AMERICA'S GREAT GAME
The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
Hugh Wilford
Basic Books; 342 pages; $29.99
"The genius of you Americans," the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser teasingly told a senior CIA official, Miles A Copeland Jr, in the late 1950s, "is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves."
By then, Nasser had good reason to gloat. For years, the State Department and the CIA had sought to marginalise - if not altogether eliminate - the upstart Egyptian leader. Instead, through a colossal series of missteps, the Eisenhower administration had helped catapult Nasser onto the global stage, where he became the undisputed spokesman for Pan-Arab nationalism and the United States' chief nemesis in the Middle East.
If hard to imagine today, there were two distinct moments when the US was regarded as a beacon of hope to the peoples of the Middle East. The first opportunity was thrown away at the end of World War I when, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab leaders sued for either independence or American conservatorship, believing that the nation's "disinterested benevolence" might save them from the imperial grasps of Britain and France. By turning his back on those desires, Woodrow Wilson consigned the region to its fate: a carving up by the European powers that created the fractious borders of today. At the end of World War II, however, with the British and French empires in rapid and terminal decline, the Americans were granted a do-over. It is this vitally important juncture in Middle Eastern history that is the subject of Hugh Wilford's frustratingly uneven America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East.
Mr Wilford centres his narrative on just three men who, by his account, were largely responsible for that shaping: Copeland, along with Archie and Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt, first cousins and both grandsons of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Born to privilege and status, the Roosevelt boys were Groton- and Harvard-educated Yankee blue bloods. Copeland, by contrast, was a college dropout from Alabama, an aspiring jazz trumpeter and self-described riverboat gambler. What united the three men in the post-World War II era was a thirst for adventure and - owing to their varied intelligence roles during the war - an abiding concern for the promotion of American interests through "crypto-diplomacy". In the late 1940s, all signed on with the newly created CIA to become the principal American intelligence gatherers in the Middle East, Copeland and Archie Roosevelt as the CIA station chiefs in Damascus and Beirut, Kim Roosevelt as director of the region's covert operations unit. Testament to the pasted-together nature of America's new spy agency, not one of this powerful troika had yet turned 35.
They were also joined together by a robust view of their job duties. Intent on channelling the nationalistic fervour then sweeping the Middle East to American benefit, the young CIA "Arabists" forged ties with progressive politicians and military officers throughout the region, and worked against the British- and French-installed puppet regimes whose grip on power was slipping by the day.
A change in Washington put an end to the flirtations. For this, Mr Wilford places blame chiefly on one man: President Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles. When it came to the Middle East, Dulles's hostility to any reformist movement became so pronounced - being rid of Nasser was a special obsession - that many in the CIA openly wondered if the secretary of state had gone mad. Not that this view was likely to gain much in-house support, considering that John Foster's brother, Allen, was the director of central intelligence.
What is most remarkable in this tale, though, is how quickly our three Arabists were willing to jump to the other side of the street, to go from identifying and encouraging progressive Arab leaders to trying to neutralise them, to go from deriding the client regimes left behind by the European powers to cozying up to them. Certainly the most infamous example was Kim Roosevelt's intimate role in the 1953 coup that toppled the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
Obviously, this is a wonderfully rich canvas upon which to draw, but in his effort to do so, Mr Wilford hobbles himself in two critical ways. The first difficulty is not entirely of his making. Denied access to the relevant CIA documents, he has had to rely heavily on the published records and private papers of his three principal characters, but - perhaps to be expected of spies - none of these come across as particularly trustworthy.
The second problem is downright baffling. A professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, Mr Wilford clearly labours under the misconception that the landmark moments of 1950s Middle Eastern history are common knowledge (if the past half-century is any judge, they aren't even common knowledge at the CIA), and chooses to glide over them in favour of the trivial and obscure.
In lieu of a reminder of those ramifications, the reader is then subjected to a 10-page disquisition on the organisational restructuring and revamped pamphleteering of the American Friends of the Middle East, an outfit most noteworthy, by all evidence, for its utter uselessness. This is history drained not just of its interesting bits but of its very import, and at such times Mr Wilford seems less an inartful storyteller than a kind of lecture-hall sadist.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
