The truth shall make you free: Catholicism and the CIA (books review)

by GREG BARNHISEL

On his first day in office, the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump came to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency to give what most mainstream news outlets described as an “unconventional” speech, one intended to reassure the spy agency of his support but that “veered off course to attack the ‘dishonest media.’”

Some CIA staff in the audience feasted on Trump’s red meat. Others, though, complained the speech was inappropriate given its venue: in front of the CIA Memorial Wall, with its stars representing 137 officers killed in the line of duty. Former Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan issued a statement saying that he was “deeply saddened and angered at Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement.”

What was also notable was the almost universally reverent tone used to describe this wall: it is a “shrine,” a “sanctuary” commemorating those who “sacrificed” for the nation, a place to which one makes a “pilgrimage.” By crapping on this sanctimony, Trump performed (if only inadvertently) the service of highlighting how the mainstream news media is willing to extend its reverence for the military to spies as well.

The intrusion of sanctified rhetoric into discussions of espionage might seem jarring. But as two recent books on the CIA show, religion — in particular, Roman Catholicism — colored the Agency from its earliest days to its greatest crisis, the spectacular 1970s revelations that it had tricked and lied to the public.

In his Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors, Michael Graziano goes back to the CIA’s predecessor agency, the World War II–era Office of Strategic Services, to look at how Catholicism “became the model through which the intelligence community could understand and manipulate other world religions,” and thus how its flawed understanding of Catholicism led to some of its greatest debacles, including the failure to see the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Jonathan Stevenson, on the other hand, focuses not on the institution but on a person: the Agency’s most reviled turncoat, Philip Agee, whose faith in part spurred him to repudiate his former employer and, for decades, crusade against US foreign policy and seek to destroy the CIA. Taken as two prongs of a thesis, these books argue that an overly simple conception of Catholicism, later taken to be congruent with all religions, led to many of the Agency’s blunders; while a deeply felt, liberation theology–influenced Catholicism brought about the worst damage to its public image and, in some cases, even its operations.

It wasn’t that the Agency itself was a redoubt of Catholicism, even though its founder, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Director “Wild Bill” Donovan, was an Irish Catholic from Buffalo. Quite the opposite: Ivy League WASPs dominated the early Agency, while the older FBI was the middle- and working-class Catholic half of the intelligence dyad. The FBI resented how aristocratic CIA officers condescended to the “Fordham Catholics” of J. Edgar Hoover’s agency.

Instead, Graziano argues, the CIA’s early approach to intelligence-gathering drew upon a burgeoning scholarly field of the 1940s and 1950s: the academic and anthropological study of “world religions,” which was developing symbiotically with the area studies that American universities and foundations were underwriting to prepare the United States for world leadership. The OSS was full of academics such as Yale’s Norman Holmes Pearson (whose biography I am currently writing) and the Harvard Americanist Perry Miller, whose 1956 study of the Puritans, Errand into the Wilderness, lends Graziano’s book its title.

The first such institution to be studied was the Vatican itself, which was, in Graziano’s words, “foreign enough to be worthy of study but familiar enough to be interpretable.” Operating under the cover of the deep persuasive power of the Church, the OSS mobilized European populations against their Nazi (and later Soviet) occupiers. The agency also collaborated with the Catholic International Press, through Belgian priest Felix Morlion, in what it called “Operation Pilgrim’s Progress.”

American spies sincerely and naïvely saw themselves in league with the priests because “American analysts often assumed that Catholic interests — and the Vatican’s more specifically — squared neatly with US aims.” In fact, once the Agency began encountering other world religions over the course of the Cold War — Shintoism in Japan, Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and especially Islam in Iran — it took for granted that “the United States and the world’s religions [were] natural allies” in the struggle against atheistic communism. They were not always right, especially in Iran, where they suspected communism, not Islam, was the force trying to topple the Shah.

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