America's Great Game (23 page)

Perhaps the clearest expression of this impulse was the vehemence with which AFME’s leaders rejected the legacy of European colonialism in the Middle East. Garland Evans Hopkins was especially vocal on this score, telling the State Department in 1953, for example, that it should “support those seeking freedom from foreign-sponsored . . . ruling cliques who are now in control in some of the Middle Eastern countries.” As he went on to make clear, Hopkins was referring not only to the French but the British as well, whom he denounced for their continuing grip on the Suez Canal and Iran’s oil fields. Dorothy Thompson went further still when, speaking in Iraq during the first official Middle Eastern tour by AFME representatives in 1952, she told an audience of American University of Beirut graduates that Britain was “an over-populated little island casting about for friends to keep her alive.” A more measured statement by the organization from later in the decade, while noting the need for the United States to honor its commitments to its Western European allies, nonetheless insisted on “the premise that our sympathies
are with peoples seeking the national goals for which we struggled successfully,” thus equating Arab nationalism with America’s own history of successful rebellion against colonial rule.
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Finally, while less immediately obvious as a motivating force for AFME than it had been for some of its organizational predecessors, and playing second fiddle to the more positive goal of promoting intercultural dialogue with Arabs and Muslims, anti-Zionism was clearly present in the organization’s value system, detectable in vague references to “special interests” subverting US foreign policy and in the absence of Israel from the roster of Middle East countries included in AFME exchange programs and other activities. This was perhaps unsurprising, considering that, although there had been some changes in open leadership positions since the days of the Committee for Justice and Peace—Kim Roosevelt’s disappearance from the public eye, for example, and Gildersleeve’s replacement by Thompson—many of the same personalities were involved behind the scenes.

Elmer Berger had consulted extensively with the CIA as AFME was set up in 1951, and he served as the new organization’s “chief pamphleteer” in the first months of its existence. Thereafter, although he did eventually join AFME’s National Council the following year, Berger kept a low profile, encouraging his American Council on Judaism colleague Morris Lazaron to play a more visible role. There was a danger of AFME’s Protestant leaders being tarred with anti-Semitism, Berger told Lazaron, and this made it “extremely important for some Jewish representation to be present.” Berger also kept George Levison apprised of developments, explaining that, because of “the difficulties of money appropriated from Washington,” the new organization was obliged to soft-pedal on domestic activity until it was able “to build up some kind of a segregated bank account.” This was a reference, presumably, to the provision of the 1947 National Security Act that explicitly prohibited the CIA from operation within the United States.
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Was AFME’s anti-Zionism related to anti-Semitic attitudes in the organization’s circle, as Zionist critics would allege later? This question is impossible to answer categorically, but there are indications that at least one AFME officer, Dorothy Thompson, held some problematic ethnic and religious attitudes. “I am
seriously
concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States,” she wrote Virginia Gildersleeve in August 1951. “Everything on the surface seems to be going the Zionist way,
but underneath the country is beginning to seethe with resentment . . . and [people] are asking themselves the question: who is really running America?” Anti-Zionists had long used the argument that Zionist agitation in the United States invited an anti-Semitic backlash, but Thompson’s expression of it lacked the tact and restraint of earlier statements by the likes of Kim Roosevelt. Nor was she any more sensitive in her remarks to Jewish anti-Zionists, complaining to Berger, for example, about “this self-centered insensibility of the Israeli (and the Zionists), this lack of any radio-receiving stations in their minds, ears or pores, so extraordinary among Jews, whom I have always thought to be possessed of, even afflicted by, hyper-sensibility.” Not that she confined such characterizations to Jews: Arabs were also ascribed a “supersensitive” nature, the result, Thompson informed her British friend Rebecca West, of a collective “psychological trauma involving ‘status’ and inferiority, made more murderous by the fact that they damned well
are
inferior.” Despite her record of courageous identification with the victims of Nazi racism, Dorothy Thompson appears to have harbored prejudiced attitudes that embraced all Semites, Arab as well as Jewish.
