America's Great Game (50 page)

At the same time that Kim Roosevelt was showing up in Beirut, a new CIA face appeared in Damascus. The son of an amateur boxer from Cincinnati, raised in poverty, and partially deaf, Howard E. “Rocky” Stone enjoyed none of the advantages of the Agency’s Grotonian set. However, he had worked his way to the CIA, where he had served with distinction in Kim Roosevelt’s TP-AJAX team, winning himself a reputation as a covert operations expert at the age of twenty-eight. Arriving in Damascus under official cover as embassy second secretary, the likable, no-nonsense Stone immediately set to work applying the lessons of Iran to Syria, trying to harness the forces of homegrown opposition—to “light a match,” as he put it later. Accompanying him in this mission was his intrepid wife, Alice Marie “Ahme” Stone, who during the earlier Tehran operation had helped guard Ardeshir Zahedi, son of Mosaddeq’s replacement, General Fazlollah Zahedi, hiding a pistol under her knitting.
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It was not long before Stone realized that there was no viable indigenous opposition in Syria. Undaunted, he began looking for potential conspirators among junior officers in the Syrian army, a search that led him to a charismatic young tank commander, Captain ‘Abdullah Atiyyah. According to Atiyyah’s later testimony, he and Stone met late one evening in early August at the apartment of a female US embassy official (possibly Elizabeth Sudmeir or Polly Curtis, both later identified as members of the Damascus CIA station by Bill Eveland). Stone, who was joined at the meeting by his deputy, Francis Jeton, spent several hours earnestly explaining the reasons why the young Syrian should oppose the communization
of his country and then went on to outline the operational plan for the proposed coup, which involved tanks securing the city of Qatanah and occupying key positions in Damascus. In response, Atiyyah demanded a personal meeting with the coup’s Syrian leaders before promising his cooperation. The talks ended at six the following morning with an agreement that an “ample” bundle of money would be left in the front compartment of an unlocked Ford parked on a nearby street for collection by a civilian accomplice of Atiyyah’s.
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The task of arranging the meeting demanded by Atiyyah fell to another Damascus CIA officer, Arthur C. Close, a young Arabist of missionary stock who was on close terms with the ex-president Shishakli and his former intelligence chief, now military attaché in Rome, Colonel Ibrahim al-Husseini. According to Eveland, the plan was to smuggle Husseini (“a moose of a man”) from Beirut into Damascus in the trunk of Close’s car. Meanwhile, Atiyyah was to go to a coffee shop at a prearranged time and wait for a signal: Rocky’s wife, Ahme, would pull up in a car with diplomatic tags, climb out, and write in a pad. The plan almost went awry when a small boy informed a nearby policeman that “this lady might be a spy trying to draw something.” Ahme escaped apprehension, however, and the meeting between Atiyyah and Husseini, the latter adorned by a fake beard and mustache, went ahead in a shuttered room in another CIA safe house. Despite the disguise, the two men recognized each other—Atiyyah had once served under Husseini—and the young officer pledged his allegiance to the leadership of the projected coup. Having sworn an oath of secrecy on a copy of the Koran he kept in his pocket, Husseini then explained that he was only conspiring with the Americans, or “donkeys” as he referred to them, because doing so presented the possibility of restoring Syria to its former greatness. “We shall not care for them,” he told Atiyyah, but “they are giving everything,” and “we must . . . gain as much as we can from them.” The conspirators “agreed to begin the move” and tied a knot in Atiyyah’s string of worry beads, signifying a date later in August; Francis Jeton then entered the room, and the men synchronized their watches. Everything seemed set.
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The only problem was that Atiyyah was a government informer. When first contacted by the Americans, he had immediately told his commanding officer, who in turn dispatched him to alert a “responsible man” in Damascus, where he turned over the money he had received from Stone to Sarraj’s Deuxième Bureau. Similar meetings with several
other junior officers, in which payments of up to $3 million changed hands, were likewise reported to the authorities. Sarraj, it seems, had allowed the conspiring to carry on so that he could see where it would lead. Ironically, just at this moment, early August 1957, the announcement of a trade agreement with Moscow caused a rift in Syria’s governing leftist coalition between communists and Ba‘athists, the latter resenting the growing Soviet influence on Syrian politics. This genuine political division offered the Eisenhower administration a much more promising opportunity for halting Syria’s leftward slide than any cooked-up military coup.
