Part III
The Real New Deal
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Throughout most of its history, Anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States was as American as apple pie, and the prospect of any kind of meaningful cooperation with the Vatican was anathema and politically unnecessary. However, the geopolitical considerations of the aspiring hegemon would demand a more sophisticated relationship with the religious juggernaut, and a different approach to the concept of separation of Church and State.
Few understood this better than Franklin Roosevelt’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, whose father had been funding Protestant missionary projects in Central and South America since the early 1930s to gather intelligence on indigenous communities sitting on valuable resources under the guise of preaching the gospel. But, compared to the Catholic Church, Rockefeller’s religious ploy fell a few centuries short of expertise and state-level infiltration.
As the grandson of Standard Oil’s founder built propaganda networks across Latin America as part of FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy” initiative, another member of the President’s cabinet was having a brainstorm about recalibrating the emerging superpower’s relationship with Catholicism, and religion in general, to serve the purposes of empire. William J. Donovan, a devout Catholic himself, grasped the value of commandeering the Church’s vast network of priests and assorted members of the clergy in the service of capitalism.
Donovan’s own political aspirations had been frustrated in the past by the prevailing anti-Catholic views of the American electorate, but during a secret meeting with the Vatican’s Apostolic delegate Amleto G. Cicognani in February, 1942, Roosevelt’s Coordinator of Information (CIO) would place Catholicism at the center of American political life, reviving the intrigue that surrounded Western power dynamics since the Reformation by brokering an “unholy alliance” between the burgeoning American intelligence community and the most powerful religious institution on earth.
Reporting back to the President that the Vatican had committed to establishing a direct channel of information between the White House and the Holy See, arrangements proceeded quickly. In June, FDR created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with Donovan at the helm, and less than two weeks later, Pope Pius XII incorporated the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), a.k.a. the Vatican Bank, which would function as the main money laundering vehicle for operation Gladioand other parts of the Cold War’s dark infrastructure.
These machinations came close to being fully exposed very early on, when a cache of weapons and German rocket artillery was discovered by Austrian police in 1947, leading to the arrests of Theodor Soucek and Dr. Hugo Rössner, who testified in court that their operation to recruit a secret army of Nazi soldiers was being funded by the CIA. Similar efforts were uncovered in Sweden, Italy, and Germany itself over the following decades but strings were consistently pulled behind the scenes to keep the sordid affair out of the headlines.
By then, the Truman administration had provided at least $350 million to help the Vatican forestall a Communist Party victory in Italy’s upcoming elections. Unthinkable only a few years before, the underwriting of the Catholic Church’s covert political operations by the United States was proof that the threat of Communism was paying large dividends for the emerging superpower. Pope Pius XII’s uneasy truce with Hitler now meaningless in the face of the Third Reich’s defeat, and the relentless advance of the Soviet Union across the territories where it had hoped to restore the Hapsburg monarchy meant that the Vatican’s only hope for survival rested at the feet of the rising Atlanticist order.
Catholics In Action
FDR struck a historic accord with the new pope, tapping prominent American industrialist, Myron C. Taylor, to be his official representative at the Vatican. The eight-year “Taylor Mission” was a critical piece of public diplomacy in the postwar transition from anti-Fascism to anti-Communism, and was especially effective at cleaning up Pope Pius XII’s dubious public image with appeals to victims of the Holocaust, even as drug money laundered through the IOR was financing the deployment of “stay-behind” paramilitary units comprised of Nazis and other far-right elements across Europe.
At the same time that Taylor was making sure Lend-Lease funds were reaching the Soviet Union to continue the tech transfer mechanisms that had propped up the Communist government since the 1920s, as Antony C. Sutton has exhaustively documented, plans were being made to recruit the Nazi brain trust. The Allied invasion of Normandy included the so-called “Target Forces”, comprised of Navy, Army and Air Force personnel, in addition to OSS agents attached to their units.
Shortened to T-Force, these special units would be spread throughout Europe to find the top Nazi scientists and weapons experts to bring them and their research stateside. Originally called Operation Overcast, most people would come to know it as Operation Paperclip, as it was renamed after the first recruit was flown into Washington D.C. on a military transport plane with blacked out windows in May, 1945.
Run out of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA – sometimes also referred to as JIOS), a subcommittee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s intelligence committee, Paperclip is mostly known for the explosives and rocketry experts brought to places like the White Sands Proving Ground (WSPG) and Fort Bliss in Texas, where many of the first experiments with Hitler’s V-series rocket technology and nuclear weapons systems took place. But scores of psychological and chemical warfare specialists were also recruited to help execute the Cold War.
Donovan’s initial breakthrough of placing religion at the center of state-sponsored psychological warfare spawned the idea of Atlanticist expansionism as a spiritual battle for men’s souls between the ‘evil’ atheists behind the iron and bamboo curtains against the ‘liberating’ theism of the free-market ideologues. This concept would underpin Cold War rhetoric for the next half century, beginning with Cardinal Mindszenty’s “show trial” and his planned martyrdom.
Execution of this long-term agenda would fall to the OSS’ successor agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which Donovan would not get to personally lead. Quietly merged with the State Department’s Division of Map Intelligence and Cartography before, the OSS would nevertheless provide the foot soldiers for the new agency, which was mocked by its detractors as “Catholics in Action”.
