Beginning in the 1830s, Episcopalians established mission posts in Athens and Constantinople (Istanbul), from which they sought to convert Muslims and Jews to Christianity. As the birthplace of the Christian faith, the Middle East had always been an area of fascination to church people in the West, and with the expansion of American diplomatic and commercial interests into the Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century, Episcopalians and other American Protestants felt called to similarly export their religious values into the region. In A Drop of Treason, Stevenson reveals what made Agee tick-and what made him run.Ĭhristian Homeland focuses on the involvement of clergy and prominent laity of the Episcopal Church in Middle Eastern affairs, both religious and political, between the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829) and the Second Arab-Israeli War (1956-1957), with a brief epilogue covering additional events up to the present day. Raised a conservative Jesuit in Tampa, he died a socialist expat in Havana. He traveled the world, enlisted Gabriel García Márquez in his cause, married a ballerina, and fought for what he believed was right. Having made profound betrayals and questionable decisions, Agee lived a rollicking, existentially fraught life filled with risk. Stevenson examines Agee’s decision to turn, how he sustained it, and how his actions intersected with world events. And he didn’t stop there-his was a lifelong political struggle that firmly allied him with the social movements of the global left and against the American project itself from the early 1970s on. ![]() Unlike mere whistleblowers, Agee exposed American spies by publicly blowing their covers. The first biography of this contentious, legendary man, Jonathan Stevenson’s A Drop of Treason is a thorough portrait of Agee and his place in the history of American foreign policy and the intelligence community during the Cold War and beyond. ![]() For almost forty years in exile, he was a thorn in the side of his country. But in 1975, he became the first such person to publicly betray the CIA-a pariah whose like was not seen again until Edward Snowden. He was the consummate intelligence insider, thoroughly entrenched in the shadow world. He joined the CIA as a young idealist, becoming an operations officer in hopes of seeing the world and safeguarding his country. Philip Agee’s story is the stuff of a John le Carré novel-perilous and thrilling adventures around the globe.
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