America's Great Game (52 page)

Criticism from foreign service colleagues was nothing new, but the CIA Arabists were also being targeted from other quarters. In the course of Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings about the Eisenhower Doctrine in early 1957, senators referred indiscreetly to officials from “another Government agency” undermining George Allen’s mission to Cairo and even conspiring with Nasser against Naguib. More surprisingly, a panel appointed by the Eisenhower White House in 1956 to look into American covert operations and made up of two stalwarts of the foreign policy establishment, David K. E. Bruce and Robert A. Lovett, returned with a startlingly negative report that condemned “the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being.” The report continued with a declaration that could easily have been interpreted as a personal attack on Kim Roosevelt: “Busy, moneyed and privileged, [the CIA] likes its ‘King Making’ responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating—considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from ‘successes’—no charge is made for ‘failures’—and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!).” No doubt the Arabists simply shrugged off some of the barbs coming their way. Still, for men who had been reared and educated to prize honor above material rewards, they must have stung a little.
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That said, the first CIA Arabist to abandon public service was no Grotonian. Miles Copeland shared the Roosevelt cousins’ deep sense of frustration with the Eisenhower Doctrine. “All of us were quite prepared
to believe that the plan might have made sense in some subtle and delicate domestic political context beyond the ken of us ‘field’ people, but in the light of extant intelligence on the Arab world, it made no sense at all,” he wrote later. Not only that, Miles was starting to grow bored with his planning job in the increasingly cumbersome bureaucracy of CIA headquarters. There was growing pressure to package intelligence, which now was usually derived from impersonal, technological rather than living, human sources—“SIGINT” rather than “HUMINT”—to support predetermined policy decisions, as opposed to intelligence shaping policy. “The CIA itself became a budget-happy agency in which solutions came first,” he lamented. Above all, Miles, the game player supreme, was fed up with always being on the losing side, not least as it meant being teased by Nasser, with whom he was still in frequent, friendly contact. “The genius of you Americans,” Nasser taunted him, “is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only
complicated
stupid moves.” It was “a turning point in my life,” Miles wrote later. “I thereafter adjusted my own personal game.”
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In May 1957, Miles resigned his government post and prepared to move to Beirut, where he and his old friend Jim Eichelberger were planning to establish a consultancy business, conducting research for American commercial interests throughout the region. Kim and Polly Roosevelt gave them “a grand farewell party,” Lorraine Copeland recalled later. “We were much envied, [and] people tried to make friends who hadn’t ‘seen’ us before!” Arriving in Beirut in July, the Copelands rented a large apartment overlooking the sea and arranged for their children to attend the American school. Lorraine was introduced to various archaeologists excavating in Lebanon and joined her first dig as “chief bottle washer,” a humble launch of what would prove to be an illustrious academic career. Miles, meanwhile, rented a “Copeland & Eichelberger” office next door to TAPline’s headquarters and opened for business. His first clients were oil executives he and Eich had met the previous year when researching Foster Dulles’s ill-fated idea for a Suez Canal Users’ Association. The Pittsburgh-based Gulf Oil Corporation wanted information about regional developments that might affect its drilling operations in Kuwait, and Copeland & Eichelberger were delighted to oblige, in part because doing so meant upstaging Gulf’s previous advisers, British Petroleum (as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had been renamed in 1954). After landing two other major clients, one
of them Pan Am, the former CIA officers were earning at least three times their government salaries. As during his spell working for Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Miles remained a CIA “loyal alumnus,” staying in regular touch with, and performing frequent tasks for, his old boss, Allen Dulles. This time, however, there would be no return through the “revolving door” to government service. Miles’s days as a full-time intelligence officer were over.
