America's Great Game (10 page)

Although Lebanon would later play an extremely important role for Archie in both his professional and his private life, this was a hurried visit. The Roosevelts were soon back in Cairo, Kim no doubt grateful for the brief but instructive glimpse of Levantine life his cousin had provided. Rare photographs of the two men together depict them at various stages of their tour. Archie looks uncharacteristically dapper in his officer’s uniform, while Kim is slightly disheveled in dark suit and tie. Otherwise, the cousins are remarkably alike: both of medium height and slight build, with similar, recognizably Rooseveltian features, although Kim’s face is slightly ruddier and fleshier, his hair starting to recede.
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Although Archie and Kim managed to fit in one more trip to Palestine, during which they were guided into Transjordan by another OSS archaeologist, Rabbi Nelson Glueck, their time together was coming to an end. In June 1944 Archie received orders to make his way to Iraq, where he took up the vacant post of assistant military attaché in Baghdad, a position he held for the remainder of the war. Stephen Penrose’s Cairo operation, meanwhile, was shifting its focus away from the Middle East and toward the Balkans, where Bill Donovan was renewing his efforts to establish a US intelligence presence independent of the British. A dashing young southerner by the name of Frank G. Wisner was brought in to run OSS/Cairo’s satellite station in Istanbul and begin mounting parachute missions into the Balkan countries and Greece. Nonetheless, OSS suspicions of British imperial intrigues remained, even as the German threat receded and possible problems with the Soviets surfaced. Many Americans were, at this stage, more inclined to support local leftist insurgents than pro-British reactionaries.

Kim Roosevelt was redeployed to Italy, where Allied forces were moving northwards in a campaign of liberation, as an “economic investigator” for Central Europe. Just after Victory in Europe Day, a jeep accident left Kim with a badly broken ankle (an injury that meant he nursed
a stiff leg for the rest of his life). Sent home to convalesce, he was put to work compiling the official wartime history of the OSS, a task that was not completed until the summer of 1947. It was only then that he would return to the Middle East. Archie, in the meantime, barely left it.
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The overall assessment of the OSS’s performance in the Middle East contained in Kim Roosevelt’s official history is surprising: the “effort in the theater in general must be considered a waste of time and money,” it reads. This seems an unduly harsh verdict on Stephen Penrose’s record. As the official history itself goes on to note, by the end of the war, “twenty-nine undercover agents had been placed in the Middle East, and in all but two countries (Afghanistan and Arabia) intelligence coverage was good.” Using a variety of covers, these agents in turn built up chains of “over 500 sub-agents” who “helped turn in, by June 1945, more than 5,000 reports.” Certainly Penrose faced considerable obstacles, among them British obstructionism, noncooperation from some US foreign service officers who resented the sudden appearance in their midst of these novice spies, and poor or nonexistent communications, which necessitated that agents in Arabia, for example, travel in person to Cairo in order to file their reports. Nonetheless, like Eddy earlier in the war, Penrose traded skillfully on his own local experience. “His knowledge of the area was of inestimable value to OSS in recruiting future representatives who were to operate in countries where strong religious, political and racial differences existed,” noted a commendation by the OSS theater commander, John Toulmin, in November 1944. Considering that he was starting completely from scratch, Penrose’s efforts “to lay a firm foundation for intelligence work in the Middle East” do not appear quite such a “waste” after all, Kim Roosevelt’s critical verdict notwithstanding.
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As for Kim himself, his personal approach to the Middle East was deeply affected by his service under Penrose’s command in Cairo. While he never went quite so far as his cousin Archie in his wartime identification with the Arabs, he did now have some real, lived experience of the region and its inhabitants, as opposed to the literary, Orientalist notions with which he had grown up. The impressions and relationships Kim formed during his World War II tour of Egypt were to prove crucial when it became his turn to assume the leadership of US Middle Eastern intelligence in the Cold War.

