he nonetheless succeeded in conveying, with his massive, six-foot, four-inch frame, broad countenance, and Irish brogue, “a different kind of eloquence that captured you, that made you hang on to what he was saying.”76 The contrast between the Elmer Gantry–like razzmatazz of the buildup to the rallies and the painfully obvious sincerity and humility of Peyton in person made his appearances all the more poignant and affecting. By 1958, the Family Rosary Crusade had traveled to Europe, the Middle and Far East, Australasia, and Africa, winning literally millions of new devotees for the Virgin. One prize still eluded Peyton, however, a continent that was home to a quarter of the world’s Catholic population, South America.
Of course, the Family Rosary Crusade was not the only U.S. organization interested in influencing the beliefs of South Americans. In addition to blatant interventions of the sort that took place in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, and Chile in 1973, the CIA was constantly involved in more subtle ideological actions intended to secure U.S. hegemony in the western hemisphere. American labor organizations were one important instrument in this effort, with the U.S. sections of international trade secretariats—transnational bodies supposedly representing all the workers in a particular industry—often doubling as fronts for Agency operations.
Hence, in 1963 CIA agents in the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the U.S. affiliate of the Public Service International (PSI), incited a strike by civil servants in British Guiana that led to the unseating of the leftist prime minister, Cheddi Jagan.77
Supplementing these industry-specific activities were a host of labor education and research projects, the most wide-ranging of which was the American Institute of Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a trade unionist training program established in 1962 with headquarters near Washington and local centers dotted around South America. Ostensibly funded by the AFL-CIO, American business leaders, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) (another descendant of the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration), the AIFLD was heavily connected, through its Executive Director Serafino Romualdi (once labor counsel for Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs) and Social Projects Director William C. Doherty, Jr., to the Lovestone apparatus
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and the International Organizations Division.78 Performing similar work, although on a smaller scale, was the New York–based Institute of International Labor Research, Inc., a program for “strengthening democratic forces” in central America and the Caribbean headed by Norman Thomas, administered by former Rumanian émigré and Radio Free Europe officer Sacha Volman, and covertly funded, via the foundation of grape juice magnate J. M. Kaplan, by the IOD.79 Along with other NCL leaders such as Victor Reuther, Allard Lowenstein, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, Volman and Thomas also participated in the Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, a CIA-inspired effort to lend international credibility to a 1966 ballot effectively rigged against the socialist former president, Juan Bosch, with Thomas reprising the role he had performed in Vietnam in 1956 by declaring the elections fair before the results had been announced.80
In the Cold War struggle for South American hearts and minds, Christian evangelists were potentially more useful even than U.S. labor leaders.
The employment of missionaries by intelligence agencies was nothing new. During World War II, the Baptist John Birch worked for the OSS
in China before being killed (or “martyred,” as many American conservatives believed) by communist soldiers when leading a patrol of Chinese Nationalists.81 Meanwhile, William Cameron (“Cam”) Townsend, founder of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Wycliffe Bible Translators, provided extensive intelligence to Nelson Rockefeller in return for logistical support as Townsend and his followers proselytized the bibleless tribes of the Amazon (he later worked with Edward Lansdale in the Philippines and Vietnam).82 Catholic missionaries, however, offered the CIA the most tactical advantage in South America. Although Catholicism was clearly the greatest ideological counterweight to communism on the politically turbulent continent, the church there was widely perceived to be in a state of crisis, with a shortage of religious ordinations, doctrinal and liturgical ignorance rampant among the poor, and a commonly held view that clergy had failed to address the need for social action in many countries. It was against this background that “concerned”