Matthew Avery Sutton, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 208–210 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.24 Book Review Matthew Avery Sutton, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War (New York: Basic Books, 2019) Eden Consenstein Princeton University, Princeton, USA Matthew Avery Sutton’s Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War follows four Protestant missionaries who became enrolled in the United States’ nascent global surveillance network between 1941 and 1945. Sutton’s four protagonists, Stewart Hermann, Stephen Penrose, William Eddy, and John Birch, each possessed language skills, personal networks, and local knowledges that made them uniquely valuable to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II-era predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sutton relies on a trove of recently declassified government records alongside each missionary’s vivid diary entries and personal correspondences . He uses the four men’s experiences to describe how missionaries were mobilized to gather tactical intelligence amidst the ravages of massive, global war. With the clarity of a novelist, Sutton narrates the beginning, middle, and end of World War II across the multiple fronts where each man served. The book is organized into six chronological sections, each comprised of shorter chapters dedicated to one of the missionary protagonists. The narrative thereby alternates between missionaries, weaving their stories together as the war unfolds. Section I, “Before They Were Spies (1883–1941),” introduces each missionary-cum-spy and Eden Consenstein 209 their charismatic boss, OSS chairman William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Donovan held a long-standing interest in the relationship between religious traditions and global affairs. Before establishing a team of “holy spooks,” he entertained multiple odd, unrealized schemes to harness religious ideas toward geopolitical ends. For example, Donovan sketched plans to assail Japanese troops with shaved raccoons coated in radium paint, hoping that the creatures would resemble a frightening omen in Japanese lore and terrify combatants into retreat (27). Such memorable personalities and anecdotes populate each chapter. The second section, which describes how the OSS recruited each missionary, concludes with the haunting image of Lutheran minister Stewart Herman in Germany, detained in an abandoned luxury hotel alongside other ex-patriots, observing the Third Reich with horror and confusion. Quotations from Herman’s diaries and letters capture the fear, ambivalence, and uncertainty that attended the beginnings of war. The third section describes how each missionary aided the Allies between 1943 and 1944. Presbyterian William Eddy was located in Algiers, where he oversaw a network of informants across the Mediterranean, a task that necessitated liaisons with fellow missionaries and Mafiosos alike. In Cairo, Congregationalist Stephen Penrose attempted to recruit Muslim spies capable of keeping US agencies up to date on local “conditions and trends” (171). In China, fundamentalist John Birch traversed hundreds of miles of countryside on foot, locating Japanese outposts and informing Chinese allies. The fourth section, covering 1944 and 1945, finds each missionary angling for strategic alliances to secure US power in the postwar world. Eddy’s fluent Arabic earned him friendships with Saudi monarchs , while Penrose eschewed alliances with Zionist organizations for fear of alienating leadership in contested regions of the Middle East. In the fifth section all but one of the missionaries returns home. While on an operation to retrieve Japanese documents, Birch ran afoul of Chinese communists who shot him and mutilated his body beyond recognition. The circumstances of Birch’s death were covered up for decades, in efforts to conceal the fact that missionaries were serving as spies. The book’s final pages recount attempts to keep collaborations between religious actors and surveillance operations under wraps, even as those partnerships remain legally permissible into the present day. The missionaries’ shared motivations unite all four biographies. Sutton emphasizes that, regardless of their multiple theological and geographic locations and despite the inherently duplicitous nature of spy craft, each missionary determined that participating in the Allied war effort ultimately served larger religious aims. In sum, they “believed that what was good for the United States was good for Christianity and that what was good for Christianity was good for the United States...