Rushin was able to gather material that was even in demand by the British. It ranged from Chinese railway inspection reports to photos of the Mitsukoshi department store in downtown Tokyo to blueprints of the chemical company that made the poison gas Hitler used to kill Jews.
Rushin's biggest obstacle appeared to have been the war's own bureaucracy. "I don't have but two legs, no one to help and the job of reproducing is terrific," he complained in a March 1944 memo. "I have material now which has been in the hands of reproduction for six weeks."
Insurance unit spies also came across bits of juicy data that had nothing to do with insurance. They passed along news, for example, that the desperate Nazis had banned the "mourning ribbons" worn by families of the growing numbers of dead. They found a German newspaper obituary of "a collaborator" killed in a "cowardly" attempt by some of Hitler's men to blow up der Fuehrer.
When the tide of the war began to turn and German insurers began losing money, the U.S. insurance agents learned that Nazi insurers were pleading for peace. A source in Stockholm revealed in late 1943 that insurers 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 still remembered the hyperinflation that followed World War I.
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. It's a task that continues today.
Panel Investigates Life Insurance Claims
A commission headed by former U.S. 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.
The insurance unit's reports gave at least one chilling glimpse of how Jewish policies were processed: "You might be interested in the enclosed Dutch Decree of June 11, 1943 ordering the reporting and liquidating of all insurance policies on behalf of the Jews. . . ."
The newly released OSS files show just how hard it is to track a paper trail through 50 years of mergers, acquisitions, secret deals and silent partnerships. The files show that American insurance premiums almost certainly wound up in Nazi banks, and German brokers were secretly covering London establishments under attack by the Luftwaffe.
"It makes you wonder if a German insurer insuring an American ship went to the German military and said: 'Don't bomb this ship!' " Bradsher said.
Axis Insurance Firms Resumed After the War
Though the Treasury Department wanted to keep harsh economic restrictions on the defeated Axis powers, 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. In the end, Home itself didn't have enough insurance to cover its losses.
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.
Though the OSS files shed light on a little-known operation, there is no good way to fully read the moods and motivations of the people who were part of it. By all accounts, though, Rushin was proud of his spy service.
"He was delighted to talk about this," said Naftali, who talked with Rushin before he died. "He was in his 80s. I was lucky. This latest release [of documents] comes too late. These people are no longer alive."
