America's Great Game (15 page)

In the summer of 1942, the Counter Intelligence Corps began deploying overseas, starting with a detachment that joined the TORCH invasion force in North Africa. Miles Copeland’s destination was London, where he took up residence in a flat near the Albert Hall with Kearns and another CIC officer, the writer and editor James M. Eichelberger. It was not long before he was up to his old tricks, testing security measures at US Army high command by stealing a safe from its headquarters on Grosvenor Square, and idly plotting the assassination of a rival for the affections of the piano prodigy Moura Lympany. “I would not actually have gone through with the murder plot,” he reassured readers later. “I’ve killed, oh, perhaps half a dozen people since, but never anyone
with whom I’ve mixed socially
.”
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Something of a Pauline conversion took place, however, when Copeland was sent on the tough Inter-Allied Commando training course in the Scottish highlands and then, on returning to London, met a young British woman at an English Speaking Union reception for US troops. Elizabeth Lorraine Adie, the daughter of an eminent Harley Street neurosurgeon, was herself engaged in intelligence work, researching the itineraries of French trains for the wartime British political warfare unit, the Special Operations Executive, “so the Resistance could blow them
up,” as she explained later. After a whirlwind Anglo-American romance, Miles and Lorraine were married in September 1942 (Frank Kearns was the best man) and settled down to life together in her mother’s North London home, where they were joined in May 1944 by Miles III. Miles Jr. now applied himself to his work with rather more purpose, organizing and directing a CIC school for orienting American counterintelligence agents assigned to the European theater, an initiative that earned him the Legion of Merit.
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Copeland also began putting his interest in game playing to uses other than gambling, participating in Grosvenor Square war games intended to gauge likely German responses to Operation OVERLORD, the planned Allied invasion of occupied northwest France. Discussions about the possibility that Nazi scientists had developed atomic weapons brought him briefly into the orbit of Boris T. Pash, a Russian-born security officer for the US nuclear bomb research program, the Manhattan Project, who toward the end of the war led the American charge to beat the advancing Red Army to research facilities in Germany. Copeland’s own war ended in Paris, which he and a few CIC colleagues had entered well in advance of the main OVERLORD invasion force, although he later admitted that they were not, as he had boasted for a while, the first Americans in the liberated city. They were merely “the first Americans to enter Paris with no particular good reason.” Drinking champagne, eating caviar, and carousing with Ernest Hemingway consumed several days, after which the young American went to work interrogating leading French collaborators and German espionage agents and then compiling the “CIC Interrogation Manual” for the benefit of other agents. Impressed by his literary efforts, in February 1945 his superiors appointed Captain Copeland, as he now was, to write a history of US counterintelligence activities in Europe. It was, as he later wrote, a project that required him to interview various Nazi scientists and spies who, “once the Second World War was over and forgotten, would be valuable to us in facing any new enemies that might have grown out of it.”
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Copeland returned to Washington in September 1945 and began work for the Strategic Services Unit, a stopgap agency that housed the orphan intelligence and counterespionage services of the defunct OSS. Lorraine joined him a year later after receiving her naturalization papers, and the family, augmented by the arrival of a daughter, Lennie, moved into the Parkfairfax development in Alexandria, Virginia. Over the next
two years, Copeland shuttled between the temporary buildings on the Washington mall that housed the nation’s nascent intelligence community, variously working on the German desk of the counterespionage branch, X-2; devising methods for recruiting agents to spy on the Soviets; and drawing up organizational charts for the handover of special operations to the new Central Intelligence Agency. Whether these contributions justified his subsequent self-depiction as a founding father of the CIA is a matter of interpretation. Kim Roosevelt, soon to be his boss in the Agency’s Near East division, was, for one, “somewhat dismissive” of this claim. “That’s Miles,” he would say, with a mixture of amusement and irritation.
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The next big development in Copeland’s picaresque career was his September 1947 posting to Damascus as CIA station chief.
The Game Player
records that it was Stephen Penrose, in his postwar role as head of special operations in the Central Intelligence Group, who first raised the possibility of a Middle Eastern assignment for Copeland. Nazi fugitives were resurfacing in the capital cities of the region, and Penrose believed that the former Counter Intelligence Corps officer’s experience of interrogating potentially useful German prisoners of war, combined with his reputation for amorality—his “well-known glandular deficiency,” as Copeland himself described it—made him the perfect man to go and investigate. His interest piqued, Copeland then read a report predicting that the Zionist-Arab clash in Palestine was bound to create chronic conflict in the Middle East and that, in these circumstances, the best the United States could do was limit the resulting damage to its own interests in the area, by covert means if necessary.
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Excited by “the prospect of engaging in a bit of clandestine hanky-panky with the justification that it was in the national interest,” Copeland learned that the front-runner for the job of commanding the new CIA’s station in Syria, “a rough and ready Marine captain,” had failed to obtain the requisite security clearance because he had confessed to an experimental sexual encounter with a male RAF pilot during the war. Offered the post instead, Copeland hesitated only briefly before accepting. The factor that swung his decision, he explained later, was his meeting Archie Roosevelt, who had just been offered the equivalent job in Beirut. Although something of an odd couple—“me a New Orleans jazz musician and Tennessee riverboat gambler, he a member in good standing of what passes for nobility in America,” as Copeland put it in
a British newspaper obituary for Archie many years later—the two men got on famously, each delighted by the other’s “wicked sense of humor” and united by their shared belief that the main threat to US national security now came from the Soviet Union.
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Hence it was that Miles Copeland, a clever young man from nowhere in particular—“The Guest No One Invites Again,” as he described himself later—found himself sitting alongside a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt on his way to the Middle East. Arriving in Beirut on September 13, 1947, Copeland spent a convivial evening with Archie; the following day he traveled on to Damascus in the legation car. Archie, meanwhile, was joined in Beirut two days later by Kim Roosevelt, who was then passing through Lebanon on another of his slightly mysterious regional tours. The cousins rapidly fell into their old routine of traveling together, and on Thursday, September 18—the same day the CIA was formally established in Washington—they drove over the mountains to find out how Miles was faring in his new duties. The three men hit it off instantly, following in T. E. Lawrence’s footsteps by setting out “on a tour of Crusader castles and off-the-beaten-path places,” as Copeland described it later. First stop was Aleppo, where, according to Archie’s diary, they climbed the steps of the ancient fortified citadel, stronghold of generations of foreign conquerors, including Greeks, Mongols, and Ottomans, and gazed out at “the whole city stretching green around us.” The Orient lay awaiting a new wave of foreigners.
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Part Two

