America's Great Game (44 page)

Outside Arabist and anti-Zionist circles, however, the move was greeted as a masterly diplomatic game-play. The day after the announcement, Dulles lunched with Eisenhower loyalists Henry Luce and C. D. Jackson. The usually granite-faced secretary of state was positively skittish, telling the Time-Life executives that the dam decision was “as big a chess move as U.S. diplomacy had made in a long time” and that Nasser was now “in a hell of a spot.” The metaphor of a chess match between Dulles and Nasser, which at least granted the Egyptian leader the status of an actual player rather than an inanimate chess piece in the Great Game, was taken up by the previously pro-Nasser
Time
in its next issue. “On the broad chessboard of international diplomacy, the U.S. moved decisively last week in a gambit that took the breath of professionals for its daring,” declared the magazine, portraying the secretary of state, in an unusually glamorous light, as cool, masterful, and manly. “It was highly possible,”
Time
concluded, “that Chessmaster Dulles already had his opponents in check.”
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No one, not even the CIA Arabists, predicted Nasser’s countermove. On July 26, the day marking the climax of celebrations of the fourth anniversary of the 1952 Revolution, the Egyptian president, as he now was, told a crowd of some 250,000 in Alexandria that his government was nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, until then largely owned by British and French shareholders, and using the proceeds from
the operation of the canal to finance the building of the high dam. At a stroke, Nasser had produced a brilliantly simple solution to his country’s financial woes and an electrifying gesture of defiance against Western domination. To add insult to injury, in a lesser-noted passage of his two-and-a-half-hour speech recounting the history of “imperialistic efforts to thwart Egyptian independence,” he mischievously referred to the events immediately following the Czech arms deal of the previous year, including his “special interview” with an unnamed “American official” who had told him to disregard the “strong note” carried to Cairo by Assistant Secretary of State George Allen. According to Allen’s later recollection, this disclosure set off a flurry of speculation in Washington about the identity of the “despicable traitor,” which was fuelled further when Allen told the
Washington Post
that the official in question was “a CIA employe[e]” with “a long-time interest in the Arab world.” Allen further disclosed that the CIA officer—obviously Kim to anyone in the know—had been “reprimanded” for taking “it upon himself to become a diplomat” and thereby perform “a major disservice to State.” Whether Nasser enjoyed the resulting embarrassment to his old friend and adversary (who later described Allen’s action as “very naughty”) is not recorded, but what is clear is that he did relish the apoplectic reaction of Secretary of State Dulles, who now looked as foolish as a week earlier he had looked clever. Checkmate.
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The earth-shaking ramifications of the nationalization of the Suez Canal in the Middle East itself—the secret British collusion with the French and Israelis to seize back the canal, their joint invasion, and their eventual humiliating withdrawal—are world-famous events. Far less well known are the repercussions of the July 1956 crisis within the United States, where Kim Roosevelt’s Arabist citizen group, the American Friends of the Middle East, would experience a series of upheavals that would change its character forever, from that of a state-private alliance into something more akin to a simple tool of US foreign policy.
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FOR THOSE WHO CARED TO
look, there were already signs of trouble brewing around AFME, not just among its old enemies in the Zionist movement but, more worryingly, within its own camp. In March 1954, for example, and then again in May 1955, the organization had come under attack from retired businessman Benjamin H. Freedman, a convert
from Judaism to Roman Catholicism and anti-Zionist zealot. Freedman had offered AFME vice president Garland Evans Hopkins a $100,000 donation and then, when Hopkins declined the offer, decided that he must be dealing with a cunning Zionist front operation designed to lure Arabs and Muslims “into a situation inimical to their best interests.” It followed logically that the Dearborn Foundation (later revealed, of course, to be a funding conduit created by the CIA) must be a fence for some shadowy pro-Israel interests. Zionist publicists had already begun to ask awkward questions about AFME’s financial arrangements—in April 1953 a contributor to the
American Zionist
, James H. Sheldon, demanded to know just “who has been financing” this “elaborate propaganda machine”—so Freedman’s allegations, although wide of the mark, were unwelcome nonetheless.
