America's Great Game (41 page)

There was a growing sense that the Arabist project featuring Nasser in the role of pan-Arab “necessary leader” was in terminal crisis. Miles Copeland followed up Kim’s report with a message stating the Cairo team’s “unanimous opinion” that military assistance for Israel would result in an immediate end to the Anderson mission, the suspension of the Aswan dam loan, and, most likely, a further Egyptian arms deal with the communist bloc. Then, on the twenty-third, Henry Byroade, who had already sent a strongly worded cable to Herbert Hoover on the subject, dispatched an impassioned personal letter to Foster Dulles, urging him “to take the initiative domestically” and “break the back of Zionism as a political force.” The ambassador concluded on a poignantly autobiographical note: “All this comes from an ex-Indiana farm boy who has never had the slightest feelings about race or creed—yet who now is labeled anti-Semitic. Believe me, I make these recommendations in what I consider to be the best interests of the United States—and in the firm conviction that they are in the long-range best interests of Israel—whether they agree or not.”
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If any hope remained of rescuing both GAMMA and the larger hopes of the Arabists, it was about to be dealt a coup de grâce, with the
blow coming from a predictable quarter. The British had always been half-hearted in their commitment to the ALPHA peace process, preoccupied as they were with the Baghdad Pact and their grievances against both the Americans and the Egyptians. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, in particular, nursed a festering personal hatred of Nasser. Reports from an MI6 source in Egypt, LUCKY BREAK, purported to show that the Egyptian premier was moving ever closer toward the Soviets while scheming to overthrow other Arab leaders. In December 1955, a cabinet reshuffle saw Harold Macmillan become chancellor of the Exchequer, leaving the Foreign Office in the relatively inexperienced hands of Welsh lawyer Selwyn Lloyd and stimulating Eden’s inclination to intervene in foreign affairs, just as his predecessor Winston Churchill had while Eden was foreign secretary. Most concerningly, the prime minister’s health was deteriorating, the legacy of a badly botched operation on his gall bladder, and he was increasingly prone to outbursts of violent temper.

Events came to a head on March 1, 1956, when ‘Abdullah’s successor as king of Jordan, his grandson Hussein, dismissed his British chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb. “Glubb Pasha,” who had first come to the small Hashemite kingdom when it was founded after World War I, was a legendary figure, the very archetype of “the old Kipling servant of the British monarchy deputized to a lesser ruler,” in the words of one historian. His dismissal, which was viewed in London as the result of meddling by Nasser, seemed tantamount to a final eviction notice for the British in the Middle East, and Eden was beside himself with rage. It did not matter that Hussein’s action was in large part intended to placate Jordanian nationalists angered by British efforts to compel their country to join the Baghdad Pact, nor that the young king, a Sandhurst graduate, rather fancied himself in the role of commander of the Arab Legion, Glubb’s Jordanian army. Eden, also fuming about a perceived snub to Selwyn Lloyd during a recent trip to Cairo, blamed Nasser personally. Dining with Evelyn Shuckburgh at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, Eden, famed for his opposition to appeasement before World War II, compared the Egyptian to Mussolini, “and a sort of 1940 look came into his eye.” Shuckburgh understood immediately what this meant: there would be no further efforts to appease the would-be Arab Hitler, no “Munich on the Nile.”
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John Foster Dulles was not as disturbed by events in Jordan as Eden; indeed, Kim Roosevelt rather suspected that the secretary of state was enjoying the discomfiture of the British. Nonetheless, with GAMMA
already running into problems, Dulles was far from unreceptive to British complaints about Nasser. Realizing this, Eden never missed an opportunity when in American company to denigrate that “awful fellow,” and he made sure that the LUCKY BREAK reports were routinely passed on to Washington. It helped that Anglo-American tensions over the Arabian peninsula were easing and that the United States was showing greater interest in supporting Britain’s Iraqi-Jordanian axis. As in Iran three years earlier, the Americans were moving slowly but inexorably toward the British position.
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On March 3, a dispirited Robert Anderson traveled to Cairo for what proved to be the last time. During a meeting on March 6, Nasser effectively killed off GAMMA (as Anderson reported to Washington) by announcing that there was no possibility of his meeting with the Israelis for security reasons (he referred to the fate of King ‘Abdullah four times); that he was unwilling to spell out a timetable for his discussions with Americans; and, finally, in “a completely new and discouraging” development, that he was not prepared to take a leadership role in promoting any peace settlement to the wider Arab world. As this last notion was a fundamental premise of the American negotiating strategy in ALPHA and GAMMA, there seemed little point in Anderson remaining in Egypt, and he departed a few days later, having canceled a last meeting with Nasser.
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If any one day marked the end of Kim Roosevelt’s Arabist dreams of Nasser, it was Thursday, March 8, 1956, when Anderson’s final cables eventually reached Washington along with reports that the Egyptian government was bidding for more communist arms and preparing for an attack on Israel. “Today,” Evelyn Shuckburgh recorded in his diary, “both we and the Americans really gave up hope of Nasser and began to look around for means of destroying him.”
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Part Four

