America's Great Game (46 page)

This program was at once reactionary and extraordinarily ambitious in scope, requiring all the covert expertise at the US government’s disposal. To help carry it through, Washington called up one of the CIA’s most experienced Arabists.

“AS YOU KNOW, ARCHIE, WE’RE
much concerned about what’s going on in Syria—especially the way the Communists and nationalists appear to be ganging up for some kind of action there,” said Foster Dulles. The secretary of state had summoned the young CIA officer to his home and was seated behind the piles of paper that covered his desk, speaking in his customarily diffident manner. “I’d like you to fly out to Damascus right away, talk to our ambassador, and see . . . what can be done about it.”
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In the years since his first Middle Eastern postings, Archie Roosevelt had strayed from the road to Samarkand—his quest for knowledge and understanding of the Arab and Muslim worlds. His spell with the Voice of America had been followed in 1951 by a posting as CIA station chief in Istanbul and then, when his tour of Turkey ended in 1953, a desk job back in Washington, serving as a branch chief and chief of operations in the Agency’s Soviet division. His new life had its consolations, among them his young Lebanese American bride Selwa (“Lucky”), who had excelled in the role of CIA wife in Istanbul, performing the diplomatic duties required by Archie’s State Department cover with great aplomb. Now, back in the United States, she was charming her initially skeptical Roosevelt in-laws while forging a promising career in her own right as a Washington journalist. Still, Archie missed the Middle East and what he regarded as the core mission of the CIA officer: intelligence gathering in the field. Unlike his high-flying cousin Kim, he was no great player of the Washington game.
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In early 1956, with the United States suffering one setback after another in his old stamping ground, Archie was gradually shifted back into
Middle East affairs. In April, after the collapse of ALPHA, he became deputy chief of the CIA’s Near East Division, assisting first Roger Goiran, then Goiran’s successor as division chief, the Yale-educated lawyer Norman S. Paul, in implementing the new OMEGA program. With conditions in Syria deteriorating especially fast—the Ba‘ath-dominated government hosted a visit from the Soviet foreign minister in June and then recognized communist China—Archie acquired specific responsibility for WAKEFUL, the operation intended to bring about regime change in Damascus, becoming, as he put it later, the Agency’s “point man on Syria.” Then came the summons to Georgetown and the secretary of state’s instructions to go to the Levant.
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Archie, or “FELS,” to give him his CIA code name, arrived in Beirut on July 1, accompanied by “NEARMAN,” the CIA’s assistant deputy director and the Dulles brothers’ “Mr. Middle East,” Kim Roosevelt. The Lebanese capital was to be the cousins’ staging post for a three-week tour of the surrounding region, during which they would assess the prospects for covert action in Syria and try to mobilize Arab opposition to Nasser. The twelve years that had elapsed since the Roosevelts first traveled the Middle East together had not diminished the familial resemblance between them. Both were now slightly thicker around the waist, but the small frames, high foreheads, and scholarly mien were the same, lending them the appearance of “bespectacled angleworms,” as Joe Alsop put it. That said, the Roosevelts had acquired different travel habits, as observed by Allen Dulles’s troubleshooter Wilbur “Bill” Eveland, who greeted them shortly after they arrived in Beirut. “A late sleeper, Kim didn’t come fully alive until after noon; then he was charged up to continue on way past midnight and after dinner was the best time to speak seriously with him,” Eveland wrote later. “Archie followed the sunrise with breakfast and was at his best during the day; even formal dinners found him dozing and a nodding head often threatened to collide with his soup.”
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With Eveland preceding them by a day so as not to arouse Syrian suspicion, the Roosevelts drove across the mountains to Damascus. After announcing themselves at the American embassy—happily, Archie knew Jimmy Moose from his days in Baghdad, and the ambassador, a long-time foe of Nasserism, proved highly receptive to the CIA men’s proposals for covert action on his turf—Archie went to visit the Syrian army’s chief of staff, Shawkat Shuqayr. The junior of the Roosevelt
cousins had high hopes for this meeting: Shuqayr was a distant cousin of Lucky’s and a prominent member of the nationalist officer class that was now playing such an important role in Syrian politics. In the flesh, however, Shuqayr proved disappointing: a grey bureaucrat who parroted the standard Nasserite line. He was, in any case, toppled from his command position a matter of days later.
