America's Great Game (8 page)

Archie also sounded a new theme: with its vast world population of adherents, Islam stood to be “a factor of increasing importance” in the postwar future, and the United States had an unprecedented opportunity in North Africa to establish itself “as the great unselfish friend of the Moslems.” With this end in mind, Archie began to advocate two projects intended to demonstrate American benevolence toward the region: the building there of an American university like AUB and the provision of US transport planes to Muslim leaders wishing to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, something they had not been able to do since the beginning of the war. Both these proposals implicitly rebuked the French for their lack of concern about the education and spiritual welfare of the “natives” supposedly under their protection.
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In June 1943, with his reputation as an observer of the Muslim and Arab scenes clearly growing, Archie was loaned to the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), an Anglo-American team of propaganda
specialists who had followed the TORCH invasion force to North Africa. The PWB was a haven for dissidents from the official US line of cooperation with the Vichy French, and its officers were prone to taking vigilante actions against alleged local fascists and to illegally protecting Gaullist resistance fighters; Eisenhower reputedly complained that the PWB gave him “more trouble than all the Germans in Africa.” Tasked with reporting on Axis propaganda targeted at the Arabs of North Africa, Archie traveled east to Algiers, meeting with Algerian nationalist leaders, and then on to Tunisia, where his pro-Arab and anticolonial reporting reached a kind of crescendo.
²¹

Several experiences in Tunisia appear to have left an especially strong impression on young Archie. One was learning of the pathetic plight of Moncef Bey, the nominal Tunisian sovereign, who had attempted to bring about some moderate nationalist reforms in the country, only for the French to subject him “to great moral and physical pressure” to abdicate (as Archie reported to PWB command). Another was his getting to know the young leaders of the Neo-Destour, the radical wing of the Tunisian nationalist movement, many of whom had only just been released after years of solitary confinement in France. Archie was introduced to the Neo-Destour by the charming Slim Driga, a performing arts impresario who also treated him and another American Arabist, Consul General Hooker Doolittle, to a memorable driving tour of the beautiful Tunisian heartland. Back in Tunis, Archie visited the Neo-Destour president, Habib Bourguiba, in his cramped, side-street apartment. With his “expressive hands and piercing blue eyes,” Bourguiba struck Archie “as a visionary, a modern prophet, . . . destined for greatness” (the prediction proved accurate: in 1957 Bourguiba became the first president of the independent Republic of Tunisia). Archie invited each of his new nationalist friends to send him a report on their recent history, which he planned to synthesize into a presentation to the US authorities. Then, on July 4, 1943, while he was at work on this final report, an incident occurred that completed Archie’s disillusionment with the official American policy of collaborating with the French. An altercation between Senegalese and Algerian soldiers in Tunis escalated into a riot in which twenty Arab civilians were massacred as French officers either stood by or, according to some reports, joined in the killing. Horrified, Archie delivered to his superiors a blistering denunciation of French colonial rule and US complicity in it.
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This was Archie Roosevelt’s last official act in Tunisia. A few weeks later, he learned that, along with Hooker Doolittle, he was being recalled to the United States, presumably at the request of the French. In a hastily penned “Report on My Activities,” he defended himself against various unnamed detractors, but this attempt “to set the record straight” was to no avail, and his recall went ahead. The night before he was due to leave, Archie was invited by Slim Driga to a farewell party in a villa on the Mediterranean shore. “All the Neo-Destour leaders were there,” he remembered later, “and after a sumptuous banquet, a Bedouin girl danced for us, with great poise . . . yet with a wildness in the flash of her black eyes.” For the budding young American Arabist, this “magic evening by the sea, lit by the crescent moon,” was the perfect climax for his romance with the Arabs of North Africa.
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GIVEN ARCHIE’S UPBRINGING AND EDUCATION
, it was inevitable that there would be traces of old-fashioned Orientalism in his wartime approach to North Africa. There was, for example, the afternoon he and Hooker Doolittle shared sipping tea on the Tunisian shoreline. “[We] felt like Connecticut Yankees, transferred to an earlier, more tranquil century,” Archie wrote later, conjuring up Orientalist notions of the East as a place of premodern simplicity, a romantic refuge from the ravages of Western progress (and, in the case of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, the loss of family status that had occurred since TR’s day). There was also Archie’s infatuation with the “exotic” femininity of Near Eastern women, another classic Orientalist theme.
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By and large, though, Archie Roosevelt’s commentary on his North African experiences suggests a perspective based not so much on European Orientalism, with its relentless “othering” of the colonial subject, as on a distinctively American tradition of more humane, interactive engagement with Arabs and Muslims. This was reflected in the extraordinary access to high-level Arab leaders that Archie enjoyed during his tour of duty, unimaginable for later generations of American intelligence officers operating in the Middle East. In turn, these contacts strengthened his own growing attraction toward Arab nationalism as he developed enduring friendships with a whole generation of North African independence leaders. Combined with his unusual intellectual gifts and openness to new experiences, these influences caused Archie Roosevelt
to imagine an American future in the Arab and Muslim worlds that would be very different from the European past.
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With Europe’s colonial power in the Middle East waning as World War II drew to a close, the question was, Would this vision become a reality? Unbeknownst to Archie, the first serious test of American Arabism was in fact already taking place, down the North African coast in Cairo, where his cousin Kim was to play a leading part in the United States’ earliest effort to establish a regional spy network.

THREE

OSS/Cairo

WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE
United States in the late summer of 1943, Archie Roosevelt went to work at the Office of War Information headquarters in Washington, DC, linking up again with his Muslim friend Muhammad Siblini to develop ideas for US propaganda in the Arab world. While in Washington, he often stayed with Kim and Polly Roosevelt in their home on the Willard family estate a few miles to the west in Fairfax, Virginia.

