America's Great Game (47 page)

UNFORTUNATELY FOR ARCHIE, KIM HAD
used up the cousins’ share of luck in 1953. A combination of adverse factors—Arab resistance, British duplicity, and the contradictions inherent in the American strategy itself—would frustrate not only the CIA’s plans for a coup in Syria but also the other objectives outlined in Francis Russell’s crucial paper of August 4, 1956: the forging of an Arab front against revolutionary Egypt and the elimination of Nasser as a force in Middle Eastern politics.

At first, the prospects for one of these goals—aligning the Hashemite and Saudi monarchies against Nasser—seemed quite good. In Hashemite Jordan, the CIA had succeeded in establishing a channel to the twenty-one-year-old King Hussein through a young intelligence officer, John Dayton, in the tiny station in Amman. Hussein had something of a playboy reputation, and Dayton was, according to British journalist Richard Beeston, “a swinger” with “an extremely pretty young Southern wife who, envious cynics said, was chosen to catch the eye of the king.” After years of dependence on the British, the Hashemite throne lacked an independent intelligence service, so Dayton arranged for a monthly payment of $5,000 Jordanian dinars (about $15,000) to enable Hussein to run a small spy ring out of his palace, the money arriving on the royal desk in a brown manila envelope. Awakened to the benefits of American patronage, Hussein asked to see Bill Eveland when the king visited Beirut to attend a sports car rally, and intimated that he would welcome the United States taking over responsibility from the United Kingdom as Jordan’s main source of Western support. Although Kim Roosevelt headed off further contact between Eveland and Hussein, he did give his blessing to the monthly CIA subsidies, which acquired the code name NO-BEEF (NO was the country prefix for Jordan). Even allowing for retrospective exaggeration, it is clear that Archie was delighted with the young monarch (“NORMAN”) when he first met him during his July 1956 tour of the region, writing later that Hussein impressed him as “the finest, most truly motivated leader of the Arab world.” Here at last, it seemed, was a possible candidate besides Nasser for the role of pan-Arab “necessary leader.”
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If the signs in Jordan were surprisingly encouraging, in Saudi Arabia, supposedly the lynchpin of the new US strategy in the Arab Cold War, the picture was less bright. As Archie explained in his memoirs, King Ibn Saud’s successor, his son Saud, “had taken the easy road of collaboration with Nasser in his attacks on the West.” Not only that,
compared to his virile warrior father, Saud was “weak—physically, mentally, and morally”—or so Archie decided after meeting him during his July 1956 tour. In an effort to disrupt the burgeoning Egyptian-Saudi collaboration (and smuggle some liquor to an old friend, US ambassador George Wadsworth), Archie made several return trips to Saudi Arabia later in the year, culminating in another audience with Saud in his gaudy, Western-style palace in Riyadh. (Archie, ever the romantic Arabist, was dismayed by signs of the creeping Americanization of Arabian culture.) The audience was “an unpleasant affair.” When Archie handed Saud a list of American complaints about Saudi complicity in Nasser’s anti-Western propaganda campaign, the king “reacted with some anger, reading a few of the items with a sarcastic comment.” Having accomplished nothing “except arousing royal rage,” Archie departed empty-handed. It seems that cousin Kim also tried reasoning personally with King Saud during a separate trip in late summer 1956, although the outcome of his visits to Riyadh is less clear.
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Better documented is another secret US mission to Saudi Arabia featuring two familiar faces: Bill Eveland and Robert Anderson, the Texan leader of the unsuccessful GAMMA peace talks in Cairo. The aims of this exercise, which seems to have first been suggested to President Eisenhower by oil executive Howard Page, then operationalized by Kim Roosevelt, were laid out in a recently declassified CIA cable sent to Eveland in Rome on August 22, 1956. Anderson, representing his friend the president, was to meet with King Saud and respectfully explain to him why Saudi interests were not served by his present policy of cooperation with Nasser. The Egyptian leader’s recent actions and rhetoric had revealed his “ambition to dominate the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia”; his “growing capability to create disorder,” currently targeted at the West, could just as easily be turned against rival Arab governments; and it was “Nasser’s picture, not Saud’s,” that was being waved at anti-Western demonstrations around the Arab world. If this appeal to Saud’s ego did not work, Anderson was to resort to an implied threat, telling the king that the regional instability caused by Nasser’s antics, especially his seizure of the Suez Canal, was causing the Western powers to look to energy sources other than Arab oil, including a “stepped-up American effort on [the] scale of the Manhattan project” to increase the “industrial use of atomic energy.” This last assertion, which was untrue, echoed ongoing discussions in
the Eisenhower administration about possible methods of deliberately deceiving Middle Eastern oil producers as to the true extent of Western dependence on the area. It also lends some credence to the later claim by Miles Copeland that the Middle East Policy Planning Group considered launching an energy deception program, Operation Rainbow, involving the construction of a dummy experimental facility somewhere in the American West, “complete with klieg lights and guard dogs in the manner of one of those plants you see in James Bond movies.” As often was the case with Copeland anecdotes, a substratum of truth lay underneath the fanciful detail.
