Barrick''s Munk defends company''s hedging

WAR!
Clinton Administration Launches
Counteroffensive Against GATA

By Bill Murphy, Chairman
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
May 17, 2000

As a result of the quot;enveloping hornquot; battle tactic
employed by the Gold Anti-Trust Committee, all heck is
breaking loose.

To begin with, I received this email early this morning
from a member of www.LeMetropoleCafe.com:

quot;Bill, apparently this article was in the news, then it
was pulled:quot;

quot;'Date: Wed May 17 2000 06:46 SlangKing (FT: GATA
exposes Gold price manipulation to Congress)
ID#293152.quot;

I don't know if this is true, so if anyone has specific
information on this, please let me know.

Speaking of being up one moment, down the next.... The
superb commentary of the Tocqueville Fund's John
Hathaway, quot;J.P. Morgan to The Rescue,quot; is back up at
their web site, www.tocqueville.com, with no
discernable changes. How many Cafe members and friends
of GATA think that J.P. Morgan, who on the day
Tocqueville took down Hathaway's essay learned that its
gold derivative position had been exposed, made a phone
call? I suspect that Tocqueville's taking this
wonderful commentary down only increased scrutiny of
Morgan. So the piece had to go back up. That's only an
educated guess on my part, but there are other reasons
for my saying so and that will come out in time.

What is really fascinating is that discussion of the
manipulation of the gold market is really picking up
steam.

I received an email from a Cafe member this afternoon
about his efforts to make Sen. John Warner of Virginia
aware of the GATA's issues. This is what the Cafe
member sent me:

quot;Got a call from the senator's office, was briefly
advised a meeting took place yesterday with Congressman
Backus and others, something to the effect that
Greenspan denies any involvement and Summers is looking
into it but denies it. They are still working on it.quot;

I have asked for clarification about the supposed
comment by Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. How can
you deny something before it is looked into?

I am happy to see that former Senator Warner is
involved. In January 1988 my wife at the time, another
couple, and I went out to the senator's sprawling ranch
in the Virginia countryside to watch the Super Bowl.
The Redskins were playing and I remember his telling me
how owner Jack Kent Cooke was a friend of his. The
senator had just split up with Elizabeth Taylor.

I will have to contact him personally soon. If Senator
Warner has already met Representative Backus, who is
chairman of the House Banking Committee's Subcommittee
on Domestic and International Monetary Policy and who
listened to the GATA delegation a week ago, then things
are cooking in Washington. The enveloping horn is
advancing at the highest levels of the U.S government.

In last night's Goldgate serving I said the following:

quot;Allow me to let you in on some of the inside scoop
going on here. Over the past year, the name Ted Truman
has popped up in our circles as a CIA snoop. That is
also the word around certain politicos in Washington.
He used to work for the Federal Reserve but he had a
falling out with Alan Greenspan. Vice President Al Gore
picked him to go work at the Treasury Department, which
is where he is employed at the moment. After our
meetings in Washington, we met with one of GATA's
support contacts and told him the names of the people
we met with. Immediately he told us to be careful with
one of them because he has a direct line to Ted
Truman.quot;

What I didn't tell you was that I set up this staffer
with the direct line to the CIA snoop, Ted Truman, to
find out if he would be fair with us or report
information to the enemy camp; i.e., the U.S. Treasury
and his CIA snoop contact, Ted Truman.

I fed him information Sunday night, only part of which
I can reveal. I figured that if he was in the
Treasury/CIA camp, I would receive some sort of
feedback soon. Little did I know then that GATA
Secretary/Treasurer Chris Powell would actually receive
a letter from Truman. This is part of what I sent the
staffer:

quot;It could not be more clear that we have hit a hot
button.

quot;Regarding the gold industry, unfortunately many of
them are clueless about what is really going on....

quot;The more the industry actually listens to what we have
to say and takes the time to evaluate the material we
left you, the more support we receive from them.

quot;The problem with gaining U.S. industry support is that
the big gold producers are afraid of U.S. government
retaliation and antagonizing their own bullion
bankers.quot;

It was my thought that if this staffer was on the other
side of the issue, he would take the bait and my
comments right to the Treasury Department and its CIA
snoop. The gold mining companies then would be
contacted and subtly informed that there are
environmentalist groups around, certain judges with
jurisdictions in some of the mining states, etc.: just
your average subtle, sledgehammer conversation items.

