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The Secret Financial Network Behind "Wizard" George Soros
by William Engdahl
EIR Investigation Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), November
1, 1996
The dossier that follows is based upon a report released on Oct.
1 by EIR's bureau in Wiesbaden, Germany, titled "A Profile of Mega-Speculator
George Soros." Research was contributed by Mark Burdman, Elisabeth
Hellenbroich, Paolo Raimondi, and Scott Thompson.
............................................................................
Time magazine has characterized financier George Soros as a "modern-day
Robin Hood," who robs from the rich to give to the poor countries
of eastern Europe and Russia. It claimed that Soros makes huge financial
gains by speculating against western central banks, in order to
use his profits to help the emerging post-communist economies of
eastern Europe and former Soviet Union, to assist them to create
what he calls an "Open Society." The Time statement is entirely
accurate in the first part, and entirely inaccurate in the second.
He robs from rich western countries, and uses his profits to rob
even more savagely from the East, under the cloak of "philanthropy."
His goal is to loot wherever and however he can. Soros has been
called the master manipulator of "hit-and-run capitalism."
As we shall see, what Soros means by "open," is a society that
allows him and his financial predator friends to loot the resources
and precious assets of former Warsaw Pact economies. By bringing
people like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden's Anders Aslund and their economic
shock therapy into these economies, Soros lays the groundwork for
buying up the assets of whole regions of the world at dirt-cheap
prices.
The man who broke the Bank of England?
An examination of Soros's secretive financial network is vital
to understand the true dimension of the "Soros problem" in eastern
Europe and other nations.
Following the crisis of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism of
September 1992, when the Bank of England was forced to abandon efforts
to stabilize the pound sterling, a little-known financial figure
emerged from the shadows, to boast that he had personally made over
$1 billion in speculation against the British pound. The speculator
was the Hungarian-born George Soros, who spent the war in Hungary
under false papers working for the Nazi government, identifying
and expropriating the property of wealthy fellow Jews. Soros left
Hungary after the war, and established American citizenship after
some years in London. Today, Soros is based in New York, but that
tells little, if anything, of who and what he is.
Following his impressive claims to possession of a "Midas touch,"
Soros has let his name be publicly used in a blatant attempt to
influence world financial markets---an out-of-character act for
most financial investors, who prefer to take advantage of situations
not yet discovered by rivals, and keep them secret. Soros the financier
is as much a political animal, as a financial speculator.
Soros proclaimed in March 1993, with great publicity, that the
price of gold was about to rise sharply; he said that he had just
gotten "inside information" that China was about to buy huge sums
of gold for its booming economy. Soros was able to trigger a rush
into buying gold, which caused prices to rise more than 20% over
four months, to the highest level since 1991. Typically for Soros,
once the fools rushed in to push prices higher, Soros and his friend
Sir James Goldsmith secretly began selling their gold at a huge
profit.
Then, in early June 1993, Soros proclaimed his intent to force
a sell-off in German government bonds in favor of the French, in
an open letter to London Times Financial Editor Anatole Kaletsky,
in which Soros proclaimed, "Down with the D-Mark!" Soros has at
various times attacked the currencies of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia,
and Mexico, coming into newly opened financial markets which have
little experience with foreign investors, let alone ones with large
funds like Soros. Soros begins buying stocks or bonds in the local
market, leading others to naively suppose that he knows something
they do not. As with gold, when the smaller investors begin to follow
Soros, driving prices of stocks or whatever higher, Soros begins
to sell to the eager new buyers, cashing in his 40% or 100% profits,
then exiting the market, and often, the entire country, to seek
another target for his speculation. This technique gave rise to
the term "hit and run." What Soros always leaves behind, is a collapsed
local market and financial ruin of national investors.
The secret of the Quantum Fund NV
Soros is the visible side of a vast and nasty secret network of
private financial interests, controlled by the leading aristocratic
and royal families of Europe, centered in the British House of Windsor.
This network, called by its members the Club of Isles, was built
upon the wreckage of the British Empire after World War II.
