America's Great Game (49 page)

Rather than Egypt itself, the CIA would concentrate its efforts on containing the spread of Nasserism into other Arab states—a huge challenge, considering the massive popularity Nasser enjoyed throughout the Arab world as a result of Suez. Some countries were lower down the list of operational targets than others. Confronted by the surging tide of anti-Western, revolutionary pan-Arabism, the Saudi monarchy was thinking better of its flirtation with Cairo and starting to close ranks with the Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. A successful official visit to the United States by King Saud in January 1957, organized with the help of the CIA Arabists and Bill Eveland, expedited this development. As for Iraq, whose crown prince ‘Abd al-Ilah was in Washington at the same time as Saud, its pro-British government likewise seemed securely within the Western camp, although here too the United States did not leave anything to chance, providing training and other forms of support for Iraq’s internal security forces.
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With Iraq lined up behind the West, Saudi Arabia moving in the same direction, and Egypt beyond redemption, the CIA trained its sights instead on the three states in the most apparent danger of surrendering to revolutionary Arab nationalism and thereby, according to the Cold War logic of John Foster Dulles, communist influence: Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. These unfortunate countries, each only just emerging from the shadow of European imperialism, would constitute the playing field for the most hectic phase of CIA game playing yet.

IN THE SPRING OF 1957,
Jordan was still the “little, artificial, impoverished country” Kim Roosevelt had described nearly a decade earlier in
Arabs, Oil, and History
, an improbable creation of British imperialists forced to depend on regular cash injections for its very survival. Now, however, it was facing a set of even greater challenges. The British were withdrawing in the wake of Suez, taking their money with them. Despite urging from various sides, including young King Hussein, Whitehall, and even the US ambassador in Amman, Lester Mallory, Washington appeared reluctant to commit itself, at least publicly, to taking over the patronage of what was so obviously a client state—“pulling a British chestnut out of the fire,” as several officials put it.
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Meanwhile, with encouragement from both Cairo and Damascus, nationalist opposition to the Hashemite monarchy was growing within Jordan, especially among the country’s large population of displaced Palestinians. The king’s clever if ineffectual prime minister Sulayman al-Nabulsi seemed content to cooperate with leftist, republican elements. Even more worrying from the palace’s point of view, army officers such as ‘Ali Abu Nuwar, Glubb Pasha’s suave and opportunistic successor as commander of the Arab Legion, were beginning to question Hussein’s personal authority. Many Western observers regretfully concluded that, like the Egyptian Farouk before him, the young king’s days were numbered.

The contest between the palace and the opposition elements reached a climax in April. A face-off between Hussein and Prime Minister Nabulsi was accompanied by a series of ominous army maneuvers reputedly orchestrated by Abu Nuwar. On the evening of April 13, fighting broke out at the Zerqa military base north of Amman between junior Free Officers and bedouin soldiers loyal to the throne. Forcing Abu Nuwar to go with him, Hussein rushed to the scene and waded
into the melee, rallying the loyalist troops, who mobbed and kissed him. Cowering in a staff car, Abu Nuwar begged his king’s forgiveness and the following day was allowed to slink into exile in Syria. The only thing that had foiled the coup plot was young Hussein’s bravery.
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Or such, anyway, was the official version of the events at Zerqa. Within days, an alternative interpretation had begun to circulate, one that portrayed the crisis as deliberately contrived by royal officials and the American embassy in order to discredit the nationalist leadership and provide a pretext for restoring palace rule—as, in other words, an Iran-like countercoup. Perhaps not surprisingly, Nabulsi, Abu Nuwar, and several other alleged plotters all insisted on the accuracy of this second version. Less to be expected, so too did several Western sources, including none other than
Time
magazine. In late April, it carried a report, “The Road to Zerqa” (touted as “a wild story that combined the dash of a Latin American army coup with the wile of an Arabian Nights adventure”), claiming that what from the outside appeared to be “a nationalist-inspired mutiny” had in fact been “carefully planned” by the king.
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The truth about Zerqa, a seminal moment in Jordanian history, remains hotly contested even today. Undoubtedly, the king’s personal conduct in the darkness and confusion at the army base was impressive, and there certainly was a general air of mutinousness in the Jordanian army in the spring of 1957. However, the notion that there was a concerted plot to get rid of the king probably owed more to the royal imagination than to reality. The evidence subsequently used to convict the Free Officers accused of conspiring against Hussein was flimsy at best, and the lenient treatment received by Abu Nuwar and other supposed ringleaders in the conspiracy amounted to a tacit admission by the palace that the charges against them were only half-baked.
