from plunder during WWII, he did have substantial gold
deposits dating back further than that.
Papers relating to the "estate" of Santa Romana purport to show a
gold account at the Union Bank of Switzerland, Zurich, containing
8,000 metric tonnes valued at US$10 billion. The account dates back
to 1920. Such a quantity of gold dating from that period represents
a massive holding, far surpassing that held today by the world’s
leading central banks.
It is also at least interesting - again, according to the account of
his wife - that Santa Romana as a young boy was adopted by his great
uncle in Hawaii who was married to the last Hawaiian princess. The
couple had remained childless throughout their marriage, leading to
the decision to adopt the young Santa Romana. According to Luz, it
was this "royal" connection that gave Santa Romana entrée into
the
Illuminati.
Interestingly, during the course of my ongoing investigation into
Project Hammer, a number of others involved in this program whom I
have spoken with have told me, quite independently of the Santa Romana story, that the
Hammer program - and numerous other
collateral trading programs associated with it - have enormously
powerful "gold trusts" of royal origin sitting behind them.
Perhaps the Hammer program was meant to generate enough money to buy
substantial quantities of black gold stashed in the Philippines to
ensure it be kept out of circulation, thus protecting the gold price
to some degree. Perhaps it had more to do with the secret
acquisition of vast amounts of this black gold in line with what
Santa Romana told his wife. Perhaps the assets in question were not
just gold but included pre-war US Treasury obligations (bonds and
notes) that are now coming to light in the Philippines but which are
said by US authorities to be fraudulent. Whatever is the case, it is
certain that substantial quantities of "black"
gold are used to
underpin (collateralize) certain trading programs, and the funds
thus generated are earmarked for use in other secretive operations.
This whole subject remains an ongoing investigation. The deeper I
dig, the murkier it becomes. Stories are commonplace of warehouses
full of banknotes waiting to be laundered by a trading program so
that they can re-enter the financial system as clean as a whistle.
Foreign exchange transactions involving billions of dollars in
equivalent currency and which trade at huge discounts - unknown in
the official marketplace - are also not uncommon. It is also a fact
that many of those involved in trading programs are members of
government intelligence and security organizations.
SOUTH AFRICAN INTELLIGENCE AND THE STASI
Another individual who has played a considerable role in Project
Hammer is the South African Rolf van Rooyen, who operated a number
of business entities including one called Oceantech and another
called Eastech International Bank. At one time van Rooyen worked for
South African intelligence, and he is also believed to have been
CIA
at the time Project Hammer was in process.
Of significance is the fact that General Cocke and van Rooyen
knew
each other, although Cocke says he only spoke to him on the phone
but never "shook hands with him". When questioned about Project
Hammer during a police interview in Germany in 1995, van Rooyen gave
this response:
"If you are referring to Operation Hamer [sic], it is an extremely
large, very delicate operation in cooperation with the authorities
of various countries in which Oceantech is involved."
Van Rooyen then proceeded to identify "America,
England, Germany,
France, Italy" as being involved. He also told German police that
from the very first day he began investigating Project Hammer:
"We realized that it was a direct state matter and that
the USA, the
CIA and several other groups in the Secret Service were involved, as
well as very, very high-coupled people in the American Government."
The latter are rumored to include:
During his deposition, Erle Cocke was asked if he considered van
Rooyen’s foregoing statement to be accurate. Cocke replied, saying:
"He is not too far off. I am sure he flavored it up a little bit,
yes."
Working alongside van Rooyen was South African intelligence
operative Riaan Stander. Both Stander and van Rooyen were board
members of the Eastcorp Syndicate, which boasted almost two dozen
other companies in its stable.
4 Included were
Intercol Pty Ltd, Cavo
Shipping, which conducted intelligence-gathering missions for
governments, and Bridge SA, which was registered in Monrovia,
Liberia.
According to Peter Goslar, once a close friend of Riaan Stander,
other board members of Bridge SA were Colonel Tim Spicer and
Mick
Ranger "of Sandline fame". In a letter written to a Washington law
firm involved in a Project Hammer lawsuit, Goslar fingers
Bridge SA
- and hence van Rooyen and Riaan Stander - as "part of the
Executive
Outcomes operation".
