America's Great Game (36 page)

As this was a battle for American public opinion, print media were a primary target of the AFME and ACJ activists. In addition to putting out their own newsletter and pamphlets, they worked hard to find publishers for books that would promote the Arabist, anti-Zionist cause to a wider audience. One such was
Violent Truce
, an exposé of Israeli violations of the 1949 UN armistice lines by navy commander Elmo Hutchison, the disgruntled former chair of the Israel/Jordan Mixed Armistice Commission. In New York, Elmer Berger pushed Hutchison’s book with Devin-Adair, the publisher of his own
Partisan History of Judaism
; from Lebanon, Bill Eddy wrote Devin-Adair on “Hutch’s” behalf and petitioned his ARAMCO colleague James Terry Duce for a grant to support the first printing; in Washington, Garland Hopkins heralded the book’s appearance in AFME’s fifth annual report.
Violent Truce
was eventually published in 1956, albeit to a muted public response.
¹⁴

The AFME network’s most remarkable publication of the period, at least from the point of view of Project ALPHA, came courtesy of Public Affairs Press in March 1955, when Dorothy Thompson contributed an introduction to the first English-language edition of Gamal Nasser’s
Egypt’s Liberation
. This work, a brief, autobiographical statement of Nasser’s brand of revolutionary nationalism, later developed a reputation in some Western circles as a sort of blueprint for Third World demagoguery. For Thompson, however, the Nasser revealed in
Egypt’s Liberation
utterly lacked “personal egotism and power-lust”; his most remarkable characteristics were rather “painful, humble, self-searching and self-analysis. . . . So far this man remains pure,” she concluded, lyrically. “Pure, faithful, and brave.”
¹⁵

Nasser’s reputation in the United States was clearly a major concern of the AFME circle, and as such it became a bone of contention between the group and the
New York Times
. The organization had long claimed that the newspaper failed to give its activities sufficient coverage, implying that this was due to its nervousness about the feelings of pro-Israel readers. To this complaint was now added another: that the
Times
’ consistently anti-Nasser editorial statements conflicted with the more balanced reportage of the paper’s own correspondent in Cairo, Kennett
Love. In his memoirs, Elmer Berger described with relish the visible embarrassment of the haughty
Times
managing editor Turner Catledge when confronted with this contradiction by the inexorable Dorothy Thompson. Unfortunately, there was no discernible improvement in the
Times
’ editorial-page treatment of Nasser.
¹⁶

For a more flattering portrayal of the Egyptian prime minister, Thompson and Berger had to turn instead to
Time
magazine. Henry Luce and C. D. Jackson had already intimated their support for AFME’s agenda, the latter in conversation with Kim Roosevelt, the former by gracing the platform of the organization’s first annual conference in 1953. This perhaps reflected both men’s close identification with the Eisenhower administration; one also wonders whether Luce, the China-born son of a Presbyterian missionary, did not recognize some kindred spirits in the AFME Arabists.
Time
was as positive about Nasser as the
New York Times
was negative, granting the Egyptian leader the signal honor of a cover story in September 1955. “Egypt: The Revolutionary” presented a stark contrast to the Orientalist portrayal of the “dizzy old wizard” Mosaddeq that had appeared in
Time’s
pages a few years earlier. Nasser, a “dedicated soldier of only 37,” was portrayed as a kind of idealized Western man in Arab guise: cool-headed, self-controlled, tough, “with the lithe grace of a big, handsome All-America fullback.” The accompanying cover portrait, which depicted the Egyptian prime minister in a crisp officer’s uniform against a background of pyramid-style wall murals, managed to associate him simultaneously with Egypt’s glorious ancient past and its current promise of modernity and democracy. Having so emphatically declared its support for Nasser, two months later, in November 1955,
Time
nailed its anti-Zionist colors to the mast by reprinting an editorial from the anti-Zionist
Jewish Newsletter
, a publication also boosted by AFME and the ACJ. Current attitudes toward Israel among American Jews, so this piece alleged, were characterized by a “brand of hysteria” that had been “manufactured by Zionist leaders” as part of “a propaganda campaign in behalf of a foreign government.”
¹⁷

