America's Great Game (19 page)

The Palestine crisis, particularly the rout of Arab forces in the 1948 war with Israel, also affected Syria’s internal politics. Syrians already faced a number of political challenges, including the sectarian and tribal tensions nurtured by the French, as well as constant interference by their Hashemite neighbors, Iraq and Transjordan. Both nursed ambitions to take over a country long regarded as the commercial, intellectual, and even spiritual center of the Arab world and schemed accordingly with rival Syrian factions. These divisions were reflected in the results of the elections that took place in 1947 (the same elections that US officials had tried secretly to police) and produced a weak, minority government under the presidency of the Damascene aristocrat Shukri al-Quwatli.
Meanwhile, new parties, defined by ideology rather than by sectarian identity, and more in touch with “the street,” were beginning to emerge, among them the Ba‘ath (“Renaissance”), a movement of nationalist, socialist intellectuals; the Communist Party; and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Arab-Israeli conflict only fractured these fault lines further, discrediting the Quwatli government, which handled the 1948 war ineptly, and providing radicals with a rallying cry that was to prove more powerful than even the struggle against European colonialism.

Kim Roosevelt lamented these developments in
Arabs, Oil, and History
, remarking on how Palestine had rendered the position of moderate, American-educated Young Effendis in Syria almost untenable. Viewed with the advantage of hindsight, however, a more important consequence of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was its role in politicizing the Syrian army, whose officer corps felt that the nation’s honor had been besmirched by its battlefield defeat. Often from humble, minority-community backgrounds that contrasted with the landed and merchant Sunni families who had so far dominated the nation’s politics, these soldiers had begun to feel a burning sense of grievance against Syria’s civilian politicians.
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As Miles Copeland wrote later, “the game environment was undergoing a rapid transformation.” Viewed from Washington, events in Syria were deeply worrying. Instability in the country spelled trouble for a number of wider US interests in the region: ARAMCO’s pipeline to the Mediterranean, TAPline, whose successful completion depended on the cooperation of the Syrian government; the security of Turkey, a crucial US ally on the southern rim of the Soviet empire; the Arab-Israeli conflict, whose peaceful settlement required Syrian willingness to come to the negotiating table; and the containment of communism, an ideology that thrived on conditions of political unrest. More generally, as the first of the Arab countries to truly escape from under European colonial control, Syria could be seen as a test case for what might happen elsewhere in the Middle East in the postcolonial era. A secret policy statement of January 1949 summed up what was at stake: “Owing to Syria’s strategic location, economic potentialities and importance as a center of Arab political and cultural activity, it is essential to our general policy of maintaining and strengthening the regional stability and well-being of the Near East that Syria . . . be a democratic, cooperative and internally stable member of the world community.”
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How, though, to accomplish this in practice? As with much else that was to follow in US Middle East policy over the next few years, a clue was provided in Kim Roosevelt’s
Arabs, Oil, and History
. To judge by the contents of the final chapter, which explicitly revise some of the arguments made earlier in the book, Kim must have tacked on “A Footnote to Americans” at the last moment before publication, possibly at the same time he wrote the dedication, in February 1949. In it, Kim added an important qualification to his thesis that the United States’ main aim in the Middle East should be to promote moderate, Western-educated nationalists using democratic methods. American democracy was, he now pointed out, the product of a specific set of historical conditions that were not necessarily present in the modern Arab world, while the position of the Young Effendis had been severely compromised by recent events. In these circumstances, such universal human values as “dignity, decency, and individual liberty” might stand a better chance of being defended by a form of government other than “a self-styled ‘democracy,’” even if that meant the United States supporting autocracies. “To favor democracy and oppose imperialism,” Kim concluded, ominously, “cannot . . . entirely do away with the hard fact that empires have existed and, though abbreviated, still do exist.”
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It is not clear whether Kim specifically had the situation in Syria in mind when he wrote these words, but they were oddly prescient of what was about to take place in that country.