But there is more. During several daylong meetings I had with Peter Goslar in late June 2000, he handed me hundreds of pages of
documents he had retrieved from Riaan Stander’s private papers.
These included documents showing a Mexican entity called Ro-Mar
Pharmaceuticals, which van Rooyen told German police was the "money
power" behind Eastech International Bank. The money
Ro-Mar
Pharmaceuticals claimed to control was represented by over US$100
billion in gold. Other papers clearly show van Rooyen and Stander
engaged in collateral trading programs involving Latin American
governments, most notably Argentina - once the preferred bolt-hole
of notorious Nazis like Martin Bormann.
Another document from the batch I received from Peter Goslar was a
list of companies grouped under the heading "United Kingdom
Network", and this "network" was identified as being part of
The
Palace Group. An interesting description, I think. In any event,
listed under this "group" were 24 business entities including,
-
Sandline International
-
Diamond Works
-
Branch Mining Ltd
-
Bridge
International
The list also included Defence Systems Ltd as a part
of The Palace Group and identified it as a division of
Vickers -
Britain’s oldest and most distinguished armaments manufacturer,
which resides at the very centre of the United Kingdom’s
Establishment.
During one of our meetings, Peter Goslar told me he was a personal
acquaintance (perhaps even a friend) of former East German
spy-master Marcus Wolf, who headed the East German security
apparatus known as the Stasi. Peter also claimed to know several
former Stasi operatives. He also spoke German fluently in addition
to Afrikaans and his native English tongue.
Later I was told that a Peter Goslar was briefly mentioned in the
autobiography written by Marcus Wolf, entitled
Man Without A Face.
Discussing the fall from grace of West German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt in 1977 following the discovery that his personal secretary,
Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, was a spy working for the Stasi,
Wolf
explains that Chancellor Schmidt’s spy-cum-secretary was caught when
her Stasi control officer Peter Goslar came under suspicion by West
German counterintelligence.
I asked Peter if he was the same Peter Goslar identified by his
"friend" Marcus Wolf and he denied this. Nonetheless, he told me
that Rolf van Rooyen was still living in Germany and was under the
protection of two former Stasi agents. And we do know that the Stasi
worked closely and in the shadows with South African intelligence on
a variety of projects, mostly weapons-related. Curious.
The Palace Group, meanwhile, contains all the guile and charm of a
privatized off-the-books appendage of Britain’s Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS).
On the other side of the Atlantic, General Cocke and his firm
Cocke
& Phillips International have many similarities with its foregoing
British cousin and probably was (and is, as the firm remains active)
one of the CIA’s private off-the-books companies. This conclusion is
not only drawn from Cocke’s affiliation with the known CIA entity
Nugan Hand Bank, but another CIA front company called
Associated
Traders Corporation (ATC).
ATC, as it is known, came into brief prominence some years ago
following a series of articles written by syndicated columnist Jack
Anderson, naming Associated Traders as a gun-running,
money-laundering, "off-the-books" CIA front. Then, in 1988, a US$4
million lawsuit was filed that involved ATC. By 1990, the Director
of the CIA, William Webster, issued an affidavit calling for a
sweeping gag order to be slapped on the lawsuit on the grounds of
national security. Of interest is the fact that more than one source
has told me that Associated Traders Corporation was General Cocke.
The foregoing connections could easily be typified as part of the
Anglo-American-African covert intelligence relationship that
continues to conceal many sins.
There is reason to suppose that part of the funds derived from the
Project Hammer financial trading program went to fund certain
military and intelligence operations in South Africa. These are
thought to have included financing of the so-called "Hammer units"
that are alleged to have engaged in brutal beatings and
assassinations throughout South Africa prior to the collapse of the
apartheid regime. It is also believed that Hammer funds were used to
finance the purchase of arms given to the Inkatha Freedom Party,
which was engaged in widespread acts of bloody violence during 1992
and 1993 - as discussed in the 1994 Report of the Goldstone
Commission of Inquiry that named Eastech, van Rooyen and
Stander.
