God’s Spooks: Religion, Spying, and the Cold War

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

—John 8:32, inscribed on the wall at CIA headquarters, Langley, VA

 

In the early years of World War II, the U.S. State Department asked all American personnel living near enemy lines in China to return home. Baptist missionary John Birch refused to leave. God, he believed, wanted him in Asia. For years Birch had worked with local Chinese communities. He knew their language, their customs, and the layout of their land. He soon put this knowledge to work—not just for God but for Uncle Sam. In 1942 his life took a dramatic turn when a squadron of bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle crashed in the Chinese countryside. The American airmen had taken off from a carrier in the Pacific, dropped bombs on Tokyo, and then flown toward safety in China, where they parachuted from their planes as their fuel supplies ran out. When Birch received word of the raid and subsequent crash, he rendezvoused with the soldiers and helped them navigate through enemy lines and to freedom.

Birch’s performance impressed the Army and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They saw in Birch a loyal foot soldier who knew the Chinese language and understood the geography and politics of the region. They put him to work, baptizing him in the waters of covert operations. During and immediately after the war Birch provided the OSS with intelligence on Chinese communism while still fronting as a missionary. He was eventually captured by communists and killed, becoming the first “martyr” of the Cold War. He later became the inspiration for Robert Welch’s extreme right-wing, anti-communist John Birch Society. Birch’s work for the government revealed that religious activists could make extremely valuable contributions to American intelligence services. But his death also demonstrated the potential consequences of mixing faith with work for the U.S. government.

What follows investigates the complicated relationship between the CIA and religion. Since its inception, the CIA has used missionaries and other religious activists for intelligence and espionage work; it has used religion as an effective propaganda tool, and its agents have even posed as clergy. CIA agents and religious activists managed to keep their partnerships mostly hidden until the 1970s. But in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, numerous journalists and then Congress began scrutinizing the agency more closely. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employing missionaries to further its agenda and that some religious activists were receiving substantial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and religious activists have long collaborated to achieve numerous policy goals.

In recent years, historians of religion have worked to better embed their narratives in the rich and complex historical contexts in which their subjects acted, linking issues of faith and belief to the ebbs and flows of particular environments. Historians Jon Butler, Paul Harvey, and Kevin Schultz have called for better integration of religion into more “mainstream” American history. The case of missionary-CIA collaboration answers that call by demonstrating how important it is for scholars to understand the many ways that religion functions in ostensibly nonreligious spheres. In the specific case of intelligence and espionage, religion had tangible impacts on American covert activities abroad. CIA-missionary relationships highlight underexplored intersections between religion and foreign policy; they expose in new ways the complicated nature of church-state collaboration; and they offer fresh insights into the many ways in which religion functions in nontraditional spheres.

At the same time, historians have much to learn by probing how and in what ways individuals and religious groups have benefited from their cooperation with the government. The State Department has often helped missionary groups expedite visas and gain entry into new regions of the world in return for their collaboration. Some government agencies have also provided humanitarian ministries with cash, food, and other supplies, subsidizing and supporting their work. Missionaries have received equally valuable, even if less tangible, benefits as well: many have found satisfaction in the conviction that in serving Uncle Sam, they were serving God. Despite the official disestablishment of religion, these partnerships illustrate how the state can serve as a historical actor, substantially aiding, or substantially undermining, a wide variety of missionary ventures.

Historians of American politics and foreign policy can also benefit from interrogating more closely the intersection of religion and covert operations. Religion has served as a popular propaganda tool for American spies for good reason. Policy makers have demonstrated by their actions that they believe that religion substantially influences individuals’ lives, impacts their decisions, and shapes their loyalties. Scholars should treat it equally seriously. In recent years, historians such as Andrew Preston, William Inboden, and others have demonstrated that religion did (and does) play an important, even if underacknowledged, role in foreign policy. Other scholars, such as Axel Schäfer, have explored the relationships between the state and various humanitarian and non-governmental organizations. By focusing on the case of CIA-missionary relations, this discussion adds another dimension to the important topic of public-private, church-state relations by highlighting important connections between the worlds of grassroots religious activists and American foreign policy.

