America's Great Game (12 page)

These sentences, which ignored such evidence of democratic aspiration in Iran’s history as the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, were written in the 1980s, not long after the 1979 Iranian Revolution had brought about the overthrow of the shah in favor of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the taking of fifty-two US embassy workers in a hostage crisis that lasted over a year. Archie Roosevelt’s personal shock and anger at the events of 1979 are palpable in his memoirs—“How could we permit ourselves to become the victims of these fanatics, and undergo the humiliation of the seizure of our embassy and the ordeal of the hostages?” he asked—and it seems likely that his account of Iranian history was colored by these emotions. His reaction to Iran after his very first visit there, in January 1945, was far more positive, reminiscent of some of his observations of North Africa. Tehran was “a wonderful place, . . . a modern city with broad avenues” surrounded by “a beautiful range of mountains.” A year later, however, with the Cold War brewing, Archie’s impressions on returning to the country for his attaché posting, as recorded in his personal diary, were much less favorable, more in keeping with the mood of his autobiography. On closer inspection, the city’s modernity proved to be superficial. The streets had developed a Russian appearance; the food was bad and the hotels crummy; even the shah’s palace was disappointing, with many of the jewels on the legendary Peacock Throne either made of paste or missing altogether. Such signs of decrepitude, a source of charm for Archie in Baghdad, now just repelled him. Most significantly, in his eyes the Iranians lacked the personally attractive qualities he had discerned in the Arabs of North Africa. Some even had traits usually ascribed them by European Orientalists. Prime Minister Qavam’s dastardly adviser Firuz, for example, was literally dehumanized in Archie’s description: he had the “face of a fox [and the] movements of a snake.” A combination of Cold War crisis and classic Orientalism had, it seemed, disposed Archie Roosevelt to see Iranians less as historical actors in their own right—worthy of American support in their struggles against domestic tyranny and foreign intervention—than as pawns in a new, Soviet-American iteration of the Great Game.
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Archie’s assignment to Iran ended in February 1947. By then, the separatist governments in Tabriz and Mahabad had collapsed, as the shah’s army retook the north of the country (in Azerbaijan, Iranian forces were preceded by two gung-ho US pressmen, Joseph C. Goodwin and Clifton Daniel, driving Archie’s staff car). Moscow watched impassively as the Azeri and Kurdish nationalist movements were brutally suppressed. Meanwhile, American pressure on Prime Minister Qavam induced him to get rid of Firuz and purge the communist members of his cabinet. In December 1947, Qavam himself was dismissed by the shah, his fate prefiguring that of Mohammed Mosaddeq a few years later. Hence, by 1947, the United States was already moving toward support for the repressive rule of the shah and away from the idealistic principles it had earlier sought to uphold in Iran.

Although Archie returned to the United States feeling his duty was done, he was not without his regrets. Shortly before he left Iran, in January 1947, he learned that Mohammed Qazi, a well-educated Muslim judge who had helped set up the Kurdish republic government in Mahabad, was about to be executed, along with his brother. Rushing to the embassy, Archie begged the new US ambassador, George V. Allen, to intercede with the shah on the Qazis’ behalf, explaining that (as Allen recalled later) they were Kurdish nationalists who had collaborated with the Soviets “only because Moscow alone had shown interest in supporting the Kurds.” After teasing Archie that he was interested in the Qazis’ fate mainly because he feared the extinction of Kurdish, one of his several languages, Allen agreed to raise the matter with the shah. When he began to do so during an audience at the palace later that day, however, the shah headed him off. “Are you afraid I’m going to have them shot?” he asked Allen. “If so, you can rest your mind. I am not.” Allen expressed his relief and left, only to read in the following day’s newspapers that the Qazis had just been executed, on the shah’s orders. Archie, whose account of the incident rounds off the section of his memoirs on his time in Iran, bitterly concluded that the command must have been given “as soon as our ambassador had closed the door behind him.” The original, handwritten draft of this passage, included among Archie’s papers at the Library of Congress, contains a closing comment about the shah that did not find its way into the published version. “I never was one of his admirers,” it reads. “Even so, neither he nor Iran deserved their miserable fate.”
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FIVE

Zion

HAVING SEEN FOR HIMSELF THE
first post–World War II Soviet-American confrontation in Iran, Archie Roosevelt arrived back in Washington just in time to witness the US government officially declaring Cold War. In March 1947, prompted by the news that an impoverished Britain could no longer afford to prop up teetering noncommunist governments in Greece and Turkey, President Harry S. Truman told Congress that the United States would henceforth provide aid to any countries threatened by communist takeover. A few months after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, the new secretary of state, George C. Marshall, used a June commencement ceremony at Harvard as the occasion to outline what soon became known as the Marshall Plan, a multibillion-dollar aid package designed to shore up the war-devastated economies of Europe against communism. The anticommunist consensus that previously had been confined to an inner circle of senior foreign policy officials had now spread to the whole government.

