America's Great Game (45 page)

The final upheaval in AFME’s leadership during what the organization’s 1956–1957 report described as “A Year of Test” occurred in April 1957, when Dorothy Thompson stepped down as president. Unlike Hopkins, Thompson had not been coerced into resigning (although she had consulted with Bill Eddy before taking the final step). Rather, her decision, which came in the midst of an AFME-sponsored tour of the Middle East, shortly after she had conducted a three-hour interview with President Nasser, reflected her growing despondency about Zionist attacks on her and her husband, and pressure from the syndication service that handled the distribution of her newspaper columns in the United States to choose between the roles of reporter and Arabist spokesperson. Increasingly isolated, cantankerous, and exhausted, the former golden girl of US journalism reflected despairingly on the personal costs of her commitment to the anti-Zionist cause. “It has lost me thousands of previous admirers and scores of personal friends. . . . It has mobilized against me one of the most powerfully organized and zealous groups in American public life. . . . And it has often filled my heart with tears.”
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Although not imposed from without, Thompson’s resignation was propitious for those seeking a new direction for AFME. Combined with the departure of Executive Secretary William Archer Wright for a Virginia pastorate, it signified a complete clearing out of the executive leadership since the previous year. The organization that emerged from the long crisis of 1956–1957 was different from the AFME of the early 1950s. After an interregnum during which the well-liked director of the Iran field office, Charles Hulac (once codedly described by Hopkins to “Stobart” as “related to you”—in other words, an undercover CIA officer),
returned to the United States to run the national headquarters, former ambassador to Lebanon Harold B. Minor assumed the presidency in January 1958. The board of directors was reshuffled and departments restructured to reflect the more “constructive” priorities communicated by Engert to Thompson. Three new field offices opened in Amman, Jordan; Arab Jerusalem; and Karachi, Pakistan. And in the fall of 1958 AFME’s headquarters, “Middle East House,” relocated from New York to a handsome four-story brownstone on New Hampshire Avenue in Washington, DC.
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It is reasonable to assume that these changes were intended, at least partly, to make AFME more amenable to government direction. Certainly, the organization’s new leadership was preferred by the State Department to the old: an official observer of AFME’s 1957 annual conference approvingly noted Charles Hulac’s “intelligent and modest attitude on the future role of AFME” and the “obvious effort made to get away from concentration on the Arab-Israel dispute.” Later in the same year, President Minor displayed an un-Hopkins-like pliability when the new assistant secretary for Near East affairs, William M. Rountree, took exception to the pro-Nasser thrust of a statement he had prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Mr. Rountree pointed out that the usefulness of the American Friends of the Middle East . . . might be greatly impaired . . . if Ambassador Minor took a position of greater partisanship for President Nasser than we considered wise,” the official minutes of the conversation recorded. “Minor acknowledged the validity of this point and indicated that he would make an effort to amend or modify his remarks.”
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The changes to the leadership, structure, and location of AFME were accompanied by a subtle but definite shift in the organization’s program. While continuing to engage in some cultural exchange activities—indeed, the spring of 1959 saw the introduction of Operation Insight, an “experiment in citizen democracy” involving a regular group tour of Arab countries by thirty or so American civic leaders—the organization increasingly emphasized what its annual reports referred to as “Technical Services,” meaning the placement of Middle Eastern students at US universities and industrial training in the region itself. This new emphasis reflected a growing concern that the lack of a modern economic base in much of the Arab world was rendering student exchange programs useless, if not actually harmful, as they had the unintended
effect of creating a pool of “over-educated and under-employed Middle Easterners,” a situation ripe for exploitation by the communists. After discussions with H. Ben Smith of “the Foundation,” AFME turned to Transworld Management Corporation (Tramancor), a consulting firm based in Long Beach, California, with extensive contacts in the Middle East (among them Sheikh Muhammad bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, father of Osama, whom Tramancor president William T. Dodson personally represented in the United States). Having completed a successful pilot scheme in Iran, AFME-Tramancor mounted a series of similar technical projects in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, and Afghanistan. The organization was especially proud of its part in training the Egyptian engineers who had taken over the management of the Suez Canal, some of whom were flown to Panama—the nearest US equivalent of the French-constructed waterway—for the purpose.
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This is not to say that AFME had abandoned its pro-Arab and anti-Zionist advocacy altogether, as was shown by its choice of Elmo Hutchison, friend of Bill Eddy and critic of Israel, to succeed CIA officer Mather Eliot in the role of Middle East director. Having discussed with Eddy “the need [for] a riot squad to shoot holes in Israeli and Zionist claims,” in August 1956 the boisterous Hutchison set up shop in Cairo, rapidly earning considerable goodwill among Arab nationalists, including Nasser himself. Correspondingly unpopular with American Zionists, his reputation hit rock bottom in 1962, when, during a press conference, he declared that “the Israel of Ben-Gurion, the belligerent army of world Zionism, is not here to stay.” Meanwhile, such luminaries as Elmer Berger and Edward Elson kept up an intermittent fire on Israel supporters in the United States, earning in return denunciations in Zionist organs such as the
Near East Report
. These did not deter the rabbi and the minister from still performing the occasional discreet service for the government when the anti-Zionist cause demanded it. When in February 1957 Secretary Dulles asked his pastor to provide “some pulpit support on Sunday” for the administration’s latest Middle East initiative, which had attracted criticism “from the Jewish population,” Elson “said he was preaching on an Old Testament subject and he thought he could do something about it.” Six years later, Berger was on hand to offer J. William Fulbright his expertise about Israeli-financed lobbying efforts in the United States when the Arkansas senator chaired a Senate Foreign Relations Committee inquiry into foreign agent registration in the United States.
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Still, as even the
Near East Report
was prepared to admit, AFME’s main focus had “veered away from explosive and controversial centers to distant, peripheral and picturesque oases.” The main emphasis was no longer on promoting Arabism and anti-Zionism to American audiences; now the organization’s chief objectives were development and technical training in the Middle East itself—in other words, providing local support to the US government’s developing global strategy of winning the Cold War through modernization. AFME was effectively retiring from the domestic fray, surrendering American public opinion to the emergent “Israel Lobby.”
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The battle was over; Kim Roosevelt’s Arabist, anti-Zionist network had lost.

