America's Great Game (21 page)

It would be a few years yet before the CIA Arabists encountered a young army officer in Egypt who possessed the “sticking” power that Husni Za‘im had lacked. In the meantime, however, a precedent had been set. The Arabists had not given up their dream of creating an independent, modern, democratic Middle East allied with the United States, but they had shown themselves prepared to countenance military rule as a means to that end, thereby compromising the moralistic idealism of the previous generation of Arabists.

Part Three

Winning, 1949–1956

NINE

American Friends of the Middle East

SOME TIME IN 1949—THE
exact date is not publicly recorded—the head of the CIA’s Near East division, Mike Mitchell, attended a top-level, interagency meeting in Washington to discuss the staffing of a new Cold War covert unit, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). The OPC was not concerned with espionage, the clandestine gathering of foreign intelligence, which remained the business of the CIA. Rather its mission—as explained in its charter, National Security Council (NSC) directive 10/2, of June 1948—was “covert operations,” that is, “all activities” carried out against “hostile foreign states or groups” in such a way “that, if uncovered, the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” As in the run-up to the creation of the CIA the previous year, some officials had been loath to give organized form to covert operations, believing that they were un-American and an invitation to domestic tyranny. This view prevailed to the extent that NSC 10/2 decreed a bureaucratic separation of powers, with the Office of Policy Coordination housed within the CIA but obliged to seek policy guidance from the secretaries of state and defense. Otherwise,
though, the new outfit was pretty much unaccountable, with an extraordinary degree of operational latitude, reflecting the climate of Cold War crisis in which it was born (1948 was the year of the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the launch of the Berlin blockade). The State Department Sovietologists and ex-OSS Wall Street lawyers who had been pushing for ever greater secret government powers to wage the Cold War had triumphed; deception and subterfuge now had official sanction.
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“I think that Kermit Roosevelt, not Archie, would be better fitted for this role.” Thus spoke Mike Mitchell, when discussion turned to candidates for the job of Near East division chief in the new covert operations unit. According to the explanation that Mitchell offered to Archie at the time, his reason for making the recommendation was that he feared losing the valuable services of the younger Roosevelt cousin as his Beirut station chief. One wonders, though, whether Archie’s perhaps undeserved reputation for freewheeling might also have been an issue. “His attempts to accomplish the most and best in the shortest time have made him very productive but, on [a] few occasions, have left something more to be desired,” declared Mitchell in Archie’s 1949 CIA performance report. “He does not take criticism easily.”
²

In contrast with the sometimes excitable Archie, Kim had a reputation for cool handling of work situations and colleagues. Successive CIA personnel evaluations described him as “level-headed” and “astute in his dealings with people.” According to the British double agent Kim Philby, who was stationed in Washington between 1949 and 1951, his American namesake was “a courteous, soft-spoken Easterner with impeccable social connections, well-educated rather than intellectual, pleasant and unassuming as host and guest. . . . In fact, the last person you would expect to be up to the neck in dirty tricks.” Philby even claimed to have dubbed Kim Roosevelt “the quiet American” several years before his friend Graham Greene wrote a novel with that title. (Kim quoted these “surprisingly kind” comments in his memoir
Countercoup
, apparently missing the irony in Philby’s description: “the quiet American” of Greene’s novel is a well-meaning but naïve idealist whose actions prove disastrous.)
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Also in Kim’s favor were the “impeccable social connections” noted by Philby. Not only was he closely associated with the new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, but there were also his old family ties with leading
figures in the intelligence community, including the influential Allen Dulles, who had known him since he was a boy and who happened to take a particular interest in Middle Eastern affairs. Thanks to his wartime posting in Cairo, Kim also knew the man named to run the Office of Policy Coordination, Frank Wisner, the adventurous Southerner who had taken over the management of OSS Balkan operations from Stephen Penrose. This is not to mention the strong sway that Belle Roosevelt still held in Washington society. Archie Roosevelt shared some of these connections, but lacking Kim’s appetite for the Washington power game and removed from the scene for long periods by his overseas postings, he was nowhere near as well networked as his cousin.
⁴

Whatever the decisive factor, the selection of Kim over Archie Roosevelt to head up US covert operations in the Middle East was another turning point in the lives of the cousins. Archie was devastated by Kim’s nomination, which he regarded as “an unfair, unprincipled act” on Mitchell’s part. “It seemed like a fatal blow to my hopes for a future as the mastermind of U.S. intelligence in the Middle East, the role I then felt sure I was destined to fulfill,” he wrote later. Kim, in contrast, was quietly delighted. For a government post, his new salary of $10,000 was quite decent, and very welcome after two years of freelancing (at GS-15, Kim was two points above Archie on the government pay scale, despite the latter’s longer CIA service). The vaguely defined powers of the OPC held out the possibility of translating the Arabist manifesto outlined in
Arabs, Oil, and History
into practice without having to answer to Zionist supporters in Congress. (It helped here that Kim could count on the support of Secretary of State Acheson, who happened to share his belief in economic and social development as an instrument of foreign policy, as did Acheson’s pick for assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, the oilman George C. McGhee.) Last, but by no means least, the role offered Kim the chance to indulge his penchant for Kipling-esque adventure in a classic spy landscape. Miles Copeland’s later statement that Kim “joined the CIA frankly for reasons of adventure” was an exaggeration—but it did have some truth to it.
⁵