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In any case, Husseini’s surreptitious visit to Damascus seems to have persuaded Sarraj that things had gone far enough. On August 12, the Syrian government announced that it had discovered an “American plot,” arrested the leading Syrian conspirators (but not Husseini, who had returned to Rome), and surrounded the US embassy with thirty armed policemen. The following day, both Stone and Jeton were told to leave the country within twenty-four hours, along with the American military attaché, Robert W. Molloy, a blustery, rambunctious man who, although probably not involved in the coup planning, had a record of irritating the Syrian authorities. The US government responded in kind, declaring the Syrian ambassador in Washington persona non grata. While emphatically denying that there was any truth to Syrian charges, privately American officials acknowledged that the CIA had indeed been plotting a coup. Stone, depicted in newspaper reports as a bewildered embassy official with a hearing aid, was flown back to Washington. In one last, impotent gesture of defiance, Molloy deliberately ran the Syrian motorcyclist escorting him to Lebanon off the road just before reaching the border.
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Both Kim and Archie Roosevelt were fond of cautioning that regime change by covert means is impossible without the willing cooperation of substantial internal elements in the country concerned. Would that they had heeded their own advice in Syria.

THE FAILURE OF KIM’S COUP
plan in 1957 added to the damage done by Archie’s abortive operation of the previous year: more Syrian conservatives were purged, Sarraj’s reputation benefited from the exposure of yet another Western plot, and Soviet influence spread still further,
with the KGB sending a senior officer to reorganize the Deuxième Bureau. While the Soviets took advantage of the CIA’s failures in Syria to score a minor victory in the Cold War, the undoubted victor in terms of inter-Arab politics, the Arab Cold War, was Gamal Nasser. The Egyptian exploited the exposure of the “American plot” to bring Damascus, long considered the strategic key to achieving regional supremacy, closer into Egypt’s orbit and away from Hashemite Iraq. The conservative ascendancy of the early summer was fading, revealing the limits of the Eisenhower Doctrine. In the beleaguered US embassy in Damascus, a running joke captured the growing American sense of helplessness in the face of rampant Arab nationalism: “Que Serraj, Serraj; whatever will be, will be.”
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Yet even now Washington could not resist the urge to meddle. Indeed, with internally produced regime change now ruled out, the Eisenhower administration began to consider more drastic solutions to the Syrian “crisis.” Recycling the code name for the Anderson peace mission of early 1956, which by this point must have seemed a very long time ago, on August 21 Foster Dulles convened GAMMA, a top-secret task force with representatives from State, Defense, and the CIA (the last including Frank Wisner and Archie Roosevelt) charged with working “through the clock . . . to formulate a recommended program of further actions.” GAMMA’s main contribution was to agree to a proposal to send the eminent foreign service veteran Loy Henderson on a tour of the Middle East that seemed intended to incite military aggression against Syria by its Arab neighbors. Reporting back to Washington on September 7, Henderson told a meeting in the White House that he had discovered a deep sense of anxiety about Syria in the region, yet little concerted will to act; only Turkey, a NATO ally, showed much appetite for intervention, and encouraging the Turks risked alienating the other Arab countries, even possibly provoking the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Foster Dulles was determined to press ahead. If the United States failed to prevent the satellization of Syria, he told the White House gathering, “the success would go to Khrushchev’s head,” and the West might find itself “with a series of incidents like the experience with Hitler.”
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It was no coincidence that the secretary of state was employing an analogy previously used mainly by British observers of the Middle East; as Foster Dulles also informed the September 7 meeting, he and his staff had been in “close contact with the United Kingdom” throughout the
previous weeks. It was Harold Macmillan who could claim the main share of credit for what Dulles described, rather fulsomely, as this “genuine, intimate, and effective cooperation.” Shortly after the crisis had begun in August, the British prime minister had written “Foster,” expressing his gratitude “for the frank confidence which so clearly exists between us,” and his conviction that “unless something can be done to stop the Communist infiltration, the whole position may collapse.” Macmillan’s next step was to send his well-regarded private secretary, Frederick Bishop, to Washington to discuss the possible establishment of an ultrasecret US-UK committee to consider joint approaches to the problem. Bishop was assisted in his mission by the new British ambassador to the United States, Harold Caccia, who shared his prime minister’s interest in luring the Americans deeper into the Middle East. (“I would suggest that our first aim should be to exploit the opening which [the] latest Communist moves in Syria have given us,” he wrote the Foreign Office. “That could lead to the partnership in the Middle East which we have been seeking for years.”) An Anglo-American Working Group on Syria was duly constituted in early September, with Kim Roosevelt representing the CIA, and reported on the eighteenth. Caccia was delighted. “As in the hot wars in 1916 and 1941, the Americans have only come in reluctantly and late,” he wrote, perhaps betraying a lingering British bitterness about the American response to Suez. “But there is now a prospect in the Middle East which has never existed before.”