To make these arguments, this discussion examines the CIA’s historic uses of religion, the controversy that such uses inspired in the 1970s, and, finally, the resolution of the missionary controversy, which was really no resolution at all. Religion has been much more fundamental to the mission of the CIA and to U.S. interventions abroad than historians have previously acknowledged, illustrating how closely entwined the United States’ mission to the world is with government leaders’ faith in the transformative power of religion to serve nationalist purposes. At the same time, various religious organizations have benefited in significant ways from their willingness to cooperate with the American government.

Just months before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dispatched General William “Wild Bill” Donovan to a basement office in the White House with an important assignment. The president wanted Donovan to draw up plans for a new intelligence agency. The result was the birth of the Coordinator of Information (COI), a new office charged with keeping the president abreast of the latest developments as war raged in Europe and Asia. After Pearl Harbor, the White House expanded Donovan’s mandate, recognizing that the nation needed a first-rate intelligence-gathering agency. Shortly thereafter, the COI changed names, becoming the OSS.

Donovan brought numerous prominent Americans to the OSS, including Allen Dulles, a well-connected attorney who had a passion for women, alcohol, and espionage. Serving as Donovan’s right-hand man, Dulles hired and recruited many of the initial leaders and agents of the OSS. He and Donovan particularly liked using missionaries for espionage work. The spymaster recognized that missionaries, more than just about any other group of Americans, had proven language skills, knew how to build the trust of local populations, and had mastered the various geographies of the regions in which they had worked. Dulles was right. American missionaries proved to be essential sources of intelligence during World War II.

Shortly after the war ended, President Truman abolished the OSS. But as the Cold War intensified, the president realized that the United States still needed an effective intelligence agency. In 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, which authorized the creation of the National Security Council and the CIA. The new agency had a broad mandate. Rather than simply serve as a research division for the president that could collect and analyze information from abroad, it acted relatively independently on the information it collected, seeking to change the course of world events. The agency’s vague mandate allowed it to function essentially as a clandestine paramilitary unit that to this day acts with little oversight.

Leaders of the new CIA quickly realized that religion could serve as a major weapon in the nation’s Cold War arsenal. In fact, the nation’s most popular religious leaders were making faith central to the fight against the Soviet Union. Evangelicals such as Billy Graham constantly preached the evils of communism and encouraged Americans to remain steadfast in their support of their country. Many mainline Protestants, following the lead of Christian realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, supported the efforts of the U.S. government to commit “lesser” evils for the sake of promoting freedom and democracy at home and abroad. Many Catholics also proved quite willing to support the nation’s Cold War crusade. Joseph McCarthy, the Kennedy brothers, William F. Buckley, Fulton Sheen, and Francis Spellman all demonstrated that powerful individuals in the church and in politics were ready and willing to join—if not lead—the American holy crusade against communism. As secretary of state, John Foster Dulles also ensured that religion would be a key component of American foreign policy. A Christian realist, he doggedly committed to eradicating communism. With his brother running the CIA in the 1950s, there was no doubt that religion would play a substantial role in the American Cold War arsenal. Nevertheless, not all religious leaders committed to fight. Numerous liberal Protestants, Catholic pacifists, and members of historic peace churches worried that taking a hard line against the U.S.S.R. was not the right approach.

At the same time that Truman and then Eisenhower encouraged Americans at home to revitalize their faith in the face of atheistic, communist aggression, the CIA encouraged religious revival abroad. A top- secret 1951 report made agency objectives clear. “The potentialities of religion as a cold war weapon against Communism are universally tremendous,” explained one intelligence analyst. “Our overall objective in seeking the use of religion as a cold war weapon should be simply the furtherance of world spiritual health; for the Communist threat could not exist in a spiritually healthy world.” The conviction that religion and communism could not coexist became a central component of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s.

