Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War

by Matthew Avery Sutton

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465052660
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,115,001
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Matthew Avery Sutton is Edward R. Meyer distinguished professor of history at Washington State University. The author of award-winning books, including American Apocalypse, he lives in Pullman, Washington.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Before They Were Spies (1883-1941)

1 "The Moral and Spiritual Defenses of a Nation" 15

2 "Between Hope and Despair" 31

3 "A Conquering Faith" 59

4 "Prophecies Yet to Be Fulfilled" 75

5 "What a Fine Schooling You Are Having" 85

Part II Going to War (1941-1943)

6 "Converted to Our Service" 95

7 "Spies and Lies in Tangier" 111

8 "The Double Opportunity to Serve God and Country" 131

9 "It's Your Souls We Want" 141

Part III Taking the Fight to the Enemy (1943-1944)

10 "The Next jump" 159

11 "A Great Hodge-Podge of Conflicting Loyalties" 169

12 "The Angry Saint Who Kept a Soldier's Faith" 187

13 "The Thorough Beating They So Richly Deserve" 199

Part IV Occupying Holy Lands (1944-1945)

14 "America's One Priority in the Arab World" 221

15 "Top-Notch and Absolutely Fearless" 231

16 "The Beginning of the End of Japan's Ungodly Power" 247

17 "Pilgrim's Progress" 263

Part V Winning the War (1945)

18 "God Help Us!" 275

19 "An Unusual Opportunity" 283

20 "The High Point of Muslim Alliance" 297

21 "Between a Strife-Torn Earth and Wrath-Darkened Heavens" 309

Part VI Legacies (1945-Present)

22 "The CIA Holds Nothing Sacred Including the Sacred" 325

Acknowledgments 349

Notes 351

Index 383

Editorial Reviews

07/01/2019

In this powerful work, historian Sutton follows the fledgling Office of Strategic Services (Roosevelt’s intelligence agency) as its head, “Wild” Bill Donovan, launched a top-secret program: the recruitment of foreign missionaries in areas of Axis conflict. The agency’s spies included William Eddy, a missionary in Africa and the Middle East; Stewart Herman, pastor of the American Church in Berlin; John Birch, an evangelist in China; and Stephen Penrose, the child of missionaries in the Middle East. Some directed operations in Egypt (Penrose) and Morocco (Eddy), aggressively building large networks of clergyman spies; others waded into combat, such as John Birch, who rescued downed Allied pilots in Japanese-occupied China. “Neither the missionaries themselves nor their religious agencies nor American military leaders felt comfortable acknowledging the wartime lying, deceiving, manipulating, and even killing that these religious activist operatives engaged in,” so records relating to their activities were hidden, expunged, or destroyed, and the participants wrestled with internal conflict. Many solved this problem by believing that violence was a necessary means to achieving peace and spreading the word of God. Some of them were later involved in shaping U.S. foreign policy, with almost evangelical results: God’s chosen people remaking the world in their image. This provocative book illuminates little-discussed history and raises larger philosophical questions. It is an unusually fresh and intelligent addition to WWII literature. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Matthew Sutton shows in this lively and fascinating book, the road from preaching the gospel to learning the dark arts of spy- craft was mapped out by Reinhold Niebuhr's theory that, Jesus's teachings aside, in a fallen world, state-sanctioned violence can be justified to destroy regimes."—Times Literary Supplement

"Arresting and informative.... Double Crossed is a great read and a fresh, archive-intensive contribution to our understanding of American intelligence during World War II."—Washington Post

"Not only a profound history of American Christian missions but also one of the most original and interesting histories of World War II in several decades."—Christianity Today

"Sutton covers new territory in his interesting endeavor, as the work of the four has largely been secret until now. Readers will be fascinated by his revelations."—Booklist

"Recommended for scholars of World War II and religious history, and the history of espionage, as well as general readers interested in the intersection of American history and Christianity."—Library Journal