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What about the claim by Abu Nuwar and others that US officials helped Hussein manufacture the crisis? For once, Miles Copeland has very little to say about Zerqa, suggesting that he, at least, did not play any part. There are, however, other sources that shed some light on the question. British embassy reports to London indicate that, like Husni Za‘im before his 1949 coup in Syria, Hussein signaled his intentions to the Western powers prior to making his move. According to one British official, “the Americans seem to have been more closely in touch with King Hussein over all this than we have been.” As the Roosevelt cousins had observed during their visit to Jordan in 1956, the CIA station in Amman was in regular contact with the king, passing
him money to fund a personal intelligence service and offering a means of secret communication with Washington. Evidently, the Agency’s new regional headquarters in Lebanon provided a second back channel to Hussein’s palace. In his memoirs about the comings and goings at the St. Georges Hotel bar, the international press corps’ preferred watering hole in Beirut, journalist Saïd K. Aburish described a local CIA officer, James Barracks, consorting regularly with Jordan’s military attaché in Lebanon, Colonel Radi ‘Abdullah, in the run-up to Zerqa. In Aburish’s account, his father, the well-regarded
Time
reporter Abu Saïd, followed Barracks and ‘Abdullah to Amman and witnessed them staying together at the royal palace. This was the basis of the late-April
Time
story that portrayed Zerqa as the culmination of a royalist plot. Most intriguing of all, John Foster Dulles’s papers contain a tantalizing hint that Kim Roosevelt was in Jordan just as the power struggle was reaching its climax. Speaking about Jordan with his brother Allen on April 21, “the Sec. asked if Kermit Roosevelt was still there.” Was Kim in Amman fomenting a royalist countercoup against a nationalist prime minister, just as he had in Tehran in 1953? Miles Copeland’s
Game of Nations
does offer one tidbit about Zerqa. Nasser, so Miles claimed, believed that Kim had passed “‘disinformation’” to Nabulsi and Abu Nuwar “to delude them into thinking they could effect a coup against Hussein, thereby pushing them into Hussein’s trap.”
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Whatever the American contribution to Hussein’s
coup de palais
, Zerqa marked a turning point in US relations with Jordan. The earlier hesitancy about rescuing a British chestnut was gone. When on April 24, 1957, Hussein, facing a leftist backlash against his Hashemite restoration, used CIA channels to notify Washington that he intended to suspend the Jordanian constitution and impose martial law, the White House issued a public statement of support, warned Israel not to intervene, and ordered the Sixth Fleet to the Lebanese coast. Significantly, the language American officials used to describe Hussein also underwent a transformation: the young king graduated from being a “playboy” or “sophomore” to “a man and a monarch on our side.” On April 29, the United States granted Jordan $10 million of assistance, followed by another $10 million in May. In the same month, Eisenhower, on learning that Syrians were hatching plots against Hussein in Damascus, declared “that this was the time for CIA [to] worm its way in and attempt to . . . counter these moves.” The Agency stepped up its security relationship with the Jordanian palace, the following year sending a young intelligence
officer, Jack O’Connell, to foil a suspected Egyptian plot against Hussein; O’Connell subsequently became one of the king’s closest advisers. By 1958, annual US financial support for Jordan amounted to about $40 million. America had effectively inherited Britain’s tutelary role in the tiny Arab kingdom: the CIA was taking over from Glubb Pasha.
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Nor was this the only covert American intervention in the Arab Cold War during the spring of 1957. In Lebanon, the Francophile Maronite president Camille Chamoun was facing an incipient Arab nationalist insurgency. As in Jordan, Washington prevaricated before becoming involved on Chamoun’s side; had not earlier generations of Americans in the Levant supported Arab nationalists
against
the pro-French Christian Maronites? However, a crucial round of elections in Lebanon was looming in June, and with both Egypt and Syria obviously interfering in the campaigning, the Eisenhower administration gradually succumbed to entreaties from Britain, France, and Chamoun himself, who, like other Middle Eastern leaders before him, adeptly played the communist card. Clandestine payments, including briefcases stuffed with Lebanese pounds personally delivered by Bill Eveland to the presidential palace, helped tip the elections in favor of Chamoun’s pro-Western candidates. Indeed, as Allen Dulles himself admitted, the US intervention was perhaps
too
effective, as the “opposition to the current regime had been almost entirely eliminated, and the opposition did include some good men.”