NOT LONG AFTER MILES COPELAND’S
arrival in Syria, another American—a tough-looking, muscular, “James Bond kind of character” (as one of Miles’s sons remembered him)—appeared in Damascus. Major Stephen J. Meade had served in the elite First US Army Ranger Battalion, the legendary “Darby’s Rangers,” during World War II, taking part in the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. According to Miles, he had also worked for the OSS, undertaking escape and evasion operations in Iran while disguised as a Kurdish tribesman and accompanying Archie Roosevelt on a mission to rescue some American missionaries who had been kidnapped by a fleeing SS platoon. Whether or not these last claims are true, it is clear that Meade was a highly coveted covert operative, lent out by the army to the CIA whenever the need was felt for his peculiar combination of physical strength, language skills,
and (to quote Miles’s
The Game Player)
“earthy charm.” After Meade was posted to Beirut as assistant military attaché, Miles was instructed to stay away from him—evidently Mike Mitchell feared that if these alpha males ever got together, “it would somehow be a case of one and one adding up to more than two,” as Miles put it. But their paths kept crossing until, at a Beirut legation function, they agreed to “stop the charade.” “We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Meade told Miles, “so who cares what the bureaucrats think?” Shortly afterward, the American minister Jim Keeley requested Meade’s transfer to Damascus.
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As a military attaché, Meade had unique access to the higher echelons of the Syrian army, including a clique of discontented officers gathered around the chief of staff, a fifty-year-old Kurdish colonel called Husni al-Za‘im. Even allowing for Orientalist prejudice in Western descriptions of him, Za‘im appears not to have been a prepossessing figure. Heavyset and florid, he was vain, bombastic, and utterly unscrupulous. Nonetheless, to dismiss him as a buffoon lacking “the competence of a French corporal,” as one US official did, was a mistake. For, as Steve Meade was about to discover, Za‘im possessed not only a well-laid plan for obtaining political power in Syria—hardly surprising given that, according to the British military attaché, he had been toying with the idea of a coup since March 1947—but also a clear vision of how he would use that power once he had it, including proposals for far-reaching political, social, and economic reform.
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Meeting with Za‘im for the first time on November 30, 1948, Meade was immediately struck (as he informed Washington) by how well the Kurdish colonel’s “strongman characteristics” would lend themselves to an “army-supported dictatorship.” In subsequent interviews, the two men skirted around this possibility, but by early March 1949, the Syrian, possibly persuaded by the assurances of their mutual friend, the head of the Lebanese secret service, or Sûreté, had decided to take the American into his confidence. Summoned to his side on March 3 and then again on March 7, Meade heard Za‘im predict that “widespread internal disturbances” would take place over the remainder of the month, causing “the fall of the incumbent government” and “leaving the military establishment in control of the country.” After the army takeover, Za‘im continued, the country’s communists and “‘weak’ politicians” would be rounded up and placed in “desert concentration camps.” Meanwhile, with Za‘im effectively in charge as defense minister, the new government
would embark on a three-to five-year period of reform, including “the breakdown of feudal power with re-distribution of lands,” and modernization of the country’s political, judicial, and social welfare institutions. With Syrians thus “properly educated and disciplined,” there would, Za‘im assured Meade, be “a gradual lessening of regimentation of the population” over the next decade. In the meantime, however, there was “only one way to start the Syrian people along the road to progress and democracy,” the would-be dictator exclaimed, hitting the desk with his riding crop, and that was “with the whip.”
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The US minister, Jim Keeley, deplored talk of a military dictatorship: the notion of illegal regime change offended him morally, and, as an Arabist, he believed in the fundamentally democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. But he also feared that Syria was on the verge of complete collapse, and he was therefore prepared to go along with Za‘im’s plan as a way of safeguarding what he thought were the long-term prospects of democracy in the country. Such, anyway, is the claim advanced in Miles Copeland’s 1969 book,
The Game of Nations
, which goes on to recount how, acting on explicit orders from Keeley, a “‘political action team’” headed by Meade “systematically developed a friendship with Za‘im, . . . suggested to him the idea of a
coup d’etat
, advised him how to go about it, and guided him through the intricate preparations in laying the groundwork for it.” Miles’s later autobiography,
The Game Player
, fleshed out this statement with more detailed descriptions of how Meade rode around Damascus in Za‘im’s limousine pointing out facilities to be seized in the hypothetical event of a coup and of how Miles himself used his agents in the Ministry of Defense to obtain “certain information” that Za‘im himself could not request “without exciting suspicion.” Miles also claimed to have met periodically with one of Za‘im’s co-conspirators, Adib al-Shishakli, a tank commander with a reputation as an amoral political operator (the two men were together one night when Lorraine Copeland, heavily pregnant with her third child, Ian, fell ill with eclampsia, and Shishakli helped save her life by rushing her to the hospital). The total effect of these passages was, as Miles presumably intended, to create the impression that Za‘im’s coup plan was a CIA operation from start to finish.
