America's Great Game (51 page)

KIM ROOSEVELT AND HIS FELLOW
Arabists had come to the Cold War Middle East hoping not only to prevent the Russians from taking it over but also to help the Arabs throw off the colonial domination of the French and British. The Suez crisis had seemed to mark a historic moment of opportunity for the Arabist vision, with the United States briefly emerging as the champion of Arab independence from European imperialism. It took less than a year, however, for that promise to be squandered. Thanks to a combination of Foster Dulles’s rigid worldview and subtle pressure from both the British and conservative Arab leaders, the Eisenhower administration came down decisively on the side of the old imperial order—and, ironically, the CIA became the main instrument of the new antinationalist policy. The Arabists did not even have the consolation of pulling off some spectacular coup, as they had in 1953. Indeed, the main effect of repeated attempts at regime change in Syria was to drive that country further into the arms of the communists.

For the CIA Arabists, the appeal of the Arabist cause had always been as much personal as political. A childhood fascination with the Orient, a powerful sense of patriotic duty, the chance for personal adventure: these were what had drawn Kim and the others to the Arab world in the first place. And so it would prove in the end, as CIA Arabism entered its terminal crisis. The reasons that the Arabists would quit the game were not just political; they were personal as well.

TWENTY

Game Over

SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE MID
-1950s, as winter descended on Washington, DC, Kim and Polly Roosevelt flew south to stay at the Florida residence of oil executive Charles B. Wrightsman. Decorated and furnished at vast expense by Wrightsman’s art collector wife, Jane, the Palm Beach mansion boasted a huge swimming pool filled with heated seawater and tennis courts on which guests could play against professionals from a nearby club. After rising late, Polly would swim and Kim would play tennis before joining their hosts for a four-course dinner and, sometimes, dancing accompanied by musicians flown in from New York. In January 1955, the Roosevelts’ fellow guests included, besides Allen Dulles, the shah and queen of Iran, who took them waterskiing and shopping for “costly trinkets” at Cartier and other stores on Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue. On the final day of their visit, the two young couples drove to Miami in the Pahlavis’ blue Rolls Royce, the shah behind the wheel discussing Iranian affairs with Kim, while the queen fussed over her lapdog. That evening the foursome dined at Maxim’s and listened to Louis Armstrong at the Beachcomber nightclub.
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After these glamorous interludes, Polly found it hard returning to the “work-a-day world” of Washington. Even after several raises to
GS-18 on the Agency pay scale, Kim’s government salary of $18,000 was not enough to cover the Harvard and Groton fees of sons Kermit and Jonathan, who had recently been joined by two new siblings, Mark and Anne, let alone the upkeep of a summer house on Nantucket. In July 1955, only a few months after Kim had received the National Security Medal at the White House, Polly found herself (as she confessed to mother-in-law Belle) having to borrow money from her children’s nanny to pay the household bills. Roosevelts had never flaunted their status, but this was sailing too close to the wind.
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Relative impecunity was not the only challenge facing the families of intelligence officers. Polly, on her own at home for months at a time while Kim traveled overseas, fretted constantly about her husband’s safety. “I hate, hate, hate, hate the prospect of this trip,” she told her mother-in-law on the eve of one of Kim’s expeditions. “The whole thing by air, the semi-war conditions in the countries he must go to, the fact that he is going round the world, the loneliness I anticipate and the pointlessness of my existence without him.” Although Archie Roosevelt’s wife, Lucky, enjoyed an independent career as a Washington newspaper columnist, she too suffered the emotional stresses and strains of marriage to an overseas operative. “Riots and revolutions seemed to follow him,” she wrote in her memoirs; “he flew in dangerous airplanes held together by luck and by God.” Then there was the additional burden of official secrecy, which meant concealing the reason for such trips from friends and relatives. “You know, it’s getting a little embarrassing to tell people you’re away all the time—people must think we’ve had a quarrel or something,” Lucky once wrote her husband. It was also difficult not to feel a little envious when contemporaries who had chosen more conventional careers began to reap such public honors as ambassadorships and invitations to join boards of directors. “Here he was, this brilliant man who knew so many languages,” remembered Lucky. “Why wasn’t he an ambassador? That was very difficult for him too, because he didn’t like looking like a failure.”
