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The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General “Wild Bill” Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname “Old Blood and Guts”.

His book, “Target Patton”, contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph that when he spoke to Mr Bazata: “He was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, that he was ordered to do so by Wild Bill Donovan.

“Donovan told him: ‘We’ve got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he’s out of control and we must save him from himself and from ruining everything the allies have done.’ I believe Douglas Bazata. He’s a sterling guy.”

Mr Bazata led an extraordinary life. He was a member of the Jedburghs, the elite unit who parachuted into France to help organise the Resistance in the run up to D-Day in 1944. He earned four purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre three times over for his efforts.

After the war he became a celebrated artist who enjoyed the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

He was friends with Salvador Dali, who painted a portrait of Bazata as Don Quixote.

He ended his career as an aide to President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Mr Wilcox also tracked down and interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin’s death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

“You have two strong witnesses here,” Mr Wilcox said. “The evidence is that the Russians finished the job.”

The scenario sounds far fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton’s body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert from Detroit, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving.

“That is a cover-up,” Mr Wilcox said.

George Patton, a dynamic controversialist who wore pearl handled revolvers on each hip and was the subject of an Oscar winning film starring George C. Scott, commanded the US 3rd Army, which cut a swathe through France after D-Day.

But his ambition to get to Berlin before Soviet forces was thwarted by supreme allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave Patton’s petrol supplies to the more cautious British General Bernard Montgomery.

Patton, who distrusted the Russians, believed Eisenhower wrongly prevented him closing the so-called Falaise Gap in the autumn of 1944, allowing hundreds of thousands of German troops to escape to fight again,. This led to the deaths of thousands of Americans during their winter counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

In order to placate Stalin, the 3rd Army was also ordered to a halt as it reached the German border and was prevented from seizing either Berlin or Prague, moves that could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the war.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph: “Patton was going to resign from the Army. He wanted to go to war with the Russians. The administration thought he was nuts.

“He also knew secrets of the war which would have ruined careers.

I don’t think Dwight Eisenhower would ever have been elected president if Patton had lived to say the things he wanted to say.” Mr Wilcox added: “I think there’s enough evidence here that if I were to go to a grand jury I could probably get an indictment, but perhaps not a conviction.”

Wikileaks has responded with a press release noting that the demands have no legal force outside Germany, so the order “must be assumed to be an attempt to engage Wikileaks via its German component — or does Mr. Uhrlau suggest it is now BND policy to kidnap foreign journalists and try them before German courts?”

According to Wikileaks, “The threats, made by BND President Ernst Uhrlau, were triggered by the Wikileaks publication of an article by Tom Burghardt, a US journalist, on the BND’s bungled Kosovo operation, together with a classified BND dossier on senior Kosovo figures from 2005 — both of which were specifically named by Mr. Uhrlau.”

The Kosovo scandal began on November 19, when three Germans were arrested in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina on suspicion of throwing explosives at the European Union office. The men, who said they were not behind the incident but were merely observing the crime scene, were identied by the German paper Spiegel as BND agents.

Germany is one of the strongest diplomatic and financial supporters of the government in Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia last February, and the BND is known to be active there.

BND sources charged that the incident was the work of local radicals, who are opposed to the deployment of EU forces in their country to replace UN peacekeepers in certain areas, which they see as likely to lead to an eventual partition of the country into a Serbian half and an Albanian half.

However, other analysts suggested that the high-profile arrests might represent an attempt to embarrass the BND by Kosovo’s prime minister, who was accused in the 2005 BND report of being involved with organized crime.

The article by researcher Tom Burghardt, which Wikileaks sees as a primary cause of the BND order, describes Kosovo as both “a European narco state” and “a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on spreading their tentacles East, encircling Russia and penetrating the former spheres of influence of the ex-Soviet Union.”

