America's Great Game
The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
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Publisher Description
From the 9/11 attacks to waterboarding to drone strikes, relations between the United States and the Middle East seem caught in a downward spiral. And all too often, the Central Intelligence Agency has made the situation worse. But this crisis was not a historical inevitability -- far from it. Indeed, the earliest generation of CIA operatives was actually the region's staunchest western ally.
In America's Great Game, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA's pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency's three most influential -- and colorful -- officers in the Middle East. Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the first head of CIA covert action in the region; his cousin, Archie Roosevelt, was a Middle East scholar and chief of the Beirut station. The two Roosevelts joined combined forces with Miles Copeland, a maverick covert operations specialist who had joined the American intelligence establishment during World War II. With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet they were also fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the "Great Game," the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these "Arabists" propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of U.S. -- Middle Eastern relations for decades to come.
Based on a vast array of declassified government records, private papers, and personal interviews, America's Great Game tells the riveting story of the merry band of CIA officers whose spy games forever changed U.S. foreign policy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilford (The Mighty Wurlitzer), professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, delivers an account of spy games and political maneuvering featuring the aristocratic grandsons of Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit and Archie, and their compatriot Miles Copeland. Reared on exotic tales from the Arabian Nights, adventurous Roosevelt cousins joined the OSS precursor to the CIA and ventured afield as elite operatives in Iran, Egypt, and Syria in order to master the clandestine arts, engaging in "psy-war" and tempting targets with the ever-alluring "honey-trap" (in which women are used as lures). Wilford runs through a sordid record of American imperialist pretensions, replete with coups, countercoups, intrigue, subterfuge, non-diplomatic back-channels, and convoluted plots that sometimes "descended into farce" including attempts at "the possible use of hypnotism in political speech-making." Often these efforts resulted in futile gestures, gross missteps, or insuperable problems. Yet aside from its reliance upon "the spooky channel" and clandestine intrigue, the United States government used benign means of exercising influence in the region, establishing the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed the American University of Beirut) and the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO). Wilford's narrative of these ambitious imperialists and their machinations is a cautionary tale of "masculine adventure," or as the case may be, elite misadventure.
