“(Agee) was part of the opposition, but he was no longer loyal.”Īgee joined the CIA as a case officer in 1957 and spent 12 years working with conservative Christian movements in Latin America. “The term whistleblower is certainly too tame to apply to Agee,” he writes. Stevenson puts the boot into Agee whenever the chance arises. This biography makes some small steps to present a balanced and fair assessment. Jonathan Stevenson clearly doesn’t share Greene’s devil-may-care attitude towards sleeping with the enemy. Those words are cited halfway through A Drop of Treason: Philip Agee and His Exposure of the CIA (Chicago University Press) - a judgmental biography that condemns the CIA’s first official defector. Graham Greene – Philby’s friend and former MI6 colleague – in his foreword to My Silent War, Philby’s 1968 autobiography asked: “He betrayed his country, yes, but who among us has not committed treason to something more important than a country?” The Soviet State provided full military honours at the British mole’s funeral in Moscow in 1988. He left Beirut on a freight ship bound for Odessa and never returned to the west. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team.Philby was working as a journalist when that rumour was confirmed in 1963. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.Īllison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. Fittingly, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA(U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency.
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