America's Great Game (7 page)

This is not to say, however, that there was no American presence at all in the Middle East before the 1940s. Starting in the early 1800s, Protestant missionaries had began journeying from New England to the “Holy Land” to convert the “Mohammedans” dwelling there. Perhaps predictably, these American evangelists failed almost entirely to win Muslim souls for Christ; many suffered terrible hardships in the attempt, and several died. Nonetheless, they did succeed in leaving a lasting impression on the region in the shape of the educational institutions they founded, such as the Syrian Protestant College (later known as the American University of Beirut, or AUB), established in 1866 by the archetypal New England missionary Daniel Bliss. And, surprisingly, they earned quite a lot of goodwill among the Middle Easterners they encountered, if only because their relatively selfless interest in the region compared so favorably with the colonialism of the European powers.
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This reputation for “disinterested benevolence,” as one Protestant theologian described it, was reinforced by the respect that some, if by no means all, of the missionaries felt for Arab culture, as shown, for example, in Bliss’s decision to adopt Arabic as the language of instruction at his university. An unintended consequence of this attitude was that,
at the same time they spread modern American ideas and values in the Middle East, institutions such as AUB and its Egyptian counterpart, the American University in Cairo, also began to function as incubators of Arab nationalism. This identification between American influence and Arab independence—logical enough, given the United States’ own origins in a war of national liberation—grew stronger still during World War I, when many Arabs noted with approval Woodrow Wilson’s support for national self-determination as set out in his famous Fourteen Points.
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After the War, Wilson’s failure to prevent the revival of European imperialism in the Middle East caused a perceptible falling off in Arab enthusiasm for things American. Meanwhile, US citizens began appearing in the region with less benign intentions than their missionary predecessors: archaeologists wanting to excavate its ancient artifacts and oilmen lured by its fantastic petroleum reserves. (Ironically, the latter’s entry into the Middle East was facilitated by an Englishman, the noted Arabist Harry St. John “Jack” Philby, who brokered a concession for Standard Oil of California in Saudi Arabia that signaled the beginning of the end of British domination of the region’s oil industry.) Nevertheless, even in the early 1940s, there still existed a large reservoir of admiration for the United States among Arabs and, on the American side, a heritage of positive, personal engagement with the Arab and Muslim worlds that ran counter to the negative imagery of classic Orientalism.
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If any one individual personified the several strands of this tradition—missionary work, education, intelligence, and oil—it was William Alfred Eddy. Born in 1896 to Presbyterian missionaries in Lebanon, Bill Eddy grew up speaking colloquial Arabic on the streets of Sidon. His first trip to the United States came when he was sent for his education to Wooster College in Ohio and then to Princeton Theological Seminary—both Presbyterian-founded institutions with ties to the missionary community. During World War I he served with distinction in the Marine Corps, suffering wounds in France that left him carrying his large frame on a lame right leg. Invalided out of active service, he returned to academe and in 1923 took up the chair of the English Department at the recently founded American University in Cairo. Subsequent university appointments in the United States never quite satisfied his yen for military service and foreign adventure, so it was little surprise when he reenlisted in the Marines on the eve of World War II and returned to Cairo in the
role of US naval attaché. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Eddy was moved to Tangier in Morocco, at the special request of Kim Roosevelt’s boss, the coordinator of information, Bill Donovan. He was to remain on loan to Donovan, still under the cover of naval attaché, for most of the rest of the war.
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Fans of the movie
Casablanca
will have some inkling of the murky, ominous atmosphere of wartime Morocco. Most of the country was still part of France’s vast colonial empire in North Africa, yet Nazi Germany pulled the strings of the collaborationist French government in Vichy, and there were fears of a German invasion from either Libya in the east or Spain to the north. Part of Eddy’s mission in Tangier was to try to divine German intentions while creating “stay-behind” networks that would sabotage an Axis occupation force. At the same time, he had to prepare for the possibility of the Allies landing an expeditionary force of their own, an eventuality that required him to predict the response of the French—would they welcome Allied troops as liberators or resist them?—and set up beachheads and landing fields. At this stage, in early 1942, it was still far from clear which of these scenarios was the more likely outcome.