As usual, it was Elmer Berger who provided the single most imaginative contribution to the state-private drive behind the ALPHA peace plan. The anti-Zionist rabbi had long wanted to travel in the Arab countries but had never been able to obtain the necessary visas. In the spring of 1955, following contacts with State Department officials and, reportedly, Kim Roosevelt, he was able to cut through the red tape and, in May, launch himself and his wife, Ruth, on a two-month, AFME-sponsored
tour of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. Predictably, the Bergers encountered their share of problems, including skepticism from some Arabs about the sincerity of their anti-Zionism and, as Ruth wrote home, “all possible annoyances and bad behavior” in Israel. Nonetheless, with the help of local AFME representatives and supporters such as Mather Eliot and Bill Eddy, they managed to win over some Arab audiences and even establish friendships with individual Arabs they met, including senior figures in the Egyptian government (although not Nasser himself). Indeed, US government officials monitoring their performance reckoned they had done a surprisingly effective job of informing Arabs about the existence of non-Zionist American Judaism and the Eisenhower administration’s policy of friendly impartiality. Nor did their efforts end on their return home. Elmer, more persuaded than ever that US support for Israel actually worked against the interests of American Jews and the Israelis themselves, collected copies of the letters he had written his ACJ colleagues during the tour and published them for a domestic audience as a sort of polemical travelogue,
Who Knows Better Must Say So!
¹⁸

Although the activities of the ACJ and AFME in 1955 are strongly suggestive of a coordinated, directed campaign, there is no actual evidence of the CIA explicitly ordering the two organizations to mobilize in support of ALPHA—no “smoking gun,” as it were. In an important sense, though, this does not matter, as the relationship between the US government and these Jewish anti-Zionists and Arabist Protestants was not (at least at this stage) one of simple, one-way control. It was indicative that, after returning from his tour of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Elmer Berger used debriefing sessions with Allen Dulles and officers of the State Department’s Near East division not to ask what he could do next for the government, but rather to “spell out . . . the detrimental effects on American interests of the . . . Zionist apparatus” and urge officials to show the Arab world that US foreign policy was “not inevitably subject to Zionist pressure.” Like other citizen groups with strong links to the CIA in the early Cold War period—for example, the American Friends of Vietnam, an organization created in 1955 to stimulate US support for the anticommunist regime in South Vietnam—the AFME-ACJ network was both a government front and a lobby group with an agenda of its own. Berger and his friends did not see Kim Roosevelt as their boss; rather, he was a partner working in a common cause.
¹⁹

THE EFFORTS OF THE ARABISTS
and anti-Zionists to bolster the Eisenhower administration’s Middle East policy at home did not meet without resistance. After giving his speech before the ACJ—an organization reputedly known in Israel as “a traitor within the family”—Henry Byroade was told by the president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann, that he would never hold a good job again. With Byroade replacing Loy Henderson as the Zionists’ most hated figure in the State Department, a new coinage, “Byroadism,” meaning a toxic mix of anti-Semitism and Arabphilia, gained circulation. Private citizens in the AFME circle did not fare any better. Dorothy Thompson was a frequent target of Zionist denunciation, perhaps not surprising given her celebrity, sensitivity to personal criticism, and habit of making statements that flirted with anti-Semitism—although insinuations that her husband, the émigré Austrian artist Max Kopf, was a Nazi sympathizer were patently unfair. Edward Elson, too, came under attack, especially after a letter he wrote to a Zionist critic, drawing an inflammatory comparison between “Political Zionism” and the Nazi German-American Bund as movements that were “out of place in American life,” fell into the hands of Zionist newspapers and the columnist Drew Pearson. When this incident was followed shortly after by another ill-advised move on Elson’s part—an invitation to the State Department Arabist Edwin Wright to speak at the National Presbyterian Church—the extent of the pastor’s influence on the Eisenhower White House became “one of the unanswered questions in Washington,” or at least Zionist publicists made sure that it did.
²⁰

