America's Great Game (54 page)

Even if the 1979 Revolution had not taken place, it seems doubtful that Kim’s Kipling-esque account of the 1953 coup would have fared
much better, given that the tastes of the reading public had now shifted to more “realistic” espionage novels like John Le Carré’s tales of double agents, betrayal, and cynicism—the world of Kim Philby rather than of
Kim
. Reviewing the course of Kim Roosevelt’s final years, one senses a man being left behind by the march of history. If only he had lived earlier, at the same time as his grandfather or father, when a family like the Roosevelts could exercise its political will relatively unchallenged, when spying was the occupation of club-land amateurs rather than salaried civil servants, and when international travel was the preserve of a handful of intrepid explorers, not a crowd of jet-propelled tourists. Still, for all the disappointments and frustrations, Kim succeeded until the end in retaining the poise and self-assurance that had so eluded Kermit Sr. “I have had a satisfactory, often exciting life, of which I am appropriately proud,” he declared in his Harvard sixtieth-reunion report, shortly before his death, at age eighty-four, in 2000. Predictably, perhaps, Kim’s obituaries all dwelled on TP-AJAX and its unintended consequences; few remarked on his Arabism.
⁸

What of the other, less famous Roosevelt cousin? After being assigned away from the Middle East in 1958, Archie served for another seventeen years in the CIA, in Madrid and in London, where he succeeded Frank Wisner as station chief in 1962 (Wisner struggled with mental illness and ultimately died by suicide in 1965), and finally in Washington as chief of the Africa and European divisions. It was a model career for an intelligence professional, and when he left the Agency in 1975 to build up a retirement nest egg working for David Rockefeller in Chase Manhattan Bank’s international division, Archie was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and showered with heartfelt encomia. However, his memoirs, published in 1988, reveal that he had by this point become badly disillusioned with the Agency’s leadership—Directors James Schlesinger and William Colby had both, in his view, betrayed their office by pandering to politicians—as well as with successive administrations’ failures to heed the advice of area experts. The Agency, he felt, had lost its founding esprit de corps and was “no longer a happy place to work.” As with cousin Kim, there was a palpable feeling of wistfulness about Archie’s later life, an elegiac note of nostalgia for the past glories of the Roosevelt family and the childhood lure of the Golden Road to Samarkand. Still, the regret was tempered by Archie’s capacity for wry, self-deprecatory humor—he was happy to tell,
for instance, of how the barber in the shop next to the Chase Manhattan headquarters would address him as “Mr. Rockefeller,” and how Lucky was sometimes greeted as “Happy,” the name of Nelson Rockefeller’s wife. He was also delighted when Lucky was appointed chief of protocol in the Reagan White House and thereby acquired the rank of ambassador. Archie was, in other words, still very much enjoying life when he unexpectedly died in his sleep at the age of seventy-two, in 1990.
⁹

And what, finally, about the third member of the triumvirate, the original self-styled “Game Player”? Miles Copeland and his family stayed on in Beirut during the 1960s, occupying a splendid Arabesque villa overlooking the Mediterranean. The former CIA man still enjoyed his inside track in Cairo and, in the role of loyal alumnus, shuttled back and forth across the region trying to avert the Arab-Israeli crisis of the late 1960s. Conditions in Lebanon were deteriorating, however, and Miles’s consultancy business ran into trouble when Jim Eichelberger eloped with the wife of a third partner, John Lufkin. By 1970, Nasser was dead of a heart attack, Miles was in bad odor with many of his former colleagues for having published
The Game of Nations
(CIA director Richard Helms was reportedly “furious” with him), and the Copelands had relocated to leafy St. John’s Wood in London. The family’s adventures were far from over, though. With the children acquiring fame and fortune in the music and entertainment industries, and Lorraine building her reputation as an archaeologist, Miles branched out into journalism, writing for the conservative American journal
National Review
(senior editor James Burnham had admired
The Game of Nations)
and appearing frequently on British radio and television as an indiscreet commentator on espionage and the Middle East. This new career did not prevent him from keeping his hand in as a high-level business consultant and occasional crypto-diplomat: shortly after the Iranian Revolution, at the suggestion of friends in the State Department, he teamed up again with Kim Roosevelt and his old Syria playmate Steve Meade to plan a rescue mission for the US embassy hostages. He even found time to help design a board game based on
The Game of Nations
for the British games manufacturer Waddington’s, in which players representing “Superpowers” manipulated “Leaders” and “Secret Agents” to gain control of the imaginary region of Kark. (“Skill and nerve are the principal requirements in this amoral and cynical game,” declared Miles on the box. “The first objective of any player is to keep himself in the game.”)
Miles eventually began to slow down in the late 1980s, as injuries sustained in a serious car accident and arthritis took their toll, and he settled down to writing his autobiography,
The Game Player
, which appeared in 1989. He died of heart failure in 1991, age seventy-four, shortly after serving as a consultant on Scotland’s investigation of the Lockerbie airline bombing.
¹⁰