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In the early summer of 1957, with Lebanon saved from Nasserite takeover, albeit on terms that undermined the legitimacy of President Chamoun’s government, Washington’s Cold War planners could be forgiven for patting themselves on the back. The Arab world’s conservative regimes were beginning to come together in opposition to the radical nationalists, as envisioned by the Eisenhower Doctrine. In terms of the personal contest between Kim Roosevelt and Gamal Nasser, the American seemed at last to be winning; the Egyptian was, so Allen Dulles crowed to his brother Foster, “fit to be tied
re
Jordan.” Now, with one mission apparently accomplished, American attention turned to a job left over from the previous year: overthrowing the pro-Nasser, leftist government of Syria.
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THE COLLAPSE OF ARCHIE ROOSEVELT’S
coup plot in the wake of Suez had all but destroyed the US position in Syria. Friends of America
such as Mikhail Ilyan had been forced to flee the country, while ‘Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, the leftist head of Syria’s intelligence organization, the Deuxième Bureau, capitalized on his successful detection of the plot to confirm his position as the dominant force in Syrian politics. With Americans now perceived as imperial intriguers in the mold of the British and French, local communists gained in respectability, and Soviet advisers began surfacing in Damascus. The announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine in these conditions elicited only suspicion and scorn.

Still, Washington had not given up on Syria altogether. The examples of Iran and Guatemala seemed to teach that it was possible to change regimes “without any military action whatsoever on the part of the United States,” or so at least Foster Dulles concluded. In November 1956, Allen Dulles had reported to the State Department on CIA capabilities in Syria after the dissolution of the coup network. “We are concentrating on building up our intelligence assets,” reads his recently declassified, and still partially redacted, report. “We are also intensively restudying the [
redaction
] with a view to reactivating it.” Special responsibility for Syria appears to have remained in the hands of Archie Roosevelt, who in January 1957 took over as acting chief of the Agency’s Near East division. Shortly afterward, Archie met with Mikhail Ilyan and agreed to fund another stab at unseating the Syrian government. In March, Syrian conservatives attempted to oust Sarraj from the Deuxième Bureau. On the afternoon of April 17, the Syrian national day, Allen Dulles told brother Foster, “they are keeping their fingers crossed
re
Syria for today.”
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As before, nothing came of Archie and Ilyan’s plotting. Sarraj not only survived the efforts to remove him but turned the tables on the Americans by using Syrian assets to destabilize the pro-Western governments in neighboring Jordan and Lebanon. Then, following resounding leftist victories in by-elections in May, the intelligence chief moved to create a Revolutionary Command Council, a Syrian version of the Egyptian Free Officers’ RCC. State Department observers concluded that the US government no longer possessed “any significant leverage in Syria” and was therefore unable “to influence directly the course of events in that country.” Allen Dulles, however, blamed the situation on a lack of conservative leadership—“no one there has guts or courage”—and insisted that “we have to start new planning. The situation is not hopeless.”
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It was time for the other Roosevelt cousin, the hero of Tehran, to take over. Arriving in Beirut, Kim held a series of planning meetings with
a senior MI6 officer, Frank Stallwood, and representatives of the Lebanese, Iraqi, and Jordanian governments (in the last case, Radi ‘Abdullah, the military attaché suspected of helping plot King Hussein’s countercoup). By now, the Americans were desperate enough to consider a leadership role for Adib al-Shishakli, the disreputable former president. The talks still led nowhere. According to Bill Eveland, who filled in for Kim when he departed on a side trip to Saudi Arabia, Frank Stallwood’s contribution was vitiated by his “fondness for Beirut’s bars”; moreover, the choice of meeting place—the ill-concealed apartment of the CIA Beirut station chief, Ghosn Zogby—meant that the comings and goings of the various representatives were under constant surveillance. “So obvious were their ‘covert’ gyrations,” Eveland claimed later, “that the Egyptian ambassador in Lebanon was reportedly taking bets on when and where the next U.S. coup would take place.”
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