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While Freedman was a rather disreputable figure, another anti-Zionist critic of AFME, Alfred A. Lilienthal, was less easy to dismiss. A descendant of a prominent Reform Jewish family and a State Department lawyer, Lilienthal had served in Cairo with George Levison during World War II, and in the late 1940s he helped run the Holyland Emergency Liaison Program (HELP), successor to Kim Roosevelt’s Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP). Afterward, he had developed a career as a freelance anti-Zionist publicist, in 1953 writing the widely reviewed
What Price Israel?
, a deliberately intemperate tract that established his reputation as the highest-profile Jewish critic of Zionism next to Elmer Berger. He also became something of a gadfly to AFME, constantly chiding it for being too restrained and polite in its anti-Zionism. “The inconsequential continues to be done with a big noise, while the essential is ignored in complete silence,” he claimed in a January 1955 report, blaming the organization’s chronic “self-censorship” on “the terms of certain contributions to remain neutral in the United States.” Another complaint of Lilienthal’s was that AFME was undemocratic, a self-elected cabal whose wealth and connections were serving to stifle genuine, organic opposition to the Zionists. On more than one occasion, the young firebrand tried to reform the core group of anti-Zionists who made up the CJP and HELP into a new, more “democratic” and “virile” organization that would truly carry the fight to Israel’s supporters in the United States.
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Meanwhile, mutterings of discontent were becoming audible in AFME’s other main constituency besides Jewish anti-Zionists, Protestant
Arabists. Officers of the Middle East Institute, an independent research and training institution founded in Washington, DC, in 1946 (and another recipient of subsidies from ARAMCO), resented the implicit suggestion in some publicity materials produced by AFME that it was the only organization interpreting the Arab world to the American people, and protested when AFME set up a Washington chapter without first consulting them. There was also disquiet in Arabist circles about Garland Hopkins’s 1954 Muslim-Christian conference in Lebanon, which some saw as an alien graft on the American missionary tradition in the area. Alford Carleton, president of Aleppo College, vigorously opposed the venture, which he feared might stir up rather than ameliorate sectarian tensions in the Levant, while back home the National Council of Churches’ Division of Foreign Missions discreetly investigated the Dearborn Foundation. As for some Jewish anti-Zionists, there was a nagging sense that AFME, with its vast yet mysteriously derived resources, was slowly colonizing a field previously occupied only by experienced volunteers acting with the clearest, and purest, of intentions.
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Nor were such concerns limited to nongovernment actors: AFME’s fuzzy background and mission were also causing misgivings in the State Department. In February 1953, Middle East hand Richard H. Sanger, observing the organization’s first annual conference, detected “an undercurrent of feeling that AFME did not quite know where it was going, should rethink its role in the United States, and reassess the value of its activities abroad.” Perhaps sensing that there was more to the group than met the eye, foreign service personnel were unsure how much overt US government agencies should do to promote it in the Middle East. “These are delicate and complex questions,” declared Near East information officer G. H. Damon. By February 1954, State’s unease about the CIA-funded group had grown into definite disapproval. AFME was in danger of becoming “merely a mouth-piece for pro-Arab and anti-Israel sentiments,” opined Sanger. “We plan to discuss this problem with . . . ARAMCO and certain other financial supporters of AFME who also have indicated their unhappiness.”
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As Sanger’s last statement implies, even AFME’s old backers in ARAMCO were growing dissatisfied with AFME. For Bill Eddy—the ex-OSS officer now working for the oil corporation—the problem was not the organization’s outspokenness on the Arab-Israeli dispute; if anything, the old Arabist thought that AFME was not doing enough
to counter Zionist publicity in the United States. A long-time correspondent of Alfred Lilienthal’s, Eddy urged Garland Hopkins to boost sales of
What Price Israel?
At the same time, he seems to have doubted the efficacy of AFME’s cultural diplomacy efforts overseas, sharing the missionaries’ concerns about newcomers to the Middle East muscling in on territory that had previously been the exclusive reserve of private volunteers. “This is . . . only one of many complaints” and “just another reason for me to doubt that Aramco should continue any generous support to the organization,” Eddy wrote Dorothy Thompson in February 1954, the same month that Sanger was proposing to discuss AFME with him.