To this end, the CIA worked closely with religious activists, missionaries, and the children of missionaries in many regions around the globe. Unfortunately, the CIA has classified most operations-related materials. But we know that in the Middle East, missionary kids such as diplomat and spy William Eddy proved particularly valuable in helping craft relationships with oil-rich kingdoms. The insights of such individuals into the foreign cultures in which they were raised proved invaluable to the U.S. government.

In Latin America it is even clearer that American clandestine services found religion to be an effective tool. Guatemala is one important site where the CIA’s faith in religion took shape. In the early 1950s, popular and charismatic president Jacobo Árbenz began a campaign for land reform, transferring thousands of acres of unused property from the hands of American corporations to local peasants. His actions directly threatened the United Fruit Company, one of the most powerful, well-connected U.S. corporations. The CIA launched a major campaign against Árbenz, linking him with communism and the Soviet Union. Religion became a centerpiece of the CIA’s extensive propaganda effort. The agency worked, as one policy directive explained, to “mobilize anti- communist activities of both Catholic Church dignitaries and of Catholic lay organizations and publications on a continuous and rapidly increasing scale.” To that end the CIA may have recruited Cardinal Francis Spellman to travel to Guatemala to encourage local prelates to issue a pastoral letter denouncing communism (and, indirectly, Árbenz).

But encouraging indigenous populations to fight communism in the name of religion was not all the CIA was up to. Perhaps agents’ most ingenious move was to create an “Organization of the Militant Godless.” American operatives fabricated a series of letters that claimed to be promoting a communist revolution in Guatemala for the sake of advancing atheism. The letters accused the Catholic Church of working on behalf of the United States and the Vatican. “We are determined,” the letter explained, “to take a more active hand in cutting down the nefarious influence of the Catholic Church in Guatemala.” The CIA sent the letters to those Guatemalans who “might be likely prospects for an atheist organization, such as intellectuals, students, and officials of the various communist front organizations.” The agency then “leaked” the letters to anti-Árbenz journalists, church leaders, and politicians. The multi-pronged effort worked beautifully. In June 1954, a small “army” led by rebel leader and American stooge Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala. Unwilling to take on the United States, Árbenz fled the country.

The CIA also made masterful use of religion in Chile, recognizing the value of employing foreign religious leaders and organizations to serve the U.S. political agenda. In what eventually became one of the most well-known stories of the CIA’s use of a religious activist, the agency allegedly paid Belgian priest Roger Vekemans millions of dollars to build a Catholic anti-communist movement in Chile. His movement helped replace the leftist government of Salvador Allende with the Christian Democratic Party’s Eduardo Frei Montalva.

The CIA also found religion to be a valuable tool in Vietnam. Rumors and speculation abound about the degree to which the agency employed religious activists on the ground. The most well-known example of CIA-activist collaboration involved Tom Dooley, a devout Catholic and medical doctor who worked with Vietnamese refugees and then established hospitals in Laos. While he was serving the local population, he was also helping the CIA keep tabs on popular sentiment in Laos and on North Vietnamese troop movements. Edward Lansdale, who led the early U.S. propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia, made religion—from fabricated astrological charts to an ad drive advising the North Vietnamese that the Virgin Mary was heading to the south—a key part of his effort to encourage the Vietnamese to resist communism. What impact, if any, these efforts had on the Vietnamese is still debated by scholars. But as the war escalated, more and more religious activists in Southeast Asia grew concerned. They feared that they were inadvertently becoming part of the U.S. government’s plan to win hearts and minds in Vietnam.

