Tower of Basel, pp. 125-126
The end of the war did not seem to bring McKittrick any closer to reality. In March 1945 Orvis Schmidt, the US Treasury official who had attended the Bretton Woods conference, met with McKittrick in Switzerland. Schmidt, like his boss Henry Morgenthau, was not a fan of either McKittrick or the BIS, and McKittrick knew it. “It was clear that Mr. McKittrick was fully aware of the manner in which he and the BIS are regarded by the Treasury Department,” Schmidt wrote.24 McKittrick tried his best to persuade Schmidt otherwise—if only the Treasury Department understood “the real role that he and the BIS had played” all that would change, the BIS president ardently believed. This seemed unlikely, considering what followed.
Schmidt continued, “The BIS, McKittrick said, had been ‘strictly neutral’ during the war. The bank was a ‘sort of club’ for the world’s central bankers, a ‘little group of like-minded-men who understood and trusted one another.’” This trust was unimpaired by issues such as national, political, or governmental interests. Rather it was a kind of celestial understanding. It would continue “regardless of the condition of the world or of the constantly changing political relations between their respective countries.” Unimpressed by McKittrick’s eulogy, Schmidt asked McKittrick why the Germans had allowed him to run the BIS in this manner—what was in it for them? In response, McKittrick claimed that, “In order to understand the conduct of the Germans toward the BIS, one must first understand the strength of the confidence and trust that the central bankers had in each other and the strength of their determination to play the game squarely.” McKittrick then said that the German members of this elite could positively influence the German government’s conduct. These financiers, said McKittrick, were not Nazis but were needed by the Nazis because of their technical skills. “The existence of this little group is the keystone in the explanation of Germany’s conduct with respect to the BIS,” he explained.
Yes, you can trust this "sort of club" at the keystone of the BIS to "play the game squarely."
Thomas McKittrick, a very interesting character...
ibid, p. 88
Despite McKittrick's safe and privileged existence, he was often lonely. His wife and four daughters were far way in the United States. Travel remained difficult and slow. There were few visitors in Bern, apart from Emil Puhl, and the postal service was erratic. McKittrick kept an account at a bookshop on Charing Cross Road and took refuge in non-bankerly works including, Will Europe Follow Atlantis, which examined the coming cataclysm of European civilization; a work of Sufi devotion called At the Gate of Discipleship; and even The Occult Causes of the Present War. McKittrick went walking in the woods and mountains with Erin Jacobssen, the daughter of the bank’s economic adviser. A keen botanist, McKittrick taught Jacobssen about the region’s rich flora. Other correspondence doubtless cheered the BIS president. Hermann Schmitz, the CEO of IG Farben and BIS board member, for example, sent his sincerest New Year wishes on January 3, 1941. Schmitz wrote, “For their friendly wishes for Christmas and the New Year, and for their good wishes for my 60th birthday, I am sending my sincere thanks. In response, I am sending you my heartfelt wishes for a prosperous year for the Bank for International Settlements.”28 It would certainly be another prosperous year for IG Farben, whose profits were soaring and whose plans were well advanced for the construction of IG Auschwitz, the firm’s own corporate concentration camp.
