America's Great Game (48 page)

Nowhere were these contradictions more obvious than in Operation MASK, a joint Anglo-American program “to bring about by peaceful methods President Nasser’s removal as quickly as possible” (as State Department NEA chief William Rountree described it). Originally proposed on September 20, 1956, when Foster Dulles was dining in London with Eden, MASK was developed in early October during discussions in Washington between a British delegation that included George Young and an American team made up of State Department Middle East hands and two unidentified CIA representatives, one of whom was almost certainly Kim Roosevelt and the other most likely Miles Copeland. Miles wrote later of participating in Anglo-American talks about Nasser’s removal shortly before the Anglo-French attack on Suez—and of his amused surprise when the British produced a supposedly top-secret diagram of the Egyptian intelligence service that he recognized as his own handiwork from his earlier assignment to Cairo as a Booz-Allen executive.
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The different perspectives represented in the US-UK Working Group on Egypt were evident from the first. While the British officials urged the adoption of aggressive economic, political, and psychological measures “to ‘disembarrass’ ourselves of Nasser,” the Americans insisted on a more cautious approach, cavilling in particular at the suggestion that they agree to a date for the Egyptian leader’s ouster. Although the Working Group did produce a joint report on October 3, Foster Dulles, who had just heard his president repeat his disapproval of operations targeting Nasser personally, was reluctant to sign off on it. Objecting especially to the first two paragraphs about Nasser, which baldly stated “the necessity for U.S.-U.K. collaboration to eliminate the threat he poses,” Dulles recalled that it “was unusual to seek written agreement at the top political level to operations of this kind”; normally, “a general oral understanding” was sufficient. Clearly, the Americans were suspicious of British intentions; a later CIA report noted of this period that “estrangement” between the two sides “was becoming dangerously
acute.” The matter of the MASK report was still not resolved at the end of October, when, as William Rountree put it in a memorandum to Dulles, it was rendered “academic” by “current developments.”
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Rountree was referring to the war in Egypt that had broken out on October 29, leading to the so-called Suez Crisis. Conceived in the weeks following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Tripartite Aggression, as it was known in the Arab world, involved an unlikely secret collusion between Britain, France, and Israel. The plan was for the Israelis to attack Egypt in the Sinai and march on the Canal Zone; the two European powers would then intervene on the pretext of restoring peace and reassert their control of the canal, in the process toppling Nasser. Militarily, the operation went as planned, with the Egyptian army and air force rapidly succumbing to vastly superior forces. Politically, however, the Tripartite Aggression was a disaster for the invaders, especially the French and British, who in the face of furious American condemnation were humiliatingly forced to accept a UN ceasefire on November 7. Rather than being knocked from his perch, Nasser skillfully exploited the opportunity to pose as the hero of the Arab world and consolidate his power base, both domestically and regionally.

There were several reasons why Washington objected so strongly to the Suez Crisis: its potentially calamitous consequences for the Western position in the Middle East and the rest of the Third World; the fact that it distracted international attention from the Soviets’ brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising, which was unfolding at exactly the same time; and its no less unfortunate timing on the eve of a US presidential election. Perhaps the most deeply felt American grievance, though, was the element of deception involved. The British had been secretly planning this operation for weeks while talking to their American cousins about other measures for dealing with Nasser. So much, then, for the Special Relationship.

