America's Great Game (25 page)

Kim returned from Cairo pleased with the outcome of his mission. “He really did have a successful time in Egypt and is keeping his fingers crossed . . . that the result of his labors will last and be of some benefit to the situation,” Kim’s wife, Polly, wrote his mother, Belle, in early March. It soon became obvious, however, that Farouk lacked the good sense to follow through on Kim’s concept of a “peaceful revolution” and save himself (he “would not even build up a security force!” Kim later explained disgustedly). Instead, there unfolded a series of events very similar to those that had occurred in Syria three years earlier.
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The Egyptian army, whose officer corps included a number of alienated young men from provincial, lower-class backgrounds, had become a seedbed of nationalist opposition to Farouk’s semicolonial regime. The continuing presence of British troops in Suez was a cause of burning resentment; so too was the corruption of the country’s pasha class of civilian politicians, who were blamed for the army’s defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. After years of conspiratorial planning, the crisis of 1952 provided the pretext the so-called Free Officers needed to make their move. Overnight on July 22–23, army units rolled into the center
of Cairo, occupying strategic positions. Two days later, on July 25, Farouk abdicated his throne and set sail from Alexandria for exile in Italy. The Free Officers constituted themselves as a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) under the leadership of the popular, avuncular General Muhammad Naguib, who assumed the post of minister of war. Informed observers knew that power really resided in the hands of a quiet-spoken thirty-four-year-old colonel by the name of Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser.

The similarities between the Syrian coup of 1949 and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 do not end there. Just as with the earlier event, there has been a long-running dispute about the degree of clandestine US involvement in Farouk’s ouster—and, once again, Miles Copeland’s books are the main cause of the controversy. On the one hand, there is Miles’s assertion in
The Game of Nations
that in March 1952 Kim Roosevelt met three times with members of the Free Officers, who apprised him of their plans to carry out a coup and establish a dictatorship that would foster the eventual emergence of democracy in Egypt. There is also Miles’s further testimony in
The Game Player
that he himself set up the meetings between Kim and the Free Officers during a trip of his own to Egypt in March 1952; that he was assisted in this work by “Rupert,” an Arabic-speaking American agent of Kim’s; and that the officers with whom Kim met included none other than Nasser himself.
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As with the Syrian putsch, some circumstantial evidence seems to corroborate Miles’s claims. In January 1952, an interdepartmental committee established by Dean Acheson to study the problems of the Arab world and chaired by Kim Roosevelt had recommended that the US government “encourage the emergence of competent leaders” in the Middle East, by covert means if necessary, “even when they are not in power.” Other documents show that prior to the July Revolution there was contact between the Free Officers and officials at the American embassy in Cairo, in particular the US-trained air force intelligence chief, Wing-Commander ‘Ali Sabri, and Lieutenant Colonel David Evans III, the American assistant air attaché, who performed a role not unlike Steve Meade’s in the run-up to Husni Za‘im’s coup in Syria. Russian records show that contemporary Soviet intelligence officials suspected a hidden American hand in the revolution. And Kim Roosevelt’s own
Arabs, Oil, and History
makes some eerily pertinent observations about the shakiness of Farouk’s hold on power and Egypt’s unreadiness for democracy. Finally, Miles’s Rupert invites tentative identification as Richard Paul
Mitchell, a young Syrian American graduate student who had come to Cairo in 1951 on a Fulbright scholarship to research the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the later recollection of William Lakeland, a junior political officer at the US embassy at the time, Mitchell “proved very useful in Cairo, because he could pass for a local . . . and report on what was going on in the town.” Unfortunately, Lakeland’s testimony does not shed any light on the truthfulness of Miles’s story that he first encountered Rupert disguised as a whirling dervish in a Cairo nightclub called Milo’s Den, a scene straight out of John Buchan’s
Greenmantle
.