Fortunately, Eddy did have some intelligence resources at his disposal. Unlike the British, who had severed relations with Vichy, the United States still had government representation in North Africa, and Eddy was able to use American officials with diplomatic immunity as a ready-made espionage network. Among the Americans already on the ground were several with excellent connections to the majority native population, including a Harvard anthropologist by the name of Carleton S. Coon, who had undertaken several field trips among the Rifi of northern Morocco, a Berber tribe with a history of resistance to European domination. Eddy was also able to draw on his own Arabic and knowledge of Islam, including the ability to recite chapters of the Koran by heart, to befriend local leaders.

Working out of a suite in the spy-infested Minzah Hotel—Tangier’s equivalent of
Casablanca’s
Rick’s Café—Eddy and his associates ran a dizzying variety of operations. A regional chain of clandestine radio stations reported intelligence ranging from ticket purchases at Casablanca airport to the height of the surf along the Moroccan coastline. Local agents surreptitiously distributed propaganda literature intended to dissuade the French from putting up a fight if and when the Allies landed.
US officials used the diplomatic pouch to smuggle arms to putative resistance groups.

To be sure, there were elements of Kipling-esque game playing about some of these activities. The rambunctious Coon, for example, appeared to be thinking of Lawrence of Arabia when he tried, unsuccessfully, to employ a Rif general with the code name Tassels to raise a tribal revolt. Similarly, various schemes involving Strings, the leader of (in Coon’s words) “the most powerful religious brotherhood in Northern Morocco,” whose followers would “obey his order to the death,” were distinctly reminiscent of the Scottish novelist John Buchan’s World War I adventure
Greenmantle
. After the war was over, Coon would delight in telling stories of stay-behind saboteurs mining Moroccan highways with explosives disguised as mule turds.
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With his Presbyterian missionary conscience, Bill Eddy did not share Coon’s relish for dirty tricks. “It is still an open question whether an operator in OSS or in CIA can ever again become a wholly honorable man,” he wrote later, in a surprisingly gloomy unpublished memoir about his wartime experiences. “We deserve to go to hell when we die.” Nonetheless, he too arguably exceeded his brief, tending not merely to gather and report intelligence but also actively to try to shape policy. Clearly convinced that the Allies should lose no time in moving on North Africa, Eddy constantly exaggerated both the threat of German invasion and the likelihood of the French welcoming an Allied preemptive strike. “If we sent an expeditionary force to North Africa, there would be only token resistance,” he assured a skeptical audience of US top brass in London in July 1942.
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Dressed in his marine uniform, Eddy cut an impressive figure—General Patton, on observing the numerous World War I ribbons on his chest, reportedly remarked, “the son of a bitch’s been shot at enough, hasn’t he?”—and his counsel helped carry the day. After secret meetings in the White House, FDR authorized Operation TORCH, an invasion plan involving over one hundred thousand Allied troops, the great majority of them American (British participation was kept to a minimum because of the possible negative impact on French opinion), under the supreme command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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With D-Day set for November 8, 1942, Eddy ramped up his operations, smuggling maritime pilots out of Morocco to join the Allied convoy, supporting Anglo-American measures designed to deceive
the Germans about the landing locations, and helping convene secret meetings between Allied and French commanders intended to forestall resistance to the invasion. He even made sure that there were agents on the beaches equipped with flares to guide in the landing craft, and maps to distribute to the disembarking troops. Leaving aside some of the Eddy team’s operational mistakes and errors of judgment, it was an impressive intelligence performance, proof of what an American with the right background and approach could achieve in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Bill Eddy, the prototypical Middle East–raised US Arabist, had quite literally prepared the way for the arrival in North Africa of Archie Roosevelt.
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IN THE EARLY HOURS OF
November 8, 1942, while Bill Eddy and Carleton Coon crouched over a radio set listening for word of TORCH’s arrival, Archie sat huddled in a landing craft, speeding through the dark toward red blinkers on a beach near Casablanca. As the bottom of his boat scraped rocks, it became evident that the Eddy team had underestimated French resistance. A fort opened up with its cannon, and the US Navy responded with its big guns, lighting up the sky like a fireworks display. Archie rushed for cover in the brush that lined the shore and then, as morning dawned, began reconnoitering inland. Over the next three days, about 1,400 Americans and 700 French would die in sporadic fighting throughout North Africa. Luckily for Archie, the area around Casablanca was pacified relatively quickly, and the challenge instead became processing the thousands of French and Moroccan soldiers and officers who wanted to surrender. With his outstanding language skills, Archie was soon on call among US commanders, including General Patton himself, as an interpreter. A cease-fire was agreed on during the night of November 11, and the following morning the twenty-four-year-old grandson of TR, dressed in mud-stained fatigues, entered Casablanca, riding through cheering crowds in a jeep alongside a resplendently attired Patton, the whole scene reminiscent of T. E. Lawrence’s victorious entry into Damascus at the end of World War I.