Rather than use the powers of the state to achieve their geopolitical
goals, a secret cross-linked holding of private financial interests,
tied to the old aristocratic oligarchy of western Europe, was developed.
It was in many ways modeled on the 17th-century British and Dutch
East India Companies. The heart of this Club of the Isles is the
financial center of the old British Empire, the City of London.
Soros is one of what in medieval days were called Hofjuden, the
"Court Jews," who were deployed by the aristocratic families.
The most important of such "Jews who are not Jews," are the Rothschilds,
who launched Soros's career. They are members of the Club of the
Isles and retainers of the British royal family. This has been true
since Amschel Rothschild sold the British Hessian troops to fight
against George Washington during the American Revolution.
Soros is American only in his passport. He is a global financial
operator, who happens to be in New York, simply because "that's
where the money is," as the bank robber Willy Sutton once quipped,
when asked why he always robbed banks. Soros speculates in world
financial markets through his offshore company, Quantum Fund NV,
a private investment fund, or "hedge fund." His hedge fund reportedly
manages some $11-14 billion of funds on behalf of its clients, or
investors---one of the most prominent of whom is, according to Soros,
Britain's Queen Elizabeth, the wealthiest person in Europe.
The Quantum Fund is registered in the tax haven of the Netherlands
Antilles, in the Caribbean. This is to avoid paying taxes, as well
as to hide the true nature of his investors and what he does with
their money.
In order to avoid U.S. government supervision of his financial
activities, something normal U.S.-based investment funds must by
law agree to in order to operate, Soros moved his legal headquarters
to the Caribbean tax haven of Curacao. The Netherlands Antilles
has repeatedly been cited by the Task Force on Money Laundering
of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
as one of the world's most important centers for laundering illegal
proceeds of the Latin American cocaine and other drug traffic. It
is a possession of the Netherlands.
Soros has taken care that the none of the 99 individual investors
who participate in his various funds is an American national. By
U.S. securities law, a hedge fund is limited to no more than 99
highly wealthy individuals, so-called "sophisticated investors."
By structuring his investment company as an offshore hedge fund,
Soros avoids public scrutiny.
Soros himself is not even on the board of Quantum Fund. Instead,
for legal reasons, he serves the Quantum Fund as official "investment
adviser," through another company, Soros Fund Management, of New
York City. If any demand were to be made of Soros to reveal the
details of Quantum Fund's operations, he is able to claim he is
"merely its investment adviser." Any competent police investigator
looking at the complex legal structure of Soros's businesses would
conclude that there is prima facie evidence of either vast money
laundering of illicit funds, or massive illegal tax evasion. Both
may be true.
To make it impossible for U.S. tax authorities or other officials
to look into the financial dealings of his web of businesses, the
board of directors of Quantum Fund NV also includes no American
citizens. His directors are Swiss, Italian, and British financiers.
George Soros is part of a tightly knit financial mafia---"mafia,"
in the sense of a closed masonic-like fraternity of families pursuing
common aims. Anyone who dares to criticize Soros or any of his associates,
is immediately hit with the charge of being "anti-Semitic"----a
criticism which often silences or intimidates genuine critics of
Soros's unscrupulous operations. The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
B'rith considers it a top priority to "protect" Soros from the charges
of "anti-Semites" in Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe, according
to ADL National Director Abraham Foxman. The ADL's record of service
to the British oligarchy has been amply documented by EIR (e.g.
The Ugly Truth About the Anti-Defamation League [Washington, D.C.,
Executive Intelligence Review: 1992]).
According to knowledgeable U.S. and European investigators, Soros's
circle includes indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive
Marc Rich of Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv; secretive Israeli arms
and commodity dealer Shaul Eisenberg, and "Dirty Rafi" Eytan, both
linked to the financial side of the Israeli Mossad; and, the family
of Jacob Lord Rothschild.
Understandably, Soros and the Rothschild interests prefer to keep
their connection hidden far from public view, so as to obscure the
well-connected friends Soros enjoys in the City of London, the British
Foreign Office, Israel, and the U.S. financial establishment. The
myth, therefore, has been created, that Soros is a lone financial
investment "genius" who, through his sheer personal brilliance in
detecting shifts in markets, has become one of the world's most
successful speculators. According to those who have done business
with him, Soros never makes a major investment move without sensitive
insider information.
