#ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS DRIVER#

If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. This idea of religion suffused American policymaking in the early Cold War era. OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan was himself a Catholic, and he popularized the notion that religion “was everywhere, free, and individual: a natural ally in war and diplomacy” (p. Such a high-profile embarrassment hardly slowed the OSS’s religious approach, however. Catholic allies in Italy provided a tantalizing cache of information on the Axis Powers, even though one of the most promising sources-which purported to reveal Japanese war plans and ended up on the desk of President Roosevelt-turned out to be the fabrication of an Italian pornographer. Catholicism “was foreign enough to be worthy of study but familiar enough to be interpretable” (p. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA, began developing a religious approach by forging alliances with Catholics during WWII. The Iranian revolution shattered the religious models that intelligence operatives had spent three-plus decades constructing. This paradigm led CIA officers, State Department officials, and US presidents to view “religion” as an ally in the Cold War, even as it obscured the nuances and contexts that shaped the religious worlds of people around the globe. In seven tightly argued chapters, Michael Graziano charts the development of a “world religions paradigm” in both the academy and the United States’ intelligence services from WWII through Vietnam.

#ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS DRIVER#

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.This creative study of the CIA’s “religious approach” to fighting the Cold War joins a growing body of scholarship examining the intersection of religion and foreign affairs. 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 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.

Errand into the wilderness of mirrors