Well into the 1960s, the CIA had mostly managed to conceal its actions in Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, and the Middle East. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, however, the public’s confidence in the CIA began to wane. Journalists began looking more closely at the nation’s clandestine services. For years the CIA had been able to plant or quash stories in the U.S. media with the willful cooperation of editors and publishers. Those days were rapidly coming to an end. Meanwhile, a new generation of socially conscious, politically progressive activists went overseas to help organize some of the world’s poorest people. The more that missionaries and humanitarians became aware of the United States’ role in indirectly and sometimes directly undermining democratic processes abroad and supporting exploitative political regimes for the sake of profit, the less willing they were to ignore the actions of the CIA.

In 1966 the New York Times ran a major series on the CIA packed with revelations. Among them was the disclosure that deep cover agents routinely masqueraded “as businessmen, tourists, scholars, students, missionaries or charity workers.” A few liberal Protestant magazines took note of the piece. A writer in Christianity and Crisis, a publication launched by Niebuhr as a Christian realist alternative to the liberal Protestant and more pacifist Christian Century, acknowledged, “there are hints . . . that CIA agents have appeared in the guise of missionaries and that Christian groups have been used by the CIA.” The author doubted, however, that “even the most politically parochial and patriotic American working abroad for the Church would jeopardize the integrity of his commitment by serving the CIA directly.”

In 1974, however, missions leaders were confronted by startling new revelations. Journalists broke the story of the CIA’s manipulation of religion in Chile to undermine democratic elections. United Methodist leaders attacked President Gerald Ford for allowing the CIA to run rampant in Latin America and called for their denomination to disassociate from the CIA. The Jesuit magazine America insisted that missionaries should not be “undercut by their own government, especially when that government operates for purposes and with methods of which most of its citizens would disapprove.” While some missionaries had pledged their full-fledged support to the Cold War and benefited from their loyalty, others wanted to keep their distance from the government.

Congress was also taking note. In the aftermath of Watergate, American senators and representatives grew more aggressive in their oversight of various federal agencies. No longer willing or able to turn a blind eye, in 1975 the U.S. Senate launched a special eleven-member committee charged with investigating the CIA. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (aptly known as the “Church Committee” for its chair, Senator Frank Church of Idaho) interviewed 800 people and held 250 executive and 21 public hearings. The story that the committee eventually told was so damning that two of its members—Republicans John Tower and Barry Goldwater—refused to support the final report.

According to the Church Committee, the CIA had informed senators that the number of missionaries and clergy working for the agency at the time was minimal—“a total of 14 covert arrangements which involved direct operational use of 21 individuals.” The CIA paid most of these American missionaries to collect and provide intelligence. One person, however, helped preserve the “cover” of other agents. Most of the religious activists’ work, according to the CIA, was “directed at ‘competing’ with communism in the Third World.” In addition, the CIA funded the ministries of various groups deemed valuable for American intelligence purposes or for promoting the United States’ global anti-communist agenda. In other words, collaboration was a two-way street in which both sides had benefited.

The senators investigating the CIA did not approve of the agency’s actions. Religion, the Church Committee solemnly assured the public, was “inherently supra-national. Making operational use of U.S. religious groups for national purposes both violates their nature and undermines their bonds with kindred groups around the world.” The committee, however, made no inquiry into or criticism of the CIA’s use of non-American religious organizations or the agency’s manipulation of religion itself.

Although the CIA-religion revelation only garnered three pages in the Church Committee’s hundreds of pages of reports, the investigation fueled a controversy that had been growing for years. At the height of the Cold War, many Americans seemed willing to turn a blind eye to the actions of the CIA. But by the 1970s, things had changed. This story struck a powerful chord, revealing how torn many Protestants and Catholics were about how closely entwined their work in foreign fields was with the state.

Just months before the Senate decided to convene the Church Committee, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks published The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. It contained one brief sentence on religion, most likely lifted from the 1966 New York Times report, which eventually received substantial attention. “In addition to official cover,” the authors wrote, “the CIA sometimes puts officers under ‘deep cover’ as businessmen, students, newsmen, or missionaries.” In an interview about the book, Marks told a reporter that the CIA “has been heavily involved in church activities, religious activities. They’ve infiltrated the church and used the church or church groups as funding mechanisms. They solicit information from missionaries, try to hire missionaries.”

