America's Great Game (35 page)

With his new global role as the CIA’s assistant deputy director of plans, Kim did not take part personally in the ALPHA negotiations, which in any case were at this stage the responsibility of State Department and Foreign Office diplomats. Nonetheless, his standing in Washington was so high that he retained his reputation as the CIA’s “Mr. Middle East” and would still be summoned at a moment’s notice by both Dulles brothers to proffer his advice or undertake some special mission to the Arab world. Later in the year, when ALPHA ran into serious difficulties, Kim would be dispatched to Egypt to reprise the role of covert envoy he had already performed to such good effect in helping to solve the Anglo-Egyptian dispute. Prior to that, his most important contribution to the peace plan came in the United States itself, as the state-private network he had helped create after World War II rallied once again to fight American Zionism and buy the Eisenhower administration some crucial time ahead of the 1956 election.
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FOR THE ANTI-ZIONIST JEWS AROUND
the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) and the Arabist Protestants of the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), the two years since Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House had been good ones, at least when compared with the accumulated disappointments of the Truman era. The change in the Washington air had first been noticed by the ACJ. In April 1953, Council president Lessing Rosenwald and Kim Roosevelt’s old friend George Levison visited the White House to meet with the new president and leave a memorandum for his secretary of state explaining the organization’s principles,
including the all-important distinction between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political movement. The meeting was a great success. Eisenhower “was extremely attentive and gave . . . the impression that what he heard was in general agreement with his views,” a delighted Levison reported to ACJ executive director Elmer Berger. Even better was to follow. Word reached Berger and his confreres that Secretary Dulles had taken their memorandum with him on his May 1953 tour of the Middle East. The famous speech that he gave after his return on June 1 announcing a more even-handed American policy in the region contained passages that bore a striking resemblance to statements of the ACJ—for example, a sentence calling on Israel to become “a part of the Near East community and cease to look upon itself . . . as alien to this community.” (Shortly afterward, AFME, having apparently lost some of its earlier reticence about tangling with Zionists, gave this phrase a provocative reformulation, with Vice President Garland Evans Hopkins stating that “Israel is in the Middle East and of the Middle East, and must eventually conform to the pattern, or it has no other alternative but to cease to exist.”)
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As the Eisenhower administration made clear its abandonment of Truman’s policy of preferential treatment for Israel, the ACJ consolidated its links to government, both overt and covert. An important figure in this process was Henry Byroade, the man Kim Roosevelt had tried to dislodge as assistant secretary for Near East affairs. A brilliant and handsome young military officer whose previous foreign service experience lay mainly in the Far East and Germany, Byroade had a different background from most of the State Department Arabists, but he soon proved a surprisingly enthusiastic ally of the Jewish anti-Zionists. Elmer Berger, again displaying his gift for cultivating Washington insiders, developed an especially close relationship with him, the two men addressing each other affectionately as “Hank” and the “mad rabbi.” Under Berger, the ACJ worked to help Byroade win domestic support for the new Middle East policy, promoting it “to Jews particularly and to Americans generally”; in return, the Council enjoyed special access to the State Department, including privileged information about American Zionist organizations suspected of acting illegally as publicity fronts for the Israeli government. Berger once joked to Levison that he was becoming a “kind of a Jewish FBI.”
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Meanwhile, Berger kept up his close contacts with “Kim’s outfit,” as he coyly referred to the CIA. Although Kim himself was increasingly
preoccupied by other matters—“He’s almost as frenzied as you and I,” Berger told Levison in May 1953, shortly before the Mosaddeq operation in Iran—he still found time to see Berger during the latter’s frequent sallies to Washington. Berger was also a frequent dinner and overnight guest at the Roosevelt family’s home in Wesley Heights. Correspondence in the American Council for Judaism’s records makes clear that these contacts included discussion of possible CIA support for ACJ projects that were separate from the AFME operation, although the details were kept vague. The most conspicuous public expression of this burgeoning state-private alliance came in May 1954, when Henry Byroade addressed the ACJ’s annual conference in Philadelphia, urging Israelis to “drop the attitude of the conqueror” and repeating the now familiar refrain that Israel should reconcile itself to being “a Middle Eastern state.” The speech, which had been drafted with the help of veteran State Department Arabist Edwin Wright and delivered with the blessing of Foster Dulles, was an unprecedented gesture of official approval for the ACJ’s anti-Zionist platform.
