Asked about Waldron's role and background, Alice Stewart, the press secretary for the Bachmann for President campaign, replied in an email: "Michele's faith is an important part of her life and Peter did a tremendous job with our faith outreach in Iowa. We are fortunate to have him on our team and look forward to having him expanding his efforts in several states."

Waldron's ordeal and life are the inspiration for a film, "The Ultimate Price: The Peter E. Waldron Story," from Big Promise Production. Here's the synopsis of the film that accompanies the trailer released on YouTube earlier this year:

Lebanon. Iraq. Syria. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Uganda. India. For over thirty years, his family never knew where he went -- never knew what he did. Based on a true story, Dr. Peter Waldron was on a mission. Was he a businessman, a preacher, a spy? Tortured and facing a firing squad, he never broke his oath of silence. What secret was worth the ultimate price?

The trailer was removed from YouTube after The Atlantic posted this story.

Waldron, a Republican operative since the late 1980s, had been in Uganda since 2002 and was at the time of his arrest working for the "Africa Dispatch" newsletter and, according to reports in 2006, working on a pilot study of a new health-care information technology management system.

One Ugandan paper alleged he was working with Congolese rebel militia members to capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the Ugandan guerrilla group the Lord's Resistance Army, and claim a $1.7 million bounty on his head being offered by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, but that planning for the operation was botched, leading police to Waldron's house and the guns. But the Kampala Monitor reported that the inspector general of police "told a news conference Waldron was suspected of links to a group in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and 'planned to set up a political party here based on Christian principles.'"

On his website, Waldron says he was "falsely accused of being a spy by the Uganda government's secret police," leading to his arrest. One man who knew Waldron in 2004 told The St. Petersburg Times in 2006 that Waldron had told him he used to work for the CIA, and the question of whether or not Waldron has worked as a spy is prominently teased in the trailer for the movie based on his life now being promoted on his personal website.

(Andrew Rice, the man who spoke with the Times about Waldron's purported history as a spook, on Wednesday said he had incorrectly recalled their conversation, but that his general impression of him was "that he was quite a vivid storyteller" and "a particularly flamboyant example of an archetypal character: the American who goes to Africa, a continent where a little money and a lot of talk can buy substantial power, in search of a position of influence.")