In fact, individual British officials, apparently torn between the demands of loyalty to their government and personal friendship, had hinted to their American counterparts that a major operation was in the works. “I’m going to have to get in my uniform,” MI6’s John Bruce-Lockhart informed the CIA’s Al Ulmer. “We can’t let Suez go, you realise it’s the lifeline of our Empire.” During a tense family picnic, Patrick Dean, chair of the British working party on MASK, confided in Chester Cooper, “You and I are in for much trouble, and it won’t be
because of Hungary.” Reporting to Foster Dulles during a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, Kim Roosevelt ran into an old Foreign Office friend. “Speaking with great feeling, he said . . . that the British and the French were about to do something extremely foolish,” Kim wrote later. When the CIA officer repeated what he had just heard to the secretary of state in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, “adding that the Britisher’s gloomy prognostication was amply supported by American intelligence reports,” he was greeted with a surprising display of indifference. “Is that all?” Foster asked, looking out of the window. When Kim indicated it was, the secretary simply said, “Thank you.”
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This anecdote, which Kim told to several interviewers, has a strongly self-exculpatory element to it, suggesting as it does that Foster Dulles received good intelligence from the CIA about British plans yet chose to ignore it. One of the interviewers noted that Kim appeared “mad” about Dulles’s claim that Suez had taken him by complete surprise. Yet combined with the other evidence of British “chatter” prior to October 29, the story seems plausible enough and raises the question of why Dulles and other American officials put “the telescope to [their] blind eye,” in Kim’s words. One probable reason was that Washington calculated that Jordan was a more likely target of Israeli attack than Egypt, and evidence of Israeli mobilization was interpreted in that light. Another was that James Jesus Angleton, acting on assurances from the Israeli embassy in Washington, advised Allen Dulles that Israel’s intentions were peaceful (prompting Deputy Director Robert Amory to utter the oft-quoted claim that Angleton was a “coopted Israeli agent”). A third possibility, which perhaps explains Kim’s habit of heaping blame for all American setbacks in the region on Foster Dulles, was that the CIA’s Middle East hands were by this point so preoccupied with covert action that they were neglecting their intelligence-gathering duties.
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This brings us, finally, to another, less-remarked reason for American anger about the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt: its effect on the situation in Syria. A few days earlier, on October 18, Bill Eveland had learned that the date of Mikhail Ilyan’s coup was being moved back again, from October 25 to October 29, for reasons that were not entirely clear. Later, after it had turned out that this was the very same day as the Israeli invasion of Egypt, Eveland began to suspect that the British had “used the Iraqis to set this up,” planning to exploit the confusion caused by the Suez Crisis to wrest control of Syria and “leaving the
United States and Ilyan as the scapegoats in the event the coup failed.” Whether or not this was the case—no such British operation materialized after the attack on Egypt—the consequences of the coincidence for Archie Roosevelt’s hopes of a second TP-AJAX were calamitous. Believing that he was being set up as a fall guy, Ilyan fled Syria and arrived at Eveland’s apartment in Beirut the following day, full of bitter recrimination. Meanwhile, the Syrian intelligence chief Sarraj, who had probably known of the plotting all along, began rounding up the conspirators Ilyan had left behind. Watching from Washington as the operation unraveled, the Dulles brothers reluctantly decided to abandon Syria to its fate, at least for the time being. Trying to make sense of the mess, Bill Eveland could draw only one firm conclusion: “Archie Roosevelt knew no more about staging coups than I did—nothing at all, that is to say.”
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For the Anglophile and dedicated intelligence professional Archie, it was a bitter pill to swallow; interviewed about Syria decades later, he still had not forgiven the British for their perfidy. Still, the CIA Arabists were not done playing games yet, as events the following year would prove.
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NINETEEN

