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Just who owned Boston Insurance was a closely guarded secret even after 1997, when Delaware-based and publicly held UnumProvident bought it from a group of private shareholders. An UnumProvident spokeswoman said the US insurer didn't know the identities of the Boston Insurance shareholders.

A former top executive of the Bank of Boston's Buenos Aires branch, who is also a relative of one of the men on the OSS list of Boston Insurance directors, said bank executives were among the stockholders of Boston Insurance. He spoke only on condition that he not be further identified.

Rosario Maria Gilligan, human resources director of Boston Insurance Co. -- known in Spanish as Boston Compania Argentina de Seguros -- said Boston Insurance was founded in 1925 by First National Bank of Boston directors. "It wasn't owned by the Bank of Boston; it was members of the board of directors, but not the bank itself," said Gilligan, speaking through a translator. [In Argentina and Brazil, the bank was commonly called Bank of Boston for many years before First National opted to officially adopt that name in 1983].

Gilligan and her supervisor, Guillermo Delaney, said in subsequent interviews that while Boston Insurance was founded by First National Bank of Boston directors, whom they declined to name, the directors were not shareholders. They said the firm was actually owned by the American Foreign Insurance Association, a trade group that represented scores of US insurance companies that had not yet opened branches in various countries. Delaney added: "BankBoston requested that the company be created, but they were never shareholders." He declined to elaborate.

Boston Insurance Co.'s Web site, while not specifying its links to the bank, says: "During its beginnings, the company had a close relationship with . . . the First National Bank of Boston and functioned in the central headquarters of the bank until 1948 when it moved to its own offices."

Argentina was both a big part of First National's globalization strategy, and a backwater marketplace for Axis countries to keep money flowing into the Reich war machine. So tight was the American expatriate community that the US Consul General in Buenos Aires, Henry H. Morgan, had an office in the building the bank owned, as well as a loan from the bank. And when the State Department tried to force Morgan into retirement in 1925, First National President Daniel Wing wrote a letter to Washington in protest. Two years later, the bank's Boston headquarters sought to convince the State Department not to seek cheaper quarters elsewhere in Buenos Aires.

Founded in 1784 initially to finance Boston's merchant trade with China, the First National Bank of Boston was long one of the dominant financial institutions in Latin America. It was the first US bank to operate there, and opened its maiden office in Argentina in 1917. The bank's South American roots are so deep that branches in the region retain the "BankBoston" moniker today -- despite the Fleet acquisition. "We are the second largest bank in Argentina," said Gibbs.

BankBoston took a postwar interest in the Holocaust, opening a Jewish cultural center in Brazil and making one of the largest contributions, $100,000, to the New England Holocaust Memorial.

In 1998, BankBoston acquired the Argentine affiliate of Germany's Deutsche Bank AG, which assured BankBoston that none of its assets had come from slave labor or Holocaust victims.

Buenos Aires freelancer Sophie Arie and Richard Pennington and Diego Ribadeneira of the Globe staff provided research assistance for this article.