America's Great Game (14 page)

The Arabists had been taught a harsh lesson in postwar American politics. It did not matter that they were from Ivy League backgrounds, that they knew their field better than anyone else, or even that they held senior government posts. The emotional power of Zionism in Holocaust-era America and the skill of the Zionist movement’s leadership in mobilizing the support of ordinary Americans were more than a match for these advantages. If anything, the Arabists’ elite position seemed to count against them, as it enabled the Zionists to portray them as aristocratic, conspiratorial, and un-American. Indeed, the very meaning of the word “Arabist” itself shifted in these years, from a neutral term simply referring to an individual with area expertise to a pejorative epithet for someone who identified excessively with Arab culture and, by definition, was anti-Zionist, if not anti-Semitic, to boot. Meanwhile, at the same time that positive images of Zionists in Palestine began circulating in national media—the settlers were depicted variously as repeating the American frontier experience, cultivating a desert, and creating an oasis of democracy in an otherwise benighted region—Arabs were represented increasingly in Orientalist terms, as backward, fanatical, and cruel. One of the aims of Protestant missionaries in the 1800s had been to try to educate their fellow Americans about the many splendid achievements of Arab civilization. Their twentieth-century heirs were, it seemed, failing to tell the Arabs’ story in similar terms.
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ARCHIE ROOSEVELT WAS KEEPING AN
eye on developments in Palestine in the summer and fall of 1947, but they were not the main thing on his mind. Of far more pressing concern was his own personal future. Earlier in the year, immediately after his return from his tour in Iran, it had briefly seemed as if Archie might be quitting the spying game. His
burgeoning reputation as a Middle East expert had earned him several different job offers, including a renewed invitation from Loy Henderson to come work with him in the State Department, and KW was hopeful that her husband might yet decide to stay and work in Washington. Just as he was about to take the foreign service oral examination (he had completed the written exams while still in Tehran, achieving the highest ever recorded score of 94 percent), however, Archie received a message via Kim Roosevelt from Michael G. Mitchell, head of the Middle East section of the Central Intelligence Group (the CIA’s immediate predecessor), asking him to come for an interview. A few days later came another offer of employment: replacing Daniel C. Dennett Jr., a former AUB instructor and OSS officer who had just died in a plane crash, as chief of the CIG station in Beirut. The Lebanese capital had been the notional location of the OSS’s regional headquarters under Harold Hoskins’s Expedition 90 plan, and Archie found the prospect of heading such an important post in the new Central Intelligence Agency irresistible. After a summer of “pretty rudimentary” training in spy craft at CIG headquarters, he left for the Middle East on September 10, 1947, “full of foreboding” about the state of his marriage, with KW and his son, Tweed, waving forlornly at the departing plane.
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Sitting next to Archie was another young intelligence officer bound for a chief of station posting in the Syrian capital of Damascus, “a brilliant, talented extrovert from Alabama” (as Archie described him) whom Archie had befriended during training. Together, these two young station chiefs would blaze the CIA’s trail in the Levant and, along with Kim Roosevelt, form an Arabist triumvirate that would dominate the Agency’s first covert operations in the Middle East as a whole.
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SIX

The Guest No One Invites Again

WILLIAM EDDY, HAROLD HOSKINS, AND
Stephen Penrose, three Arabists of missionary stock, had pioneered the United States’ intelligence effort in the Middle East while at the same time working to promote their deeply held Arabist and anti-Zionist convictions. Overall, considering the strong colonial hold that the British and French still exercised on the region, the OSS Arabists had been unexpectedly successful in their intelligence mission, reflecting their intimate experience and knowledge of the Arab world. Where they had failed—again, to some extent because of their partial detachment from US society and culture—was in converting their fellow Americans to their love of Arab civilization and opposition to a Zionist state in Palestine.

Now, with the passing of the OSS and creation of the CIA, a new generation of younger intelligence officers was appearing on the scene who, although not themselves Middle East–born, shared the Arabist values of their predecessors thanks to their wartime experiences serving in the Arab world. The main exemplars of this type were the Roosevelt cousins Kim and Archie. However, not all of the new CIA’s Middle
Eastern hands were of such aristocratic lineage, nor did they necessarily have any experience of serving in the region prior to their posting there by the Agency. Indeed, several came from quite humble backgrounds and were drawn to the Middle East, at least initially, mainly for reasons of adventure—men like the young Alabaman seated next to Archie on the flight to Lebanon in September 1947.