Another aspect of Project Hammer may have involved the desire to
plunder South Africa of much of its available mineral wealth prior
to the country’s coming under control of the ANC in 1994. In the
hard-hitting and suppressed book
Glitter and Greed, written by
Australian investigative reporter Janine Roberts, the Oppenheimer
family and De Beers arranged that a,
"...fabulous multibillion Rand
stockpile of the finest gems was shipped out prior to the 1994
elections, and that the mines producing the best gems were put into
overdrive in both South Africa and Namibia so that as many as
possible of the better gems were extracted as fast as possible."
5
I
have also been told that large quantities of South African gold were
also surreptitiously shipped out of South Africa at around this time
- presumably for similar reasons.
It is also of interest to note that mounting evidence points to the
conclusion that since 1995 the price of gold has been kept purposely
low as a result of a conspiracy engineered by the US Treasury
Department in collaboration with leading international banks. The
result has been that the cost of extracting gold for many South
African gold mines is no longer cost-effective.
Could some of this alleged "missing" South African gold be related
to a transaction that van Rooyen and Stander entered into in 1991?
This involved Eastech International Bank’s agreeing to purchase
5,000 metric tonnes of gold at a 4% discount from the prevailing
Second London Fix - at a cost of about US$50 billion. This gold was
held in the free zone area beneath Zurich’s Kloten Airport. The
contract, which was to be governed by the "canton laws of Zurich",
runs to six pages and each page bears the official stamp of the
Swiss police, authorizing and validating the transaction.
It remains unclear if van Rooyen and Stander were acting on their
own behalf or were fronting for someone else in this transaction.
Van Rooyen, at least, has been fingered as a CIA asset in addition
to his having South African intelligence affiliations. Might they
have been operating as a "deniable cut-out" for the US Treasury
Department who wished to get delivery of this gold?
Perhaps the Chinese Government was party to the transaction instead.
Eastech International Bank was, after all, a wholly owned subsidiary
of Sino-Eastech, an entity which van Rooyen told German police
investigators was "established in China" and which "operates from
Xin Xong and was originally established by the General Staff of the
7th military power in China". In operating their bank,
van Rooyen
and Stander liaised with a Chinese Army General whom van Rooyen
declined to name, saying he wasn’t "sure what his name is". His
German police interrogator, displaying a well-honed sense of
official disinterest in such diplomatic incongruities, rapidly moved
on to other issues.
By 1995, Eastech International Bank had begun to hit the radar
screen of regulatory authorities around the world, which viewed it
with suspicion. But by then it seems probable that much of Project
Hammer’s South African objectives had been fulfilled. Fearing the
worse, Rolf van Rooyen left South Africa and traveled to Germany.
And according to his one-time friend Peter Goslar, that is where he
still lives - albeit protected by former members of East Germany’s
Stasi spy network.
It remains to be seen whether the sanctions-busting objective of the
South African end of
Project Hammer was a simple case of certain
elites making sure they got all the mineral wealth they needed from
South Africa before turning the country over to the ANC and
Nelson
Mandela in 1994. What is known is that, beginning in 1995, the price
of gold entered a new round of price manipulation which continues to
this day.
Over the last two years, the Gold Anti-Trust Action (GATA) group has
demonstrated that the manipulation of the gold price has been
orchestrated by the US Federal Reserve working in collusion with
leading Wall Street and international banks. Many of those banks
quoted by GATA as being party to the price manipulation conspiracy -
for that is what it amounts to - are also major players in trading
programs.
In any event, the depressed price of gold has made many South
African mines uneconomic to operate, and one cannot help but ask if
this was by design. Southern hemisphere nations may sit on much of
the mineral wealth of the planet, but the northern hemisphere
industrialized nations appear intent on continuing to control and
exploit it.
MORE "BLACK" GOLD
Project Hammer and the Jacobe program have the appearance of being
"umbrella" operations geared, in the narrow sense at least, to
generating funds for particular authorized projects. Once the proper
authorization has been issued, programs such as these seem to
broaden in scope and greater effort goes towards creating deniable
slush funds for use in any number of ways as the occasion demands.