FOUR

Great Game Redux

IT WAS SUMMER 1945
, the war was ending, and while Kim Roosevelt was home in the United States recovering from his accident in Italy, cousin Archie was still in Iraq, wondering about his peacetime future. His outstanding student record and natural scholarly bent seemed to mark him out for an academic career, and he had already begun sounding out various East Coast schools about possible positions. Try as he might, though, he could not muster much enthusiasm for the prospect. His experiences in the Arab world, including his current posting as assistant military attaché in Iraq, had awakened in him an appetite for a less cloistered, more active life. Moreover, there were signs that, even as one world war was ending, another was beginning, with the United States and the Soviet Union as the chief protagonists, and neighboring Iran as the new conflict’s flashpoint.

It was as he was taking off on a sortie to the Iranian capital of Tehran, his plane rising from the yellow desert floor to the snow-capped peaks of the Zagros mountains, that Archie was struck by a revelation. “How can I go back from this to a university to study dead languages and old civilizations?” he asked himself. “I am a part of something new, something exciting.” Although he did not realize it at the time, it was a
pivotal moment in Archie’s life. His decision to stay on in the Middle East after World War II launched him on “the process of becoming a committed intelligence officer,” confirmed his new identity as an Arabist, and made him a firsthand witness to and participant in many of the key events of the Cold War, beginning with the Iran Crisis of 1946.
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WHAT WAS IT, EXACTLY, THAT
had prompted Archie’s momentous decision? One factor, clearly, was the fascination with the Arab world that he had developed in French North Africa and that grew even stronger during his tour of duty in Iraq. His mentor during his previous posting in Cairo, the former missionary and archaeologist Edwin Wright, had warned him not to expect too much of Baghdad, whose modern-day appearance was a notorious source of disappointment for travelers brought up on
The Arabian Nights
. Archie, however, was delighted to be “on the site of the splendor of Old Islam,” regarding his assignment to Iraq as his first real step on the “Road to Samarkand,” his quest for understanding the Arab and Muslim worlds. It perhaps helped that the Roosevelt family name won him easy access to the upper rungs of Baghdad society: he renewed his childhood acquaintance with the Hashemite prince Muhiddin ibn ‘Ali al-Haidar and befriended the prince’s cousin, the regent ‘Abd al-Ilah, then ruling Iraq on behalf of the boy king, Faisal II. In May 1945, he even accompanied the regent to the United States on a state visit that included a side trip to the Roosevelt family seat in Oyster Bay.

