Editing American International Group (AIG) (section)

===From Paul Williams book===
"Charles Jocelyn Hambro of the Hambros Bank. The firm, which was registered in Panama, employed mob figure Sonny Fassoulis, an international arms dealer, to provide "services" to General Chiang's National Army. The primary function of the WCC ([[World Commerce Corporation]]) was to buy and sell surplus US weapons and munitions to foreign underworld groups, including the KMT and the Italian Mafias. 

In exchange for the arms, the KMT provided the opium required to create the CIA as the US postwar intelligence agency. The opium was flown from the mountains of Burma and Laos by Civil Air Transport to Bangkok, where the planes were emptied and loaded with for the return flight to the poppy fields. In Bangkok, General Phao Sriyanonda, director general of Thailand's national police, employed his officers to load the product on the freighters of a mysterious shipping company called Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front run by Paul Helliwell, who now served at the Burmese consulate in Miami." 

In 1954, British customs in Singapore stated that Bangkok had become the major center for opium trafficking in Southeast Asia. The drug trade became so lucrative that Thailand abandoned the anti-opium campaign it had launched in 1948. 

General Phao developed a close friendship with Donovan, who had been appointed US ambassador to Thailand. Indeed, Wild Bill became so enthralled with Phao that he nominated the Thai general for a Legion of Merit award. Although he did not win the award, Phao, by 1953, had received $35 million in aid from the CIA, including gifts of several naval vessels and cargo planes used to transport drugs to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Marseilles. These were given with the expectation that the KMT would launch guerrilla raids into China. 

The WCC and Sea Supply, like Civil Air Transport (CAT), emerged from a subculture within the intelligence community of extremely wealthy and well-connected lawyers and businessmen who, at the time, were not part of any official government agency. This subculture would eventually give rise to a network of banks (including the Bank of Credit and Commerce International) and proprietary businesses (including the American International Group of C. V. Starr), which were created to support and conceal the flow of money from the heroin trade."