On the board of directors of Soros's Quantum Fund N.V. is Richard
Katz, a Rothschild man who is also on the board of the London N.M.
Rothschild and Sons merchant bank, and the head of Rothschild Italia
S.p.A. of Milan. Another Rothschild family link to Soros's Quantum
Fund is Quantum board member Nils O. Taube, the partner of the London
investment group St. James Place Capital, whose major partner is
Lord Rothschild. London Times columnist Lord William Rees-Mogg is
also on the board of Rothschild's St. James Place Capital.
A frequent business partner of Soros in various speculative deals,
including in the 1993 gold manipulation, although not on the Quantum
Fund directly, is the Anglo-French speculator Sir James Goldsmith,
a cousin of the Rothschild family.
>From the very first days when Soros created his own investment
fund in 1969, he owed his success to his relation to the Rothschild
family banking network. Soros worked in New York in the 1960s for
a small private bank close to the Rothschilds, Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder,
Inc., a banking family which represented Rothschild interests in
Germany during Bismarck's time. To this day, A. & S. Bleichroeder,
Inc. remains the Principal Custodian, along with Citibank, of funds
of Soros's Quantum Fund. George C. Karlweiss, of Edmond de Rothschild's
Switzerland-based Banque Privee SA in Lugano, as well as of the
scandal-tainted Rothschild Bank AG of Zurich, gave Soros financial
backing. Karlweiss provided some of the vital initial capital and
investors for Soros's Quantum Fund.
Union Banque Privee and the 'Swiss connection'
Another member of the board of Soros's Quantum Fund is the head
of one of the most controversial Swiss private banks, Edgar de Picciotto,
who has been called "one of the cleverest bankers in Geneva"---and
is one of the most scandal-tainted. De Picciotto, from an old Portuguese
Jewish trading family, who was born in Lebanon, is head of the Geneva
private bank CBI-TDB Union Bancaire Privee, a major player in the
gold and offshore hedge funds business. Hedge funds have been identified
by international police agencies as the fastest-growing outlet for
illegal money laundering today.
De Picciotto is a longtime friend and business associate of banker
Edmond Safra, also born in Lebanon, whose family came from Aleppo,
Syria, and who now controls the Republic Bank of New York. Republic
Bank has been identified in U.S. investigations into Russian organized
crime, as the bank involved in transferring billions of U.S. Federal
Reserve notes from New York to organized crime-controlled Moscow
banks, on behalf of Russian organized crime figures. Safra is under
investigation by U.S. and Swiss authorities for laundering Turkish
and Columbian drug money. In 1990, Safra's Trade Development Bank
(TDB) of Geneva was merged with de Picciotto's CBI to create the
CBI-TDB Union Banque Privee. The details of the merger are shrouded
in secrecy to this day. As part of the deal, de Picciotto became
a board member of American Express Bank (Switzerland) SA of Geneva,
and two American Express Bank of New York executives sit on the
board of de Picciotto's Union Banque Privee. Safra had sold his
Trade Development Bank to American Express, Inc. in the 1980s. Henry
Kissinger sits on the board of American Express, Inc., which has
repeatedly been implicated in international money-laundering scandals.
De Picciotto's start as a Geneva banker came from Nicholas Baring
of the London Barings Bank, who tapped de Picciotto to run the bank's
secret Swiss bank business. Barings has for centuries been private
banker to the British royal family, and since the bank's collapse
in March 1995, has been overhauled by the Dutch ING Bank, which
is reported to be a major money-laundering institution.
De Picciotto is also a longtime business partner of Venetian businessman
Carlo De Benedetti, who recently was forced to resign as head of
Olivetti Corp. Both persons sit on the board of the Societe Financiere
de Geneve investment holding company in Geneva. De Benedetti is
under investigation in Italy for suspicion of triggering the collapse
of Italy's Banco Ambrosiano in the early 1980s.The head of that
bank, Roberto Calvi, was later found hanging from the London Blackfriar's
Bridge, in what police believe was a masonic ritual murder.