When you think about it, this makes considerable sense for those who
engage in the game of
black operations and political manipulation.
In addition to its authorization to repatriate dollars dating back
to the 1940s and 1950s, as explained by General Cocke, could
Project
Hammer have had other purposes? For example, could it have been used
to finance another project - one that had specific East German
connotations and which might explain the Stasi connection more
fully?
It is certainly interesting that on 6 February 1989, the French
Central Bank, the Banque de France, issued an International
Certificate of Deposit for 620,000 kilograms of 99.99% pure gold. At
that time, 620 metric tonnes of gold had a market value of about
US$7 billion. A king’s ransom.
The certificate is almost identical to dozens I have on file and
which I have written about and also reproduced in my book,
The Secret Gold Treaty. As I explain there, certificates of this nature
invariably contain spelling mistakes or other obvious typographical
flaws which can be used to deny the validity of the certificate in
the event it ever reaches public attention.
This was a technique developed by Britain’s secretive Special
Operations Executive (SOE) in WWII. SOE agents, parachuted into
France and elsewhere in occupied Europe, were taught to insert
pre-arranged spelling errors into messages they sent by radio in the
event they were captured by the Nazis. This would immediately alert
SOE that the agent was in custody and that German
counterintelligence wished to use the agent to feed false
information back to HQ.
In any event, the Banque de France certificate mentioned above was
in the name of Erich Honecker, the then East German head of state
(see exhibit below).
Six months later, in a trumpet of media coverage, Honecker was ousted from power. A month after that, the Berlin Wall
- the very symbol of Communism throughout the world - was opened.
The opening was abruptly followed by its complete demolition at the
hands of a euphoric public. Germany, which had been divided for over
30 years, was at last reunified.
By many accounts, Project Hammer began trading in November
1989 but
was set up a lot earlier than that. Few of those involved in the
transaction on the periphery know for certain what assets were used
to collateralize it, although black gold has been mentioned in
numerous telephone conversations and correspondence. But all parties
are certain that an element of the backing collateral was cash.
What we do know is that Citibank had accounts in the name of
José
Diaz and Severino Santa Romana. These were bullion accounts dating
back to the years that Santa Romana, General Edward Lansdale and
others were engaged in recovering gold stashed in the Philippines by
the Japanese plunder teams, the Golden Lily.
At some point in history, some of Santa Romana’s gold
was converted
to cash. This, along with gold and other plunder, was deposited in
well over a hundred bank accounts located in over 40 countries
throughout the world. These were the deniable assets that made up a
particular CIA slush fund, known to insiders in the black gold
market as the Black Eagle Fund - a name that was based on the symbol
of the Nazi eagle. Some of these assets were placed under the
control of the late
Baron von Krupp, whose personal attorney,
Carl
Hermann Letemeyer, of the private Zurich-based law firm of Senn,
Christians & Letemeyer, handled the Baron’s estate following his
death.
Documents I published in
The Secret Gold Treaty
reveal that out of a
fortune of just over US$12 trillion which the late Baron controlled,
slightly over $110 billion was earmarked for one Clemente Santiago,
a relative of Candelaria Santiago who was the "most trusted lady" of
the late President Marcos of the Philippines.
Baron Krupp’s incredible fortune was undoubtedly largely composed of Santa Romana’s plunder, later acquired by deception by
President
Marcos, who had earlier been Santa Romana’s lawyer in the
Philippines prior to his rise to political office. In reality,
stories about "Marcos gold" speak of Santa Romana’s gold and the
OSS/CIA’s gold - although Marcos did recover vast quantities for
himself via a Philippine Army battalion dedicated to locating and
recovering WWII plunder.
A memorandum under the letterhead of Senn, Christians & Letemeyer,
and signed by Carl Herman Letemeyer (see exhibit below), lists four bank
accounts which collectively have a balance of US$71 billion.