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The Groton ethic of selfless public service was still a powerful influence on the outlook of the Roosevelt cousins, but it was coming under increasing strain. It did not help that the CIA Arabists were, by the second half of 1957, thoroughly disillusioned with the Eisenhower administration’s handling of Middle East policy. According to his autobiography, Archie’s misgivings about his political masters’ approach to
the Arab world—their conflation of nationalism and communism, their tendency to overestimate the American ability to influence local developments, and their failure to heed the advice of area experts—came to a head at a meeting of the GAMMA committee, the interdepartmental group convened in late August to consider the next step after the detection of the “American plot” in Syria. When discussion turned to Foster Dulles’s proposal to send Loy Henderson on a tour to line up other Arab governments against the Syrian regime—a patently misconceived scheme likely to increase rather than reduce nationalist feelings throughout the region—Archie slipped a note to his CIA superior, Deputy Director Charles P. Cabell, stating, “I wish to voice my strong dissent from the opinions expressed here.” Cabell, “a soldier who saluted when a commander gave him his orders,” responded with another note saying, “It is not for us to give our views on matters of policy.” Consequently, when Dulles canvassed the meeting’s opinion, Archie kept his “eyes on the table and remained silent.” The next morning, unable to contain his disquiet, Archie tried to track down Henderson, but the senior diplomat had already left on his ill-advised mission. Much later, Archie claimed, Henderson told him, “I heard you were trying to get hold of me, and I knew why. The decision was a mistaken one.”
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These feelings were shared by the other Roosevelt cousin. In an interview with OSS historian R. Harris Smith, Kim claimed actually to have complained to Allen Dulles about the State Department and White House adopting “bad policy” and then, when it failed, asking the CIA, “Please overthrow this gov[ernmen]t for us.” TP-AJAX only worked, Kim explained, because there was a domestic force, the Iranian army, that supported the shah over Mosaddeq. As such, the operation represented a “very special situation, one that could not be done repeatedly and at will.” The Eisenhower administration’s “adventurist policy” was “intolerable. . . . You can’t go around overthrowing any gov[ernmen]t.” Allen Dulles “sympathized,” Kim recalled, “but said there was nothing he could do about it.”
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There was a strong hint in these later comments of being wise after the event: both cousins were, after all, involved in covert efforts to overthrow various Middle Eastern governments, and they clearly enjoyed the opportunities for adventure offered by such operations, including the chance of temporary escape from the perhaps unhappy or workaday conditions of their domestic lives. Still, some contemporary
evidence indicates that the Roosevelts did indeed try to rein in Foster Dulles. In September 1957, for example, when the secretary of state was excitedly contemplating American support for a Turkish invasion as a possible solution to the “Syrian crisis,” Kim informed the secret Anglo-American Working Group on Syria that the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal, had personally expressed to him “concern lest the United States should encourage the Turks to attack Syria.” The following month, after a somewhat calmer Dulles accepted the working group’s conclusion “that unilateral Turkish military intervention at this time would be undesirable,” attention shifted to contingency planning for possible nationalist coups against the pro-Western Arab governments on Syria’s borders. On November 9, the CIA stated its strong belief, presumably through its representative, Kim, “that the disadvantages of [military] intervention in the case of Jordan would be greater even than those of inaction. . . . Arab opinion would be solidly united against us; Hussein, if rescued only by such intervention would be regarded as a complete puppet; and his regime would collapse as soon as United Kingdom/United States forces were withdrawn.” In other words, Kim had not yet abandoned the skepticism he had voiced years earlier in
Arabs, Oil, and History
about the viability of Jordan’s client monarchy. There was little enthusiasm here for extracting Britain’s chestnut from the fire.