Warm-Up, 1947–1949

SEVEN

Game Plan

WHEN THEY CAME TO THE
Middle East in the fall of 1947, the CIA Arabists found a region greatly but not entirely transformed by the fading of European colonial power. The French had reluctantly withdrawn from Lebanon and Syria the previous year (thanks in part to American pressure), although both countries would continue to be troubled by tribal and sectarian divisions left over from the divide-and-rule days of the French mandate. Also in 1946, the emirate of Transjordan had acquired its independence from Britain and become a Hashemite kingdom. Nevertheless, like its supposedly independent Hashemite neighbor Iraq, Transjordan remained under de facto British control. A similar situation obtained in Egypt, where, after a brief show of independence during the war that ended when he was humiliatingly slapped down by British ambassador Sir Miles Lampson, young King Farouk ruled in name only. Among the Arab world’s monarchs, only the United States’ new friend, Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, had really succeeded in emerging from under the sway of the European powers.

Such was the state of affairs awaiting the newly arrived Americans. How would they respond? Would they perpetuate Western imperialism in the Middle East, creating another “Covert Empire” like that of the
British, or would they honor the Arabist legacy of their OSS forebears and help the Arabs at last achieve true independence? It would not be until two years later, in 1949, when the first Arab coup of the Cold War era was launched in Syria, that the CIA Arabists’ principles would be put to the test in the Middle East itself. In the meantime, however, an answer of sorts would be provided back in the United States, where Kim Roosevelt, his wartime fascination with the Arab world strengthened by a return trip there in 1947, was hard at work on two major projects: telling the story of the Arabs to the American public and building a movement capable of countering the growing influence of Zionism on US foreign policy.

WHEREAS ARCHIE ROOSEVELT AND MILES
Copeland, in their new role as CIA station chiefs, were in the Middle East on official business in September 1947, Kim Roosevelt was traveling as a private citizen. Although he had enjoyed some aspects of his postwar assignment as OSS historian—commuting from Washington to New York to interview Bill Donovan and Allen Dulles, for example—Kim had resented the “horrible officialese language” in which he was compelled to write. With the project finally finished in May 1947, he promptly resigned from government employment and set about trying to live off his private income from the Willard family’s real estate holdings, supplemented by occasional writing and lecturing engagements. He would carry on in this fashion for the next two years, recreating the lifestyle of his father, Kermit, a gentleman amateur who performed secret service for the state out of a sense of patriotic rather than professional duty. Meanwhile, as befitted a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, Kim engaged conspicuously in public life, speaking at Republican Party meetings and writing about the Middle East in such venues as
Harper’s
magazine (once a publishing platform for TR himself).
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It was just such a writing assignment—a book contract with Harper—that brought Kim back to the Middle East for the first time since the war in May 1947, only a week after his government contract had ended. Arriving in Cairo accompanied by his wife, Polly, who planned to sell photographs of the trip to the
Saturday Evening Post
, Kim headed for his old haunt, Shepheard’s Hotel, to reacquaint himself with the passing American oilmen, archaeologists, and reporters who
frequented the Long Bar. After nearly a month in Egypt, it was on to Lebanon—a happy development for Polly, who had been overwhelmed by the heat and dirt of Cairo and had once landed in jail when an angry crowd took exception to her photographing some street children. Beirut, like “a European Mediterranean town except for a few Arab costumes here and there,” as a relieved Polly observed, became the couple’s headquarters for the remainder of their half-year tour of the Middle East, which included excursions to Palestine, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
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In all these places, Kim met with an amazing range of local political, religious, and tribal leaders, including no fewer than four kings and one regent. This extraordinary degree of access to the region’s elites reflected both the hard work he had put into cultivating Middle Eastern contacts during his wartime posting in Cairo—several, of course, the result of introductions by Archie—and the cachet of the Roosevelt family name. It seems also that Kim was acting as a “semi-official U.S. representative,” as he wrote his mother, Belle, with the blessing if not the encouragement of the many powerful figures he still knew in the US foreign policy establishment. “We are royally received everywhere,” he explained, after delivering a statement on US policy to the regent and prime minister of Iraq. “It’s not exactly a reporter’s job, but no one seems to care.” Like his earlier undercover OSS mission, Kim’s trip had more than one purpose.
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