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Also clearly benefiting from the new dispensation in Washington were the American Friends of the Middle East. Garland Hopkins enjoyed several audiences with Secretary Dulles and Assistant Secretary Byroade, using them as opportunities to press the organization’s pro-Arab and anti-Zionist agenda; AFME returned the favor by rallying around the Eisenhower administration on such occasions as the 1954 congressional elections, urging candidates to ignore Zionist calls on them to repudiate current US Middle East policy. This relationship was personified by another relative newcomer to the organized anti-Zionist struggle, Edward L. R. Elson. Raised by devout Presbyterian parents in Pennsylvania and ordained by the Presbytery of Los Angeles, Elson had served as an army chaplain during and after World War II, drawing the attention of General Eisenhower for his postwar work in Germany. After returning to the United States, he was named pastor of what later became the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, in which role he baptized the new president in 1953 (despite his religiosity, Ike had never formally joined a church). President Eisenhower henceforth attended Elson’s services regularly, along with that most conscientious of Presbyterians, Secretary of State Dulles.
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Reverend Elson joined AFME’s board of directors in 1954, having earlier toured the Middle East as holder of the organization’s first annual lectureship, speaking on the themes of “The Spiritual Significance of the
World Crisis” and “Resources for Dynamic Democracy.” His interest in the region, he later explained, had grown out of reading the Bible in his childhood and touring the Arabian peninsula as a young man. These experiences left him with a profound admiration for the Arab world and, evidently, a strong antipathy toward “political Zionism,” attitudes he was not shy about sharing with his politically powerful congregation. His sermons, famed for their skillful delivery and mixing of Calvinism with ardent patriotism, often alluded to the Middle East. He also wrote frequently to both the president and the secretary of state, offering spiritual and practical guidance about their handling of the region, urging the former to resist pressure from “a minority segment” of the American population to pander to Israel, and the latter to visit Cairo personally so that he could renew his acquaintance with Nasser. (Elson himself did just this in 1957, again with AFME sponsorship, coming away from a meeting with the Egyptian premier full of praise for his thoughtfulness and sincerity.) The Presbyterian pastor made a particular point of boosting AFME in his correspondence with Eisenhower, describing it as “the most effective instrument for promoting friendship on both sides.” In 1955 he even managed to work in a reference to the work of the American Council for Judaism during the Thanksgiving Day celebrations at the Eisenhower family home in Gettysburg.
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This is not to say that AFME and the ACJ were so preoccupied supporting Eisenhower’s Middle East policy that they forgot altogether about other aspects of their respective programs. The Council, for example, launched a successful religious education program in the early 1950s, founding ten schools dedicated to teaching the principles of classical Reform Judaism. As for AFME, something of the importance it still attached to its mission of promoting spiritual dialogue between Americans and Arabs can be inferred from the fact that CIA case officer Mather Eliot was assigned to lay the “administrative foundation” for the Christian-Muslim Convocation called by Garland Hopkins in Lebanon in 1954. Edward Elson proved an especially keen advocate of this dimension of AFME’s work. “The people of the Middle East will understand us if we communicate in spiritual terms,” he wrote his congregant, President Eisenhower. “It will help to acknowledge our indebtedness to the Middle East for contributing to the world the three great religions of Semitic origin.” (An early draft of this letter had referred specifically to “Arabs” rather than “people of the Middle East,” but Elson presumably
decided this risked the appearance of special pleading and deleted the reference.) Eisenhower’s response to his pastor’s “fine memorandum” was also telling. “I am greatly impressed by your belief as to the relations we should maintain with the Arabs, as people,” he wrote. The president’s words reflected the deep importance his administration attached to what it called “People-to-People” diplomacy: the cultivation of mutual understanding and sympathy between ordinary American citizens and their counterparts overseas, as well as his own personal belief in the capability of religious faith to defeat communist atheism. In other words, it was not just AFME’s anti-Zionism that struck a responsive chord in the Eisenhower White House; so too did the organization’s positive interest in American-Arab friendship and Christian-Muslim dialogue.
