America's Great Game (39 page)

WITH JOHN FOSTER DULLES ROUTINELY
resorting to the secret channels provided by his brother Allen, crypto-diplomacy became the Eisenhower administration’s preferred method for dealing with Middle Eastern leaders, and Kim Roosevelt the chief crypto-diplomat. “When someone had to hop on an aeroplane and go to Iran, Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia to talk to the Shah, Nasser, King Hussein or King Saud, the Dulles brothers would think of either Kim or myself, sometimes together, sometimes singly, and sometimes in the company of some professional VIP,” Miles Copeland explained later. “Throughout Secretary Dulles’s time, an ambassador lived with the fear that one morning, between his residence and the Chancery, he would encounter . . . [a] VIP crypto-diplomat riding by in the opposite direction, in a guest Cadillac, on his way to the palace.”
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Crypto-diplomacy undoubtedly had its advantages, not least of which was that it afforded Middle Eastern leaders the opportunity to conduct conversations in private that they would have been unable to hold publicly, leading to negotiated breakthroughs like the Anglo-Egyptian Suez base agreement of 1954. But it also involved a number of risks: crossing wires with foreign service professionals, who understandably resented Secretary Dulles’s constant use of nondiplomatic channels; distracting
the intelligence professionals from their core mission, the gathering and evaluation of foreign intelligence; and sowing confusion and suspicion in the minds of foreign heads of state. When Dulles resorted to crypto-diplomacy to solve the arms-to-Egypt problem, he not only undermined the effectiveness of Ambassador Henry Byroade but eventually embarrassed Kim Roosevelt himself.

If American crypto-diplomacy clearly benefited anyone in 1955, it was Gamal Nasser. The Egyptian “was delighted with the whole thing,” Miles recalled: “with the arms deal itself, with his public’s reaction to it, with the talk of an ‘ultimatum’ from us, with his own performance in response to the ultimatum, with his public’s reaction to his response, and with the fact that, in the end, there was no ultimatum. Not only had he made a play which raised his standing in the Arab world . . . but he had managed to dramatize it in the most advantageous way possible—and with our help.”
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The Great Game in the Middle East had found its most skillful player yet, and he wasn’t British, Russian, or even American—he was Arab.

FIFTEEN

Peacemakers

IN THE DESERT ARAB KINGDOM
of Al Khadra, the prime minister, Brigadier Mustafa ibn Mabrouk, has been in secret negotiations with the Soviet Union. When he finds out, Calvin Hampshire, the American secretary of state, is livid, as Mabrouk is jeopardizing his grand strategic vision of a defensive ring encircling the communist bloc. Ignoring his ambassador in Al Khadra—the veteran foreign service Arabist Sean Fitzgibbon—Hampshire sends for his Harvard classmate Paul Pullmotor, a shadowy but vastly influential Cold War troubleshooter. Assisted by his sidekick, a Southern-born, multilingual master of disguise, Cornelius MacFlicker, Pullmotor sets about orchestrating a bedouin tribal uprising to topple Mabrouk.