De Picciotto and his Union Banque Privee have been implicated
in numerous drug and illegal money-laundering operations. In November
1994, U.S. federal agents arrested a senior official of de Picciotto's
Geneva bank, Jean-Jacques Handali, along with two other UBP officials,
on charges of leading a multimillion-dollar drug-money-laundering
ring. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami, Handali
and Union Banque Privee were the "Swiss connection" in an international
drug-money-laundering ring tied to Colombian and Turkish cocaine
and heroin organizations. A close business and political associate
of de Picciotto is a mysterious arm dealer, Helmut Raiser, who is
linked in business dealings with reputed Russian organized crime
kingpin Grigori Luchansky, who controls the Russian and Swiss holding
company Nordex Group.
Another director of Soros's Quantum Fund is Isodoro Albertini,
owner of the Milan stock brokerage firm Albertini and Co. Beat Notz
of the Geneva Banque Worms is another private banker on the board
of Soros's Quantum Fund, as is Alberto Foglia, who is chief of the
Lugano, Switzerland Banca del Ceresio. Lugano, just across the Swiss
border from Milan, is notorious as the financial secret bank haven
for Italian organized crime families, including the heroin mafia
behind the 1980s "Pizza Connection" case. The Banca del Ceresio
has been one of the secret Swiss banks identified in the recent
Italian political corruption scandals as the repository of bribe
funds of several Italian politicians now in prison.
The sponsorship of the Rothschilds
Soros's relation to the Rothschild finance circle represents no
ordinary or casual banking connection. It goes a long way to explain
the extraordinary success of a mere private speculator, and Soros's
uncanny ability to "gamble right" so many times in such high-risk
markets. Soros has access to the "insider track" in some of the
most important government and private channels in the world.
Since World War II, the Rothschild family, at the heart of the
financial apparatus of the Club of the Isles, has gone to great
lengths to create a public myth about its own insignificance. The
family has spent significant sums cultivating a public image as
a family of wealthy, but quiet, "gentlemen," some of whom prefer
to cultivate fine French wines, some of whom are devoted to charity.
Since British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote his famous
November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild, expressing official British
government backing for establishment of a Palestinian national home
for the Jewish people, the Rothschilds were intimately involved
in the creation of Israel. But behind their public facade of a family
donating money for projects such as planting trees in the deserts
of Israel, N.M. Rothschild of London is at the center of various
intelligence operations, and more than once has been linked to the
more unsavory elements of international organized crime. The family
prefers to keep such links at arm's length, and away from its London
headquarters, via its lesser-known outposts such as their Zurich
Rothschild Bank AG and Rothschild Italia of Milan, the bank of Soros
partner Richard Katz.
N.M. Rothschild is considered by City of London sources to be
one of the most influential parts of the British intelligence establishment,
tied to the Thatcher "free market" wing of the Tory Party. Rothschild
and Sons made huge sums managing for Thatcher the privatization
of billions of dollars of British state industry holdings during
the 1980s, and today, for John Major's government. Rothschilds is
also at the very heart of the world gold trade, being the bank at
which twice daily the London Gold Fix is struck by a group of the
five most influential gold trade banks. Gold constitutes a major
part of the economy of drug dealings globally.
N.M. Rothschild and Sons is also implicated in some of the filthiest
drugs-for-weapons secret intelligence operations. Because it is
connected to the highest levels of the British intelligence establishment,
Rothschilds managed to evade any prominent mention of its complicity
in one of the more sordid black covert intelligence networks, that
of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Rothschilds
was at the center of the international web of money-laundering banks
used during the 1970s and 1980s by Britain's MI-6 and the networks
of Col. Oliver North and George Bush, to finance such projects as
the Nicaraguan Contras.