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Still, at this point in its existence, AFME’s primary focus was on the domestic front—in 1954 it reported that twenty-seven of its current projects were devoted mainly to “spreading information” about the Middle East in the United States, as compared with a mere four concerned with “interpreting” America to the Middle East—and this tendency only increased with the inauguration of Project ALPHA in the winter of 1955. It is clear from declassified State Department records that John Foster Dulles considered the management of domestic US opinion about the Arab-Israeli conflict an important adjunct of his peace plan. “The Secretary inquired how the group expected to keep Jewish leaders in this country quiet during this period of preparation,” read the minutes of a planning meeting of ALPHA’s Anglo-American team of negotiators in January 1955. “The Administration had succeeded in deflating Israel in order to make a reasonable settlement possible,” Dulles went on to explain. “As a result the Israeli position was now weaker than it ever had been, but by 1956 it was likely to gain new strength.” This last point about the impending presidential election, which Dulles repeated to the chief British representative, Evelyn Shuckburgh, later in the month, was partly intended to create tactical pressure on the Arabs to settle quickly. But it also reflected a real concern about the potential of American Zionists to derail ALPHA.
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Dulles was not alone in this concern. “Zionist influence in America is a force that cannot be ignored,” Kim Roosevelt and Henry Byroade told the Egyptian ambassador Ahmad Hussein during a four-hour meeting in Washington in December 1954. Egyptian Foreign Ministry
records show that Kim met frequently with Hussein during the year that followed, often expressing strong American support for the Nasser regime. (Nasser himself used to joke that Kim was so friendly to his government, and the US-educated ambassador Hussein so pro-American, that the two should swap jobs.) Edward Elson, identified only as the pastor of the church attended by the president and secretary of state, also featured in Hussein’s reports to Cairo, assuring the ambassador that Eisenhower would be liberated in his approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict by victory in the 1956 election. A document from another Egyptian source (the papers of Miles Copeland’s friend Hassan al-Tuhami), a “message from K to Big Brother” dated December 23, 1954, is even more revealing. In it, K (Kim Roosevelt, presumably) warns Big Brother (Nasser) that he, Nasser, is “in danger of walking into some well-laid Israeli traps, . . . with results which will handicap seriously the ability of [his] friends in the United States to counter Zionist pressure here.” The following summer, Tuhami reported to Nasser that he and “Jones” (Miles’s cover name in Cairo) had discussed “Egypt’s need for . . . organized propaganda in America aimed at the purpose of opposing Jewish propaganda.” Tuhami added that “they” (the CIA) “are completely ready to work with us in planning this program,” hoping that Nasser would return the favor by softening some of his more anti-Western pronouncements.
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“I myself have been deeply involved in a number of things in Washington which I hesitate to put on paper,” Elmer Berger wrote ACJ colleague Morris Lazaron in late December 1954. Although the documentary record is scant, it is possible, using scattered clues from a variety of sources, to assemble a detailed picture of the domestic campaign carried out by Kim Roosevelt’s state-private network in support of the Eisenhower peace plan. First, there was the AFME group’s support for Henry Byroade at a crucial stage of the ALPHA planning process. Prompted by an expectation that, as a young military man, Assistant Secretary Byroade would get on better with Nasser than the veteran diplomat Jefferson Caffery, Kim advised the White House to name him the new ambassador to Egypt, which it duly did in December. However, as Foster Dulles warned Eisenhower, there was bound to be resistance in Congress to the appointment because of Byroade’s reputation for friendliness with Arabists and anti-Zionist Jews, and an unrelated vendetta against him by a senator from his home state of Indiana. Shortly afterward, Edward Elson and Dorothy Thompson swung into action,
writing and meeting with the senator in question, William A. Jenner. In late January 1955, with his assignment to Egypt confirmed, a grateful Byroade wrote Thompson, “I hope you will continue . . . your good work with the American Friends of the Middle East . . . and,
inshallah
, that we meet in Cairo.”
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