America's Great Game (24 page)

There is, then, evidence aplenty of the CIA using AFME for tactical purposes in the Middle East and keeping a tight hold on the organization’s affairs at home. But it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that the organization was merely an inanimate instrument of the Agency’s will—a puppet on a string, as it were. A number of considerations weigh against such a view of AFME: the long history of private-citizen engagement in the Middle East that preceded its creation, its immediate organizational origins in spontaneous anti-Zionist activism by nongovernment actors, and the fact that the man in overall charge of the CIA’s Middle Eastern program, Kim Roosevelt, had himself participated in that tradition. Historians of CIA front operations on the Non-Communist Left have noted how many of the intelligence officers involved naturally shared the liberal political values of the citizen groups they were secretly subsidizing. A similar pattern seems to have prevailed in the case of AFME, except that the values concerned were Arabism and anti-Zionism. Indeed, the hold of these values appears to have been so strong that even CIA officers who lacked a prior history of engagement with the Arab cause, such as Mather Eliot, soon developed an Arabist and anti-Zionist mind-set after becoming involved with the organization. Writing to his parents in December 1953 following a tour of “the front lines of Jordan and Israel,” Eliot lamented the lot of the Palestinians evicted from land that was “their whole life and their whole inheritance,” predicting that the “Jews who took easily will live to rue . . . the day they did this taking.”
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In other words, the relationship between the CIA and the American Friends of the Middle East was less like that of a patron and client than
an alliance of partners united by a shared purpose and outlook. That said, there was a fundamental contradiction involved in the arrangement. AFME professed to represent a private tradition of disinterested American engagement with the Arab world, yet it was secretly dependent on US government support for its very existence. Moreover, while the CIA might have naturally shared AFME’s agenda and therefore have been disinclined to meddle in the group, its control of the purse strings did give it the ultimate say in the affairs of its Arabist front organization—the power to call the tune, as it were.

WHILE KIM ROOSEVELT WAS AT
last realizing his long-held ambition of creating a viable Arabist citizen group, Archie Roosevelt, the man he had beaten out for the Office of Policy Coordination job, was in crisis. In addition to his strained relationship with his boss, Mike Mitchell, Archie had clashed with the US ambassador in Lebanon, Lowell C. Pinkerton (a not uncommon occurrence in the early history of the CIA, as jurisdictional disputes arose between veteran diplomats and novice spies). His family life offered scant consolation, as he and KW, who had eventually gone out to join him in Beirut with young Tweed, remained trapped in a loveless marriage. To cap it all, in the summer of 1949, Archie had nearly died from endocarditis, a bacterial infection of his faulty heart valve, only surviving thanks to treatment he received at the American University of Beirut hospital. In an implicit protest at the wretched state of his life, Archie took the unprecedented step, for a Roosevelt man, of growing a beard, attracting the disapproval of his militaristic father and causing children in Cold Spring Harbor to run after him, laughing and pointing.
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Archie’s fortunes eventually began to turn around after he returned home from his Beirut tour of duty. In November 1949 he went on loan from the CIA to work at the New York offices of the Voice of America, overseeing the launch of US broadcast operations in the Middle East. He and KW at last began divorce proceedings, and he moved into a small midtown apartment in Manhattan. Then, one Saturday in June 1950, while Archie was catching up on paperwork at his office, there was a knock on his door. A Vassar senior, Selwa “Lucky” Showker, had been sent to see him by his wartime mentor, Edwin Wright, to discuss the possibility of working on the Voice’s Arabic service—and perhaps be
assessed for recruitment by the CIA. The daughter of Lebanese Druze immigrants who spoke with an accent that reflected her upbringing in Tennessee—very different from the clipped East Coast tones Archie was used to hearing—Lucky instantly captivated the young Arabist. Although it soon became evident that she did not have enough Arabic to be useful to either the Voice or the CIA, Archie, in a moment of romantic impetuosity, asked her to lunch. After flirting outrageously over cocktails, the two contrived to spend the rest of the afternoon and all of Sunday together as well, Archie accompanying Lucky back to Vassar, unable to tear himself away. The following week he could hardly contain his excitement as he lunched with Miles Copeland, also now based back in the United States, rhapsodizing about the “semitic” beauty of the Lebanese woman from the South. “She’s even got a dolichocephalic head!” he exclaimed—a reference to the supposedly long crania of Semites. (“Christ, I thought, the boy is in love!” recalled Miles.) Lucky, for her part, was charmed by Archie’s mixture of old-world gallantry and boyish sense of fun. Three months later, on September 1, 1950, the couple were married at Belle Roosevelt’s New York home on Sutton Place, overlooking the East River, with cousin Kim, apparently forgiven for taking the OPC job, serving as best man.
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Archie’s marriage to an Arab American meant that, in order to avoid charges of bias, he would henceforth recuse himself from intelligence postings in Arab countries. But this seemed a small price to pay for his new state of domestic bliss. And in any case, the Arabist cause appeared safe in the hands of his cousin. Indeed, having just secretly come to the financial rescue of pro-Arab, anti-Zionist elements within American society, Kim Roosevelt was about to throw the support of the CIA behind the greatest Arab nationalist leader of his generation.