On June 8, 1993 the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives'
Committee on Banking, Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-Tex.), made a speech
charging that the U.S. government, under the previous Bush and Reagan
administrations, had systematically refused to prosecute the BCCI,
and that the Department of Justice had repeatedly refused to cooperate
with Congressional investigations of both the BCCI scandal and what
Gonzalez claims is the closely related scandal of the Atlanta, Georgia
Banca Nationale del Lavoro, which was alleged to have secured billions
in loans from the Bush administration to Saddam Hussein, just prior
to the Gulf War of 1990-91.
Gonzalez charged that the Bush administration had "a Justice Department
that I say, and I repeat, has been the most corrupt, most unbelievably
corrupt justice system that I have seen in the 32 years I have been
in the Congress."
The BCCI violated countless laws, including laundering drug money,
financing illegal arms traffic, and falsifying bank records. In
July 1991, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced
a grand jury indictment against BCCI, charging it with having committed
"the largest bank fraud in world financial history. BCCI operated
as a corrupt criminal organization throughout its entire 19-year
history."
The BCCI had links directly into the Bush White House. Saudi Sheik
Kamal Adham, a BCCI director and former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence
when George Bush was head of the CIA, was one of the BCCI shareholders
indicted in the United States. Days after his indictment, former
top Bush White House aide Edward Rogers went to Saudi Arabia as
a private citizen to sign a contract to represent Sheikh Adham in
the United States.
--- continued in part 2 --- --- continued from part 1 ---
But, what has never been identified in a single major Western
press investigation, was that the Rothschild group was at the heart
of the vast illegal web of BCCI. The key figure was Dr. Alfred Hartmann,
the managing director of the BCCI Swiss subsidiary, Banque de Commerce
et de Placement SA; at the same time, he ran the Zurich Rothschild
Bank AG, and sat in London as a member of the board of N.M. Rothschild
and Sons, Hartmann was also a business partner of Helmut Raiser,
friend of de Picciotto, and linked to Nordex.
Hartmann was also chairman of the Swiss affiliate of the Italian
BNL bank, which was implicated in the Bush administration illegal
transfers to Iraq prior to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The
Atlanta branch of BNL, with the knowledge of George Bush when he
was vice president, conduited funds to Helmut Raiser's Zug, Switzerland
company, Consen, for development of the CondorII missile program
by Iraq, Egypt, and Argentina, during the Iran-Iraq War. Hartmann
was vice-chairman of another secretive private Geneva bank, the
Bank of NY-Inter-Maritime Bank, a bank whose chairman, Bruce Rappaport,
was one of the illegal financial conduits for Col. Oliver North's
Contra drugs-for-weapons network during the late 1980. North also
used the BCCI as one of his preferred banks to hide his illegal
funds.
Rich, Reichmann, and Soros's Israeli links
According to reports of former U.S. State Department intelligence
officers familiar with the Soros case, Soros's Quantum Fund amassed
a war chest of well over $10 billion, with the help of a powerful
group of "silent" investors who let Soros deploy the capital to
demolish European monetary stability in September 1992.
Among Soros's silent investors, these sources say, are the fugitive
metals and oil trader Marc Rich, based in Zug, Switzerland; and
Shaul Eisenberg, a decades-long member of Israeli Mossad intelligence,
who functions as a major arms merchant throughout Asia and the Near
East. Eisenberg was recently banned from doing business in Uzbekistan,
where he had been accused by the government of massive fraud and
corruption. A third Soros partner is Israel's "Dirty Rafi" Eytan,
who served in London previously as Mossad liaison to British intelligence.
Rich was one of the most active western traders in oil, aluminum,
and other commodities in the Soviet Union and Russia between 1989
and 1993. This, not coincidentally, is just the period when Grigori
Luchansky's Nordex Group became a multibillion-dollar company selling
Russian oil, aluminum, and other commodities.
Canadian real estate entrepreneur Paul Reichmann, formerly of
Olympia and York notoriety, a Hungarian-born Jew like Soros, is
a business partner in Soros's Quantum Realty, a $525-million real
estate investment fund.