Sure enough, that is what came back to me today. Word
is also going out that GATA is a bunch of crazies. This
soon will all be laid out in detail for you; it is all
on paper in several files already.

It is like an interview of a juror. As far as I am
concerned, this staffer has disqualified himself from
further participation in the investigation of the gold
market. He has no credibility with me anymore. The
written evidence of what occurred is going off to
Washington next week. It should remove someone who
appears to wish to kill the gold market investigation
just as it is roaring ahead.

It is clear that the players manipulating the gold
market are going on a full-court press to discredit
GATA. That has been the Clinton administration's
standard operating procedure from the beginning. They
will lose this time. The truth is too obvious and they
are going to run out of gold.

Monday's issue of Roll Call just arrived. GATA's open
letter advertisement looks fantastic in print.
Remember, I mentioned that one of the politicians we
met with was fuming over Patrick Kennedy? Well, here is
part of a story in this issue of Roll Call:

quot;Democrats Torn Over DeLay Suit.quot;

quot;Several centrist House Democrats are publicly
questioning Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
Chairman Patrick Kennedy's decision to file a
racketeering lawsuit against Majority Whip Tom DeLay.

quot;Arguing that Kennedy may have made a serious mistake
in taking such aggressive action against the Texas
Republican, these members believe their leadership
damaged the party's ability to adopt the reform message
promulgated by former GOP presidential candidate Sen.
John McCain and further poisoned relations with the
GOP.

quot;'This is a can of worms,' said Rep. Bud Cramer, D-
Ala., who is one of the Blue Dogs, a coalition of
conservative Democrats. 'I just don't know where this
might end up.'

quot;'I think if was a little over the edge,quot; added Rep.
Gary Condit, D-Calif.'quot;

The big headline of this issue of Roll Call was:

quot;Six Months to Go, House up for Grabs.

quot;Roll Call Analysis Shows Democrats Poised for Gains.quot;

The election for control of the House for the next two
years is very close. If a Clinton administration
scandal surfaced, it could win the day for the
Republicans. That is why so many Republicans are so
interested in what the GATA delegation showed them.

Thirty-six of 41 poor gold-producing countries opposed
the International Monetary Fund's gold sale proposal
because the added gold supply would suppress the gold
price. The governments and people of these mostly black
African countries want the better economies that a
higher gold price will give them, not handouts from the
IMF.

When the Goldgate scandal breaks into the worldwide
press, the black African countries and the black
politicians in the U.S. will realize they have been
sandbagged by the U.S. administration. I should think
they will go ballistic when they realize the suffering
the manipulation of the gold market has caused so that
the rich New York banks and the Clinton administration
could unfairly benefit.

That is why I think this scandal will bigger than
Watergate. As I said yesterday, this one could affect
the Clinton administration, the coming presidential
election, the makeup of the House, and the Blair
administration in Britain. In the days and months to
come, you will learn how it also might affect
French/German relations and politics in Germany itself.

As you may have already surmised, GATA will be
presenting our case to certain Black Caucus leaders in
the near future.

This is going to be some summer.

There are so many creative ways everyone can help GATA
win the day. Jeffrey P. Dahl of Samex Mining Corp. came
up with one. Samex is a Vancouver-based gold company
that is exploring the mineral-rich Cordillera area of
Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. This prolific mining
belt hosts some of the world's largest ore bodies.

Dahl, who has as good an attitude as there is out
there, has clipped a note to the 14-by-22 color Roll
Call open letter and is mailing it in a tube to gold
industry people, the press, and gold share investors.

His note reads:

quot;This full-color, two-page ad was recently placed in
the Washington, D.C., newspaper Roll Call by an
organization named GATA. Whether you accept their
assertion or not, I am sure you'll agree that the
issues being addressed by GATA are very serious indeed.

quot;At Samex we pondered the widely held investor
perception that gold is 'just another commodity' with
little value and limited upside potential. What merit
is there in assuming the risks inherent to exploration,
especially involving a mineral that few consider
precious?

quot;The conclusions derived from our introspective musings
were simply: Gold is precious and perceptions will
change.

quot;Stay tuned and enjoy the unfolding drama.

quot;Jeffrey P. Dahl, Vice Chairman, Samex Mining Corp.quot;

Three cheers.