This is not to say that the atmosphere in Washington was one of complete unanimity. Two controversies in particular roiled the nation’s political establishment. One of these concerned the future of foreign intelligence in America. In the last days of World War II, OSS chief Bill
Donovan had begun lobbying the White House for the creation of a permanent civilian intelligence agency to help the United States cope with its greatly expanded role in world affairs. The internationalist-minded FDR was sympathetic, but he was also aware that many Americans would not care for the suggestion, smacking as it did of big government and Old World political intrigue, and so he avoided giving Donovan a clear response. Undeterred, Wild Bill pursued the proposal with Harry Truman, only to find the new president definitely opposed to it on the grounds that he wanted no hand in “building up a gestapo.” The OSS was terminated on October 1, 1945, with its research and analysis branch hived off to the State Department, and most of its other divisions going to the military. Peacetime America, it seemed, would be no place for spies.
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But the matter did not rest there. Confronted by the threatening postwar environment, President Truman decided that he did need some sort of intelligence service after all, and in January 1946 he created the interim Central Intelligence Group (CIG). Meanwhile, Donovan carried on his campaign with the support of other former OSS-ers such as Allen W. Dulles, his wartime European deputy, now practicing corporate law on Wall Street. The Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of a secretary of state, Dulles was a card-carrying member of the Republican foreign policy establishment. Family friends included the Oyster Bay Roosevelts; indeed, Dulles’s children had attended a small school run by Archie Roosevelt’s parents, so he had known Archie and Kim since their childhoods. Although Dulles and his allies couched their pleas for the creation of a peacetime secret service in the language of political and bureaucratic necessity, what was most striking about their presentations was their appeal to the ethos of self-sacrificing public service—and aristocratic masculine privilege—fostered at exclusive East Coast institutions like Groton. “To create an effective Central Intelligence Agency, we must have in the key positions men who are prepared to make this a life work,” explained Dulles in words that could well have been spoken by Endicott Peabody. “The Agency should be directed by a relatively small but elite corps of men [who] . . . must find their reward primarily in the work itself, and in the service they render their government, rather than in public acclaim.”
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Donovan and Dulles’s campaign, which received a valuable assist from the OSS Arabist Bill Eddy in his postwar role as head of intelligence in the State Department, encountered a good deal of resistance, both from those who objected to the proposed agency on principle as
un-American and from institutional rivals such as J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nonetheless, by July 1947 the atmosphere of international crisis was such that Congress was ready to swallow its qualms about executive tyranny and approve the National Security Act, at a stroke transforming the CIG into a centralized, independent secret service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and creating much of the rest of the modern US national security state besides. The intelligence reformers had failed to remove the new agency entirely from military control: the post of director of central intelligence would be occupied by a succession of admirals and generals until 1953, when Allen Dulles, always the reformers’ preferred candidate for the job, eventually took over. In almost every other respect, however, they had prevailed.

The other controversy disturbing Washington at the time of Archie’s return there in 1947 proved less susceptible to a quick resolution. More emotion-laden than the debate about foreign intelligence, it also had a much older and more complicated history.

TRADITIONALLY, AMERICAN OFFICIALS HAD TRIED
to ignore the growing conflict between the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and the Jewish immigrants drawn to the country by the Zionist dream of a national homeland. The British were in charge there, as per the terms of their 1922 League of Nations mandate, so it was their problem to solve. By the time of World War II, though, this hands-off approach was no longer feasible. A second Arab Revolt, this time directed at British rather than Ottoman rule, had begun in 1936, leading to a series of violent clashes between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. Meanwhile, support for the Zionist project was growing within the United States among Jewish Americans who saw a new state in Palestine as a possible refuge for European Jews trying to flee Nazi persecution and among Christians who believed that Jewish restoration to the Holy Land was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The Zionist movement, its leadership increasingly radicalized by developments in Palestine and in Europe, was quick to act on this mood of public sympathy, taking out newspaper advertisements and lobbying Congress, many of whose members became active supporters. True to form, FDR lent a friendly ear to Zionist leaders while avoiding making any definite commitments, but even he was beginning to find it hard not to take a position on the issue.

One reason for FDR’s reluctance to commit himself to the Zionist movement was the advice that the White House was receiving from the Middle East area specialists in the State Department who, almost to a man, advised against American support for a Jewish state. The phenomenon of anti-Zionism in the US foreign service was, and continues to be, deeply controversial. For example, Loy Henderson, the arch anticommunist who took over the State Department’s Near East division after the war, was denounced vehemently at the time for his widely reported opposition to Zionism—one congressman from a heavily Jewish area of New York City, Emanuel Celler, called him a “striped-trousered underling saboteur”—and has often been accused since of having been motivated by anti-Semitism.
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In Henderson’s case, this last charge is probably unfair, at least in the sense that his ruling emotion when running the Near East bureau was the same as it had been during his earlier postings as a “Sovietologist” in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: his hatred of communism. American support for the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine would, he feared, open up the Middle East to Soviet influence by turning its majority Arab population against the United States. The fact that many Zionist leaders came from socialist backgrounds also rankled with him, sowing the suspicion that a Jewish nation would naturally gravitate toward Moscow rather than Washington. For Loy Henderson, then, the debate about American support for Jewish statehood came down mainly to a question of Cold War strategy.
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That said, cultural and social factors did undoubtedly play some role in the US foreign service’s lack of sympathy for Zionism. Like most elite American institutions prior to World War II, the State Department and its Near East office had a WASP-ish, clubby atmosphere that was not especially friendly to Jews, and during the war itself, foreign service careerists by and large failed to appreciate the transformative impact that the Holocaust had on Jewish attitudes toward the question of a national homeland. If not actually anti-Semitic, they were at least guilty of a serious failure of imagination. There was also an unmistakable hint of patrician hauteur about these mandarins’ response to the democratic pressures on government that the Zionist movement was mobilizing. US foreign policy should be left to trained civil servants such as themselves, they believed, not to the whims of public opinion.