The Reichmann tie links Soros as well with Henry Kissinger and
former Tory Foreign Minister Lord Carrington (who is also a member
of Kissinger Associates, Inc. of New York). Reichmann sits with
both Kissinger and Carrington on the board of the influential British-Canadian
publishing group, Hollinger, Inc. Hollinger owns a large number
of newspapers in Canada and the United States, the London Daily
Telegraph, and the largest English-language daily in Israel, the
Jerusalem Post. Hollinger has been attacking President Clinton and
the Middle East peace process ever since Clinton's election in November
1992.
Soros and geopolitics
Soros is little more than one of several significant vehicles
for economic and financial warfare by the Club of the Isles faction.
Because his affiliations to these interests have not previously
been spotlighted, he serves extremely useful functions for the oligarchy,
as in 1992 and 1993, when he launched his attack on the European
Rate Mechanism.
Although Soros's speculation played a role in finally taking the
British pound out of the ERM currency group entirely, it would be
a mistake to view that action as "anti-British." Soros went for
the first time to London, where he studied under Karl Popper and
Friedrich von Hayek at the London School of Economics.
Soros's business ties to Sir James Goldsmith and Lord Rothschild
place him in the inner circles of the Thatcher wing of the British
establishment. By helping the "anti-Europe" Thatcherites pull Britain
out of the ERM in September 1992 (and making more than $1 billion
in the process at British taxpayer expense), Soros helped the long-term
goal of the Thatcherites in weakening continental Europe's economic
stability. Since 1904 , it has been British geopolitical strategy
to prevent by all means any successful economic linkage between
western continental European economies, especially that of Germany,
with Russia and the countries of eastern Europe.
Soros's personal outlook is consonant with that of the Thatcher
wing of the Tory Party, those who three years ago launched the "Germany,
the Fourth Reich" hate campaign against unified Germany, comparing
Chancellor Helmut Kohl with Adolf Hitler. Soros is personally extremely
anti-German. In his 191 autobiography, Underwriting Democracy, Soros
warned that a reunited Germany would "upset the balance of Europe
.... It is easy to see how the interwar scenario could be replayed.
A united Germany becomes the strongest economic power and develops
Eastern Europe as its Lebensraum ... a potent witches' brew." Soros's
recent public attacks on the German economy and the deutsche mark
are fundamentally motivated by this geopolitical view.
Soros is quite close to the circles of George Bush in the U.S.
intelligence community and finance. His principal bank custodian,
and reputed major lender in the 1992 assault on Europe's ERM, is
Citicorp NA, the nation's largest bank. Citicorp is more than a
lending institution; it is a core part of the American liberal establishment.
In 1989, as it became clear that German unification was a real possibility,
a senior official at Citicorp, a former adviser to Michael Dukakis's
Presidential campaign, told a European business associate that "German
unity will be a disaster for our interests; we must take measures
to ensure a sharp D-Mark collapse on the order of 30%, so that she
will not have the capability to reconstruct East Germany into the
economic engine of a new Europe."
While Soros was calling on world investors to pull down the deutsche
mark in 1993, he had been making a strong play in the French media,
since late 1992, to portray himself as a "friend of French interests."
Soros is reported to be close to senior figures of the French establishment,
the Treasury, and in particular, Bank of France head Jean-Claude
Trichet. In effect, Soros is echoing the old Entente Cordiale alliance
against Germany, which helped precipitate World War 1.
Soros admits that he survived in Nazi Hungary during the war,
as a Jew, by adopting what he calls a double personality. "I have
lived with a double personality practically all my life," Soros
recently stated. "It started at age fourteen in Hungary, when I
assumed a false identity in order to escape persecution as a Jew."
Soros admitted in a radio interview that his father gave him Nazi
credentials in Hungary during the war, and he looted wealthy Jewish
estates. Further research showed that this operation was probably
run by the SS.
Soros did not leave the country until two years after the war.
Though he and his friends in the media are quick to attack any policy
opponent of Soros, especially in eastern Europe, as being "anti-Semitic,"
Soros's Jewish identity apparently has only utilitarian value for
him, rather than providing moral foundations. In short, the young
Soros was a cynical, ambitious person, the ideal recruit for the
British postwar intelligence network.
