America's Great Game (34 page)

Other incidents described in
Countercoup
add to the impression that Kim regarded his mission to Iran as a Kipling-esque adventure. He entered the country in July not bothering to conceal his identity; he showed his passport to a border guard, who mistakenly recorded his name as one of his distinguishing physical characteristics (a suitably swashbuckling one): “Mr. Scar on Right Forehead.” On August 19, he belatedly responded to Walter Bedell Smith’s cable ordering his return home, explaining that the tide had just turned in the shah’s favor and then cheekily signing off, “Love and kisses from all the team.” The sense of spying fun-and-games is heightened by the frequent references to actual games, especially card games, that populate
Countercoup
. Even the operation’s “theme song,” a tune Kim played repeatedly in the weeks before the coup, was about games: “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” the gambling song from the musical
Guys and Dolls
.
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The more one reads Kim’s account of TP-AJAX in
Countercoup
, the more one is struck by its resemblance to an adventure novel or spy thriller. There are the allusions to Kipling, both implicit and explicit, as when Kim (Roosevelt) likens some bearded, roaming tribesmen in eastern Iran to Mahbub Ali in
Kim
(the novel). Then there is the narrative’s main framing device, Kim’s journey from Washington to Tehran, which
both builds suspense and enables him to set the scene for the coup by recounting his previous experience of Iran.
Kim
, too, is basically about a journey that culminates in a decisive play in the Great Game. One also thinks of John Buchan’s
Greenmantle
and its hero Richard Hannay’s perilous trek across World War I Europe to the novel’s climactic battle scene in Turkey.

