America's Great Game (43 page)

The main effect of the mixed messages the United States was sending Nasser was probably to confuse him about American intentions, but they at least indicated that, in some quarters, America had not yet abandoned
its traditional sympathy for Arab nationalism. Moreover, Kim’s opposition to MI6’s plans for Syria and Egypt showed that there were limits to his Anglophile and adventurist instincts: he was not going to tag along with the British in their ever more reckless campaign to restore their imperial position in the Middle East. In fact, next to MI6’s saber-rattling George Young, who once described spies as “the main guardian[s] of intellectual integrity” in modern society, Kim looked distinctly cautious and conservative. An incident described in Bill Eveland’s memoirs is telling. Passing through London again in May 1956, Eveland made a secret recording of a conversation with Young to pass on to the CIA. Far from applauding Eveland’s initiative, Kim declared his subterfuge “perfidious”: he had “breached all the rules of spycraft among allies.” Apparently, the old Grotonian still believed in playing by the rules of the game, even if the public school boys of MI6 did not.
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AND YET KERMIT ROOSEVELT COULD
not resist the call to
Kim
-like adventure altogether. With almost all CIA officers at the deputy director level or above preoccupied with one Cold War challenge or another—Frank Wisner, for example, with the liberation of Eastern Europe—Kim had an almost free hand in the Middle East whether he wanted it or not. TP-AJAX had transformed him into the Agency’s “Mr. Political Action,” one of the first to be consulted if some Third World leader was deemed in need of replacing, be it in Iran, Guatemala, or Indonesia. Kipling-esque imagery followed him around, trailing like an invisible cloud. “Kim Roosevelt is in the game,” the British diplomat Evelyn Shuckburgh wrote excitedly in his diary in January 1956, after learning that the American was taking over the ALPHA negotiations in Egypt. His very name, conjuring as it did both the Great Game and the Rough Rider president, created certain expectations.
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Then there was Kim’s lieutenant, Miles Copeland. By 1956, Miles was taking game playing to a whole new level. When not joking with Nasser in Cairo, the Alabaman was helping run a five-member CIA unit under Kim’s direct command, the Political Action Staff, whose brief—thinking up new projects to counter Soviet political and psychological warfare—extended beyond the Middle East to cover all Third World theaters of the Cold War. Assisted by the former naval intelligence officer Robert S. Mandelstam, Miles explored such promising possibilities
as “OHP” or “Occultism in High Places,” a plan to plant astrologers, witch doctors, “and other exegetes of the occult” on superstitious Third World leaders with the aim of influencing their actions in a pro-Western direction. According to
The Game Player
, Mandelstam’s OHP project involved a number of private American consultants with an interest in the occult, including Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. If these claims sound fanciful, they receive some independent confirmation in the less widely read memoirs of Donald Wilber, the Persian archaeologist who had helped plan TP-AJAX. Wilber recalled serving on “Kim’s special group” during the 1950s, alongside the “most stimulating” Miles Copeland. Among the “fresh approaches to political action and psychological warfare” explored by the group was the possible use of hypnotism in political speech making, which Wilber investigated in some depth with the assistance of a leading US stage hypnotist. Although the idea was eventually rejected as operationally impractical, Wilber at least learned how to hypnotize dinner party guests with the cue “Rug Weaving in Iran.”
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But Miles was not only playing games metaphorically; he was also doing so literally. Soon after he was recalled from Cairo to Washington in 1955, the CIA officer became a regular guest at a twelfth-floor State Department office overlooking Connecticut Avenue where, according to
The Game of Nations
, “a carefully selected assortment of super experts ‘gamed out’ international trends and crises to predict their outcome.” In a typical “Games Center” exercise, teams representing particular nations assessed their responses to a fictional scenario on the basis of real information teletyped to them hourly by various US intelligence sources and then compiled a report that was either fed into a computer or passed to the relevant country desks in interested departments. Miles’s task in these games was always the same. He played the part of Gamal Nasser, a role he was also often called on to perform at strategy-planning meetings in the offices of John Foster Dulles and Herbert Hoover Jr. So convincing was his “Nasser act” that senior officials would sometimes forget he was just pretending. During one crisis in American-Egyptian relations, Allen Dulles angrily told him: “If that colonel of yours pushes us too far, we will break him in half!”
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Historians of US government “War Games” have sought in vain for records documenting Miles’s Games Center. Nonetheless, the existence of some such entity in the mid-1950s seems likely enough. War games
developed at the RAND Corporation, a Cold War think tank, and following a format much like that described in
The Game of Nations