“For the ruling elites of the former Yugoslavia and their Western allies, Kosovo is a veritable goldmine,” Burghardt writes. “Situated in the heart of the Balkans, Kosovo’s government is deeply tied to organized crime structures: narcotrafficking, arms smuggling, car theft rings and human trafficking that feeds the sex slave ‘industry.’ These operations are intimately linked to American destabilization campaigns and their cosy ties to on-again, off-again intelligence assets that include al-Qaeda and other far-right terror gangs.”

Figures out from Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) today show the current account deficit was $6 billion in the September quarter.

The current account, also known as the balance of payments, measures all of New Zealand’s transactions with the outside world.

The annual deficit was $15.5b, which was 8.6 percent of gross domestic product, up from 8.4 percent of GDP in the June year and 8 percent in the March quarter.

“Given the credit-centric nature of the shock facing the global economy, New Zealand’s current account cannot continue its current trajectory,” ANZ bank said after the release of today’s data.

“An adjustment is imminent, either undertaken voluntarily or forced up on it externally.”

The deterioration in the annual balance was entirely due to a growing goods and services deficit, which rose in annual terms from $2b to $2.7b.

The investment income balance improved slightly courtesy of a fall in profitability of foreign firms operating in this country.

While an improvement in the seasonally adjusted deficit was encouraging, much of the improvement could be put down to the lagged effect of high commodity prices, ANZ said.

Seasonally adjusted, the September quarter deficit was $4.1b, $571 million smaller than the June quarter deficit.

With this country’s main commodity prices falling, any improvement in the trade balance would rely on a sharp fall off in import volumes, ANZ said.

“Years of imbalanced growth have resulted in a ballooning current account deficit, which by definition means we are spending much more than we save as a nation.”

Running large current account deficits was not an issue in an environment where credit was cheap and abundant, as was the case in the first part of the decade.

But the economy was now in a more vulnerable position, with credit much more expensive and difficult to come by.

Typically, a current account adjustment had two distinct dynamics — a period of weak activity in the domestic economy, and a depreciating currency.

“Both of these dynamics have already begun, but considering the large starting position for the external balance, and the worst credit shock in 80 years, there is still some way to go yet.”

During the September quarter, New Zealand’s investment income deficit shrunk by $396m to $3.2b.

ASB economists said the investment income deficit was by far the biggest component of the current account, so a nascent turning was positive, even if much of the cause of it was a weak domestic economy.

The weakening domestic economy was starting to have an impact on the equity earnings going to foreign owners of New Zealand corporates, somewhat perversely helping in containing the deficit.

Income paid out to foreign creditors did increase moderately relative to a year ago, but with interest rates now falling that component of the current account would increasingly become less of a drag than during the interest rate tightening cycle.

The experts say that for some, the relative security of a warm building and three meals a day beats being homeless and hungry in the community.

Detroit has, by many measures, replaced New Orleans as America’s most beleaguered city.

The jobless rate has climbed past 21 percent, tens of thousands of homes and stores are abandoned and the ex-mayor is in jail for a text-messaging sex scandal. Even the pro football team is in tatters — the Lions are within two losses of an unprecedented 0-16 season.

While the 0.922 percent yield was the lowest on record since the Treasury began regular auctions of the securities in 1975, the average forecast in a Bloomberg survey of eight firms that bid on the sale was for a yield of 0.912 percent. The bid- to-cover ratio, a gauge of demand, was 2.13, compared with an average of 2.25 at the last six auctions. The government will sell a record $28 billion in five-year notes tomorrow.

“It’s a lot of paper,” said Jay Mueller, who manages about $3 billion of bonds at Wells Fargo Capital Management in Milwaukee. “It makes you wonder who exactly is lining up out there to buy it.”

The two-year note yield increased six basis points, or 0.06 percentage point, to 0.82 percent at 4:08 p.m. in New York, according to BGCantor Market Data. It dropped to a record low of 0.60 percent on Dec. 17, from a peak this year of 3.11 percent on June 13. The price of the 1.25 percent security due in November 2010 fell 1/8, or $1.25 per $1,000 face amount, to 100 26/32.

