The Truth Shall Make You Free: Catholicism and the CIA

One of the great parts in the article on how to manufacture consent for war using celebrities and humanitarian calls:

Central to the CIA’s use of Catholicism was a man named Tom Dooley. Though the name is largely obscure today, in 1961 he placed third in Gallup’s “Most Esteemed” man in the world poll. Dooley was a Navy doctor who provided care for South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the chaos after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His 1956 best seller Deliver Us from Evil, as well as countless articles and media appearances afterward, “justified American intervention in Vietnam and presented Vietnamese Catholics as sympathetic subjects.” He was a central-casting missionary, and the persecuted Vietnamese were precisely the kinds of people Christ charged Catholics to serve. But he was writing CIA-sponsored propaganda to build domestic support for Vietnam, and his stories weren’t “strictly speaking, true.”

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And the Edward Snowden of the CIA of that era Philip Agee:

But the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico City in 1968, in which he felt the CIA was complicit, was his Damascene moment. Agee had begun to immerse himself in the leftist Catholic liberation theology movement sweeping Latin America: “I became the servant of the capitalism I rejected. I became one of its secret policemen. The CIA, after all, is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism.”

Agee didn’t just quit. He moved to Cuba for a time to do “research,” and then, from his residence in the United Kingdom, wrote and published Inside the Company (1975), one of the first books by a former officer to air the CIA’s dirty laundry. But, controversially, he went further: in the book, Agee actually revealed the names of hundreds of active CIA officers and agents. “One way to neutralize the CIA’s support to repression,” he wrote at the time, “is to expose its officers so that their presence in foreign countries becomes untenable.”

Reads like something from the Know Nothing party[1]. Lots of broad characterizations without much support and several internal contradictions, referring to Catholics of different political persuasions..What exactly is the thesis other than a strong anti-Catholicism? . While the article is ostensibly about the CIA, the swipe at the Supreme court at the end gives his biases away.The fact simply is that Catholics of various political persuasions from JFK to John Brennan to Scalia became more prominent in American government as the descendants of poor Irish, Italian, and German Catholics became better educated. Do we really want to descend back to the days when a group of a certain ethnic or religious persuasion can be targeted as a secret cabal of conspirators behind every door?

[1]https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party

2007 Agee in Counterpunch, "The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America"

https://web.archive.org/web/20070317212930/https://www.count...

I heard Agee talk (not a lecture) to students for an hour at a college in 1987. Far from hyperbolic, he was a decent, square-shooter personality. I distinctly recall his saying (paraphrase) that 'they are planning to turn the US into another Latin America'. I remember that because it kept explaining a lot of what was going on. And still does.

Edit: A response to 'Drop of Treason' in Covert Action (May 25, 2021)

[https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/05/25/new-book-that-tr...]

This article doesn’t provide much substance, other than listing directors that were Catholic and a rouge Agent who also happened to be Catholic. I was expecting a revelation but sadly this just seems like a clickbait title at worst, and a brief history of leadership affiliations at best.

The Catholicism in this piece seems tacked-on; it has much more to do with the Philip Agee phenomenon, and with criticism (no doubt well founded) of the CIA's Cold War role as an instigator of war. Agee, ironically, was turned in part by his experience of the oppression of Catholic liberation theologists in Central America.

>its flawed understanding of Catholicism led to some of its greatest debacles, including the failure to see the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Daily reminder: the CIA directly and intentionally funded and fomented the rise of islamic fundamentalism in order to counter Soviet interests in Afghanistan through the Mujaheddin in 1976.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

to say the CIA just "misunderstood" religion is outright disinformation.

This article seems to be coming from 5 directions at once and I genuinely fail to bring it all together. I see a huge enumeration of various catholic laypeople. Do these people represent the supernatural Catholic Church, the Vatican or the magisterium? And who are these “right-wing bishops appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict”? Are there many of these or just a few? What is their exact relationship to the CIA, if any? And how does Trump (following a peculiar “prosperity gospel”) fit into all of this? What is the relation to the Second Vatican Council? What is the connection between a Church Council and the CIA? Does being conservative in liturgical and theological issues make you a political right winger? Is it related to being “impervious to facts”? Could we replace “Catholic Church” with “Hollywood” or “shoe industry” and get a similar article? Help me out here.