IN DECEMBER 1958, AFME DRAFTED
a pamphlet,
Story of a Purpose
, which eloquently articulated the group’s founding values: “sympathy toward Arab nationalism” and the “drive toward Arab unity,” rejection of “the last vestiges of colonialism and imperialism,” and a belief that “the Palestine Question is the very heart of the Middle Eastern problem,” requiring a US policy “of friendly and sympathetic impartiality.” Above all,
Story of a Purpose
portrayed AFME as a “people-to-people operation,” an attempt to give organizational form to a tradition of personal interaction between Americans and Arabs based on tolerance, understanding, and “an enduring mutuality of interest” that was “apart from considerations of government.” The pamphlet was quite firm on this point: “The foundations for such a policy were carefully laid by a century and a half of private American endeavor in this part of the world.” Far from building on this tradition, US government intervention in the Arab world over the past decade had, if anything, eroded it: “Grants of money have not concealed our failure to act, person-to-person, by the American ideals of the past. . . . We have felt, indeed, that the great failure of the West in the Middle East in the last decade has stemmed from substitution of elements of power, such as pressures, pacts, aid programs and doctrines, for the simple element of human understanding.”
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What
Story of a Purpose
failed to mention was another aspect of the US government’s new involvement in the Arab world: government officers’ growing use of the earlier tradition of private, personal interaction as an instrument of official policy. One example was the Eisenhower
administration’s interest in harnessing the power of religious faith to the US Cold War effort in the Middle East, especially after 1956, when Nasser lost his status as the United States’ most favored Arab head of state to King Saud, Ike’s personal candidate for the role of Muslim leader. In the spring of 1957, an Operations Coordinating Board working group that included the Iran expert and CIA part-timer Donald Wilber compiled an inventory of US government and private groups with links to Islamic organizations “as an aspect of overseas operations.” The working group’s report recommended increasing government support for private organizations “promoting Muslim-Christian cooperation” and “the community of ideas which Islam and Islamic countries share with the U.S.” There were echoes here of the AFME circle’s hopes for an interfaith alliance against godless communism, but the exercise was geared less to mutual theological exchange than political warfare, making it more reminiscent of much earlier, British efforts to mobilize Islamist groups against the secular Arab left.
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Another, even more blatant example of the Cold War weaponization of the US missionary tradition involved the American University of Beirut. In the fall of 1956, officials in Washington grew concerned that the presidency of AUB—“an important instrument for the advancement of American interests and influence in the Middle East”—had remained unfilled since the death of Stephen Penrose a few year earlier. Participating in discussions about possible successors to Penrose were his fellow OSS Arabist Harold Hoskins, both Dulles brothers, and the pro-Western Lebanese foreign minister Charles Malik. One suggestion given serious consideration as in “the interest of the free world” was that Malik be appointed to serve as a “front man in Lebanon and in the U.S.” while an American vice president “handle the University administration.” It is difficult to imagine this Machiavellian idea meeting with the approval of the AUB founder, the sternly moralistic New England missionary Daniel Bliss.
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The irony is that, with its concealed funding by the CIA, the American Friends of the Middle East itself served as yet another example of this colonization of the private sphere by the official. At first, “the dual nature and operation of the organization,” as Garland Hopkins put it, operated successfully, AFME’s government and nongovernment elements working together harmoniously, united by shared values and aims. Gradually, however, as Eisenhower administration policy diverged
from the Arabist, anti-Zionist agenda of Kim Roosevelt’s state-private network, the duality became problematic. It was other anti-Zionists and Arabists who first noticed that there were something odd about the organization, an artificiality about its actions and statements that suggested it must be operating under some hidden constraints. Eventually, in a development similar to events in several CIA front groups on the Non-Communist Left, AFME’s covert patrons in government abandoned the pretense of consensus and asserted their control of the purse strings, dictating changes in the organization’s policy and leadership. From being a state-private alliance, AFME became, in Hopkins’s phrase, a vehicle primarily for the CIA’s purposes.