Such is the plot of a highly entertaining 1964 novel,
Kingdom of Illusion
, by the American journalist Edward R. F. Sheehan. Based on Sheehan’s experiences serving as a press officer in the US embassy in Cairo in the late 1950s, as well as, in all likelihood, later conversations with Miles Copeland about Gamal Nasser’s 1955 Soviet-bloc arms deal,
Kingdom of Illusion
abounds in detail drawn from satirical observation of real personalities. The Nasser figure, the humbly born Mustafa ibn Mabrouk, is a brilliant but cynical young soldier, a “Borgian” (as opposed
to Machiavellian), who runs Al Khadra “the only way he knew how: . . . by
plotting.”
Mabrouk tries to get along with the moralistic Secretary of State Hampshire (Foster Dulles), but the two men fail to “find a common language,” principally because Hampshire’s “firm grasp of European problems did not always extend to the complexities of the world beyond.” Instead, it is the ambitious and ruthless Paul Pullmotor (Hasty Pudding, tennis-playing, non–Arabic-speaking—Kim Roosevelt, in other words) who really understands Mabrouk, and vice versa. Indeed, the two men are close friends, Pullmotor having earlier helped Mabrouk shore up his nationalist revolution against British colonial rule, introducing him to “the latest gobbledegook of progressive government” and “the most modern methods of spy detection.” Even after they quarrel and the American begins plotting against his erstwhile protégé (with the help of Cornelius MacFlicker—a thinly disguised Miles), the powerful connection between them remains. Mabrouk, who likes nothing more “than to play games of chance,” positively relishes the prospect of taking on his old friend and fellow Borgian. “Plotting against Pullmotor is the most sublime pleasure I have in life,” he declares. As for Pullmotor himself, “overthrowing governments was a game, and a good game was always very, very funny.”
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The main difference between the events of fall 1955 and their imaginative rendering in
Kingdom of Illusion
is that the Soviet-bloc arms deal was not in fact followed immediately by a decisive American move to get rid of Nasser the way Mosaddeq had been removed two years earlier. Certainly, John Foster Dulles was angry, and the British were beginning to press for drastic measures against Egypt, but Washington still had too much invested in Nasser to give up on him quite so easily. In fact, by enhancing Egypt’s regional prestige and increasing the pressure on Israel to yield to Western demands, the arms deal had, if anything, strengthened American hopes for an Arab-Israeli settlement with the Egyptian leader as a key player.

Consequently, what happened next was not another TP-AJAX-style coup but rather a last-ditch attempt to salvage Project ALPHA, with CIA crypto-diplomats Kim Roosevelt and Miles Copeland appearing in the perhaps unlikely guise of would-be peacemakers. In retrospect, this effort to rescue ALPHA might appear doomed from the start, so numerous and massive were the obstacles in its path. But at the time, it seemed to contain its moments of promise, and it deserves at least to be included in any historical reckoning of the CIA Arabists, alongside
the coups and spy games with which their names are more commonly associated.

OPERATION GAMMA, AS THE POST–SOVIET
arms deal iteration of the Eisenhower peace plan was code-named, differed from ALPHA in two important respects. With the United States no longer able to hold out arms as an incentive for Egyptian cooperation, another form of American assistance was now on offer. Key to Nasser’s plans to transform Egypt into a modern economy was the building of a dam at Aswan, a giant engineering project that would bring flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectricity to the upper Nile valley. The projected cost of the dam’s construction was astronomical, in excess of $1 billion, and the penurious Egyptian government was obliged to raise a foreign loan of $400 million. In December 1955, the World Bank agreed to lend Egypt half that amount, with the US and UK governments pledging to provide the remainder, on the tacit understanding that Nasser would seek no more aid from the communists and would advance the cause of Arab-Israeli peace. There was one further sweetener for the Egyptian premier. Zionists were calling on the Eisenhower administration to counter the Czech arms deal by selling a similar quantity of arms to the Israelis. With Miles Copeland in Cairo warning that such a move would drive Egypt further into the communist embrace, Foster Dulles let it be known that, for the time being, the United States was not going to arm Israel, even if that meant incurring the displeasure of Jewish American voters in the forthcoming elections.

