America's Great Game (13 page)

Whatever its origins, the anti-Zionism of the “overt” Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known. Less widely appreciated is the
opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’
covert
apparatus in the Middle East, first Bill Donovan’s OSS, and then the CIA—men like Kim Roosevelt’s boss in Cairo, Stephen Penrose. Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS. In 1942, the militant Zionist Peter Bergson organized a campaign to raise US support for a “Jewish army” to fight in Europe alongside Allied forces. Penrose suspected that Bergson’s proposal was a ruse to prepare the ground for Jewish statehood after the war, when the putative army would also probably be used to crush Arab resistance to Zionism. After Bergson had purchased a two-page advertisement for his campaign in the
New York Times
featuring a petition signed by an impressive list of prominent American citizens, Penrose wrote eight of the signatories who hailed from his home state of Washington, urging them to withdraw their support. All but one obliged.

Early the following year, when he learned that Rabbi James G. Heller, the Zionist president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, was also advocating the army idea, Penrose stepped up his counteroffensive, obtaining letters from signatories of Bergson’s petition stating their newfound opposition to the proposal, lobbying congressmen he thought might be receptive to his anti-Zionist message, and even contacting the State Department to discuss Rabbi Heller’s plans to travel to Palestine, presumably with a view to placing some bureaucratic obstacles in his path. Although he was at pains to make it clear that he was acting in a private rather than an official capacity, Penrose also let it be known that his views were shared by his OSS colleagues. “Some pretty potent stuff is brewing in opposition to the Zionist,” he told an anti-Zionist friend. “Although I am one of the chief cooks, I shall not appear in the dining room.”
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There was an emotional edge to Penrose’s statements about Zionism that raises the question of whether some deep-seated prejudice might have been at play. However, none of his papers contain any definite evidence of anti-Semitism, while other records point toward his having cooperated extensively with the pre-Israel Jewish authority, the Jewish Agency, when he was in Cairo. (The Agency, incidentally, shared some of Penrose’s objections to Peter Bergson’s activities in the United States.) Like the Sovietologist Henderson, Penrose’s anti-Zionism was probably motivated first and foremost by a prior, overriding intellectual and
emotional commitment. As a former American University of Beirut instructor of missionary and educator descent, Penrose was deeply concerned about the welfare of Palestinian Arabs and the tradition of American-Arab friendship that had developed since the nineteenth century, both causes that he feared might be harmed by US support for a Jewish state in Palestine. (Like other Arabists, Penrose also feared, apparently sincerely, for the future of the Jewish settlers themselves, believing that they would eventually be wiped out by their numerically superior Arab neighbors.) Doubtless, Penrose’s anti-Zionism was reinforced by the fact that, like his area counterparts in the State Department, he moved mostly in circles in which there were few if any Jews. Still, there is no reason to disbelieve the claim he made explicitly to fellow anti-Zionists that his opposition to Jewish statehood in Palestine was driven by concerns about its likely consequences for Arab Palestinians and US-Arab relations rather than by a dislike of Zionism per se.
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In addition to pointing out the possible strategic and humanitarian costs of Jewish statehood, anti-Zionists in the State Department and the OSS appealed straight to the bottom line. The Saudi Arabian oil industry, which US companies had first broken into in 1933 with the help of the renegade British Arabist Jack Philby, had by the time of World War II assumed massive importance in the minds of not just American oilmen but also Washington’s national security planners. The United States still had vast oil reserves of its own, but they were fast being depleted by the war effort, and experts had already forecast that the nation’s postwar energy needs would exceed its ability to supply them. With the Axis powers clearly planning military strategy to ensure their access to foreign oil fields, and the British and Russians tightening their grip on Iran, the Roosevelt administration focused its attention on keeping Saudi petroleum—“the greatest single prize in all history,” as one State Department analyst described it in 1943—firmly within the American grasp. To achieve this vital goal, it was necessary to maintain the goodwill of the Saudi king, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud, an aged but still fearsome warrior who had created his desert kingdom by killing in battle or driving from the Arabian peninsula all potential rivals to his rule. As the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world—he was contemptuous of similar claims made by the British-backed Hashemite rulers of Iraq and Transjordan—Ibn Saud was implacably opposed to Zionism and deeply suspicious of American intentions in Palestine.
