America's Great Game (18 page)

At first, the Committee for Justice and Peace struck a responsive chord in Washington. In early March, Kim Roosevelt arranged an appointment for Gildersleeve, Daniel Bliss (grandson of the AUB founder), and the OSS ethnographer Carleton Coon to meet with George Marshall. The secretary of state “listened with interest” as the Arabists explained the Committee’s purpose; Gildersleeve later gathered that Marshall “was rather in sympathy with our views.” Shortly afterward, the CJP chair called on Warren R. Austin, head of the US delegation to the UN, to inform him about the Committee’s work and offer “its services in helping to bring about peace and justice in the Holy Land.” In the course of this meeting, she “was delighted to find that a new policy was being developed,” one very like the one she had urged on Marshall. The American Council for Judaism also performed its part: Rosenwald, Levison, and Berger all liaised with Roosevelt and Henderson in an effort to run interference on the Zionist movement, which was campaigning hard to preserve partition. The tide appeared to be turning. On March 8, Truman authorized Marshall to advance a plan for UN trusteeship of Palestine; on March 19, Warren Austin asked the
Security Council to approve the proposal. The CJP and ACJ activists were jubilant. Thanks to Kim Roosevelt, American anti-Zionism was at last making some headway.
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But the rejoicing did not last. The president, it turned out, immediately regretted his new position on partition, writing privately that the State Department had “pulled the rug out from under” him and made him into a “liar and double-crosser.” The trusteeship idea proved hard to translate into practice, and with the May deadline for the withdrawal of British troops approaching fast, Jewish forces in Palestine achieved a clear military advantage over their Arab opponents. Meanwhile, US Zionists cranked up the pressure on a White House increasingly preoccupied by the upcoming November presidential election, whose outcome, some observers predicted, would be determined by the voting behavior of East Coast Jews. The CJP and ACJ responded by redoubling their own publicity efforts. Kim Roosevelt in particular worked frenetically to counter the “renewed effort to bring about the partitioning of Palestine,” traveling to San Francisco to address a number of meetings organized by George Levison, drafting news releases, and huddling about strategy with Loy Henderson. Nonetheless, he found the mood among his Washington allies “gloomy,” as he reported to ACJ president Lessing Rosenwald, and access to the White House—“the key to the whole situation”—impossible. By early May, Kim knew that the game was up, even as he and his allies rushed between meetings and rallies. “The fact is I am afraid that present conditions are extremely inauspicious,” he wrote Elmer Berger on May 10, with uncharacteristic despondency. “Right at the moment I am feeling rather discouraged.” On May 14, following a series of extraordinarily tense and ill-tempered meetings between State Department and White House officials, and just eleven minutes after Zionist leaders in Tel Aviv had declared their independence, a spokesman for the president announced formal US recognition of the new state of Israel.
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For the second time, the anti-Zionists had failed to carry America with them. This defeat was all the more bitter because of the bloody Arab-Israeli war that followed, and the accompanying flight and expulsion of Arab refugees from Palestine. Other setbacks followed in short order. Allegations of anti-Semitism aimed at CJP officers began to stick, especially to Virginia Gildersleeve, who was not helped by her reputation for deliberately fostering a genteel, WASP-ish atmosphere at
Barnard that many Jewish students found hostile. The appointment of their old friend Dean Acheson as successor to George Marshall in January 1949 provided some encouragement to the anti-Zionists, but it soon became clear that the new secretary of state intended to keep the CJP and American Council for Judaism at arm’s length. Nor did the publication of
Arabs, Oil, and History
in April 1949 have quite the impact that Kim had hoped it would, possibly because, as he informed Berger, Zionist pressure had induced major reviewers, such as the Sunday
New York Times
, to bury it. The grandson of TR and the anti-Zionist rabbi commiserated with each as they rode in the Roosevelt family car back to Washington after an ACJ lecture in Baltimore, their “eloquent moans” just audible “above the rattle of the ten-year old Ford.” Berger summed up the feeling of being an anti-Zionist in the late 1940s rather well. It was, he told Kim in March 1949, like marching through the ranks of a parade “in the opposite direction.”
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KIM ROOSEVELT AND HIS ALLIES
had failed to prevent US recognition of Israel in 1948, much as the OSS Arabists had been unable to avert the partition of Palestine the year before. Where Kim had done much better than the previous generation of Arabists was in promoting the Arab cause to the American public and organizing the various forces of anti-Zionism in US society, including anti-Zionist Jews. Thanks to his efforts, there now existed a dynamic, well-coordinated, and deeply committed anti-Zionist network capable of being reactivated in more auspicious times.

Nor were the prospects for Arabism on the ground in the Middle East itself entirely gloomy. Indeed, in Syria, the new CIA station chief was having the time of his life.

EIGHT

The Right Kind of Leader? Syria, 1949

MILES COPELAND WAS DELIGHTED
. Told to expect a “hardship post” when he set off for Damascus in September 1947, he arrived to find a city felicitously located between the mountains of Lebanon and the Syrian desert, a harmonious blend of gracious French avenues and picturesque cobbled streets. His wife, Lorraine, and their two children joined him early in 1948, and the young family moved into a seven-bedroom villa with a staff of servants drawn from nearby Christian villages. While Miles went to work under his cover as a foreign service officer at the legation (the US post in Damascus was not yet a full-fledged embassy), Lorraine shopped in the city’s bustling souks and hitched plane rides with the US air attaché to other parts of the region. The legation was tightly run by Ambassador James Hugh Keeley Jr., an Arabist with long area experience who had arrived in Damascus shortly after Copeland, and morale among American officials was high.