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Predictably, this version of events has proven highly controversial, with several critics suggesting that Miles greatly exaggerated his own contribution to Za‘im’s coup planning. Certainly, there is an even stronger
literary quality to Miles’s account of events in Syria than usual, with the reader sensing that, as events in the life of a CIA officer go, coups lend themselves particularly well to subsequent storytelling. “As I review my varied past in search of materials suitable for bedtime stories to tell my grandchildren, I find myself dwelling inordinately on
coups d’etat,”
Miles himself admitted later in
The Game Player
. It also has to be said that Miles did not exactly help his own cause when, for no apparent reason, he suddenly backtracked in one passage of
The Game Player
, flatly contradicting his earlier account in
The Game of Nations
by stating that, in fact, “it was Husni’s show all the way.”
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Still, for all the doubts about Miles’s veracity, there is some historical evidence, besides his testimony, of covert US plotting in Syria. For example, a young political officer in the US legation, Deane R. Hinton, later went on record stating that Copeland and Meade had indeed conspired with Za‘im. (Hinton, who like many foreign service officers disapproved of the CIA’s activities, went on to state that Miles considered himself “a bigger bigshot than the Minister” and that “hyperbole was his middle name.”) Some Syrian sources also alluded to clandestine American meddling: the foreign minister in the Quwatli government, for one, suspected the “American military attaché” of nefarious activities.
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Surprisingly, it is the most implausible-sounding story in
The Game Player
that turns out to be the best supported in terms of other evidence. Trying to come up with ways of embarrassing the Quwatli government, Copeland and Meade (so Miles wrote later) hit on the idea of staging an incident at the former’s home intended to suggest that foreign representatives in Syria had no protection from the country’s authorities. The plan was to spread rumors that Miles kept secret documents in his house, luring Syrian intelligence officers into raiding it when it appeared to be unoccupied. Miles, Meade, and some American accomplices would then emerge from hiding places and apprehend the housebreakers. Preparations for the sting proceeded smoothly, with Lorraine Copeland and the children packed off to Lebanon and the villa booby-trapped with klieg lights and teargas canisters. Things started to go wrong after a larger-than-expected team of government goons arrived toting guns and opened fire when called on to surrender. The Americans returned fire and a twenty-minute gun battle ensued, only ending when the raiders fled by car, leaving the house’s occupants unscathed. While Husni Za‘im was delighted that the incident was even more spectacular
than originally planned, Miles’s boss in Washington, Mike Mitchell, was characteristically unimpressed, sternly demanding a detailed report of the whole incident.
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Although this all sounds like another Copeland yarn, it has some support from an unexpected quarter: a
New York Times
story, dated March 10, 1949, describing “four muffled gunmen” firing on the home of one Miles A. Copeland Jr., “attaché in the United States Legation” and “crack shot,” who fired back with his pistol. Indeed, the explanation offered in
The Game Player
is rather more convincing than the one offered at the time by legation officials, who, according to the
Times
, stone-facedly insisted that “the attack had no political motive.” There is, in addition, a substantial body of Copeland family lore about the shoot-out, not all of it concocted by Miles himself. For example, Miles III vividly remembers himself as a five-year-old being whisked away from Damascus to a hotel in the mountains, where he had to eat poached eggs, which he hated, and returning to find his home pockmarked with bullet holes. A contemporary document, a legation report of March 18, 1949, also offers a hint of corroboration, referring to Za‘im’s interest in having US agents “provoke and abet internal disturbance which [is] essential for [a] coup d’état.”
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