But Archie did not just confine himself to the aristocracy of Baghdad; he also devoted a great deal of time to adventurous expeditions among the Arab tribes of Iraq’s southern provinces and the rebellious Kurds of the country’s mountainous northeast, a region he found instantly beguiling. His official reports on these trips, replete with minute ethnographic detail about Iraqi tribal life, soon earned him a reputation as an American authority on the subject, something from which he evidently derived great personal satisfaction. Looking back at his eighteen-month assignment in Baghdad many years on, Archie reckoned it one of the happiest times of his life.
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Another factor that contributed to Archie Roosevelt’s enjoyment of Iraq—and his desire to become an intelligence officer—was less predictable, given his dislike of French colonialism in North Africa: the British imperial presence in the country. To a certain extent, Archie could not
avoid dealing with the British. Although Iraq was nominally independent, the British mandate there having ended in 1932, its location astride land routes to India and its massive oil reserves meant that London continued to exercise a barely hidden hand in its affairs. Growing nationalist sentiment had erupted in a pro-Axis coup in 1941, which saw the regent briefly banished to Transjordan, but the British succeeded in quelling the insurgency and afterward only tightened their grip further. By the time Archie arrived in Baghdad, both court and cabinet were firmly under the sway of the British embassy, although the veteran prime minister, Nuri al-Sa‘id (another of Archie’s Iraqi friends), did manage to collaborate with the British on terms somewhat of his own making. In the tribal areas British political advisers wielded the power of, in Archie’s phrase, “kinglets.” To conduct any sort of intelligence business in Iraq, therefore, Archie Roosevelt had little choice but to cooperate with his British counterparts.
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Yet there was more to the young American’s relations with British officials in Iraq than bureaucratic necessity. Like his uncle Kermit during World War I, Archie Roosevelt appears to have felt a strong attraction to the Arabist officers and advisers who manned Britain’s imperial regime—its “Covert Empire”—in the Middle East. The day before he set off on his journey from the United States to Cairo in April 1944, he dined in Washington with Freya Stark, the famous Arabian explorer (and friend of the poet James Elroy Flecker, of “Golden Road to Samarkand” fame) now engaged in wartime British propaganda efforts in the Arab world, and the two “took to each other beautifully.” Immediately after arriving in Baghdad, Archie visited the mud-brick headquarters of the British Counter Intelligence Centre, Iraq, where its staff of young RAF officers greeted him warmly. “The barrier of our different nationalities melted away,” he recalled later, and “we formed these easy friendships of wartime.”
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These friendly feelings, so different from Archie’s frosty encounters with French colonial officials earlier in the war, sprang from several sources. In part, Archie was channeling the traditional attitudes of American visitors to the Middle East, especially the missionary and educator settlers of the Levant, who had tended to get on much better with British officials there than with the French. An additional factor was Archie’s own upbringing and education. “My New England background had conditioned me to be an Anglophile,” he confessed in his memoirs. “Philosophically, I found the [British] congenial; we were the same kind
of people.” Finally, as a budding Arabist himself, Archie was drawn to the British reputation for cultural immersion in the Arab world. Unlike the French, who “for the most part considered ‘their’ Arabs inferiors,” the “Englishman . . . is broader minded, and seeks to find out what is right and true,” wrote Archie in one of his attaché reports. This rather gushing judgment was probably colored by the air of Kipling-esque romance that surrounded many of the British Arabists in Iraq. Francis Grimley, for example, a political officer “with a merry, open face under fair hair” who guided Archie along the Lower Tigris, habitually wore Arab clothes, a sartorial choice that “won him the disapproval of some of the old colonial hands” but that the young American happily imitated during their expeditions together. And along with the hovering presence of Lawrence of Arabia, Kipling’s India itself was not far from wartime Iraq: the British forces stationed there included a large number of Indian regiments, while its political officer system basically reproduced that of the Raj.
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In sum, for all his distaste for European colonialism and his desire that Americans should invent a new kind of Western relationship with the Middle East, Archie Roosevelt’s ambition of becoming an intelligence officer, indeed his very conception of that role, was heavily influenced by the British imperial experience. “When I speak of an intelligence officer,” he wrote later, “it is in the old-fashioned sense, perhaps best exemplified . . . by Kipling’s British political officers in India.” Even the fact that the revelation about his future had come to him while overflying Iran was telling: RAF aerial surveillance had been a crucial technique for enforcing the British mandate, so this was very much an imperial perspective from which to survey the Middle East.
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That said, Archie’s decision to stay on in the region after the war was impelled above all by a consideration not mentioned so far: his hatred of communism. Often Cold War American anticommunism is characterized as a product of mindless conformism, a shapeless fear of the McCarthy era. What this picture omits is the deliberate ideological conviction with which many Americans had opposed the ideas and tactics of the communist movement long before Senator McCarthy appeared on the scene in 1950. Archie Roosevelt is a good example. The roots of his anticommunism can be dated to his school days, when he came across the
Daily Worker
in the Groton library “and found its message of class hatred a calumny on the ideals of America.” A few years later, shortly after graduating from Harvard, Archie learned that communists were
secretly involved in running the American Youth Congress (AYC), a national youth group prominently supported by his cousin, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Although not a political activist by nature, in January 1940 Archie traveled with two friends to Washington to attend an AYC meeting and protest what he perceived as the organization’s hidden communist agenda. In a piece published soon afterward in the
New York Herald Tribune
, Archie attacked those who “pretend to be defenders of democracy at home” while serving as “minions of tyranny abroad.” He also criticized Eleanor Roosevelt for lending “her prestige and her eloquence” to the AYC’s cause, echoing the common anticommunist complaint that “innocent liberals” were the unwitting dupes of the Soviet Union (while at the same time conjuring the ongoing family rivalry between the Oyster Bay and the Hyde Park Roosevelts).
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