Soros savages eastern Europe
Soros has established no fewer than 19 "charitable" foundations
across eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has sponsored
"peace" concerts in former Yugoslavia with such performers as Joan
Baez. He is helping send young east Europeans to Oxford University.
A model citizen, is the image he broadcasts.
The reality is something else. Soros has been personally responsible
for introducing shock therapy into the emerging economies of eastern
Europe since 1989. He has deliberately fostered on fragile new governments
in the east the most draconian economic madness, policies which
have allowed Soros and his financial predator friends, such as Marc
Rich and Shaul Eisenberg, to loot the resources of large parts of
eastern Europe at dirt-cheap prices. Here are illustrative case
histories of Soros's eastern "charity":
Poland: In late 1989, Soros organized a secret meeting between
the "reform" communist government of Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski
and the leaders of the then-illegal Solidarnosc trade union organization.
According to well-informed Polish sources, at that 1989 meeting,
Soros unveiled his "plan" for Poland: The communists must let Solidarnosc
take over the government, so as to gain the confidence of the population.
Then, said Soros, the state must act to bankrupt its own industrial
and agricultural enterprises, using astronomical interest rates,
withholding state credits, and burdening firms with unpayable debt.
Once thie were done, Soros promised that he would encourage his
wealthy international business friends to come into Poland, as prospective
buyers of the privatized state enterprises. A recent example of
this privatization plan is the case of the large steel facility
Huta Warsawa. According to steel experts, this modern complex would
cost $3-4 billion for a western company to build new. Several months
ago, the Polish government agreed to assume the debts of Huta Warsawa,
and to sell the debt-free enterprise to a Milan company, Lucchini,
for $30 million!.
Soros recruited his friend, Harvard University economist Jeffery
Sachs, who had previously advised the Bolivian government in economic
policy, leading to the takeover of that nation's economy by the
cocaine trade. To further his plan in Poland, Soros set up one of
his numerous foundations, the Stefan Batory Foundation, the official
sponsor of Sach's work in Poland in 1989-90.
Soros boasts, "I established close personal contact with Walesa's
chief adviser, Bronislaw Geremek. I was also received by [President
Gen Wojciech] Jaruzelski, the head of State, to obtain his blessing
for my foundation." He worked closely with the eminence gris of
Polish shock therapy, Witold Trzeciakowski, a shadow adviser to
Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz. Soros also cultivated relations
with Balcerowicz, the man who would first impose Sach's shock therapy
on Poland. Soros says when Walesa was elected President, that "largely
because of western pressure, Walesa retained Balcerowicz as minister."
Balcerowicz imposed a freeze on wages while industry was to be bankrupted
by a cutoff of state credits. Industrial output fell by more than
30% over two years.
Soros admits he knew in advance that his shock therapy would cause
huge unemployment, closing of factories, and social unrest. For
this reason, he insisted that Solidarnosc be brought into the government,
to help deal with the unrest. Through the Batory Foundation, Soros
coopted key media opinion makers such as Adam Michnik, and through
cooperation with the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, imposed a media censorship
favorable to Soros's shock therapy, and hostile to all critics.
Russia and the Community of Independent States (CIS): Soros headed
a delegation to Russia, where he had worked together with Raisa
Gorbachova since the late 1980s, to establish the Cultural Initiative
Foundation. As with his other "charitable foundations," this was
a tax-free vehicle for Soros and his influential Western friends
to enter the top policymaking levels of the country, and for tiny
sums of scarce hard currency, but up important political and intellectual
figures. After a false start under Mikhail Gorbachov in 1988-91,
Soros shifted to the new Yeltsin circle. It was Soros who introduced
Jeffery Sachs and shock therapy into Russia, in late 1991. Soros
describes his effort: "I started mobilizing a group of economists
to take to the Soviet Union (July 1990). Professor Jeffery Sachs,
with whom I had worked in Poland, was ready and eager to participate.
He suggested a number of other participants: Romano Prodi from Italy;
David Finch, a retired official from the IMF [International Monetary
Fund]. I wanted to include Stanley Fischer and Jacob Frenkel, heads
of research of the World Bank and IMF, respectively; Larry Summers
from Harvard and Michael Bruno of the Central Bank of Israel."