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To deal with this formidable personage, Washington turned to the Arabists, including two of the principal figures involved in the OSS’s efforts to build up a US espionage presence in the Arab world: Harold Hoskins, the textile magnate picked to lead Expedition 90 in 1942, and his cousin, Bill Eddy. Hoskins returned from his controversial mission to the Middle East in the spring of 1943 reporting that the “most important and most serious fact” he had discovered on his travels was the danger of a “renewed outbreak of fighting between Arabs and Jews in Palestine before the end of the war.” Although FDR did not act on Hoskins’s recommendation that the United States declare a moratorium on the Palestine issue until after the war was over—a ploy to slow the momentum the Zionist movement was gaining in America—the president did call on Hoskins’s services again in the summer of 1943, this time for a mission to sound out King Ibn Saud about the possibility of his entering into secret peace talks with the moderate Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Unfortunately, the plan reminded the Saudi ruler of a similar scheme involving Weizmann and an offer of £20 million in development money brought to him by the meddlesome Jack Philby a few years earlier, a proposal he had rejected angrily as an attempted bribe. Although Hoskins therefore made no progress with regard to Palestine, he otherwise got along very well with Ibn Saud, and the Arabist returned to Washington persuaded of the king’s “fundamental honesty and his deep religious sincerity,” as he told FDR during a one-and-a-half-hour meeting in the White House. Hoskins also used his audience with the president to restate the anti-Zionist view “that the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine can only be imposed . . . [and] maintained by force”—in other words, that if the Zionists were to succeed, FDR would have to send American troops into the Middle East.
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While Harold Hoskins helped initiate the American alliance with Ibn Saud—scoring points against the Zionists as he did so—it was William Eddy who clinched it. Eddy was assigned to Saudi Arabia after returning from his triumphant tour of North Africa in 1943, first as a roving regional emissary for FDR, then in the impressive-sounding role of envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, specifically tasked with working his way into Ibn Saud’s confidence. He was to prove very effective in this mission, accompanying the king as he progressed around the tribal Arabian hinterland and even sleeping in the royal tent. It helped that the two men’s views on such questions as the Palestinian
conflict were almost identical. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to tell whether, in his dispatches to Washington, Eddy was merely reporting Ibn Saud’s opinions or advocating them.

Meanwhile, with millions of Lend-Lease dollars starting to flow to Saudi Arabia after FDR declared the country of vital strategic interest to the United States in 1943, the American presence there grew steadily. In the oil town of Dhahran, the recently formed US consortium the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) built a company compound, American Camp, that reminded visitors of a Californian suburb. The construction of a neighboring American airfield, negotiated by Eddy, soon followed, providing the United States with a vital strategic base in the Persian Gulf. The climax of the courtship came in February 1945, when, returning from the Yalta conference, the ailing FDR hosted a reception for Ibn Saud on board the USS
Quincy
, Eddy acting in the symbolically appropriate role of interpreter. With bedouin tents and Persian rugs strewn on the steel deck of the US cruiser, the meeting had an improbable, even surreal quality, and the president was surprised to find his famous charm failing to sway the king from his hatred of Zionism. In every other regard, however, the conference was wildly successful, cementing the new US-Saudi “special relationship” just as a comparatively chilly encounter between Winston Churchill and Ibn Saud soon afterward captured the fading British influence on the Arabian scene. For Eddy, it was a supremely happy moment, a convergence of the two civilizations he had tried to bridge his entire life, the beginning of a new spiritual alliance between Christianity and Islam that harked back to the one forged centuries earlier during the Crusades by Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.
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However, the Arabists’ anti-Zionist campaign was about to suffer a disastrous setback. The death of FDR brought to the White House a man who had stronger natural sympathies for Zionism than his predecessor—a legacy, in part, of his Baptist upbringing—and less skill at straddling conflicting political positions. As the full horror of the Holocaust began to sink in with the US public, the Zionism of the American Jewish community increased, especially among its Eastern European grassroots, and along with it the number of Gentile sympathizers. With Arab Americans and their advocates relatively few in number, arithmetic alone indicated that it made good political sense for elected representatives to support Zionist calls for the lifting of British restrictions on Jewish
immigration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism,” Truman pointed out. “I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs [among] my constituents.”