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Thompson was, however, unusual in AFME’s inner circle in that she was neither an anti-Zionist Jew nor a thoroughgoing Arabist with long, firsthand area experience. There is no conclusive documentary evidence of individuals who fall into either of these two categories holding anti-Semitic views—unless, of course, one interprets anti-Zionism as prima facie proof of anti-Semitism or, in the case of anti-Zionist Jews, Jewish self-hatred. Equally, though, there is little sign that the upper-class Gentiles around AFME ever developed much consideration for the post-Holocaust emotions of American Jews, the more subtle example of Kim Roosevelt’s anti-Zionism notwithstanding; Bill Eddy’s willingness to consort with the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi grand mufti is a case in point. Indeed, after the disappointments of Palestinian partition and US recognition of Israeli statehood, the anti-Zionism of older Arabists like Eddy only hardened further. There was also a growing sense of aristocratic irritation about the new influence of Zionist lobbyists on the domestic political process and, indirectly, on official foreign relations. “If U.S. policy, under our democratic system, must be determined by the need of politicians for funds and votes in our domestic elections,” wrote Eddy to Thompson in October 1951, “then it should be necessary some day, as George Kennan has remarked, to take a second look at the
alleged blessings of our American democratic system.” Until some way of moderating the baleful effects of excessive democracy was found, so the reasoning went, American Arabists and anti-Zionists would have to resort to the stratagem of executive secrecy, in the form of covert CIA funding.
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WHILE IT IS HARD TO
say for certain in the absence of the relevant CIA files, it is possible to infer from various other sources some of the tactical objectives that the Agency brought to its secret relationship with the American Friends of the Middle East. To start with perhaps the most obvious of these, the presence of AFME field offices in the Middle East provided CIA officers with nonembassy cover to carry out their espionage and covert action duties. There is scattered evidence from credible sources of AFME representatives in the Middle East performing such a function: one, based in Syria, would rendezvous with members of the embassy CIA station at night in “the ‘safe houses’ that the station maintained for clandestine contacts” to pass on the intelligence he had gathered; another, in Baghdad, would type up “at least weekly roundups” of local events and hide them in “a special bookcase with a secret compartment in its base.” The presence of these “deep-cover” intelligence officers was convenient for Middle Easterners wanting to maintain a “back channel” to the US government. One AFME representative suspected that most local officials realized that the organization was a front but cooperated with it because it served their interests to do so.
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AFME’s appearance as a nongovernment organization was also useful when it came to promoting cultural exchange. Middle Easterners were more likely to accept an invitation to visit the United States from a voluntary association than from a government agency, while Americans going the other way enjoyed more credibility in Arab and Muslim eyes when traveling with private as opposed to official sponsorship. “In a number of cases we have found it extremely helpful to call on AFME to sponsor certain visits which we as a government were unable to sponsor,” one State Department officer informed another in 1959. “Exchanges under such auspices tend to give the individuals concerned an independent status which enhances their effectiveness.” It was not just the unpopularity of Western governments in the Arab world that made the use of nonofficial instrumentalities so desirable there; the region’s
historical experience of benevolent actions by private American citizens meant that organizations such as AFME could draw on “the good will of their predecessors,” as William Eddy put it.
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AFME had one more practical use for its covert official sponsors that belied its overt purpose: its mere existence testified to the existence of Arabist, anti-Zionist opinion in the United States, and therefore of the possibility of the US government adopting a Middle East policy less favorable to Israel and more so to the Arab countries. Whether or not this might happen in reality was, of course, very much open to question, not least given that AFME was launched while Harry Truman, the president who had recognized the independence of Israel just eleven minutes after its declaration, was still in the White House. Still, it was desirable to maintain the
impression
that such change might occur. “In the absence of any marked change in policy which would remove [Arab] political mistrust, we, as propagandists, can only do our best to keep alive the hope in the Arab world that a political solution on the part of the United States is possible,” explained the US ambassador to Iraq, Burton Y. Berry, in 1952, before going on explicitly to describe the government’s “channel to the activities of the American Friends of the Middle East” as holding “the greatest promise in this direction.” In this respect, AFME was similar to other CIA front activities that enabled the US government to present more than one face to foreign audiences simultaneously—for example, the secret subsidizing of groups on the Non-Communist Left at a time when the US Congress was experiencing the conservative convulsions of McCarthyism.
