It seems like a page taken out of a spy novel.
Four trucks pull out of a “secret” facility somewhere in London while the city sleeps. A police escort on the ground and the air joins the heavy trucks with lights flashing to clear the road and a helicopter whirring above.
The passenger receiving this high-security entourage? Twenty large wooden crates filled with solid gold bars.
The events last Friday were not the first time this mission was carried out.
“It was the eighth time we had made the trip, in the middle of the night,” Paul Holt, general manager of G4Si in Europe (North and South), Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, said. “It was all very secretive, and extremely important it was done well.”
Any large delivery of gold would seem important given the value of the cargo. But these shipments were important because of the historic significance.
According to G4Si, after Germany invaded Poland in the early days of World War II, Poland arranged for its entire reserves of gold to be evacuated rather than fall into the hands and coffers of the Third Reich. The “exporting” of Poland reserves began the night of Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the first Nazi tanks rolled across the border. Some 80 tons of gold, along with banknotes, were sent on a journey through Romania to Turkey, across the Mediterranean Sea into Africa, back to the European continent and France and ending in New York. Part of the shipments that wound up in London resulted from Poland’s national reserve split into three sections in 1943 and placed in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, the Bank of Canada in Ottawa and the Bank of England in London.
Read more about the secret mission to move billions in gold from London to Poland on the Fox Business website HERE