Since Jan. 2, 1992, shock therapy has introduced chaos and hyperinflation
into Russia. Irreplaceable groups from advanced scientific research
institutes have fled in pursuit of jobs in the West. Yegor Gaidar
and the Yeltsin government imposed draconian cuts in state spending
to industry and agriculture, even though the entire economy was
state-owned. A goal of a zero deficit budget within three months
was announced. Credit to industry was ended, and enterprises piled
up astronomical debts, as inflation of the ruble went out of control.
The friends of Soros lost no time in capitalizing on this situation.
Marc Rich began buying Russian aluminum at absurdly cheap prices,
with his hard currency. Rich then dumped the aluminum onto western
industrial markets last year, causing a 30% collapse in the price
of the metal, as western industry had no way to compete. There was
such an outflow of aluminum last year from Russia, that there were
shortages of aluminum for Russian fish canneries. At the same time,
Rich reportedly moved in to secure export control over the supply
of most West Siberian crude oil to western markets. Rich's companies
have been under investigation for fraud in Russia, according to
a report in the Wall Street Journal of May 13, 1993.
Another Soros silent partner who has moved in to exploit the chaos
in the former Soviet Union, is Shaul Eisenberg. Eisenberg, reportedly
with a letter of introduction from then-European Bank chief Jacques
Attali, managed to secure an exclusive concession for textiles and
other trade in Uzbekistan. When Uzbek officials confirmed defrauding
of the government by Eisenberg, his concessions were summarily abrogated.
The incident has reportedly caused a major loss for Israeli Mossad
strategic interests throughout the Central Asian republics.
Soros has extensive influence in Hungary. When nationalist opposition
parliamentarian Istvan Csurka tried to protest what was being done
to ruin the Hungarian economy, under the policies of Soros and friends,
Csurka was labeled an "anti-Semite," and in June 1993, he was forced
out of the governing Democratic Forum, as a result of pressure from
Soros-linked circles in Hungary and abroad, including Soros's close
friend, U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos.
Lighting the Balkan Fuse
In early 1990, in what was then still Yugoslavia, Soros's intervention
with shock therapy, in cooperation with the IMF, helped light the
economic fuse that led to the outbreak of war in June 1991. Soros
boasted at that time, "Yugoslavia is a particularly interesting
case. Even as national rivalries have brought the country to the
verge of a breakup, a radical monetary stabilization program, which
was introduced on the same date as in Poland---January 1, 1990-----has
begun to change the political landscape. The program is very much
along the Polish lines, and it had greater initial success. By the
middle of the year, people were beginning to think Yugoslav again."
Soros is friends with former Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger, the former U.S. ambassador to Belgrade and the patron
of Serbian Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic. Eagleburger is a
past president of Kissinger Associates, on whose board sits Lord
Carrington, whose Balkan mediations supported Serbian aggression
into Croatia and Bosnia.
Today, Soros has established his Foundation centers in Bosnia,
Croatia, Slovenia, and a Soros Yugoslavia Foundation in Belgrade,
Serbia. In Croatia, he has tried to use his foundation monies to
woo influential journalists or to slander opponents of his shock
therapy, by labeling them variously "anti-Semitic" or "neo-Nazi."
The head of Soros's Open Society Fund---Croatia, Prof. Zarko Puhovski,
is a man who has reportedly made a recent dramatic conversion from
orthodox Marxism to Soros's radical free market. Only seven years
ago, according to one of his former students, as professor of philosophy
at the University of Zagreb, Puhovski attacked students trying to
articulate a critique of communism, by insisting, "It is unprincipled
to criticize Marxism from a liberal standpoint." His work for the
Soros Foundation in Zagreb has promoted an anti-nationalist "global
culture," hiring a network of anti-Croatian journalists to propagandize,
in effect, for the Serbian cause.
These examples can be elaborated for each of the other 19 locations
across eastern Europe where George Soros operates. The political
agenda of Soros and this group of financial "globalists" will create
the conditions for a new outbreak of war, even world war, if it
continues to be tolerated.
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