America's Great Game (53 page)

Significantly, though, the loudest local voice cautioning against military action belonged to the old Arabist William Eddy, who had moved from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon several years earlier to help run ARAMCO’s TAPline and was now living out his retirement in his country of birth. “Armed intervention by the Western Allies in the civil strife in Lebanon would be a catastrophe to American interests,” he told McClintock. As a Maronite Christian, Chamoun was not representative of Lebanon’s population, Eddy explained; for that matter, he was not even representative of the Maronite community, whose patriarch was trying to live in peace with the Muslim majority (this is an echo of Eddy’s earlier interest in promoting Christian-Muslim dialogue). Military support for the president would, therefore, be tantamount to “an act of aggression against at least half of the population,” invoke memories of earlier colonial depredations, and even invite comparison with the Soviet Union’s treatment of the “captive nations.” Moreover, Eddy continued, it would place Western troops in unnecessary danger, as the experience of the British in Palestine and the French in Algeria showed that occupying armies “are powerless to stem a spreading wave of violence and hate for the invaders.” Similar sentiments were also articulated by the other surviving member of the first generation of OSS Arabists, Harold B. Hoskins, who warned the State Department that a US landing in Lebanon might serve to “align the U.S. with the colonial powers and against the Moslem majority in the area.” “So long as the strife is so obviously domestic,” Eddy concluded in another of several such communications, this one to the president of TAPline, “I trust not one American nor British nor French soldier will set foot in Lebanon, to revive the memories of [the] Allies in Egypt, or Russians in Hungary.”
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Eddy’s advice was disregarded. In a desperate effort to rescue American credibility, the administration ordered troop landings in Beirut on July 15 and reluctantly supported a similar British action in Jordan two days later. The simultaneous operations, whose planning dated back to discussions in the Anglo-American Working Group on Syria the previous fall, were the most dramatic indication yet of the extent to which American power in the Middle East, once associated with an effort to replace the old imperial order with something new, had now become identified with the failing British and French colonial regimes. The whole affair evoked memories of Victorian “gunboat diplomacy,” or “the whiff of musketry” that Dean Acheson had detected in Egypt just
before the 1952 Revolution. At the same time, there was a slightly surreal quality to the landing itself, which far from meeting with local opposition seemed to inspire indifference. Many accounts since have dwelled on the fact that disembarking marines waded ashore among bikini-clad sunbathers and street boys hawking sodas. Bill Eddy, dismayed by the whole spectacle, tried at least to take pleasure in the presence in Beirut of his beloved Leathernecks and of President Eisenhower’s personal representative, his old friend Robert Murphy, who back in 1942 had paved the way diplomatically for the Operation TORCH landings in Morocco and Algeria.
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It was a final irony that Eddy, who sixteen years earlier had used his Arabist knowledge to prepare a World War II bridgehead for American forces to liberate North Africa, should now be watching aghast, as US troops returned to the Arab world to defend the old imperial order.

TWENTY-ONE

Epilogue

IRONICALLY, THE PROSPECTS FOR AMERICAN-ARAB
relations brightened briefly after the CIA Arabists’ departure from the scene. Shaken by the calamities of 1958, the Eisenhower administration called a truce in its confrontation with Nasserism. In a decision full of resonance for a later era, Ike and his advisors chose not to take military action against revolutionary Iraq, reasoning that doing so would lose the United States further support in the Arab world and create insuperable problems for any American occupation force. (They did, however, entertain various suggestions for covert action against the new Iraqi leader, ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim, among them a scheme proposed by the CIA’s Health Alteration Committee involving a poisoned handkerchief; it is also possible that the Agency was linked to a 1959 attempt on Qasim’s life involving a young Ba‘athist assassin by the name of Saddam Hussein.) The naturally pragmatic instincts of the president came further to the fore when, desperately ill with cancer, John Foster Dulles resigned as secretary of state in April 1959 and died the following month. The grudging accommodation with Arab nationalism that marked the final days of the Eisenhower presidency carried over into the administration
of John F. Kennedy, who even tried to reach out personally to Nasser, his very near contemporary.
¹