If
Countercoup
reads like a novel, this was no coincidence: by the time Kim wrote the book in the 1970s, he had been telling the story of Operation AJAX for years. The process of emplotting the chaotic events that had taken place in Tehran, turning them into a coherent story to tell others, began immediately after the coup, when Kim stopped off in London on his way home and met with MI6 officials for debriefing. Both
Countercoup
and Donald Wilber’s 1954 report on AJAX are surprisingly frank on this score. “They wanted the whole story, . . . concentrating on the glamorous features of the operation,” Kim wrote of his meetings with the British spies, who clearly viewed Mosaddeq’s removal as an opportunity to improve their standing with the Foreign Office. Kim obliged by telling his tale over dinner at the grill room of the Connaught Hotel “as elaborately and excitingly as [he] possibly could,” including “all the names and numbers of the players, every suspicion, hope or anxiety [he] had known.” The following day, with his “routine down cold, in living color,” Kim visited the Foreign Office, where, as requested by his friends in MI6, he gave acting foreign secretary Lord Salisbury (Moucher’s brother Bobbety) “the full treatment”: “a vivid account of the recent disturbances in Iran,” as Salisbury himself described it after the meeting. According to the Wilber coup report, Salisbury “appeared to be absolutely fascinated.” As he left the Foreign Office, Kim encountered an MI6 official clutching “a folder covered with red ribbons, sealing wax, and other
objets d’art”
who excitedly told him that the acting foreign secretary had just given the go-ahead to another Secret Service operation he had previously been reluctant to approve.
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From the Foreign Office, it was on to the final appointment of the day, at Number 10 Downing Street. Led to a living room by a military aide, Kim found Prime Minister Winston Churchill lying in a bed, propped up by pillows. The old adventurer had recently suffered a stroke and was clearly in bad shape. “He had great difficulty in hearing; occasional difficulty in articulating; and apparent difficulty seeing to his left,” so Kim reported after the meeting. Nevertheless, the young
American was greeted enthusiastically and instructed to pull up a chair on the right-hand side of the bed. There he sat for the next two hours, telling the story of the coup as the ailing prime minister, “consumed alternately by curiosity and by sleepiness,” slipped in and out of a doze. At the tale’s end, Sir Winston grinned, shifted himself up on his pillows, and addressed his visitor. “Young man,” Kim recalled him saying, “if I had been but a few years younger, I would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture.” “Thank you, sir,” replied Kim, deeply moved by “what was, coming from this man, the supreme compliment.” The scene, which resembled nothing so much as a man telling a child a bedtime story, could not have been more poignant: Kim had gotten to rehearse his latter-day enactment of the Great Game narrative for a living relic of Britain’s imperial heyday.
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The storytelling carried on in America, where Kim now returned, trailing clouds of glory. Fearful of arousing unwelcome press interest by visiting President Eisenhower in his Denver retreat—too “radio active” for the president’s “gold-fish-bowl,” as he told a British official—Kim spent the last days of August with his family in Nantucket, contenting himself with writing a report for the president that contained personal messages from the shah, General Zahedi, and Prime Minister Churchill. (As in the case of Egypt, it is easy to imagine Kim reveling in the role of personal envoy between kings, presidents, and prime ministers.) The following month, he at last got his chance to tell the president his story in person, presenting a briefing on Operation AJAX at a White House meeting attended by Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, and other senior figures. “The substance of my report had nothing new,” he wrote in
Countercoup;
“it was simply a combination of what I had told our British allies and the story I had given to the dozing Winston Churchill.” Nevertheless, the reception was enthusiastic. John Foster Dulles, in particular, “seemed to be purring like a giant cat,” Kim observed. The president, too, was impressed but shrewdly noted a literary quality in the reports he was receiving about Iran. They “sounded more like a dime novel than historical facts,” he wrote later.
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Indeed, this was too good a story to keep completely secret. In the fall of the following year, after another successful CIA coup operation in Guatemala, Allen Dulles authorized Agency cooperation with the
Saturday Evening Post
on a three-part report by Richard and Gladys Harkness, “The Mysterious Doings of CIA.” The boosterist story, which appeared
around the same time that a presidential commission charged with reviewing the CIA’s performance to date reported to the White House, paid particular attention to the “stranger-than-fiction circumstances” in which “the strategic little nation of Iran was rescued from the closing clutch of Moscow.” Specific sentences, such as the reporters’ insistence that, despite the CIA’s enabling role, “the physical overthrow of Mossadegh [
sic
] was accomplished by the Iranians themselves,” sound uncannily like formulations of Kim Roosevelt’s—who, it will be remembered, had contributed several articles to the
Saturday Evening Post
before he joined the Agency. Kim, meanwhile, was delighting in telling the tale to guests at his Washington home. Normally a “very quiet, private person,” he would, so his son Jonathan recalled later, become quite “garrulous” on the subject of Iran. When the story was published, many retellings later, as
Countercoup
, the intelligence commentator Thomas Powers remarked on the “golly-gee-whiz air” that pervaded the book. It was, he wrote, “the sort of story an old man might set down for the pleasure of his grandchildren,” echoing Miles Copeland’s observation in
The Game Player
that coups lent themselves particularly well to family storytelling.
²⁶

The Arab historian Albert Hourani once wrote of T. E. Lawrence and his self-mythologizing memoir of the Arab Revolt,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, that Lawrence deliberately acted like an epic hero during World War I and then after the war wrote an epic book about his actions. There was something of this circular, literary quality to Kim Roosevelt’s involvement in the Iran coup. His actions were shaped, at least in part, by a cluster of ideas and emotions derived from Roosevelt family lore and earlier literary works. Afterward, indeed even before he had returned home from Iran, Kim was turning the operation into his signature story, his own charge up Kettle Hill or River of Doubt expedition, a real-life Kipling adventure. Others in the CIA (and, for that matter, MI6) encouraged him in this process because it suited their bureaucratic purposes to do so, with the result that the story entered the Agency’s own canonical history as one of the signal successes of the Allen Dulles “Golden Era.”
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If only Kim and his superiors in the CIA had heeded the words spoken by the lama to his fictional namesake in the Kipling novel: “Thou hast loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far.”
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THIRTEEN

From ALPHA . . .