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In addition to offering a glimpse of the CIA’s tactical aims in running AFME, State Department records and other, privately generated documents throw light on the security arrangements the Agency used to “handle” its Middle Eastern front group. First, it assigned the organization a case officer, who helped manage its day-to-day affairs— a role performed initially by Mather Eliot, whose frequent meetings in New York with the organization’s leadership were explained away by his adopting the guise of Dorothy Thompson’s personal secretary. After Eliot moved into the field as AFME Middle East director in 1953, two other junior CIA officers, Jack Williams and Lorraine Nye Norton, “teamed up” as his “joint ‘backstop’” in the United States. Norton, a native New Yorker who had spent much of World War II in occupied France as a doctoral student at the Sorbonne, was an accomplished literary
scholar, former wife of a son of the eminent French Arabist Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, and fluent French speaker who had joined the CIA as a North Africa specialist in 1950. Later, in 1956, when Eliot left AFME altogether and began a new cover assignment as an oilman in Iran, Norton took over the job of the organization’s case officer from him, making her one of very few women to command such responsibility in the CIA at this time. (Much later, Eliot and Norton would marry.)
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The case officer was not the CIA’s only channel to AFME. The board of directors was an important medium of communication, with men styled as representatives of the Dearborn Foundation attending meetings in order to pass on decisions about general policy or particular projects made elsewhere, which were then relayed by board members to the organization’s executive officers. (The Committee of Correspondence, the CIA’s all-woman front group, received similar visits from “the Dearborn.”) According to Lorraine Norton, her commanding officer, H. Ben Smith, would often be in attendance, and sometimes Kim Roosevelt himself would sit in. AFME’s executive officers, all of whom had sworn official secrecy oaths and, according to Norton, received payment for their services, also communicated directly with senior Agency personnel. For example, Dorothy Thompson’s personal papers include a copy of a letter from Garland Evans Hopkins addressed to a Harold U. Stobart (probably a code name or “funny name”) at a post office box in Washington containing confidential information about the Continuing Committee on Muslim-Christian Cooperation, laying out various financial requirements, and identifying “people fully to be trusted to cooperate” whose participation should “allow the maximum opportunity for guidance.” Although one of her biographers denies it, Thompson herself was clearly “witting”—operational terminology for private citizens who were privy to details of the CIA’s relationships with front groups—judging not only by her coy remarks about the anonymous donor of $25,000 at the organizing meeting in December 1951 but also by her advice to Garland Hopkins during the 1954 search for someone to direct the Phoenix news service that “nobody should be hired without previous and unequivocal clearance.” Thompson was, however, reluctant to take money from the CIA, Norton recalls, presumably because she feared damage to her journalistic reputation if word ever got out.
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Finally, there is evidence that some AFME field station workers besides Mather Eliot were career intelligence officers. For example, “Keith
Williams” (probably another code name), an AFME representative in Damascus, was later identified as an undercover CIA man, as was “Eugene Burns,” an AFME relief worker in Baghdad. Meanwhile, at its domestic headquarters in New York, AFME took on administrative staff who had previously worked for other groups later revealed to be CIA fronts, often women graduates of the Seven Sisters colleges. Vassar-educated Nancy Spofford, for example, came to the organization from Radio Free Europe; Alice B. Whelen, AFME’s general factotum in its earlier days, was a graduate not only of Smith but also of the OSS, for which she had worked “in the psychological warfare field in connection with the Italian and North African campaign.” Again, the same practice took place in the Committee of Correspondence.
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