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Faced with what they saw as an increasingly disturbing domestic picture, Arabists in the foreign service, Eddy prominent among them, struggled to persuade Truman not to give in to Zionist demands. In addition to repeating Henderson’s argument that US support for a Jewish state might drive Arabs into the arms of the Soviet Union, Eddy and the others harped on Ibn Saud’s anti-Zionism, warning that Saudi Arabia might cancel ARAMCO’s oil concession if the United States took a Zionist position on Palestine. Although prepared to bow to the advice of the foreign policy advisors he had inherited from FDR on other questions, Truman was unimpressed by these representations. Pro-Zionist members of his White House staff were telling him that the House of Saud needed US support just as much as Americans needed Saudi oil, and the sometimes pompous, lecturing approach of the “striped-pants boys” from Foggy Bottom needled the plain-spoken president. As congressional elections loomed in the fall of 1946, Truman chose the eve of Yom Kippur, October 4, to declare his public support for the notion of a Jewish state in Palestine, the first US president ever to do so.
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Meanwhile, the situation in Palestine itself was deteriorating rapidly. Terrorist attacks on British targets by Jewish groups hastened London’s decision to surrender its authority to the United Nations, with May 1948 named as the date for final British withdrawal. The question of what was to follow the British Mandate could no longer be sidestepped. Zionists advocated what they represented as a compromise solution: the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem under international control. Although a UN special committee that reported in September 1947 made a similar recommendation, Arab leaders rejected partition on the grounds that it violated the rights of Palestine’s majority Arab population. In the meantime, the British authorities fueled the emotional atmosphere in the United States by turning away boatloads of displaced persons, many of them Holocaust survivors, seeking admission to Palestine. The UN, preparing to vote on the special committee’s recommendation for partition in November, was the scene of frantic lobbying by both sides.
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It was at this point that the newly created CIA, in one of its earliest intelligence assessments—a seventeen-page paper on “The Consequences of the Partition of Palestine” dated November 28, 1947—made an extraordinary intervention in the debate. Its authorship is not known for sure, but Thomas W. Lippman, biographer of Bill Eddy, strongly suspects the OSS Arabist’s hand in it. As Lippman points out, the tone is disconcertingly subjective, with the proposed partition portrayed as nothing less than an unmitigated disaster for all parties concerned. Specific predictions in the document, such as the likelihood that Arab forces would wipe out the new Jewish state within two years, were to prove seriously inaccurate. In other respects, however, the report was eerily prophetic, such as its forecast that partition would lead to prolonged “armed hostilities between Jews and Arabs,” serious disturbance of the “stability of the Arab world,” and damage to the United States’ previously excellent standing in the Middle East. Accurate though it might have been in these predictions, “The Consequences of the Partition of Palestine” failed to change any minds in the Truman White House, or to affect the voting behavior of the UN General Assembly, which on November 29 approved the partition resolution.
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At almost exactly the same moment that the OSS had been revived in Cold War form as the CIA, the Arabist spies of World War II had gone down to defeat on Palestine. Their shock and anger were manifest. Eddy resigned from government service in October 1947, citing unhappiness about supposedly inadequate congressional appropriations for the new intelligence apparatus he had helped steer into being. Family members, however, testify that it was in fact despair about the Truman administration’s unreceptiveness to the Arabists’ viewpoint that drove his resignation. He went to work for ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, as an “adviser on political relations in the Near East,” beating a path to the oil companies that would be followed by many other former intelligence officers (although, as later events would show, he never entirely severed his ties to the CIA). Stephen Penrose, who after the OSS’s dissolution had stayed on as an operations chief in the CIG and then in the fall of 1947 moved over to work as special assistant to the hardline anticommunist and anti-Zionist defense secretary James V. Forrestal, also eventually returned to the private sector, in his case taking up the presidency of the American University of Beirut in the summer of 1948, a post he held until his untimely death in 1954. Finally, the independently wealthy Harold
Hoskins, whose last official position had been that of James Landis’s replacement running the wartime Middle East Supply Center in Cairo, carried on a Cassandra-like commentary on the government’s Palestine policy while at the same time consulting with ARAMCO and serving on the AUB board of trustees. The OSS Arabists’ most prominent ally in the State Department, Loy Henderson, was once again punished for crossing the White House by being shunted off to the diplomatic sidings, this time an ambassadorship in India, although he was to reappear in the Middle East at a crucial juncture a few years later.
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