As the story gained steam, Marks claimed that in an informal survey of missionaries, 30 to 40 percent of those he contacted “either had a CIA-church connection story to tell or knew someone who did.” Marks then listed some examples of what he learned: that a Catholic bishop was working for the CIA in Vietnam; a missionary in India had been collecting information for the agency; a Protestant missionary in Bolivia sent the CIA regular reports about the communist party, labor unions, and farmers’ cooperatives; and another missionary in Bolivia regularly supplied the CIA with the names of suspected communists. Marks offered no evidence to support his allegations, and nobody ever questioned his claims. While his observations were almost certainly founded in some fact, they were so vague and unsubstantiated as to be almost worthless. Nevertheless, various religious news agencies publicized his allegations.

A story documenting Marks’s claims in the National Catholic Reporter helped generate more attention to the CIA’s relationship to religion. “The growing awareness that the CIA has infiltrated the churches has placed church leaders on the horns of a Watergate-like dilemma,” Richard L. Rashke keenly observed. “If they do not own up to their CIA church connections, they will be accused of a cover up; but if they tell what they know, they will further damage their credibility, shock the sensibilities of Americans, and expose innocent people to the threat of expulsion, imprisonment, or even torture and death.” As the controversy unfolded, the Washington Post, New York Times, and other papers began examining the CIA’s missionary tactics.

Americans expressed conflicting opinions about the revelations of religious activist-CIA partnerships. “The CIA holds nothing sacred including the sacred,” opined historian and columnist Garry Wills. “What we need, right now, is not so much a wall of separation between church and state but a wall between us and the CIA, to protect us from its imperial meddling.” Michael Novak disagreed. “I prefer a war fought through intelligence services to a war fought with atomic weapons.” He advised journalists and agency critics to back off and let the CIA do its business.

The leading Christian magazines weighed in as well. Editors had already been following the growing controversy over Vietnam and debating the issue of government support for humanitarian aid missions. So they were prepared to tackle the even more complex and controversial issue of CIA-missionary collaboration. Editors of the Catholic weekly America took a middle position, arguing that at times missionary-CIA collaborations, especially in the context of fighting communism, represented a positive good, but advising that church leaders should avoid the “tragic blunders” of the past. The liberal Protestant Christian Century ran a long piece by Gary MacEoin, an author and Catholic activist, about the damage the CIA had done to Latin American missionaries’ credibility. The evangelical magazine of record, Christianity Today, also covered the unfolding story. However the tone of its piece expressed indifference rather than outrage; evangelicals there had been more supportive of the war in Vietnam for longer than most of their mainline and Catholic counterparts. Since World War II, they had seen tremendous potential in working closely with the state to export Christianity, and they were less willing to criticize the government.

Nevertheless, religious leaders all understood how important the issue was. Missionaries working abroad were always vulnerable, and the increasing controversy did not help. In 1964 a rebel group in the Congo had killed missionary Paul Carlson, whom it accused of spying for the United States. By the early 1970s, missionaries were regularly suspected of working for the U.S. government. Combined with the growing power of anti-colonial and liberation movements in Latin America and Africa, missionary work was becoming increasingly dangerous.

Furthermore, the debate over CIA collaboration came in the context of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization, held in Lausanne, Switzerland. At this historic event organized by Billy Graham and others for the purpose of rethinking missions, religious leaders from the global South critiqued American missionaries’ assumptions about other cultures. They also demonstrated that the core of Christian power was quickly shifting away from the West. American religious leaders were taking note. Many sensed that they could no longer afford to continue business as usual. In order to do effective evangelism, they had to decouple the gospel from the American way of life.