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Next, it was Kim Roosevelt’s turn. Late in 1957, Kim was drawn, apparently unwillingly, into CIA planning to overthrow the Indonesian leader Sukharno, a prominent Third World “neutralist.” The details are not clear, but Miles wrote later of Kim’s “confidence [taking] another blow in a conversation with Allen [Dulles], Frank [Wisner] and the head of the FE Division [Desmond Fitzgerald] about a proposed operation in Indonesia.” On September 12, around the height of the Syrian crisis, Polly told Belle Roosevelt that “Kim had a terrible flap at the office last night,” adding that “he is very discouraged about the Middle East.” Later in the same letter, Polly again brought up “the sordid question of money,” noting that Groton fees had just gone up and that the family would have difficulty paying Harvard that month. To make matters worse, there was a strong possibility that Kim might have to drop everything and take off abroad on Agency business, leaving Polly holding her “breath through the day, . . . hoping that this evening’s news will be better.” With the autumn nights drawing in, a deep sense of gloom settled on the Roosevelt household.
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There was only one solution. Shortly before Christmas, 1957, Kim announced his intention of resigning from the Agency and taking up a position with a private employer. In January he attended a CIA stag dinner given in his honor by Allen Dulles—“Speeches,
etc.
will proclaim loudly that they are all sorry to see Kim leave government service,” Polly predicted of the event to Belle, with heavy irony—and began commuting to the Pittsburgh headquarters of Gulf Oil to discuss terms. Soon afterward, he was installed in a plush Washington office as a Gulf vice president in charge of government relations, liaising between his new employer, the various relevant bureaucracies in Washington, and royal families and high officials in oil-producing Middle Eastern states—“a top-level advocate, door-opener, smoother of problems,” as his old Groton and Harvard classmate, Benjamin Welles, now described him.
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Like Miles, Kim did not sever his ties to the CIA; indeed, he routinely passed on the reports that Copeland & Eichelberger compiled for
Gulf Oil to his old colleagues, and he even encouraged Miles to cultivate his friendship with Nasser, his unique “inside track” in Cairo, for intelligence purposes. Kim, too, was a loyal alumnus, in other words. Still, after two decades of government employment interrupted only by spells of public advocacy for the Arab cause, “the lucrative corporate embrace of big business” (as Welles put it) was a decisive shift. Would the Rector have approved? Perhaps Kim, who had just turned forty, had already done enough to satisfy the Groton ethic and the Roosevelt expectation of wartime sacrifice to one’s country: the citation for the Distinguished Intelligence Medal he earned on the eve of his departure from the CIA noted that, as “the principal architect of United States political action operations in the Near East,” he had performed work “of greatest importance to the national security of the United States.” In any case, he could at least now afford the Groton fees—and a larger house in Washington, where he and Polly moved shortly after he started his new job.
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Of the CIA’s original Arabist triumvirate, this left just Archie Roosevelt. Despite his unhappiness about Eisenhower administration policy, there was never much question of Archie quitting the Agency: he was too dedicated an intelligence officer for that. However, early in 1958, he was moved out of the Arab world into a new post as station chief in Madrid, leaving division chief Norman Paul in complete control of the Near East. The causes of this move are not documented, but evidently Archie was not happy about it. “Imagine sending me to one of the few countries where I don’t speak the language,” he told Lucky. “I’ve spent so much of my life studying the Middle East—what do I know about Spain?” Was Archie being punished for the failure of successive coup attempts in Syria, or had his discontent with the administration line become too obvious? It is not clear.
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What was clear was the sum effect of all these changes: as Bill Eveland described it later, a complete “changing of the CIA guard over the Middle East,” similar to the emptying out from government service of the OSS Arabists after the partition of Palestine in 1947. Even Eveland himself would shortly follow his Agency colleagues into the private sector, leaving his government post in 1959 for a job in the construction industry.
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The Arabist moment that had begun ten years earlier, when Kim, Archie, and Miles had stood together on the citadel battlements in Aleppo, was over.

THERE WAS STILL ONE ACT
left in the drama, however: the denouement of the antinationalist Eisenhower Doctrine.

