As I mentioned before, there are 3 people involved in the Leo Wanta story,
Wanta himself,
Michael C. Cottrell, and Christopher Story, an editor for a journal titled the International Currency Review. While I am pretty convinced this whole thing is a hoax, I am still not sure what the objective is, so I have been trying to figure out who these people are. I even e-mailed Cottrell, asking how I could get a copy of his thesis, but received no response.
Story, much like Cottrell, has been on
Greg Szymanski's radio program several times, making the some ridiculous claims and accusing the same international powers of involvement in this conspiracy. One of his biggest themes is that the mainstream media refuses to pick up the story. He is correct in this, I can still find no references to either Story or the Wanta story, by any mainstream souce. The fact that there is no substantiation for this tale, however, appears the mostly likely explanation.
The International Currency Review, oddly enough, doesn't have its own website, but shares one called
World Reports with other periodicals run by Story such as Soviet Analyst and Economic Intelligence Review. This publication is presented as a serious financial journal, with a rather steep pricetag of $525 a year, but it has been rather difficult to find out much about it.
I am a graduate business student, so I looked it up at our library, the University of Washington library has one of the largest collections in the world, and was actually able to find the ICR in the stacks. They only carry it from the early 70s to 1995 unfortunately. Looking through the articles, it appeared to start out as a legitimate financial journal, with mundane articles on currency exchange and monetary policy, but starting in the early 90s began focusing on paranoid Cold War/Illuminati/Vatican conspiracy theories, many of which are reflected on Story's
website.
We're not arrogant, we're just smarter than you.