America's Great Game (42 page)

After a briefing session with Dan Debardeleben, Eveland and Eichelberger carried on by Tube to St. James’s Park station and then walked
the short distance to MI6 headquarters at 54 Broadway Buildings. There they were greeted by two surprises. One was the cramped, dreary condition of the glamorous spy agency’s accommodations. Riding an ancient, rickety elevator to the top floor, the two Americans emerged into a gloomy conference room whose walls showed clear signs of rain damage. Seated around a table were six MI6 officers all attired in identical crumpled, stained suits that made them look less like aristocratic Oxbridge graduates than humble office clerks. “There wasn’t a James Bond in the bunch,” recalled Eveland later, sounding disappointed.
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The other surprise for the Americans was the acrimonious nature of their reception. Setting the tone was MI6 deputy director George Kennedy Young, a large, looming Scot with a reputation for brash Cold War activism. In a torrent of recrimination recalled later by Eveland, Young accused the absent Kim Roosevelt of “boasting about returning the shah of Iran to power,” creating “a monster in Nasser,” and passing on intelligence about Egypt that was “pure rubbish.” As Eveland and Eichelberger listened with mounting dismay, Young then proceeded to outline a three-stage plan for preventing the further spread of Nasserite neutralism and communism in the Middle East. The first phase, so urgent that the United Kingdom was prepared to undertake it alone within the month, was a “complete change of government of Syria.” Although Young deliberately concealed operational details of the projected coup, it was clear that Britain’s principal Arab ally, Iraq, would play a major role, including mounting a possible invasion. Second, MI6 wanted “to discuss CIA political action potential” against Nasserite elements in Saudi Arabia; again, if the Americans were not prepared to go along with them, the British might mobilize the Iraqis as well as the Saudis’ enemies in the sheikhdoms along the Persian Gulf. Finally, with Nasser’s friends in Syria and Saudi Arabia removed from the picture, the time would be right “to tumble [the] Egyptian government” itself, if necessary “by force (both British and Israeli).” As if this scenario of clandestinely induced mayhem was not disturbing enough, Young liberally sprinkled his presentation with colonial-style references to “Wogs” and “Gyppos.” “Don’t be offended, Old Boy,” another MI6 officer whispered to Eveland, “George is out of patience with the blasé attitude you chaps have taken to a situation which to us means life or death.” After their final meeting, on the morning of April 1, Young stood menacingly at Eveland’s shoulder as he composed a cable to Washington summarizing the talks. Far from demurring at the American’s frank description of
the British position, Young demanded the insertion of such apocalyptic phrases as “No matter what the cost we will win” and, even more ominously, “Britain [is] now prepared to fight its last battle.”
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Something was rotten in Whitehall. This was no mere case of post-imperial malaise, the “wispy, enveloping” melancholy that another CIA liaison officer, Chester L. Cooper, had detected on arriving in London the previous summer. The British appeared enraged, vengeful, irrational. Jim Eichelberger claimed even to have heard Young say that MI6 was plotting an attempt on Nasser’s life. “He talked openly of assassinating Nasser, instead of using a polite euphemism like ‘liquidating,’” the CIA man reported after his return to Cairo. Years later, the renegade former British intelligence officer Peter Wright would reveal in his memoir
Spycatcher
details of MI6 plans to place canisters of nerve gas inside the ventilation systems of the Egyptian leader’s headquarters; when that plot fell through, the spies debated using a packet of cigarettes containing darts tipped with poison. With Prime Minister Anthony Eden consumed by a murderous hatred for Nasser, and MI6 practically unsupervised by the Foreign Office, there seemed to be no limits to the imaginings of Broadway Buildings’ spies. Not surprisingly, gaming imagery abounded, although there was a growing sense that the old rules had ceased to matter, giving way to a sort of nihilistic free-for-all. “What bothered us most,” Miles Copeland wrote later, “was the fact that the British weren’t reacting at all like seasoned, cold-blooded gameplayers. . . . It was as though a chess Grand Master, embarrassed at having been outmaneuvred by an opponent whom he considered an inferior player, wanted to kick over the table.”