The year 1958 was to feature upheaval throughout the Middle East, a first Arab Spring, so to speak, as the wave of Nasserite nationalism finally engulfed the conservative regimes left over from the days of the British and French Empires. On February 1, the Egyptian and Syrian governments merged to form the United Arab Republic (UAR), signifying Egypt’s victory in the long regional contest for control of Syria (although the union would prove short-lived, Syria seceding in 1961). The Iraqi and Jordanian monarchies responded by creating the rival Arab Union, a futile gesture that served only to inflame nationalist feeling against them. Carrying on the inglorious tradition of the ill-fated Syrian coup plot STRAGGLE, an Arab Coordinating Committee made up of representatives of the conservative Arab governments sat in Beirut hatching various schemes against Nasser and the Syrian intelligence chief Sarraj, as the Western secret services looked on somewhat nervously. In March 1958, Sarraj “made a monkey” out of King Saud by exposing a particularly crude Saudi plot to bribe him personally into opposing the formation of the UAR. The resulting scandal effectively forced the abdication of Saud (lest it be forgotten, Eisenhower’s candidate for Arab necessary leader), leaving the Saudi throne to Prince Faisal, a far less desirable occupant in American eyes. Everywhere one looked in the Arab world, nationalists were routing pro-Western conservatives.
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But the worst was still to come. In May, sectarian tensions in Lebanon, stirred by Nasser and Sarraj, boiled over into a full-scale uprising against President Camille Chamoun. Encouraged by leading Lebanese businessmen and an unnamed oil company, probably Gulf, Miles Copeland volunteered in June to use his inside channel to Cairo to try to work out a truce. Neither Chamoun nor Nasser proved amenable, though; indeed, Miles found his Egyptian friend in an unusually truculent mood, complaining that the United States “regard[ed] him as [a] problem child rather than [a] responsible official.” Meanwhile, a defiant Chamoun retreated inside the presidential palace, where Bill Eveland, apparently an ardent supporter of the Lebanese president despite his later professions of sympathy for Arab nationalism, visited him regularly, braving rebel gunfire in his white and gold DeSoto and helping stash the Chamoun family jewels in the US embassy safe. The next flash point was Jordan, where in early July the “Brave Young King” Hussein claimed to have
detected another army plot against him, this one also involving a threat to the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. As the young CIA officer Jack O’Connell helped unravel a conspiracy involving twenty-two Jordanian officers, an Iraqi infantry brigade summoned to defend Hussein’s throne happened to pass through Baghdad in the early morning of July 14. Apparently, no one in the Iraqi capital had heeded Jordan’s warnings about a possible coup, because what happened next took the CIA and MI6 stations there by complete surprise.
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At six
AM
the troops fanned out and seized key positions, attacked Prime Minister Nuri’s residence (the CIA station chief Carlton Swift, sleeping on the roof of his house because of the summer heat, was awakened by the sound of gunfire from across the Tigris) and then descended on the royal palace. There they confronted and shot to death King Faisal and Crown Prince ‘Abd al-Ilah, Archie Roosevelt’s old friend. The following day, a city mob dug up ‘Abd al-Ilah’s hastily buried body, mutilated it, and dragged it naked through the streets. Nuri, disguised as an old woman to elude capture by the army, was recognized by the crowd and murdered; his body suffered a similar fate. Several Europeans and Americans also died that day, among them a Californian, Eugene Burns, later identified, with terrible irony, as a relief worker for the American Friends of the Middle East. The carnage dismayed observers in London and Washington; they now feared the complete collapse of the old monarchical order across the whole region.
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Believing that Lebanon would be the next Arab state to succumb to nationalist revolution, Chamoun implored the United States to intervene militarily, invoking the Eisenhower Doctrine. This posed a major dilemma for the Eisenhower administration. Despite constant Lebanese and British assertions that the country’s problems were due to communist and Nasserite interference, most American observers knew full well that in fact it was internal communal divisions that were the main threat to Chamoun’s increasingly unpopular government. Yet Lebanon had become a crucial test of credibility for the United States: if Washington did not respond to Chamoun’s entreaties, then other pro-Western governments in the region would surely conclude that they were better off accommodating themselves to the forces of Nasserite nationalism. Americans on the ground in Beirut offered conflicting advice. In a classic scene of crypto-diplomat versus regular diplomat, Bill Eveland urged support for Chamoun, while the US ambassador, Robert McClintock, advised listening to the opposition.
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