The five-year note yield rose six basis points to 1.42 percent, and the 10-year yield was up four basis points, to 2.17 percent.

Treasuries fell earlier as a gauge of banks’ reluctance to lend slipped below 150 basis points for the first time since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September amid speculation interest rates near zero and promises of more government cash will help thaw credit.

Indirect Bidders

The funds, which manage $3,800bn and have seen big cash inflows, are reeling from frozen credit markets, subprime exposure and a crisis of confidence triggered by one fund “breaking the buck”, or returning investors less than they paid in.

The US Federal Reserve last week cut its target interest rate to between zero and 0.25 per cent, from one per cent.

Jim McDonald, who runs taxable money market funds for T Rowe Price, said: “You can’t make money in this situation. If short-term interest rates stay where they are, it’s virtually impossible to run a government [bond] fund and make any money. You can close the fund, that’s one option.”

Vanguard last week closed two of its money market funds to institutional investors, while Credit Suisse said it would quit managing money market funds in the US and liquidate $8bn in assets across its three funds.

David Glocke, a portfolio manager at Vanguard, said: “It just doesn’t make any sense to take in money in this environment, it would dilute yields for existing investors.”

Investors poured $550bn into government money market funds – which invest mostly in US Treasuries – in the six months to the end of November, in an unprecedented flight to safety.

The cost of running money market funds is greater than the fees charged. Usually, the difference is not great, and the funds are able to pick up profit on excess yield.

However, the gap between costs and fees has widened, and yields have plummeted. The average yield on a Treasury retail fund was 0.34 per cent at the end of November, compared with 2.9 per cent last December, according to iMoneyNet, an industry tracker. About one in 10 money funds yields nothing.

Mr McDonald said: “Our Treasury fund yield was net 50 basis points after investor fees, and our expense is 47 basis points. If assets remain unchanged and we continue to roll over securities, our fund will run out of yield in February.

“The board has to make a decision about whether they waive fees. I am not advocating this, but you can also tell shareholders that they will have to pay a fee, an extra fee above what the portfolio earns.”

Fidelity, the biggest money market operator, has already reimbursed small amounts of fees on five funds.

Ms Rice told the Financial Times the new administration was likely to follow Mr Bush’s lead in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme. During the president’s second term, the US has co-ordinated its approach with the European Union, Russia and China.

“When I talk to our allies they believe that that is the structure with which this is ultimately going to be resolved,” Ms Rice said, while acknowledging that the Obama administration would generally “do things in their own way”.

She said: “The reason why there might be some elements of continuity is that what we’ve tried to do is to arrange or organise international groupings that can first manage and then resolve these very difficult problems in a multilateral way.” She was referring not just to the administration’s efforts over Iran but also its approach to North Korea and the Israel-Palestinian issue.

Economists warned that exports — a mainstay of the world’s second-largest economy — would tumble further with no recovery in sight for the global economy. Even exports to the rest of Asia are falling sharply.

“Demand is rapidly cooling not only in the United States and Europe but also in Russia and the Middle East, and we are expecting a further plunge in exports as the global economy is deteriorating,” said Hideki Matsumura, a senior economist at the Japan Research Institute in Tokyo.

Battered by plunging global demand and a strengthening yen, major exporters like Toyota Motor Corp. and Sony Corp. have scaled back production, jobs and earnings projections.

Toyota on Monday said it would barely break even this fiscal year through March, slashing its profit forecast to 50 billion yen ($555 million) — a fraction of the 1.7 trillion yen it earned the previous year.

“The change that has hit the world economy is of a critical scale that comes once in a hundred years,” President Katsuaki Watanabe said at the company’s Nagoya office. The drop in vehicle sales over the last month was “far faster, wider and deeper than expected.”

Indeed, exports suffered their biggest year-on-year drop since the current system of statistics went into effect in 1980. Exports totaled 5.3 trillion yen ($60 billion), while imports fell 14.4 percent from a year earlier to 5.55 trillion yen ($62 billion), the ministry said.