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Perhaps inevitably, though, other sources contradict the Copeland scenario of a coup carried out according to a plan agreed on by Roosevelt and Nasser. Interviewed recently, William Lakeland, who himself had close links to Nasser and the Free Officers, expressed doubts that Miles and Kim met with leading members of the movement before the revolution. (Lakeland’s general attitude to Miles is rather cool, similar to that of the junior political officer in the Damascus embassy, Deane Hinton.) In a second echo of March 1949, when Za‘im approached British military adviser Colonel Gordon Fox prior to launching his coup, there is evidence of the Egyptian Free Officers courting Western suitors besides the Americans. In December 1951, another British military instructor, former RAF intelligence officer Group Captain Patrick Domville, wrote the Conservative member of Parliament Julian Amery telling him that friends in the Egyptian army and air force had asked him to seek secret British support for a plot “to overthrow . . . the King and then to set up a military dictatorship.” Perhaps most damaging to Miles’s claims, both Kim Roosevelt himself and several of the Free Officers allegedly involved later denied any CIA role in the conspiracy to depose Farouk, Kim explicitly rejecting the suggestion that he returned to Egypt after his February trip to meet with Nasser and the others—although he did admit that the Agency was “informed indirectly” of the coup plot (and family correspondence indicates that he might in fact have traveled to Cairo in April).
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Of course, it is hardly surprising that both Kim and the Free Officers should have denied Miles’s claims, the former because he later developed business relationships with several Arab monarchs and would therefore want to avoid any appearance of having once been involved in a republican conspiracy, the latter because the suggestion that a Western imperial power was present at the creation of Egypt’s revolutionary government
was politically embarrassing. Moreover, there is a considerable amount of evidence that, whether or not the CIA dealt directly with the Free Officers
prior
to their July 1952 coup, there was extensive secret American-Egyptian contact in the months
after
the revolution. As in 1949, when Steve Meade had provided a key channel to the Za‘im regime during the early months of its existence, Air Attaché David Evans was the Free Officers’ first point of contact. Within hours of the revolution, Evans received an invitation to Military Intelligence headquarters, where he learned of the new government’s desire for cooperation with the United States and its plans to crack down on Egyptian communists. William Lakeland, too, stayed close to the officers; befriended Nasser’s favorite reporter, the up-and-coming journalist Muhammad Haikal; and regularly hosted Nasser himself for supper at his apartment overlooking the Nile. Although the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, a stately Southerner approaching retirement, preferred to deal only with the nominal Egyptian premier, General Naguib, he quietly encouraged Evans and Lakeland to build on their contacts with Nasser. A long-time critic of British imperialism, Caffery was keen to promote American friendship with the Free Officers; he boosted the new regime in his reports to Washington.
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According to Miles’s later recollection, Kim Roosevelt was weary of military dictatorships after the Za‘im debacle, and he therefore “refrained from any direct contact with Nasser” in the early days of the Egyptian Revolution. This did not prevent him, though, from sending out indirect probes to the Free Officers, as revealed in an extraordinary document discovered among the personal papers of AFME president Dorothy Thompson. In September 1952, while preparing for a trip to Egypt, Thompson received a note bearing Kim’s handwriting, instructing her to raise with General Naguib the fate of former prime minister Hilali and two other members of the previous government “with reputations for honesty and independence (and . . . a pro-American bias)” who had been imprisoned since the revolution. Naguib, the note explained, had “shown himself to be an able, efficient, and determined leader,” but such political arrests had the potential to “cast a poor light on his whole program.” Interestingly, this indirect call for clemency, reminiscent of Meade’s intervention with Za‘im on behalf of the deposed Syrian president Quwatli in 1949, specifically excluded certain Egyptian politicians who had been so closely associated with the Farouk regime
that they now seemed beyond rehabilitation. One such was Murtada al-Maraghi, a former government minister and, if Miles is to be believed, an accomplice in Kim’s earlier plot to foment a “peaceful revolution,” who was quietly abandoned to his fate.
