Sterling Seagrave

Sterling Seagrave     (historian, author)
Sterling with his wife Peggy Seagrave
Born	1937-04-15 Columbus, Ohio
Died	May 1, 2017 (Age 80)
Nationality	American
Spouse	Peggy Seagrave
Interests	• Far East • Deep Politics
Author of numerous other books which address unofficial and clandestine aspects of the 20th-century political history of countries in the Far East.

Sterling Seagrave was an American historian. He was the author of The Soong Dynasty, The Marcos Dynasty, Gold Warriors and numerous other books which address unofficial and clandestine aspects of the 20th-century political history of countries in the Far East.

Personal life

Born in Columbus, Ohio on April 15, 1937, Seagrave grew up on the China-Myanmar border, the fifth generation of an American family living in the Orient for nearly two centuries (his father was Dr. Gordon Seagrave, author of Burma Surgeon). He and his family moved to Corpus Christi, Texas and he attended W. B. Ray Highschool from 1953 to 1955.

Seagrave's collaborator and wife of 35 years was Peggy Sawyer Seagrave, who died about a year before her husband.

Seagrave died on May 1, 2017 in France, where he had been living for more than 30 years with his wife. Seagrave's death was not announced publicly until July 31, 2017.

Assassination attempt

In a 2011 email with his publisher, he described an attempt on his life that followed the Spanish publication of Gold Warriors:

A hired thug tried to murder me on the serpentine road leading up to our isolated house on the ridge overlooking Banyuls-sur-Mer, and nearly succeeded. (We’ve had several serious death threats because of our books.) The road was very narrow in places, with tarmac barely the width of my tires. At 10 pm Christmas night, in 2011, after visiting Peggy at a clinic in Perpignan, as I turned the final hairpin, I clearly saw a guy sitting on a cement block path leading up to a shed for the uphill vineyard. He was obviously waiting for me because we were the only people living up there on that mountain shoulder. He jumped up, raised a long pole, and unfurled a black fabric that totally blocked the narrowest turn ahead of me. I tried to swerve to avoid him (not knowing whether he also had a gun), and my right front drive wheel went off the tarmac and lost traction in the rubble. The car teetered and then plunged down through a steep vineyard on my right side, rolling and bouncing front and rear, 100 meters into a ravine where it finally came to rest against a tree. Thanks to my seatbelt and air bag, I survived. I don’t know how many concussions I got on the way down, but I managed to squeeze out the driver’s door and fell onto the rubble. I got up on my left hand and knees, but my right shoulder caved it. (Turned out later that I had fractured my right shoulder, and all the ligaments there had torn loose.) I passed out and remained unconscious for 14 hours.

After 12 hours, a vigneron driving up the next morning saw my wrecked car and body. He called the Gendarmerie on his portable, and I was hoisted out unconscious by a chopper and flown to an old Victorian-era hospital in Perpignan where they did nothing but keep me doped on morphine for two weeks — no X-rays or serious medical care. Finally, friends in Banyuls got me (and Peggy) transferred to a clinic on the beach there, where Peggy and I shared a room while we both recovered. I got my right shoulder ligaments fixed by an excellent surgeon in Perpignan. (Peggy did not know it then but she had an early stage of cancer.) I still have a hairline fracture in my right shoulder.

I attribute the event to staying too long in one place, so the spooks eventually tracked me down. We had been living for years on a sailboat, moving from Holland to Britain to Portugal to Spain and finally to France, where we found — in Catalonia — an ideal village at the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. In retrospect, I’m sorry I agreed to move ashore for Peggy’s sake, and sold the beautiful 43-foot boat I had built from a bare hull. It was very comfortable, but Peggy wanted a house. We never did find the right house in Banyuls — so we spent 18 years restoring a 13th century Templar ruin on the shoulder of the mountain. Made me an easy target. Definitely a bad decision. I think it was the Spanish edition of Gold Warriors that made me the easy target.

Books

• Soong Dynasty, Sidg. & J, 1985, ISBN 978-0-283-99238-4
• The Marcos Dynasty, Harper Collins, 1988, ISBN 978-0-06-015815-6
• Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China, Vintage Books, New York, 1992 ISBN 0-679-73369-8.
• Lords of the Rim, Putnam publishing, 1995, ISBN 978-0-552-14052-2
• The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan's Imperial Family, Broadway Books, 2000, ISBN 978-0-7679-0496-4
• Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold, co-written with Peggy Seagrave, Verso, 2003 ISBN 978-1-85984-542-4.
• RED SKY in the morning, Booksurge Publishing, 2008, ISBN 1-4392-4047-7

 

A Quote by Sterling Seagrave

Page	Quote	Date
Theodore Shackley	“Bill Casey was one of the key men in the acquisition of media after WW2. It was one of his proteges (a young German immigrant to the US) who was sent back to Germany after the war to take over Bertelsmann and build it up. Rupert Murdoch was very tight with Shackley, which is how he got launched on his global acquisitions and has now taken over the WSJ. Murdoch was running a failed national newspaper in Australia while Shackley was station chief in Oz. Then suddenly he becomes a US citizen literally overnight and goes on an endless buying spree. Shackley's pockets were infinitely deep. At the time, Murdoch was facing the likely closure of his newspaper The Australian. His ticket out was Shackley. This also explains why Murdoch was allowed to break all the rules in acquisition of media in America.”	2007

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