Losing, 1956–1958

SIXTEEN

. . . to OMEGA

AFTER MANY YEARS SPENT OBSERVING
politics in the Middle East and United States, Miles Copeland posited a general theory of political behavior. “Both leaders and doers in a given society play three games at the same time,” he wrote in his autobiography: “the personal, the domestic, the international—and sometimes a fourth, the bureaucratic.”
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According to Miles’s scheme, his old boss Kim Roosevelt had performed remarkably well during his first half-decade as a CIA officer. Personally, he had earned the sort of honor expected of someone from his family and educational background, achieving legendary status within the CIA. Domestically, he had scored a significant victory against Zionism by launching the American Friends of the Middle East, thereby accomplishing an important element of the Arabist agenda he had inherited from the first generation of OSS spies in the Middle East. Internationally, he had pulled off a spectacular covert action success in Iran while quietly building up the American position in the traditional British stronghold of Egypt, forging a personal friendship with the most important leader in the Arab world, Gamal Nasser. Bureaucratically, his supremely high standing with the Dulles brothers, combined with the
general atmosphere of executive privilege that prevailed in 1950s Washington, meant that, to a great extent, he could do as he wished.

By mid-decade, however, the game environment, and with it Kim’s performance, was deteriorating. At home, the Zionists, backed by supporters in the legislative branch of government as well as from abroad by Israel, were fighting back. In the Middle East, the British were likewise staging a comeback, mixing diehard imperialism with a tactical cleverness born of years of area experience and a readiness to resort to drastic measures if circumstances demanded them. Meanwhile, the Arabs were proving surprisingly uncooperative, not least Nasser himself, who had emerged as an outstandingly clever game player in his own right, upsetting Kim’s carefully laid plans for Arab-Israeli peace. These setbacks had translated into some significant communist victories that, while they did not bother Kim particularly, horrified John Foster Dulles, whose highly personal handling of US foreign policy, and bureaucratic tendency to use the CIA as a tool of crypto-diplomacy, now began to work against the Arabist agenda. And, finally, there was always the danger that Kim’s larger purposes might be undermined by his own personality, in particular by his desire for adventure—for game playing in the old-fashioned, Kipling sense.

In addition to his notion of multiple, overlapping games, Miles Copeland’s experience serving under Kim Roosevelt in the Middle East led him to one other general conclusion. “An intelligent person, agency, political party or even nation can get so caught up in the interplay,” he wrote, “that he, she or it is stuck with a source of action leading, inevitably, to disaster.” And so it would prove for the CIA Arabists, as the game moved into a new phase, one featuring some familiar players and a few new ones, too.
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EARLY ON THE MORNING OF
Wednesday, March 28, 1956, James Eichelberger, the ad man turned CIA Cairo station chief, knocked on the door of a suite at the exclusive Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, London. Eich had been ordered to England in the wake of the collapse of the Eisenhower peace initiative as part of a new Anglo-American program in the Middle East, OMEGA. Whereas ALPHA had accorded Nasser a leadership role in the Arab world, OMEGA sought to reduce the Egyptian’s influence in favor of more reliably pro-Western leaders
in the region. Eich’s mission was to prepare a joint intelligence estimate of the prospects for this scheme with Britain’s MI6, and to pave the way for the arrival in London on April 1 of Allen Dulles and Kim Roosevelt, at which point the discussions would shift up to the ministerial level. On his way to meet with the MI6 liaison officer Dan Debardeleben at a secret location in the West End, Eichelberger had stopped off at the Connaught to collect his American partner in the talks, Wilbur Crane Eveland.