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In an accompanying note on “The Background” to Thompson’s mission, Kim expanded on the reasons for his desire to improve Naguib’s image, in doing so providing a revealing glimpse of his general feelings about Egypt’s new government. Since gaining power, Kim explained, the Free Officers had initiated “a number of reform measures which began to raise the hopes of informed friends of Egypt.” These included the abolition of such titles as “Bey” and “Pasha,” a “house-cleaning” of the “corrupt . . . parliament,” and the institution of a badly needed “land-reform program” combined with measures to attract “foreign investment.” These socially and economically progressive steps had all been taken at the same time that the new government had adopted measures “to strengthen the basis of Egypt’s internal security.” (Kim was possibly referring here to the military’s brutal repression of a strike by textile workers in Alexandria the previous month, and a subsequent roundup of communist leaders.) In short, the Free Officers offered short-term stability while holding out the long-term possibility of democratization and modernization carried out under American guidance. A further visit to Cairo in October 1952 by a new member of the AFME circle, Edward L. R. Elson, a Presbyterian minister from Washington, DC, only served to strengthen this impression. In answer to a series of pointedly political questions posed by Elson, Naguib confirmed his regime’s respect for individual liberties, receptiveness to foreign assistance, and ambition to develop the Egyptian economy. “Everything indicated that we now had at the board a new player who was exactly what we were looking for,” wrote Miles Copeland later.
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On their side, the Free Officers were, it seems, highly receptive to these American overtures. With its founding in a successful struggle against colonial British rule, and its more recent history of relatively benign missionary activity in the Arab world, the United States looked to the Egyptians like a potential partner—more so than the godless Soviet Union. Intelligence chief ‘Ali Sabri and journalist Muhammad Haikal had been to the Land of the Free and returned with an appreciation of American popular culture that they shared with their compatriots. Haikal encouraged Bill Lakeland to serve Nasser hot dogs and show
him Hollywood movies, both of which he consumed enthusiastically (according to Lakeland, Nasser was a particular fan of “aquamusical” star Esther Williams). The young Egyptians also warmed to the democratic informality of American manners, a refreshing change from the starchy British. The appreciation was mutual. Americans noted with approval the earnestness and self-discipline the Free Officers brought to the task of governing Egypt, traits also reflected in their private lives—Nasser, a dedicated family man, led a particularly modest existence—all very different from the licentious Farouk. Even the young men’s physiques—“clean-cut . . . slim, and athletic looking,” to quote Copeland—contrasted favorably with the pot-bellied generals of the Farouk era. Americans, too, were young and virile, unlike the old and feeble British. Nasser reportedly referred to the United States as
al-gāyin
(“the coming”) and Britain as
al-rāyihin
(“the going”).
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Not surprisingly, British observers did not much care for these signs of Egyptian-American camaraderie. During World War II, the British had condescended to OSS officers in Cairo; now, they were just plain angry. The Americans were being disloyal to their old friend and ally, complained the British ambassador in Cairo, Ralph Stevenson, and were encouraging the Egyptians to make unreasonable demands. They were also being naïve, failing to detect the deviousness of Arabs who professed friendship yet in truth, according to veteran Arabist Sir Alec Kirkbride, regarded them with “hidden contempt for being so easily deceived.” (“Sooner or later, the local associates go too far and the connexion has to be broken, so that the Americans end with their erstwhile friends as their enemies,” the sour Kirkbride went on to observe, with, as it turned out, some prescience.) Resorting to amateur psychology, the British blamed these tendencies on “semi-conscious feelings and emotions about the Arabs and ourselves latent in the American mind” (Roger Makins, British ambassador in Washington) and on “the underlying fixed, even if almost subconscious, ideas which they have of us as ‘imperialists’ and oppressors of backward races, as distinct from themselves, whom they feel to be the liberators and uplifters of the oppressed” (Robin Hankey, Foreign Office official in Cairo). The Americans, in other words, were allowing themselves to be ruled by irrational, emotional forces, rather like the Oriental Arabs, in fact, and not at all like the sensible, hardnosed British. “The most pathetic aspects of the question are the belief of the average American that he deserves to be liked, and his inability
to understand why he is not when that fact becomes too obvious to be overlooked any longer,” concluded Alec Kirkbride, now pretty much resorting to abuse.
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