That resulted in a trade deficit of 223.4 billion yen ($2.5 billion) — the fourth time this year Japan said its imports exceeded exports after January, August and October. August’s deficit was the first in 26 years, excluding the month of January, when trade deficits are more common because of the slowdown for the New Year holidays.

For years, Japan was blasted by its trading partners over its trade surpluses. But now, the global economic slump is turning Japan into a net importer, at least in recent months.

“The plunge in exports in November clearly reflected a severe global downturn,” said ministry official Yu Oki. “Demand for Japanese goods, especially cars and electronics products, is falling sharply everywhere.”

The latest figures, however, do not necessarily signal a fundamental structural shift of Japan’s export-driven economy. With a quickly shrinking population, many Japanese companies have nowhere to look but abroad for future growth and have planned accordingly.

Exports to the United States, the world’s largest economy, plummeted by a record 33.8 percent in November, marking the 15th consecutive year-on-year fall.

Among U.S.-bound shipments, vehicle exports plummeted by 44 percent in the month, while exports of auto parts fell 40 percent and those of audio equipment was down by 48.2 percent.

Japan’s exports to the European Union tumbled by 30.8 percent, with vehicle shipments to the region falling by 37.2 percent, the ministry said.

Asia-bound exports fell 26.7 percent as semiconductor shipments dropped by 30.2 percent. Japan’s exports to China alone plunged by 24.5 percent.

Exports are also shrinking as the yen appreciates against most major currencies. That means overseas sales in dollars and euros translates into fewer yen.

The ministry said the yen traded to 97.97 to the dollar on average in November, up 16 percent from the same month last year.

Felt died Thursday at his home in Santa Rosa under hospice care after suffering from congestive heart failure for several months, said family friend John D. O’Connor, who wrote a Vanity Fair article disclosing Felt’s secret in 2005.

The shadowy central figure in one of the most gripping political dramas of the 20th century, Felt insisted his alter ego be kept secret when he leaked damaging information to Post reporter Bob Woodward.

The scandal led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, two years after the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building in Washington.

While some — including Nixon and his aides — speculated that Felt was Deep Throat, he steadfastly denied the accusations until finally coming forward in May 2005.

“I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat,” Felt told O’Connor for the Vanity Fair article, creating a whirlwind of attention. Weakened by a stroke, he wasn’t doing much talking — he merely waved to the media from the front door of his daughter’s Santa Rosa home.

Critics, including those who went to prison for the Watergate scandal, called him a traitor for betraying the commander in chief. Supporters hailed him as a hero for blowing the whistle on a corrupt administration trying to cover up attempts to sabotage opponents.

In a phone interview Friday, Woodward said despite the criticism and Felt’s own ambivalence, it is clear that Felt should be remembered as a man who did the right thing.

“This is a man who did his duty to the Constitution,” Woodward told The Associated Press.

Just last month, Woodward and onetime partner Carl Bernstein visited Felt in his home. It was the first time Bernstein had met him. Woodward said Felt had flashes of lucidity and still cut the appearance of an FBI agent, sitting straight and stiff and dressed in a red blazer.

Felt had argued with his children over whether to reveal his identity or to take his secret to the grave, O’Connor said. He agonized about what revealing his identity would do to his reputation. Would he be seen as a turncoat or a man of honor?

“People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward,” Felt wrote in his 2006 memoir, “A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, `Deep Throat’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington.” “The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn’t that what the FBI is supposed to do?”

Ultimately, his daughter, Joan, persuaded him to go public; after all, Woodward was sure to profit by revealing the secret after Felt died. “We could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I’ve run up for the kids’ education,” she told her father, according to the Vanity Fair article. “Let’s do it for the family.”

The revelation capped a Washington whodunit that spanned more than three decades and seven presidents. It was the biggest mystery of Watergate, the subject of the best-selling book and hit movie “All the President’s Men,” which inspired a generation of college students to pursue journalism.

In the movie, the enduring image of Deep Throat is of a testy, chain-smoking Hal Holbrook telling Woodward, played by Robert Redford, to “follow the money.”

