The Grenada Documents: Archive Of Church Subversion

An Interview With Dr. Michael A. Ledeen

Dr. Michael A. Ledeen, a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, is a former Rome correspondent for the The New Republic and former executive editor of The Washington Quarterly. He also serves from time to time as a consultant to the United States Department of State and the Department of Defense. He is currently analyzing documents of the New Jewel Movement, a revolutionary party which received extensive support from church leaders and agencies in the United States during the time it held power on the island of Grenada.

Dr. Ledeen was recently interviewed in Washington by the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Following is a transcript of the interview, along with a Grenadian government document describing strategies for subverting churches on the island.

DR. LEDEEN: The American and Caribbean armed forces that liberated Grenada last fall brought all documentation regarding the ruling party, the New Jewel Movement, to the United States for analysis. There is an unbelievable quantity: we have been through about 25,000 pounds of documents so far, and we have another huge shipment that has just come in. It’s mostly government material, although there are also some private diaries. There is also a substantial amount of documentation in Spanish that was in the possession of the Cubans on the island.

IRD: What is the special significance of these documents?

DR. LEDEEN: They comprise the first full documentary record of a country that was taken over by the Soviet Union and its proxy forces. Consequently, the Grenada archive constitutes an historical source of enormous and quite unique importance. Moreover, I would wager that if we could lay hands on the Nicaraguan archive, we would find a replication of what we have found in Grenada. So I think it is a real case study of Soviet and Cuban behavior in his hemisphere.

IRD: What is there of special interest to church-goers in the United States?

DR. LEDEEN: The first thing is that, contrary to what some sophisticated people contend, Communists really do believe in Communism. It may sound simple-minded to say that. But I, along with lots of other presumably well-informed people, had come to believe that the Russians and the Cubans really didn’t believe in Communism anymore. To be sure, they paid lip service to the ideology, and invoked Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin, but they didn’t really believe in it. Therefore you could deal with them like anybody else. Well, once you start reading these documents you see that a great deal of very scarce money and man-power was invested in the indoctrination of the people of the island. Ideology means a lot.

Secondly, religious ideas were clearly viewed as an obstacle to the process of political indoctrination. There was one secret agreement between the Cuban Communist Party and the New Jewel Movement which arranged for ex-changes of personnel: Grenadians going to Cuba to be trained and Cubans coming to Grenada to train other Grenadians there. The agreement quite explicitly provides for sending people to Cuba to be trained in dealing with the churches while Cubans skilled in handling churches would take up assignments in Grenada.

The purpose of this exchange was to strengthen a campaign of unrelenting hostility and suspicion by the government against the churches. This campaign was carried out in a variety of ways. Given a pretext, the government would simply get rid of the religious leaders who were explicitly anti-Communist. On one occasion a Methodist minister who refused to perform a funeral service for a Communist was simply thrown out of the country.

But their longer run plan is set forth in a memorandum drafted by the chief of their internal security structure, Major Keith Roberts. It is dated July 12, 1983, and called “Analysis of the Church in Grenada” (see Appendix). The last two pages consist of a series of recommendations which begin by saying that the party must infiltrate the churches and watch them all very carefully, and that they must build up the Communist mass organizations, the national youth organization, the national women’s organization, the pioneers and so forth, as alternatives to the churches. Point seven says that they should remove from primary schools all deeply religious head teachers by whatever means most suitable, replacing them with more “progressive elements.” Political education was to be introduced into all the social studies curricula down to the primary schools and the secondary schools. The document called for eliminating the Mass from Sunday morning radio programs.

IRD: That sounds like what is happening in Nicaragua.

DR. LEDEEN: Overall, the plan was very much like the Nicaraguan model. The Grenadians speak of trying to substitute clergy and lay people from other Communist regimes for the traditional religious authorities on the island. They talk of bringing in people from Nicaragua and other Latin American countries linked, as Major Roberts puts it, to the theory of liberation and to the idea of a church committed to revolutionary positions.

IRD: Do you find in these documents any sign that this support for liberation theology and the “people’s church” derived from any genuine Christian commitments on the part of New Jewel leaders?

DR. LEDEEN: No, they were Marxist-Leninists; they were not Christians. In the final analysis they were aiming at raising a new generation of Grenadians who were atheistic.

IRD: So their interest in radically-inclined Christians was just a tactic for them?

DR. LEDEEN: When you go through these documents, it is clear that the whole treatment of the churches is a tactical question. They are not interested in religious or theological issues at all. And, in fact, they frequently complain that religious leaders seem really to believe in religion, and that they actually want to Christianize the inhabitants of Grenada.

