America's Great Game (30 page)

The shah and empress of Iran arriving at Rome Airport on August 18, 1953, after the apparent failure of Kim Roosevelt’s coup operation. A few days later, the shah would return to Iran in triumph.

CORBIS

James Eichelberger, the former ad man who coached the leadership of Egypt’s revolutionary government while running the CIA station in Cairo.

ANNE TAZEWELL EICHELBERGER

Gamal Nasser. “He is very good at chess,” said a friend. “It’s never easy to know his intentions.”

GETTY

Wilbur Crane Eveland (right), Allen Dulles’s personal Middle East operative during the late 1950s and perhaps the most reckless American game player of them all.

WILBUR CRANE EVELAND PAPERS, HOOVER INSTITUTION ARCHIVES

Lucky, Archie, and Kim Roosevelt in Portugal in the late 1950s.

ARCHIE ROOSEVELT PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A rare picture of James Jesus Angleton (center), chief of CIA counterintelligence and the Israeli “account,” with the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion. As Arabism waned after the mid-1950s, the CIA-Mossad “Connection” thrived.

ALLEN DULLES PAPERS, PUBLIC POLICY PAPERS DIVISION, DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

The Game of Nations
: the board game designed by Miles Copeland in his retirement. “Skill and nerve are the principal requirements in this amoral and cynical game,” Miles explained on the box. “There are neither winners nor losers—only survivors.”

Miles Copeland’s dual mission was worked out over the spring and early summer of 1953, as he shuttled between meetings with officials in Washington and the New York offices of BA&H. Both his old and his new bosses wanted him in Cairo—BA&H so that he could prepare the ground for a survey of the tangled holdings of the Egyptian national bank, the Banque Misr, and the CIA so that he could follow up on discussions between the air attaché David Evans and chiefs of the Egyptian intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, about possible American assistance with officer training. In April, Miles was introduced to Hassan al-Tuhami, a Free Officer sent to Washington by Nasser to inspect the US intelligence services on their home ground and establish an American-Egyptian liaison. Shortly afterward, Kim Roosevelt and Nasser met in Cairo and formalized the liaison arrangement. Miles, Lorraine, the children, and dogs decamped to Egypt in June 1953.
¹¹

The Copelands were delighted to be back in the Middle East, leading an existence that combined elements of Britain’s passing imperial regime—the sort described by novelist Lawrence Durrell in his
Alexandria Quartet
—and the new American order. Hassan Tuhami installed them in a sprawling villa, and himself in the guest house, on the east bank
of the Nile in Maadi, a village about thirty minutes’ drive from Cairo. The house, which came with formal gardens and a kidney-shaped swimming pool, had earlier been home to the commander of British troops in Egypt, General “Jumbo” Wilson, and Maadi had a British school and country club, where the Copeland children learned to swim. With a full staff, Lorraine had the time to visit all the nearby antiquities, snap up bargains in oriental bric-a-brac, and enjoy evening parties in a canvassailed
felucca
on the Nile. It was, she admitted, “a cocooned life,” made all the more pleasurable by the fact that, because of Miles’s move to BA&H, she did not have to submit to the authority of Ambassador Caffery’s fearsome wife, Gertrude, who insisted on “white gloves, hats and straight stocking seams” for the “Embassy wives.” This left Lorraine free to indulge her growing interest in archaeology, which had been whetted during a “red-carpet” tour with Kim and Polly Roosevelt, when she was allowed to go into a pit by the Great Pyramid and look through a peephole at the just-discovered Khufu ship. The Copeland children, meanwhile, romped through the villa, ate figs and drank goat’s milk, and explored the streets on bicycle.
¹²

