Interesting Old Ruppert Article on AIG

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/part_2.html

oops sorry, thought I was in the Political conspiracies section.

Edited September 19, 2008 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Actually, rereading this article which I recall reading when it originally came out, I realize that it could have gone in the JFK section also

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Deconstructing AIG

The seemingly mundane insurance business is, in fact, one of the primary weapons of intelligence gathering around the world. And the founder of AIG, Cornelius Starr, was an architect of its use in World War II. Consider these

quotes from a September 22, 2000 story by Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Fritz entitled, "The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men."

"COLLEGE PARK, Md.ÑThey knew which factories to burn, which bridges to blow up, which cargo ships could be sunk in good conscience. They had pothole counts for roads used for invasion and head counts for city blocks marked for incineration.

"They werenÕt 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 HitlerÕs Third Reich.

"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 enemyÕs 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. 'They used insurance information as a weapon of war,' said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records. That insurance information was critical to Allied strategists, who were seeking to cripple the enemyÕs industrial base and batter morale by burning citiesÉ

"Germany had 45% of the worldwide wholesale insurance industry before the war began and managed to actually 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 they were reinsuring [emphasis, mine]É

"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. He was forced to move his operation to New York in 1939, when Japan invaded China. In the early years of the war, the German insurance industry expanded its business as it conquered continental Europe. Nazi insurance brokers who traveled with combat troops during invasions also scoured local insurance files for strategic dataÉ"

On the special value of reinsurance as a vehicle for intelligence gathering Fritz wrote:

"Such convoluted business dealings were traced largely through the work of Ernest Stiefel, a member of the intelligence unit who diagrammed the way insurance companies pooled their risks, invested in and insured each other and, as a result, willfully or witlessly shared data about nations at war. 'Stiefel mapped the entire system, said [Timothy] Naftali, a historian at the University of VirginiaÕs Miller Center of Public Affairs. "Each time I take a piece of your risk, youÕve got to give me information. I am not going to reinsure your company unless you give me all the documents. ThatÕs great intelligence informationÉ"

Later in the story Fritz confirmed the value of reinsurance as a vehicle for money laundering:

"With the Axis defeat imminent, U.S. 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..."

And how did Starr benefit from his service? Fritz writes:

"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.

Starr died in 1968, but his empire endures. AIG is the biggest foreign insurance company in Japan. More than a third of its $40 billion in revenue last year came from the Far East theater that Starr helped carpet bomb and liberate.

"In The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA (Basic Books, 1983) author Bradley F. Smith shed more light on Cornelius Starr and the OSS.

"It [a secret intelligence operation in China] was formed in April 1942, when [bill] Donovan persuaded British insurance magnate C.V. Starr to let C.O.I. (Covert Operations Intelligence) use his commercial and insurance connections in occupied China and Formosa to create a deep cover intelligence network. Although the State Department was nervous about the operation, Donovan went ahead and, with the cooperation of the U.S. Army, bypassed the diplomats in operating the communications system. Starr's people handled their own internal communication, then turned over their intelligence findings to [General Richard] Stillwell's headquarters for dispatch to the U.S. Starr, who was residing in the U.S. at the time, provided these services to the Allied cause. Later Starr became disgusted with what he considered Donovan's inefficiency and transferred his services to the British S.I.S. But the Starr-Donovan connection worked in China at least until the winter of 1943-44.

"The establishment of the Starr intelligence network, an operation so secret that it even escaped the attention of Chiang's [Kai Shek] security police (and of historians heretofore), was a major accomplishment for an intelligence operation barely six months old" [p.133]

