Reveals the previous underexplored influence of religious thought in building the foundations of the CIA. 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. 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. 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. 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. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. 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.

Introduction : charting the wilderness -- American spies and American Catholics -- Refining the religious approach -- The great jihad of freedom -- On caring what it is -- Baptizing Vietnam -- Counterinsurgency and the study of world religions -- Iran and revolutionary thinking -- Conclusion : a new wilderness.

In this book the authors make the case for renewable energy and renewable energy policy. Each chapter begins with an inspiring story by someone working in renewable energy or a related field.

In this shocking exposé, investigative researcher and author S. K. Bain reveals the truth behind the mass-murdering psychopaths responsible for the events of September 11, 2001, and reconstructs the occult-driven script for this Global Luciferian MegaRitual. As Bain uncovers, the framework for the entire event was a psychological warfare campaign built upon a deadly foundation of black magick and high technology. The book details the sinister nature of the defining event of the 21st century and explains the vast scope of the machinery of oppression that has been constructed around us.

Christian Homeland focuses on the involvement of clergy and prominent laity of the Episcopal Church in Middle Eastern affairs, both religious and political, between the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829) and the Second Arab-Israeli War (1956-1957), with a brief epilogue covering additional events up to the present day. As the birthplace of the Christian faith, the Middle East had always been an area of fascination to church people in the West, and with the expansion of American diplomatic and commercial interests into the Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century, Episcopalians and other American Protestants felt called to similarly export their religious values into the region. Beginning in the 1830s, Episcopalians established mission posts in Athens and Constantinople (Istanbul), from which they sought to convert Muslims and Jews to Christianity. Having failed to achieve any appreciable evangelistic success with non-Christians, they soon turned their attention to reforming the ancient churches of the East instead. Later assisted by the Church of England's missionary bishopric in Jerusalem, a small, but influential corps of Episcopalians dedicated themselves to keeping church members informed about the Middle East, particularly the status of the region's Christian population, well into the twentieth century. This book analyses how the theological ideas held by Episcopal church leaders not only guided missionary and religious activities, but also influenced their denomination's response to major social and political questions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries issues such as immigration into the United States, genocide, wartime refugee relief, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinian Nakba.

At the dawn of the Cold War, the world’s most important intelligence agencies—the Soviet KGB, the American CIA, and the British MI6—appeared to have clear-cut roles and a sense of rising importance in their respective countries. But when Kim Philby, head of MI6’s Russian division and arguably the twenty-first century’s greatest spy, was revealed to be a Russian mole along with British government heavyweights Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, everything in the Western intelligence world turned upside down. Here is the true story of how the American James Bond—the colorful, foulmouthed, pistol-packing, alcoholic ex-FBI agent William “King” Harvey—put the finger on Philby; how James Jesus Angleton, the chain-smoking poet of Yale University and the CIA’s supposed “master spy” in charge of counterintelligence, began his descent into a paranoid wilderness of mirrors upon learning of family friend Kim Philby’s ultimate betrayal; and the devastating consequences of the loss of MI6 prestige and the CIA’s subsequent self-defeating witch hunts. Every revelation, every stranger-than-fiction twist and turn is all the more intriguing as truths become lies and unlikely scenarios are revealed as reality. With impeccable sourcing and the use of thousands of pages of declassified research, David C. Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors is widely recognized as a masterpiece of intelligence literature.

Jacques Attali, French President Mitterand's most trusted advisor and president of the new European bank of Reconstruction and development, offers a provocative and all-too-convincing view of the future in an increasingly troubled world.

"In the midst of World War II, the United States sent a liaison mission to the headquarters of Chinese Communist forces behind the lines in Yan'an, China. Nicknamed the "Dixie Mission," for its location in "rebel" territory, it was an interagency delegation that included intelligence officers from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The intelligence officers were there to gather intelligence that would help the war effort against Japan, but interagency and political conflicts erupted over whether or not the mission would expand beyond intelligence collection to operations with the Communists. Mission to Mao is a social history of the OSS officers in the field and their clash with political appointees and Washington over the direction of the US relationship with the Chinese Communists. The book reveals the attempts of America's inexperienced intelligence officers to improvise operations and to try to define a role for themselves. The book takes us beyond the history of "China hands" versus American anticommunists who backed Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, introducing more nuance. Sara B. Castro shows how potential benefits for the war effort were thwarted by politicization, but she also shows how the OSS officers overreached their authority and suffered from their own biases and blindspots. The book draws upon over 14,000 unpublished records from five archives plus numerous published white papers, memoirs, and scholarly studies to with a focus on the individual American intelligence officers who spent time in Yan'an working with Communist leaders"--

The untold story of the Christian missionaries who played a crucial role in the allied victory in World War II What makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Office of Strategic Services. They entered into a world of lies, deception, and murder, confident that their nefarious deeds would eventually help them expand the kingdom of God. In Double Crossed, historian Matthew Avery Sutton tells the extraordinary story of the entwined roles of spy-craft and faith in a world at war. Missionaries, priests, and rabbis, acutely aware of how their actions seemingly conflicted with their spiritual calling, carried out covert operations, bombings, and assassinations within the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine. Working for eternal rewards rather than temporal spoils, these loyal secret soldiers proved willing to sacrifice and even to die for Franklin Roosevelt's crusade for global freedom of religion. Chosen for their intelligence, powers of persuasion, and ability to seamlessly blend into different environments, Donovan's recruits included people like John Birch, who led guerilla attacks against the Japanese, William Eddy, who laid the groundwork for the Allied invasion of North Africa, and Stewart Herman, who dropped lone-wolf agents into Nazi Germany. After securing victory, those who survived helped establish the CIA, ensuring that religion continued to influence American foreign policy. Surprising and absorbing at every turn, Double Crossed is the untold story of World War II espionage and a profound account of the compromises and doubts that war forces on those who wage it.

Philip Agee’s story is the stuff of a John le Carré novel—perilous and thrilling adventures around the globe. He joined the CIA as a young idealist, becoming an operations officer in hopes of seeing the world and safeguarding his country. He was the consummate intelligence insider, thoroughly entrenched in the shadow world. But in 1975, he became the first such person to publicly betray the CIA—a pariah whose like was not seen again until Edward Snowden. For almost forty years in exile, he was a thorn in the side of his country. The first biography of this contentious, legendary man, Jonathan Stevenson’s A Drop of Treason is a thorough portrait of Agee and his place in the history of American foreign policy and the intelligence community during the Cold War and beyond. Unlike mere whistleblowers, Agee exposed American spies by publicly blowing their covers. And he didn’t stop there—his was a lifelong political struggle that firmly allied him with the social movements of the global left and against the American project itself from the early 1970s on. Stevenson examines Agee’s decision to turn, how he sustained it, and how his actions intersected with world events. Having made profound betrayals and questionable decisions, Agee lived a rollicking, existentially fraught life filled with risk. He traveled the world, enlisted Gabriel García Márquez in his cause, married a ballerina, and fought for what he believed was right. Raised a conservative Jesuit in Tampa, he died a socialist expat in Havana. In A Drop of Treason, Stevenson reveals what made Agee tick—and what made him run.