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The working group’s report was, in effect, a mishmash of earlier American and British proposals for covert action against Syria: stimulating internal resistance to the government, including the elimination of key figures such as Sarraj; provoking border incidents that would serve as a pretext for intervention by Iraq and, possibly, Jordan; and triggering tribal insurrections within Syria itself. Foster Dulles was not persuaded. There was, he complained during a meeting with British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd on September 21, a lack of “real evaluation of what could be done on a subversive basis in Syria.” Furthermore, he was now convinced “that Iraq and Jordan alone could never carry out the operation.” As Henderson’s tour had shown, the only regional power with the will and ability to do anything about Syria was Turkey, and the secretary of state was coming around to the view that, whatever the risks of a Turkish intervention—antagonizing Arab opinion and provoking Soviet retaliation, to which the United States would in turn have to respond—
they were preferable to the alternative, allowing a Soviet satellite to appear in the heart of the Arab world. In other words, Foster Dulles was contemplating the possibility of an armed confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Middle East. Something of Dulles’s emotional agitation at this time can be gauged from his instruction to those attending his meeting with Lloyd “that anyone having possession of the [top-secret] Report [of the Anglo-American Working Group] should protect it with his life if necessary.”
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By now, the British were beginning to regret their strategy of deliberately fanning the flames of US anticommunism. The Americans were behaving recklessly, seemingly willing to gamble everything on the riskiest of ventures. Syria had the makings of a “Suez in reverse,” wrote Macmillan privately. “If it were not serious . . . it would be rather comic.” Ironically, whereas in earlier crises it had been London that advocated external intervention in one or another Arab country, while Washington argued instead for internal measures, now the positions were reversed, with Whitehall urging the merits of the working group’s “Preferred Plan” over the “Turkish alternative.”

Fortunately for the British—indeed, for all concerned—events in the Middle East itself eventually steered the United States toward a more moderate course of action. With Egyptian propaganda stoking the fires of nationalism across the Arab world, the region’s more conservative regimes opted to tone down their calls for action against Syria and encouraged the Americans to do the same. Combined with discreet pressure from Macmillan and intimations from Moscow that a Turkish invasion of Syria would be met by a Soviet military response, these developments compelled a Dulles rethink. The secretary of state “was now firmly opposed to unilateral Turkish action and indeed has convinced himself this was always the case,” Caccia informed London on October 16. There was “no need for us to ‘rub it in,’” Macmillan responded. “Rather let us get Foster thinking about the next phase.”
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The “next phase” arrived soon enough in early November, when Dulles and Lloyd instructed the Anglo-American Working Group on Syria to initiate combined planning for a joint military intervention in Jordan and Lebanon in the event that either country’s government was again threatened by a coup (a plausible scenario, as events turned out the following year). Meanwhile, in an atmosphere of seriously dented American confidence caused by the Soviet launch of
Sputnik
, Washington drew
yet closer to London, setting up a series of top-secret Anglo-American committees modeled on the Syria Working Group to coordinate planning in a variety of other Cold War areas, the first such formal mechanisms for US-UK dialogue created since World War II. At the end of the year, Macmillan delightedly noted that the spirit of discord created by Suez had finally been dispelled. The reconciliation between the “cousins” that had begun in the intelligence services had not been derailed by the failure in Syria. Indeed, if anything, the crisis atmosphere that arose after the detection of the “American plot” helped cement relations. The British tactic of using secret back channels to secure American material support for traditional imperial interests in the Middle East had worked. The players might have been different after Suez, but the rules of the game were the same.
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