The second major difference was that, whereas ALPHA had been a joint Anglo-American venture, this time the Americans were going it alone. The British had never gotten over their resentment at the United States’ evident determination to replace them in Egypt, and they suspected that, for all its protestations of impartiality, the American government was still inclined to treat Israel preferentially. The Americans, for their part, were irritated by the United Kingdom’s obvious ambition to hang onto its dominion in the Arab world by expanding the Baghdad Pact. Not only was this strategy antagonizing Nasser, and thereby damaging the prospects of Arab-Israeli peace, it was also inviting instability in countries such as Jordan, where Nasserite agents were fomenting nationalist unrest against the British-backed monarchy. Added to these tensions, the English-speaking powers were at loggerheads in the
Arabian peninsula, where the Saudis, allegedly funded by ARAMCO and the CIA, were fighting with the British-backed sheikhdoms on the Persian Gulf over ownership of the strategically valuable Buraimi oasis. Despite, or perhaps because of, his Anglophile credentials, Kim Roosevelt became a particular focus of British recriminations about Egypt and the Gulf. According to one rumor, Kim was trying to bribe sheikhs in Buraimi with air-conditioned Cadillacs.
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GAMMA would be an exclusively American—and, more specifically, a CIA—operation. Although not previously involved in the ALPHA negotiations as such, except in the sense that his Arabist and anti-Zionist citizen network had tried to protect the Eisenhower administration’s domestic flank while the peace plan was rolled out in the Middle East, Kim Roosevelt had earlier been involved in another American effort to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute. Launched in late 1954, Operation Chameleon (also known as Mirage or Camelot) envisioned Nasser secretly meeting an “‘opposite’ [Israeli] representative” (as “K.” told “Big Brother”) to discuss a possible settlement, with an “American representative” (Kim himself) also in attendance to ensure “that the ‘opposite’ representative pull[ed] no tricks.” Knowledge of the meeting would be confined to a tiny circle of senior officials in Egypt, Israel, and the United States, in the latter case consisting of (as Kim also explained) “myself, the President, the Secretary of State, and his brother.” Although the plan advanced sufficiently far that the former Israeli chief of staff, Yigael Yadin, was tapped for the role of “opposite representative,” Chameleon was eventually scuppered by the 1954 Lavon affair (Israel’s plot involving attacks on Westerners in Egypt), and an attempt to revive it in the early summer of 1955 failed. Nonetheless, the CIA lines of communication that had facilitated the earlier covert contacts were still in place when the decision was made in the wake of the Soviet-bloc arms deal to relaunch the ALPHA peace process. GAMMA, then, represented a merging of ALPHA, hitherto run through overt foreign service channels, with CIA crypto-diplomacy.
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With Kim Roosevelt going to cover the Egyptian end of GAMMA, another CIA officer of equal if not even greater stature was selected to deal with the Israelis. James Jesus Angleton is best known to history as the long-serving counterintelligence chief who led the CIA in an increasingly obsessive, some would say paranoid, mole hunt until being eventually forced to retire in 1975. A less remarked-on facet of Angleton’s career was his equally long ownership of the “Israeli account,” the
CIA’s intelligence-sharing arrangement with Israel’s secret service, Mossad, which dated back to a series of high-level meetings in Washington and Tel Aviv in 1951. Quite why the Agency’s Israel desk was hived off from the Near East division in this fashion is unclear. According to some accounts, the NEA’s Arabists feared the possibility of Zionist sympathizers in their midst passing secrets to the Israeli embassy. Others suggest the opposite: that Israeli officials did not want the CIA-Mossad connection compromised by the Arabists in the NEA, and that Agency chiefs such as Allen Dulles complied with their wishes because Israel, with its large Soviet-bloc émigré population, was such a valuable source of Cold War intelligence about the communist world. Whatever its origins, the split led to a curious bifurcation in the Agency’s Middle East operations, with Jim Angleton, who was as pro-Zionist as Kim Roosevelt was anti, jealously shielding his Israeli sources and assets from the Arabists. GAMMA, in which Angleton was to perform a support role in Israel similar to what Kim would play in Egypt, was therefore a rare moment of professional cooperation between these two CIA legends.
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Partly because of this institutional divide between the CIA’s Arab and Israel desks, but chiefly because Nasser felt he could not risk the exposure of a direct meeting with Israeli representatives, the GAMMA plan involved a third American party besides Roosevelt and Angleton: a special presidential representative to serve as a secret intermediary between Cairo and Tel Aviv, moving to and fro until an agreement was reached in a manner that anticipated Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” of the 1970s. Various candidates were suggested for this role, including the president’s brother Milton Eisenhower and Eric Johnston, the VIP crypto-diplomat present in Cairo during the abortive Allen mission, but the choice eventually settled on a complete newcomer to the Middle East scene: former secretary of the navy and undersecretary of defense, Texan businessman Robert B. Anderson, not coincidentally a very close friend of the president’s. In December, while Anderson traveled to London to get a feel for the British position, CIA officers working with Israeli and Egyptian leaders (or the “northerners” and “southerners,” as Foster and Allen Dulles referred to them in telephone conversations) prepared the ground for a series of meetings to take place in Cairo and Tel Aviv in January 1956. Henry Byroade, still the US ambassador to Egypt, was not informed.
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