The Great Ruble Scam

With an understanding of the economic war being waged on the Soviet Union, the focus needs to turn to reports that on September 11, 1991, President George Bush was responsible for issuing $240 billion dollars in secretive bonds as a part of this attack.

There are six lines of evidence from eight sources that suggest this was indeed the case. Many of these instances are corroborated with documents available on the internet, presented by those making the claims.174

1. There has been a body of investigative reporting that suggests that between 1991 and 1992, the ruble was under a massive attack, with an unknown source of funding. The capital flight from the Soviet Union in U.S. dollars was estimated by Fidel Castro at $500 billion, and by Gorbachev at one trillion dollars. Somebody had to put up the lion’s share of funding for those dollars. The most authoritative source on the subject, Claire Sterling, writes that unknown intelligence operations were behind the attack.

“The fact that scarcely anyone outside Russia has heard of the Great Ruble Scam may be explained partly by its seemingly unbelievable details, but partly, too, by Western reluctance to touch exquisitely sensitive political nerves. Western governments rejoicing in the collapse of the evil empire wanted to assume, and to all appearances did assume, that all the evils in an emerging democracy emanated from politicians identified with the fallen communist state. Not one was prepared to acknowledge indelicate evidence to the contrary. The ability of three or four characters to mount such a planet wide operation, their extraordinary impact on what was still a world superpower, and their singular immunity from beginning to end suggest the guiding hand of not just one, but several intelligence agencies.”175

Documentation supporting the contention that there was ‘cash’ in this order of magnitude floating around Russia in 1991 and 1992 is also found in Stephen Handelman’s book Comrade Criminal. Handelman, who appears to have had access to KGB files brought back to the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union, notes that prior to 1991, the Russian Communist Party had a reserve of 435 billion rubles of ‘freely convertible hard currency,” and that in the summer after the coup, there were unnamed individuals in Russia who could provide up to 300 billion rubles on a months notice.176 In the former instance 435 billion rubles in July of 1991 converts into $240 billion. This fund was converted and moved out of the Soviet Union, and the ruble scam would have needed to provide hard dollars in that order of magnitude. A year later, Handelman’s second examples suggests criminal individuals had at their disposal $3 to $4.5 billion on short notice.177 By comparison, at the same time, the U.S. Congress could not pass a $10 billion appropriation bill due to mandatory budget ceiling constraints.

2. Andrei Kozlov, First Deputy Head of Russia’s Central Bank, was heading an investigation into the loss and reported the theft at 400 billion rubles from the Central Bank in 1991. (Not to be confused with a similar scam run out of Chechnya in 1992 on a much smaller order of magnitude.) These rubles were stolen by someone putting hard currency securities in remote Chechen banks as collateral for Russian loans and then making the collateral notes disappear from the remote banks at the same time the funds were being withdrawn.178 While the black-market value of a ruble was about $1, the ‘official’ conversion rate at the time was 1.8 rubles/dollar. Using the official US dollar equivalent for 400 billion rubles, the theft converted to

$222 billion. Kozlov was gunned down shortly after announcing he was close to understanding where the 400 billion rubles went. The head of the Central Bank at that time – former KGB official Georgy Matyuhin – who authorized these credits, on behalf of Yeltsin an at the request of Yeltsin’s First Deputy, Khasbulatov was retired after he was reported to be a CIA asset. 179

3. Mrs. V.K. Durham, wife of Russell Herman, who was a fund controller for the CIA’s covert fund, has contended in sworn testimony that George H.W. Bush, Oliver North and Alan Greenspan forced her husband into relinquishing the funding for the bonds on that date. They later forged Hermann’s signature on related financial transactions.180 She also claims they were responsible for his death three years later because Hermann believed these funds were the property of the U.S. citizens rather than the private slush fund of the Bush circle, and protested the manner in which they were being used. Wanta has since maintained a similar stance, that the earnings from his covert operations should be public funds rather than a covert slush funds used by U.S. presidents. 181

