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Dr. Stewart Herman was president of the Lutheran School of Theology, Maywood Campus, when I arrived in the fall of 1963. He was charming and friendly to students, and we knew of his distinguished career as pastor of the American Lutheran Church in Berlin in the 1930s. We knew that he had been briefly detained by the Nazi government, because he had been a translator for the American embassy in Berlin, and that he was later an international churchman with the World Council of Churches, helping refugee resettlement and war relief efforts. I interviewed him several times for the seminary newsletter about his work back then.
What we did not know at the time was that Herman had been a spy, recruited (along with a number of other missionaries and overseas churchmen) by “Wild” Bill Donovan of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and that during the war he was with the OSS in England, running “ops” managing European “assets” and dropping American spies into occupied France. Stewart’s knowledge of German churches (both the Confessing Church and the “Deutsche Christen”) and his fluency in French and German gave him valuable insights into the situations and people “on the ground” in war-torn Europe and in the post-war years.
Presbyterians probably did not know that some of their long-term, skilled, multi-lingual missionaries in the Middle East were also spies for the OSS, their payment made through shadowy financial deals with mission boards. The American University in Beirut and other mission enterprises and personnel in the Middle East were often used as “covers” for OSS spies and spies moving through that territory.
Then there were the Roman Catholic priests and bishops “subsidized” in various ways by the OSS; and – of course known to Americans – John Birch, the Baptist missionary in China who became the chief American spy there during the war.
Herman and protestants get most of the chapters in Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During World War II, by Matthew Avery Sutton, (Basic Books, 2019). The book is extremely well-documented. Herman died in 2006 and his family allowed Sutton to use his papers; and the author had access to many documents from the others whose lives as spies are told in the book.
We Lutherans, I think, will be fascinated by this “adventure story” about one of our own on the inside of the OSS during the war and after.
And we will learn how many other aspects of missionary organizations became part of the intelligence-gathering and “operational” work of the United States during those years. Furthermore, anyone who has been close to international church work during the cold-war years and following will think of people from both sides of the former Iron Curtain whose presence in certain places or travels made them useful “contacts” for those gathering intelligence.
The book is also available on the Audible recorded-book service.
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