Upon learning that the CIA had been using American religious activists for covert operations, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, an outspoken evangelical and Baptist, wrote Director William Colby to express his concerns. Colby, however, had no intention of restricting the agency’s use of missionaries. In many countries clergy, both indigenous and American, he explained, “play a significant role and can be of assistance to the United States through CIA with no reflection upon their integrity nor their mission.” He blamed the controversy on “sensational publicity” rather than the facts on the ground.

Unsatisfied with Colby’s response, Hatfield then turned to President Ford, claiming that CIA involvement with clergy, members of religious orders, and missionaries “tarnishes the image of the United States in foreign countries and prostitutes the church.” In allowing the CIA to use missionaries, he continued, “we pervert the church’s mission and create the view that the United States will resort to any means in pursuit of its particular interests.” He ended by asking the president to take executive action to stop the CIA from using religious activists for American espionage. Once again, the senator did not get the response he was hoping for. Not only did Ford refuse to stop the CIA, his aide made things worse by telling Hatfield that “many” clergymen were engaged in regular communication with the agency.

Hatfield then went public with his protest. He took to the floor of the Senate in late 1975 to denounce the CIA’s practices and the president’s refusal to discuss the issue. He claimed that church-state separation had been violated, adding, “In this country . . . the church is not an arm of the state, nor is the state the tool of the church. The first amendment and all our history . . . make that abundantly clear.” Having failed to convince the director and the president of the importance of classifying clergy as out-of-bounds for clandestine work, Hatfield introduced a new bill to outlaw federal intelligence agency engagement with religious activists “for the purpose of manipulating political events or collecting intelligence.” The legislation prohibited the National Security Agency, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency from paying “any member of the clergy or any employee or affiliate of a religious organization, association, or society for intelligence gathering or for any other participation in agency operations.” The bill also prohibited intelligence operatives from “soliciting or accepting the services” of religious activists.

Hatfield returned to the floor of the Senate again on February 5, 1976, to encourage legislators to act on his bill. He also inserted into the Congressional Record a series of letters protesting the CIA’s tactics from such theologically diverse American religious organizations as the National Council of Churches, the United Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the Maryknoll Fathers, and the Church of the Nazarene. Other groups protesting the CIA policy included the Mennonite Central Committee and World Vision International, an evangelical organization that had previously accepted CIA money through a front group.

In the wake of the CIA’s revelations, almost nobody thought that it was a good idea for Christian activists to work with the agency. For decades many Christians—though certainly not all—saw working with U.S. intelligence services as a worthwhile and patriotic duty. It also sometimes provided tangible benefits. But as Americans learned more and more about the agency’s actions in Chile, Guatemala, Cuba, and Vietnam, the CIA no longer looked like the right hand of a godly Uncle Sam, but instead like it might be an exploitative, manipulative, hypocritical tool of the devil. Missionaries risked undermining their hard work through association with the agency.

As the church protests grew, Methodist missionary and writer Arthur J. Moore feared that Christians had oversimplified the issues. Echoing the Christian realist perspective developed by Niebuhr, he took to the pages of Niebuhr’s magazine Christianity and Crisis to call Hatfield’s legislative approach theologically “dubious” and “impractical.” He explained that try as American missionaries might, they could not step outside of their citizenship. They were subjects—legally and morally—of the American state. Whether activists were giving information to the CIA or leading demonstrations against the U.S. Consulate, whether they were working from the political left or the political right, they could not escape the tension between their religious calling and their very real citizenship in this world. Neutrality was an illusion.

Others still hoped for greater church-state separation. Writing on behalf of a coalition of Baptists, James E. Wood called agents’ work with missionaries a “flagrant violation of the Constitution of the United States” that “profaned” religion. “The Constitution,” he asserted, “prohibits the U.S. government from using religious means for the accomplishment of secular ends.” Wood’s article highlighted the key issues that were beginning to emerge in the five-way discussion among the White House, the CIA, the press, church leaders, and Senator Hatfield. Americans, long committed at least in principle to the separation of church and state (no matter how fictitious actual separation was), seemed surprised that missionaries and other religious activists had such deep and complex relationships with the state.

