"If you go and live with these Arabs," President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and the assembled members of the National Security Council, "you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity. They have lived so long under dictatorships of one kind or another, how can we expect them to run successfully a free government?"
The CIA set out to answer that question by trying to convert, coerce, or control governments throughout Asia and the Middle East. It saw itself wrestling with Moscow for the loyalties of millions of people, grappling to gain political and economic sway over the nations that geological accident had given billions of barrels of oil. The new battle line was a great crescent reaching from Indonesia across the Indian Ocean, through the deserts of Iran and Iraq, to the ancient capitals of the Middle East.
The agency saw every Muslim political chief who would not pledge allegiance to the United States as "a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action," said Archie Roosevelt, the chief of station in Turkey and a cousin to Kim Roosevelt, the CIA's Near East czar. Many of the most powerful men in the Islamic world took the CIA's cash and counsel. The agency swayed them when it could. But few CIA officers spoke the language, knew the customs, or understood the people they sought to support or suborn.
The president said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. "We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect," he said at a September 1957 White House meeting attended by Frank Wisner, Foster Dulles, assistant secretary of state for the Near East William Rountree, and members of the Joint Chiefs. Foster Dulles proposed "a secret task force," under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.
"These four mongrels were supposed to be our defense against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the Middle East," said Harrison Symmes, who worked closely with the CIA as Rountree's right-hand man and later served as ambassador in Jordan. The only lasting legacy of the "secret task force" was the fulfillment of Frank Wisner's proposal to put King Hussein of Jordan on the CIA's payroll. The agency created a Jordanian intelligence service, which lives today as its liaison to much of the Arab world. The king received a secret subsidy for the next twenty years.
If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA's secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. If it could help create an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands, Foster was all for it. "Let's put it this way," said Ambassador Symmes. "John Foster Dulles had taken the view that anything we can do to bring down these neutralists--anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, extreme nationalist regimes--should be done.
"He had given a mandate to Allen Dulles to do this.... And, of course, Allen Dulles just unleashed people." As a result, "we were caught out in attempted coups, ham-handed operations of all kinds." He and his fellow diplomats tried "to keep track of some of these dirty tricks that were being planned in the Middle East so that if they were just utterly impossible, we'd get them killed before they got any further. And we succeeded in doing that in some cases. But we couldn't get all of them killed."
"RIPE FOR A MILITARY COUP D'ETAT"
One such "dirty trick" went on for a decade: the plot to overthrow the government of Syria.
In 1949, the CIA installed a pro-American colonel, Adib Shishakli, as the Syrian leader. He won direct American military assistance along with covert financial aid. The CIA station chief in Damascus, Miles Copeland, called the colonel "a likeable rogue" who "had not, to my certain knowledge, ever bowed down to a graven image. He had, however, committed sacrilege, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft." He lasted four years before he was overthrown by Ba'ath Party and communist politicians and military officers. In March 1955, Allen Dulles predicted that the country was "ripe for a military coup d'etat" supported by the agency. In April 1956, the CIA's Kim Roosevelt and his British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) counterpart Sir George Young tried to mobilize right-wing Syrian army officers; the CIA delivered half a million Syrian pounds to the leaders of the plot. But the Suez fiasco poisoned the political climate in the Middle East, pushed Syria closer to the Soviets, and forced the Americans and the British to postpone their plan at the end of October 1956.
In the spring and summer of April 1957, they revived it. A document discovered in 2003 among the private papers of Duncan Sandys, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's defense secretary, spells out their effort in detail.
Syria had to be "made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments," it said. CIA and SIS would manufacture "national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities" in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan, and blame them on Syria. They would create paramilitary factions and spark revolts among the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus. The creation of the appearance of instability would destabilize the government; border clashes manufactured by American and British intelligence would serve as a pretext for the pro-Western armies of Iraq and Jordan to invade. The CIA and SIS envisioned that any new regime they installed would likely "rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power" to survive.
Roosevelt identified Abdul Hamid Serraj, the longtime chief of the Syrian intelligence service, as the most powerful man in Damascus. Serraj was to be assassinated, along with the chief of the Syrian general staff and the head of the Communist Party.
The CIA sent Rocky Stone, who had cut his teeth in the Iran operation, to serve as the new chief of station in Damascus. Accredited as a diplomat, a second secretary at the American embassy, he used promises of millions of dollars and unlimited political power to befriend officers in the Syrian army. He represented his recruits in reports to headquarters as a crack corps for an American-backed coup.
Abdul Hamid Serraj saw through Stone in a matter of weeks.
