America's Great Game (22 page)

On March 16, 1951, Berger wrote Thompson asking to see her “at a very early date
privately
[emphasis in the original] on a matter of the utmost importance and confidence.” At the end of March, Berger and Thompson (who was already friendly with Allen Dulles) traveled to the nation’s capital for meetings about the “Washington project” with Kim Roosevelt and other, unidentified CIA officers. Early the following month, Thompson circulated a letter (probably drafted with the assistance of Berger and Engert) to a long list of prominent US citizens. Stressing the importance of “the spiritual and cultural bonds between the civilizations of the Middle East and our own” as a defense against “the onslaught which Communism is today preparing against us,” this letter proposed the formation of a group to promote US–Middle Eastern friendship, adding that “some financial support would be forthcoming”
for the initiative. On May 11, Allen Dulles instructed office staff at the CIA to expect a call from Engert, who was “engaged in setting up . . . a committee and [would] need office space and personnel.” Four days later, on May 15, twenty-four people meeting at Thompson’s spacious Manhattan residence on East Forty-Eighth Street formed a steering committee to launch a new organization, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME).
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Despite all these signs of CIA involvement, as of summer 1951 the American Friends of the Middle East still had quite an ad hoc, amateurish feel to it. With Dorothy Thompson retreating from the New York heat to her farmhouse in the Vermont countryside, the spry former diplomat Cornelius Van Engert took up residence in her Manhattan home and began attending to such matters as the new group’s legal incorporation and creating a checking account for it at Thompson’s bank. There are also indications that, at least at this stage, ARAMCO was carrying on its role as a discreet benefactor of American Arabism. The company’s chief Washington-based executive, James Terry Duce, corresponded frequently with Engert, while Bill Eddy continued to write Thompson on a regular basis. Eddy would later refer to himself as a member “of Dorothy Thompson’s original advisory committee.”
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It was not until October 1951 that the CIA took steps to give the American Friends of the Middle East a more permanent, professional basis, appointing a case officer for the organization and dispatching him to New York to set its affairs in order. Unusually for an Agency front group, it is possible to identify the case officer in question thanks to some unofficial correspondence discovered in a collection of family papers. As his name suggests, Mather Greenleaf Eliot was from an old WASP dynasty. His ancestors included William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder of Washington University in St. Louis, and one of his cousins was T. S. Eliot (as already noted, Kim Roosevelt’s favorite poet). Born in 1911 in Berkeley, California, Mather graduated from Antioch College, Ohio, in 1933 and then spent several footloose years roaming from job to job—relatives describe him as a gregarious dilettante—before serving in the US Army during World War II and with American occupation forces in postwar Berlin. He joined the CIA early in 1950, finding it “something of a grind and not too rewarding” at first, until his transfer in June 1951 to the Near East division, where he discovered a team of “adventurous spirits” like himself.

After several months spent reading various classic works of Orientalist scholarship, Eliot returned from a vacation in October to “a big job” (as he proudly wrote his parents), “an organization with headquarters in New York, a promising program, but a wholly inadequate staff whose members, to boot, were in a sorry state of bad morale due to ill-assorted personalities and a sad lack of direction and care from Washington.” After a month of “patient negotiating with scores of people,” Eliot secured the services of the Virginia minister Garland Evans Hopkins, who since the demise of the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land had been working in Chicago as associate editor of the
Christian Century
. Promising him a princely annual salary of $12,000, Eliot installed Hopkins in new offices in midtown Manhattan, on East Fifty-Seventh Street, with “a staff about him who were transformed from gloom to confidence.” The CIA officer then set to work steering “the revitalized ‘project’ through a hierarchy of committees . . . to approve its enlargement . . . into a size . . . that is realistic in relation to the job to be done.”