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There were, however, several elements in the British proposals that also featured in US plans for OMEGA, which Foster Dulles had laid out before the president during a meeting at the White House on March 28, 1956. Still smarting from the Czech arms deal and the failure of ALPHA, the Americans agreed on the need to bring Nasser to heel, or at least show him he could not carry on dealing with the Soviets and expect “most-favored-nation treatment from the United States.” Meanwhile, the United States would help Britain build up the Baghdad Pact nations as a counterweight to Nasserite and communist influence in the region; one proposal called for American assistance for Iraqi radio so that it could respond in kind to Egyptian broadcasts denouncing the pro-Western prime minister, Nuri al-Sa‘id. Most significant was American acceptance
of the need for secret joint planning with the British to bring about a “possible change of Government in Syria to one more friendly to Iraq and the West.” It helped that the hectoring George Young was not the only British voice urging action on the Eisenhower administration. Prime Minister Eden, Foreign Secretary Lloyd, and Ambassador Roger Makins all joined in what Foreign Office Undersecretary Ivone Kirkpatrick patronizingly described as “an educational process through various channels.” As in Iran three years earlier, the British noted that the “main United States preoccupation in the Middle East [was] the threat of Russian expansion” and adjusted their message accordingly.
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Still, for all this common ground, there were several important differences between the US and UK versions of OMEGA. The American preference for Syria was for regime change by internal opposition groups of the sort Bill Eveland had been cultivating in WAKEFUL, not some crude military intervention by a hostile neighboring power like Iraq, Turkey, or Israel, which might serve British interests but was bound to antagonize the rest of the Arab world. Young’s call for a joint operation against Saudi Arabia was unacceptable on its face. Granted, the Saudis were less desirable allies since Ibn Saud’s death in 1953: the old king’s successor, his son Saud, lacked his father’s prestige and abilities, and was proving far too accommodating toward Nasser’s Egypt. Nonetheless, with its oil fields and US military bases, the desert kingdom, described by Allen Dulles during one National Security Council meeting as “right out of the Arabian Nights, with the addition of Cadillacs,” remained crucial to US strategy in the region; Dwight Eisenhower in particular hoped that Saud might yet turn into a great spiritual leader capable of challenging Nasser for leadership of the Arab world. As for Egypt, the Eisenhower administration’s emphasis was less on getting rid of Nasser—although such action was not ruled out in the long term—than on subtly bringing pressure to bear on him, by withholding aid and applying sanctions, for example, so that he would eventually be induced to mend his ways. “We would want for the time being to avoid any open break,” Foster Dulles explained to the president, “and . . . leave Nasser a bridge back to good relations with the West if he so desires.” Predictably, the British did not care for this show of independent American thinking. When Lloyd wrote Eden a note describing the “U.S. unwillingness to admit that we have a common policy,” the PM recorded a one-word response in the margin: “Folly.”
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Where did the CIA stand on these questions? Evidently, the British, perhaps thinking back to the 1953 Anglo-American operation in Iran, believed they could count on Washington’s spies to back their latest schemes within the Eisenhower administration. “It will be easier to align the President and Foster Dulles in a new policy towards the Middle East if we have first convinced Allen Dulles and secured his cooperation in the practical measures which might be necessary,” Selwyn Lloyd euphemistically wrote Roger Makins. There are no records of the meetings between MI6 and Kim Roosevelt that took place in London during the first week of April 1956 (Allen Dulles had decided to stay home, pleading his gout, although this might well have been an excuse to avoid exposing himself to unwelcome British pressure; Makins reported that Dulles “was very reluctant to go”). It is clear, though, from various sources that Kim disappointed British expectations, pouring cold water on STRAGGLE, as Young’s plan for an Iraqi-assisted coup in Syria was code-named. In early May, Lloyd told Foster Dulles, “on the basis of conversations which he had had during Kermit Roosevelt’s visit in London,” that the “CIA was obviously more dubious than the British . . . that the operation could be carried out.” “Their plans do not seem to us wholly realistic or likely to achieve the desired results,” Allen Dulles explained to his brother a few days later, after Foster had quoted the Iran operation TP-AJAX as a possible precedent. “The situation does not lend itself to the same type of operation.”
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Kim’s diffidence about STRAGGLE was not an isolated phenomenon. Not long after TP-AJAX, Foster Dulles had invited the CIA Arabist to take command of PB-SUCCESS, a paramilitary operation to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, who was upsetting Washington with his supposedly communist-inspired efforts to expropriate land owned by US corporation United Fruit Company. Kim declined. AJAX had succeeded, he believed, chiefly because the CIA’s aims were shared by large numbers of Iranians, and it was obvious that the same condition did not obtain among Guatemalans. The operation went ahead without Kim, and Arbenz resigned in June 1954, principally because blatant signs of American hostility had convinced him that a full-scale US invasion was imminent. “We had our will in Guatemala,” Kim commented later, “[but] it wasn’t really accomplished by clandestine means.”
