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.