When the CIA was an outpost of Arabism

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http://yementimes.com/en/1771/opinion/3716/When-the-CIA-was-an-outpost-of-Arabism.htm


When the CIA was an outpost of Arabism
Published on 10 April 2014
dailystar.com.lb Hugh Wilford

From Cold War-era coups to “enhanced interrogation” in the “war on terror,” the CIA has courted the suspicion and hatred of the Muslim world. But it was not always so. For several years after its creation in 1947, the agency was an outpost of support for Arab nationalism in the U.S. government.

Even more surprising, the head of the CIA’s “Arabists” was Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, better known as the man who organized the 1953 coup in Iran that toppled the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. Where did this Arabist impulse come from, and why was it eventually overwhelmed by other forces in U.S. foreign policy?

Like many Middle East hands in the State Department, the CIA Arabists believed that the region and its oil reserves were the key to U.S. victory in the Cold War. But they also had personal reasons for their interest in the Arab world beyond strategic or economic considerations. Kermit Roosevelt grew up on stories of the British Empire and the “Great Game,” the Anglo-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia. His nickname “Kim” came from the famous novel about espionage in colonial India by Rudyard Kipling, a friend of his grandfather, President Theodore Roosevelt; his father, Kermit Sr., served in the Middle East during World War I alongside such British Arabists as T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia.” From the British, Kim Roosevelt and his cousin Archie, another senior officer in the early CIA, inherited an appetite for personal adventure in the Orient and a romantic attraction to Arab civilization.

Even more important as a source of CIA Arabism was the American missionary tradition in the Arab world that, like the British presence there, dated back to the 19th century. When the U.S. government first sought to establish an intelligence network in the region during World War II, it turned to two descendants of prominent missionary families associated with the American University of Beirut, William Eddy and Harold Hoskins. Future AUB President Stephen Penrose ran the Cairo headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s wartime precursor. Kim Roosevelt’s first Middle Eastern posting was as an undercover OSS officer in Cairo, where he absorbed Penrose’s respect for Arab nationalism and belief in the importance of American-Arab friendship.