-Caveat Lector- Insurance agents were vital weapons in World War II By Mark Fritz Los Angeles Times, 10/15/2000 COLLEGE PARK, Md. - They knew which factories to burn, which bridges to blow up, and which cargo ships could be sunk in good conscience. They had pothole counts for roads used for invasions, and head counts for city blocks marked for incineration. They weren't just secret agents. They were secret insurance agents. These undercover underwriters gave their World War II spymasters access to a global industry that both bankrolled and, ultimately, helped bring down Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Declassified US intelligence files have told the remarkable story of the secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, a forerunner of the CIA and its counterintelligence branch, X-2. Although 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, Germany. ''They used insurance information as a weapon of war,'' said Greg Bradsher, a National Archives historian and a specialist on the declassified records. That insurance information was critical to Allied strategists, who were seeking to cripple the enemy's industrial base and batter morale by firebombing cities. ''Within a few days, a conference on the burning possibilities of some important cities will be held,'' unit chief Robert ''Lucky Luke'' Rushin wrote to a colleague in February 1944, when he was sending data to an Allied bombing-target committee. ''I have reproductions of approximately 150 plans covering Jap plants about ready to ride.'' The files, at the National Archives office in College Park, are among the US intelligence documents ordered declassified by President Clinton last year to speed the identification of Nazi assets. Most of the research attention there has focused on what US intelligence knew about the Holocaust, the whereabouts of Nazi loot, the migration of Nazi war criminals, and how much important information never made it to the Oval Office. But the documents suggest that insurance played an important, if less-noticed, role in the war. The OSS insurance unit was launched in early 1943, long after it had become clear that the Nazis were using their insurance industry not only to help finance the war but to gather strategic data. American insurance companies had been competing for overseas business even after the United States entered the war, and the OSS files suggest that details about US factories and cities were falling into enemy hands because of the interlocking international relationships among insurance companies. Germany had 45 percent of the worldwide wholesale insurance industry before the war began, and it managed to expand its business as it conquered continental Europe. As wholesalers, or ''reinsurers,'' these companies covered other insurers against a catastrophic loss that could wipe out a single company. In the process, the wholesaler learned everything about the lives and property it was reinsuring. The motives of the OSS unit's founders were both pragmatic and patriotic. ''This story is incredible because the unit begins as part of the desire of American interests to contribute to the war effort and exploit it for future economic gain,'' said Timothy Naftali, a historian and a consultant to a congressional working group on Nazi war criminals. The men behind the insurance unit were the OSS head, William ''Wild Bill'' Donovan, and the 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. He was forced to move his operation to New York in 1939, when Japan invaded China. German-owned companies were blacklisted by the Allies, but the Insurance Intelligence Unit found that the Nazis did business through countries such as Switzerland and laundered transactions through South American affiliates, particularly in Argentina. Starr's group and other insurance executives had intimate knowledge of the people involved in the global insurance business, so they were able to track potential collaborators. Among those they investigated was Carl Theodore Endemann, a naturalized American from Germany who was assigned by the American Foreign Insurance Association to Paris in the 1930s. When war broke out, Endemann sided with the Nazis. When France capitulated, Endemann contacted the Germans and gave them exceptionally detailed blueprints, maps, and other information to aid Erwin Rommel's war in North Africa. When the tide of the war turned, and German insurers began losing money, the US insurance agents learned that Nazi insurers were pleading for peace. A source in Stockholm reported in late 1943 that insurers had advised Hitler's people that ''ruin threatens all life and fire insurance companies in Germany.'' As Germany was heavily bombed and casualties mounted, the Nazis prohibited insurance companies from selling new policies - a drastic measure that even prompted complaints in the newspapers. Life insurance and the interest it earned had been viewed as stable investments for Germans who remembered the hyperinflation that followed World War I. With the Axis defeat imminent, US intelligence officials focused greater attention on ways the Nazis would try to use insurance to hide and launder their assets so they could be used to rebuild the war machine. It's a task that continues today. A commission headed by former secretary of state Lawrence S. Eagleburger is investigating whether five mostly German-owned insurance companies operating today ever paid off all the life-insurance policies they sold to Jews, a target market as the Nazis were ascendant. After the war, the US Treasury Department wanted to keep harsh economic restrictions on the defeated Axis powers, but the State Department prevailed, and German and Japanese insurance industries resumed operations after the war. Today, for example, Munich Re and Swiss Re are, once again, the two biggest insurance wholesalers in the world. Rushin was promoted to the X-2 branch in Washington after his London mission and then returned to Home Insurance after the war. He retired from the company, which eventually was crushed by asbestos claims from cancer victims in the 1970s. Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became American International Group, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in secrecy. Starr died in 1968, but his empire endures. American International Group is the biggest foreign insurance company in Japan, earning $40 billion last year. This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 10/15/2000. � Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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