were just starting to catch on at elite East Coast research centers with links to the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon. Miles was an obvious choice to take part in such exercises. In addition to his uncommon familiarity with Nasser, he was intrinsically interested in game theory, the complex system of mathematical and social scientific thought on which RAND’s original game designs were based. Indeed, important game theory concepts like “optimality”—a game outcome that cannot be improved without hurting at least one player—were derived from the writings of Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian thinker who had influenced Miles’s intellectual mentor, James Burnham. The very notion of international relations as a game, self-contained and governed by rational rules, echoed the Paretian conception of society as a closed system or organism that naturally sought equilibrium. In other words, Miles’s account of taking part in State Department war games intended to predict Nasser’s behavior has the ring of truth about it (even if his accompanying claim to have written a “monumental textbook for the CIA,
Non-Mathematical Games for Innumerate Intelligence Officers”
does not). It was as if the Great Game had been reinvented for the Cold War, in glossy American social-scientific packaging.
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Yet, as both Miles and later historians pointed out, there was always a tension in the American government’s war gaming between theory and lived experience, between scientific rationality and the often irrational behavior of real historical actors. A case in point was John Foster Dulles’s growing personal animus against Nasser, fuelled by a mixture of Calvinism, Orientalism, and clever British goading. “We kept hearing that ‘the Secretary is mad,’” Muhammad Haikal recalled. “We heard it so often that eventually . . . Nasser began to think he really was mad.” The tipping point came on May 16, when, in Foster Dulles’s equivalent of what the sacking of Glubb Pasha had meant to Anthony Eden, the Egyptian government formally recognized communist China. Ironically, this move was partly motivated by a desire on Nasser’s part to exploit the emerging Sino-Soviet split for Egyptian tactical advantage, but such a possibility appears not to have occurred to the secretary of state, who only saw in it further evidence that Nasser was hitching his wagon to the international communist movement. Calling Ambassador Hussein into the State Department for a dressing down, Foster Dulles, sounding
more and more like Eden, raged that “Nasser had made a bargain with the devil with the hope of . . . establishing an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic ocean.”
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The following week, on May 23, it was Kim Roosevelt’s turn to be summoned to the secretary’s office, for a conference with the State Department’s Middle East hands to discuss “an expansion of the Omega program.” Among the measures on the agenda for consideration at this crucial meeting were the clandestine distribution of “informational material pointing up Nasser’s identification with the communists,” “efforts in Saudi Arabia playing upon King Saud’s . . . latent distrust of the Egyptians,” and, most important, planning with the British “for possible covert action” in Syria “to bring into power and maintain a pro-Western government.” Kim’s contributions to the discussion have been redacted in the official records, although it is easy to imagine his spirits sinking as he contemplated the further slide of American relations with Nasser’s Egypt and the rush to action with the British in Syria. Shortly after the meeting, Foster Dulles approved “a ‘probing operation’ involving contacts with selected Syrians and Iraqis to determine the extent of pro-Western strength which may be mustered in Syria.” Raymond A. Hare, State Department deputy director and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, then called Bill Eveland to his office. “You’re to be the ‘prober,’” Hare told Eveland.
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Shortly afterward, Eveland quit his OCB desk job and left Washington on a one-way ticket to Beirut, taking up permanent residence in the city that, with Cairo now increasingly off-limits to American spies, was becoming the cockpit of the US espionage effort in the Middle East. In his remarkably revealing memoir
Ropes of Sand
, published in 1980, Eveland tried to portray himself as a contemporary critic of Cold War American covert operations who was almost tricked into becoming Allen Dulles’s point man in Syria. Yet a careful reading of this work (which otherwise seems to be quite reliable), combined with documentary evidence from the era itself, suggest the opposite—that Eveland positively jumped at the chance to relocate to Beirut to work for the CIA director. “I’d now dealt with chiefs of state and international policies,” he wrote in
Ropes of Sand
. “The thought of returning to a routine existence appeared less attractive each day.”
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And there was another personal factor involved. Eveland was married to Marjorie, a nurse from Kansas who did not share his love of
glamorous international travel, preferring to stay in the United States raising their adopted son, Crane. In 1954, during a trip to Cairo, Eveland had become infatuated with a Pan Am stewardess, Mimosa “Mimi” Giordano, who happened to be based in Beirut. Shortly before leaving on his Syrian “probing operation,” Bill Eveland announced his intention of divorcing Marje and marrying Mimi. “It was,” he admitted later, “a heady atmosphere in which I was living, [and] my juices were flowing.” For the 1950s American male spy, the Middle East could be a playground in more ways than one.
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THE SHIFT IN US MIDDLE
East policy from ALPHA to OMEGA might have created new opportunities for masculine adventure, but it also spelled the beginning of the end of the CIA Arabists’ project of backing Nasser as the nationalist hero of the Arab world. The baleful consequences of OMEGA would soon become evident not only in the Middle East itself, where there would be a surge of covert operations intended to combat rather than support Arab nationalism, but at home in the United States, where Kim Roosevelt’s state-private network of Arabists and anti-Zionists would be purged of its most outspoken Nasser supporters.