"Sutton's research is impressive, his writing is clear, and his account is exhaustive.... Sutton rescues a crucially important story that raises profound questions regarding the relationship between God and country."—Kirkus

"This provocative book illuminates little-discussed history and raises larger philosophical questions. It is an unusually fresh and intelligent addition to WWII literature."—Publishers Weekly

"A marvelous book about the holy spooks of World War II: the missionaries who toiled in secret and to considerable effect in the U.S. intelligence effort, convinced they were advancing both God's and America's cause. Matthew Sutton is a generous, discerning historian, and he succeeds splendidly in bringing this little-known story to life."—Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

"Deeply-researched and engagingly written, Matthew Sutton's Double Crossed fills a gap in the literatures on 20th century secret-intelligence and the Second World War. Shinning a light on the cross-and-dagger intrigues of Protestant missionaries who spied against the Axis, Sutton shows how they helped lay some of the moral and even diplomatic foundations for what we now call globalization. This is both an adventure story and an important contribution to the emerging study of religion as a handmaiden of 20th-century secular power."—Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

"In this absorbing book, Matthew Sutton skillfully and effortlessly guides his reader through the life-and-death clandestine operations of the United States' missionary-spies: bible-believing spooks who, during WWII, grappled internally with the contradictions of faith and violence, deep love of family, and patriotic duty but who never shied away from advancing the Allied cause — no matter the cost. Double Crossed is an authoritative and highly revealing account of a (purposely) hidden facet of church-state collusion in modern America."—Darren Dochuk, author of Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America

"Double Crossed tells an astonishing and heretofore unknown story of the Christian missionaries and religious activists who doubled as American spies during World War II. Although their wartime scheming often conflicted with their religious principles, the work of the four men profiled here — whose covert operations ranged from Europe to China and across the Middle East — was absolutely critical to the success of U.S. military strategy and diplomacy, and it built the edifice for religious collaboration with espionage that, for better or worse, persists in the CIA to this day. Matthew Sutton has written a deeply researched, captivating, and indispensable contribution to our understanding of the role of religion in the history of American spycraft."—Marie Griffith, author of Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics

"In a thrilling and remarkably original narrative, Matthew Avery Sutton explains the critical part missionaries played in American espionage during what was, for them, a holy war to save Christian civilization. For anyone who cares about the history of religion or the Second World War, this fine book will be a revelation."—Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918

"In this brilliant book, Matthew Avery Sutton has recovered the long-hidden history of Americans who blurred the line between religious missions and secret missions in the Second World War. Rooted in painstaking research and written with powerful prose, Double Crossed is a must-read."—Kevin M. Kruse, author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

From the Publisher

2019-07-01
The little-known history of the "sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and sometimes profound ways that the founders of the United States' pioneering foreign intelligence service tried to use humans' deep spirituality as a tool for war."

The subjects of this military history were missionaries during World War II, sent by their houses of worship to spread the word of God throughout the world. But they also were American spies, charged by their handlers with all sorts of clandestine work that even included assassination plots. Though there were dozens of them, including Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, Sutton (History/Washington State Univ.; American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, 2014, etc.) focuses on four of them—William Eddy, John Birch, Stephen Penrose, and Stewart Herman Jr.—who served in a variety of arenas, from major embassies to the front lines. (One even led an air raid that killed scores of Japanese fighters.) Most of the missionaries agreed to their missions because they thought of America as the classic city on the hill. Sutton's research is impressive, his writing is clear, and his account is exhaustive—but also occasionally exhausting. It seems the author couldn't bear to leave any of his research in his notes; as a result, the primary narrative often gets buried beneath an avalanche of detail. Still, Sutton rescues a crucially important story that raises profound questions regarding the relationship between God and country. Even the missionaries, whose work helped win the war and led to the founding of the CIA, ended their careers wondering whether they had served God or mammon (as the author notes, they "sometimes served their god and the gods of war at the same time")—and whether they could ever be trusted again by anyone, even themselves.

Scholars will appreciate the thoroughness and lucidity. General readers may want to skim certain sections.

Kirkus Reviews