A few days later, US headquarters were moved a short way up the Atlantic coast to Morocco’s capital, Rabat, and it was then that Archie Roosevelt’s love affair with the Arab world began in earnest. Although the ancient walled city, or medina, was off-limits to US troops, he was
able to explore the rose-colored minaret of the Tour Hassan; the Casbah of the Oudaias, with its lovely gardens “perfumed with jasmine and orange blossoms” (as he wrote later); and the Chellah, burial ground of past sultans. Accompanying Archie on these explorations was another GI by the name of Muhammad Siblini, a young Lebanese American from a prominent Beirut family who had run a fur-importing business in New York. The two men had met at the Camp Ritchie intelligence school, where they “established an immediate rapport,” and had sailed together across the Atlantic. In Rabat, Siblini became something of a celebrity with the local Muslim community, and with his support, Archie Roosevelt gained special permission to enter the medina. There he befriended a number of young Arabs, who entertained him in their homes and discussed a wide range of issues with him. One in particular sought him out: Mehdi Ben Barka, a prominent member of the nationalist Istiqlal (Independence) Party, then banned by the French authorities. “He spent considerable time with me at various places,” Archie recalled, “educating me about French colonialism in Morocco.” During the 1960s, Ben Barka would develop a reputation as a major Third World revolutionary before vanishing, under mysterious circumstances, in Paris in 1965.
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One reason why Ben Barka’s history lessons found such a receptive audience in Archie Roosevelt was that there was a prior history of tension, if not outright conflict, between Americans and French residing in the Arab world. In the nineteenth-century Levant, Protestant New England missionaries of the sort who founded the American University of Beirut tended to be at odds with the Catholic Maronites, an indigenous Christian group heavily identified with the French. This divide deepened after World War I, when the French mandate saw Greater Syria subdivided and the Maronites elevated to positions of power, while Arab nationalists were crushed. In World War II North Africa, France’s reputation among American Arabists grew worse still, thanks to the collaborationism of Vichy officials, who were allowed to remain in office even after the Allied invasion.

With his history of interest in the Arab world, and recent exposure to the influence of Moroccan nationalists, young Archie Roosevelt grew increasingly troubled by the continuing French presence. Still in Rabat, but reassigned from his interpreting duties to the task of monitoring Arabic programming on Radio Maroc, he filed a series of reports reflecting,
as he put it later, “the views expressed to me by the nationalists, their aspirations to throw off French rule, and their complaints that the French were taking advantage of the American presence to reinforce their position.” Soon, French police began to monitor Archie’s movements and harass the young Arab intellectuals with whom he was meeting.
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If anything, Archie’s sympathy with Arab nationalism only grew stronger with each of his subsequent postings in North Africa. In February 1943, he transferred back to Casablanca and went to work for the Office of War Information (OWI), the wartime US propaganda agency. He was sad to part ways with Muhammad Siblini, who moved to Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers, where he was employed reciting the Koran on Radio Algiers. Nonetheless, Archie soon made new friends who shared his anticolonial views, including Carleton Coon and another American with ties to the rebellious Rifi, reporter and novelist Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean. He also continued to fraternize with Moroccans, enjoying the lavish hospitality of Arab tribal leader Caid el-Ayadi in Marrakesh, a city whose beauty he described lyrically in his memoirs, and discovering a strong attraction to “the appealing femininity [of] many Near Eastern women”—although he resisted any urge to betray his marriage vows to KW. Meanwhile, he carried on criticizing the French, claiming in reports to OWI command that they were trying to turn the local populace against the United States by portraying GIs as “in the habit of having sexual intercourse with donkeys.”
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