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The fruits of these labors became apparent at a second meeting of the new organization’s charter members on December 12, 1951, when Thompson announced that she had just received a gift of $25,000 from a donor who wished to remain anonymous, with a pledge of a further $25,000 if she matched the amount with donations from other sources. (Incidentally, $25,000 was exactly the amount paid by an anonymous donor to another CIA front group, a women’s organization called the Committee of Correspondence, when it was launched in January 1953.) “Our situation is that we have friends who say ‘Go ahead, but for God’s sake don’t tell that I gave you any money,’” Thompson informed those present, before revealing that “it certainly was not the oil interests who made this contribution” and that the mysterious patron was interested in “piping down some of the radical Zionists.” Cornelius Van Engert, now acting as the American Friends of the Middle East’s secretary-treasurer, rose to the donor’s challenge and secured the additional funding during the spring of 1952. Later in the same year, the Dearborn Foundation, only just formed in Chicago, made the first of a series of regular grants to the organization that would, by 1957, add up to a recorded total of roughly $1.5 million. The Dearborn, whose other beneficiaries included the women’s front group, the Committee of Correspondence, was one of the foundations identified in the
Ramparts
’ revelations of 1967 as a CIA conduit.
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Although Kim Roosevelt had by this point retreated entirely from public view, there are occasional hints of his continuing to exercise a strong interest in the American Friends of the Middle East from behind the scenes. “One of his ‘little boys’ was up here on Tuesday,” Elmer Berger wrote his and Kim’s mutual friend George Levison from New York on December 20, 1951, probably referring to Mather Eliot, “and he tells me that Kim is involved more than ever.”
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ITS FUNDING ASSURED, THE AMERICAN
Friends of the Middle East now set about creating a permanent administrative structure for itself. In December 1951, at the same meeting that heard Thompson’s announcement about the anonymous grant, the organization’s charter members constituted themselves as a National Council, elected a board of directors to make policy, and formed an executive committee to carry it out, consisting of the president, Dorothy Thompson; the vice president (effectively, chief executive officer), Garland Evans Hopkins; and the secretary-treasurer, Engert. By April of the following year, Hopkins had established four executive departments: Intercultural Relations, Research and Publications, Public Relations, and Student Affairs. Volunteer branches sprang up around the United States—those in Chicago and Los Angeles proved especially active—as well as in the Middle East itself, the latter mainly attached to American colleges in the region. By the summer of 1953, the organization had begun setting up field offices in Middle Eastern cities: first in Tehran, under the direction of a former Presbyterian minister, Charles R. Hulac Jr., and then in Jerusalem under John W. Barwick, previously a YMCA worker aiding Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. In October 1953, Mather Eliot himself traveled to Damascus to assume the post of AFME Middle East director.
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With this apparatus in place, and with its recorded annual budget rising to over half a million dollars by 1955, AFME embarked on an impressively wide-ranging program of activities. Annual meetings in New York, noted for their lavish standard of hospitality, were complemented by numerous lectures and other local events, many hosted enthusiastically by volunteer members. Distinguished Middle Eastern guests visited the United States on AFME grants, while American grantees and officers of the organization traveled in the other direction. Cultural exchange was also the theme of a thriving student program that included
support for Arab student conferences and organizations in the United States and local screening of Middle Eastern applicants for American universities in Iran and Iraq. (The latter service was pioneered by Charles Hulac, who came to AFME from a position as international student director at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, an institution with several other Middle Eastern links.) In addition to building a well-stocked library at its headquarters, AFME published its own books and pamphlets, a monthly newsletter, and remarkably detailed and handsomely produced annual reports; a subsidiary service, Phoenix, provided “background” news releases about and to the Middle East. The organization was also behind a well-publicized convocation of Christian and Muslim theologians that took place in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in April 1954, and led to the formation of the Continuing Committee on Muslim-Christian Cooperation, a separate entity that received AFME assistance and guidance through its co-secretary chair, Garland Hopkins.