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The ruse did not work. The Anderson mission arrived in Dhahran on August 23 and then moved to the neon-lit royal palace in Riyadh for a series of audiences with Saud and his brother, Prince Faisal. When it became obvious that the Saudis were not ready to risk antagonizing Arab opinion by coming out against Nasser, Anderson played the nuclear energy card. The Saudi response came early the following morning in a handwritten note from Saud, which Bill Eveland translated from the Arabic for the benefit of the rest of the party. “Prince Faisal, it appeared, had done considerable reading on the subject of nuclear energy and rejected as impossible Anderson’s assertions that we could provide Western Europe an alternative to petroleum.” Abruptly terminated, the mission left Riyadh the same morning with nothing to show for its efforts. As the plane climbed through the Arabian sky, Eveland reflected uncomfortably on how “these simple people of the desert had caught us bluffing.”
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If the effort to rally the region’s monarchs against Nasser was faltering in Saudi Arabia, so too were the plans for regime change in Syria. Part of the problem was offstage Iraqi and British plotting, which constantly threatened to undo the American plan for engineering a coup from within Syria. The Anglo-Iraqi candidate to take over from Quwatli was the exiled former military dictator Adib Shishakli, who announced his interest in a return to power by appearing in Beirut in July. American observers were unnerved by this development—in their view, Shishakli was a “political opportunist” and “heavy drinker” who had long outlived his usefulness—and were therefore relieved when he seemed to have second thoughts, returning to Europe with a share of the Iraqi funds intended to finance the coup. This left the field open to the United States’ preferred candidate, Mikhail Ilyan, but the Americans’ problems
were not over yet. Ilyan was himself closely associated with Iraq’s ruling Hashemite family and in Iraqi pay. Moreover, able and energetic though Ilyan was, his Christianity counted heavily against him in a majority Muslim society. This was all the more unfortunate because, much like the Soviet émigré population the CIA was trying to organize through AMCOMLIB, the exile Syrian community in Beirut was seething with internal divisions and feuds, making any sort of concerted planning there difficult if not impossible.
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Meanwhile, conditions in Syria itself were growing steadily less favorable to American covert action. The nationalization of the Suez Canal had produced a surge of pro-Nasser sentiment among ordinary Syrians, and nationalist, anti-Western elements were consolidating their control over the government. Particularly worrisome from an American point of view was the growing power of the chief of the Syrian security service, ‘Abd al-Hamid Sarraj. A cool, reserved young man with a reputation as “something of a lone wolf,” Sarraj had first been taken up as a junior army officer by his fellow Kurd Husni Za‘im, who after the 1949 coup placed him in Syrian military intelligence. Having survived the many changes of government of the early 1950s, partly by dint of accepting an appointment as assistant military attaché in Paris, Sarraj was appointed head of the Deuxième Bureau in March 1955 by Lucky Roosevelt’s cousin Shawkat Shuqayr. He had since distinguished himself as a skillful detector of Western plots and, in the words of the US embassy in Damascus, was the “foremost obstacle to efforts [to] diminish [the] influence of pro-Nasser and pro-Soviet groups in Syria.”
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Sadly for Archie Roosevelt, US assets in Syria were no match for Sarraj. Lodged in a stuffy, windowless office in the embassy, the Damascus CIA station was understaffed—Bill Eveland counted only five officers, in contrast with the “empire” Kim Roosevelt had built up in Cairo behind Nasser—and low in morale. Not even the occasional visit by Miles Copeland—who attempted to revive his old contacts in the Syrian army and once, reportedly, smuggled a local informant out of the country in the trunk of a CIA car—could lift the gathering gloom. Making Archie’s job in Syria all the more difficult was the laxness of security surrounding WAKEFUL’s planning in Beirut. The Lebanese capital happened to be the informal headquarters of the Western press corps in the Levant, and the appearance there in July 1956 of both Roosevelt cousins—not one but two grandsons of TR—stirred so much excitement
that reports of it made their way into the pages of the
New York Times
. The CIA Beirut station chief, the Lebanese American Ghosn Zogby, even threw a cocktail party for the Roosevelts attended by American reporters, exasperating Bill Eveland, who lived in fear of being exposed as a CIA contract employee. “When the day of your coup comes, are you going to sell tickets?” the Egyptian ambassador to Lebanon mischievously asked a passing Miles Copeland.