The Copelands socialized with Miles’s colleagues and members of the Levant’s expatriate European community. As a childhood fan of Lawrence of Arabia, Lorraine was particularly thrilled to meet his
World War I companion, Colonel W. F. Stirling. But they did not confine themselves to Western circles, finding a warm welcome among elite Damascenes still well disposed toward the United States after a century of American “disinterested benevolence” in the region, and the legation’s recent assistance in expelling the French. On weekends, the Copelands went picnicking in the surrounding countryside, often receiving spontaneous offers of hospitality from villagers who turned out to greet them. Sometimes they were joined on these outings by Archie Roosevelt, or they would drive across the mountains to see him in Beirut, where he was settling down to an equally pleasant existence in a little house in the Manara quarter, overlooking the waterfront. One summer, Archie and the Copelands rented a stone cottage together in the mountains above Beirut, taking long walks among the olive groves during the day and watching the city lights begin to twinkle below them as dusk gathered. It was “a wonderful period in our lives,” Lorraine recalled later.
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Professionally, Miles and Archie faced a formidable task: building an espionage network almost from scratch. In Archie’s case, the challenge was all the greater because, as he soon realized, the principal Lebanese agent he had inherited from the previous Beirut station chief, Dan Dennett, was making up his reports (Archie caught him in the act by inventing a story about a nonexistent Soviet embassy official that the agent duly confirmed as true). It was not long, however, before the young Arabist, putting to good use the language skills and capacity for cultural immersion he had already demonstrated in North Africa, was receiving a steady stream of intelligence reports in French, Arabic, and Russian from credible local sources. Indeed, newly independent Lebanon, with its many ethnic and religious communities, turned out to be the perfect espionage environment for the eternally curious, multilingual Archie Roosevelt. It was as if Harold Hoskins’s abortive wartime Expedition 90 had at long last arrived at its intended destination, only in one-man form.
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In Damascus, meanwhile, Miles Copeland was proving no slouch in the espionage stakes, rapidly acquiring good Arabic (although he always spoke it with an Alabama drawl), recruiting local agents (such as a Damascus loan shark, who in turn helped him cultivate sources in the Ministry of Defense), and building up contacts in the Syrian intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau. Whether his reporting to headquarters ever matched the quality of Archie’s, though, is doubtful. According to Miles’s later recollection, Archie would chide him “for fabricating
his reports.” “What’s the difference between my fabricating reports and your letting your agents do it?” Miles would retort. “At least mine make sense.”
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As this last comment suggests, there was more than a hint of game playing about both Miles’s and Archie’s early CIA careers in the Middle East. Almost immediately after arriving in the Levant, the two young men incurred the ire of their divisional boss, Mike Mitchell, by questioning his negative assessment of another Middle Eastern station chief they had encountered en route. Mitchell, according to Archie a rather humorless, moralistic Arab American of missionary stock, responded with an “eyes only” cable to Archie, stating, “Such irresponsible freewheeling will not be tolerated in the future.” Future reprimands of this nature were also directed to Archie in Lebanon rather than Miles in Syria, reflecting, presumably, the higher status of the Beirut station. Yet there was no shortage of questionable behavior on Miles’s part.

This included one occasion, clearly much embellished in Copeland family legend, when a bedouin merchant turned up at the Damascus legation with a roll of parchment that Miles carried to the building’s roof for photographing with his CIA-issue camera, in the process losing several pieces to the wind, only later to realize that they were a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Most of my station chiefs test the ice, then move cautiously across the pool,” Mitchell told a friend of Archie’s. “Miles, though, is an architect by nature—he’d build a submarine. And Archie would just rush on across the thin ice to the opposite side, never mind the consequences.” The assessment would seem unfair to Archie, except that there was often a whiff of mischief making in the air whenever he and Miles got together. “Miles appears,” reads Archie’s diary for October 14, 1947. “Stupid tel[egram] from Wash[ington]. Lots of fun as ever.” Ten days later: “Miles appears. Usual confusion.”
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Later, the phenomenon of US intelligence operatives freewheeling in the Middle East would acquire more sinister overtones. At this early stage, however, such antics had an innocent, even benign quality to them. In
The Game of Nations
, Miles Copeland described the first American covert operations in post-mandate Syria as being focused on the elimination of corruption and intimidation in national elections held in July 1947. As he went on to explain, these efforts arose out of the idealistic impulses of the first generation of US government officers in the Levant, “mostly former missionaries and romantics,” who wanted
to free the Arab world of the last shackles of “Turkish or French subjection,” and believed “that changing the leadership in Middle Eastern countries . . . was a matter of removing certain artificial props which were keeping in power leaders who, by rights, shouldn’t be there in the first place.” Miles even suggested that Syria was consciously viewed by US officials as a “pilot project” for testing the American capacity for exerting a democratizing influence on Arab countries. Although there is little other documentary evidence of the existence of such a program, we have little reason to disbelieve Miles on this score, as what he said about the American desire to aid “the rise of ‘the right kind of leaders’” fits with what else we know about OSS and CIA Arabism in the 1940s, including the program outlined in Kim Roosevelt’s
Arabs, Oil, and History
for boosting the position of young nationalist reformers in Arab society. Miles’s “right kind of leaders” sounds a lot like Kim’s “Young Effendis.”
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If this was the original American game plan, it was upset by the UN vote on Palestine in November 1947. In Syria, the consequences of partition were manifold, beginning with a precipitous decline in the United States’ popularity. “Everyone was aghast,” remembered Lorraine Copeland. A mob besieged the legation in Damascus, tearing down the US flag and burning cars. Legation officials responded by working frantically to salvage America’s image, remonstrating with Washington about its Palestine policy and striving to mend bridges to Syrian politicians. The initial turbulence abated as a result but flared up again with the declaration of Israeli statehood the following year and with the first anniversary of the partition vote, which was greeted with a fresh round of rioting in Damascus.
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