LA Times: The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men (AIG & OSS)

[Hannah Bell]

By Mark Fritz
September 22, 2000


...Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2.

Though rarely numbering more than a half dozen agents, the unit gathered intelligence on the enemy's insurance industry, Nazi insurance titans and suspected collaborators in the insurance business. But, more significantly, the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets, from a brewery in Bangkok to a candy company in Bergedorf...

The men behind the insurance unit were OSS head William "Wild Bill" Donovan and California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V. Starr. Starr had started out selling insurance to Chinese in Shanghai in 1919 and, over the next 50 years, would build what is now American International Group, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world...

Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became AIG, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in the deepest secrecy.


http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/22/news/mn-25118?s=o&n=o&sessid=5a40726832b27607caccd3925b1cfe8b50cb12bc&uuid=78f3a79ed213d2c7e7e2a63477eac8aa0db8328f&pg=0&pgtp=article&eagi=&cat=arts+%26+humanities&pe_id=4957167&page_type=article&exci=2000_09_22_news_mn-25118

[Triana]

1. Great article. But what a godawful format - all the damned links in the middle and to the side

of it. There is no print version. Unfortunate.

[aquart]

2. Did we bail them out because they know where the bodies are buried?

[leftstreet]

3. Very interesting!

Thanks for posting this

[BeFree]

4. I'll never look at my...

...insurance agent the same way again. There's no telling what they're selling.

[Hannah Bell]

5. Frank G. Wisner Jr., AIG Vice Chairman, is son of Frank Sr., head of OSS & CIA Directorate of Plans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wisner

Frank Gardiner Wisner (June 23, 1909 – October 29, 1965) was head of Office of Strategic Services operations in southeastern Europe at the end of World War II, and the head of the Directorate of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_G._Wisner

Frank George Wisner II (born 1938) is an American businessman and former diplomat. He is the son of Frank Wisner.

Wisner is currently Vice Chairman of American International Group. He retired from this post as of February 13, 2009, according to an internal AIG memo issued by Edward Liddy, CEO.

He joined the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer... Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State. He was United States Ambassador to Zambia, 1979-82; Egypt, 1986-91; Philippines, 1991-92; India, 1994-97.

Wisner joined the board at a subsidiary of Enron...on the board of Hakluyt & Company...

Wisner is married to Christine de Ganay (former wife of Pal Sarkozy and former stepmother of French president Nicolas Sarkozy).



http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=BW&Date=20090213&ID=9609636&Symbol=AIG

AIG Vice Chairman Frank G. Wisner Announces Retirement February 13, 2009

[Hannah Bell]

6. kick