Many major denominations and missionary organizations supported Hatfield’s bill. Leaders of the liberal Protestant National Council of Churches vowed to fight “any allegation” that their overseas ministries were working with the CIA and advised member churches “to refrain from all contacts with C.I.A.” The Methodist church adopted a resolution that vowed to sever ties with any missionaries intentionally working for the CIA. The Assemblies of God, which had a large and active missionary outreach, quietly instructed workers to avoid CIA collaboration. However, church leaders did not want to go on record publicly against the CIA. They most likely did not want their loyalty to the government questioned.

Sojourners, the magazine published by progressive evangelical Jim Wallis, also criticized the CIA’s practices. Editors printed a handful of the letters that Hatfield had received. They indicated that the problem of CIA-religious activists’ collaboration was, at least in their eyes, a serious one. Mel White, at the time a prolific ghostwriter for some of the nation’s leading evangelicals, wrote Hatfield that he had been approached by the CIA multiple times for information after trips abroad. When he refused to cooperate, one agent threatened him. “Who issues your passport, and do you think you’ll be able to maintain it if you don’t cooperate?” she asked. C. Peter Wagner, a professor of world missions at Fuller Theological Seminary, revealed to Hatfield that he had “first hand knowledge” of missionaries who had routinely cooperated with the CIA. The agency rewarded them with contributions to their ministries. Ralph R. Covell, a longtime missionary, had also encountered the CIA through his work in Asia. “It became apparent then to me, as never before, that there was danger of missionaries becoming what the Chinese Communists accused us of being—political agents for American imperialism.”

The protests of these missionaries, churches, and magazines, along with Hatfield’s threat of legislation aimed at curtailing the power and independence of the CIA, had an impact. When George Herbert Walker Bush took over as director of the CIA in early 1976, his first act was to forbid the agency from entering into “paid” relationships with American missionaries and clergy. Bush’s policy directive was pure genius. It appeared to provide much of what Hatfield and the major American denominations and missionary organizations wanted without actually doing much at all. Bush vowed that the “CIA shall establish no secret, paid or unpaid contractual relationship with any American clergyman or missionary.” “In addition,” he promised, “American church groups will not be funded nor used as funding cutouts for CIA purposes. The CIA will, however, continue to welcome information volunteered by American clergymen or missionaries.” Nevertheless, the CIA maintained the right “to initiate contact” with missionaries in the United States if senior agency officials believed that religious workers returning from abroad “might possess important foreign intelligence information.” Hatfield was satisfied with Bush’s promises. He returned once again to the floor of the Senate to laud the policy shift, share a series of warm letters that he and Bush had exchanged, and to withdraw officially his bill from consideration. The CIA was off the hook, allowed to continue its long practice of crafting and implementing its own policies without congressional oversight.

Despite Hatfield’s enthusiasm for Bush’s policy, some of the more progressive and politically attuned Christian magazines did not buy what the director was selling. A writer in Christianity and Crisis feared that the American people had been “Bush-wacked.” The CIA, he asserted, had already moved beyond the kinds of paid contractual relationships described in Bush’s new policy. “Religious groups,” he wrote, “will receive nothing more than Bush’s prohibition of what is not occurring.” Christian Century editors believed that the CIA was making false distinctions. They saw no difference between CIA partnerships with American religious activists and with non-American activists, between soliciting voluntary collaborations with missionaries and hiring those missionaries for paid work, and between debriefing clergy at home and debriefing them in the field. “The moral universe in which world mission has meaning for the Christian church,” editors groused, was not “so compartmentalized.” The editors of Sojourners agreed. “While the American church may be gaining partial insulation against the attempted intrusion of the CIA into its mission,” the magazine editorialized, “nothing curtails the CIA’s forays into the church universal.” Bush’s policy shift required American religious leaders to decide where their loyalties lay. Was their mission to work toward keeping the global church pure, or simply to keep their own American ministries free of CIA taint?

