Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors

This is an illuminating study of how agents of the World War II–era Office of Strategic Services (Oss) and its postwar successor, the Central Intelligence Agency (Cia), interpreted and instrumentalized religion for the sake of espionage, psychological operations, and warmongering. Focusing on settings as diverse as 1950s Vietnam and 1970s Iran, Michael Graziano shows how these officials' approach to religion provided pathways for on-the-ground engagement with locals and helped pave the way for geopolitical blunders on a global scale. According to Graziano, the rise of the Cold War and the midcentury institutionalization of “religious studies” as an academic discipline created a context in which intelligence officials adopted a “kind of applied religious studies” (p. 149). Yet these officials' interpretations of religious intelligence often enough missed the mark, and at times they used their flawed conclusions to propagandize Americans. Therefore, the book is a cautionary tale about intellectual hubris and the technocratic temptation to overestimate or misuse expertise around the “X factor” of religious belief, practice, and experience (p. 237

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