My personal guess is that Zippy didn’t really know and is mostly a pawn in this game because a) he is not smart enough to understand any of this and b) he was not interested enough to pay attention.
As long as he was getting his ego stroked and his pockets lined (illicit campaign kickbacks, money from the books he “wrote,” etc.) he didn’t know or care what else was going on.
I believe that Zippy’s puppetmasters were pulling his strings as well as the stock market strings.