The Oyster Bay Roosevelts were a tight-knit family, and the cousins had seen each other quite often when they were growing up. Archibald Sr., a sentimental man despite his curmudgeonly tendencies, had kept one eye on his brother Kermit’s children, making sure that they at least got regular baths at Sagamore while their father was off exploring and their mother was busy in Washington. For his part, Kim received special instructions from Archie’s mother, Grace, to watch out for her son at Groton. “She seemed particularly worried about the way he is slanging everybody,” Kim primly wrote his father. “I told her I would do all I could.” Still, the two years that separated the cousins counted for a lot at hierarchical institutions like Groton and Harvard, and Archie appears to have spent less time with Kim than with Kim’s younger brother Willard,
his direct contemporary. It was not until the war, with both cousins involved in intelligence and raising young families (KW gave birth to a boy, Tweed, in 1942), that they really began to appreciate how much they had in common: “interests, tastes, and even sense of humor,” as Archie put it later. Relaxing together over drinks after long days of war work, the two young men, neither yet thirty, talked late into the evening, Kim listening to Archie as he expounded what had become his personal theme, “that the Arab world would be of great importance after the war and deserved more attention now.”
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Kim himself had not had any previous involvement with the Arab countries. The closest he had come was in September 1941, when Bill Donovan requested his views on Iran and he had taken himself off to the Library of Congress for a briefing on the subject by colonial affairs analyst (and future first black winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) Ralph Bunche. Around the same time, a family friend had suggested that Kim go out to China to join General Claire Chennault and his force of volunteer aviators, an idea that, if pursued, might well have led to his becoming a “China hand” rather than an Arabist, area specialisms with little in common except that they shared missionary pasts and would later both be reviled by many Americans.
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Instead, Kim moved sideways in Washington. In August 1942 he left Bill Donovan’s outfit, which had just been renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), for a post as an assistant section chief at the OWI, working on propaganda related to Lend-Lease, the program for sending war materials to US allies. He shifted jobs again in January 1943, this time joining the State Department, where he helped Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary in charge of economic affairs, in the actual implementation of Lend-Lease, attending a number of meetings with senior representatives of Allied governments. It was high-level stuff for one so young, yet Acheson, the quintessential East Coast patrician (and fellow Grotonian), was impressed with Kim’s maturity, declaring that he possessed “a very able mind, an excellent educational and cultural background and an intense interest in governmental problems.” Dining at the White House, Belle Roosevelt heard similar praise for her son’s “mental attributes” and “virtues” from another Grotonian, undersecretary of state and family friend Sumner Welles. Kim was a rising star of wartime Washington.
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There is therefore something curious about his posting to Cairo in January 1944. Later, in his memoir
Countercoup
, Kim offered the following
explanation for the move. In the course of the duties he was performing for Dean Acheson, he had recommended one James M. Landis for the post of American director of economic operations in the Middle East, responsible for overseeing the massive US Lend-Lease operation in the region. Landis had duly been dispatched to Cairo, where he triggered a diplomatic row by criticizing the British, still the dominant Western power in Egypt. A furious Acheson had then ordered his assistant out to the Middle East to clean up the mess he had indirectly created.
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Evidently, though, there was more to Kim Roosevelt’s Cairo mission than the Landis affair alone. As he himself revealed in
Countercoup
, Kim was still reporting to Bill Donovan as well as Dean Acheson when he left Washington. Elsewhere, he wrote of “doing special intelligence work” in Cairo, “originally with the State Department and later with the army.” Declassified official records suggest that, at least after April 1944, when he was officially reassigned from the State Department to the OSS and entered the US Army in the rank of private, Kim was a key player in Project SOPHIA, a secret program for spreading OSS officers throughout the region under cover of Landis’s economic assistance operations.
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Archie Roosevelt, for one, was skeptical about the official explanation of his cousin’s presence in the Egyptian capital. “I don’t believe his mission came about by an arbitrary decision by his superiors,” he stated later. “Rather, it may have resulted from what I had said in Washington about the future importance of the Middle East.” Whether it was Archie who planted the seed of Kim’s first Middle East mission, it was not the last time that the cousins’ professional lives would intersect in ways that were to prove momentous, both personally and historically.
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AS KIM ROOSEVELT OBSERVED LATER
, the continuing influence of British imperialism was everywhere in wartime Cairo, from the “shabby grandeur” of Shepheard’s Hotel and its famous Long Bar to the “clipped British accent[s]” of many young Arab intellectuals. Kim might also have mentioned the sizeable presence of British spies. Cairo had been the headquarters of Britain’s Arab Bureau in World War I, and it performed a similar function in World War II, as home to the British Political Intelligence Centre Cairo, a vast spy station that coordinated a region-wide espionage network not just in the Middle East but in the Nazi-occupied Balkans as well (the British still lumped together
the countries of the eastern Mediterranean into one imperial zone, the “Near East”). The Balkan resistance movement was riddled with internal divisions, and these were replicated in Cairo itself, where, according to senior British official Bickham Sweet-Escott, “an atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion, and intrigue” prevailed. One common aim, however, did unite the British: keeping other Westerners out of their bailiwick. Small wonder, then, that Americans, especially those with a distaste for European imperialism, should have regarded the Egyptian capital with considerable misgivings. The wartime British minister resident, Harold Macmillan, summed up US attitudes in his diary: “Cairo is suspect—it is somehow connected in their minds with imperialism, Kipling and all that.”
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