America's Great Game (6 page)

Kim was particularly interested in the possibility of doing work for Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the World War I hero, Wall Street lawyer, and Republican Party stalwart. The Oyster Bay Roosevelts had been close to Donovan for several years; in 1932, Kermit had lent prominent support to his unsuccessful bid for the New York governorship. Now, worried that the existing US intelligence apparatus was too weak and fragmented to respond effectively to the challenge of the war in Europe, Donovan was campaigning for the creation of a unified, strategic intelligence service. Kim, doubtful of his prospects at Cal Tech, and hoping for a position in “a Government agency that, although it doesn’t exist yet, will probably be formed soon,” bided his time in Pasadena, lecturing local audiences about the errors of isolationism, planning how to turn his thesis into “a more or less popular book on propaganda,” and drafting a scholarly article about “the kind of clandestine service organization the U.S. should develop for World War II.” In the early summer of 1941, acting on the advice of reporter Joseph Alsop, his cousin and fellow Grotonian, Kim showed the article to Donovan, who had just been appointed coordinator of information (COI) by FDR. Donovan responded immediately by inviting Kim to come join him in Fairfax, Virginia, where he was setting up the COI office—in effect, the United States’ first central intelligence agency—on Belle Roosevelt’s family estate. Kim did so in August, taking the position of special assistant to the director of research and analysis. It was still four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Like generations of Roosevelt men before him, Kim had gotten into the fight early.
²⁰

KIM ROOSEVELT HAD NEGOTIATED THE
difficult business of becoming a Roosevelt man quite skillfully. He had discovered an occupation that reconciled his attraction to both the contemplative and the
active life, while satisfying the Groton ethic that he render service to his country. Moreover, the job of professional spy promised to satisfy his appetite for adventure, for playing the Great Game, which he had developed listening to his father’s stories and reading Kipling. By his mid-twenties, Kim Roosevelt already exhibited the qualities that would define his adult personality—coolness, self-confidence, a certain inscrutability—and make him one of the most vaunted CIA officers of his day.

Tragically, his father, for all his considerable talents, never developed the same emotional poise as his son. Discharged from the British army on medical grounds in 1941, he returned to the United States, where his life continued its downward spiral into depression and alcoholism. After an unsuccessful course of treatment in a Connecticut sanatorium, he was posted to a remote military base in Alaska. It was there, in June 1943, that Kermit Roosevelt shot himself to death with his Mesopotamian service revolver. “He gave his life for a great cause with the complete courage which is characteristic of his family,” wrote Endicott Peabody to Kermit’s widow, Belle, in one of his last letters to the Oyster Bay Roosevelts.
²¹

TWO

Beginning the Quest

KIM ROOSEVELT’S CHILDHOOD ENCOUNTER WITH
the Middle East—essentially a vicarious one, mediated by the culture of the British Empire—would exercise a powerful influence on the mind-set of the CIA as it first approached the region in the late 1940s. However, Kim’s experience was not the only kind of American engagement with the Arab and Muslim worlds prior to the Cold War. Equally if not more important in shaping early CIA attitudes toward the Middle East was a distinctly American tradition of direct, personal contact with the region’s inhabitants that likewise dated back to the nineteenth century.

A number of individuals, several of them born and raised in the Middle East itself, would help convey this tradition to the young CIA. One in particular, William Alfred Eddy, came to play a crucial role in bridging the worlds of the official US intelligence community and Middle East–born American Arabists. Yet perhaps the most ardent early advocate of the Arabist viewpoint was not himself from a Middle Eastern background. Rather, he had experienced an almost identical upbringing and education to those of Kim Roosevelt: Kim’s cousin Archie.

BORN TWO YEARS AFTER KIM
, in 1918, Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt was named for his father, Archibald Sr., the third of TR’s sons. After a
childhood spent mainly in New York City and Cold Spring Harbor, close to Oyster Bay, Archie Jr. entered Groton in 1930, in the same class as Kim’s younger brother Willard. Then it was on to Harvard, where, like Kim, Archie distinguished himself academically despite going through in just three years, graduating in 1939
magna cum laude
(family lore had it that he would have been
summa
had he not absentmindedly forgotten an examination) and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He also dutifully found himself a New England wife, Katherine Winthrop Tweed, or “KW”—“I don’t believe in getting involved unless one intends to marry the girl,” he told his bride-to-be—thereby disqualifying himself from taking up his place at Oxford, as the Rhodes required scholars to be unmarried. Instead, under pressure to earn a livelihood with which to support a young family, he began working as a newspaper “copyboy” and then cub reporter, and ended up in the San Francisco Bay Area.
¹

Nor did the similarities with Kim end there. Like all young Roosevelt males, Archie had been sent west to be toughened up by a spell of frontier life, spending the year before he went to Groton at the Arizona Desert School near Tucson. Indeed, under the influence of Archibald Sr., rather a martinet compared with the romantic Kermit, Archie appears to have been even more exposed to the strenuous life than young Kim. During an especially arduous hunting expedition near Fairbanks, Alaska, he became thoroughly lost and had to camp on his own overnight, surrounded by bear and wolf tracks. As he grew up and it became clearer that his interests and talents mainly lay in intellectual pursuits, Archie drifted away from his father, identifying more with his historian and naturalist grandfather TR, whose hovering presence he sensed throughout his life, simultaneously protecting and judging him. Still, later on, Archie would feel well served by the masculine ordeals of his adolescence. “I had become a man and had found a strength that has never deserted me in time of testing,” he recalled of his Alaska experience in his memoirs. Archie had particularly fond memories of his stay in Arizona, an experience that instilled in him “a love for the desert and a nostalgia for it” that was only requited years later when he “attained the deserts on the other side of the world.”
²