MILES COPELAND PRESENTS THE HISTORIAN
with a problem. After leaving the CIA, he wrote a series of books, culminating in his 1989 autobiography,
The Game Player
, that together constitute one of the most revelatory set of writings by a former US intelligence officer ever published. In addition to disarmingly candid confessions about their author’s personality—
The Game Player
begins with an account of how, when quizzed by CIA psychologists, Copeland could not think of anyone he had ever disliked and then cheerfully owned up to his readiness “to ice someone”—these works also contain extraordinarily detailed accounts of CIA covert operations in, among other countries, Syria, Egypt, and Iran, making them an indispensable source about the secret history of America’s involvement in the Middle East. As such, they present a stark contrast with Archie Roosevelt’s autobiography, which is so tight-lipped about CIA operations that, in the words of British author John Keay, “its main title,
For Lust of Knowing
, invites a ‘
But Not of Telling.’”
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The trouble is that it is very difficult to know how far one can trust Copeland’s writings. Former colleagues, personal acquaintances, and even, tacitly, Copeland himself testified to his unreliability. When confronted about one wild claim, “he laughed, thought it was terribly funny,” recalled one friend. Indeed, the consensus on this score is so unanimous that the skeptical researcher begins to wonder if it might not be a bluff concocted by CIA insiders to distract attention from Copeland’s essential truthfulness. Then there are other possibilities to consider. Perhaps Copeland deliberately mixed fact and fiction in order to evade official censorship, a fate that would befall several other CIA memoirists. Was there a more mysterious, darker motive, as hinted by Jack Philby’s son, the British double agent Kim Philby, who described another of Copeland’s controversial books,
The Game of Nations
, as “itself a move in the CIA’s monstrous game”? Or was it simply that Miles
Copeland enjoyed telling a tall tale, playing games with his readers? Whatever the explanation, this trait in Copeland obliges one to tread carefully, cross-checking his assertions when other records are available, and acknowledging when there is only his word to go on. “Miles Copeland,” the irreverent, rollicking, and thoroughly amoral Game Player of Copeland’s own writings, was a splendid literary creation—but was he real?
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To begin with what we know for sure: Miles Axe Copeland Jr. was born on July 16, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father, Miles Sr., was a distinguished local physician, his mother, Lenora, a professional cook who developed recipes for radio. According to
The Game Player
, young Miles was close to the warm-hearted Lenora, a gifted storyteller, but never got on with his father, a remote and severe disciplinarian (a parenting style he consciously rejected when raising his own sons). Although he would eventually grow into a robust, big-framed man, with “thick, sandy hair and . . . eyes that danced with excitement,” as one acquaintance described him, Miles Jr. was a sickly, tubercular boy, forced to rely on his cunning to best his athletic younger brother, Hunter. Kept home for two years until his health improved, he eventually enrolled at Birmingham’s Erskine Ramsay Technical High School, where, according to the 1933 yearbook, he sat on the school council and presided over his Session Room, and, according to his autobiography, plagued his teachers with devilish pranks while at the same time pretending to advise them on how to catch the perpetrator. From Ramsay High it was on to the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, which he attended until the spring of 1937, majoring in advertising and sales, playing in the ROTC band and Capstone Orchestra, and boxing for the varsity squad. He did not graduate, however, because of extracurricular distractions, the main one being his flourishing career as a jazz trumpeter.
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It is at this point that the record becomes hazier. In his memoirs, Copeland makes several impressive statements about his days as a jazz musician, claiming that, for example, in early 1932 he played with an all-black combo that later became Erskine Hawkins’s big band from Tuskegee, Alabama, performing the hit “Tuxedo Junction” in Harlem’s Cotton Club; also that in September 1940 he spent a week playing fourth trumpet in the Glenn Miller orchestra on the Roosevelt Hotel roof in New Orleans. Yet, in fact, Erskine Hawkins’s band was from Montgomery, not Tuskegee, and never performed at the Cotton Club, while the
nearest the Glenn Miller orchestra got to New Orleans in the latter part of 1940 was Washington, DC. Copeland’s CIA personnel records say nothing about his having ever been a professional musician, suggesting instead that during the late 1930s he held a number of prosaic-sounding sales jobs in Birmingham while studying prelaw subjects at Birmingham Southern College.
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Still, none of this disproves Copeland’s main claim to have been a good trumpet player. Several relatives and friends have testified to his musical ability, among them two sons, Miles III and Ian, who became major producers and managers in the rock music industry, and a third, Stewart, who played the drums behind front man Sting in the Police. There is also a hint of willful recklessness about some of his boasts—the movements and membership of the Glenn Miller orchestra are among the best documented phenomena in jazz history—as if he were deliberately courting correction by some earnest musicologist. Whatever the exact truth, it is clear that his early days as a jazz musician became an important part of the Copeland persona, lending him a bohemian, “wild man” reputation in the early CIA that helped compensate for his relative lack of education and social pedigree. Here was a rougher but more obviously authentic masculinity than the aristocratic sort manufactured by Endicott Peabody at Groton. And perhaps the jazz man’s experience of crossing between the segregated worlds of white and black in the pre–Civil Rights era South gave Copeland skills of cultural adaptability that his social betters from the Ivy League schools lacked.

In any case, life as a salesman-cum-musician eventually began to pall, and in November 1940 Copeland joined the US Army, working in the divisional Finance Office of the National Guard Armory, not perhaps the best job for him given that his other great interest in life beside jazz was gambling. Various Bilko-esque escapades ensued (see
The Game Player
for details), and then, in the course of a routine army exam at Camp Livingstone, Louisiana, our hero was discovered to have supergenius-level intelligence, “roughly the same as the estimated IQs of Albert Einstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Jesus Christ,” as he helpfully explained later. Declaring himself “super-brain,” Copeland wrote one of his congressmen requesting a transfer to a post better suited to his abilities, and he soon found himself in Washington, DC, sitting across a desk from Coordinator of Information Wild Bill Donovan, entertaining him with stories of maneuvers in the Louisiana swamps.
Shortly after his return to Camp Livingstone, a secret dispatch arrived at Private Copeland’s pup tent ordering him back to Washington, where he was assigned as a “special agent” to the military counterespionage and subversion unit, the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), not quite the “Oh So Social” OSS but a step up nonetheless. After training by a young journalist, Frank Kearns, the former jazz man was let loose on the streets of the nation’s capital to sniff out Axis spies. When none revealed themselves, Special Agents Copeland and Kearns resorted to “gaming out” possible acts of sabotage by German agents, causing consternation among the District of Columbia’s regular police.

Again, the stories are obviously embellished, but the main elements ring true. The Washington field office of the CIC did get carried away in its wartime domestic investigations—for example, bugging a hotel where Eleanor Roosevelt was suspected of carrying on a romantic liaison with a communist army sergeant—and was eventually disbanded in November 1943. Also, despite the tomfoolery, something else was becoming clear: Copeland really was bright, and the emergency conditions of the early 1940s were creating opportunities for him to prove it.
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