I usually find stories of Friends by tracking a list of a hundred-plus Quaker-related RSS feeds. I’ll also find them being shared on Facebook or in the Reddit Quakers group. For the first time ever I stumbled on one in Twitter Moments. Another likely first: I’m linking to the CIA website. Read the story of the Quaker pacifist who lived with the CIA.
Margaret [Scattergood] was far more skeptical of CIA and considered the organization’s mission to be in violation of her pacifist beliefs. She used her trust fund to financially contribute to antiwar causes. She lobbied Congress to cut the US Intelligence and military budgets. In the 1980s Margaret opened her home to Sandinistas from Nicaragua, while CIA supported the opposition.
Inviting Sandinistas to her home in the middle of the CIA headquarters compound is easily the most kickass Quaker stories I’ve heard in awhile. Chuck Fager also shared some of this story in a nice remembrance in a 1987 Friends Journal shortly after she died; apparently the land purchases in the 1940s weren’t quite so neighborly as the CIA public relations team seem to make out.
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