It was proving a good move for Miles professionally, too. A BA&H task force of five management engineers set up shop in Cairo’s Garden City, a wealthy neighborhood originally designed around the citadel-like British embassy, and got to work at the Banque Misr, “cutting through both organizational chaos and . . . the ‘petrification of tradition,’” as one team member put it. Meanwhile, two other new arrivals from Washington were on hand to support the work Miles was doing for the CIA: Jim Eichelberger and another London roommate from Counter Intelligence Corps days, journalist Frank Kearns. Kim Roosevelt had sent Eich to Cairo undercover as economic attaché to advise the revolutionary government on matters of organization. Kearns, who had recently contributed to Earl Warren’s campaign for governor in California, was in Egypt simultaneously working as a CBS reporter and, according to Miles, “giving Nasser a bit of free public relations advice (‘Just get him to
smile
a bit more,’ Kim told him).” (A third operative, Miles’s Syrian playmate Steve Meade, also passed through Cairo on Kim’s orders, assessing the Nasser regime’s prospects for survival, but he had moved on by the time of Miles’s arrival.)
¹³

It was not long before Copeland was in regular contact with Nasser himself, lunching on soup and sandwiches in the latter’s office or the mess of the Revolutionary Command Council’s headquarters. The Egyptian
appreciated Miles’s knowledge about covert affairs in other Arab countries, especially Syria, and his sense of humor; the American reckoned it was his “store of anecdotes about Syrian coups” that made him
“persona grata
in Nasser’s household.” On his side, Miles clearly enjoyed Nasser’s company. “I know of no one with whom I would rather spend a long evening of conversation and joking,” he wrote later. The two men were surprisingly indiscreet about their friendship. Lorraine Copeland remembers Nasser roaring up to the villa in Maadi “with a motorcycle escort and an entourage,” and running into him one evening at a Cairo movie theater in a knot of bodyguards. “He saw Miles and slapped him on the back, grinning.” Nasser would continue to meet with Miles confidentially for years, even after he stopped talking to most other Westerners.
¹⁴

After seeing Nasser, Miles would rendezvous with Eichelberger and Kearns in the latter’s luxurious apartment in the Badrawi Buildings in the affluent Zamalek district on Gezira Island, which served as a kind of informal CIA station. The three old CIC comrades were delighted to be reunited and often partied together with their wives at each other’s homes. Another gathering place was the Gezira Sporting Club, previously the exclusive domain of the British army but now, under Nasser, open to elite Egyptians and, so it seems, to spies of various nationalities. According to one Israeli agent, “the Americans had colonized a place near the entrance to the restaurant,” where the British glowered at them from “their own corners near the billiard room.” The Mad Men were taking over.
¹⁵

ALTHOUGH MILES COPELAND AND MUHAMMAD
Haikal, the eminent Egyptian journalist-cum-Nasser mouthpiece, did not always see eye to eye, they agreed on one thing. When seeking a word to describe the interactions between the CIA and the Nasser regime that took place in the years 1953 to 1955, they both reached for the language of romance. This was, they wrote separately, a “honeymoon” period. Not only was the Eisenhower administration better disposed toward the Arab cause than its predecessor, but it also was prepared to give freer rein to CIA covert operations as part of its “New Look” national security policy (the Truman White House had always seemed rather queasy about the use of dirty tricks). Better still, the president was a great personal
believer in psychological warfare, even appointing Time-Life executive C. D. Jackson as a special presidential adviser on the subject—and Jackson happened to agree entirely with Kim Roosevelt’s views on the Middle East. In short, every possible element on the American side was lined up in favor of Kim’s policy of secret support for the revolutionary Egyptian government, even down to the Dulles brothers, old Roosevelt family friends, occupying the two most powerful positions within the US foreign policy apparatus. As for the Egyptians themselves, the United States was easily the most appealing of the potential candidates for the role of great-power ally; in Kim Roosevelt it had a personal representative much more attractive to Gamal Nasser than the other foreign officials with whom he was dealing. Of course, the word “honeymoon” carries with it the possible implication of an eventual cooling of ardor, but at this stage of the relationship there were few if any signs of marital discord.
¹⁶