Drug Connections

The War Conspiracy (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972) by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. of UC Berkeley is a book few Americans have seen. The compelling and meticulously documented history of the creation of the Vietnam War was rushed from bookstores and shelves almost as soon as it was published. Scott, author of Deep Politics and the Assassination of JFK, The Iran-Contra Connection and Cocaine Politics is an expert on the interface between covert operations and the international drug trade. In Chapter Six of The War Conspiracy, entitled "Opium, the China Lobby, and the CIA," Scott traces the connections between drug trafficking in Southeast Asia and American intelligence operations. There are detailed references to C.V. Starr and connections with some figures, like CIA veteran Paul Helliwell, who have been irrevocably and blatantly tied to the drug trade. Those connections also lead directly into the so-called "China Lobby" and firms identified as either CIA proprietaries or "affiliates" such as Sea Supply, Inc. (run by Helliwell), Civil Air Transport (CAT), a CIA proprietary, Civil Air Transport Co., Ltd. (CATCL) -- a separate firm not owned by but affiliated with the CIA through CAT-- and Air America, an evolution of Civil Air Transport. In 1957 the Airdale Corporation which owned 100 per cent of Air America changed its name to Pacific Corp. In 1976 CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston testified before the Senate's Church Committee looking into intelligence abuses about CIA Air operations. When asked what the one single holding company, above all others, was at the top of CIA proprietary and contract air operations, he identified Pacific Corporation. According to published reports, Houston also testified that the CIA also had interests in investment and insurance companies.

Pacific Corp -- which one source has told me is currently insured by AIG -- and the CIA have, in the 1990s, been connected with the "laundering" of some 28 C-130 military transport aircraft into the hands of private, forest fire, air tanker contractors in the U.S. Subsequently, many of those C-130s turned up all over the world. Some were directly involved in drug trafficking and one in particular, operated by Aero-Postale de Mexico, was seized with a billion dollars in cocaine aboard in Mexico City in 1996. [see FTW, Vol I, No 10 - Dec, 1998]

A key figure in the post-war operations was lawyer Tommy Corcoran, a legendary "fixer" in the Roosevelt Administration, who went on to represent Nationalist Chinese financial interests after the Communists took power in 1949. Corcoran and Helliwell worked closely together in Asia. One of the critical and well-documented U.S. responses to the Communist takeover was to fund remnants of the Chinese Nationalist army -- who had fled into Burma, Thailand and Laos -- with opium. Much of that money, along with the drugs, found its way into the U.S. As noted by writers like the late Jonathan Kwitny of The Wall Street Journal in The Crimes of Patriots (Penguin, 1987) and by Professor Alfred McCoy of the University of Wisconsin in The Politics of Heroin (1972, 1991, Lawrence Hill Books), Helliwell paid the troops using five-pound "sticky" bars of heroin. Helliwell later went on to head Castle Bank and Trust in Florida and the Bahamas and then was heavily involved with The Nugan Hand Bank in Australia and the U.S. Both banks have been heavily linked in official investigations to both drug trafficking and money laundering while also moving money for the CIA.

In The War Conspiracy Scott writes:

"For it is a striking fact that the law firm of Tommy Corcoran, the Washington lawyer for CATCL and [China Lobbyist] T.V. Soong, had its own links to the interlocking worlds of the China Lobby and of organized crime. His partner W.S. Youngman joined the board of U.S. Life and other insurance companies, controlled by C.V. Starr (OSS China) with the help of Philippine and other Asian capital. Youngman's fellow-directors of Starr's companies have included John S. Woodbridge of Pan Am, Francis F. Randolph of J. and W. Seligman, W. Palmer Dixon of Loeb Rhoades, Charles Edison of the postwar China Lobby, and Alfred B. Jones of the Nationalist Chinese government's registered agency, the Universal Trading Corporation. The [senate] McClellan Committee heard that in 1950 U.S. Life [later part of AIG] (with Edison as a director) and a much smaller company (Union Casualty of New York) were allotted a major Teamsters insurance contract, after a lower bid from a larger and safer company had been rejected, [Jimmy] Hoffa was accused by a fellow trustee, testifying under oath before another committee, of intervening on behalf of US Life and Union Casualty, whose agents were Hoffa's close business associates Paul and Allen DorfmanÉ

"We find the same network linking CIA proprietaries, war lobbies, and organized crime, when we turn our attention from CAT to the other identified supporter of opium activities, Sea Supply, Inc. Sea Supply, Inc. was organized in Miami, Florida, where its counsel, Paul E. Helliwell, doubled after 1951 as the counsel for C.V. Starr insurance interests, and also as the Thai consul in Miami..."