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With the planning talks beset by problems, the plotters moved back the date of the projected coup, from August 31 to October 25. In September, Eveland collected from the CIA station in Beirut the half million Syrian pounds he had promised Ilyan and set out for Damascus with the cash stuffed in a suitcase in the trunk of his car. Rendezvousing with the Syrian in the lobby of the New Omayad, Eveland was briefed about the latest coup plans. Conservative colonels in the Syrian army, Ilyan explained, were to seize control of Damascus and other major cities, while armored units sealed the borders with Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon; once the country had been brought under complete control, the army would hand power to a civilian government headed by Ilyan himself. (This explanation omitted several key details of the plot that smelled of Anglo-Iraqi collusion, including coordinated tribal uprisings in southern and western Syria, and incursions by paramilitary forces of Iraqi-armed exiles, one of which would enter Damascus disguised in police uniforms and assassinate key leftwing officers and politicians.) After a nerve-wracking day’s wait, Eveland met Ilyan again at a deserted French casino in the mountains above Damascus and handed over the money. Now there was nothing left for him to do but return to Beirut and cool his heels.
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This left a third challenge for Washington’s covert Cold Warriors: what to do about Nasser? As usual, American attitudes toward the Egyptian president were fundamentally ambivalent. Desirous though Foster Dulles was of getting rid of Nasser, he was reluctant to support the extreme solutions being proposed by the British, which included ever more elaborate MI6 assassination plots, such as a scheme to inject poison into his chocolates. Dulles feared that such action would further discredit the Western powers in the Middle East and in other Third World theaters of the Cold War, and, in any case, President Eisenhower himself had indicated his disapproval.
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In an effort to head off the British, the secretary of state once again turned to the crypto-diplomats of the CIA. Arriving in London in late
August 1956 on the first leg of a world tour of CIA stations, Allen Dulles tried but failed to damp down British enthusiasm, reporting home that “‘they’ were more determined than ever to proceed along a certain line.” The following month, Miles Copeland and James Eichelberger were enlisted in another initiative of the secretary’s, the Suez Canal Users’ Association (SCUA), a proposal to place control of the contested waterway in the hands of an international body representing the Western powers that made most use of it. Scornfully rejected by Nasser, who pointed out that, contrary to European predictions, Egyptian engineers were doing a perfectly good job of operating the canal on their own, SCUA nonetheless afforded Miles and Eich an amusing diversion and, as it would turn out later, a promising new career opportunity. More importantly, the CIA Arabists were, even at this late stage of the crisis in Egyptian relations with the West, keeping open their own channels to Nasser’s circle, with Kim Roosevelt meeting ‘Ali Sabri and Muhammad Haikal in New York to discuss the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the Suez dispute. Might Kim still work the magic he had performed securing the Anglo-Egyptian agreement of 1954?
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Even if Nasser had been amenable, too many factors were working against such an outcome, including constant lobbying for more drastic measures by the British. While Prime Minister Eden and Foreign Secretary Lloyd dripped anticommunist words into the ear of Foster Dulles, MI6 Middle East chief George Young harangued his CIA colleagues about their failure to support London’s plans for “bashing the Gyppos,” warning Chester Cooper at a Mayfair cocktail party, “Your friends at home had better come up with something constructive pretty soon.” Such pressure could also take on more subtle forms. American correspondents in the Middle East often relied heavily on British sources, and there were hints that Whitehall was deliberately using these channels to shape the already pro-Israel US media’s coverage of the Suez dispute. These included a growing American tendency to imitate the British practice of likening the Egyptian president to Adolf Hitler, despite the numerous differences between the two men noted in a State Department report on the subject, such as the fact that, whereas “Hitler was noted for ranting and raging at visitors, Nasser tends to a relaxed and rational attitude.” With the American Friends of the Middle East ordered to stand down from their domestic anti-Zionist campaigning in the summer of 1956, the Israeli publicity or
hasbara
effort in the United States, now largely unopposed, kicked up a gear, swaying American public
opinion further against Nasser. Even within the CIA itself, support was draining away from the Arabists. “James Angleton, who wanted to make use of Israel, was exerting more influence than Kermit Roosevelt,” Charles “Chip” Bohlen, US ambassador to the Soviet Union, informed his Egyptian counterpart in Washington, Ambassador Hussein. An acquaintance of Miles Copeland gloatingly told him, “I think we’ve finally got you Nasser lovers on the run.”
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