The Syrians set up a sting. "The officers with whom Stone was dealing took his money and then went on television and announced that they had received this money from the 'corrupt and sinister Americans' in an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria," said Curtis F. Jones, a State Department officer sent to clean up the mess Stone left behind. Serraj's forces surrounded the American embassy in Damascus, seized Stone, and interrogated him roughly. He told them everything he knew. The Syrians identified him publicly as an American spy posing as a diplomat, a veteran of the CIA's coup in Iran, and a conspirator with Syrian army officers and politicians to overthrow the government in exchange for millions of dollars in American aid.
The revelation of this "particularly clumsy CIA plot," in the words of the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Charles Yost, had consequences that reverberate today. The Syrian government formally declared Rocky Stone persona non grata. That was the first time that an American diplomat of any stripe--be he a spy working undercover or a bona fide State Department officer--had been expelled from an Arab nation. In turn, the United States expelled the Syrian ambassador to Washington, the first expulsion of any foreign diplomat from Washington since World War I. The United States denounced Syria's "fabrications" and "slanders." Stone's Syrian co-conspirators, including the former president, Adib Shishakli, were sentenced to death. A purge of every military officer who had ever been associated with the American embassy followed.
A Syrian-Egyptian alliance grew from this political turmoil: the United Arab Republic. It was the locus of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. As America's reputation plummeted in Damascus, Soviet political and military influence grew. After the botched coup, no Americans could win the trust of the increasingly tyrannical Syrian leadership.
One trouble with blown operations such as this was that they "couldn't possibly be 'plausibly denied,'" David Bruce's report to President Eisenhower had warned. The American hand was clear to all. Was there no accounting for "the immediate costs of disappointments (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, et al.)"? asked the report. Who was "calculating the impacts on our international position"? Was the CIA "stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? What of the effects on our present alliances? Where will we be tomorrow?"
"WE CAME TO POWER ON A CIA TRAIN"
On May 14, 1958, Allen Dulles convened his deputies for their regular morning meeting. He lashed out at Wisner, advising him to do "some soul-searching" about the agency's performance in the Middle East. On top of the botched coup in Syria, anti-American riots had erupted without warning in Beirut and Algiers. Was this all part of a global plot? Dulles and his aides speculated that "the Communists were in fact pulling the strings" in the Mideast and across the world. As the fear of Soviet encroachment escalated, the goal of creating a tier of pro-American nations on the Soviets' southern flank grew more urgent.
The CIA's officers in Iraq had orders to work with political leaders, military commanders, security ministers, and power brokers, offering money and guns in exchange for anticommunist alliances. But on July 14, 1958, when a gang of army officers overthrew the pro-American Iraqi monarchy of Nuri Said, the Baghdad station was sound asleep. "We were caught completely by surprise," said Ambassador Robert C. F. Gordon, then an embassy political officer.
The new regime, led by General Abdel Karim Qasim, dug into the old government's archives. They held proof that the CIA had been deeply entwined with Iraq's royalist government, paying off the leaders of the old guard. One American working under contract for the CIA, posing as a writer for an agency front, the American Friends of the Middle East, was arrested in his hotel and disappeared without a trace. The officers at the CIA station fled.
Allen Dulles began calling Iraq "the most dangerous place in the world." General Qasim began allowing Soviet political, economic, and cultural delegations into Iraq. "We have no evidence that Qasim is a communist," the CIA advised the White House, but "unless action is taken to curb Communism, or unless the Communists make a major tactical error, Iraq will probably be transformed into a Communist-controlled state." The agency's leaders acknowledged among themselves that they had no idea what to do about that threat: "The only effective and organized force in Iraq capable of countering Communism is the Army. Our basic intelligence on the present situation of the Army is very weak." The CIA, having lost one battle in Syria, and another in Iraq, agonized over what to do to stop the Middle East from turning red.
After the Iraq debacle, Kim Roosevelt, the CIA's Near East division chief since 1950, resigned to seek his fortune as a private consultant to American oil companies. He was replaced by James Critchfield, the agency's longtime liaison with General Reinhard Gehlen in Germany.
Critchfield quickly became interested in the Ba'ath Party of Iraq after its thugs tried to kill Qasim in a bungled gun battle. His officers ran another failed assassination plot, using a poisoned handkerchief, an idea that was endorsed all the way up the CIA's chain of command. It took five more years, but the agency finally backed a successful coup in Iraq in the name of American influence.
"We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Ba'ath Party interior minister in the 1960s. One of the passengers on that train was an up-and-coming assassin named Saddam Hussein.