Among the American adventurers attracted to the Middle East in the first years of the Cold War, Wilbur Eveland had traveled the furthest, both literally and figuratively. Born in 1918 to a poor, pioneer family in Spokane, Washington, young Bill soon grew bored with his isolated, circumscribed existence. In the mid-1930s, the depths of the Great Depression, he drifted, hobo-like, around America, eventually landing in Boston in the winter of 1940. Walking the streets looking for work during the day, and sleeping nights at South Station, he desultorily took some university extension classes on the Harvard campus (his CV would later claim full-time attendance) and then enlisted in the US Army. As for so many men of his generation, World War II proved the turning point. In no time, Eveland’s native intelligence and ability to ingratiate himself with senior officers earned him promotion to sergeant and then recruitment by the army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, the same route into wartime espionage work followed by that other self-made spy, Miles Copeland.
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Apart from a spell after the war working in a New York import-export business, Eveland would stay in the army through the mid-1950s, serving as assistant military attaché in Iraq (the post earlier occupied by Archie Roosevelt) and as Defense Department representative on the Operations Coordinating Board, the covert Cold War planning unit. Along the way, he acquired the trappings of an Arabist, including excellent Arabic and a sympathy for the Palestinian cause, an attitude he later claimed was strengthened by his strong sense of identification with his distant relative, the famously pro-Arab and anti-Zionist Charles Crane. (In fact, it is unclear if there was any connection between the two men beyond a shared name.) Meanwhile, Eveland also developed a taste for expensive hotels, as shown by his choice of the Connaught for his London lodgings, and high-end English-style clothing, a fact noted by Eichelberger and Copeland when they met him for the first time
at Cairo airport in 1954. “‘Jeezus,’ said Eich, ‘he’s in fancy dress!’” as the tall, slender Eveland descended the airplane steps, clad, according to Miles’s later recollection, in “striped pants, tailored Oxford grey waistcoat of the kind one wears to diplomatic funerals, [and] homburg hat.” This “apparition” earned Eichelberger’s instant mistrust, but Copeland took to Eveland as a fellow “kibbitzer” after hearing him casually drop the name Foster into a conversation about the secretary of state.
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Americans with Eveland’s knowledge of Arabic and facility for cultivating top-level contacts were rare in the early Cold War, so despite his eccentricities, in June 1955 he was personally selected by Kim Roosevelt to undertake a particularly sensitive mission to Syria. Early in the previous year, the former French colony had cast off the military dictatorship of Miles’s old friend, Adib Shishakli. Now, with the nationalist and socialist Ba‘ath gaining in influence, and the local Communist Party acquiring a reputation as the most active outside of the Eastern bloc, the country was fast drifting leftward, raising American fears of a Soviet takeover similar to those that preceded the 1953 Iran coup. It did not help that the new president was none other than Shukri al-Quwatli, the notoriously weak-willed politician Husni Za‘im had overthrown in March 1949. Unfortunately, the American ambassador in Damascus, veteran Arabist James S. Moose, was having difficulty keeping up with the pace of political developments—he was in “way over his head,” Kim told Eveland—while the CIA’s own station chief had so far failed to recruit any agents among Syria’s new political elites. Eveland’s mission, code-named WAKEFUL (“WA” being the CIA prefix for Syria), was to use his Arab contacts to, as he put it later, “expand the horizons of the Damascus embassy for a few months” and then return to his desk at the Operations Coordinating Board. Basing himself in neighboring Lebanon, Eveland rapidly established links to right-wing Syrian malcontents conspiring against their country’s leftist government. Although he never actually joined the CIA, he reported directly to Allen Dulles, becoming in effect the director’s point man in Syria, thereby adding a further layer of complexity to the United States’ crypto-diplomatic maneuverings in the Middle East. It was in this role that Eveland traveled to London in March 1956, his presence at the Anglo-American talks alongside Eichelberger ensuring that Syria would receive equal attention to Egypt.
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