Psychological Warfare
The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) was formed out the CIA’s original covert action arm, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in 1951 to serve as a coordinating body for all psychological warfare activities in the CIA, the military services and other federal agencies. Board members included former OSS propagandist and senior executive at Henry Luce’s Time, Inc., Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson, and Edward P. Lilly, a veteran of the defunct Office of War Information (OWI) and a former history professor at the Catholic University of America.
Together, they would reframe the global ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union expressed in the Truman Doctrine as a religious conflict. In a series of memos culminating with a call to action titled “The Religious Factor“, the PSB moved Donovan’s original vision up to national security status, as the “spiritual” challenge of Communism was enthusiastically embraced by President Eisenhower and the broader postwar American establishment.
Which religion, in particular, didn’t matter. The idea was to weaponize all religious faiths against the Communist boogeyman by making the U.S. war machine appear to be their protector. Convinced that this was the way forward, American business and policy leaders joined to launch a “spiritual counter-offensive”, with organizations like Eisenhower’s Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order (FRASCO), featuring a national advisory council comprised of media mogul Henry Luce, Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld and Southern Baptist minister Billy Graham, among others.
Vice President Richard Nixon solicited help for FRASCO’s global plans from the CIA, attaching a proposal for a “Spiritual Counteroffensive in Southeast Asia”, while a program called Militant Liberty was put together at the Pentagon to indoctrinate target nations on the ostensible virtues of Judeo-Christian values for a “free society”. Ultimately, the Pentagon’s plan was shelved by the more experienced psychological warfare veterans at the CIA, who understood that infiltrating a culture’s own belief systems was more effective than imposing a different one.
Attending the FRASCO National Conference in 1955, W. R. Grace & Co. CEO, J. Peter Grace, expressed his conviction that the course of history would be changed by “the power of American men of business”. Also in attendance was Admiral Arthur W. Radford, a staunch advocate of Militant Liberty on the grounds that its implementation could arm American soldiers against Korean “brainwashing” techniques.
Considered by some to be the “father of MKULTRA“, Grace would play a central role in the higher levels of the counterintelligence operation against the Vatican known as the Cold War. Despite his seemingly impeccable Catholic credentials and leadership of the Eastern chapter of the American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Grace’s commitment to the “spiritual counter-offensive” Cold War strategy can only be understood in the context of the economic and political penetration of Catholic-dominated Latin America, where his grandfather – the first Catholic Mayor of New York City –, first founded W. R. Grace & Co. back in 1854.
Fall From Grace
Four years before the FRASCO conference, a group of Nazi scientists at Edgewood Arsenal brought to the United States were directed to shift their research from nerve gas agents to identifying hallucinogenic chemicals that may be found in plants or other natural sources for the purposes of mind-control. First codenamed “Bluebird”, later “Artichoke”, and ultimately MKULTRA/MKDELTA, the CIA & Joint Intelligence Committee psychochemical experimentation project was cloaked behind a University of Maryland contract, that eventually expanded to comprise 80 institutions and 44 universities.
J. Peter Grace had led the charge to open the door for Hitler’s psychological and chemical warfare experts to work for the United States in these dark projects. Among the most salient examples is the case of Otto Ambros, a director of I. G. Farben during the war, and Zyklon B enthusiast, who managed the Auschwitz concentration camp, personally selecting it to function as an I. G. Farben factory in order to take advantage of the slave labor at the camp.
Grace held “a very deep admiration” for Ambros, praising him “not only for his ability, but more important, for his character in terms of truthfulness and integrity”, and interceded on the war criminal’s behalf with the Justice Department, which was following official policy and refused to grant Ambros a visa. Nevertheless, with the help of Project National Interest, Ambros’ record was expunged and he was employed at W. R. Grace & Co. as well as with the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, immediately upon release from prison by then US High Commissioner for Germany, John Jay McCloy, after serving only half of his eight-year prison sentence.
Right alongside Grace were his intimate business partners, the Rockefellers, whose shared ventures included multiple concerns throughout Latin America in the oil, mining, chemical, and banking sectors. Now appointed as Eisenhower’s special assistant in charge of cold war strategy and psychological warfare, Nelson Rockefeller was in a unique position to inform the covert, union-busting activities of many of Gladio’s offshoots in places like Latin America, where Grace himself chaired a CIA “labor property” called the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD).
Along with representatives from ITT, Merck & Co., Anaconda Corp., and many other U.S. multinationals, the AIFLD sabotaged labor unions, planted intelligence agents, and aided military putschists in countries like Brazil and Peru, where grassroots political movements threatened their interests. Similar operations were carried out in Europe, as well, where OSS veteran and future host of CNN’s Crossfire, Tom Braden was using another CIA labor property, the AFL-CIO, to fund Corsican mob hits on striking dock workers in France, who were hindering the movement of weapons to Indochina, and the heroin shipments underwriting the broader operation.
Among the varied interests that joined Grace to the Rockefellers, perhaps none are more obvious than oil. Not only in the strictly commercial sense, but as a strategic asset of the burgeoning national security state, which the Graces, Rockefellers, and the nascent Military Industrial Complex were in the process of constructing. Controlling domestic supply was just as important as maintaining a hand on the lever of global reserves, and there was no greater pool of black gold in the continental United States than in the dry and flat Texas landscape.