TEN

In Search of a Hero: Egypt, 1952

KIM ROOSEVELT’S SHIFT TO THE
Office of Policy Coordination was a smart career move. The new covert operations unit, propelled by such Cold War shocks as China’s turn to communism and the outbreak of war in Korea, grew at a prodigious rate, from slightly over three hundred employees in 1949 to just under six thousand by 1952. Exempted from congressional accounting requirements by the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, the CIA was awash with unvouchered funds for new projects. Miles Copeland, now assisting Kim as his deputy chief for intelligence, calculated that the Near East division (NEA), whose geographical territory also included Africa and Southeast Asia, needed a budget of roughly $20 million. Kim, not wanting to be outdone by other division heads, requested five times that amount—and got it. Miles insisted later that the uses to which this money was put were quite harmless. “We were
not
a lot of evil geniuses plotting to brainwash the world,” he wrote in his memoirs. Nevertheless, some of the “W&W” (“Weird and Wonderful”) NEA projects he went on to describe—attempting to slip hallucinogens to the Indonesian leader Sukarno, for example, or
employing a medium in Richmond, Virginia, to send telepathic messages to Istanbul—hardly suggest a measured, disciplined approach, even allowing for Copeland narrative license.
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There were some efforts to rein in the OPC’s game-playing tendencies, especially after the widely respected general Walter Bedell Smith, Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff during World War II, became director of Central Intelligence in October 1950. The notoriously irascible “Beetle” fired many of the Agency’s more flagrant society types and established a “murder board” to weed out particularly hare-brained projects, thoroughly intimidating OPC chief Frank Wisner in the process. However, he did not halt the CIA’s underlying drift away from its original mission of intelligence gathering and analysis toward covert action. Moreover, thanks perhaps to the influence of his friend Belle Roosevelt, Beetle nursed a soft spot for Kim, who had moved to within a few doors of his home in the upmarket Washington neighborhood of Wesley Heights. So too did Smith’s deputy director, the genial, pipe-smoking Allen Dulles. Dulles cared a great deal about social pedigree, and Kim’s was impeccable. Better still, he was “an Oyster Bay Roosevelt,” as Dulles joked when introducing him to fellow Republicans, “not one of those Hyde Park liberals.” Even the literary association of Kim’s nickname counted in his favor: Dulles had spent several years of his youth in India, counted
Kim
among his favorite books (a copy was by his bedside when he died), and “imagined himself a character in a John Buchan novel,” as Kim once told Miles Copeland. Combined with the shortage of Middle Eastern area expertise in US government circles, Kim’s high standing with his seniors meant that he and his small circle of Arabist intimates increasingly enjoyed “what amounted to a show of our own,” as Miles put it later.
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Kim had used the operational latitude and resources available to him at the OPC to accomplish one element of his Arabist program: the creation of a domestic counterforce to American Zionism. His ambitions for the Middle East itself, though, were as yet unfulfilled. Syria’s Husni Za‘im had briefly shown promise as “the right kind of leader,” an enlightened strongman committed to modernizing his country and even seeking a modus vivendi between Arabs and Israelis, yet in the end he had been found wanting in the personal qualities necessary for the role. Now Kim turned elsewhere in his search for an Arab hero.