This affinity for the “Desert Sublime” was also a characteristic of the English Arabists whom Kermit Roosevelt had befriended during World War I, and it is not surprising to learn that, like Kim’s, Archie’s childhood
was permeated by the culture of the British Empire, particularly texts about the Orient. Archibald Sr. frequently read his son
The Ballad of East and West
, the Kipling poem containing the seminal Orientalist statement “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Sneaking into TR’s study at Sagamore, the boy Archie pored over
The Arabian Nights
. Later, at Groton, he ransacked the school library for works on the Arabs, “with Lawrence of Arabia as a starting point.” One of Archie’s proudest childhood memories was of winning a Groton public-speaking prize for his recitation from
Hassan: A Play in Five Acts
by the English poet James Elroy Flecker. These verses, with their central theme of a spiritual pilgrimage (“Golden Road”) to Samarkand, the fabled ancient city on the Silk Road, became a constant refrain in the life of the adult Archie, as he embarked on his own quest in search of an essential yet elusive Orient.
³

Not all of the Middle Eastern experiences of Archie’s childhood were second-hand and British ones. His father’s friends included Prince Muhiddin ibn ‘Ali al-Haidar, the son of the former emir of Medina and cousin of the Hashemite princes whom T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell had helped install as rulers of Transjordan and Iraq. Later, Archie recalled the excitement of “Prince Mooi’s” visits to the family home in Cold Spring Harbor. There was even a brief moment spent in the Arab world itself when, in the course of a tour around the Mediterranean, Archie and his family walked through the Casbah in Algiers. The sixteen-year-old boy was “fascinated by the Moorish scene” that surrounded him: “I was in the land of
Beau Geste
, and wished I could linger.”
⁴

There were other small but not insignificant differences between the young cousins. Whereas Kim, after the initial shock of life at Groton, settled down and appeared even to enjoy life at the school, Archie never adjusted. A small, toothy boy with extremely bad eyesight, he fared poorly on the playing field and was “usually the last to be chosen for a team.” Archie’s lack of athleticism was balanced by his performance in the classroom, where he posted consistently excellent grades, especially in history and the classics. Perversely, though, he tended to identify not with past empires and their conquests but rather with “the losers of history”: “Carthage against Rome, the Moors of Spain against Castile, and the Byzantines against everybody.” And in contrast to the conventionally heroic verses Kim penned for the
Grotonian
, Archie
concocted gloomy Dark Ages sagas, freighted with historical and linguistic allusions.
⁵

Small wonder, then, that Archie was not Endicott Peabody’s favorite pupil; indeed, he later suspected that the Rector had toyed with the idea of moving him to another school. It probably did not help that Archie had an irrepressible appreciation for the absurd, something he retained into adult life. The Rector would sprinkle his stern Sunday sermons with vague yet intriguing references to a bad man—in fact, “the foulest man [he] ever knew”—who had somehow offended him during his time in Tombstone, and Archie spent many an hour speculating hilariously with his classmates about the possible nature of this unfortunate character’s transgressions.
⁶

Yet, for all his bookishness and irreverence, Archie Roosevelt keenly felt the Grotonian call to serve the nation. “The values you and Father gave me as a boy, and the family tradition of public service, have not led me to attach to money an overwhelming importance,” he later wrote his mother, Grace, after she had chided him for failing to win back the family fortune. As American entrance into World War II loomed, Archie, possibly taking his lead from cousin Kim, tried to sign up as an intelligence officer. He had some exceptional qualifications for this role, not just his innate intellectual abilities but also his language skills: in addition to the modern and classical languages he had acquired at Groton, he had learned some Russian from an émigré gardener who worked for his parents, and then at Harvard, as part of his broad field of literature, obtained a special dispensation to study Arabic, supplementing his schoolwork with private tutoring by a Palestinian friend. The problems were his extreme nearsightedness and, at age twenty-four, his youth. Applications to the army’s intelligence unit (G-2), the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Bill Donovan’s new outfit all failed, the latter despite some lobbying on his behalf by Kim.
⁷

Eventually, after the intervention of his father (who himself fought in the Pacific despite having the opposite problem of being too old for combat service), Archie got into the Army Specialist Corps, a civilian organization that performed special assignments for the military. After some intelligence training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland and then boot camp in Virginia, in October 1942 Archie found himself on a troopship convoy apparently bound for the Senegalese port of Dakar. On board ship, he learned that his specialist corps was to be abolished and
its members absorbed by the regular army. Then a ship loudspeaker announcement by General George S. Patton informed him that he was in fact on his way to capture a beachhead near Casablanca in Morocco, as part of an operation code-named TORCH.

Like his grandfather charging up Kettle Hill in Cuba, young Archie Roosevelt was about to face his “crowded hour.”

THE ARAB WORLD ARCHIE ROOSEVELT
was poised to enter in October 1942 was still an exclusively European political and military preserve. There had been the occasional expression of official American interest in the region—TR, for example, had mused about taking over Britain’s role in Egypt, reckoning he would soon “have things moving in fine order”—but successive US administrations had by and large been content to defer to the British and French on the so-called Eastern Question. William J. Jardine, the American minister in Cairo during the 1930s (one of only a handful of US government representatives in the Middle East prior to World War II), summed up this attitude: “It appears to me to be quite a sideshow.”
⁸