The
bulk of this is listed as being held in account number 4 77 22 P at Standard Chartered International Trustee Limited, London; US$9
billion is shown under account number LVI 820975 TI at Citicorp,
New
York; US$12 billion is listed under the Bank of China,
Hong Kong,
account number 5555 201HE; and US$3 billion in the Bank of East
Asia, Hong Kong, account number 78 9520 37 0. The memorandum is
dated October 3, 1989 - right in line with the Hammer and Jacobe
trading programs.
This is more than interesting. Other information provided to me
shows that Standard & Chartered Bank was deeply involved in the
Jacobe program. According to a detailed memorandum in my possession,
the trustee of the Jacobe program had "arranged that the monies be funnelled through a Trust account" of this bank.
Citibank, according to General Cocke and many others who were
involved, was "the cheese" behind the Project Hammer trading
program.
And then there is the Chinese connection to van Rooyen’s Eastech
International Bank and van Rooyen’s and Stander’s involvement with
both Hammer and Jacobe.
SECRET FUNDING FOR DENIABLE GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS
The foregoing has merely scraped the surface of what is an
exceptionally complex and extensive story. A great deal of further
investigative work is required to plumb the depths in order to
present a more comprehensive account. Presently there are more
questions than answers.
Hammer and Jacobe, meanwhile, are only two of many other trading
programs currently under investigation by this writer. Others with
names like "Redhead", "Grandmother" and "Graystone" also need
investigating.
These programs eclipse more secrets than you can wag a dog’s tail
at. They represent the very pinnacle of covert funding for deniable
government operations. Slush funds that have been generated by this
process are regularly said to be in the many trillions of dollars.
This is confirmed in the deposition of General Cocke, who argues
that the Hammer program "expanded" by Dan Hughes in 1989 would have
become "enhanced" over the decade and now be worth over one thousand
billion dollars. It is also confirmed by the documents issued by the
late
Baron von Krupp’s Swiss lawyer, which reveal "profits" in
excess of US$12 trillion.
Amounts of this magnitude could punch a massive hole through the
shortfalls in social welfare programs around the world. Famine could
be eradicated from the face of the Earth, and death from easily
curable diseases (in the southern hemisphere in particular), which
spiral for lack of money, could easily become a thing of the past.
All this could be achieved if these huge gobs of money were brought
in from the cold and placed "on ledger".
But there appears to be no will to do this. Too many difficult
questions and harder-to-justify explanations block the way. How
would G7 governments explain to a cynical public that decades of
drug money and illegal weapons sales proceeds had been laundered
with their blessing (albeit in secret) in order to win the Cold War
and also to artificially prop up a political system that we call
Capitalism, which would otherwise collapse under its own inherent
flaws?
It took the CIA over six months to respond to a Freedom of
Information Act request seeking information on Project Hammer and
the Jacobe program. The request was denied under exemptions (b)(1)
and (b)(3) of the FOI Act. Section (b)(1) of the Act applies to
material that is "properly classified pursuant to an Executive Order
in the interest of national defense or foreign policy", and
exemption (b)(3) applies to the CIA Director’s statutory obligation
to "protect from disclosure intelligence sources and methods, as
well as organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries or
numbers of personnel employed by the Agency". Appeals are in
progress.
For those readers who would like to view some documents relating to
Project Hammer, Jacobe and the officially "nonexistent" gold
deposits of Severino Garcia Santa Romana, I have scanned in a
half-dozen or so pages that are freely available on my
website. I have also made available, at a small
cost, a full copy of General Erle Cocke’s 67-page deposition,
together with a copy of the deposition given to German police by Rolf van Rooyen, plus a few other relevant documents which I have
named the "The Project Hammer File".
Meanwhile, my investigation into Project Hammer and similar projects
involving covert finance operations continues apace.
Endnotes:
4. Among the many activities that
Stander and van Rooyen were
engaged in - including gold dealing, setting up banks in Switzerland
and Latin America, trading prime bank debentures plus numerous other
"business" opportunities - they were also putting together a deal to
sell a consignment of Glock pistols.
5. Janine Roberts’s incredible and compelling book,
Glitter and
Greed: The Diamond Investigation
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