WHEN KIM ARRIVED AT CAIRO’S
King Farouk Airport in February 1952, he did not head for his usual accommodation. A few weeks earlier, on January 26—Black Saturday, as it became known—nationalist protestors had reduced Shepheard’s Hotel to a heap of smoldering rubble, along with Barclays Bank, the Turf Club, and several other landmarks of British colonialism. The rioting in Cairo, which left seventy-six dead and countless more injured, had come in response to the killing of fifty Egyptian policemen during a British army raid on police barracks on the Suez Canal, which had itself followed a series of attacks by nationalist guerillas (fedayeen) on the British canal base. Watching from Washington, Dean Acheson despaired at Britain’s inability to contain the spiraling violence, tartly observing, “The ‘splutter of musketry’ apparently does not stop things as we had been told from time to time that it would.” If the United States was to prevent chaos from overtaking Egypt and spreading throughout the region, thereby opening it up to communist penetration, it would have to act now, independently of the British—“break the embrace and take to the oars,” as Acheson put it. As a first step, the secretary of state did the same thing he had done in 1944 when he learned that the Landis mission in Cairo had gotten into difficulty: he sent for Kim Roosevelt.
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Kim had been back to Cairo several times since the war, beginning with the 1947 research trip that resulted in the
Harper’s
article “Egypt’s Inferiority Complex” and the chapter “Cakes for the Fat, an Onion for the Thin” in
Arabs, Oil, and History
. These writings had condemned Egypt’s social and economic inequalities, portrayed young King Farouk as a feckless playboy unmanned by the constant humiliation of kowtowing to the British, and praised the reform efforts of the country’s Young Effendis. Small wonder, then, that the Egyptian authorities detained Kim when he attempted to pass through Farouk Airport in January 1951 on charges of making anti-Arab statements. Eventually, however, “after some high-level activity,” the young CIA officer was released.
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Despite these frustrations, Kim was acutely conscious of Egypt’s strategic importance as, to quote
Arabs, Oil, and History
, “a communications center, close to oil, [and] as a key state in the Arab world where democracy and Communism meet face to face.” Moreover, for all his reservations about the contemporary state of the country, Kim was fascinated both by Egypt’s pharaonic history and its more recent past as the headquarters of Britain’s “Covert Empire” in the Arab world. In the
summer of 1951, during a tour of CIA stations in the region, Kim dallied in Cairo so that his oldest son, Kermit, could absorb the atmosphere of empires ancient and modern, climbing the pyramids and sailing on the Nile.
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Kim’s ambivalence about Egypt was reflected in the mission on which Dean Acheson dispatched him in February 1952. According to an account offered in Miles Copeland’s 1969 book
The Game of Nations
, and later verified by Kim himself, the secretary of state had charged Kim with persuading King Farouk to implement a reform program that would defuse the “revolutionary forces” in Egyptian society and thereby save his throne. (In his later memoir,
The Game Player
, Miles also volunteered the information that the mission was “approved by Allen Dulles over tea in his Georgetown house on the Sunday afternoon following Black Saturday,” and that it was informally known within the CIA’s NEA division as “Project FF” for Farouk’s unkind nickname, “Fat Fucker.”) If, Miles continued, the effort to bring about a “peaceful revolution” should fail, then Kim was to abandon Farouk and cast around for other leadership elements capable of bringing stability to the country—“a handsome front man, a strong man, or some formula combining the two.”
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