It was by chance that Felt came to play a pivotal role in the drama.

Back in 1970, Woodward struck up a conversation with Felt while both were waiting in a White House hallway. Felt apparently took a liking to the young Woodward, then a Navy courier, and Woodward kept the relationship going, treating Felt as a mentor as he tried to figure out the ways of Washington.

Later, while Woodward and Bernstein relied on various sources in reporting on Watergate, the man their editor dubbed “Deep Throat” helped to keep them on track and confirm vital information. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage.

The nickname “Deep Throat” was a double entendre: Felt was providing information on the condition of complete anonymity, known as “deep background,” and his actions coincided with a popular 1972 porn movie.

Woodward had phoned Felt within days of the June 1972 burglary at the Watergate.

“He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said that the Watergate burglary case was going to `heat up’ for reasons he could not explain,” Woodward wrote after Felt was named. “He then hung up abruptly.”

Felt helped Woodward link former CIA man Howard Hunt to the break-in. He said the reporter could accurately write that Hunt, whose name was found in the address book of one of the burglars, was a suspect. But Felt told him off the record, insisting that their relationship and Felt’s identity remain secret.

Worried that phones were being tapped, Felt arranged clandestine meetings worthy of a spy novel. Woodward would move a flower pot with a red flag on his balcony if he needed to meet Felt. The G-man would scrawl a time to meet on page 20 of Woodward’s copy of The New York Times and they would rendezvous in a suburban Virginia parking garage in the dead of night.

In his memoir published in April 2006, Felt said he saw himself as a “Lone Ranger” who could help derail a White House cover-up.

Felt wrote that he was upset by the slow pace of the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in and believed the press could pressure the administration to cooperate.

“From the start, it was clear that senior administration officials were up to their necks in this mess, and that they would stop at nothing to sabotage our investigation,” Felt wrote in his memoir.

Some critics said Felt, a J. Edgar Hoover loyalist, was bitter at being passed over when Nixon appointed an FBI outsider and confidante, L. Patrick Gray, to lead the FBI after Hoover’s death. Gray was later implicated in Watergate abuses.

Felt wrote that he wasn’t motivated by anger. “It is true that I would have welcomed an appointment as FBI director when Hoover died. It is not true that I was jealous of Gray,” he wrote.

Felt was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, and worked for an Idaho senator during graduate school. After law school at George Washington University he spent a year at the Federal Trade Commission. Felt joined the FBI in 1942 and worked as a Nazi hunter during World War II.

Ironically, while providing crucial information to the Post, Felt also was assigned to ferret out the newspaper’s source. The investigation never went anywhere, but plenty of people, including those in the White House at the time, guessed that Felt, who was leading the investigation into Watergate, may have been acting as a double agent.

The Watergate tapes captured White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman telling Nixon that Felt was the source, but they were afraid to stop him.

Nixon asks: “Somebody in the FBI?”

Haldeman: “Yes, sir. Mark Felt … If we move on him, he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI.”

Felt left the FBI in 1973 for the lecture circuit. Five years later he was indicted on charges of authorizing FBI break-ins at homes associated with suspected bombers from the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground. President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt in 1981 while the case was on appeal — a move applauded by Nixon.

Woodward and Bernstein said they wouldn’t reveal the source’s identity until he or she died, and finally confirmed Felt’s role only after he came forward.

O’Connor said Thursday his friend appeared to be at peace since the revelation.

“What I saw was a person that went from a divided personality that carried around this heavy secret to a completely integrated and glowing personality over these past few years once he let the secret out,” he said.

Felt is survived by two children, Joan Felt and Mark Felt Jr., and four grandchildren. His wife, Audrey Felt, died in 1984.

But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation’s largest banks say they can’t track exactly how they’re spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,”‘ said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest? None of the banks provided specific answers.

“We’re not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking,” said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Ga.-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Some banks said they simply didn’t know where the money was going.