It was not long, however, before JFK ran into the same problems as his predecessor: the intractability of the Palestine conflict and the cleavage within the Arab world between the forces of nationalism and conservatism, which in 1962 coalesced around a civil war in the tiny Arabian country of Yemen, with the Egyptians and Saudis backing republican and monarchist proxies respectively, and the United States inevitably falling in behind its long-standing Saudi allies. Then came November 1963 and the elevation to the White House of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, a veteran Texan politico who turned out to be the most pro-Zionist president since Harry Truman, perceiving Israel as a sort of Middle Eastern Alamo and Nasser a latter-day Santa Anna. In response, the Egyptian leader rallied his nationalist base with increasingly anti-American speeches, proclaiming that he was “not going to accept gangsterism by cowboys.” Meanwhile, relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors worsened steadily, emboldening extremists on both sides and driving the region to the edge of all-out war.
²

If the Arabist defeats of the Eisenhower era established the basic pattern of US relations with the Middle East in the years that followed, they also shaped the outcome of subsequent domestic debates about the Arab-Israeli dispute. In 1963, Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings about “foreign agent” registration, chaired by William Fulbright (with some research assistance from Elmer Berger), revealed that Israeli-financed lobbying efforts in the United States, including “monitoring and combating of the efforts of ‘hostile’ groups,” had grown massively since the early 1950s. At the same time that the influence of the Israel Lobby was increasing, the structures of social and political power that had once supported Kim Roosevelt’s Arabist, anti-Zionist state-private network were breaking down. The previously undisputed ethnic dominance of East Coast Anglo-Americans was eroding; senior Protestant clergy such as Edward Elson, for example, no longer commanded the privileged access to national media they had enjoyed during the early 1950s. The botched 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (precisely the sort of military action Kim and the other Arabists had advised against) led to the forced resignation of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and tarnished the once-golden image of the CIA (Dulles died eight years later, in 1969). The first stirrings of domestic opposition
to the Vietnam War were chipping away at the anticommunist consensus that had enabled the CIA to maintain its cover in front organizations such as the American Friends of the Middle East. Indeed, Zionist publications like Si Kenen’s
Near East Report
had begun to hint heavily that AFME was receiving secret government funds. In 1966, fearing its exposure, Secretary of State Dean Rusk ordered a review of “continued U[nited] S[tates] G[overnment] support of AFME through CIA channels.” “They were planning for ways to cut it loose,” one of the organization’s officers explained later.
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These efforts came too late. On February 17, 1967, three days after carrying an advertisement announcing
Ramparts
magazine’s imminent exposé of CIA links with US student groups, the
New York Times
identified AFME as a recipient of grants from an Agency “pass-through,” the J. Frederick Brown Foundation. Similar stories about other foundations that had funded the group appeared over the course of the following week. This very public confirmation of what they had long suspected delighted AFME’s enemies. Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, chair of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), appealed to President Johnson to put an end to government funding for AFME, pointing out (according to one newspaper report) that the organization had “‘disseminated anti-Israel and anti-Zionist views prejudicial to the state of Israel,’ had slandered a large segment of the American people, and was a major supporter of the Organization of Arab Students, ‘which abuses the hospitality of the United States.’” Several pro-Israel congressmen chimed in with similar statements. AFME’s directors responded by insisting that they had not known about the true source of their funds and therefore that their program was unaffected by it (a common self-defense among “blown” Agency fronts) while scrambling to speed up the handover from the CIA to new, private sponsors. A meeting of the board to discuss these moves was scheduled for June 5, 1967. Hope was beginning to grow that AFME might yet survive what its new executive vice president, Orin D. Parker, later called “our 1967 War.”
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It was at precisely the moment that the directors were gathering in AFME’s Washington headquarters that word arrived of a surprise Israeli attack on Egypt. As Parker recalled later, the remainder of the day was spent “watching as the Six-Day War became hour by hour more devastating for the Arab states” (after destroying the Egyptian air force, the Israelis had turned their attention on Jordan and Syria). Before a week
was out, Israel had drubbed the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies, and had captured territories three times its original size, including the Sinai, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights. Meanwhile, with the United States now thoroughly identified in the Arab mind with Israel, violence against American targets escalated throughout the region. Even the pro-Arab AFME was compelled to close field stations in Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad (the office in the Iraqi capital was sacked and burned by a mob of students, its chief intended beneficiaries) and to order the evacuation of representatives’ families from Cairo, Tripoli, Beirut, and Amman. At home, pleas from the organization’s leaders to President Johnson that the United States “stop Israeli aggression by any measures necessary” fell on deaf ears. Coming as it did so soon after the
Ramparts
revelations, the Six-Day War completed the rout of the American Friends of the Middle East.
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DRAMATIC THOUGH THE EVENTS OF
1967—the two wars, one foreign and one domestic—undoubtedly were, the truth was that Kim Roosevelt’s Arabist, anti-Zionist citizen network had long been a spent force. The most poignant evidence of this was the unhappy personal fates of some of its best-known members: Dorothy Thompson, bitter until her death in 1961 about her treatment at the hands of the Zionists; Elmer Berger, increasingly isolated in the American Jewish community and eventually deposed from the leadership of the American Council for Judaism after the Six-Day War; and William Eddy, who died in Beirut in 1962, painfully conscious of the eclipse of American-Arab goodwill that the last years of his life had witnessed.