IT WAS A COOL SPRING
morning in the nation’s capital, but Kim Roosevelt was glowing with pride. With him in the White House were his wife, sons, and mother, Belle, as well as both Dulles brothers and Loy Henderson. “In a situation grave and menacing to our security, Mr. Roosevelt demonstrated the highest order of courage, resourcefulness, and determination,” declared Dwight Eisenhower, reading a citation composed eighteen months earlier, shortly after the Iran coup. “His achievement is in keeping with the highest traditions of service to the United States and merits the gratitude of his Government.” With these words, the president stepped forward to pin the National Security Medal to Kim’s chest.
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The award, created in the final days of the Truman administration, was a rare honor, reserved for a select few in the intelligence community. Only two officers of the CIA had received it before Kim: his fellow nation builder and “quiet American” Edward Lansdale and Ike’s former chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith. For Kim, it was the latest in a series of personal triumphs, including TP-AJAX (the disastrous long-term results of which were yet to become apparent), his contribution to the Anglo-Egyptian settlement of the Suez dispute, and, most recently, his
promotion from chief of the Near East division to assistant deputy director of plans, just under Frank Wisner in the CIA chain of command. Although the ceremony was marked as “Off Record” on the White House calendar, and therefore unaccompanied by the sort of press attention that would be paid to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover when he received the same honor in May 1955, this probably did not bother Kim. He was used to slipping in and out of the offices of presidents and prime ministers unobserved. Indeed, the lack of hoopla rather suited his growing reputation as a youthful éminence grise and his Grotonian sense of noblesse oblige.
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The timing of the ceremony—March 24, 1955—seemed propitious as well. With one of the two greatest threats to Middle East peace, the Suez issue, now apparently resolved (thanks in no small part to Kim), the Eisenhower administration was turning its attention to the other: the Arab-Israeli conflict. The obstacles in the path of a settlement were huge, of course, and new problems presented themselves almost daily, but there were some reasons for cautious optimism as well. No longer preoccupied with maintaining their position in Egypt, the British were ready to throw their weight behind the push for peace. Nasser, who had just proclaimed himself Egyptian prime minister, now enjoyed the internal stability and regional standing necessary to bear the weight of a negotiated settlement in the Arab world (something that Husni Za‘im, an earlier candidate for the role of Arab “necessary leader,” could never have claimed). And the Israelis, with the British buffer between themselves and the Egyptians about to go from Suez, were in an unusually accommodating mood. Most important, the Eisenhower administration, thanks to its Middle Eastern policy of “friendly impartiality,” appeared much better placed than its predecessor to play the role of umpire or broker between the two sides. Indeed, the main concern of US officials was less to do with the substantial issues in the conflict than with domestic time constraints. The presidential election of 1956 was looming, meaning that before long the administration would have to steer clear of the controversial Palestine issue, potentially so costly in terms of pro-Israel votes. If the United States was to secure a settlement that would be acceptable in the Arab world, it would have to act quickly.

Such was the background to the launch of Project ALPHA, a comprehensive Anglo-American effort to resolve all the outstanding points of contention between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Formulated by a team of US and British negotiators in early 1955, the ALPHA proposals
appeared on paper as strikingly fair, not least with regard to the two most divisive issues: the Palestinian refugees and territorial borders. According to the plan, Israel was to repatriate seventy-five thousand refugees and pay compensation to the remainder, who were to be absorbed by the Arab states. Meanwhile, Israel’s borders would be fixed, with some minor adjustments, at the 1949 armistice lines, not those of the 1947 UN partition. As an incentive to both parties to accept these terms, the United States would commit the vast sum of $1 billion of aid to the area over the next five years. The ALPHA plan has since struck some Middle East experts as representing a moment of genuine promise in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, coming as it did before the piling up of grievances caused by later wars and the rise of such contentious issues as the Occupied Territories.
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