The historical connections to CIA covert or proprietary air operations are interesting in light of the fact that AIG proudly announces in its 2000 annual report that with 494 full-sized jets -- 89 of which it manages itself -- it owns "the world's most modern fleet of aircraft." AIG customers include major airlines and a number of air transport companies. AIG also reported that in 2000 it leased additional aircraft "to a number of established customers" in South America.

CIA proprietary ownership or interest in companies is very difficult to detect. But, it has been proven by writers like Scott and many other researchers who combed through the paperwork that surfaced during the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s, where Air America assets were laundered into companies like Southern Air Transport and Evergreen Air. The single largest stockholder in AIG, the Starr International Company (SICO), holds 13.62% of AIG stock. Aside from knowing that Maurice Greenberg owns 21.86% of SICO (source, SEC) we may never be able to find out who, or what, owns the rest.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

Deconstructing AIG

The single largest stockholder in AIG, the Starr International Company (SICO), holds 13.62% of AIG stock. Aside from knowing that Maurice Greenberg owns 21.86% of SICO (source, SEC) we may never be able to find out who, or what, owns the rest.

Whoever they are, they just lost their shirts, and Uncle Sam now owns nearly everything.

Thank you for posting this very Interesting article

[William Kelly]

Deconstructing AIG

The single largest stockholder in AIG, the Starr International Company (SICO), holds 13.62% of AIG stock. Aside from knowing that Maurice Greenberg owns 21.86% of SICO (source, SEC) we may never be able to find out who, or what, owns the rest.

Whoever they are, they just lost their shirts, and Uncle Sam now owns nearly everything.

Thank you for posting this very Interesting article

Yea,

Thanks for calling our attention to that article Nate.

Ruppert wrote that?

The whole OSS/Starr/AIG connection is fascinating, and why should we be surprised?

I mean Loyds ship insurers probably had/have the best intelligence network you could possibly have for a century or more.

And its not off topic. Wasn't Oswald's father in the insurance business? And Ruth Paine's old man?

BK

[Ron Ecker]

This is also relevant to 9/11. If controlled demolition was used at the WTC, as many truthers believe, and if the official reports of the destruction there are thus not worth the paper they were written on, the insurance industry would seemingly not have much trouble figuring it out. Yet the insurers didn't even raise the possibility of insurance fraud as they paid through the nose for those buildings. Does the insurers' silence argue against CD, or could it be more a case of "your money or your life"?

[William Kelly]

This is also relevant to 9/11. If controlled demolition was used at the WTC, as many truthers believe, and if the official reports of the destruction there are thus not worth the paper they were written on, the insurance industry would seemingly not have much trouble figuring it out. Yet the insurers didn't even raise the possibility of insurance fraud as they paid through the nose for those buildings. Does the insurers' silence argue against CD, or could it be more a case of "your money or your life"?

Tink Thompson was one of the investigators paid to review some of the events of 9/11, ie. Building 7 colapase, and I believe he was hired by the insurance companies.

BK

[Robert Howard]

This is also relevant to 9/11. If controlled demolition was used at the WTC, as many truthers believe, and if the official reports of the destruction there are thus not worth the paper they were written on, the insurance industry would seemingly not have much trouble figuring it out. Yet the insurers didn't even raise the possibility of insurance fraud as they paid through the nose for those buildings. Does the insurers' silence argue against CD, or could it be more a case of "your money or your life"?

Tink Thompson was one of the investigators paid to review some of the events of 9/11, ie. Building 7 colapase, and I believe he was hired by the insurance companies.

BK

If today had a title, it might be Another episode in the Fourth Turning.....