Most of the BIS staff stayed, but Charles Kindelberger, an American with a young wife, returned home. His departure left a vacancy. Leon Fraser, now president of the First National Bank of New York, had a suggestion for his old friend McKittrick. In November 1940, Fraser met with a young man named Henry Tasca in Washington, DC. Tasca was working at the National Defense Commission, specializing in foreign trade and Latin America. “He has a pleasing personality, a manifestly keen mind, and is ambitious and hard-working.”29 Tasca could leave for Switzerland on thirty days’ notice. “He makes a much more favorable impression than did Kindelberger, both in appearance and seriousness of purpose.”30 And Tasca, fortunately, had the right answer for the most sensitive question, reported Fraser. Merle Cochran had asked it, “and the reply was that Tasca was not Jewish.”31
As the war ground on, the Czechoslovak gold affair still haunted the BIS. Once again, there were angry questions in the House of Commons about Britain’s continued membership, the bank’s role, and its connections to Nazi Germany. The government stayed firm in its support. Sir Kingsley Wood, the finance minister, declared in October 1942 that with McKittrick at the helm, there was nothing to worry about. “The conduct and control of the bank have been and are today in the sole hands of the President of the Bank, an American citizen. . . . This gentleman has our complete confidence.”32
McKittrick was also a close friend and intelligence source to Allen Dulles:
archive.today - CIA.gov: The OSS and Project SAFEHAVENIn Bern, the heart of the Swiss banking and German gold transfer activity, the OSS chief was Allen W. Dulles, later (1953 to 1962) Director of Central Intelligence. An East Coast brahmin with extensive prewar ties to European banking circles, Dulles spent his tenure in Bern constructing an "old-boy" network of sources that extended throughout neutral and Axis-occupied Europe. It was an astonishingly successful system, ideally suited to his situation in neutral Switzerland and well conceived to gain access to European government and business circles. For example, Dulles counted among his close personal friends no less a personage than Thomas B. McKittrick, President of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basel. A multinational corporation created to manage international currency and gold exchanges, BIS was the single-largest channel for gold transfers in prewar and wartime Europe. McKittrick also was an OSS source who provided Dulles with "comfortable access" to thinking of the bankers most responsible for moving German assets throughout Europe.14 Among other kinds of information, McKittrick kept Dulles informed of the comings and goings of Reichsbankvizepräsident Emil Puhl, the architect of the German gold transfer arrangements.15
Also:
viewtopic.php?p=485037#p485037L.S.: Another famous plan was the one named after Owen D. Young. With it the world saw the creation of the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland. Related to the BIS, there is this famous quote by the outstanding historian Carroll Quigley in “Tragedy and Hope”:
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. … The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.” (2)
What’s your take on this?
G.P.: Yes, a disquieting chapter, which has exercised the minds and pens of scores of conspiracy theorists. The Owen Plan is not that important in that it lasted a mere year and a half: it was annulled by the Crisis. As for the erection of the BIS as the mother apex of a giant network of central banks, each one controlled by the banking brethren is a disquieting image. Honestly, I don’t know how dominant the BIS is today in the game; I don’t know if it ever rose to wield the coordinating role that many attribute to it.
What is certain is that it was the extra-territorial venue, the off-shore haven where the warring parties –and that is to say the representatives of Nazi Germany, too, of course— sat across the same table to allocate repayments, interest and dividends amongst each other. This supposedly went on until 1944…Or to put the disturbing truth in simpler relief: that is where the Nazis honored their ongoing debt to fuel the war (for supplies and provisions, given Germany’s poverty of raw materials), face to face with their very enemies, while an American banker, McKittrick officiated.
Unbelievable. We have yet to know what was really being done in Basel in those days. For instance, while conducting archival research, I was denied access to certain folders of the Bank of England which contained information on the shareholders of the BIS. Everything about this entire affair is revolting. And what has troubled me even more about it is that all those that have looked into this understand very well that the various pieces of the tale we have been sold do not add up, but, out of fear and some kind of deeper psychological conditioning, keep an air of obsequious composure about it all. So long as this sort of forma mentis, coupled with fear, prevails there is no future for a reformed world.
L.S.: Two men who played an important role in those years were Montagu Norman and Benjamin Strong. Why should people pay attention to their activities?
G.P.: It is a very interesting bond, not so much as seen from Strong’s view point (he will die of cancer in 1928; fairly early in this story), but rather from Norman’s. What is of interest is how the British managed to entangle the American apparatus so deeply into this affair despite substantial isolationist feeling – isolationist feeling, it is true, which had been severely lamed since America’s commitment to WWI (one should read Dos Passos for the chronicling of America’s patriotic metamorphosis at that time). In essence, through an endless strategizing effort punctuated by frequent and highly secret visits to the Fed and indefatigable negotiations via banking and diplomatic channels, Norman managed to feed the German boom —read: rearmament— with American dollars for five years (1924-1929). Strong was a subaltern ally in this British operation – of that there is no doubt.