Game On: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, 1957

ACCORDING TO OUTWARD APPEARANCES, THE
Suez Crisis marked an abrupt end to British imperial pretensions in the Middle East. After a disgraced Anthony Eden departed from Downing Street in January 1957, his successor, Harold Macmillan, appeared to adopt a chastened approach to the region, enacting policies that more accurately reflected Britain’s reduced circumstances in the post–World War II world. Meanwhile, the United States, whose refusal to support the Anglo-French-Israeli misadventure of the previous fall had earned considerable goodwill among Arabs, responded much as it had to Britain’s withdrawal from Greece and Turkey ten years earlier, proclaiming in the same month as Eden’s resignation the Eisenhower Doctrine, a new commitment to defending Middle Eastern states menaced by Soviet expansionism. The days of British empire and imperial-style adventurism were, it seemed, over at last.
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Or were they? Behind the scenes, American and British officials were behaving in ways that belied Suez’s reputation as a watershed in Western relations with the Middle East, actually escalating their joint
campaign against radical Arab nationalism, a force now grown more powerful thanks to the botched British attempt to dislodge Nasser. On the US side, Eisenhower quickly swallowed his personal anger with the British and even contemplated rebuilding their position in the region as part of a wider American strategy of supporting pro-Western, conservative Arab governments against nationalist revolutionaries. The Eisenhower Doctrine was, in this sense, a public declaration of the principles promulgated the previous year in the secret OMEGA project. The British, not surprisingly, played along with this policy, gently massaging US fears of communist subversion in the Middle East, a technique also employed by the conservative Arab regimes themselves. Harold Macmillan prided himself on his subtle handling of his trans-Atlantic cousins, discreetly nudging them away from their earlier, naïve anti-imperialism toward a more “realistic” understanding of their new responsibilities in the postcolonial era.
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Helping cement this quiet Anglo-American rapprochement were the secret services. In the immediate wake of Suez, hurt feelings on both sides had caused a temporary suspension of official contact between the CIA and MI6. The fiery George Young complained that, “When the moment came [the United States] was not prepared to lift a finger.” “A.[llen Dulles] is suspicious of our cousins,” a transcript of a conversation between the intelligence chief and his brother, the secretary of state, recorded. “If they want a thing, he thinks we should look at it hard.” It was perhaps only to be expected, therefore, that the first attempt to reopen official channels—a goodwill mission by Kim Roosevelt to London very soon after the crisis—should have been unsuccessful, with Kim for once receiving a less than enthusiastic reception in Whitehall. When another CIA officer, the Grotonian quarterback Tracy Barnes, made the same trip in December 1956, however, the welcome was much warmer. Early in 1957, it was the British turn to try to thaw out relations, with the new chief of MI6, Dick White, traveling to Washington in order to meet his American counterpart. White, who shared Harold Macmillan’s strong interest in cultivating the Americans, was delighted when Allen Dulles took him to his favorite Washington club, the Alibi. He was even more thrilled when Dulles played a practical joke on him, inviting him to sit in his plush office chair before flicking a hidden massage switch. Such pranks were, White felt sure, reserved only for family friends.
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The stage was set for a new surge of covert activism by the CIA Arabists. By now, the focus had shifted from Egypt, Kim Roosevelt
having finally given up on his vision of promoting his friend Gamal Nasser as the leader of a modern, progressive, pro-American Middle East. Unlike the British, though, Kim appears not to have become obsessed with the idea of getting rid of Nasser. Admittedly, the evidence here is ambiguous: several sources, including the memoirs of Bill Eveland, attest to an intensification of the sort of anti-Nasser methods contemplated in the MASK talks of the previous fall, and it is clear that the British, despite Macmillan and Dick White supposedly curbing the more swashbuckling elements of MI6, in fact carried on plotting to assassinate the Egyptian leader. On balance, though, the evidence points toward CIA actions following a pattern similar to that of 1956; that is, the Agency Arabists played along with the extreme solutions proposed by the British but ultimately refused to pull the trigger. The denouement of Edward Sheehan’s novel
Kingdom of Illusion
captures this fundamental ambivalence about as well as any existing historical account. Abetted by his Copeland-like henchman Cornelius MacFlicker, the Kim figure, Paul Pullmotor, does eventually attempt to mount a coup against his old friend, the prime minister of Al Khadra, Mustafa ibn Mabrouk. When Mabrouk foils the plot and taunts Pullmotor by sending an army band to play “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” under his hotel window, the American is secretly pleased. Indeed, as he prepares to leave Al Khadra for the last time, and realizes he probably will never see Mabrouk again, the cynical Pullmotor suddenly experiences an emotion he has never felt before: regret.
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