[http://books.google.com/books?id=Fpv9AAAACAAJ&dq=The+Fourth+Turning]

Anyway, Election 2008 certainly seems to exceed anything that has happened in American Presidential Politics when it comes to political surrealism; Bob Dylan, waxing eloquently about the Rosenberg's once wrote......Eisenhower was President/Senator Joe was King/Long as you didn't say nothin/You could say anything/.....Bob Dylan "Julius & Ethel"

George Santanya probably felt like nobody ever listens

.....author Sam Roberts wrote a book called The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to The Electric Chair

Those familiar with the JFK assassination saga, would recognize many of the names, that pop up here and there, both of people and places...The FBI's Alan Belmont, the Rosenberg's, it evokes an image of Lee Oswald being handed a pamphlet in New York as a youth...., the McCarthy Hearings, and a younger Robert Morriss.......A interesting passage from the book reads....

......Finally David said, he had evolved into a relavist: "I can never believe in absolutism again. . . .Never can I see things in pure black and white again. Things are not that simple." Members of the [parole] board were less conflicted. On April 2, [1956] they voted unanimously to deny parole. The Greenglasses were devastated. But David rallied sufficiently to testify in Washington a few weeks later before a closed-door session of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. David was billed as a star witness on Communist subversion (although later the committees counsel, Robert Morriss, who emerged as his most persistent champion of parole, referred to him as merely "a fringe character in atomic thefts" and a "supernumerary."........

Anyone remember Ruth Paine's testimony, in the Big Easy where the subject turned towards Insurance Companies, and one of her family members....?

The point being, if there is one, is there are always things happening in Washington, that none of us, are cognizant of, us being the masses, the Election of 1932 is, in my mind the closest analogy to how those who hunger for sanity can contrast the Election of 2008......See the parallels.......One of the most corrupt Republican Administrations of the century, Herbert Hoover's, The Teapot-Dome scandal, a country beset by a crisis of epic proportions, massive unemployment, on the heels of the Crash of 1929.

After FDR's first 100 days in the White House, the banking collapse was stabilized, by those dreaded New Deal bankers, [does anyone remember the McCarthy Era and George Lincoln Rockwell, besides George Clooney?] Even though it wasn't until World War II that the economy recovered, and of course, no-one remembers Roosevelt was not only elected, but re-elected in 1936, 1940 and 1944, when he died ALL the American people mourned him deeply. His legacy has been, at least in America, shredded by the political right, by virtue of the fact he allied the United States, on the side of the Soviet Union. At times, it seems as if there is a realpolitik, that is almost sorry we did not ally ourselves with the National Socialists.

Much like every Democratic President that has followed Roosevelt...Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton are maligned by today's right as failures or borderline failures, while they were in many ways, the only President's that we KNEW, gave a damn about the disenfranchised, and the least among us. We are being conditioned to believe the Democrats cannot govern, and that maybe the most salient reality regarding the upcoming election.....

January 20, 2009 - The End of an Error

Edited September 19, 2008 by Robert Howard

[Len Colby]

This is also relevant to 9/11. If controlled demolition was used at the WTC, as many truthers believe, and if the official reports of the destruction there are thus not worth the paper they were written on, the insurance industry would seemingly not have much trouble figuring it out. Yet the insurers didn't even raise the possibility of insurance fraud as they paid through the nose for those buildings. Does the insurers' silence argue against CD, or could it be more a case of "your money or your life"?

Tink Thompson was one of the investigators paid to review some of the events of 9/11, ie. Building 7 colapase, and I believe he was hired by the insurance companies.

BK

Indeed he, I and others have brought up the lack off objections from insurance companies as an indicator of the non-case for CD. He said his clients would love evidence that it were true

As for the article I agree it was interesting thanks for posting it Nate, but Mark Fritz the LA Times reporter derves much more of the credit than Ruppert. I'd take his claims with oceans of salt.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Yes I know you would Len. I'm sure that that has nothing at all to do with the fact that he does not back the government's

abortive narrative of what happened on 9/11

If only your government press releases were subject to the same saline solutions.

