People are just starting to wake up that there are other people behind the curtain who just feel that they have to know everything everywhere all the time. When our model correctly forecast the collapse of the Russian economy and the London Financial Times broadcast that all over the place, things started to get dicey at Princeton Economics. The CIA called and said they wanted me to go to Virginia and build the model for them. I declined, but offered to run any study they wanted. They responded – NO – they had to own it.
The world of intelligence gathering is real. We had one client in Geneva that was a large grain company. But the requests we kept getting were for studies of just about everything other than grains. At a lunch in Geneva, I asked a banker I knew there about the firm and he bluntly told me they were a front for the KGB.
One of the reasons I stopped managing personal money in the late 1980s was because I just could no longer be sure who was who. We had an account that I thought was a Saudi and it turned out to me Qaddafi. Then I thought I was dealing with the Gaon family out of Geneva, of whom Albert died in 2010, who owned the NOGA Hiltons and had own the oil wells in Nigeria before the coup. They offered me $5 million to use my name and wanted to open Armstrong Brokerage House of something to that effect. I declined.
In the process, I was invited to the Grand Opening of Herald Square in New York, which I was led to believe was their’s. That turned out to be a front for the ownership of Ferdinand Marcos, which originally opened in 1982 as a retail mall on the old E.J. Korvette site, but was secretly owned by Marcos and the NY Post thought was fronted by New York brothers Joseph and Ralph Bernstein. It turned out Marcos was involved with Qaddafi and Adnan Khashoggi (b 1935). When Marcos fled the Philippines, the FBI came into my office and asked me where Marcos stashed the gold. They assumed I knew him and was the largest gold adviser so they connected the dots.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There was Galina Vasilyevna Starovoitova (1946-1998) who was assassinated in her apartment. She was going to run against Yeltsin. In Russia they tried to slander her portraying her as a puppet of a Western Financier. That turned out to be me. Why? Her son worked in our London office so again they connected the dots.
What goes on behind the curtain you would not believe. Everybody is eavesdropping on everyone else all because they think they might miss something. I have simply found that the people react to events they do not cause them. Nevertheless, this does not stop this idea that if they gather absolutely everything, somehow they will figure it all out. Sorry – it just does not work that way. They are putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, we lose everything worthwhile that once made our society “free” predicated first upon human rights. I have been often referred to as the man that knew too much. Perhaps. Who really knows? But the common thread, everyone wanted to know what the model was forecasting next.