First, though, would come the most audacious gameplay yet: Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.

SEVENTEEN

Increasingly a Vehicle for Your Purposes

ON JULY 19, 1956, FOLLOWING
months of growing American-Egyptian discord caused by the Czech arms deals, the collapse of the GAMMA peace talks, and Cairo’s recognition of communist China, John Foster Dulles informed Ambassador Ahmed Hussein that the United States was withdrawing its offer to help finance the Aswan High Dam, thereby effectively declaring the Eisenhower administration’s three-year courtship of Egypt’s nationalist government at an end. The move had been preceded by several clear signs that a decisive break was imminent, the most obvious of which was the transfer of the Arabist ambassador Henry Byroade from Cairo to South Africa. (One of Byroade’s last acts in Egypt was to present Nasser with a copy of the Frank Capra movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
, the gift a pathos-filled reminder of the Egyptian leader’s love for sentimental, democratic American popular culture.) Nonetheless, the harsh State Department announcement accompanying the loan’s cancellation, which explained the decision in terms of a lack of US confidence in Egyptians’ ability to complete the dam, did come as a surprise. “This is not a withdrawal,” a furious Nasser told his journalist
friend, Muhammad Haikal. “It is an attack on the regime and an invitation to the people of Egypt to bring it down.”
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The CIA Arabists were no less taken aback than Nasser. In Washington for a meeting about Syria, Bill Eveland encountered an ashen-faced Miles Copeland pacing a State Department corridor. “The Secretary of State has gone mad!” Miles informed Eveland, reporting how he had heard firsthand from Ahmed Hussein that “Dulles had insulted Nasser, the ambassador, the Arabs, and Arab nationalism.” A few days later, the Jewish anti-Zionist Elmer Berger, also in the nation’s capital for meetings, discovered (as he told another of Kim Roosevelt’s Jewish friends, George Levison) a state of “utter confusion and consternation” in government circles. “I could not find any working officer who . . . was willing to say he agreed with the way in which the decision was made and announced.” (Berger’s personal view, perceptive as ever, was that the administration was playing “cat’s paw for the British,” who were “spoiling for a chance to go back into Egypt with force.”)
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