Kim Roosevelt had thrown American Arabism a lifeline in the shape of secret CIA subsidies to AFME, but at the same time he had fatally corrupted it.

EIGHTEEN

Archie’s Turn: Syria, 1956

REINING IN NASSER’S US SUPPORTERS
in the American Friends of the Middle East was part of the Eisenhower administration’s response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal, but a more pressing concern was what to do about the man himself. The answer came in the form of a top-secret planning document drafted after a series of emergency meetings between State Department, Pentagon, and CIA officials (the latter including Allen Dulles, Kim Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland) at John Foster Dulles’s Georgetown home. Authored on August 4, 1956, by Dulles’s special assistant Francis Russell (ironically, the chief US negotiator in the earlier ALPHA peace talks), “U.S. Policies Toward Nasser” proposed various policies “designed to reduce and, if possible, eliminate Nasser as a force in the Middle East and Africa.” These included discussion with the United Kingdom of “covert steps which might result in Nasser’s replacement by a regime disposed to cooperate with the West”; the use of “all suitable opportunities, overt and covert, to plant among other Arab countries suspicions and fears of the Egyptians,” the aim being to produce an anti-Nasser alignment “between King Saud and
the Hashemite Houses of Iraq and Jordan”; and, finally, preparation for “drastic steps to bring about a moderate government in Syria” (the Syrians now being perceived as Nasserite fellow-travelers). To sum up the new strategy presented in Russell’s paper, the United States was effectively changing sides in the so-called Arab Cold War, from supporting the nationalist Young Effendis to backing the old, colonial-era governing classes.
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