[Ron Ecker]

Indeed he, I and others have brought up the lack off objections from insurance companies as an indicator of the non-case for CD. He said his clients would love evidence that it were true

I'm sure they might say that. But if (and it's a big if) CD was involved, I question whether insurance companies, if they knew it, would be willing to take on the perpetrators. Seeing what they did on 9/11, I imagine that such perpetrators would find it easy to put any particular insurance company out of business with some well-chosen catastrophic losses (not to mention putting some insurance company CEOs "out of business"). So it's understandable if insurers would find it preferable to clam up and pay up.

[Len Colby]

Yes I know you would Len. I'm sure that that has nothing at all to do with the fact that he does not back the government's

abortive narrative of what happened on 9/11

If only your government press releases were subject to the same saline solutions.

No, the problem with Ruppert is that the man is an unreliable loon. When one actually checks his sources its not uncommon to find they have been misinterpreted or taken out of context. He got kicked off the LAPD for being crazy, he claims it was because he uncovered CIA drug trafficking but produced no evidence in support of such a claim. He even hosts (or hosted) a 2 part newspaper article on his site which he thinks proves his case but in which people close to him say he went nuts.

[Linda Minor]

Yes I know you would Len. I'm sure that that has nothing at all to do with the fact that he does not back the government's

abortive narrative of what happened on 9/11

If only your government press releases were subject to the same saline solutions.

No, the problem with Ruppert is that the man is an unreliable loon. When one actually checks his sources its not uncommon to find they have been misinterpreted or taken out of context. He got kicked off the LAPD for being crazy, he claims it was because he uncovered CIA drug trafficking but produced no evidence in support of such a claim. He even hosts (or hosted) a 2 part newspaper article on his site which he thinks proves his case but in which people close to him say he went nuts.

Not to defend Ruppert, but he does cite sources, which is much more than Len has does in his critique of him. Looks like a lot of name-calling and innuendo here to me: attacking the messenger instead of the message?

[Len Colby]

Yes I know you would Len. I'm sure that that has nothing at all to do with the fact that he does not back the government's

abortive narrative of what happened on 9/11

If only your government press releases were subject to the same saline solutions.

No, the problem with Ruppert is that the man is an unreliable loon. When one actually checks his sources its not uncommon to find they have been misinterpreted or taken out of context. He got kicked off the LAPD for being crazy, he claims it was because he uncovered CIA drug trafficking but produced no evidence in support of such a claim. He even hosts (or hosted) a 2 part newspaper article on his site which he thinks proves his case but in which people close to him say he went nuts.

Not to defend Ruppert, but he does cite sources, which is much more than Len has does in his critique of him. Looks like a lot of name-calling and innuendo here to me: attacking the messenger instead of the message?

Ruppert has been reasonably upfront about his psychiatric problems at the end of his LAPD career. They are mentioned in the two part LA Herald Examiner article about him linked from the page linked below. They are also mentioned in his “resignation letter” which include comments from the department to the effect that he had committed himself to "psychiatric care" and his readmission was not recommended until he gone through “a thorough psychiatric examination”. He seems to think the newspaper articles reflect well on him, why is beyond me, people close to him said they thought he was imagining things. In his mind they “confirmed that Ruppert had stumbled on illegal covert operations” but I can’t figure out what part of them he thinks did that.

As for his “proof” of CIA involvement in drug trafficking I’ve yet to see him offer any.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/about.shtml

Resignation letter http://www.fromthewilderness.com/mcr_lapd/resignation_1.gif

[J. Raymond Carroll]

The explosion of AIG reminds me of Nicholas Leeson and the collapse of Berings Bank.

Instead of one deluded individual, we have a conspiracy of self-deluded people who thought they had invented a machine for printing FREE MONEY. If this New York Times story is accurate, it seems that greedy old man Greenberg himself was involved in this scheme, though the numbers seem to have gotten much bigger after Greenberg was ousted by Eliot Spitzer.

In the case of A.I.G., the virus exploded from a freewheeling little 377-person unit in London, and flourished in a climate of opulent pay, lax oversight and blind faith in financial risk models. It nearly decimated one of the world’s most admired companies, a seemingly sturdy insurer with a trillion-dollar balance sheet, 116,000 employees and operations in 130 countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html?hp