Jay Reid and the Catholic Intelligence Agency
How I learned the extent of the Agency's representation in Jay's Bethesda, MD neighborhood
Jay Reid married a Catholic woman, attended every mass for which he did not have a ready made excuse to miss, and secured his final resting place in a Catholic cemetery. In fact, for more than 30 years, his next door neighbors were priests.
“He didn’t believe any of it,” I was once told. He just went through the motions for his wife, my grandmother, Virginia.
Doting father that he was, Jay volunteered many a Sunday morning through the mid-1960s to watch the children so Ginny could attend mass in peace.
Translation: Ginny went to church, Jay read the newspaper, and the kids…well, they did all kinds of stuff.
One Sunday, my pre-school aged father and his older-by-11-months-to-the-day brother snuck out of the house, walked down the street to St. Bartholomew’s, opened the door, and walked right up the aisle to the edge of the altar, where they spoke with the priest in the middle of the homily while my grandmother looked on in sheer horror.
Jay, head surely in the paper, must have been in the living room that day. Had he been sitting on the front landing, there is no way the boys would have been able to escape. You could almost see the church from Jay’s front door. From the front yard, it was clear as day.
St. Bartholomew’s played a central role in the neighborhood. Jay’s kids attended elementary school there, and all the area kids, regardless of religion, played on the church playground and in the massive parking lot between the church and the end of Blacklock Road.
With the knowledge that numerous CIA officials lived very close to Jay, I have often wondered whether St. Bart’s, as it is affectionately known, had any sort of relationship with the Agency.
Last year I had a chance to ask a former church employee about that. Rather than ask directly, I shared some of my research findings and invited the person to comment.
I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard the response.
Spying and the Church
Since its inception, the CIA has been intertwined with the Catholic Church.
It is common knowledge these days that the CIA funneled money through the Church to help keep Italy in the capitalist camp during the early Cold War period.
In fact, the Agency’s work in Italy from the late-1940s through the early 1960s remains one of its great successes.
The Church was naturally inclined to push back against communism, and it was seen as an agency ally in countries with large Catholic populations.
One such example is Poland, where the Church holds significant sway in society and politics.
Although never as close to the Church hierarchy in Poland as it was in Italy, the Agency nonetheless monitored closely church-state relations in the restive, Eastern European country.
In recent years, other parts of the American intelligence apparatus have taken an interest in the Church.
A December 4, 2023 press release by the House Judiciary Committee revealed an undercover FBI operation that aimed to cultivate a priest as an informant against his parishioners:
In February 2023, the Committee began its oversight after whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed the existence of the Richmond memorandum in internal FBI systems. In April 2023, after the FBI failed to fully cooperate with the oversight, Chairman Jordan issued a subpoena to Director Christopher Wray, requesting documents related to the memorandum. The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s oversight shows that the FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists. The Committee and Select Subcommittee discovered that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment and the FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership. Not only did the FBI propose to develop sources, but it already interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia for the memorandum. Most concerning of all, without the disclosure of the whistleblower, the Richmond memorandum would still be operative in FBI systems, violating the religious liberties of millions of Catholic Americans.
Concerning as the Committee’s findings were, an even more relevant disclosure came to light in 2013, around the time Francis became Pope.
The Italian news magazine Panorama reported that the NSA had spied on the Vatican in the run up to the papal conclave.
Panorama magazine said that among 46 million phone calls followed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in Italy from Dec. 10, 2012, to Jan. 8, 2013, were conversations in and out of the Vatican…
“It is feared” that calls were listened to up until the start of the conclave that elected Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, Panorama said.
The magazine said there was also a suspicion that the Rome residence where some cardinals lived before the conclave, including the future pope, was monitored.
If the NSA could eavesdrop on the Vatican at roughly the same time it was monitoring the cell conversations of the German chancellor, it is certainly well within the range of possibility that the NSA could monitor smaller, local parishes.
This is a question I’ve been pondering since early 2024.
The people in the pews
“A lot of people in that parish were CIA,” the former St. Bart’s employee told me. “It was easy to get to from there.”
I responded with surprise.
The former employee continued, “There were maybe 20, 25 men and women [among the parishioners] who were in the CIA [in the mid-1970s].”
St. Bart’s was a stone’s throw from Jay’s mailbox. That meant he was inundated with Agency officials.
What impact that had on Jay’s life, career, and relationship with the Agency, I still do not know.
At this point, aside from Jay, I can only name one other parishioner who worked at or for the Agency.
That person was four-time Station Chief in Southeast Asia, and later Chief of the Counterintelligence Staff, B. Hugh Tovar.