“The genius of you Americans,” the Egyptian president #Gamal_Abdel_Nasser teasingly told a senior #C.I.A. official, Miles A. Copeland Jr., in the late 1950s, “is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves.”
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If hard to imagine today, there were two distinct moments when the United States 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 C.I.A.’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East.”
Wilford centers 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.
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Intent on channeling the nationalistic fervor then sweeping the Middle East to American benefit, the young C.I.A. “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. Kim Roosevelt carried this effort to the domestic front by funneling C.I.A. money to an anti-Zionist and pro-Arab nationalist lobbying group called the American Friends of the Middle East.
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The first damper on their fun was quick in coming. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the Truman administration’s immediate recognition of Israeli independence spurred a wave of anti-Americanism across the Arab world. But if a heavy blow, that event was not a mortal one; in the years immediately after, the C.I.A. Arabists continued to woo an array of nationalist leaders, the so-called Young Effendis. These included the then-colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the mastermind of the 1952 Free Officers coup that ousted Britain’s satrap in Cairo, King Farouk.
A change in Washington put an end to the flirtations. For this, Wilford places blame chiefly on one man: President Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles. As the Cold War deepened, Dulles came to regard the participants in nationalistic or anticolonial movements in the Arab world — indeed, all across the globe — as potential Communist fellow travelers, their causes not to be encouraged but strangled in the crib. 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 C.I.A. 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.
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Obviously, this is a wonderfully rich canvas upon which to draw, but in his effort to do so, Wilford hobbles himself in two critical ways. The first difficulty is not entirely of his making. Denied access to the relevant C.I.A. 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. (...)
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