Based primarily on the diaries by the author’s mother, The Missionary's Wife is the intriguing, disturbing, and as-it-happened story of Jim and Alexis Barclay, who found themselves as citizens of the United States of America living in the neutral country of Venezuela, South America during the most difficult years of World War II. The Barclays had planned a life as missionaries, but the United States government (through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States Office of Strategic Services or OSS, later the CIA), desperately needed American feet on the ground in Venezuela to monitor and fight against the then darkest scourge facing humanity — the Nazis and their accomplices, imperial Japan and fascist Italy. The Axis powers desperately wanted and needed what neutral Venezuela had in abundance — oil, iron ore, and natural rubber — to run their respective war machinery.
What better cover was there for the United States and its Allies from December 1943 through December 1945, than operative spies working as missionaries? And what a potentially corruptive mission for the Barclays — a mission that required lies, cheating, seduction, adultery, killing — and nerves of steel. Alexis Barclay was one of the most qualified and highly effective spies for the United States. She deeply loved and was trusted by both her American husband Jim and the German Nazi Major Jonathan Speer.
Within the Barclays’ story the book highlights attempts by the Nazis to take rubber and oil out of South America, and find safe havens within countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela for the European gold and artifacts stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families, Jewish places of worship, its communities and businesses, as well as the recently emptied treasuries of conquered countries such as France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
The book offers an emotional and thrilling ride of events for readers, including evidentiary support for alternative locations of tainted Nazi treasures that have so far eluded discovery.
