who was at the time serving as a Navy press officer, attached to the admiralty, appreciated the eloquence of Dooley's situation reports, and suggested that he write a book. After his first draft was complete, he and Lederer spent two weeks living together polishing the manuscript. Lederer was also on "special assignment" for the CIA during this period. In 1956, Dooley's book Deliver Us from Evil was released and became a best-seller, establishing him as an icon of American humanitarian and anti-communist activities abroad. His vivid accounts of communist atrocities committed on Catholic refugees appear to have been either fabricated or exaggerated. It has been alleged that Dooley was passing along descriptions of events that had been created by Landsdale and his team. In 1956, U.S. officials who were stationed in the Hanoi-Haiphong area during his tour of duty submitted a lengthy report to the U.S. Information Agency holding that Deliver Us from Evil was "not the truth" and that the accounts of Viet Minh atrocities were "nonfactual and exaggerated." However, the US government kept the report classified for nearly thirty years. James Fisher allows that the U.S. Information Agency report was "valid," but he also argues it "must be viewed with some suspicion" because they were preparing to "discredit Dooley" as "an insurance policy against a renewed outbreak of anti-internationalism." Dooley's book featured exceptionally gory tales of religious persecution. The doctor claimed the Viet Minh jammed chopsticks into the ears of children to keep them from hearing the Lord's Prayer and regularly mutilated Catholic instructors. Most sensationally, he fabricated a story of the Viet Minh pounding nails into the head of a priest—"a communist version of the crown of thorns, once forced on the Savior of whom he preached." He also claimed that Ho Chi Minh's forces had "disemboweled more than 1,000 native women in Hanoi." Thirty years after his death, in response to a journalist's question, Lederer said that "the atrocities the doctor described 'never took place.'" At the time, however, Lederer brokered a deal with Reader's Digest to publish Dooley's claims to their massive audience; and, he used him as the "real-life model" for Father John Finian, a heroic character in The Ugly American. Commenting on these allegations, Seth Jacobs wrote that although Dooley "may have exaggerated or fabricated", this was not done to make his book more sensational. Instead, these atrocity stories grew out of a