C.I.A. SECRET MISSIONARIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670009-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 8, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: April 26, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/08: CIA-RDP96-00806R000100670009-8
I
ARTICLE APP f CaD THE NATIO111
ON FAGS 26 April 1980
for, like his cou.
strate an intim,
tics, as well as
courtesy of th,
local and fore
C.I.A. now at
area, partly lii
Catholic and F
following revel
sionary groups
rity agencies c
example, Nvas.t
S-ecr8i
o ?
the Uruguayan interior LV1IIHauy, L.u13. V tIoaa, vauuciiuia,
was an old C.I.A. hand who had worked with former C.I.A.
agent-.Philip Agee in the 1960s. The pair spent their time
making life difficult for diplomats from the socialist coun-
tries accredited to Uruguay back in the days when Uruguay
.was. still a democracy. Vargas Garmendia was generally
thought to have planned.the murders of two former Uru-
guayan Senators in Buenos Aires in 1976. He was later made
secretary to President Aparicio Mendez, front man for
Uruguay's repressive military regime.-
Because of his background in Church affairs,. acquired
during a stint in Central America, Centeno was chosen to
monitor and persecute Uruguay's critical Catholic Church.
Also useful were his credentials as. a militant in Catholic
Action, a laymen's movement that was influential in Latin
America during the 1960s. Centeno professed not to under-
stand why Uruguayan priests were so "strangely" reluctant
to answer questions, whereas his experience with Catholics
in Central America had been "just the opposite." But in
view of the regime's arrest and/or expulsion of fifteen t
religious between 1972 and 1976, the closure of five Church
publications and a smear campaign- against Montevideo's
Archbishop Carlos Parteli, labeled a Communist because he
defended human rights, such reticence was well-founded.
Though an: "educated" policeman,. Centeno specialized in
the "black propaganda" of half-truths or outright lies prac-
ticed by- the C.I.A.. in-- its work--with Church groups in
Ecuador, Brazil and Chile during the-1960s and early 1970s.
When such important Montevideo bookstores as Ramos y.
Until 1975, the Central Intelligence Agency routinely used
missionaries and clerics as informants and for covert activi-
ties. This was particularly true in Latin America, where
most of the fourteen documented cases. of collaboration
with the C'LA. occurred.
Now, under foreign intelligence charter legislation being,
considered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
the C. LA. would again he empowered to use church groups
to gather intelligence. White House spokesmen claim that
the C.LA. would enlist missionaries only if "it is terribly im-
portant. " They alsq state that the Government will support
a charter to `protect the integrity" of missionaries and
clerics. On the basis of the C.LA.'s past record, however,
such assurances are dubious-as is shown by the following
passage excerpted from Penny LernouY's Cry of the Peo-
-.ple, to be published by Doubleday on May 2.
.. _ . . TL
~ditoM
e
PENNY LERNOUX
guayan Jesuit, how. brutish Uruguayan police known as
h ld oa do with people threatened the owners.=
t
teno Alancastro was suitably sympa- Mosca refused to stock-The Church of Silence, a slanderous
Golf
C
en
o .
thetic: -It, really was-a.shame, he told -the Uru- attack on Chile's bishops by a right-wing Catholic group
T 1d't on Family and Property (T.F? P.) Centeno
cou y
A --LjL- agents were, but w a
..who, thought- that Medellin* was the name of a person and Merl like Centeno owe their skills- in part to the Agency
_'confused pictures of Christ with Che Guevara. for International Development's police training programs,
The. police had just ransacked the priest's house in Monte- but they also adhere to a long tradition of Church spying
video, carrying off his entire library. to burn, including a that dates to the C.I.A.'s forerunner, the Office of Strategic
. rare collection of theological.-treatises, and here-was their Services (O.S.S.), formed during World War It. Later, dun-
boss commiserating with him over the loss of his life's work! . ing the cold war, U.S. missionaries routinely collaborated
According to Centeno, such incidents would never happen if with the C.I.A.. and, on their return to the United States,
Church officials would only cooperate with educated police- .visited the State Department to be debriefed. In those days
men like himself.' there was nothing conspiratorial about this relationship, nor
Whatever his claims, Centeno had bona fidecredentials, any suggestion of moral conflict: most missionaries shared CONTINUM
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/08: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670009-8