Hence it was that on November 10, 1949, Kim Roosevelt reported to OPC headquarters on the Washington Mall to take up his duties as deputy chief of the Near East and Africa Division (NEA). The years that followed would constitute a defining period in modern US–Middle Eastern relations, as Kim first worked secretly to support the Arab world’s
leading nationalist—the Egyptian Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser—and then personally led a covert operation to topple the region’s other most prominent nationalist leader, Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq. Nor was Kim’s influence confined to the Middle East. At home, in America itself, the CIA would be increasingly drawn into the domestic debate about US policy toward Israel, as Kim used his new position to provide covert US government support for a group of apparently private American Arabists and anti-Zionists.
⁶

KIM ROOSEVELT’S FIRST VENTURE IN
anti-Zionist organizing, the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP), had fizzled out from a combination of its “straitened financial condition . . . and the curious reluctance of the press to report our activities,” as Kim explained to members. Another organization featuring much the same personnel, the Holyland Emergency Liaison Program, was launched in September 1949 with the twin aims of coordinating relief efforts for Palestinian refugees and publicizing the Arab cause to Americans, but it too failed to generate public support. Kim’s attempts to organize the forces of American Arabism and anti-Zionism were, it appeared, doomed to an endless cycle of initial optimism and eventual disappointment.
⁷

By 1950, though, the Arabist camp enjoyed two advantages it had not possessed before. One was the backing of a genuine American celebrity, the journalist Dorothy Thompson. Described in 1939 by
Time
magazine as the most influential American woman after Eleanor Roosevelt, Thompson wrote a thrice-weekly column, “On the Record,” that was syndicated to two hundred American newspapers, and during the late 1930s she appeared nightly as a news commentator on NBC radio. Patrician-accented and formidable in appearance, Thompson had some of the instincts of a literary bohemian—she had once been married to novelist Sinclair Lewis—and was drawn to political controversy. She was reputed to have inspired the character of the foreign correspondent Tess Harding, an archetypal role for actress Katherine Hepburn in the 1942 movie
Woman of the Year
. Most of all, Thompson was famous for having been tossed out of Germany in 1934, the first American journalist to be so treated by the Nazis, after having personally criticized Adolf Hitler. She subsequently became a prominent campaigner in the United States on behalf of the victims of the Third Reich, a position she combined with vocal support for Zionism.
⁸

It was a surprise, therefore, when in the late 1940s Thompson began voicing objections to various aspects of Zionist behavior, both in Palestine and in the United States: acts of terrorism against the British, harsh treatment of Palestinian Arabs, and the growth of nationalist feeling among American Jews, which she perceived as a form of divided loyalty. In response, she was attacked in Zionist media, and pressure was brought on some of the newspapers that carried her column to drop it. Thanks to a mixture of intellectual conviction, ruffled personal dignity, and sheer cussedness, this treatment only stiffened Thompson’s resolve, and she began to cast around for possible comrades in her new cause. Catching word of this interesting development, the ever-resourceful anti-Zionist activist Rabbi Elmer Berger wrote her in January 1949, offering her the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) as a platform to express her misgivings about Zionism to the American Jewish community, and apprising his friend Kim Roosevelt of this valuable new contact. Later in the year, in November, she spoke to the ACJ’s Philadelphia chapter, another shot across Zionist bows. Meanwhile, officers of the Holyland Emergency Liaison Program attempted to rope her into their activities, and the following year William Eddy started regularly writing her from the Middle East. By the summer of 1950, Dorothy Thompson was a card-carrying member of Kim Roosevelt’s anti-Zionist network and a potential organizational figurehead in the tradition of the CJP chair Virginia Gildersleeve, only much better known.
⁹

The other advantage enjoyed by American anti-Zionists in 1950 was even more important than the involvement of Thompson but less apparent to the outside observer—indeed, deliberately hidden from public view: the covert financial support of the CIA. Two years earlier, the Office of Policy Coordination had begun making secret payments to US labor leaders involved in overseas efforts to counter communist “front” activities in the international labor movement. By 1950, the list of those receiving clandestine subsidies from the CIA had grown to include several other citizens’ groups on the American Non-Communist Left, among them students and intellectuals, and the OPC was experimenting with various forms of funding pass-through to disguise its grants, including fake charitable foundations. Maintaining secrecy across this sprawling, tentacular operation was not easy for the intelligence officers involved, but they were helped by the anticommunist consensus that prevailed in early Cold War America and by the social deference they could generally count on others to show them on account of their elite backgrounds.
It would not be until 1967, with the anticommunist consensus badly undermined by the Vietnam War and the social power of old East Coast elites eroded by the cultural upheavals of the sixties, that the CIA’s cover would be blown by the radical West Coast magazine
Ramparts
.
¹⁰

Although the relevant official records remain closed to researchers, it is possible to assemble a quite detailed picture of CIA front operations from clues contained in papers left by the private citizens who participated in them. The first hint that Kim Roosevelt was thinking of using the front tactic to promote the causes of Arabism and anti-Zionism dates from June 1950, when his correspondence with Elmer Berger started to feature veiled references to the possibility of Berger taking on some official work in Washington. Later in the year, in December, with Berger still waiting for “clearance,” the OSS Arabist Bill Eddy wrote Cornelius Van H. Engert, a retired foreign service officer and former US ambassador to Afghanistan, informing him of a plan to create “a small group . . . to promote fellowship and interest in the Near East.” Engert responded enthusiastically, noting the possible interest in this suggestion of an old friend of his, Allen Dulles, who was in the process of joining the CIA as deputy director. In January 1951, around the same time that Dorothy Thompson was returning from a two-month tour of the Middle East (an idea originally suggested, according to one of Thompson’s biographers, by Arabist acquaintances in the State Department), Berger was cleared to begin part-time consultancy duties with the CIA, which he carried out while continuing to work full-time for the American Council for Judaism.
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