As for Kim Roosevelt himself, he never recaptured the élan and influence of his early life. His post-CIA business career was reasonably successful, especially after he resigned from Gulf Oil in 1964 and set up his own consultancy business, Kermit Roosevelt & Associates, using his contacts in Middle Eastern courts and cabinets to smooth the path in the region for such corporate clients as Raytheon and Northrop. A 1974 Northrop report estimated the value of contracts he had helped win for the company in Iran and Saudi Arabia at about a billion dollars. The following year, however, Kim was mired in scandal when a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee uncovered evidence of payoffs by Northrop to two Saudi air force generals in a fighter plane deal, and
pages of Kim’s correspondence with the company were made public, revealing that he had consulted with his “friends in the CIA” about the moves of rival firms.
⁶

Kim’s once promising literary career also tailed off in middle age. The
Saturday Evening Post
rejected his essay about the Suez crisis, “The Ghost of Suez,” and sales of his travelogue memoir about his trip to Africa retracing the footsteps of TR,
A Sentimental Safari
, proved disappointing. To rub salt in the wound, Miles Copeland’s 1969 debut,
The Game of Nations
, whose revelatory contents caused Kim much “trouble and embarrassment,” did relatively well. Most regrettably of all, what should have been the crowning glory of Kim’s career, the publication in 1979 of the well-rehearsed story of the 1953 Iran coup, turned out to be anything but. Even before it was published,
Countercoup
ran into problems: First, the opposition of the shah, who, after seeing an early draft, reportedly objected to his depiction as a “waverer forced into various crucial decisions” (it is not clear whether this protest influenced the flattering portrayal of the king contained in the book’s final version). Next, MI6 came forward demanding that all references to its involvement in the planning of TP-AJAX be removed. Rather than embarking on a complete rewrite, Kim hit on the ruse of simply substituting the name of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for that of the British secret service throughout the manuscript. When BP (as the AIOC now was) got wind of this development, it threatened libel action, causing Kim’s publisher, McGraw-Hill, to pulp the first print run after copies had already gone out to reviewers. By now, the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the shah and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini as supreme leader had taken place, and what previously had looked to most people like a US victory in the Cold War had become instead a classic case of blowback. As one reviewer who had seen a copy of the pulped edition put it, the 1953 coup was “an event that changed dramatically the course of modern Iranian political history,” yet here it was, represented as “an act of personal adventure entirely appropriate for the son of one of America’s great families.” Kim tried to acknowledge these developments in his foreword to the final version of
Countercoup
, which was eventually released in 1980, after one last delay caused by the US hostage crisis in Tehran. “What was a heroic story,” he lamented, “has gone on to become a tragic story.”
⁷