As I began to trace the secret bullion transactions, the real story of Yamashita’s Gold unfolded in a totally unexpected manner. The facts and personalities were radically different from the legend and far more sinister, if that is an adequate word. Backtracking the trail of Ferdinand’s involvement with the buried treasure, I was led eventually to a group of American generals, admirals, and former CIA officials operating as a shadow force of Paladins in world affairs — some of the same superpatriots identified with the Iran-Contra arms scandal, the Nugan-Hand Bank scandal, and other CIA misadventures. This tracing of Yamashita’s Gold also led to a cabal of powerbrokers in Tokyo known as the kuromaku, the men behind the black curtain, whose wealth and leverage mysteriously survived Japan’s defeat in World War II, emerging even stronger than before. These men — the Japanese kuromaku, the CIA Paladins, and Ferdinand Marcos — were all interlocked.
What puzzled me most about the Marcos story was the way Ferdinand was consistently portrayed as just another Third World politician, cleverer than most, who clawed his way up and then went bad — as if he suddenly appeared in the world at age forty-three. Everything before that was uncertain. Nobody knew much about Ferdinand Marcos — about his real origins, where his money came from, who his backers were, how he came to have an iron grip on America’s only colony, and what made him so attractive to the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA.
Over the years, Marcos avoided such questions and provided a self-flattering version of his life to biographers. They portrayed him as the superbright child of a poor but honest family in the north, a brilliant young lawyer who became the greatest Filipino resistance leader of World War II and the most decorated soldier in the U.S. armed forces, next to Audie Murphy. Unless you read several of these books about Marcos closely and noticed the discrepancies, there was no way to tell that his life was an ingenious work of fiction. To be sure, his campaign biographies were written by respectable journalists, including the Filipino editor and publisher Benjamin Gray, and the bestselling American author Hartzell Spence, who for many years had been the editor of the armed forces journal StarsandStripesand was widely admired in the Pentagon.
It was Spence more than anyone else, with his military background, who gave the heroic Marcos legend a ring of validity when his biography ForEveryTearaVictorywas published in New York during the Philippine presidential campaign of 1964-65, which first carried Ferdinand and Imelda into Malacanang Palace. The Spence book was widely distributed to American newspapers and magazines, to embassies, and to U.S. government agencies. It was not clearly recognized that Marcos had tailored some information for the occasion. While some readers may have been suspicious, the mood in New York and Washington at the time was preconditioned to support Marcos, as the latest proxy brought forward in years of CIA manipulation in Manila, and as part of LBJ’s desperate maneuvers to save face in Vietnam. Soon the most respected journals in America were repeating the gospel according to Spence, quoting long passages or summarizing his assertions as if they were palpable facts. After that, who was to challenge the authenticity of the Marcos legend?
Ferdinand learned a lot about presidential politics from Lyndon Johnson’s example, as he had learned much from Douglas MacArthur about enhancing a military career. While MacArthur kept a public relations team busy full time identifying him as the hero of Bataan (to the private disgust of Dwight Eisenhower), President Johnson invented a grandfather who died heroically at the Alamo. Johnson then had no difficulty enlarging a minor incident in the Gulf of Tonkin into an excuse to escalate the Vietnam War. The same President Johnson had no problem praising President Marcos for faked heroics in Bataan, and did not hesitate to offer Marcos an open purse to back his Vietnam policy.
Many years later, several journalists finally gained access to long-hidden documents in the National Archives that exposed the fakery of the Marcos war record. They discovered that his claims had been investigated by the U.S. Army after World War II and were found to be false and “criminal.” But these U.S. Army findings were tucked away for thirty-five years by the Pentagon, which resisted every effort to examine them, quite possibly with the approval of the White House or even at its instigation.