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There was perhaps a hint of self-boosterism in Kim’s unflattering comparisons between AJAX and SUCCESS, but his objections to the
more crudely interventionist aspects of the Guatemalan operation seem sincere enough and help explain his reluctance to rally behind British plans for STRAGGLE. It is possible to detect a similar wariness, even moral squeamishness, in the Arabist’s response to another MI6 proposal: the elimination of Nasser. According to the then deputy director of the CIA, Robert Amory, “Kim was absolutely terrified at the thought of . . . arranging for the overthrow of Nasser with the support of the Egyptian army” because he “knew something of their torture methods.” Whether Kim put him up to it is not clear, but after returning to Cairo from London, Jim Eichelberger leaked some of MI6’s plans to his Egyptian contacts, warning them that the British “were determined to ‘do a Mossadeq’ [
sic
] with Nasser.” True to form, Miles Copeland went one step further. According to his later account, no doubt embellished but probably still containing a grain of truth, the Dulles brothers sent Miles to Egypt to investigate the possibility of murdering Nasser on the tacit understanding that he would reach a negative assessment and thereby, it was hoped, discourage any British attempt. Arriving in Cairo, Miles immediately confessed his mission to Nasser, whereupon the old friends began gaming out possible assassination plots. “How about poison?” the American asked the Egyptian. “Suppose I just wait until you turn your head and then slip a pill into your coffee?” “Well, there’s Hassan standing right there,” replied Nasser. “If I didn’t see you Hassan would.” “But maybe we could bribe a servant to poison the coffee before bringing it in?” “The coffee would only kill the taster.” And so the conversation carried on—at least in Miles’s recollection.
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Not even the relatively restrained anti-Nasser plans of the Eisenhower administration found much favor with the CIA Arabists. Reacting to the State Department’s March 28 OMEGA planning paper, Kim complained that it failed either to allow for the resumption of direct talks with Nasser should he show signs of reform or to make clear that “direct intervention” was, at this stage, only one of several possible courses of action. After returning from his meeting in London with MI6, Kim began attending the Middle East Policy Planning Group, a top-level interagency committee originally formed to discuss the ALPHA peace plan but now devoted to OMEGA. The group spent just as much time considering positive proposals for improving the Western position in the Arab world, including Allen Dulles’s idea for a “Near East Development Institution,” as it did punitive measures. The notion of a Middle
Eastern Marshall Plan, which Kim had proposed in
Arabs, Oil, and History
, was, it seemed, still not entirely dead.
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Meanwhile, far from putting “the squeeze on Nasser,” as enjoined by OMEGA, the CIA station in Cairo appeared, if anything, to be growing closer to members of the circle around the Egyptian leader, in particular ‘Ali Sabri and Zakaria Mohieddin. To a certain extent, these contacts were intended to expose the Egyptians to American arguments against Cold War neutralism and thereby engender some Nasserite “soul-searching.” (Such exchanges, often “heated, but always friendly,” according to a CIA cable from Cairo, usually ended with Zakaria cheerfully offering the advice that the United States “should not worry so much about the situation.”) On other occasions, the spies seemed to be acting in direct contravention of OMEGA, as when they blamed recent Egyptian-American “misunderstandings” on Zionist and British meddling, rather than on Nasser himself. The most remarkable expression of dissent from the Eisenhower administration’s new line came courtesy of Jim Eichelberger in a cable of May 2, 1956. The United States would be making a huge mistake, the CIA station chief warned, if it engaged in “direct combat with Arab nationalism,” as such a course of action would almost certainly “lead to the defeat of Western interests in this area.” As regards the specific measures contemplated by Washington, Eichelberger argued that anti-Soviet propaganda was unlikely to have much effect on Middle Eastern opinion; sanctions against Egypt would likely push the Nasser regime, and possibly other Arab nationalist governments, into accepting yet more assistance from the Eastern bloc; and “covert political action, particularly that involving the use of force, would run more than the usual degree of danger of boomeranging, even if successful at the outset.” In places, Eichelberger’s cable sounds more like a critique of 1950s US foreign policy by a modern-day liberal academic than a CIA message of the era itself. As such, it found a strong echo in reports to Washington from the US ambassador in Cairo, the Arabists’ old ally Henry Byroade, who throughout the first half of 1956 grew increasingly strident in his criticisms of John Foster Dulles’s policies toward Egypt. At times, the Cairo embassy was in almost open rebellion against Washington.
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