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Far more promising was another contact arranged by Bill Eveland. Mikhail Ilyan, a wealthy Christian landowner from Aleppo and powerful conservative politician, had already spent a large amount of his own money plotting against the government of the Damascene Shukri al-Quwatli (earlier the victim of Husni Za‘im’s coup plot). As such, he seemed to fit well with the US strategy of encouraging the internal Syrian right to arrest the country’s leftward drift, as opposed to the British and Iraqi strategy of external intervention. For his part, Ilyan was keen to meet the Roosevelts, perhaps partly because he was under the impression that they were sons of FDR. Eveland did not disabuse him of this notion. Instead, he suggested a meeting with Archie in Ilyan’s suite at the New Omayad Hotel.
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As Ilyan sat spinning his worry beads, Archie got quickly to the point. What would Syrian conservatives need to prevent the communists and their sympathizers taking over the country? he asked in Arabic. Ilyan responded, so Eveland recalled later, “by ticking off names and places: the radio stations in Damascus and Aleppo; a few key senior officers; and enough money to buy newspapers now in Egyptian and Saudi hands.” Eveland was agog—“Ilyan was talking about nothing short of a coup d’état”—but Archie appeared unfazed. “Could these things, he asked Ilyan, be done with U.S. money and assets alone, with no other Western or Near Eastern country involved?” “Without question,” Ilyan answered. Apparently satisfied with what he heard, Archie departed soon afterward, leaving Eveland “with a Syrian who was smiling like the cat who’d just swallowed the canary.”
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After further excursions to Jordan and Saudi Arabia to drum up opposition to Nasser, the Roosevelt cousins returned to Washington, where they reported their confidence in the ability of Syrian conservatives—with appropriate assistance from the United States—to prevent the satellization of their country. With the secretary of state indicating presidential approval, Kim directed Eveland to obtain from Ilyan a precise estimate of the amount of US assistance he would require and a time frame for
the action he was proposing. The sum named was half a million Syrian pounds, and August 31 was set as the date on which right-wing elements would rally against the current government. Archie was back in the game.
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AT FIRST GLANCE, ARCHIE ROOSEVELT’S
leading role in a coup operation against an Arab nationalist government appears even more puzzling that his cousin Kim’s leadership of the plot to remove the Iranian Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953. During World War II, Archie had championed the cause of Arab nationalism against European imperialism. Later, he came to share his cousin Kim’s enthusiasm for Gamal Nasser. “Here was a man we could work with,” he concluded after meeting the Egyptian in 1953. “This might be the leader who could unite the Arab world in seeking . . . solutions for the area’s problems.” Archie was therefore dubious about John Foster Dulles’s march toward confrontation with the Egyptian and about the underlying assumption that pan-Arabism was dangerously susceptible to communism. The Soviets might have tried “to exploit the forces unleashed by Nasser,” he believed, “but they never gained control of them.” Writing his memoirs after his retirement, Archie even sounded skeptical about the perceived threat of communist takeover of Syria in 1956: yes, there was a leftist front of Arab nationalists and “a small contingent of true Marxists including the minuscule Communist party, abetted by the Soviets,” but, in truth, “the aims of Communists and nationalists were diametrically opposed.”
