Chapter 08
Roosevelt Fed Stalin and Made Him Smile

III. Roosevelt Gave Silver to Stalin for Free

At the end of 1943, in addition to continuing to send large quantities of aid to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act, Roosevelt also planned other ways to curry favor with Stalin. Shortly after the Allies’ Tehran Conference in December 1943, Roosevelt decided to gift Stalin 2,000 tons of American silver bars worth over $26 million to further appease him. To avoid drawing attention — especially to prevent the British from thinking the U.S. was currying favor with the Soviets — this operation was kept absolutely secret. The ship John Barry (hereafter “Barry”) was assigned to carry out this mission, and for security reasons, it was routed through the Persian Gulf along the southern route to reach the Soviet Union.

The ship John Barry arrived at Trinidad Island in mid-June 1944. The crew received orders to sail to a port in Maine, where some cargo was unloaded. The purpose of the mission puzzled everyone. Later, the captain received new secret instructions: the ship was to continue southward, first heading to New York City, then Philadelphia, and finally Norfolk. After that, Captain Elwood would lead the ship through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Suez Canal, entering the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.

After the John Barry arrived in New York, FBI agents handed over altered shipping documents to the crew and then supervised the secret loading of cargo. Under the arrangement of the U.S. Treasury Department, silver bars, heavily wrapped, were quietly and orderly loaded onto the ship. In Philadelphia, silver coins worth $500,000 Saudi riyals were also loaded. The FBI agents then left the ship. The John Barry arrived at Norfolk late at night. Official reports indicated that the ship was clearly overloaded. The cargo manifest vaguely listed the destination as “a port in the Persian Gulf.”

On July 19, 1944, the John Barry sailed into the Atlantic Ocean and headed south according to its planned route. Shortly after entering the Arabian Sea, the German submarine U-859, commanded by Captain Jebsen, spotted the John Barry. At 10 p.m. on August 28, about 127 nautical miles southeast of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, Captain Jebsen ordered the submarine to fire on the ship. The first torpedo missed, but the second struck the starboard side of the John Barry. As seawater flooded the ship, the captain sent out an international distress signal and was forced to order the engines shut down. As the John Barry began to sink, Captain Elwood placed the codebooks and navigation logs into weighted bags and threw them into the sea, then ordered the crew to abandon ship. The crew escaped in four lifeboats and four life rafts. The submarine’s third torpedo hit the stern, breaking the ship in two. The John Barry, carrying 2,000 tons of silver, sank to a depth of 8,500 feet.

The survivors of the John Barry were discovered and rescued by the ship Benjamin Bonneville. After the crew safely returned home, officials conducted routine questioning about the incident and compiled a formal report on the sinking. During one of the interrogations, the ship’s purser, Richard, stated that in addition to the regular Lend-Lease aid, the ship was also carrying several million dollars’ worth of unidentified cargo. The secret of the John Barry thus began to surface.

After World War II, historians John Bunker and Arthur Moore made this secret public. In the late 1980s, Navy pilot and rescue officer Colonel Bryan Shoemaker teamed up with Jay Fiondella of California to begin searching for the wreck of the John Barry. Later, British Arabic-language journalist John Beasant, then based in Oman, joined the effort. In 1995, he published the book Stalin’s Silver: The Sinking of the U.S.S. John Barry. The three men partnered with a deep-sea diving expedition group based in Key West, Florida, to search for the shipwreck and its treasures.

Starting in 1990, Shoemaker and his team received assistance from the governments of Oman and Yemen, as well as from some of the ship’s surviving crew. They compiled all available nautical charts and documents to determine the wreck’s location and conducted five salvage missions in total.

After four failed attempts, the expedition team finally accessed the wreck of the John Barry. They spent several days and eventually retrieved silver riyal coins worth $1.4 million from Cargo Hold No. 2. Since the ship had broken in two when it sank, and the divers first explored the stern — where the silver coins happened to be stored — they still hadn’t located the section containing the silver bars. At that point, the team no longer had the time or resources to continue searching the rest of the wreck. Nevertheless, the gleaming riyal coins were enough to confirm that the John Barry was indeed carrying the rumored treasure.

The salvage team believed that the remaining silver bars, still resting on the ocean floor, were likely stored in Cargo Hold No. 3 on the starboard side, which had been specially reinforced. Bissantz estimated that the silver bars were now buried about three feet beneath the seabed silt. After conducting multiple surveys of the area, the team gathered a wealth of valuable information and planned to one day return to the site — to recover from the deep ocean those vast quantities of silver that were originally destined for the Soviet Union.