Posts
America's
Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle
East, by Hugh Wilford
Wilford continues the story with the Americans moving into
Cairo; there was a need to coordinate Lend-Lease activities in the region. It turns out that Lend-Lease was useful for
purposes other than sending Jeeps to Europe.
From the time of his transfer from the State Department to the OSS in
April 1944…
…Kim [Roosevelt] was a key player
in Project SOPHIA, a secret program for spreading OSS officers throughout the
region under cover of [Lend-Lease.]
Bill Donovan had been looking into setting up a Cairo office
for the OSS as early as 1942; the office was established in May 1943. With this now in place, the office would be
charged with collecting intelligence, spreading propaganda, and conduct a
massive campaign of political warfare.
The Americans were blessed with a unique asset – the tremendous
goodwill developed and earned by American Missionaries and educators in the
decades prior. While the British and French
were looked at with suspicion and even despised for their colonial attitudes in
the region, the Americans were seen, rightly until this point, as benevolent. This goodwill was the currency that the
Americans would exploit to gain their advantage.
Stephen Penrose, Jr. was the first American assigned to the
Cairo office. He was the son of the
president of Whitman College, a small college in Washington founded by New
England missionaries. He would spend
time teaching at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where he would later return
as president.
This background brought him connections in the Arab world;
he brought in several former colleagues from AUB to staff the Cairo office –
including David Dodge, the great-grandson of AUB founder Daniel Bliss. Penrose leveraged his contacts on several
missionary boards, obtaining street maps and other detailed information of the
various cities and locales in the region.
Kim Roosevelt would travel to Allied-occupied Iran, under
cover of the Lend-Lease program. He
would meet with Joseph Upton, a Harvard-educated expert on Persian antiquities,
apparently in Tehran overseeing the archeological work by New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art. He was, in reality, an
OSS field agent.
Another agent in Tehran was specialist in Persian language
and history at Princeton University; a third majored in art and archeology at Princeton
before pursuing a scholarly career.
By this time, Kim’s cousin Archie had returned to the Middle
East, and they met upon Kim’s return to Cairo.
Tours of Palestine and Lebanon would follow, including meetings with
Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. But still,
this was a time for Arabists, not Zionists, in the United States government.
When Kim departed and with the war over, he wrote in his final
report that the entire US effort in the Middle East was a waste of time and
money. Archie remained in the region,
now in Iraq. Despite being married,
Archie found the happiest moments of his life when assigned to the Middle East.
The end of the war brought on the Cold War and the
continuation of the Great Game – with Britain hanging on but with visible signs
of the transition to America in taking the lead Anglo role. Communists were to be found in every corner;
the Soviets were assumed to be behind every antagonistic action aimed at the
colonialist British.
Archie was in an interesting spot – several years earlier he
had learned that communists were involved in running the American Youth
Congress (AYC), a national youth group prominently supported by his cousin,
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. He would
publicly criticize her for this role.
Conclusion
At the end of the war, Archie returned home for a short
time; to his wife’s disappointment, he quickly took an assignment to Iran.
Iran – long a plaything in the Great Game between Great Britain
and Russia; soon to be the plaything of the United States and the Soviet Union. And soon to be home for the first – and perhaps
most well-known – major CIA intervention in the region.
