ble. Catholicism was a powerful ideological presence in two regions of the world where communism was threatening to expand: Southeast Asia and South America. U.S. Catholics were bound to their coreligionists in these new theaters of the Cold War not only by their common membership in a universal church, but also by historic ties of paternalistic sentiment, practical assistance, and missionary work. These links, similar in their way to the bonds that united American labor, youth, and women’s organizations with their counterparts overseas, help explain why the CIA came to regard the American Catholic community as a valuable ally in its covert war with the Cominform—so valuable that, in addition to disregarding the prohibition against domestic operation it had already violated in its relations with several other citizen groups, the Agency was also prepared to ignore the separation between church and state ordained by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The history of the CIA’s secret alliance with U.S. Catholicism in the Cold War crusade against communism in Southeast Asia and Latin America is best told through the stories of two outstanding, charismatic, and, some would say, saintly individuals, Tom Dooley and Patrick Peyton.
Although little remembered today, Tom Dooley was during the final years of his tragically short life—he died in 1961 at the age of thirty-four—a true American celebrity. His boyish good looks adorned magazine covers; appearances on such television shows as
era ballad about the execution of a young Confederate soldier for the murder of his mistress, but many listeners mistakenly associated it with the handsome “jungle doctor”).3 Explaining why Dooley inspired such admiration during his lifetime, and then—contrary to the fate of most other youth icons of the era who died young—sank into posthumous obscurity, requires a detailed accounting not only of his extraordinary life and career but also of the numerous CIA front operations in Southeast Asia into which he was unwittingly drawn.
Little in the early life of Thomas A. Dooley hinted at the heroic humanitarian he would become. A dandyish scion of an affluent midwestern family, the young Catholic drifted through Notre Dame and nearly
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flunked out of St. Louis University (SLU) medical school, graduating 109th out of a class of 116.4 It was not until 1954, the year that France was forced to withdraw from Indochina in the face of the Vietminh insurgency led by the communist Ho Chi Minh, that Dooley revealed a side to himself other than that of St. Louis playboy. Having enlisted in the U.S.