Miles had done very well in life, rising above his original station and passing the Roosevelt cousins as they moved in the other direction. Much the same was true of several other covert operatives from non–Ivy League backgrounds who had thrived in the heady excitement of World War II and the Cold War: Steve Meade, who after retiring from the military enjoyed a second career as a financial advisor, and Rocky Stone, an energetic campaigner for the deaf following his retirement from the Agency. The only individual of Miles’s parvenu stock who did not fare so well was Wilbur Crane Eveland. During his spell in Beirut as Allen Dulles’s personal agent, Eveland had developed a friendship with the British mole Kim Philby, then living and working in the Lebanese capital as a Middle East correspondent. Unwisely, the Arabist adventurer maintained contact with the double agent even after the latter’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, exchanging jokey cards and letters with him in Moscow. Reports about Eveland’s ongoing dealings with Philby found their way into CIA and FBI files on him already made thick by reports about his marital affairs and grievances filed by various officials whom he had crossed during his crypto-diplomatic peregrinations around the Middle East. Eveland lost his security clearance and suspected a hidden official hand when a business deal went bad and he wound up in jail in Singapore in 1976. He even claimed that a hit-and-run motor accident in which he was involved after the publication of his revelatory memoir
Ropes of Sand
in 1980 was an attempt on his life. Denied a government pension, Bill Eveland died in poverty in Boston in 1990.
¹¹

Game playing, it seems, did carry some risk of personal injury after all.

IT WOULD BE UNJUST NOT
to recognize some of the CIA Arabists’ positive accomplishments. Building on the tradition of personal interaction with the Arab world they inherited from their predecessors in the OSS, they rapidly acquired an impressive level of firsthand experience and knowledge of the Middle East that belied the United States’ lack
of prior official engagement with the region. They enjoyed a degree of access to and influence among Middle Eastern leaders—including the foremost Arab figure of his day, Gamal Nasser—that no generation of American officials has been able to reproduce since. They made a sincere and imaginative effort to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict that, although it ended in failure, anticipated key aspects of later, more successful peace initiatives. And they tried to rein in the worst antinationalist excesses of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and their counterparts in MI6. Compared with some of the gross missteps that would come later in US policy toward the Middle East, the early CIA’s emphasis on nonmilitary, covert operations to secure American goals in the region looks almost prudent in comparison.

In the end, though, the failures and unintended consequences of CIA Arabism seem more significant. Kim Roosevelt and the others might have wanted to build a new kind of Western relationship with the Arab world, a nonimperial, non-Orientalist one that reflected Americans’ record of “disinterested benevolence” in the region. In fact, though, they ended up replicating much of the British imperial experience in the Middle East, shoring up client monarchies with covert interventions and secret subsidies, first in Iran and then in the Arab countries too. Even in those instances in which they did support progressive Arab nationalists—that is, in Syria (if Husni Za‘im counts as such) and in Egypt—they also fueled a tendency toward military authoritarianism and the creation of the repressive, Bonapartist states that Arabs are still trying to cast off today. Britain’s Covert Empire became America’s Covert Empire; Britain’s Great Game became America’s Great Game.

The Arabists’ efforts to garner sympathy and support for the Arab cause at home in the United States were similarly ill-fated. The arrangement of secret CIA funding for the American Friends of the Middle East, while briefly ensuring that a pro-Arab voice was at least heard in domestic debates about US policy toward the region, in the end did more harm than good. For all their love of storytelling, the Arabists failed to tell the story of the Arabs in ways that captured the imagination of their fellow Americans. Where was the Arabist equivalent of
Exodus
, the wildly successful novel about the founding of Israel by the Zionist Leon Uris?
¹²

The Arabists themselves were not necessarily to blame for these failures. They were constantly obstructed and frustrated by factors beyond
their control: the meddling of Secretary of State Dulles, the scheming of their British counterparts in MI6, and the resistance to their designs of the Arab world itself. That said, internal flaws in CIA Arabism arguably doomed it from the outset. These included lingering traces of the very imperialist and Orientalist modes of thought that it professed to reject, a strong personal inclination toward romantic adventurism, and an aristocratic impatience with the ordinary processes of democratic government that manifested itself in the Arabists’ readiness to resort to crypto-diplomacy abroad and secret government funding for Kim Roosevelt’s Arabist, anti-Zionist network at home. In this regard, the Arabists’ experience was typical of the early drift of the CIA from its original intelligence-gathering mission toward a growing preoccupation with covert operations of dubious value; in the imagery of
Kim
, the Game had distracted them from the Quest.

More than half a century on, the echoes of the CIA Arabists’ experience are manifold: in recent efforts by politicians to manipulate intelligence about Iraq so that it suited predetermined policy outcomes; in the continuing controversy about US policy concerning the Arab-Israeli dispute, including debates between Zionists and anti-Zionists within the American Jewish community about appropriate levels of support for Israel; in discussions about the CIA’s potential role in bringing about regime change in Middle Eastern countries with repressive governments (some recent pronouncements about the Agency’s lack of assets in Syria could easily have dated from the summer of 1957); and in the ongoing tension in US Middle East policy, brought into dramatic relief by the Arab Spring, between the strategic desire for regional stability and the impulse to support the democratic aspirations of ordinary Arabs—between, as Miles Copeland might have put it, Machiavellianism and idealism.

Evidently, the era of the CIA Arabists was foundational to the current American relationship with the Middle East. At a time of renewed and profound flux in the Arab world, it would serve all those concerned with US policy in that region to study the earlier moment carefully, to understand better the underlying historical forces, domestic as well as foreign, cultural and emotional as well as political, that have shaped the fraught American–Middle Eastern encounter ever since.

Notes

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