“We manage our capital in its aggregate,” said Regions Financial Corp. spokesman Tim Deighton, who said the Birmingham, Ala.-based company is not tracking how it is spending the $3.5 billion it received as part of the financial bailout.

The answers highlight the secrecy surrounding the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which earmarked $700 billion — about the size of the Netherlands’ economy — to help rescue the financial industry. The Treasury Department has been using the money to buy stock in U.S. banks, hoping that the sudden inflow of cash will get banks to start lending money.

There has been no accounting of how banks spend that money. Lawmakers summoned bank executives to Capitol Hill last month and implored them to lend the money — not to hoard it or spend it on corporate bonuses, junkets or to buy other banks. But there is no process in place to make sure that’s happening and there are no consequences for banks who don’t comply.

“It is entirely appropriate for the American people to know how their taxpayer dollars are being spent in private industry,” said Elizabeth Warren, the top congressional watchdog overseeing the financial bailout.

But, at least for now, there’s no way for taxpayers to find that out.

Pressured by the Bush administration to approve the money quickly, Congress attached nearly no strings on the $700 billion bailout in October. And the Treasury Department, which doles out the money, never asked banks how it would be spent.

“Those are legitimate questions that should have been asked on Day One,” said Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., a House Financial Services Committee member who opposed the bailout as it was rushed through Congress. “Where is the money going to go to? How is it going to be spent? When are we going to get a record on it?”

Nearly every bank AP questioned — including Citibank and Bank of America, two of the largest recipients of bailout money — responded with generic public relations statements explaining that the money was being used to strengthen balance sheets and continue making loans to ease the credit crisis.

A few banks described company-specific programs, such as JPMorgan Chase’s plan to lend $5 billion to nonprofit and health care companies next year. Richard Becker, senior vice president of Wisconsin-based Marshall & Ilsley Corp., said the $1.75 billion in bailout money allowed the bank to temporarily stop foreclosing on homes.

But no bank provided even the most basic accounting for the federal money.

“We’re choosing not to disclose that,” said Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which received about $3 billion.

Others said the money couldn’t be tracked. Bob Denham, a spokesman for North Carolina-based BB&T Corp., said the bailout money “doesn’t have its own bucket.” But he said taxpayer money wasn’t used in the bank’s recent purchase of a Florida insurance company. Asked how he could be sure, since the money wasn’t being tracked, Denham said the bank would have made that deal regardless.

Others, such as Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Carissa Ramirez, offered to discuss the matter with reporters on condition of anonymity. When AP refused, Ramirez sent an e-mail saying: “We are going to decline to comment on your story.”

Most banks wouldn’t say why they were keeping the details secret. “We’re not sharing any other details. We’re just not at this time,” said Wendy Walker, a spokeswoman for Dallas-based Comerica Inc., which received $2.25 billion from the government.

Heine, the New York Mellon Corp. spokesman who said he wouldn’t share spending specifics, added: “I just would prefer if you wouldn’t say that we’re not going to discuss those details.”

The banks which came closest to answering the questions were those, such as U.S. Bancorp and Huntington Bancshares, that only recently received the money and have yet to spend it. But neither provided anything more than a generic summary of how the money would be spent.

Lawmakers say they want to tighten restrictions on the remaining, yet-to-be-released $350 billion block of bailout money before more cash is handed out. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the department is trying to step up its monitoring of bank spending.

“What we’ve been doing here is moving, I think, with lightning speed to put necessary programs in place, to develop them, implement them, and then we need to monitor them while we’re doing this,” Paulson said at a recent forum in New York. “So we’re building this organization as we’re going.”

Warren, the congressional watchdog appointed by Democrats, said her oversight panel will try to force the banks to say where they’ve spent the money. “It would take a lot of nerve not to give answers,” she said.

But Warren said she’s surprised she even has to ask. “If the appropriate restrictions were put on the money to begin with, if the appropriate transparency was in place, then we wouldn’t be in a position where you’re trying to call every recipient and get the basic information that should already be in public documents,” she said.