Although many religious leaders continued to lobby Bush for a more explicit policy change, the director well knew that with Hatfield pacified, the churches had no chance of undermining the power of the CIA. Soon the controversy died down. Without Congressional support, American church and missions leaders returned to business as usual. As CIA abuses receded from the headlines, they had less and less incentive to bring continued attention to the many ways that their missionaries and activists had helped support some of the United States’ most controversial global ambitious. But agency leaders were certainly not done with missionaries. In 1977 Bush’s successor at the CIA clarified in an undisclosed internal agency memo that Bush’s policy directive did not “prohibit overt relationships with missionaries or members of the clergy on matters which are unrelated to their religious status, such as the providing of unclassified translation services.” Apparently the CIA believed that it could still draw clear lines between what was religious and what was not. The agency, the memo implied, could keep missionaries on the payroll.

Over the next few decades journalists, activists, and congressmen and -women occasionally revived the controversy, but it never again received such sustained attention. What nobody knew, however, was that Bush’s policy directive was not only almost meaningless, but also not even binding. In 1996 CIA director John Deutch testified before a Senate intelligence committee that although the 1976 ban on paid relationships with clergy was still technically in effect, he had the authority to waive the ban in cases of “unique and special threats to national security.” He revealed that since 1976 he and his predecessors had “arrived at the conclusion that the Agency should not be prohibited from considering the use of American . . . clergy in exceptional circumstances.”

Indeed, the CIA had masterfully built into its own policy a series of gaping loopholes that Congress never tried to close. Publicly the agency promised not to use American missionaries for covert operations or intelligence gathering. But privately the agency maintained the right to do just that if it believed that circumstances warranted it or if the missionaries were on American soil. The agency also felt free to distinguish between activists’ explicit “religious work” and their nonreligious work and believed that it had the right to hire them for the latter. Meanwhile, the agency never stopped or even denied using foreign clergy and missionaries to further its goals, nor did agents have any reservations about creating fictitious religious organizations to dispel propaganda. Across the second half of the twentieth century, the CIA found in God a useful, consistent, and powerful ally.

In sum, missionaries have long played an important role as extensions of the American state. During World War II and the early Cold War, many missionaries proved willing to work simultaneously with both their nation and the foreign populations whom they served. But as the Cold War began to thaw, and more and more Americans began to question American foreign policy in the context of Vietnam, missionaries and church leaders grew increasingly embarrassed by some of the ways in which they had partnered with the CIA. Scholars need to better understand how and why this change occurred. The history of CIA-missionary collaboration illustrates in new ways the complexity of church-state relations in foreign fields. While there is much yet for scholars to learn about the way religion has functioned in American foreign policy, the history of CIA-missionary partnerships, the uses to which the CIA put religion, and the controversies that the CIA’s deployment of religion and religious activists provoked demonstrate that religion mattered in very tangible ways to U.S. policy makers and spies.

Despite the CIA’s use of religion and religious activists, few church leaders or missions organizations have waged a sustained battle against the government. Indeed, many religious organizations substantially benefited from their work with state agencies. They have, however, required one thing from the CIA. The agency, which had long used missionaries for cover, needed to return the favor. American Christians decided in the 1970s that they needed the world to believe that they were not agents of the CIA. Hatfield and Bush gave them exactly what they required. Little has changed since John Birch went to work for the OSS during World War II. But Christians now have an official, open CIA policy that gives them plausible deniability. They are no longer agents of the state from whence they come. Except when they are.

 

*EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America. It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press.

 

* Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and department chair in history at Washington State University. He is the author of five other books on the history of American Christianity, including Double Crossed and American Apocalypse, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

 

Source: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/gods-spooks-religion-spying-and-the-cold-war/