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Then there was Archie’s basic conservatism as a spy, his preference for intelligence gathering over political machinations. Interviewed many years later, Lucky Roosevelt recalled how during his spell as station chief in Turkey, a role that involved oversight of covert operations in the Balkans, her husband became “profoundly upset” about infiltration missions the Agency was running behind the Iron Curtain. “He believed in diligent intelligence work, carefully prepared,” she remembered. Instead, the CIA was dropping émigré operatives with almost no training into enemy territory, where they were rounded up and never heard from again. Archie complained vociferously to headquarters (he could not have known at the time that many of the operations had probably been compromised by the British double agent Kim Philby). Later,
Archie would also express objections to the Agency mounting “giant paramilitary operations in disputed parts of the Third World,” such as the 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, echoing Kim Roosevelt’s criticisms of the 1954 action in Guatemala. “Local forces essentially govern these nations’ own political systems,” he wrote, “and we can influence the course of events only when we give our support to a force strong enough to prevail.” Although he went on to mention TP-AJAX as an example of an operation that successfully harnessed such forces, privately Archie voiced reservations about cousin Kim’s Iranian adventure. “I don’t think he said or did anything to embarrass or undermine Kermit at the time,” recollected Lucky, “but he told me he thought it was a big mistake.” Archie’s memoirs even contain an implied dig at Kim and Miles’s crypto-diplomatic efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute. “Intelligence officers have an obligation to provide an understanding of the constantly changing nature of the problem,” Archie admonished. “The diplomats must take it from there.”
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How, then, to explain Archie’s command of the 1956 operation to topple the Syrian government, a plan that, in the words of British writer Tom Bower, “reeked of nineteenth-century manipulation”? Scattered clues suggest some possible answers. To begin with, despite his protests about amateurish agent drops in the Balkans, the young CIA officer did not object to covert operations per se. Indeed, he was an enthusiastic exponent of another effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain and roll back communism: appealing to the anti-Russian sentiment of Muslims and other minority groups on the southern flank of the Soviet Union, the communist “underbelly.” According to Miles Copeland, while Archie was based in Lebanon during the late 1940s, he ran operations into Soviet Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, including a personal tour of the region on foot and horseback. This claim has some plausibility in light of Archie’s subsequent assignments to the Voice of America, Turkey, and the CIA’s Soviet division. There is also evidence that Archie worked with the American Committee for Liberation (AMCOMLIB), a CIA front organization with the mission of organizing Soviet-bloc émigrés, including Turkic Muslims, into a secret force capable of spearheading the liberation of their homelands. These various activities echoed the prediction that Archie had made when he was serving during World War II in North Africa that Islam would be a force to reckon with in the postwar world—except that now, in the midst of the Cold War, Archie
was turning his sympathetic interest in Muslims to political warfare purposes. Much later, after the Cold War was over, CIA covert operations involving anti-Soviet Islamists would return to haunt the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but Archie, a dedicated anticommunist since his youth, appears not to have foreseen such blowback.
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Not only was Archie a dedicated Cold Warrior, ready to resort to anticommunist measures that, in retrospect, seem ill-advised; he was also a loyal public servant, disinclined to question direct orders from the secretary of state. Writing in his memoirs, he explained the principles that guided him as an intelligence officer. A “natural curiosity to seek out the ways of the many tribes of mankind” and an “intimate understanding” of different cultures: these were fine qualities in themselves and also prerequisites for intelligence work, he explained. But the spy must also “believe in his own society, his country, and its form of government.” If he did not, he risked the cynicism of characters in the novels of John Le Carré, “who find their side no less amoral than the other” and end by becoming traitors to their country. To avoid this trap, the intelligence officer “must not only know whose side he is on, but have a deep conviction that it is the right one”—even if that meant, as in the Arabist Archie’s case, having to subordinate his sympathy for Arab nationalism to his patriotic duty to serve his government.
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The apparent contradiction between Archie’s Arabism on the one hand and his actions in the summer of 1956 on the other could then be explained by his Cold War activism and his patriotism. To these might be added other motives evident earlier in his career—a tendency to defer to the British in their Middle Eastern “Covert Empire” and the Rooseveltian appetite for adventure in the spyscape of the Arab world—as well as, possibly, some personal, psychological considerations. After several years of watching cousin Kim carry all before him in Washington while he himself performed honorable but less spectacular service at the division level or in the field, Archie was enjoying being back at the center of things. In his memoirs, he wrote with obvious relish of frequent meetings in 1956 with his old family friend, CIA director Allen Dulles, and listening as “Allen” spoke on the telephone with “Foster” or the president. Kim largely owed his legendary reputation to his success in Iran; now, perhaps, Syria offered the other Roosevelt Arabist a similar shot at fame: the chance to be able to tell future generations the story of his own Middle Eastern coup.
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