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Increasingly, criticisms of AFME focused on one person: Garland Hopkins. Part of the problem was Hopkins’s high-handed management style, which appears to have antagonized a number of AFME employees. His relationship with Kay Sisto, the director of AFME’s Phoenix news bureau, was particularly bad—“our weekly editorial meetings have to date merely amounted to a series of proclamations by Mr. Hopkins,” Sisto complained to Thompson—and contributed to the discontinuation of the service in December 1954. There also seems to have been a personal element in the tensions between AFME and other Arabist and anti-Zionist activists, especially Alfred Lilienthal, who repeatedly singled out Hopkins in his criticism of the organization, accusing him of frittering away the considerable funds at his disposal on self-seeking showmanship. In fairness to Hopkins, tensions over editorial freedom and the resentment of rival groups with scarcer resources were far from unusual in the affairs of CIA front groups. That said, AFME’s chief executive officer does appear to have been an exceptionally “controversial figure,” as Richard Sanger put it in January 1955. “AFME is a good idea,” continued Sanger, “but it would seem not to have worked out well recently, partly due to Hopkins’s personality and characteristics.”
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Hopkins remained in charge of AFME for the time being, but changes were afoot that would eventually end his reign as executive vice president. These were heralded in late 1954, when ARAMCO suspended its subsidies to the organization. The precise circumstances are unclear, although it seems likely that Bill Eddy’s growing dissatisfaction with AFME’s domestic anti-Zionist record played a part. But this was probably not the only reason. With the increasing tendency of Middle Eastern leaders to nationalize their countries’ primary assets, some US
oil executives were growing nervous about the possible threat to their interests posed by Arab nationalism. AFME’s support of Gamal Nasser, along with Garland Hopkins’s past record of speaking up on behalf of Mohammed Mosaddeq in his confrontation with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, might therefore have begun to count against the organization. In any event, at the same time that the Arabian-based ARAMCO was retreating from the picture, new foundation donors with links to the Texas oil industry were appearing in AFME’s annual accounts. The San Jacinto Fund, created in March 1954 by Houston oilman John W. Mecom, now became the group’s second most generous patron after the Dearborn. In 1967, the year of the
Ramparts
revelations, the San Jacinto was identified as a CIA conduit, along with several other Houston-based foundations.
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These events were the backdrop to a major shake-up of AFME that began in July 1956, at precisely the same time John Foster Dulles decided to dump Nasser once and for all. First came a policy review initiated by the board of directors “in the light of the great political changes which have recently taken place in the Arab World” and “with the assumption that it was unlikely that AFME would . . . receive sizable contributions from other-than-Foundation sources.” The board’s main conclusions, as reported to Dorothy Thompson by Secretary-Treasurer Cornelius Van Engert, were that AFME should henceforth avoid “any activities which smack of propaganda and might be considered provocative”; scale down its domestic program to “the minimum required to support its overseas efforts”; and divorce itself altogether from specific projects such as Hopkins’s Continuing Committee on Muslim-Christian Cooperation. In case Thompson was in any doubt as to the authority of these recommendations, Engert explained that the board had made them “knowing the repeatedly expressed preferences” of the “one or two Foundations” that were AFME’s “principal supporters.” In other words, these were orders straight from the CIA.
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An even more blatant intervention in AFME’s affairs occurred on the morning of Tuesday, September 16. During a meeting with “Harold U. Stobart”—clearly a pseudonym for a CIA officer, likely Kim Roosevelt himself—Garland Hopkins was asked to resign. After considering his response for a few days, an overwrought Hopkins wrote “Harold” a remarkably bitter letter expressing “a deep sense of hurt at the summary way in which it has been proposed I leave AFME,”
demanding that Stobart continue to fund the Continuing Committee on Muslim-Christian Cooperation “as long as the essentially religious nature of that organization was not compromised,” and protesting that his treatment violated “the old concept of the dual nature and operation of the organization. . . . The conception of AFME has greatly altered since its [launch] in 1951. It has increasingly become simply a vehicle for your purposes.” Evidently, the CIA must have granted Hopkins’s request concerning the CCMCC, as he resigned the AFME vice presidency in January 1957 ostensibly “in order to devote more time to his work with the Continuing Committee on Muslim-Christian Cooperation,” receiving for his pains a parting gift of a silver plate presented him by the Presbyterian minister Edward Elson.
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