Clearly, some of this Zionist counteroffensive against the AFME-ACJ network was being coordinated from Israel. As soon as Eisenhower was elected in November 1952, David Ben-Gurion, the great Zionist leader and first Israeli prime minister, acknowledged the need to step up publicity or
hasbara
work in the United States. “Until now there was only one conduit to the White House—the Israeli; from now on, there will be an Arab one as well,” he wrote privately. “Eisenhower adores his young brother Milton who is close to the pro-Arab group of Dorothy Thompson. Efforts must be made to influence Milton in our direction.” Such activities appeared to intensify in late 1954, at the same time that American officials were beginning to formulate the ALPHA plan for Arab-Israeli peace, with
hasbara
officials at the Israeli embassies in Washington and New York confirming their twin desires “to try to reach the public directly, over as broad a front as possible,” and “influence the
’molders of public opinion’ in important specific spheres.” The same year saw the beginnings of a process of reorganization among Zionist groups in the United States that included the founding by I. L. “Si” Kenen of the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, subsequently renamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Launched a few years later, Kenen’s
Near East Report
, “A Washington Letter on American Policy in the Near East,” routinely criticized AFME and its various Arabist and anti-Zionist associates in a special column, “Propaganda Pressures.” Indeed, so clearly were the lines of ideological battle drawn that it is tempting to see the confrontation between the AFME-ACJ network and Zionist organizations such as AIPAC as part of a covert war between the Israeli and US governments for control of American public opinion concerning the Middle East.
²¹

The hostile response of American Zionists to the AFME-ACJ network’s domestic campaign in support of ALPHA was predictable. More concerning was evidence of a new determination on the part of the Israelis themselves to resist the Anglo-American peace plan. Already casting a shadow over the initiative was the so-called Lavon affair of summer 1954, an Israeli plot to have Egyptian-born Jewish agents provocateurs attack Western targets in Egypt with the intention of wrecking the Anglo-Egyptian settlement and any consequent UK-US efforts to impose an Arab-Israeli peace. The conspirators were apprehended and the resulting Egyptian trials carried on into January 1955, embarrassing the government of Ben-Gurion’s successor as prime minister, the relatively moderate Zionist Moshe Sharett. However, Israelis still fretted about the dangers of a settlement negotiated by the Americans and the British, especially the dreaded prospect of having to give up territory in the Negev so that Egypt could have a common land border with its Arab neighbor, Jordan. This was the backdrop to the return to power in February 1955 of David Ben-Gurion and the Gaza raid of February 28, when Israeli forces led by Ariel Sharon attacked the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, destroying its military headquarters and killing some forty soldiers. Although ostensibly carried out in reprisal for earlier raids on Israel by Egyptian fedayeen, the Gaza raid was perceived by some observers as a calculated attempt to antagonize Nasser and strangle the Anglo-American peace plan in its cradle.

Israel was not the only party to the proposed settlement behaving problematically. A few days before the Gaza raid, on February 25, 1955,
Iraq had signed a security treaty with Turkey, the so-called Baghdad Pact. As well as being a clear play for regional leadership by the veteran Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Sa‘id, the pact was a thinly veiled move by the British to restore their position in the Middle East through their Hashemite proxies in Baghdad and Amman. John Foster Dulles resisted British pressure to join the new security league but otherwise did little to indicate American disapproval, as the pact basically fit with his developing strategic vision of a “Northern Tier,” a chain of Western-aligned states girding the southern borders of the Eurasian communist heartland. Nasser, in contrast, was appalled by the spectacle of the quisling Hashemites consorting with the Arabs’ ancient Ottoman foe; he turned to Syria and Saudi Arabia in an effort to create a countervailing power bloc, thus joining an internal struggle for dominance in the Arab world that historians would later refer to as the “Arab Cold War.”
²²

Obviously, none of this was good news for ALPHA, premised as it was on the idea of Nasser commanding unified Arab support for a probably unpopular settlement with Israel. This consideration seems not to have bothered the British, who had never much cared for the upstart Egyptian leader. Indeed, a gang of backbench Conservative members of Parliament known as the Suez Group was already calling on Anthony Eden, who succeeded Winston Churchill as prime minister in April 1955, to “bash the Wog,” as the racist language of the day had it. Long overshadowed by Churchill, Eden was extremely sensitive to charges that he was “scuttling” the empire, and keen to assert his political manhood in the Middle East. The new British leader was already set on a collision course with Nasser.