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In all these activities, AFME’s directors and officers consistently expressed a clear set of values. Perhaps the strongest of these was a sense of cultural and spiritual identification between America and the Middle East. In part, this reflected the prior engagement of many of the individuals concerned in missionary and educational work in the region, an experience that sensitized them to the interpersonal dimension of foreign relations. As Garland Hopkins put it in the organization’s 1954–1955 annual report, citing John Barwick’s aid work in Palestinian refugee camps as an example, “the personal element is of the essence.” This emphasis on Americans’ nonmaterial bonds with the Middle East also sprang from a deep historical consciousness of the area’s role as a “cradle” of monotheistic world faiths, the “Religions of the Book,” as writer, former OSS operative, and AFME director Harold Lamb called them—meaning not just Christianity and Judaism but Islam as well. The fundamental similarity between the religious beliefs of Christians and Muslims was a frequent refrain of the organization’s supporters. “We . . . share with Islam many of our prophets and much of our Scripture,” wrote William Eddy. “We [also] share the beliefs in reverence, humility, charity, the brotherhood of mankind, and the family as the sacred unit in society.” Other statements from the AFME circle pointed out how Arab scholars had nurtured the “ideas of Western civilization” during the European Dark Ages, thereby implying a Western debt to the Arab world that had yet to be repaid.
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Those around AFME also shared the belief that, since the missionary endeavors of the previous century, Americans’ relations with Arabs and Muslims had become clouded by mutual misunderstanding and ignorance. “Too often Americans are apt to think of the Middle East either in the romantic terms of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ or as a vast petroleum reservoir,” explained an AFME statement in 1951. For their part, Middle Easterners generally failed to see through the superficial materialism of modern American life to the spiritual values that lay underneath, animating the nation’s very existence. At a time when communism was seeking to portray itself as holding the same precepts as the great religions yet really was working “to capture and eventually destroy” both Christianity and Islam, this situation was downright dangerous.
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AFME’s mission was clear. On the one hand, the organization had a duty to reeducate Americans about Arabs and Muslims’ contribution to Western civilization, to “get away from thinking of the Middle East only in terms of strategy or oil or trade,” as Cornelius Van Engert put it. On the other, AFME was charged with helping Middle Easterners understand that, for all the United States’ obvious scientific and technical progress in recent times, still “Americans regard spiritual and cultural values as supreme.” To be sure, there was a Cold War purpose to this program. By raising consciousness of a common spiritual heritage in the United States and Middle East, AFME would also be generating a shared awareness of “the same menace of atheistic communism or materialism that we ourselves fear and feel menaced by,” as Engert told the December 1951 meeting of the organization’s founders. In Bill Eddy’s mind, the idea of a “moral alliance” against communism between Christianity and Islam was the key to winning the Cold War in the Middle East; he pushed this idea heavily throughout the early 1950s, both in Washington and the region itself, discussing it (as he informed Dorothy Thompson in June 1951) with the secretary-general of the Arab League, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, and Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud.
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AFME’s purpose was not confined merely to gaining tactical advantage in a new theater of the Cold War. In keeping with Eddy’s earlier vision of a great synthesis of Christian and Muslim civilizations, the organization’s founders nursed notions of something much grander. America could settle the West’s ancient debt to the East, they believed, by sharing with it the benefits of recent Western progress, political as
well as material, and supporting new Arab nations as they moved toward democracy “in their own several ways.” In return, the Middle East could convey some of the religious intensity of modern Islam back into the United States, helping “Americans themselves revive and reactivate the spiritual truths.” (Anxiety about the materialism of modern American life was a nagging undercurrent in many utterances of the AFME Arabists, much as it had been for several nineteenth-century missionaries.)
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This is not to say that the Arabists of AFME envisioned a completely equal exchange between West and East. Admiration for the ancient glories of Islamic civilization tended to go hand in hand with perceptions of more recent “cultural stagnation,” to quote Garland Hopkins, which in turn implied the need for benign American tutelage in the ways of modernity. It is also noticeable that, although their principal interest clearly lay in the Arab world, officers of AFME tended to favor a rather vague and elastic definition of the “Middle East”—according to Hopkins, it was “more a psychological than a geographical area,” extending “from Morocco through Indonesia”—that arguably invited the maximum play of US power in the region. Still, compared with earlier colonial and Orientalist approaches, AFME represented a new departure of sorts, an effort to place Western relations with Arabs and Muslims on a more humane, engaged, mutually beneficial footing.
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