4. Several sources from the Office of Naval Investigation (ONI) have released over 100 pages of bank transactions detailing transactions in the range of 100s of billions of dollars. These are the same files released also by Derek Vreeland from a Canadian prison, from which he warned his guards about the forthcoming attack on the World Trade Center. Vreeland contended he was an ONI operative.182 The files cover three periods of transactions which correspond to this covert war on the Soviet Union; While the transactions do not directly show securities going to the Soviet Union, they do support the theory that the Bush Vulcans were spending massive amounts of cash in a manner inconsistent with US Federal budget spending caps in effect at the time, and moving massive funding into covert accounts at key trust funds – most notably Pilgrim Investments, to the account of “Jorge” Bush. (Jorge is Spanish for George.)

 the first series of transactions in August to October 1989 coincides with the Mexican and Latin American debt resettlement. During this period it has been contended that Bush was responsible for generating 300 hundred billion dollars in illegal earnings by making other countries debt collateral disappear for a few months, while whoever was holding this collateral profited from August 11 to October 6 on what is known as a period of a rare the “inverted yield curve.”

 the second series of transactions from September 24 to October 10, 1990 period would most likely represent funding for the purchase of the Soviet gold treasury, and the movement of Communist Party funds out of the Soviet Union. Leo Wanta reports having started his efforts at this time.

 the third series of transactions from May 27-28th 1991 would most likely represent funding for his Ruble destabilization program

5. Documents released from Leo Wanta’s files for these bonds provide great detail about the Soviet deals:

• These bonds were used to fund an undesignated “joint venture” with Russia 183

Coincidentally, On 14 September 1991, Vladimir Shcherbakov, the last First Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, formed the International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment [FPI] with two other partners. The second partner has never been revealed. The third partner was the now notorious Austrian firm, Nordex GmbH. The International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment [FPI]. would be one of the major organizations involved in the Bank of New York money- laundering scandal and a major crime front. Interpol would be reported as making Marc Rich one of the founders of Nordex. Marc Rich would be pardoned by President William Clinton, presumably for his services to the US in arranging for the collapse of the Soviet Union, although the reasons for his pardon have never been made public.

• These bonds were backed by Swiss gold held in vault in the free trade zone in Kloten, Switzerland 184.

The Kloten repository resides at the Zurich airport, which the Marcos gold hoard as well as the stolen Soviet treasury gold was reported as being stored at.

"… tons of the loot was liberated by Ferdinand Marcos before his ouster. Billions of dollars worth were shipped overseas by American intelligence agents and the Mafia. Much of the horde was cabbaged away in a high-security, subterranean storage cache buried beneath the Zurich airport.185

• The bonds were made conditional to loan acceptance by government officials in the USSR 186

• These bonds provided, in part, of payments of currency from Lehman of at least $100 million per day for an indefinite period of time 187

• These bonds provided, cash funneled to Russia through the Deutschebank 188

6. Depositions on Project Hammer seems inextricably linked to the same banks and funds as the information being documented by Vreeland, ONI and Wanta:

 General Earl Cock’s deathbed deposition in April 2000 describes Citibank’s and John Reed’s central involvement in Project Hammer in the last quarter of 1991 as being funded with $223 billion dollars, of mostly CIA moneys. Cocke also references the use of baby bonds to collaterize these funds, which are 10 year bonds. Cocke describes the source of these funds as “accounts, participants or players” with the accounts converting to bank ownership upon the death of the controlling party, and then to the government. This matches exactly what Sterling and Peggy Seagrave claim happens to the gold accounts opened by agents of the US;189

 Roelfo Van Rooyen’s deposition in 1995 describes Project Hammer as a 1991 CIA operation.190

Information and documents released from 9 independent sources all merge into the same story:

1. Leo Wanta – imprisoned on trumped up tax charges to keep him quiet.

2. U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence – destroyed on September 11 to keep them quiet.

3. Derek Vreeland– imprisoned to keep him quiet, now in hiding.

4. Major Colonel Erle Cocke – deathbed confession of co-conspirator.

5. Andrei Kozlov– Russian Central Bank director, gunned down to keep him quiet.

6. Claire Sterling – international correspondent co-opted and hired by CIA to keep her quiet. Deceased.

7. V.K. Durham – ignored, but not silenced.

8. Sterling and Peggy Seagrave – authors and historians, received multiple death threats to prevent publication. of their book on the Marcos Gold– now in hiding;

9. David Guyatt, independent reporter and published author.