I feel the introduction via a critique of Trump is an odd choice. These days it seems required in some publications. (no matter what the topic is).

It is -not. that I am defending Trump.

It is that I dont particularly see the reason to give him more of the spotlight and the mindshare than he seeks and wants.

History does have its place and we should not forget. Nor should he be obsessed over.

Several cherry picked members of the CIA and the more general US government all happen to belong to the largest single religion in the US. What a surprise.

A: Analytics indicates a clear interest in health and toothpaste, do we have anybody working on that?

B: Not at the moment but we could have C write something.

C: What about toothpaste and health?

B sighs: Now that is YOUR job, isn't it?

C: Ok, but do we know something new about toothpaste, have you seen any new study or ...

B: Find the damn studies! If there aren't any just suggest we don't really know how healthy it is, find something about the fluoride industry, there must be some dirt in there.

C: So you want me to suggest it isn't healthy?

B: Of course not! Just make sound like it's complicated.

C: Sorry B, I really need some help with this, I have no idea how to title it or introduce it since I don't know where I should be going with this.

A: Analytics still show a big interest in big T, surely big T brushes his teeth, doesn't he?

C: Thank you, I know how to start.

C leaves.

A: That's why they pay me the big bucks.

B: You just can't find competent people any more.

It's very interesting how religious organizations behaved over the course of the 20th century with respect to the rise of communism and fascism and the post WWII Cold War.

One of the more interesting episodes revolves around the Spanish Civil War, involving Franco and the Catholic Church and its strange little subgroup, Opus Dei. That story remains shrouded in mystery (the whole Franco-Pius-Hitler-Mussolini connection is probably why, see "Hitler's Pope" by John Cornwell, 1999).

Other investigations have revealed the following [1]:

> Since World War II, the CIA has:

> Subsidized a Catholic lay organization that served as the political slugging arm of the pope and the Vatican throughout the Cold War;

> Penetrated the American section of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Vatican orders;

> Passed money to a large number of priests and bishops — some of whom became witting agents in CIA covert operations;

> Employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia (the Vatican government) and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who challenged the political assumptions of the United States;

> Prepared intelligence briefings that accurately predicted the rise of liberation theology; and

> Collaborated with right-wing Catholic groups to counter the actions of progressive clerics in Latin America.

[1] Mother Jones 1983 Martin A. Lee "The CIA and the Vatican’s Intelligence Apparatus"

This all foreshadows (and is concurrent with) the CIA's dalliance with violent Islamic groups as a counter to the Godless Commies, from involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood as an anti-Nasser force in Egypt (1950s) onwards, most notably in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but it's a common theme. It's a pretty sordid history, with disastrous consequences (i.e. 9/11 etc.).

I had no idea Catholicism was becoming more influential, or that it had an extreme right-wing branch. But apparently it does.[1]

[1] https://www.lifesitenews.com

I can’t help but feel like this article (and a lot of articles written these days) feel like they’re building up to something but end up finishing abruptly and not really going anywhere. Kind of like a TV show that wants to hook viewers, but the writers don’t know where to take it after season 1.

Seems odd to talk about the early and pre-CIA (OSS) without mentioning one its most influential academic writers who is on almost every university syllabus today, and whose work essentially founded the movements that produced everything from Alinsky to intersectionality by studying and adapting the soviet and other european methods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse

Trumpism was a reaction to perceived cultural nihilism, which the CIA has earned popular credit for producing in its role as the O.G. american "deep state." Catholicism has always been state religion, so the base rate of anyone in govt being Catholic was already pretty high in those earlier years and I'd probably not attribute much to it. If you wanted to look at peculiar religious influence on the U.S. intelligence community, I've been told by other contractors that Mormonism has an unusual representation cluster though. However, the interesting bit of Catholicism that lends itself to an organization like the CIA would be the Jesuits, who have been the butt of conspiracy theories since their founding, but also run an old network of elite schools and are considered the Vatican brain trust.