Cope-and-Dagger Stories

Businessmen, students, journalists, even Mafiosi have all, it seems, been used by the CIA for its various overseas operations. Has the CIA also extended its reach to the church? Many missionaries, particularly in Latin America, have regularly, and falsely, been accused of having CIA ties. Last week religious periodicals around the U.S. were carrying new allegations that certain churchmen had either given information to the CIA or received money from it for propaganda purposes. Most of the charges came from two articles, distributed by the National Catholic News Service, written by an inveterate CIA foe, John D. Marks, author with Victor Marchetti of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (TIME, April 22,1974).

Marks interviewed more than 30 church and CIA sources, most of whom insisted upon anonymity and made veiled accusations. A typical charge was that during the '60s CIA funds had been channeled into a Catholic-run anti-Communist radio network in Colombia. Another allegation: 15 years ago, a Protestant missionary in Bolivia, "as a patriotic duty and not for pay," gave reports to the CIA about the Communist Party, labor unions and farmers' cooperatives. At least one nun in Colombia, an ex-agent says, meticulously compiled an account of the political affiliation of each family in a village; it went to the CIA. According to Marks' report, another ex-agent claimed that a Roman Catholic bishop in South Viet Nam was "on the CIA's payroll" as recently as 1971. A knowledgeable Vatican source, informed of this charge, stoutly maintained that no bishop would ever knowingly take CIA money, even for good purposes, much less be "on the payroll."

Boasted of Money. Marks provided the most detail about a Belgian Jesuit priest named Roger Vekemans, who arrived in Chile in 1957 and founded a network of social-action organizations, one of which grew to have 100 employees and a $30-million-a-year budget. In 1963, Marks reported, Vekemans boasted to Father James Vizzard, now Washington lobbyist for the United Farm Workers, of getting money from the CIA. After a meeting with President Kennedy and CIA Director John McCone, Vekemans had dinner with Vizzard in Washington and said with a grin: "I got $10 million--$5 million overt and $5 million covert." The first half was from the Agency for International Development, he explained, and the second half was from the CIA, largely to help Eduardo Frei beat Marxist Salvador Allende in the next presidential election. Vekemans, who has now shifted his base of operations to Bogota, refused to give his version of the tale last week.

Whatever is later substantiated about Marks' cope-and-dagger stories, TIME'S sources report that the CIA as a matter of policy only rarely tries to make any contact in the field with U.S. missionaries. Over the years, as it did with certain other travelers, the agency interviewed a number of returning missionaries about conditions in the countries they had left. Several Protestant and Catholic mission boards are now discussing whether to direct their people to have no contact at all with the CIA --a policy that the pacifist Church of the Brethren established last October.

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