IRD: One of these documents refers rather favorably to the Caribbean Conference of Churches, which denounced the joint U.S.-Caribbean action almost immediately after it began. But we later learned that the Grenada Christian Council itself was a very strong supporter of the action. How do you explain the statement of the Caribbean Conference of Churches, and the apparent assumption of the New Jewel Movement that it was an ally?

DR. LEDEEN: It looks like the New Jewel Movement was right. The Caribbean Conference of Churches certainly wasn’t representing the interests or the views of the churches on Grenada. The new Jewel Movement considered the churches on Grenada to be enemies. And, as the accounts of the government’s internal espionage organization make clear, the Grenadian churches did not like Communism. IRD: Immediately after the invasion, something in this country called the Committee in Solidarity with Free Grenada issued a press release under the headline “Religious and Community Leaders Condemn U.S. Invasion of Grenada.” This release came out of the office of the Caribbean and Latin American affairs staff person at the United Methodist Church’s Office on the United Nations. And among the signers of the release were a number of officials of the U.S. National Council of Churches. Is there evidence in the records of the New Jewel Movement that it worked to cultivate allies in church bodies here?

DR. LEDEEN: Yes, in fact it had lots of allies of all sorts in the United States. They periodically traveled around this country, touching base with their supporters here. We have found the references in documents to what they have called their U.S. Front Group, which consisted of a variety of people: some people in the mass media; some in the universities; a substantial number from Communist Party, USA. IRD: These documents refer to a number of conflicts the government had with the churches in Grenada. They seem to have been particularly concerned that Bishop Sidney Clark, a Roman Catholic, was organizing a youth movement. In another passage they’re concerned that boxes of the Jerusalem Bible had been sent in.

DR. LEDEEN: Yes, they were terrified by the fact that over 4,000 Bibles arrived on the island. This appears in several of their documents. Churches brought in 4,365 copies of the Jerusalem Bible, and the government was concerned that because this Bible was written in a very readable style it would influence the masses.

IRD: One other document says that the government sees “the church in the immediate period as being the more dangerous sector for the development of internal counter revolution,” and they talk of fearing a “Poland situation” (see Appendix). Moreover, the churches they were most concerned about — the Catholics, Methodists, and Anglicans — are those that have been socially active and progressive. Why?

DR. LEDEEN: That is always the case. The major enemies of Communist regimes are always progressive forces; the first targets are always people on the democratic Left. They have to eliminate any option on the Left. They know that in time they can usually destroy more conservative .organizations and groups, but the most difficult groups to do away with are free-trade unions, progressive intellectuals, and other popular, non-Communist political parties. In fact, the Communists sometimes find it useful to keep the others around so they can point to them and say: see the enemy is real — there is an actual conservative.

 IRD: Would you say that what is evident from these documents about what occurred in Grenada could reasonably be considered a pattern in totalitarian attitudes toward religion?

DR. LEDEEN: It is exactly what you would expect to find. Anyone who is familiar with Communism would have expected to find a government irritated by people who believe in God. Religion has to be done away with because it gets in the way of communizing and mobilizing the masses.

IRD: Have you released these documents to the American press?

DR. LEDEEN: We are in the process of releasing all the documents we can lay our hands on to the American public. We hope by late spring or early summer to have microfilmed or microfiched all of the material from Grenada. And as soon as that is done and a reasonably decent index is prepared, we will open it up to the world and anyone who wants to see this stuff can come and read it.

IRD: Who would benefit most from reading these documents?

DR. LEDEEN: In the religious context, those church people who harbor hope for alliances with Communists to bring about change. They would learn that the Communists were cynically using those who sympathize with liberation theology. No amount of excuses can deny what is evident in these documents: the desire of the New Jewel regime was to eliminate any authentic religious institutions from Grenada.

The question of how was a tactical matter, but the clear objective was that there should be no independent, authentic religious institution in that country. If that could be achieved by subverting the churches and substituting a political religion, that would be quite satisfactory.

They talked about bringing in “people’s churches,” as they tried to do in Nicaragua: creating organizations claiming to be religious which in reality were political. Or they would have been happy just to have driven out all the priests and preachers they didn’t like. Or they would have liked to recruit all the youth to atheism, and to have ended any kind of religious instruction or religious tradition. All of these were tactical questions. The main point was simply that religion had to go. There is no room for religion in this kind of society.

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