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Nor, apparently, had Kim given up altogether on his other major Arabist ambition for the Middle East—besides replacing imperial-era regimes with nationalist ones—that is, securing an equitable resolution to the Palestine conflict. “The Governments of the United States of America and the United Kingdom agree that the unsolved Arab-Israel problem presents a grave obstacle to the peaceful and prosperous development of the peoples of the Middle East, and that tranquility will never come to the area without a just settlement of that problem,” read a draft statement brought before the Anglo-American Working Group in October 1957. “Any settlement must make provision for the three basic elements of refugees, security, and boundaries,” the text continued, with territorial agreements representing “some form of compromise between the present armistice lines and the boundaries proposed in the United Nations resolution of 1947.” The CIA members of the working group were reportedly “very keen” that this statement be adopted, but State Department representatives blocked the move. In this respect, the debate
echoed a dispute that had taken place the previous December, when the CIA representatives on an Operations Coordinating Board working group on Middle East policy failed to persuade its other members to include a statement in their report to the effect “that U.S. interests and solution of problems in the Near East depend upon an immediate settlement of the Arab-Israel dispute.” Even now, Kim and his fellow Arabists were, it seems, not quite ready to surrender the dream of a “just” peace that had animated ALPHA a few years earlier.
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But these lingering hopes signified nothing. Much as the British swiftly worked their way back into American favor after Suez, so the Israelis too quickly rehabilitated their reputation, emerging as a pro-Western island in a sea of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Reviewing the recent setbacks in US Middle East policy, Allen Dulles asked Bill Eveland, “I guess that leaves Israel’s intelligence service as the only one on which we can count, doesn’t it?” Beginning in 1958, there was a considerable expansion of the “Connection,” the informal alliance between the CIA and Mossad. The United States provided the money as the Israelis established collaborative programs with other non-Arab secret services in the region—in Turkey and Iran—and began branching out into sub-Saharan Africa, where they helped the Americans combat penetration by the KGB. The rivalry between the Near East and Israel divisions in the CIA, nearly as old as the Agency itself, was being decided in favor of the latter; James Jesus Angleton had bested Kim Roosevelt. It was another Arabist defeat to add to a list that already included the failure to control Nasser, the collapse of ALPHA, and the “loss” of Syria.
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The CIA Arabists were not alone in their discontent with John Foster Dulles’s management of US foreign policy: a growing number of Middle East hands within the State Department itself were beginning to question the wisdom of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Ironically, though, this dissident mood, and the creeping sense of demoralization that accompanied it, tended to focus less on Dulles himself than on the CIA crypto-diplomats charged with carrying out his orders on the ground in the Middle East. In Syria, for example, where the US diplomatic corps had been greatly reduced as a result of the abortive coup attempt of August 1957—in addition to the expulsion of Rocky Stone’s operatives, Ambassador Jimmy Moose, on leave at the time of the plot’s discovery, was instructed not to return to Damascus—there was clearly a good deal of ill feeling toward the CIA. Arriving in Damascus in 1958, the
new ambassador, Charles W. Yost, set about trying to rebuild American relations with Syrians by drawing a line under the events of the previous few years, when, as he put it later, “we were trying rather clumsily to get into some of their domestic affairs.” There were echoes here of the earlier problems in Henry Byroade’s Cairo embassy caused by the crypto-diplomacy of Kim Roosevelt and Miles Copeland, “this tendency to fall back on the spooky channel, so to speak, rather than doing it through the official diplomatic channel,” as junior embassy official William Lakeland described it. “We were actively intervening—in very ham-handed ways in some cases—all over the landscape,” recalled State Department Middle East hand Harrison M. Symmes. “Allen Dulles just unleashed people, many of whom were very good operatives. . . . But there were some people over there also who were utterly unprincipled.”
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