Cornelius Vander Starr

Starr was born to parents of Dutch ancestry. His father was a railroad engineer. The Special prosecutor Ken Starr (1946 – 2022) was his grand nephew. Starr attended University of California, Berkeley from 1910 to 1911 before dropping out and returning to his hometown of Fort Bragg, California.

He joined the U.S. Army in 1918 but was never deployed overseas because World War I had ended. He joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a clerk in Yokohama, Japan. Later that year, he traveled to Shanghai where he worked for several insurance businesses.

In 1919 he founded what was then known as American Asiatic Underwriters (later American International Underwriters) in Shanghai, China, a global insurance and investment organization. After Japan invaded China in 1939, he moved his operation to New York to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. During World War II Starr worked for the OSS, in 1943 he established the OSS insurance intelligence unit with William "Wild Bill" Donovan and served as the chief operative behind former U.S. Army Air Force officer Claire L. Chennault.

Chennault is best known for coordinating the OSS-bankrolled American Volunteer Group (better known as the "Flying Tigers") to bring the fight to the Japanese without a declaration of war and return Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to dominance in China. Starr and the OSS later backed Chiang over Communist leader Mao Zedong.

In 2000, war correspondent and author Mark Fritz wrote in the article entitled The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men for the Los Angeles Times:

They 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 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.

After World War II, Starr hired O.S.S. captain Duncan Lee, a lawyer, who became the long-term general counsel of AIG.

AIG left China in early 1949, as Mao led the advance of the Communist People's Liberation Army on Shanghai, and Starr moved the company headquarters to its current home in New York City. AIG was the world's largest insurance company, and as of 2021 remains unchallenged in that respect.