TOM DOOLEY, M.D., CIA
Throughout the mid-to-late 1950s, Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley III was widely celebrated as embodying the great and unselfish good of American aid. His humanitarian medical assistance in rural areas of Laos and Vietnam during the early U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was widely praised. President John F. Kennedy awarded Dooley, who died in 1961, a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal. There was a movement to have Dooley, a Roman Catholic, canonized as a saint. Yet there was a hidden side to Dooley, U.S.government records revealed later. After World War II, when U.S. foreign policy focused on containing communism, Dooley was the consummate “cold warrior.” He assisted the CIA by gathering intelligence on North Vietnamese operations in Laos and South Vietnam, while creating and promoting U.S. “disinformation” as a CIA propaganda weapon in the struggle for Vietnamese “hearts and minds.” Today all thought of sainthood has vanished, leaving in its place a legacy of contradictions and controversy.
Dooley was born in St. Louis on Jan. 17, 1927. His parents were strict Roman Catholics, and after high school he studied at one of American’s most famous Catholic universities, Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, but dropped out after five semesters. In 1944 as World War II raged, Dooley joined the Navy. He became a Navy corpsman and was stationed at a naval hospital in New York City. After the war, Dooley left the Navy and returned to Notre Dame in 1946, but dropped out again. Dooley never revealed why he entered and left twice, except to say he was “restless.”
Afterward Dooley entered St. Louis University School of
